Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I am with Matt Ricketts today, and this is smart business moves. Hey Matt It's um good to see you Yeah Liz had some other stuff in her world going on today And I knew that she was gonna be off site and she thought she was gonna be able to join us but Got a text here about five minutes ago and the stars. I aren't lining up so Matt and I are home down the fort today Yeah, I am I'm excited to be here and Another topic is holiday marketing and things like that so we can talk about that or anything else anybody wants to Pick my brain on and what I'm working on I I was telling Tom I just moved into my my new home office They're actually moving appliances in we got a kitchen down here And it's not totally done with this room is kind of coming together and I have a window again I was working out of an office closet for about a year and I'm moving my camera out here to show it I guess it's harder to do than I thought but having natural light in an office and not being in a closet all day. That's It's a big win. I'm happy for that. Does that change how you feel about stuff I don't know I've been thinking that it was A little dreary and a little closed off just having a window open it up if I want to get some fresh air It's you know, it's nice. So I'm Looking forward to kind of getting all set up and getting all my Camera, I have all these different cameras that I sometimes use for different video shows I don't have my my big gun hooked up yet for for yet, but I've got a GoPro that's running our show today so I like to I used to do a lot of my own videos for my business So I have all these toys sitting around that I Now I just use them for web production and stuff like that.  It is headache inducing. Um, it it's just a little too much movement Um, it it felt we tried it. It felt Like it would cause seizures. I don't know just it didn't turn out Yeah, we've played around with that before too and kind of the same thing The idea of being able to do it like from a first person perspective Kind of like a video game, uh, you know Seemed to make a lot of sense, but the execution just didn't Although the technology has gotten a lot better. So this is a GoPro six here which I've got a GoPro eight going and now the GoPro 10 is is out So they've really improved that image stabilization a lot. So I have not tried it since I was using this GoPro Which is like four or five generations ago at this point So maybe it's gotten better. Maybe we'll try it again. So it would be It would be great if you could make it work And you know, they've got like the handheld stable lies, you know devices that will take a lot of the the movement out.  They've they've got for that. I wonder if It's like you need a gimbal like something like this that would stabilize it on your chest So you need you would need some sort of gimbal to do that. So I've got that stuff sitting around where maybe I'll Maybe I'll piece something together and let you know what I come up with But you've seen the gyroscopic ones though that you can hold your hand They're kind of big.  It might not sit on your chest, but Yeah, I actually have a I have a small They're called a smooth. No, that's not a smoothie. I don't know smoothie is like when you have a on a Um on a slider. I'm not sure what that's called What it's what the technical term is but I I own a small one that I that I bought a while back for shooting it And uh, maybe that's when you take like a banana and some berries and throw it in a blender, right? Right, right? Yeah same same principle so uh we have uh Yeah, some people showing up. It's uh Again, you know, we're talking about marketing. So cameras come in handy to make some of those videos I've I've done a little bit of that this year but maybe uh Should we talk about gift cards or what what should we talk about? Yeah, well, this is like all all things holidays and you know, this is the uh, last last smart missus moves of the month Next month will be in november and Honestly, I need to check the calendar and find out what we're going to be doing in november. I'll look that up but Matt, I know that you have for for a while kind of been on the forefront of using gift cards and other type of promotional items to generate additional revenue and over the holiday season and I think it would be very timely and useful if maybe you could just kind of Share your some of your programs and the things you've learned and and what works Yeah, so first of all, um, I do You know have a good strong history of running gift card promotions through holidays like you like you described oftentimes generating an additional After discount revenue back to my company of about $30,000 annually, so it can it can be a big pop Um, I allow them to be sold to my existing customers But I limit it to like a thousand dollars max per customer so that they can't buy the whole year worth or something like that So you need to put some reasonable limitations On it so that you know, you are upside down on customers that are going to use them But in general When you promote them to your email lists and everything else my redemption rates Have been right around like 73 to 85 depending on the year So generally even if you give a 20 discount, you're not giving up the full 20 percent because a lot of them never get redeemed So let's let's see the math on that just to just kind of you know, keep it easy You're doing a 20 discount and you're say selling them for $100 a piece.  I guess a gift card that's worth $100 But if you sell 10 of them Only seven of them come back on average. So you collect 800 dollars and only 700 get redeemed. So You know, you're really you're really getting a better margin Gross profit off of the cleanings that you're getting with those those cards and then what you would if you didn't do the program at all It can't it can work out that way, you know, the hard part is Um, you know the hard part is is tracking them. So what I do is I sell them through an outside software Called gift card cafe and then I put that credit into quick books so that when They redeem them through made central it applies, you know It goes and finds that customer that we've created And it finds that credit that that we're keeping on our books And so that way like every visit it's deducting from that balance every time So I have not found an automated way to do all of that yet, but Maybe we'll talk about that in uh in a design meeting at some point time. We'll have to yeah, we'll have to It's definitely coming. It's definitely coming But you know, the cool part about it is it isn't like it. This is something that you're doing all day every day You know throughout the year. It's just kind of How much how much of a how much of a lift is it to? Manage through through gift card cafe and just doing it in quick books Not hard at all. I mean it's every single time one comes in you do need to make a you need you need to make a register transaction You know in your in your quick books So that's manual so but I mean you're gonna only do this like you said one time a year probably where you're going to do a big push and You know, maybe you do some other ones from others day or things like that But they're not going to sell at the level of black friday I mean that's and honestly this year might be the year to do it. Maybe don't do a 20% Maybe just do 10% this year Um, you know, and here's the thing with the supply chain disruptions We might be their best gift that they could possibly deliver For a last-minute choice, you know this year. We might be it, you know That they can wrap up and give to their wife and be a hero on You know, they might even be buying it on christmas eve Yeah, I mean truly if uh, they're waiting last minute to go shopping. They're not gonna Run out to a local store go to uh, amazon and get it because it's not going to be there You haven't met my wife tom, but she's already done with her christmas shopping We have to you'll have to meet her but she's very a very prepared person Um, I would not call her a prepper that close She uh, she believes in being prepared and having a full pantry and having christmas shopping done before thanksgiving So we're we're done. I think you know, I've got to buy her gifts still but Other than that our family She handles every she's you're you're only responsible for one person and that's pretty much it So I need to get on top of it and find out what she wants, but uh Yeah She buys what she wants for the most part.  That's why Buying a gift of cleaning is is a fantastic gift. We're all so used to it We think everybody gets this but it is a very unique gift. Um, it's it's a great experience to get your house clean um I'm sharing gift card cafe their website Is there anything here in particular that uh, somebody would need to know in terms of How to how to plug into this? Yeah, so they so grow the plans and pricing This is kind of important because they have two different tiers of pricing. So, um What I would look at doing is if you think you're going to sell a lot of gift cards Is that they have different fee structures that they that they offer Um, I think I'm grandfathered on something else, but they take a they take a fee of Let's see some small amount of the purchase.  You don't want to you don't want to give up another three percent to them So they'll take a flat fee if you go to the largest plan So that would be the one I would I would do if you think you're going to run a program like this So you're not giving up additional percentage in addition to your credit card processing so This is almost five percent with a one time fee of 50 dollars. This is three percent With Okay, and I'm paying ten dollars a month every month. I guess Yep And this is a fixed fee paying Ten dollars a month so three percent Divided into two dollars and fifty cents A little bit of arithmetic here If your average job was more than eighty four dollars and forty cents, which I'm sure it would be You're probably it's more economical to do plan number three here And you can do packages anyway, like where you only sell gift cards in different tiers Like no matter what so you can sell a gift card for like two hundred fifty dollar value five hundred dollar value Or like so I kept mine at a thousand so that I don't have and again The reason behind that being I don't want some customer buying a whole year's worth at the whole discount I mean, I'm willing to let my current customers get in on the deal But not all of them do not everyone has the money to do that anyway to To pre-plan the year like that So you will get some customers your existing customers that do this and that'll that'll definitely drive up your redemption rate But a lot of them will be one-time gifts and things like that And what I would probably do is set it at a minimum of two fifty for your gift card because really You know, it's the first time in a house Two fifty is probably for actually our minimum this year became three hundred So we probably if we did this this year we would need to change our minimum Uh to three hundred I guess Okay So that's how I would structure it or or you can do packages Where you have, um, you know a certain number of Estimated cleanings and things like that where you can do it. So but that plan makes the most sense if you're going to sell a big volume for that For that, uh, I'm out there So in my mind, this is the easy part though because Any of us could go to you know gift card cafe and set up an account and Okay, I'm selling gift cards now and I guess the way it works is they give you A hyperlink and you click on the link and it goes to what the options are and they actually into their credit card and actually are buying these You know digital cards if you will through gift card cafe Yeah You're not you're at that point they gift card cafe takes the money and pays you and gives your whoever's buying the gift card the gift card in a digital format, I guess, right So the hard part is How do you drive demand for that? Because it's easy to set up the link and nobody ever clicks on it. Nobody rebies anything. So what's the trick to actually selling them? Yeah, the trick is you have to leverage your lists, right?  So you have an email list that you've generated So I use made central now for all of my email lists. I can actually segment out Um, you know past customers that are no longer customers Uh, so the first people I try and sell this to are people that have gotten quotes from us in the past And that don't do and they have nothing business with us So I segment my list into different lists. So I'll segment it out into, you know leads Uh, like, you know, they've gotten a quote from us and then I'll segment it out into Um past customers and then current customers And I'll I'll wait to see how the the other two perform before I send out to current customers as well so, um, you know, you can automate some of this with, um With your email provider where you can set these all these up in advance So I have, uh, let me see if I can open up an email here and share it. So I'll have Let me see what I got going on here if I can share it But these are just the images I don't know that I have the actual copy from the emails going on but let me share my screen here if I can Give me a second. There it is. There's the show button Okay, it's like I can share the whole screen. So it's like a big lob of stuff going on over here, but um So that, you know, I'll I'll have an image set up, you know, um You know, I'll edit the image you could use canvas or something like that put your love on it Um, put the offer in it. The other thing you can do Is use your lists your email lists to target people on facebook now I know that we're all thinking like facebook nobody's using it as much anymore, but we're all broadcasting on it now um The demographic that's leaving facebook rapidly is under 35 Like but we're all over 35. I assume that's on this and probably a lot of our buyers are They're the facebook is incredibly sticky to that demographic over 35 so it is Still where people our age are Or older are spending their time on social media. So You could create like an image like this and then target your your previous customers your your leads And even create lookalike audiences if you want to go broader And target them as well. So we'll do some of that as well when we when we do this So what you're describing there? I know some people probably have done that before taking an email list and you know building a building a campaign and Uploading the email list into facebook, which basically at that point The facebook accounts that are linked to those email addresses then Start seeing that ad coming up in the news feed, right? Yeah, I'll be totally honest the thing that delivers the best is just the email But we do sell some through that channel as well. Yes, and it's cheap to test But we all we all probably have bigger email lists than we even use I would assume that most of us have Even if you've got a hundred leads a month. I mean, I don't know that might be high Whatever it is, you know, most companies are generating between 500 to 1,000 new leads a year Um, that they they don't sell all of those Those are people still that are engaged with you in some way Um, and if you've been collecting those leads for years I mean, I came to my list up a few years ago I had like I had like 30,000 emails and I basically said anything over Like three years old that has never responded anything. I'm just going to get rid of because it's just It's not really good for my deliverability and stuff like that and I still ended up having like 16,000 emails. It's like um you know, so Most of us have big lists I think that we've been in business for a while and if you haven't then this is harder to To scale you would you need some sort of list to work off of but we can all be Building our lists and you know, maybe that's a topic for another day, but you know, that's certainly certainly important but we all have a list and um The actual campaign you're doing do you you know, what's the how many how many emails? What's what's the actual sequence look like and what's the timing of it? Sure So we actually kind of do like black friday early. So we actually start sending these on monday. We actually We're actually trying to capture the buzz before all the other black friday deals go live So like the monday of thanksgiving week We send out an email. We'll send out an email Wednesday night Saying black friday came early like here's the deal And then we'll send one final email on friday to try and capture any stragglers like hey last chance. So generally three emails um And generally we do them in the morning At you know, you know the first one on black friday the one on black friday We send out fairly early because the kind of people out shopping for deals They might be in a line at a store and they might open their phone So we might send that one out like five five in the morning or something like that The rest of them we all send out at kind of more normal times like, you know, nine a.m Through noon basically to try and get most of the day for them to get some eyeballs on that on that You know Do you find actually using the the word the words black friday and the subject line get you a higher open rate? I would have to look at what we've sent. I I think what we usually do is like, you know Our best cleaning deal all year basically is what we typically Like is what we typically cover is, you know, the best deal for made central all year because it truly is It's the only time we ever do any discounting is this one week Where we where we offer this discount. So um, some people wait for it all year and um, You know, I you know, you got me thinking I may do it I was kind of thinking we aren't going to do it this year, but you know, I'm going to do 10% this year I'm going to just but in the cool part about it is what you're what you're telling me is the first email doesn't go out until Like the wednesday before thanksgiving. Is that right monday before thanksgiving then the wednesday right before and then the friday after So you start the week of thanksgiving monday wednesday friday, so So one of them might be, you know, the wednesday one might be black friday, you know came early Um, but the first one is our very best deal all year And then the very last one is something like last chance to get better life made's best deal all year So so, you know The sequence is something along those lines where the last one is kind of last chance You know the you know black friday came early as the middle one And then the first one is our very best deal all year and it really should be your best deal year because you don't want to be You don't want to be discounting often You know, it's uh, it's something special And the thing to keep in mind here though You don't all of these gift cards Some of them aren't redeemed. I mean if 30 of them aren't redeemed That's basically free money. You know, it's very much the case that that they regularly are not redeemed People buy stuff like all the time and it goes to waste Is there Something like in the terms when it was being purchased that that says that this has an expiration date of such and such time I don't because they're a cash value So like, you know in 10 years if somebody came with one and you know And we had applied it to quick books and it would all be there. We would we would We would treat it You know our cleanings have gone up in value So that $100 gift card that they bought 10 years ago is worth $100 still so it's not like we I would never sell a gift card For a deep clean and then like somebody redeems that 10 years that could be problematic As long as it's a cash value It it really can't come back.  Here's you know, that's fine. We'll take that and we'll we'll cover the rest There are some legal parameters. You need to look at each state has different rules on gift card expirations There's federal rules requiring them that they last at least five years, I believe Um, and so you want to basically follow at least the federal guidelines as your minimum You can you can probably get that from gift card cafe. I'm assuming they manage all that for you though, right? They do they do they're not going to let you put together a program that's violating The law I would say I don't know. I think that I think that you probably can still on it You know, I don't know for sure, but I I do know that they give you all the guidance as to what you know What the the federal minimums are but some states have stricter Rules and you just need to make sure that you're in compliance with your state rules too because some states Don't allow gift cards to expire at all. They have to maintain their cash value indefinitely The truth is though as long as you put them into your into your quick books at that point Um, even if you decided not to keep a subscription to quick to gift card cafe You've at least recorded that liability moving forward on that, you know potential customers account But customer a buys that card It's a gift card though. So if they give it to their next door neighbor You don't know who I mean you do jump the we they do generally fill it out for who it is They put the name of the recipient and their email address So because they're digitally sent to that person They they do get a digital you you have enough information to create a unique identified customer in quick books with a unique email address generally So if i'm uh, if i'm Have one of these gift certificates worth 300 dollars and I call up better life maids It's like hey, my neighbor gave me this gift certificate for 300 What's your email address? We'll search it in quick books first. That is that's kind of the key field Is there any type of control number on it that makes it like unique? There is there is a there is a certificate number and we put that in the the notes as well Okay, but we redeem them out of gift card. So we don't use gift card cafe For the reduction feature because I don't want to have to keep a gift card cafe Subscription forever. What if I don't want to use their service anymore? That's why I immediately put them into quick books and track them that way Okay But I've been using gift card cafe for years. So it's never really been It's really never been an issue. So I you know, I could probably just do the redemption gift card cafe I've always just been looking for a better tool or to integrate it More seamlessly with the way I do things, but it's the best thing that I've found for now I'm sure if somebody had a better suggestion. I would be open to at this point Like I you know, I'm I'm always evaluating tools We will we will we will build a better tool, but for the moment. This is a pretty cool idea And I love the idea of a pulling the revenue forward because this is money that you can get now that You might not even get it all in the 30% art redeem. That's uh, that's free money Yeah, I think and also I mean It is a great gift like it is and it's such a exciting thing that like You know that people think of our businesses enough to actually even give it as a gift, right? Like, you know, not all service businesses like a plumber that can't sell a gift card, right? People think this is a waiting waiting for the hot water heater to blow up finally. Okay. Now I can use that gift card Right. So I mean think about that. We have a service that's exciting enough for people to even buy most service businesses Like window cleaning anything like that. They can't sell gift cards We have something that people desire We actually sell such a luxury item that people would buy it in advance and give it to someone as a gift That people forget our businesses are a luxury item That is pretty cool. If we deliver it in a great experience and package it well It's uh, I mean, it's not a Louis Vuitton purse But it is it's very valuable and it's a status symbol thing for a household to have their house clean too So I guess the other part of it is you're sending these emails out to inactive customers or leads maybe that have never converted Some of those are going to turn into new recurring business. I would think right That's that's my first hope is that we recapture some of those leads and we And the reason I segment them into three different lists is I want to see which lists perform the best And where that revenue came from and the sales came from and um You got to segment your list. You can't just send this out in one big blast You need to know which list got the best opens which lists got the best purchases Um, it's you know, there's a lot of reasons to segment the list But yes to re-engage old leads that you know, maybe hadn't thought of you in six months or you know um, I mean you should be emailing your entire list once a month. You should be like, um What's the company that sends out a coupon every month in the mail? Um, they think they're like a home furnishing provider of some kind. Um, I'm thinking val pack, but that's not what you're talking about No, I'm thinking of a store like where you buy all your stuff for college.  I just can't I'm sorry. I'm blanking on it. Does anybody anybody out there? Uh, know what I'm talking about. It's like, uh, I have no idea. I'm thinking it's a st. Lois thing. I'm a zuri thing No, it's uh bed bath and beyond there you go. See care. Get out. Get out. Thank you, Karen Whoa, you saved us. Okay. We do have bed bath and beyond here. I never paid attention Yeah, bed bath and beyond. See what I was talking about.  There you go. Linda knew what I was talking about too. There you go So it was uh, so bed bath and beyond is like If I were to if I were to give you a piece of advice is market like bed bath and beyond Send one thing to your customers every month to stay relevant and in their inbox So that you keep your list fresh at least once a month Send something to your entire list even better if you segment it to like different targets on your list but Yeah, you need to be you need to be marketing to those lists pretty regularly Wow that makes a lot of sense so You know You take it's kind of a convenient convergence, right? You got the holidays coming up It's a good reason to you know offer gift cards because people are going to have an interest You can discount the gift cards to give people instead of say, hey, I'm getting a deal. I can't pass this up Send it to an active customers and in leads that have never converted So you're going to generate more recurring revenue from that. I mean, it's it's You think about all those reasons really it we're any if if you're not doing this, you're missing an opportunity, right? Yeah, I think the marginal costs of the discount of 10 or whatever we decide to do are certainly Overcome by all the things you just described. So yeah, I think it would be Some sort of once a year big promotion would be Would be good. I mean letting I talked about like that like, you know, Louis Vuitton doesn't offer discounts So you might want to do it as a different A different structure if that doesn't fit your brand if you are like Truly the luxury brand. I don't consider my company the luxury cleaning provider That's not my target. My target is like Uh, a family of five people in a three bedroom house. They've got a dog. There's too many people living there And it's it's messy. It's it's dirty. It's not like some showroom house I don't I'm not a showroom cleaning company like I may we make these busy lives better Right like that's my name and the company's better like maids It's really strictly my market what I'm trying to sell to is maybe different than Like a true luxury brand, but it is such an everyday luxury to these people that we want to make accessible So I guess it just depends on your on your positioning in the marketplace on how to do discounts Well, you know discount is is one approach And I know that it's you know, I think what we discussed It's it's really important to be doing it on a dollar amount as opposed to You know give us, you know, I'm going to clean your home You know type gift certificate because you really don't know what you're dealing with there But is there a way that you could roll in? Extra value is a five hundred dollar three hundred dollar whatever gift card And in addition to the five hundred dollar credit, you're also getting Yeah, I don't know Deep clean something another or refrigerator clean or another another way to do it instead of discounting Is to do this is that the gift card cafe allows you to do this is that you could do bogos Is that for every hundred dollars in gift cards that they get? Especially if it's for your existing customers That they get twenty dollars So so basically they get a twenty dollars you twenty dollars you gift certificate You can set the bogos at whatever you want to buy one get one So that might be a better structure if you don't want to show a discount But you want to creating, you know, you want to create an incentive for your current customers to buy these for other people You could offer these buy one get ones as an opportunity But you buy you buy for every hundred dollars you get an extra twenty Yeah, that's an opportunity that I think is is instead of even discounting It the same thing happens, but it um It maybe increases the value proposition for them to buy these for other people too Beyond even just buying them for themselves Yeah Does uh gift card cafe give you the ability to set it up that way? It does it does you can even run daily deals with gift card cafe where you could actually have Like a like a countdown timer and um, you know run this like, you know So that there's a timer on it it creates the urgency of the situation of that this deal is just till friday, right? So you can run, you know, you can run a lot of uh You know different promotions like that through it. So So this is a a little off the gift card idea, but if you're using that for like, uh, production planning purposes and if you knew Like I've got a really light day on tuesday. Could you run a uh a daily deal and say tuesday only and Yeah, I mean you could I would probably just uh do a quick search and made central for all of my on-demand customers and send them a text message, but Yes, you you could do that. Um The way that I currently do that is is just I look for customers with certain tags and made central and send them A text message and I even sort it down to the To the zip code the method zip code to the zone that I want to send to like Um, you know where we where we actually even have the the opening app where I want to try and fill it and uh, we've been really nailing it with those on-demand customers, but You know, yes, you could do it like that where where you were trying to to fill some revenue I don't Structurally, I'm not exactly sure of how you would get them to redeem right then and then do that, but you could Um, I would think about more of like a month. It's low like where you want to Drive some demand and maybe do like a certificate like almost like the old group on days Where it's like hey limited time offer and this certificate Um, if it's like a group on type of deal It can have a shorter term expiration than a than a than a gift card too so like a daily deal has different rules than um A gift card where you could actually drive some short term to man demand like what you're talking about So I guess that a daily deal is Something that's deeply discounted, right? Yeah, probably probably more discounted than 20% like but if you were trying to fill some short term demand You could put a cap on it where like we're going to sell 5 000 of these things You have to use them within the next 30 days So you could you could create some You could create some short term demand with that tool and that's a that's a feature built within uh, give card cafe okay I haven't done anything like that in years, but I I'm remembering a group on that I did like It's got to be like 10 years ago. I did I don't know how long group on that's it's been a while, right like Did you ever do was group on and living social was that the other one? Yes, I did a living essentially, right? I did living social. Yeah Yeah, are they slow people Yeah, I don't I don't know. I think they've more morphed into various things. I don't think Daily deals are very popular. I I know some some cleaning companies got themselves and you know Some awkward spots doing daily deals and sold a bunch of business that they were upside down on and you know You can get yourself in trouble if you don't set those up, right? Yeah, you got to have good limiters and good like what's the cap and You know, even just like, you know, those daily deals They didn't care where they sold that to so you could probably end up with like a Deal and like, you know part of town you don't want to go to it's too far or like whatever. So it's uh Yeah, I haven't done one in probably 10 years, but I did and we made some good money off them and we turned a lot of them into customers so, um You have to have a really good follow-up plan if you're going to do some kind of daily deal You need some kind of follow-up plan with it to turn as many of them into recurring customers as you can Um, obviously that's not what all of them are wanting But some percentage of them need to turn into recurring business or else the whole thing is not worth doing So here you go.  Wow 50 two man hours of house cleaning. So it's like 30 dollars an hour. So You know, so they're they're rack are they saying their rack rate is 60 dollars an hour. So yeah, they're they're definitely discounting pretty deeply, but at least their rate is good Yeah, I'm wondering if it really is 60 dollars an hour though They might actually be selling it at 40 and they say 60 in order to make the The numbers work look look better. Sure. Yeah, I don't know There's a little bit of gamemanship in all sales a little bit, right? You know, you want to be as honest as you can with your sales presentations though because it'll tend to It'll tend to come back to bite you at some point if it's if it's not so I think that they would regret that if they If they were kind of gaming that too much Yeah Definitely Definitely, you don't want to don't want to do that um So is there anything else to the the gift card idea? I mean we've talked about, you know The platforms to set it up and there's probably others out there But yeah, we've we've used gift card, you know cafe over the years as well and have had good luck with it Yeah, I think the biggest thing is I think it's fun Just on Friday morning to kind of sit there and drink and coffee and watch the money roll and and just be like You know, you know, you're not working that we always take off I don't know if everyone else does this but we've always taken off the friday after Thanksgiving I've never been open that day And uh, so normally and the way I think about it is I want to be off that day I wouldn't want anyone in my home. So I try to put myself in my customer shoes and I've never I've never regretted that other than I'd love to make the revenue on the day, but it just It doesn't feel right. Like, you know, I want to be off that day as well So we've always been off, but it's fun to watch the revenue come in that day um Is there Any value and and like putting a page on your website or at least No, a link or something on your website that would take visitors to the Yes, let me uh, I mean, I think I've got the page up. Let me share what I've got going here. I think I've got it share screen One of the things I don't love about vidyard is that you can only share the whole oh no, you can do it a window Oh, I was wrong here. I thought I just didn't realize that was the top there it is so You would build a page on your website, you know, you don't have to be as graphic about this But the buy now button would take them to your gift card checkout, but you would you would put this on your website as well And you can you know, we the last time I did a big gift card push was We actually were shut down in st. Louis during covet um, and we did a gift card push and uh, you know, that was very helpful in you know, generating some revenue to kind of Whether whether, you know We didn't know all that ppp money was coming all that stuff We talked about we didn't want to talk too much about that stuff today But here it is coming up again, but we didn't know what we didn't know and um And so we we did a gift card push and put about $20,000 in our bank account, which which felt really good at the time because uh, we were shut down for six weeks and um You know that money probably was the difference between, you know, whether or not if the ppp hadn't come in whether or not we would have had spool up money to to get through again because we had I mean, we just watched our accounts dwindling down every week, you know every week after week, you know, so um This was part of our restart plan was to sell some gift cards and have enough cash in the bank to Make our first payroll basically after all this was said and done so I didn't have to go into personal Uh You know, I went pretty liquid and I was ready to go into the personal funds But I did not have to go and use any personal money to restart my business after covid. So that was a good thing Could you share how how much revenue and gift cards you saw? Uh during covid I think around 20 around $20,000 is what we collected We did a 10 discount is what we did just to you know for and and you know customers that were very loyal the other thing we did that wasn't gift card related was we we put a A link on our website where they could do a donation to an employee assistance fund Where we would make direct cash contributions to our uh to our employees that needed cash assistance strain covid So we we gave them the opportunity to both support the company and to support the employees directly Wow It seems like that was a lifetime ago. Doesn't it it wasn't that long ago, but you know, that was a very generous People were very generous though. I am very thankful for the generosity of our of our customers during that time and uh you know I had feelings at the time that covid was going to bring our country together and obviously that didn't happen We were going to all come together kumbaya and get over this together that didn't happen But it was in the end I remember it being a very I felt very positive about the whole experience because of the way that I felt about my customers And how they took like, you know took care of us at the time So I do remember having some positive feelings even though we were going through a scary time uh, there were there were there were a lot of kind people doing kind things, you know, it Didn't fix everything and maybe it you know Didn't stick the way that that we would want to but you know, those people are still out there and the thoughts and sentiments are still there Yeah, hopefully we can can get to a better place without having to have a another pandemic to To get us there Yeah, we'll get you know, we'll hopefully we'll we'll all get together on the same page again some days It turns out it's not cove that's going to bring us all together I kind of thought it was going to be like a 911 moment again where we're all hanging our flags at the door and And kind of coming together as americans that didn't happen But we can hope for the best like there's You know, there's still a lot of things that we have commonality on that We don't need to fight about everything so it's not covid. It'll be something else What we're going to figure it out But uh, you know, I was very I was very pleased with how you know, the good moments of covid with how people treated Our staff with kindness and with a lot of dignity and respect and really showed their appreciation for them by buying both gifts certificates for us and you know helping fund that employee assistance fund which we We used every drop of it and helped our employees We matched that dollar for dollar as well. So for every dollar that the customers gave Angel and I also donated to that as well that got very expensive But it felt like the right thing to do since we were laying off our employees, you know, right And then fortunately the sba came along and with yes ptp and other things to Make uh make that easier to do too. Yes. Yes We were able to be very very generous with with getting our staff back on board and working again and Yeah, all of that helped obviously but Yeah, you know to to get to the to drive it home with gift cards is that You know the the thing is you can use it a lot of different ways But this is kind of a big moment. We've got, you know, three weeks to plan for um For this so what I would suggest now is the first up is Getting all your tools together You know tools that you might need to do this might be gift card cafe and canva maybe to create some artwork You know for for the ads, but it could just be a simple It could just be a simple ad that you have uh on on your Uh, you know like in the email. It doesn't have to be crazy. There's buy now buttons directly from um Gift card cafe where you can you know do all that we don't even need to do any graphics if you don't want to I'm looking at your your your website mat. There's This isn't really in the menu, right? No, it's it's not it's on the about us on the on the side menu there on the about us I'm not directly trying to put this into my header menu You'd have to get to this through a link or if you use the about us link on the right hand. So if I go here Uh, where is my so if I go to about us here And then if I go to get certificates they can find it here But it's not in my top level navigation I got you Because it's not really what I want to drive every day to I wonder though if it was just like right on your main landing page like where it says I mean, I don't I don't know how you would do it, but something making that just for you know the holiday season Yeah, I mean I certainly could go right to my own page and put It's not a bad idea. I mean again, it's a it's a wordpress site. So you can certainly do whatever you want, right? I could probably write below Here just be like, you know, how like I could put a banner here Um, you know right on the header, but you know holiday gift cards. That's probably not a terrible idea I hate to be going there thinking that I want to get my home cleaned for the holidays and find out I could do the gift cards.  I noticed today made central is I have seven trainees Right now my staffing situation is getting like back to normal I think we're gonna break like 32 or 33 technicians again We were at 37 prior to covid We peaked at like 40 Maybe in you know, december of that year or december of 2019 Like, you know, we always are a little bit higher staff in december and kind of come down a little bit in january february march The following year we you know, it just kind of trends and cycles because we we Used to do like 20 of our business was uh Was one time work now. It's like five five percent because we just don't have the labor But I think we're gonna be in a pretty good position right now Maybe maybe the rest of you if anyone wants to chime in Are you seeing that you're having enough labor to maybe, you know, sell some extra cleanings over the holidays? Are you getting on top of this again? Because i'm starting to see a good trend I can tell you Pretty much across all branches. We're in better position now than we've been anytime since covid You know a little early despite the football yet, but we're we're we're feeling we're feeling good about it It's good Yeah, I was like I was showing somebody the software today. I was doing a demo and I was looking at Just the there's an employee Scheduled page where you can see all all of your employees and I had all these employees up on the not scheduled tab And I was like, oh my god I haven't had that in forever where I've had extra labor that we haven't even assigned yet Like we need to we need to still put these people on teams and And I was like, oh my god, we're actually like the good old days when we I don't know if people remember our like years ago. I used to hire floaters and I'd be like I'll sell the business. I'm gonna hire these people. I don't have jobs for them yet I don't have teams for them yet, but um, I would sell I would I would hire them as floaters and um We would call them the day before and let them know if they had work or not or if they would be off and we generally always told them there was work, but You know the rules with floaters in Missouri is you had to give at least four hours pay If if you didn't let them like there was rules to this like in Missouri at least I don't know if it's in every state It's different But if you didn't let them know the night before you had to give them at least four hours of pay So we would want to make sure it was clear that they got, you know, you know notified either the night before or uh Or uh, you know, at least give them something to do the next day Did did you guys ever have that like floaters where you have you know people that you didn't have assigned work to? Yeah, yeah It's been years since I've had enough labor to do that. But yeah um so We we actually and I'm rolling the clock back, you know, probably 20 years but we run a temporary labor service called service staffing and we staffed hotels and restaurants and Oh, cool. All kinds of stuff and uh we would also use that as as like Reserve inventory for for for castle keepers because we put them through training where they could could could you know do professional house cleaning but You know, we would form them out to to other businesses and give them extra hours cleaning homes if we we had extra demand It's great. Yeah, I remember I remember we've talked about this a little more That was a good program that you guys were able to run But no more staffing no more staffing agency at all. You still have the LLC but you don't run it after them Yeah, we as we do it for more internal things, you know running a temporary labor agency Has a lot of challenges as well Not least of which is you need a ton of cash Because your your clients basically use you as a bank and you got to make payroll every week but you might have receivables that are 90 days out and We had more than than where one scary moment where you know cash was short. We were chasing it There's a lot of companies that use temporary labor services for that very reason cash is short for them too. So um, they pay a premium for the temporary labor, but uh, it Is is as good as bank financing if if you're an important job Yeah Oh, yeah, that's interesting. I never thought about how like how much capital intensity that probably has at I mean, yeah And I was one of the reasons why we kind of kind of backed off of some of that is just um, I didn't have the stomach for it Yeah, I think most of us in our industry love like Do the work get paid the same day like very little up receivables little very little um very little risk really as far as as far as Um bad debt, that's you know, it's I mean, I can't even I can't even say that it's more than a percentage every year in bad debt of unpaid invoices whatever gets above that that would be Like miraculously low in a lot of industries.  You're right It's probably less than even a percent now for most companies We're 99.9 credit cards. I still have one or two customers that we allow to do a check and Really, I think it's just one customer now. I think if I were to look at like Yeah, I think it's one customer that we batch invoice. That's it. I think everyone else that we have a credit card for them So that's uh, that's changed dramatically even in the last couple years Logistically it just creates so many more opportunities as well. You know, you don't have to have You know, your your your technician is coming back to the office to hand in, you know checks or cash or something It's just too many things that can can can go wrong Especially, you know post covid where you know more and more You know companies are going to solos and you know technicians are working from home and so forth Yeah, you know, well, we are Approaching the top of the hour. We're winding down here. We're going to be uh next month We're going to be talking about accounting and finance And all this is kind of leading up to convention which is going to be the 15th through like the 17th of November we're going to be talking about that as well um You know, I'm hoping to see a lot of people at convention. I've kind of heard You know that that there's some people that that that oftentimes go that may be thinking that they're going to be passing this year But you know, I've heard some of the numbers are starting to tip up as well I just talked someone into it today. I I said that, you know, they really need to be there for the networking opportunities for the I mean I get a lot of my I mean I get a lot of my best ideas for my business once a year that I execute I remember Kathy gauge years ago told me something I can't even remember what we were talking about and I went home Like from that convention is in chicago probably eight years ago I went home and executed on it and it was like it was a big deal I got to remember what it was But it made me tens of thousands of dollars from this one little idea that she was doing that she was willing to share She's a local competitor You know And it that's really what it's about to you know, it's not like, you know coming back with a with a with a with a basket full of You know stuff to implement. I mean you might but Usually it's just one idea that you never would have come up with if you had Been there and you hadn't of And you would never gotten it through a webinar or anything else it's just the the whole thing of being with other people and networking and Um, it happens and you bring it back and and it it could be a big thing It'll it can change your business and I've seen that happen time and time and time again Hey, robin's going to be there awesome That's good That's good. Look at looking forward to that robin. Where are you going to be there? We're going to be speaking we're going to be Talking to people about made central. We're going to be doing all kinds of stuff I just got worried that uh, I asked to say one of me to do a couple of spots at the show too So I got a couple of pinch hitter rolls I didn't apply it initially Initially to be a speaker, but they asked me today if I'd pinch in a little bit So I got to make some presentation. You know what you're going to talk you know what you're going to talk about I'd like to talk about kpi's, but I don't know if you're already talking about that. Maybe that's not what I'll talk about Maybe we can we can we can coordinate we can coordinate. I've got um, you know We could talk for for weeks about kpi's. We've we've done it before So there's uh, there's a lot of real estate there That is true. I had a presentation I like about uh, the the main kpi's people or that I look at every day running my business But there's a few other things that I have kind of in the can that I'll probably play around with well monday, we're going to be back and uh, we're going to be talking about accounting and finance for the month of november And kedma.  She's uh, wow She's a force of nature and you don't want to miss kedma. She brings it. She brings it 110 percent um We are at the top of the hour matt. Thank you. This was uh, this was good Um, I've got notes here and honestly, I gotta tell you that I wasn't really Uh focused on you know trying to push gift cards this year But we can certainly get ourselves together here the week of uh, thanksgiving to do this and We're gonna do it You've you've inspired me That's good. You're one. I got to get myself fired up I was I was thinking I was going to take a pass this year, but now that I talked about it I think I'm going to do it as well. So it's uh, you know, it's it's It's always been good for my business. I just was kind of thinking You know, hey, we're doing so good this year. We were labor constrained But then I saw all these employees we hired it's time to I might need to actually get them busy So I I need to do it myself Okay, well Thank you matt as always. This was awesome. Thanks for joining us today We'll be back uh, monday at five o'clock eastern with uh, ked malo till then take care. Bye. Bye


The question to me why Virtua is is pretty simple. I mean it just works. It's just amazing sunscreen that I trust for myself, my skin. I spend the majority of my life in the sun and I wear nothing but Virtua and the same it goes with my family and it's just something that I've tested over a long period of time and I don't trust anything else.


We got a bunch of new evolution methods with the release of Pokemon Scholar and Violet. In today's video I'm going to show you how to evolve two of these new Pokemon so you can easily get Annihilape and King Gambit, the evolutions of Primip and Bishop in these new games. But before we get into today's video please subscribe to the channel remember you can always unsubscribe later if you would like to. Starting off we will look at how to evolve Primip into the new ghost and fighting type Annihilape. These are available to catch throughout the Paldaire region in these areas shown on the map. There's South province area 2, South province area 5 and South province area 6 so getting one even in the early game isn't going to be a problem for you. Once you have caught a monkey level it up to level 28 and the monkey will evolve into Primip. Alternatively you can catch a Primip which can be found in these areas on the map West province area 1 and North province area 2. Once you have your Primip you will need to level it up to level 35 so learn the move rage fist. Once you have this move you will then need Primip to use this move 20 times. This move has 10pp so run through all the pp twice and once you have done this level it up once more through either battling or using candies and once you've done this Primip will evolve into Annihilape. This is a pretty weird evolution method but it is one that we saw use quite commonly with moves used a number of times in Pokemon Legends Arceus. The next Pokemon in this guide we're going to look at is King Gambit. It is the new evolution of Bishop and definitely has one of the most obscure evolution methods that we will go over now in this video. Firstly here are the locations on the map where you will find Ponyard and Bishop. You get Ponyard pretty early on in this game in the South province area 3 and close by the lighthouse near Los Plasso but I'd recommend for this method to try and catch a Bishop in North province area 2 where the evolution method is easiest to complete. The North province area 2 is the area that is available in the later stages of your game but once you have some of the additional ride mechanics for your Choreodon and Moriodon you will be able to travel here and do this method to get King Gambit. The area we are travelling to is located next to the team star fighting crew base. Once you are at this Pokemon center located here on the map you will first need to find a Leader Bishop and just for context a Leader Bishop is a single Bishop surrounded by 4 to 5 Ponyards like you see here. When you find a Leader Bishop engage a battle with it and catch it. Check its held item and you should find if it is a Leader Bishop it will be holding the Leader's Crest item. You will need to keep this item attached to your court Bishop and find 3 more Leader Bishops just like the one you've caught and defeat all 3 in battle. To make this easier if you have a fighting type TM teach it to your Bishop it definitely helps speed up the mirror matches otherwise you are going to be hitting it with Dark type moves and Steel type moves which are going to be ineffective and this method will take a lot longer. To find more Leader Bishops just leave this area and come back into it and repeat this process until you find 3 more Leader Bishops. Knock all of them out and once you have done so level up this Bishop either by battling any random Pokemon at this stage or with candies and once you've done this if you've done the method correctly and followed the steps in this video your Bishop will now evolve into King Gambit and there you have it these are 2 methods of how to evolve Bishop and Primeip into their new Evolution's King Gambit and Annihilate in Pokemon Scholar and Violet. I hope you found this guide useful if you have please drop a like and subscribe to the channel for more guides and Pokemon Scholar and Violet until the next time friends bye bye


The private sector has an important role to play, if appropriately partnered with and managed, to play in disaster response, not least from the know-how that they bring to the table, and in many cases, the actual supply chain logistics capabilities. I think you should use everything available to you, and yeah, that means that you'll have to put some safeguards into place, and you'll have to be aware that there are equities that people have. But in reality, that's no different than a political negotiation. Everybody comes to a discussion with their own set of what it is they're hoping to get out of it. The private sector is no different, but it also doesn't mean that their motivations are inherently cynical. And I think that there can be an expectation that the private sector is looking at something from a purely for profit motive. I don't think that's true anymore. I think that actually the growth of corporate social responsibility outlets and the importance of doing well while doing good has really sunk in, particularly with a lot of large companies. I think that there's an opportunity there for us to build essentially a compact. And it's not just with the private sector, it's with the international NGO community, it's with other aspects of civic society, it's with local governance structures. There's any number of outlets of entities that can bring their resources and their skills to bear. But you know, if we're going to do a massive logistics project, I would like a professional logistician doing that. And I think that that really simplistic way of looking at it means that you should look at who has what assets and then look at bringing them to bear. Because the reality is that the level right now of crisis is so high across the board, whether it's peace and security or environmental or otherwise, that we really need all the help we can get. So I think there's a real need for companies to look at how they can make a strategic contribution to the well-being and development of a nation and not just a more geographically limited contribution because they may in certain contexts be reaping extraordinary reward. But how can some of that reward be more broadly shared in the society? I think the other part of this equation is that there are pools of capital in the world that are looking for infrastructure opportunities. And in so many of the post-conflict contexts, infrastructure needs to be built. Now, it's not so easy as I think this capital that can't be directed, capital has a mind of its own, it can't be directed to invest in infrastructure. But I think policymakers can do a lot more to think about ways to bridge this. So it's not just the public taxpayer that's going to be paying for the roads and the housing and the power stations and all the infrastructure that needs to be built. There are ways that that private capital can help underwrite the costs of reconstruction.


Hi, this is Sandy. Today we'll be exploring two great things that work great together. Pick collage and thing link. These are web tools that can be used to create your living vision board. The idea behind a vision board is to help your students set tangible goals, both short term and long. I will also share with you two great websites where you can download free high quality images for your vision board. Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell to enable notifications for our channel by clicking our logo during the video. Also, leave us a comment or check out our related videos by clicking the pop-up cards in the upper right corner. Ready to set some goals? Let's begin. First of all, I would like to briefly explain vision boards. Sometimes they're called dream boards and they are a collage of visual goals that serve as your image of the future. Everybody has their own idea of what they want their future to look like, so these boards help us stay on track to make it happen. Sort of like mind mapping. Everybody is inspired by something different and that's what makes vision board so unique. They are personal to you and display everything that you desire for your future. What is a living vision board? Well, you'll create your vision board and it'll serve as a dynamic vision that is continually edited and updated. Living documents are changed through revisions that may or may not reference previous changes. The first app we'll use is Pick Collage. In Pick Collage, you get to choose your starting point. You can keep it organized with a grid or go into it freestyle. You can also go up here to this plus sign. Once you click plus sign, it'll ask you to tap anywhere to add a photo. You can collect photos from your computer. You can actually take photos, use a web search. You can actually draw on this. You could add really cool text. They have some interesting stickers and you could change up the background. Now, it's always good to use your own pictures for this project, but there are two websites that are really great and they're free. You can get some beautiful images.  So you could download these images. This is called Pixabay, P-I-X-A-B-A-Y and another one is called Pexels. Pexels is the same exact setup. You search for the photo, they pop up and here they are. So if you have pictures of things you obviously want to use for your dream board, like a brand new car that you don't have yet or whatever, you could always look it up here. So that's always a great option.  You could print it, you could set as a lock screen or you could save it. We want to save it and it'll ask you where to save it. You can name it and you hit save. Now you have your collage saved in your computer somewhere. You're going to open up Thinglink.  The create button will bring you to upload image, upload video and you're going to upload the image. You're going to find the image that you created and there you have it. Once you have uploaded your digital collage in Thinglink, this is where you could add the interactions. These buttons are interactive buttons that take me to YouTube videos but you can also add like web pages or whatever it is you want. You're going to click on the add tag button and then you can actually add a text label, text and media. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add content from a website. I've already copied a video of cute puppies from YouTube and I'm going to paste that URL right here. The cool thing is you could change the icon. So if you want to change the icon, it'll ask you color choices and then you hit done. Here it is and when I click on it, it'll actually take me to that web page. When you click the done button, it'll bring you to this page. You'll click the share button. It will not let you download on offline unless you have a membership but to share the link, publish to social and to embed your media is all free. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to like, comment or reply to one of our other videos or share the playlist below. Subscribe to our channel and enable notifications so you don't miss out on the next episode. Don't forget to check out our other resources like this cast podcast and see what else is going on at Ori County Schools. Be sure to follow at Dear Dis is on social media or contact us via email or our blog.


Whole Story Quest audiobooks presents Shifting Skin, by Chris Sims, narrated by Dean Williamson. CHAPTER ONE John Spicer looked around what used to be his weight training room and side. Bear plaster walls faced him, exposed surfaces still raw from where he'd scrubbed them with sandpaper. The carpet was hidden by dust sheets that stretched from skirting board to skirting board. In the corner the steam machine looked like the victim of a clumsy shave, scraps of dry wallpaper stuck all over it. He started peeling apart last week's local paper, separating the pages and laying them across the small table in the middle of the room. Immediately, and even as he tried to look away, his eyes were snagged by the front page headline, Butcher of Bellevue Strikes Again. Quickly he flipped the page over, but it was too late. The horrific details of his latest case came streaming into the last place on earth he wanted them—the nursery. The latest victim, Carol Miller, had been a midwife at Stepping Hill Hospital. She was good-looking, her strong facial features complemented by a curvy, full figure. The sort of woman his dad would refer to in his strong, Lancashire accent as proper breeding material. In his own way, he would have been right. She'd given birth to a thick-set baby the year before. John had watched as the infant strained an entire bottle of milk without pausing for breath, blissfully unaware of the tears streaming down the face of his grandmother above him. John had sat with his tongue frozen in his mouth, thanking God that bereavement counselor had come with him to inform the woman that her only child was dead. The counselor had kept up a soothing murmur, the actual words of secondary importance to the comforting tone of her voice. What will become of our Davy? the woman had gasped. His father's not around, and I'm not well. What will become of him when I'm gone? The wrinkles round her eyes deepened, and she started sobbing again. John could feel her looking at him, and he kept his eyes fixed on the counselor, willing her to break the silence with an answer.  Pushing the memory away, he picked up the paint tray and decorating implements. He banged them down on the table, then placed the tin of paint next to the tray. Sample complete. Ready to continue?


Assalamu alaikum peace and blessings of Allah be upon you all. Welcome to All The Minutes, this is Muhammad Ali and now we are to talk about courage. Courage known as an admirable personal trait that provides benefits for people personally, socially, mentally and spiritually and is a characteristic that informs and strengthens all other traits. Courage should definitely be present within believing Muslim individualities. Now one might ask what exactly is courage? Courage is defined as the mental and emotional preparedness and ability to deal with difficult, challenging and sometimes seemingly impossible circumstances. It is the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty, intimidation and other threats. It is one of the traits that one cannot be born with, instead it is one that needs to be developed and can cultivate it and hone. Although the definition of the term courage may be the same, there is however a different depending on the type of courage one is referring to. There are two types of courage, each with different characteristics that differentiate them from each other. Moral courage and physical courage are the two types of courage that exist in today's world and play a major role in decisions we take every single day. The most prominent of the two and one that Islam focused on the most is moral courage. Moral courage is defined as doing the right thing even at the risk of inconvenience, radical punishment or even loss of social status. It requires one to make judgment about what actions or behaviours are supportive of one's highest ideals and which ones are destructive. It assists individuals to recognise responsibilities and see the consequences of the actions one part takes every day. This is a very important aspect in the religion of Islam and should be present within the individuality of each believing Muslim. Courage ideally should come out of love, respect and fear from Allah as the sincerity one has towards the creator persuades them to do what is right and stand firm against what is wrong. Those who possess this type of courage have adopted the manners taught by the Holy Quran and are always striving to persuade others to do the same. These individuals do not remain silent in the face of evil acts committed and take on full responsibility of opposing what is wrong no matter what the outcome may be. These characteristics of moral courage mentioned like many other positive virtues are seen to be within the individuality of all the prophets, members of the Ahl al-Bait and the Allah's messengers, peace be upon them. This is mentioned in the Holy Quranic verse. Prophets are those who confide Allah's message and fear Him, fearing no one except Allah. Allah suffices as a Rekna. Surah al-Ahzab verse 39. This holy verse is stating that because the messengers of Allah chose to spread the holy message they were faced with many obstacles. However, the only thing they feared was Allah and not the unbelievers in their communities no matter how great a threat they were. One of the greatest and most powerful examples of moral courage history has ever witnessed was the courage Sayyid al-Zaynab possessed and revealed after the day of Ashura. When the women and children as well as Imam Zayn al-Abideen, who was very ill at the time, were taken as captives to Kufa to the palace of Ubaid Allah al-Zaynab, Sayyid al-Zaynab held a powerful position and said a powerful sermon that has remained as a symbol for moral courage and will continue to remain. When the members of the Ahlul Bayt al-Salam were presented in front of Ubaid Allah ibn Ziyad, Sayyid al-Zaynab al-Salam and Imam Zayn al-Abideen al-Salam bravely stood before Him with the rest of the women and children behind them.  At these moments, Sayyid al-Zaynab's heart was filled with moral courage and she did not fear anybody nor anything except Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as she exposed the terrorism that had been committed towards her holy family. When asked who this woman speaking was, Ubaid Allah ibn Ziyad was informed that this was Zaynab al-Salam, the daughter of Ibn Abi Qail ibn al-Salam, known for her bravery, eloquence and patience in which all was inherited from her father. Upon recognizing whom was speaking with, Ubaid Allah decided to reveal the joy he felt as he thought he was victorious over the Imam al-Salam and said, How did you find the way Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala treated your brother and your family? At this point, however, Ubaid Allah did not know he was speaking to the perfect embodiment of courage and eloquence as Sayyid al-Zaynab al-Salam said, I have seen nothing but beauty. They rushed toward their graves with honor but know that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will judge between you and them and he will call you to account. So be worried about the winner at that day. Either it will be you or them. This powerful stand led to the revealing the true face of terrorism and revealed what moral courage truly is. By speaking this way, there was a large risk for Sayyid al-Zaynab al-Salam to lose her life. However, she preserved through all of this and continued to fight against the enemies. Through her bravery, eloquence and firm stand, Sayyid al-Zaynab al-Salam revealed who Imam Hussain al-Salam truly is and awakened and enlightened the hearts of people at that time. Sayyid al-Zaynab life was always laden with hardship but because of the moral courage she possessed, she never feared coping with difficulties instead. This enhanced her endurance to elevate her soul. Because of her stand, the Hussaini revolution has lived in the memories and hearts of millions to this day has kept the sacrifice of Imam Hussain al-Salam and brought dynamism to every movement that is aimed at removing injustice on earth. Due to the powerful stand Sayyid al-Zaynab took, these words will never be forgotten. I express my complaint only to Allah SWT and have trust in him.  By Allah SWT, you cannot remove us from the minds of people and you cannot fade our message. You will never reach our glory and you can never wash the stain of this crime from your hands. Your decisions will not be stable, your period of ruling will be short and your population will scatter. In that day a voice that shouts, indeed may the curse of Allah SWT be upon the oppresses. With these words of Sayyid al-Zaynab al-Salam we end up our episode. Stay tuned dear brothers and sisters for more morals and don't forget the dua to hasten the reappearance of our beloved Imam al-Mahdi may Allah hasten his reappearance. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh


The hardest part about RDC school is definitely the uniform inspections. You come here you think you know how to wear a uniform and they're gonna make you feel like you're back in boot camp because you don't know how to wear the uniform. The uniform didn't fit right.  You find one stray one it's a hit. I think out of the fleet a lot of the uniform regulations are relaxed. There's a lot of people that don't enforce the uniform regulations so you get in that comfort zone of that's how you're gonna wear it and then you come here and then that's it's back to this is what the it's back to what the instruction says and a lot of people aren't ready for that. Did you take a limp roller around that place? Yes! Limp roller ahead of its back? No. Look at all this limp right here. Nobody likes looking looking bad and especially when you got 88 recruits looking at you and then you don't know how to wear the uniform and you're supposed to teach them how to wear the uniform it motivates you to get your stuff together. I would definitely tell somebody come here if you enjoy a challenge I mean if you're looking for a lack short-dirty don't even think about it. Three hits in your fill you know so just gotta do it again.


It's five o'clock, so I'll call this meeting to order. Will you please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? Pledge of Allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, then we have the roll call. All there, Feldy. All the persons, Flickie Pineski and Pirella, are excused. All the person, Acley. Here. All the person that you'll see here, that gives us a quorum. Moving on to 1.4, we'll skip through the introductions of committee and staff, so item 2.1, approve all of the minutes. Any discussion? Otherwise, we're looking for a motion to approve. All right, we have a motion and a second. Seeing no more discussion. All those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Chair votes aye. The ayes have it. The motion passes. Moving on to item 3.1, resolution number 41 of 2122. Resolution authorizing a transfer in the 2021 budget related to donations received in support of the Shapoikin Police Department's canine program. Who would like to take this one? Senator. Good evening. This resolution is just a financial accounting practice change and correction. The canine funds that were donated in the past have been going into the general fund and the revenues and expenses. However, at the end of the year, they've been rolled over into the general fund balance when they should have been separated out into a special revenue fund. So this resolution is correcting that and we have established the correct accounts for moving forward so that practice is correct. Any questions from committee members? Anything for a motion to approve? We have a motion and a second. Seeing no more discussion. All those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Chair votes aye. Ayes have it. Thank you. And item number 3.2 is resolution 42 of 21-22. Resolution authorizing the appropriate city officials to enter into a master subscription agreement with Granicus LLC. And I'm back. I'm filling in for Chad today. So this contract is for host compliance software. There are a lot of Airbnb type rentals in the city that are going on and this software will assist the city in making sure that all of the hosts in the city are being compliant and paying their share of the room tax, which as I'm sure you know, that goes between Visit Cheboygan and the city of Cheboygan revenue. So this is to increase revenue and keep everybody compliant and that. So if any other questions, Todd can elaborate if you would like. Crack of, or have you looked into how much revenue we had lost by not putting this into effect? Actually, this company that we're looking to partner with will actually be monitoring all of the rental streams that are out there. What they do is they look at like travel velocity and all of these other groups that are out there and they check the businesses within or the rentals, the Airbnb's within Cheboygan. And according to our city ordinance, they should be registered with the city. So this program will allow us to know who's actually operating an Airbnb, whether it's something they do on a regular basis or a part-time basis and that will alert us to the activity that they're doing and will give us a report. And we've actually estimated that we will not only pay for this cost, but will actually increase the revenue that is being developed within the city. So it is part of the ordinance and we're losing a significant amount of revenue because of the activity that's been going on. And this will help keep everybody honest. Would be another way to look at it. Thank you. Any other questions or comments for a motion to recommend approval? Second. We have a motion and a second. Seeing no further comments. All those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. All opposed. Chair votes aye. Aye's have it. The motion passes. Our next meeting is on August 23rd, 2021. And with that, I believe we've set a record for at least this generation of our committee because 5.1 is a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second. Seeing no discussion. All those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. All opposed. Chair votes aye. We are adjourned. Six minutes. I'll say it, if you wouldn't ask a question, it would only get five. No, I'm good. It's good.


Hello everyone today We're going to talk about things you should not be accepting from your client or from a prospective client or for whoever wants to hire you to do business with you and These are some things that I've come across that I've seen myself and that really kind of Annoy me in the way people think they can treat translators or freelancers in general Along those lines that sort of divided it first. I'm gonna have the stuff that you should not be accepting from them and next I'm gonna have the stuff that Just get on my nerves, but it might just be me kind of being nitpicky about it But let's start with the stuff that I think you shouldn't accept From clients at this point or at any point in the future number one The first thing you shouldn't accept from clients is when they ask you Please do this job for cheap as more work will be coming in the future or there is a possibility for more work in the future There's a possibility to have a long-term relationship However, they word it something like that basically what they're asking for you is you haven't a rate of X They want you to offer them X minus something because they're saying there's gonna be a lot more work with that came from in some Hypothetical future at some point. Maybe you know as long as we're happy with whatever whatever that's Yeah, it's complete crap if look if they're happy with you and you're happy with them Then absolutely you can negotiate a future job or whatever and you can see that ahead of time But in the meantime you pay my rate I do a good job for you and then we're happy and that's how business works Okay, you don't convince me to do a lower rate because of the possibility No, in fact if you reserve me now for jobs in the future, then we can negotiate a rate for all the stuff in the future But you're not guaranteeing anything you're just saying there's a possibility of something in the future Which doesn't mean anything will season see this is how annoyed I get which doesn't mean anything So, you know skip it if any perspective client tells you give me a lower rate because there's a possibility of Something in the future Ignore that give them your standard rate because that is your rate and you know There is no lower rate because there's more stuff in the future and I'll get into this a bit more in fact here Let me get into it now where people say Oh, yeah, the other argument that they give you is that sorry I have to check my notes because I Get matted in so I had to yeah keep track of all of them. Otherwise I start rambling a bit too much the other thing they say is We have a huge volume of work. So lower your rate again. Your rate is X They want X minus something because they give you a large volume of work They're thinking behind this is that oh, you know the more work there is the easier because you're probably using some cat Tool in fact many times they'll do and I've mentioned this before they do this whole study of fuzzy matches Perfect matches and they pay you less for all of that Anyway, these are kind of two different sides of the same coin First of all if you don't use a cat tool, then there is no advantage, you know It's not like it's you have it's easier if you have a longer job than a shorter job What is true is that you're least guaranteed a job, you know for longer than then just a short job you know if you have a job of like to translate 20 words and And then you have to search for your next client in your next client Yeah, it's true if they give you something long at least you're guaranteed a client for the next You know few days or however long the job takes and so that's true on the other hand It's still a lot of work and you should get paid for the amount of work you do So you shouldn't be lowering your rate just because volume means lower rate You know you can do you can make a judgment call saying well Otherwise, I'm not sure if I can get another job. So yeah, I'll accept a bit lower because at least I'm guaranteed a job That's up to you, but also remember this could affect you in the future because that means from then that point on They're only gonna hire you at that rate, but The fact the mere fact that there's volume and that they think that means you should have a lower rate Doesn't make sense and you shouldn't accept it just on itself so and that that ties into the other thing where they you know because The first point I mentioned where they say oh, we're giving you this small job now But there'll be a whole lot more in the future. So give us a good break. Yeah, that annoys me. Anyway onto the next one Let's see. I already did you work down more possible in the future. Oh another one. That's Maybe I should have it. No, I'll include this here and stuff. You shouldn't accept. At least I don't accept it I know I did before but and the issue is with urgent jobs Now this is especially clients you have not worked with before if you know them already and you feel comfortable with them Fine you make your own judgment call But if their clients you have not worked with before and they have an urgent job that really needs to be done right away I would avoid those quite frankly because Every time that I've had them there's been some problem with them if it's a problem If you know either it's a problem with the files They send me and and they have to keep resending me or I send back the translation and it's done Well, but then they have issues because you know, they miss any time there's something urgent It means they have some issue along that supply chain either the person you're dealing with or their client or their boss or something like that and Which is making everything urgent, you know that Presentation that needs to be translated, you know, it wasn't just thought up yesterday the meeting or the you know The whatever it is that you're translating for the big for the big Get together or you know, whatever whatever it is that you're translating for the annual report Like it's not something that was just dreamed up yesterday. People have been preparing this forever, but Because something along the supply chain, you know, someone didn't do their job, right? Or you know, that has no idea what they're doing. Anyway, because of some mess up there Suddenly everything got urgent and it's gonna come back to bite you whether it be that they sent you the wrong file or they sent you the correct file, but they wanted different stuff done or with a payment and In fact, I'm having an issue now with a payment because of anyway something correlated with that It's been going on for a while but anyway and or something along the lines will get messed up if it's an urgent job, that should be a big big rig flag and So just remember that urgent is not a good sign You know, it's a judgment call as with anything at the end of the day But I would kind of stay away from those from the urgent jobs Oh This is a great one that I like when it's time to get paid and you probably get this with the urgent jobs as well That's what happened to me. They'll say, oh, we can't pay you now because our client hasn't paid us yet You should never have to accept this ever. Okay, you your contract is with Whoever hired you and that's it. You did the job for the person who hired you you expect to get paid The fact is if they have another end client if you're working for a translation agency Whoever it is and they have an end client. They're getting paid more per word than you are, right? But that's because they assume the risk anytime I hire and a translator for my agency I pay them after their job No matter if my client has paid me or not that has nothing to do with me paying the translator for their job Okay, that that's not on them I'm the one who decided to work with the end client who isn't paying me and so I have to deal with that That has nothing to do with them.  They're paying with someone else It's too bad, but that's it and so what I've had is I've had someone keep insisting that this is the case I said my contract is with you has nothing to do with them So I need to get paid for me. They're like, oh no has everything to do with them because I'm like, okay If my contract has something to do with them, I'm contacting them directly I'm letting them know that I made the translation not you because I come to find out the person Who had hired me she'd and I've talked about this a couple years ago in a in a video But she had you know told the client that she was translating it But instead she hired it out to me into another person, which was a complete mess. Anyway, you know, I was like I'm gonna contact them directly. She's like, no that goes against every code. You can't do that I'm like you're going against every code here. Okay, anyway, they need to pay you for your job If you've done your job you get paid. That's it. Nothing to do with the end client or whoever else it might be That's it. Okay, calm down Let's see what else there is In terms of things you shouldn't accept for your client to have one more. It's the ambiguous projects. These are The problem with ambiguous projects is they'll they might give you something that needs to be translated But they haven't sent you the final documents They haven't finalized the timeline yet or they haven't done something you don't want surprises once you accept the job That's the main thing do not accept the job until you've seen the thing to be translated and you have it in writing what the precise deadline is and And what you're getting paid for it, you know Because the problem with this is if you do not want to have to accept the job and Then later not be able to do it because no matter how much it's that client's fault for not telling you ahead of time They're gonna blame you, you know, there's there's no way, you know Because suddenly they got screwed they suddenly thought they had hired a translator out and suddenly don't they haven't they you know They suddenly they're they're without a translation or they have to go find another translator And they have to do the work again from scratch And of course they're gonna blame you even if it's completely their job They're gonna blame you so and the way to avoid this is to make sure that you know the job 100% before you say yes So don't accept a job on spec, you know, make sure you've seen the file the exact file to be translated You have it right there You know, don't don't say, you know, don't let them tell you Oh, we'll send you a page and tell us if that's okay, then it'll be like, you know 500 more pages like that one. No, you don't know that and so you need to see all the 500 pages You need to know the exact deadline and you need to know where you're getting paid Okay, because then later, you know, at least everything's there and it's in black and white because you have it in writing You need in writing even just an email or something. It's fine Preferably you can get either a payment order, but I don't I don't care too much about payment orders What I do care is that it's somewhere there in writing as long as it's on an email Then I know I can go back and you know show that that is has been done so yeah, make sure there's no ambiguity and That you know exactly what you're doing So once you accept a job you don't have to change later because you you never want to do that You never want to accept a job and then come back later and say you can't do it or something along those lines So those are the things you should not accept from clients now I'm gonna get briefly because I'm it's already 10 minutes of video here And just stuff that annoys me about you know when clients contact you first of all is when they contact you with an email That says dear linguist.   That's why I didn't say it in a thing You should totally avoid but it's a thing that annoys me. So that's why I'm leaving it there another thing that really annoys me is when they asked for a best rate and Maybe I should have included this and stuff. You shouldn't you shouldn't ever accept I didn't because a lot of people just right nowadays just right We need your best rate and they don't even think about it. They just write it and put it in What annoys me is that it implies that you have a standard rate once again x and they want your x minus something Because your standard rate is Padded up, you know, they assume that you artificially raise your standard rate and they're like no no We want your real rate your best rate. No, and you know, that's not that's not how I work I I you know, I have a rate and that's it, you know, I know I don't have a best rate for people who are in the know And so I know a lot of people they don't put that much thought into it when they write best rate But it still annoys me. So yeah, that just annoys me when they write best rate and the last one that kind of annoys me is when they Write something like we're offering you a job Again, this might just be me. It just sounds patronizing to me when they say Well, you're sitting there and you're unemployed and you don't have anything to do so we're offering you this job Because now you can suddenly start making some money. You pour an employed slob Again, this really just comes across It's conveyed in the email in the in the way they email you and but I've had enough of them That kind of give me that sense that it just annoys me again. This might just be me And again, it also might just be because I do have regular clients So I'm not in that situation. Maybe if I were more in that situation then I'd I relate a bit more But I don't so it just annoys me. So there you go.  No, no, you're a professional and you should be treated as a professional And as once you make the commitment to be a freelance translator That's the case and that's it And and I try to emphasize this also my course and stuff like that where you know Say treat it like a real job and make it very professional because you are it's only going to be as professional as you treat it This you know People are only going to take your job as seriously as you take it So take it seriously and I think that's what annoys me about those patronizing type emails. Um, anyway Hopefully hopefully you don't come across stuff like this too often But hopefully when you do come across it you can sort of see the red flags and hopefully avoid some You know really bad headaches down the line Uh by avoiding some of this stuff, you know, where they ask you for yeah the cheap work now and the The ambiguous stuff or the urgent stuff that then just starts going to hell in a hand basket and all that stuff Anyway, hopefully you can find this video useful in your future endeavors And uh, don't forget to like and don't forget to subscribe if you want more videos like this in the future And that's pretty much it. I'll talk to you in the next video. Thanks. Bye


It's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, see you can't do that when you're doing the remote Skype stuff. Why? Because it's sound, the sound is all sucky and then the rick's too loud it'll rip down. I still think that.  And you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, for more juicy content. It's so juicy. It's called BELLY! Awesome. They're down there. They're down there. Go follow them. Right now. My volume was turned all the way down. Now that's comedy. We are reacting to a trailer today. It's a Tamil film. Good. It's good. Anything else, Rick? Younger, newer, buyer, seller, woman, man, child. 12. 18. Yes. No, this is actually... We've reacted to a song and a fight scene from this movie. I still don't know what we're doing. It has Kamalu-san. Oh, cool. I believe it was the transformation fight scene. Like, in the thing, and he's the thing, and he transforms in the basement. Yes. I remember that one. Absolutely. We were flipping out about what a great job he was doing. He was maniacally going in and out. He was like a guy with a monster in him. Remember that? Yeah. This is the trailer for that film. Got it. And that was a great scene, by the way. Yeah, I totally forgot that that was him. Yeah. I think that was actually our first exposure, wasn't it? Either our first or one of our first exposures. One hundred percent. And it was a great scene. I love that scene. Anyway, this is called Vishwarpam. Vishwarpam. Vishwarpam. Vishwarpam. Uh, trailer. I don't know if this is an official one or if it's a fan made. I don't know. Well, we'll find out very quickly. But we know he transforms. Transformers swear every single time. Now I want to count down. Well, it takes 30 days to create a new habit. And we were doing it for four months. You realize that 25% of our content now on OSR is lockdown Skype reaction. The best kind of Skype reaction. Lockdown. Yeah. We don't know what that means. Just those days. I couldn't smell you. Three, two... What? You're doing it anyway. Ah! That's the dance one. That's the same smell? No. Thank you, Sasi, for the subs. That's not the same movie as the one where he's in the basement monstering. That's the one we did the reaction to with the song where he was doing the dancing, which I still didn't realize there was a military element to that film. I'm so confused. Yeah, no. That was, uh... It is. That's the same movie. It's like a cross between... That had so much going on in it. One, I don't think that was an official trailer. Black Hawk Down, Flash Dance, and The Fly. I have no idea that the song that was behind it at the beginning that we reacted to, which we loved that song. It was a great song. This one right here. Yeah. Oh, I vividly remember it. I had no idea that was the same film as the... And I don't know if I recalled it in this. I could have said it. I hear the fingers on the keyboards right now. We told you this. Back when you first reacted. And it's why we said this is one of the films by Kamahasan that you should watch. Is this one of the films that we should watch? Of his? Because I had... This is like a first. I had no idea those were the same film. No! Not in a million years! They don't even look like... It could be from the same film. One, there was a lot going on in that trailer. There was a ton going on in that trailer. Oh yeah. Because the military... Military in Manhattan. Then he was doing the dance. Dancing with people. Then he... Then he's in a basement becoming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So, this is the scene. That scene is in it too? No, this is the fight scene, the transformation. We vividly remember that one. Yeah. This is the transformation. No, not the other one. You're thinking of a different one. This is a different actor, isn't it? Yeah. I think you're thinking of the Vikram one. You're thinking of the Vikram one. Where he went full on... Yeah. You're thinking of the Vikram one. This one was also his transformation scene, which we also reacted to. Which I still wouldn't have put that with the one where he's dancing. Do you remember this one? Vividly. No idea that that was the same film. Like... Anyways, let's see what this film is actually about. A florist moves to Chicago and falls in love with a quaint little girl from the south side. So, this came out in 2013. Wow. Thank you. When a classical dancer suspecting wife sets an investigator behind him, a series of violent events triggered revealing his real identity and connection to a darker world. So, he's a dancer, but he has a secret identity. So, that makes sense. A lot. That doesn't even seem like the same film. Right. Because he has an alternate personality. Exactly. That's why you watched the film. That's right. He's a dancer with a... Oh, and he directed it. He directed it, wrote it, produced it. Did he do the music? No. Not impressed anymore. Not impressed at all. If he'd done the music too, now we're done. Interesting. Interesting. Well, let us know about this film because we've seen a bunch of stuff from it and I think those are really popular videos from what I remember of those reactions. Like, those reactions are really popular. That doesn't mean the film is great, but you can let us know if the film is great and this is something of his we should start with. We need to get into more Kamal Hasan and I think... Well, we need to get into Kamal Hasan and Kamal Hasan. What should be the first film? It's only about two and a half hours. It looks like it grossed some money. Yeah, I can't even... You know what I love? IMDB shows the budget in rupees, but the gross in dollars. Thanks for that, IMDB. Yeah, it grossed $790,000. Which is not a good... That's terrible. We know that's... it's not a comparable thing at all. Because you take the $790,000, you multiply it times $75,000, and you get the number of rupees we get. You know who was composed by that? They are my mom. No, Shankar Mahavadan. Oh, who did Breathless. Yes, that guy. So there's a lot of people... I don't know if he's a passion project fan, or if he just did that... I don't know how much he directed in his career about him. Because we're dumb. Very dumb. But, let us know down below!