How do you Shopify? A step-by-step guide on how to create a profitable online store. This is part one of two. So you want to go back and watch part two after this. You're going to look down below in the description. You'll find a link to that. Welcome to the channel. Hey, if you haven't subscribed, make sure you do so. Hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Oh! Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. Now, this video is going to walk you all the way through how to use Shopify. How to set up that store. I remember when I first logged in to Shopify, I was like, oh my God, there's so much here. I don't know what to do. Is it a logo? Well, what color? What theme do I do? Do I add products? I didn't know what to do. And I did go through it. I was very successful. As a matter of fact, I actually have a course on Shopify. After you watch this video, if you'd like to actually see a course on it, it's called Ecom Road. There will be a link below. Just look for Ecom Road. And it'll walk you through building out your whole store. But I'm going to try to walk you through as many steps as possible. In these two videos, it gets you started on your store. Now, the example I'm going to use for this particular video is going to be a hot sauce store. Okay. So that we have to pick something. So we're going to pick hot sauce. Now I'm going to have a link to Shopify below so you could set up a store. You can get a 14 day free trial with that link. And when you first set up your store, it's going to ask you to put a name in there. So it's going to be like abcclothing.shopify.com. And I wouldn't agonize over that a whole lot because you can always buy a domain and direct it to the domain. So it may be abcclothing or appeal clothing or whatever you want to do. You can always change that later on. So don't worry about that so much. Okay. So let me put something up on the screen and then I'm going to kind of walk you through all the steps that you're going to need to know. So maybe you can make a list of these off to the side and you'll be more prepared when you actually sign up for your Shopify store. So let's check it out. First thing you're going to need is a business idea since so many hot sauce brands brag about being the hottest sauce ever. In this particular example, it's going to be kind of hot sauce. Okay. So great tasting mild hot sauces for the semi adventurous. If you don't have a business idea yet, you can also browse through a list of just different business ideas for inspiration. They have that on Shopify. Next thing you're going to need is a business name. You can use name check. You can use a whole bunch of different things out there. You can use GoDaddy to find a name, whatever you want. On this example, we're going to use kind of hot sauce dot shop as the domain. So don't worry about what you're going to call your store because you can always choose a domain later on or try Shopify's free domain name generator. Next thing you're going to need is a logo. Don't overthink this logo thing. I worked with a designer before and I've used, you know, self designing logos. They're all pretty good. It's not that big of a deal.  You're going to prepare a PNF file. I'll go ahead and put it on the screen here real quick. There's what we came up with, kind of hot sauce. Next thing you're going to need to know is what products you can actually sell. Are you going to do digital products? Are you going to do physical products? Are you going to have services available? All those things need to be thought out before you build your store. Photos, you're going to need clean product photos. It helps you sell your product. Okay. Here's three photos right here that we're going to put on the store. You see them right there. It's kind of hot sauce. If you're unsure what to put up there, just start with something. It doesn't matter. I think people overthink this stuff. The first thing you're going to need to do is you're going to need to add your products to the store. They got to be on the store. Okay. So, you got to get your products in there. Don't worry about having thousands of products yet. Okay. You want to just start with base products, maybe 10, 20 products, whatever you have, and get those up on your store. Now, let me show you a screen of what you're going to see within Shopify. You're going to go to products, add product to create your first product. Listing. You can see that right here. There's a number of decisions that's going to be made on this page. So, let me break it down. You're going to write your product title and description. Super important, guys. This part is super important. Your product pages are where your customers go to learn about the product and decide whether or not to buy it. Details do matter. And sharing the right information in the right way from pricing to sizing through text and visuals really can make the difference. Now, if you're unsure about how to do this, you could look at some of your competitors. What did they do? Emulate some of the stuff they did. Not copy, but you can emulate. You could do something similar for that. Next thing you're going to need to do is product descriptions. You're going to describe and sell your product there. You got to know who you're speaking to. Okay? Super important. Who's your audience? You got to highlight your incentives. You got to anticipate common questions and objections. You want to make your text easy to scan. You want to help customers see themselves using your product. Okay. Let's check this out on the screen. This is hot enough. Have an arrow right here. And it's got products. You've got your title there. I've put in a description of that particular product right there. And then you're going to upload your photos and other media. You know, most cameras in an iPhone right now are good enough.   Okay? It's like the newest iPhone I have right now is the 13 at the time I'm recording this, the 13 Pro Max or whatever it is. It will actually do some really nice bokeh in the background where you can blur out the background. So a lot of iPhones will do. You don't have to overthink this. But you want to get a decent picture on there. You don't want to use standard stock photos. Then, of course, you're going to need to set your price for the product. That's where we added our pictures. And here's our pricing right here. You're going to have your price. Compare at price. Cost per item. That way you can look at your profit margins and how much money you're making. And here's a little chart of everything up there. Got hot enough, high banero, and it's got all my price per product. My actual price and my gross profit margin on each one in the weights. Inventory is something to think about. If you were dropshipping, you wouldn't have to worry about it. If you're doing printable demand, you don't have to worry about it. But if you're making your own product, of course you will. You're going to need to have your SKU in there, which is a stock keeping unit. It's used to keep track and manage your inventory. You're going to want to have your barcode in there. You're going to want to have your quantity in there. And you can slow this video down if you want to read some of those descriptions. You're certainly welcome to do that. This is what it looks like inside of Shopify. The screen here that says inventory. Then you're going to want to think about your shipping. Of course you're going to want to have your weight, any of your customs information in there, any shipping information in here. This is a shipping screenshot right here. What it's going to look like. This is used to calculate the rates at checkout, the country of origin, the providence, all that good stuff. If you have any variants to the products, you're going to do that. Variant screenshot right here. Variants are different sizes of that particular hot sauce or different sizes of clothing or whatever it may be. Then of course you're going to want to have your product type, your vendor, your tags, any of the collections. All those things are very, very important. And then product availability. You need to manage that. You've got to have in here, you know, if it's an online store, what the product type is, who the vendor is, any collections you have in there, any and all tags you want. You want to fill those in. I do suggest using Ubersuggest. It's a free keyword search tool to gauge how often people search for different keywords when you're doing your products. Here's an example right here. Search engine listing preview. It's got the title of it. It's got the description of it. And you can see the page title and description there. And it also gives me a preview so I can see what it looks like. The collections. Okay. Here's a collection page right here. Medium hot sauces for the semi-adventurous. So I'm going to put that in there. I have all that information listed in there. This is what it looks like on the search engine. This is the page title. This is the description right here. Browser collection of flavorful. Oh, got a little error there. Medium hot sauces. Got to fix that. Then you're going to want to create online shopping keys for the pages in the stores. You want to have your contact page. You want to have your about us page. You want to have your frequently asked question page and your policy pages also. Here's an example of our story page. We didn't want to make the world's hottest hot sauce. We wanted to make the tastiest. Okay. So this website is all geared around tasty hot sauces. Not just burning you up. Okay. You want to have a good contact page. Here's an example of a contact page right here. And you can use a template if you want, which makes it really simple. And you can answer some of these questions so you save with a lot of customer contact on there. Now in the next video, I'm going to get into all the other pages you need to create. You want to go through these steps one by one. I know it seems like a lot of information and I know it seems difficult, but you can do this. You could get through this. This is the thing that puts a lot of people off as they see how much work there is to it. And they just go, I'm not going to do that. And then they sit around and watch Netflix or they watch a movie or something and it does nothing for you. And in that saying that people say, oh, it drives me crazy. They go, well, that's going to take so much time. Well, here's the thing with time. Let's say it takes six months. Let's say it takes three months. Is there relevant? Because unless you die, that time is going to pass anyhow. So are you going to pass it by watching Netflix? I don't want to pickle Netflix too much because I watch Netflix. But are you going to pass that time with just mindless bubble gum, right? Are you going to do that? Or are you going to invest some of your time into something worthwhile? The time is going to go by no matter what. And if you get that in your head, the time is going to go by no matter what instead of saying that will take two years or that will take six months or this will take a week. Ignore that fact because the week is going to pass anyhow. The six months is going to pass. The two years is going to pass anyhow. Long as you're alive, okay? So why not invest it in something good? Okay? Take your time and invest it in something good. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you got a lot out of it. If you did, of course you did. Comment below, right? Let me know what you got out of it. Let me know if it helped you. Let me know if you have other questions because I want to address those if I can too. This channel is all about helping you start running grow online businesses. I've got over a thousand videos on this channel right now that you can watch for free. Now, I've got a free course below too. It's a $97 course. You can click that link and get it also for free. No credit card required. And I've got some other links down there and information I would suggest you check those out. I have my reading list down there. Great books that are going to help you on your journey. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. Hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn it on. Wait, wait. I can do better than that. Much better. Make sure you ring the bell. Turn it on. 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How's it going everybody? Dato Adoya here with another Dragon Ball Fighters video. And because the open beta for this game is coming out later on tonight, I wanted to talk about fighting games in general, and what makes them uniquely frustrating. Now if you're coming to fighting games from MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2, the first thing you'll notice is obviously that you don't have any teammates. And no matter how obvious it is, it is an important distinction between fighting games and a lot of other games that are played competitively. Games like CSGO and League of Legends are made up of teams of five, and the accomplishments and the failures of those teams are split up amongst all five members of the team and sometimes even a coach. So one of the first things you're going to notice when playing by yourself and really trying to win is that the wins will feel a lot better and the losses will sting a lot harder. And it's in those losses where you'll find most of your improvement, but in order to do that you have to allow yourself a certain amount of room to lose without getting too angry with yourself. Thinking about your losses critically is always going to help more than just blaming the opponent for doing something cheap. A lot of new players have this problem. For example, you'll hear a lot of newcomers complain about projectile type moves and opponents using them while running away, but really those types of strategies aren't foolproof, especially in Dragon Ball Fighters. If someone's keeping you away from them using Keyblast, you can just use the homing dash and go right through them, and if they use a beam you can just jump over them or vanish. But these are things that you have to learn by experimenting in the game and playing against these types of players over and over again and losing until you find out how to win. And this isn't even the only aspect of fighting games that's frustrating that takes time to get over. There's also the added on pressure of learning your character to a point where you don't have to think about combos and special moves in order to perform them. That becomes especially prevalent when you remember that you have to learn three characters in this game. There's nothing worse than going into training mode for a couple of hours and practicing one combo over and over again on both sides of the opponent to get it down to a T, and then going online and realizing that you're too scared to perform it in an actual match. This leads to players in a way having to practice the same combo at least twice for an extended period of time.  And I know at this point I've made it sound like fighting games aren't even a game at this point, they're just something that you do as a project. But really a lot of the things I listed don't have to be practiced intentionally. If you just genuinely enjoy the game, you'll improve over a period of time naturally. And strangely enough this is where I see a lot of problems in new players. They want to be the best before they can even have hands on time with the game. And they end up putting so much pressure on themselves to win every match they play, and that's just not realistic, even for the most seasoned fighting game veterans. There will be a lot of times when you'll lose to something that you know you should be. It's happened to me more times than I'd like to admit, but you just can't let those losses burn you out. That's why I always say that my number one tip to getting better at a fighting game is to just genuinely enjoy playing the game, because if you enjoy playing it you'll just get better naturally. But if you force yourself to meet these unrealistic goals, then you're gonna start getting burned out quick. And it would be a shame to start hating your game because you loved it enough that you wanted to be the best at it. But really that's all I had to say for this video. Hopefully you guys have a lot of fun in the beta later on tonight and for the next couple of days. I know I'll be having a ton of fun, and I wanted to ask you guys, what's the one thing you're most excited about for trying in the open beta? Me personally, I can't wait to play some Krillin against Nappa, and seeing if there's a dramatic intro where Krillin kills all the Cybermen before facing Nappa. But if you want to leave me your favorite thing, do so in the comments below. I'll be down there as always. And while you're down there, if you like this video and channel, make sure to like the video and subscribe. And I'll see you in the next one.


Hello everyone, this is financial author Amit Dan of amitdan.com on this channel You'll find financial travel and more videos just like the one you're watching right now If you like what you see, please give me a thumbs up and consider subscribing Hello everyone, this is Amit Dan of amitdan.com today I'll have another episode of unboxing video and I'll be opening Manfrotto Pixie Evo II mini tripod And I'm expecting this video about 8 to 10 minutes long Manfrotto Pixie Evo tripod. This tripod has various features and I bought this with my own money This is not a paid review or affiliated review, so there will not be any affiliated link in The description box below or anywhere and the reason I bought this I wanted to try how it feels to do my own video blogging, especially when I'm on the street Or when I would like to take my own video holding the camera putting on top of the tripod So let's start with unboxing first. Then I'll go through some features and how it feels and everything else Okay, so here's the package and I'll just give you some special some details from the package which is right here So the maximum weight this can support is 5.5 pound or 2.5 kg which is right here. So I would say it would be good for most handy DSLR cameras and the 5.5 pound is a lot of weight So it should be okay for most of the everyday cameras you we use and then it can go high as 7.8 inch or 20 centimeter and actually it has two different sections and The aluminum ball head is Rotate has rotating wheel or ball head and it has a locking knob as well and on the back of the Packaging you can you can see various ways to use the mini tripod and it has leg angle selector and The material is made of two different Materials which one is adaptor which I believe a combination of plastic or something else and that it's got aluminum and It's it should feel very good in hand and let's open up and Take a look at how it looks and feels The first impression is that it feels good in my hand it feels durable and sturdy and It's made of aluminum and adaptor two different materials and when you Open it then It comes this way. That's the widest angle possible. However, there is a knob right here and If you slide it towards the left Then you can actually achieve even further Placement closer to the ground. So it's gonna be like this way and this is very good for macro shooting or other Type of video shooting where you want to be very closer to the object Our subject so that it has that feature However, most of the time I'll be using This angle, so I don't need this to be that closer to the ground now when you put it on on a flat surface Then it feels very stable and sturdy and it has a rubberized grip on right here Video may not be catching it properly, but there's something rubberized grip here that you know keeps it sturdy on the surface and then these three legs they have separate positioning levers there's a button right here and You can achieve a different height Based on where you place them. So for example, I can extend it all the way and then it can be this high Or I can just Put it in the middle and then It can come up to this side Another thing you can do. Let's say you can put them put different legs in different positions to achieve your desired height for example, this is all the way and this is The shortest length and then If you put your camera here, then it will give you different angle To do video or photography now one thing I would like to show you that when you insert other tripod into the quarter inch hole then What happens you have to Move the whole thing to tighten it up tighten that up but for this one actually if you just put it here all you have to do is just Circle the Button here and that will tighten up the camera on the surface. So you don't have to Move the whole thing. So that's a good feature Okay, so that Titans up the whole camera and then you can achieve various Levels you can push it place it this way And you have to tighten up the Knob here to tighten up the ball head or let's say if you want it this way You can do that too. You can tighten up So that that's a very good feature to have You can move it that way any way you want and this is gonna be very handy in terms of you know for vlogging Let's say I'm at a restaurant or I'm sitting somewhere and I can just put this on a flat surface Or even I I believe I can place it on an uneven surface and then I can Position my camera towards any angle I want and then it's I can do the video So I'll just remove this one here It takes about probably like 10 15 seconds to Un-tie or Remove the camera from the section so These are the main features of this tripod and In terms of color it comes in three different color combinations. I believe I mentioned that before and The feeling is very good. The weight is not that bad And you can hold 2.5 kg or 5.5 pound another thing I'd like to mention that when I saw the picture of this tripod. I was expecting this to be a little bit slimmer However, in reality, it looks like a little bit bulkier. It's not too bulkier But I was expecting these legs to be slimmer But this is not a big deal, but that's what I thought is gonna be However, still it's a good Weight and good shape to carry with you. However, you want to do a video or photography shooting outside and Especially for a video blogging So overall, I'm happy with the purchase. I I can't find anything to complain about this product So I'm totally happy in terms of the price the color and the material and everything and by the look And by the look and feel of it it looks like it's gonna be durable and it will last for many years to come so I'll end this video at this point and Again, this was not a paid video. I purchased this with my own money and on this channel You'll find a variety of videos covering different topics and subjects. I'm not limited to only one type of videos so if that's what you like to watch, please subscribe and Please like this video and there will be more videos coming up on different topics. So keep watching and I'll see you shortly


Hey, good afternoon everybody. Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter and this is smart business moves Hey y'all We're Live it is August 10th, and this is leadership month We're bringing leadership today You know Tom you and I really do both like this topic so even though we got thrown a little curve ball today This is a good topic. I think for us to get a little curve ball No, we're gonna have fun with us. We will dug out some of our favorite leadership books So we're gonna be talking about them and And I guess our audience can participate as well and we can drop some titles and chat and You know do a little deep dive on that But you know what today is I? Bet some kind of data came from somewhere that we need to hear about Today is the day that the consumer price index numbers come out every month All right, why don't you know what Tom? Have you ever explained to the audience what the consumer price index is? It's a survey not probably have it. We'll take just a second This is done through the Department of Labor not sure why maybe they didn't know where else to stick it but there is Right then and they didn't know where out maybe you know, maybe maybe that's a logical place I don't know Like a labor thing to me seems like it's more of a commerce thing, but it is tied to employment. That's a component of it But there is what they call a basket of goods And I don't know what that is exactly what to probably Google it and figure it out But it's a representative sample of stuff that consumers buy hence consumer price index And it measures the change in price from those items from one month to the next and also compares it from You know this month this year to August of well in this case it would be July of last year and The whole Thing is if the price goes up, you know if the average price increase is five percent higher this year for that same basket of goods than what it was last year then inflation is five percent and We've been tracking those numbers Recently because the numbers have been getting high the year over year number for June was like 9.1% Which is as high as we've seen it in like 47 years you have to go back to like the early 80s to have to define the number that I And you know, I guess I kind of remember the early 80s, but I really wasn't At least not the stuff that you would find in the basket of goods Maybe Because just a quick Google tells us that the things that are in the basket of goods only stay in there for four years And then they come out and then do you have a list of some of the things that's in the basket? Well, I thought it was actually pretty interesting. So it changes all the time based on the different Prices so items for sampling at each outlet are selected randomly based on odds Proportional to how much spending they attract relative to category alternatives in term of brand variety and size or weight so It changes and there are a total this is interesting. I thought Basic indexes for a 211 good services and housing item categories for 32 geographic area areas Subdividing all US urban areas. So it's a pretty Big deal when they're choosing these. I'm like there's a lot of reading here. That's just what I got you know off the Quick Google search, but there's when they try to deconstruct the basket of goods. That's not an easy answer No, like corn I was expecting 211 things corn rent, you know something but no And there are different components of it and in some segments are up a lot more than others Housing especially like rent right housing is double digits crazy Expensive which is taking money away from the consumer for other things There's two CPI numbers one is the overall number and then they have another number. They call the course consumer price index where You know While they do this, I'm not sure but they take out energy which includes gasoline fuel They take out food because those are typically more volatile and So the core was like six point one percent I believe which was a five percent I mean point five percent a half percent increase over what it was a Month ago No, a year ago rather is point three percent over month a month So core is going up higher and supposedly that's what the Federal Reserve looks at more when they're figuring out How much they want to raise their interest rates? So The inflation numbers dropped, but I'll share my screen here show you a graph just so we don't get to it Excited just because the rate of inflation dropped doesn't mean that The problem is fixed that just means that the graph is dropped here and it was up here It's still Compared to you know, historically what it has been over the last Plus years Crazy hi, I really like the graph the graph really illustrates it well and quickly We are we've got a long way to go before we're we're out of the woods on this and prices And this means that prices are still going to continue to go up for the foreseeable future. There's People are thinking that you know, it might be a couple of years down the road before we actually see inflation rates getting down to You know two percent two percent's kind of what the Federal Reserve wants it to be But they're going to continue to raise interest rates Maybe not as as as bigger increases as what they've had recently, but maybe they will we really don't know There's a speculation that the jobs market will be cooling off because of all of this and I've been just reading that supposedly You know more work not supposedly more more companies have been announcing that they're going to be like doing some layoffs or stop hiring Supposedly the labor market is getting softer. Have you heard much from The people you work with in your success circles, are they having an easier time finding running technicians these days so everybody has In a much better state right now everybody there are about 65 people in the circles and Across the board. I would say 97% of all of the companies are like. Yeah, things are better We are either fully staffed or over staff, but people still aren't Unnervous There's still like How's it Nobody has confidence that it's going to stay this way for long just because coming off of such hard hiring times People are still nervous I'm guessing it's going to get Easier and easier to find people. I mean saying easy. It's a relative term But I'm thinking it's going to be You know relative sense that there's going to be more people in the marketplace looking for work Which is which is good news on the flip side of it, you know as inflation goes up and people are You know fuel prices are down. That's a good thing, but housing costs, especially rental Rates are going up at an alarming rate and when people are happy to make the same rentals, that's a good That's good news for I'm not bemoaning that one And we had it we went through a period of time too when it was a real struggle to get people to pay their rent So it's kind of like this seems fair All right, this seems really fair You have rentals so Okay that's what we have to look forward to and tomorrow the Producer price index number comes out and it'll be interesting to see you know if that's You know, so thinking that that was going to come down a little bit too because a lot of that gets into commodities and raw materials and stuff that As a rule those prices have been coming down quite a bit Okay, so Tom, so let's take this information that we got that you brought to us. Thank you and How do we translate that into our topic of the month leadership, right? How do we use that information as the leaders of our companies? What do we what do we need to be thinking about talking about? planning for any any thoughts there one of the Key responsibilities, you know, we talk about this in in in foundations and When we do foundations next March will be talk one of the things we'll be talking about is You know, what is what are the job responsibilities of a CEO talk about leadership? CEO is the head leader in every organization and you know, there are a lot of business owners that that join us We don't always think of ourselves as CEOs, but we are we're the Officer the top manager top leader in our business and probably the most not probably the most important thing that the CEO needs to do with the organization is lead the strategic planning part of the business and You know as the labor market changes as You know prices change as consumer Ability to buy your service changes all of that really gets into, you know your strategy What is your current strategy and what adjustments do you make to your strategy? Based upon changing conditions, you know, we should all have a plan and we all should have started You know our year with a plan and a budget These are the major Rocks if you will that we were going to be managing in our Business throughout the year, but it's really important to keep an eye on the situation that your business is is is doing business in and as the situation changes as you You know get new data if the situation changes you need to often change with it Right You at least have to be looking at it and thinking about how does this going to impact me and our business? How are we do we need to change and if we do what do we need to change? So you can be looking at it and I think the the biggest thing there is you need to have it be a plan and Not even if your plan is not right a plan that is not the perfect plan is better than no plan Where you're just being buffeted by whatever comes along, right? so I think a lot of times what at least what I run into in the circles is People don't want to They don't want to create a plan because they don't know But I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what's going to happen It's not you think anybody had a clue that COVID was gonna happen the way that it did right And everybody's plans were like poof gone. That's it I have no idea scrap that start over But that's okay. You have a place to start from so you got to have something to start from and move forward but you know, it's really really kind of awesome about that is a Lot of the businesses that that I work with that I know made a lot of changes in their business model and their strategy because of COVID Help them better deal with it and as part of that They're a lot more efficient. They're a lot more profitable now They're making the generating more gross profit off of the homes that they clean is a combination of pricing It's a combination of better using their workforce solo cleaners driving their own car leaving from home Which is a competitive advantage moving into, you know, the situation we have now with inflation and our costs going up Our labor rates are still going up salaries are still going up the numbers that came out today show That salaries are still going up. We're gonna have to pay more in the future than we are now to hire the same talent Okay, fine. We're gonna have to either Be more efficient with that so we can generate more revenue the same amount of labor and or we need to raise our rates and You know in part to answer your question We've been beating that drum for for a good while now, but we need to improve our pricing raise our rates We still need to be doing that It's gonna get harder though once, you know, if the leads start slowing down a little bit if You know, we don't I'm starting to see some numbers that that lead me to believe that that that there is You know from the industry Maybe we're starting to see a little bit of slowdown and in the demand for house cleaning services and to stand to figure that would happen because of So there's so much money to go around and for people that happen to make a decision that they need to cut back on their house Well, I think another thing that we're seeing more of too is People get nervous and so they either pause or cancel their cleaning not to say they won't come back again when they realize Oh, I don't know how to clean I don't want to clean right, but they get nervous and they kind of panic So I know that over the course of June and July quite a few of the few of the companies that I work with saw Like wow numbers lost numbers that they had not seen and they weren't anticipating. They weren't expecting that and also Decrease leads coming in like oh, okay Gonna have to put a little bit more money out To to get those leads or at least got to put a little focus there and have to start doing something more than just Letting it run on autopilot. So we are seeing that The traditional reaction to that is okay demand starting to soften. I better back off on my the rates that I'm charging Yeah, I Would argue that you know, I mean it depends. There's a lot of different ways you can apply that You know that the top line, you know what you're charging per hour, you know, maybe you need to Slow that down a little bit But you always have homes that you're you're providing service to on a recurring basis that are underpriced and we want to be looking at those regardless and You know if you do that using the right tools you can Basically replace them that the gross profit that that you're getting off of those Several times over by doing rate increases. You might want to cleaning fewer homes and making more money doing it and All right, I'm glad you I'm really glad you brought that up because That is a real sticking point for people. They're like they don't want fewer customers They just they constantly are focusing on that customer number. I want to grow my customer base, you know I've got 300 customers. I want 350. I've got 350. I want 400 but really You and I are always saying you need to focus more on when you focus more on gross profit And I'm always focusing more on net profit, right? I'm like, I want you to reduce expenses too and get more money in in your in your purse there Yes, Tom, make sure that you have more money in your purse. So that you Used to see my purse I have seen your purse very large looks like a briefcase But either here or there but you're always focusing really much more on gross profit Like let's just get and be making more money off of each each labor Hour that we're sticking out there in the world, right? Make have more money coming back to us That gross profit is the fuel that powers everything all the good stuff that you aspire to do in your business we all had these visions of What we the good that we were going to do in the world and for our families and for ourselves by Being entrepreneurs and owner own business then you start doing it and you get smacked upside the head with the reality of You know how hard it is and you get smacked up beside the head enough You can't even forget, you know what it was that you're trying to do when you started But all those good things that that that you were aspiring to when you started all happened with gross profit You know, that's how you make better jobs. That's how you make provide better service. That's how you you know Provide a better, you know living in value for your for taking the risk of owning a business and Operating expenses are an issue. That's important too, but I Guess having studied the numbers and have have you know coached a number of cleaning businesses over the years The ones that are struggling to pay the bills not all the time, but more time and not is a gross profit issue They're not making enough The homes they're cleaning Rather than some expense item absolutely had totally agreed if they don't get that payroll percent of revenue number in check It doesn't really matter anything else that that's got to be the first concern The number one place that that everybody has to hit It's just too large of a chunk of the money that's leaving your company or our companies Focus on the gross profit from recurring clients and the quality of service during these inflationary times. Hey Robin You see Robin. Thanks for being here absolutely more so now and ever because You know, it's very possible that it's going to be a little bit tougher very early to say to what degree and how bad and for how long but You know, I think that we're starting to see see it a little bit in the numbers. I think that You see a lot of numbers.  So you do spend a lot of time looking at it I mean, I I always look to you to know what's going on just because I know you do look at all of that stuff all the time And and you do have numbers to look at. Well, we we've started doing this program and We made central called McDrive. I'm kidding I came up with like immediately I was like, oh McDrive. He's gonna talk about McDrive Where where where where we help users of a central C You know what we refer to them as core KPIs, but you know where their numbers are and Where they potentially could be relative to to other people that use me central and It's it's it's kind of a coaching program it is a coaching program and we get an opportunity to look at a lot of numbers as part of that and The revenue number might might be the number of homes the number of homes are being cleaned each month be more precisely as Is is showing us starting to take down a little bit? All right, so let's let's talk about that though because that's kind of what we started with is the idea that Okay, that you shouldn't be focusing on the number of homes as much but Tom No, I'm just laughing because it here's the other part of that story for Those of you don't know our pricing model and made central is really based on the number of homes you clean each month And I've noticed that a number of our partners aren't quite clean as many homes each month as they notice it That's like, you know our billing may central billing has dropped a little bit Doesn't Where do we come up with that pricing model? I don't know So, you know what now? I think it works really well because you're gonna be really focused on helping people to get more clients But it is funny that you're focusing on number of clients instead of like making more money and gross profit Right. I'm doing the wrong thing. It's like Don't worry as you raise your rate for your homes make more money. That's good for them, you know I mean central makes less money, but yeah I don't know. He's I think you're talking yourself into price increases. Is that what it's just Yeah, you're not gonna be popular today Tom, sorry Also focusing a low-cost marketing efforts email and door hangers interesting Is that working for you Robin? Yeah, I want to hear about that too. Yeah I know a lot of people are going doing some door hanger work a lot more than we had seen over the past couple years More monthly clients being added Yeah, that seems like that's kind of a normal thing that'll happen People can't afford to have their houses clean twice a month because they're struggling a little bit Email is working. Oh, wow. Email is working. That's awesome. What's your what's your rate on email? What are you tell us some numbers? Open rate Return rate. What what are you doing there? I'd love to hear about that email has been such a dog for Like the last couple of years love to hear that that's working again. Yeah, there's Just changes I understand like Gmail has been making some changes that's making it a little bit harder to get Everybody's working against us from digital marketing, you know Apple and everything they're doing on that side, you know, they've made changes to make digital marketing They're doing Tom. What are they doing? Oh, well, it's this is more on the on the on the on the ad side And it particularly tying into Facebook marketing. They're making a lot more difficult to be Facebook marketing not necessarily email, but Understand Google is doing some things to make email more more difficult to yeah Everybody wants their piece of the pie. Everybody wants to be making a little bit more money. So a lot I heard that the Justice Department is looking at charging Google with some Exactly what it was but it's something to do with with monopolistic practices So, wow This or not. All right. How could that not help us? That would have to help us. Yeah, some of the other like Handy Yeah The guy who I've seen a hand or hand who used to run handy that got bought by Angie and now I've seen run he's the CEO of handy but Companies like that are getting all over Google because that earlier fair shape Google's getting more into Hey, you don't need to go those guys. We you know here. We'll recommend, you know vendors to you I saw an interview from from them this morning and they're talking about that You know the demand for the service that they sell was dropping But the number of home service contractors that are signing up with with Angie Yeah, pretty sharply, which means they're not getting as much work as they used to through their normal channels And they're they're feeling like they have to reach out because Angie is not that makes sense though I mean, that's not just house cleaning. That's right Speaks to What we're talking about that things are typing right when they start going to Places like Angie. Do you think with inflation that we are reaching a ceiling on price increases to be passed on the client? A little bit about that No, I wouldn't I wouldn't look at it that way we need to be mindful.  It's easier to hire people because theoretically you can pay more It's going to go down But you know, we need to look at price increases more practically Everybody has customers that should be getting a rate adjusted. That's my belief. We should always be doing rated adjustments We talked about you should always be recruiting Yeah, you should always be recruiting, but you should always be doing great adjustments We in the MC live event the main central live event that that we've done the last several times most recently a few weeks ago you weren't town you Your event as well we We show a graph and we see this from company to company where you can look at the average revenue per hour for a recurring home It can look like a solid number. It might be like 60 70 dollars I was like, wow, that is awesome But you graph it from the home that's got the lowest revenue per hour to the home that's got the highest revenue per hour You got a ton of homes that are down there 30 40 dollars an hour for later And if you raise those rates you do rate adjustments there then you're you can go from You know, you can increase your average rate by six or seven bucks in the examples that that we've shown In all bottom line, basically you're doubling your net profit if you're able to do that And you can do I mean it's You think about how hard you have to work over the course of the month Do all the things that you need to do to clean all the homes that you need to clean and get those people to pay you And pay your bills and have something left over and say that you can double that amount by doing some rate adjustments It's silly not to do that little extra stuff. Yeah um, we are so afraid that of losing customers and Actually just that they're just afraid of losing customers that it's hard to get past that I wish we could come actually i'm going to challenge you. This is something that you are really good at You need to find a way to Get to create some sort of a visualization for people to be able to understand how It is more important to raise your rates and clean you are better off cleaning fewer jobs And making more money people just can't grasp their They can't grasp that idea. They kind of get it when you're talking. They're like, yes, that makes sense That makes sense now. It's time to do price increases, but I don't want to lose any clients All right, they can't they can't get the things together there Okay This is going to sound like we scripted this but if anybody that really knows how we do this knows that that couldn't happen because we never script anything That would require too much Different foundations. So yeah, that's true foundations. We we we do script that All right. I love it. What do we got here tom? We have Let me see if I can Yeah, make it bigger It's hard but when the numbers are so tiny I have a huge screen My business partner made me go out and buy this ginormous screen I'm working from from from the office. It's kind of silly. I've got my I never work here But I need to start I need to start coming in the office I never do either. It's terrible. All right, bigger. You can make it bigger because look you have the whole right hand side of your screen is Yeah, but some things are going to be falling off, but They are okay. We'll make we'll make this work. Okay. Oh, that's so much better tom. Okay, so The format that we typically use when you build spreadsheets for modeling is the numbers that we're supposed to change are kind of this peach color and that's kind of a convention that Excel uses so we just stick with it and everything else here calculates and the way this works is Say you've got a bill rate per job and what does make it up and say $200 a job I think that's maybe that's a little high for most people call it As an average. Yeah It's like the company that's maybe they're doing 500 Jobs a month. Okay. Okay so What would be happening there is 500 jobs a month at 175? That would be a revenue of 87 500 a month revenue Um, let's pretend that your payroll to revenue number is 40 percent. Okay So at that point you're going to have to get sold would be 35 000 Payroll to revenue Approxied for cost to get sold So I need to explain that more. I mean if you were with us Years ago, we we took a like a walk through the the wilderness for like a month talking about this Was it only a month? All right, so I know a lot of so we're running into this a little bit So I do want to clarify this so a lot of you have bookkeepers That don't think that You have any cost of goods sold and they don't have your charter account set up this way And they don't want to set it up this way Tom, can you explain a little bit of what what we're calling cost of goods sold and why we're why we're using a cost of goods sold model Yeah, most bookkeepers. Let's say bookkeepers. I'm gonna say cpa's. Yeah accountants.  That's what you're you're you're paying taxes on We not only I mean, it's just kind of general practice from a management accounting standpoint But you separate your variable cost from your Variable costs traditionally are referred to as cost of goods So The thinking point comes in from like a nerdy accounting standpoint. We're not selling goods or selling services fine services It's the same thing Come closer to your speaker If you could Okay, much better um Cost of services sold so If you clean one extra home What additional costs do you realize? and You know, you're using a little more window cleaner You're you know using you know another vacuum cleaner bag But all of that's really what they call in material from an accounting standpoint In the bigger sense, you want to know what that is and you want to track it and you want to know it But for day-to-day planning purposes, I suggest for most cleaning companies don't get You know, you spend more time, you know trying to to get a really accurate number and not enough time Managing your business based on what you already know so I want to say proxy what I'm really talking about is Uh, this payroll to revenue number, which is basically the amount of Every dollar that comes in from cleaning what percentage of that goes to to the technicians that that that are cleaning the home for you and you can calculate that on a weekly basis by looking at your Payroll and payroll expenses that go to your your your cleaning technicians divided by the revenue that those technicians generated That's another discussion, but it's it's an easy calculation to do and you need to be tracking that every payroll period So my payroll to revenue is 40. What that means is 40 cents out of every dollar that comes in Is variable it goes to my technicians. We're going to call that cost a good solve So this 35 thousand dollars basically is 40 percent of the 87 five So every home I clean 40 cents out of every dollar is going to go there At the end of the month, whatever's left over is the difference to take my revenue across to good solve Which is this 52 500 dollars? What's the money I use to pay all my other bills pay my rent? okay All the fun stuff you want to do parties or your employees marketing the extra help that you're going to have in your office Yeah, your office staff um What's left over after that is all that stuff For companies that are struggling though to make the numbers work to make enough money to have enough money in the bank to Make payroll and to pay the other bills and keep a roof over your head And and actually have profit left over for that a reward for taking the risk and doing all the hard work More times than not it's because this percentage here is too high And this number the cost to get sold is a ratio to revenues too high And if it's too high You're never going to clean enough homes to make enough money Do the things that you want to do So that's why we we worry about uh payroll to revenue so much or or or gross profit So if I want to raise rates, uh, it scares me Because if I do that i'm going to lose customers. Yes, I raise my rates all my customers are going to fire me Or maybe not all of them but enough of them that I can't afford it yeah so What this is is a calculator That allows us to Once we know what our average bill rate is and how many jobs that we're doing And what our payroll to revenue is we can play what if analysis The fancy word for that is sensitivity analysis, but it's like what if games, okay? Yeah, what if And if you see right here, I set the rate increase to zero and expected job loss to zero I've got two columns here with numbers in them One of them says Hourly or allowed hours pay and the other is fees but Flip fee split pay or commission pay so If I raise my rates 10 percent So allowed hours just for people that don't know allowed hours is the same thing as job ticket hour job ticket hour And then fee split is the same thing as percentage All right or commission some people call it commitment too. All right, so we're good If I raise my rates across the board 10 percent My bill rate per job goes from 175 to 192 50 In both columns. Okay. Yep For the moment, I'm going to say I'm losing zero jobs or zero percent So I'm still doing 500 jobs a month, but my revenue goes up to 96,000 to 50 If I'm paying hourly or job ticket hour My cost of goods sold is still at $35,000 because I'm paying Based on the allowed hours or I'm just paying a flat hourly rate. Okay So over here my cost of goods sold or payroll to revenue is 40 percent It goes down to 36.36 percent Because I did the rate increase and I'm getting more money, but my cost to get sold is the same My gross profit goes up to 61,000 from 52. I got an extra gross profit of 8,750 That's the same as cleaning an extra 45 jobs a month In terms of gross profit without having to clean anything more That's like a nine percent increase in In gross profit nice Sweet nice. Yeah And if I go over to fee split It looks a little bit different when I get down here to cost a good sold because I'm paying commission. So if I raise My bill rate that gets passed over to my technicians So in that case my cost to get sold is still fixed at 40 percent. So my payroll Goes up to 38 five, which leaves me 57 750 I've got 5200 leftovers extra gross profit. That's another 27 Palms. Okay. Yeah What happens if we say, okay, well, I'm going to do a 10% rate increase I'm going to lose some of my customers, but out of the 500 how many do we think we quit? Would 50 quit? Wow, that's a lot. I don't think 50 are quitting now With 25 I don't know. I've never done a rate increase with more than at the end of it Two or three Quitting maybe usually tell people in the circles tom that if you're losing If you're losing three percent or less, dude, that's that's good So let's see three percent so All these numbers up here remain the same Because this is before the expected job loss Yeah, I'm going to scroll down here. And this is after the expected job loss. So Losing three percent. Basically. I'm losing 15 jobs a month Which gives me 485 I applied the new bill rate to 485 jobs. I've got revenue of 93 three Cost a good sold to 33 nine gross profit of 59 Extra revenue almost 7,600 $900 an extra revenue with the rate increase and a 3% loss That's an extra 35 homes or 7% So I've got an extra $6,900 Left over every month and I wouldn't have had before with a 10% increase and a 3% customer loss Yeah, and that's after the customer those 3% customers. They're gone. Yeah, there's a customer Those 15 jobs are gone one And if I'm doing and people say yeah, but I pay commission so it's you know Give you that calculation too. And it winds up to be $3,500 extra That you would would have left over After you're doing the same calculation with with with commission pay And the cool thing about commission pay is your technicians are now making more money as well So you're keeping up with with with inflation and you don't have to give anybody raises You don't have to do anything there.  It's not harder than anybody Keep your business going to keep them going. You're going to want to pass some of that along to them. Anyway, right But you'll have it to do it is the cool part. This is how you create better jobs. This is how you You know create, you know better service. This is how you create a more awesome company is by Generating more gross profit a stronger company That can withstand much more So maybe maybe it's five percent, you know, I don't think it would be I mean three percent And this is what happens. We talk about this in foundations. It's like it's a negotiation Very rarely does somebody say, okay, I got your rate increase letter. I quit That's a rate increase letter, but dog. I still want my home clean. Can I talk to you about it? And they might not ask that way, but you know, you'll want to talk to them about it It's like, you know, I can't afford this. Okay. Well, let's figure out what we can do And maybe we can adjust the scope of work. Maybe we can You know, maybe there's a couple bucks, you know, you can can can take off the maybe there's something you can do to To make it a win-win without losing All right, so this is the argument that I get on this tom when I try to talk to people, you know We had get this argument in foundations too people say No, I'm not going to negotiate my price. My price is my price. I'm a business I shouldn't have to negotiate my price. They take it or they leave it Well, um That's one way to look at it and one of your core values and if You know, that's the way you want to do it. I mean you it's your business You can get your your your your privilege do it. I can tell you though if you want to be more profitable It doesn't mean that you just basically just give it away and do what, you know, all your you're, you know Negotiation doesn't mean giving in Negotiation means looking for something that looks like a win-win that you can keep the customer and still add To this gross profit number Still make more money If you negotiate negotiate well, you will have more gross profit.  They're happy to negotiate. They understand the idea of negotiation So it's it's a sticking point with a mindset many times this idea that No, I have to do this because otherwise i'm not a real company. It's just a a little bit of a A misnomer I think about What people think a real company is sometimes so well it's I get that but you you really Don't want to As a rule, I mean there could be you know Situationally, you've got a customer that you want to get rid of for other reasons and you give them a rate increase And and hope that they say they can't afford it You say I understand we'll miss you Um, good luck. Mrs. Johnson. Yes. I hear some here are some companies in the area that you might be interested in So you're you know, you're less favorite competitor Less favorite business owners All right. This is awesome. Tom. Thank you. Um, maybe is it possible to share this? Sure You can can drop me an email tom at made central.com and i'll i'll be glad to to share it with you until you can run your own what-if analysis and The thing that I think is really cool is if you really are concerned. Okay, what if I yeah that thanks Tom That's what I was talking about 10 percent 10 percent. I'm doing commission. Okay. I'm I'm losing my but I go to even 10 loss Which is unfathomable I didn't like that. That's not even part of my working vocabulary. I don't know where that came from That's hard to believe. You know, I've still got $2,600 over here on hourly enough I'm doing fee split and a 10 loss and 10 increase Hey, I wouldn't want to do that. That's not a trade. That's not a trade worth making. Nope, but then you can all So two things there. You're probably not increasing all 500 of those jobs all at one time So let's say that you did raise it too much, right? You raised it too high You use 10 and for whatever reason your market can't handle it. You just raised them three months ago. Whatever Whatever the reason is and You have You've gotten 10 percent of your people that said, nope. I'm not doing it. Here's the time to negotiate. Okay Maybe this was not your best strategic move You don't have to every time you do something in your company If it doesn't work out, it doesn't mean that you have to stay wedded to that Most of the decisions that we're making we can change we can change our minds You know what? This was not my best decision You find out that your favorite customer mrs. Johnson who's been with you for 15 years and has always paid really well And has never been a problem. She says she's gonna have to cancel. She can't afford it You might want to rethink that y'all you might want to rethink that maybe this wasn't Maybe this wasn't the time. Maybe it wasn't maybe there was something wrong with your letter I don't know but maybe rethink it And that's one of the reasons why we recommend that you not Raise every single person all the same time. Right Tom. Yes, absolutely You want to ideally especially in 2022 There was a time when rate increases were a lot more Arduous, I mean it was just a lot of work and a lot of you know, a lot of manual stuff going on.  Oh my gosh. It was so hard So hard, but you can you can you can do this with a few clickable buttons in 2022 in which case You want to get on some type of cadence at least once a month. You want to be looking at You know customers that you've had at an old rate and You know when inflation is 1% or less that an annual increase probably makes sense The rate increases that we've been doing within castle keepers We say that you know, we're having to do rate increase for all the reasons that we're inflation and so on and so forth And we can't promise you that this will be the last increase you'll see this year We set the expectation That you know, this isn't necessarily an annual thing anymore because Great inflation dropped from 9.1 percent to 8.5 percent, but that still means year over year You know prices are going up another 8 percent. So You know doing two and three percent re it increases in an annual basis. You're way falling behind. Yeah I really like the strategy of Of talking to the clients and explaining that this might not be This might not be the we we hope that it will be the last one this year, but I like to use the verbage. We're not optimistic the way things are going Wouldn't hold my breath. Yeah, because things are tough So tom, I'm so glad that we have six more minutes here that we can talk about leadership books Well, we had a plan we had a plan Just like this is a perfect example You have a plan if things go in a different direction, you can change your plan And it's a great thing about running your own business You know, I've told you about my father-in-law who uh was a colonel in the marine corps and one of his favorite savings was Make a plan and deviate because like He was like on the battlefield and you know, well, it's flying and so forth So you always went out with a plan But as soon as the bullets start flying You deviated from that plan based on new information Oh goodness, they're coming from over there now. So instead of, you know, we're going to do something different Yeah, and business is kind of the same way, you know once you need a plan, but You know, once it's gay time and once things actually start happening and especially knowing your numbers And once you're able to start seeing the numbers You deviate based on those numbers And I'm telling people all the time in the circles So like I want to see their plan in advance because we do quarterly plans, right? And so we work by quarter Yes, you have to have a plan But if you're sticking to your plan all the time, there's a problem there You have you're you're not actually evaluating what's happening You should be more often than not you should be changing your plan up as you get closer That's that's the standard. That's what we want Change based on what is the incoming data that you have currently If you're not doing that Chances aren't good that you're growing in a smart way because If everything around you Is static if everything around you never changes Then you could argue that well, I'm not going to change anything if it ain't broke don't fix it But everything around us is changing and changing faster now than it then it used to from inflation and the labor market what's happening, you know and on the consumer side And if we aren't making changes along with that plus we need to be making changes to grow our business What what core kpis are we improving a lot and they're not going to improve Occasionally they'll improve accidentally Sometimes they'll get better for reasons you don't even I did nothing and and we're making more money. I've seen that happen Yep, me too. It's an accident. Yeah, definitely making more money. I don't even know what happened And we have also really seen small companies get very lucky For quite a long time You can get very lucky with a lot of stuff doing just some basic stuff, but at some time Luck runs out Then you have to start being a little bit more strategic And I'm really I'm really thinking the economy is going to get tougher here over the months ahead and I'm really thinking That there's going to be You know the competitive forces are going to change and I wouldn't surprise me to see some some of our competitors Deciding if they no longer want to be competitors and get out of business It could be some acquisition opportunities And this gets into I mean a lot of things if anything any big purchases you're thinking about making I mean if you need to make it now or or think you found a real deal Go ahead and do it But if it's something that you know, I could do that now or I could do it six months or a year from now I'm I would be waiting six months or a year from now odds are you're gonna gonna find better opportunities Huh? I think that was a really good little piece of the advice to leave people with for this leadership topic today Even though we didn't hit any of our stacks of books Yeah, I gotta put all these back now, but What's that one that you left in that stack over there tom What's that one? This is an awesome book everybody should have a hundred or so of these And if you don't I know where you can get a hundred or so Um, it actually is it actually is a a good book So, uh, we just happen to have a lot of them if you want one We'll let us know and when we see you at foundations or at one of the next I promise you will be giving these away at foundations. Um, or maybe some other life of that. I kind of I saw this on the bookshelf. So no when we will talk about this today Yeah, why haven't we gotten it out? We have about a hundred or so of these. We um, we inherited them You got a good deal. That was a good deal. That was at the Marcus Sheridan event and where was it down Tucson? Tucson not Tulsa not Tulsa Those are different places. Yeah, it was a good time there All right. Well robin. Thanks for joining us live today and having a lot of interesting input for us. Appreciate that And what are we doing next week, Tom? Um, but uh, we we we're going to deviate a little bit from from leadership air and air and lash is going to be with us from ARC si And we're going to be playing playing phc jeopardy um, so it's phc technician certification program, uh the arc see recognized online training program for cleaning technicians We have a jeopardy game that we actually introduced a convention last year. Yeah, it was fun We're uh air is going to join us and we're going to we're going to play jeopardy. So if you think you know your your your stuff when it comes to the science of cleaning and the chemistry and safety and methods of materials and equipment and so on and so forth Come on and we'll test that we'll get to compete against each other in a live Say jeopardy, but really isn't jeopardy. I I'm not I'm not saying that right. It's like a bar trivia game We all get an account we can all like play on our phones and answer the questions and we can stay you know, everybody's score at the end of each question and Yeah, I don't know it's a bar Maybe we can have a drink while we're doing it For you guys, that's a little bit later than us two o'clock in the afternoon. I guess you can drink it too, right? What's your point? All right, y'all bring beer, I guess It is the top of the hour. So we'll be here next wednesday with erin and Phc trivia until then you guys have a good week. Take care. Thanks. We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. Yeah


Hey there YouTube, my name is Craig. From along I-70 in Georgetown, Colorado Fall is in the air. You're watching TJV with Trucker Josh and Diesel. Enjoy! At least that's what their slogan says there. We're just getting ready to go here. For those of you new, hey welcome, hit that subscribe button before you do anything else. Love to have you as part of our TJV crew here. First thing I have to tell you though is that I'm not your usual stereotypical trucker. I'm a little weird. I'm a little different. I am my own brand of trucker. I don't fit into the stereotype and that's on purpose. It's a welcome. You want to see trucking from a different point of view? You came to the right place! Diesel, hey! Even my dog thinks I'm weird. That's Diesel back there by the way. He's been with me on the road since he was about ten weeks old. He just turned eight last week. They all just said happy belated birthday diesel, right? They all said happy birthday diesel. Don't you feel special? Okay, so we're all ready to go. I've done my pre-trip, checked all the lights. Everything checks out. Sunglasses are on. Hat is on. Wearing clothes, wearing pants. I think we're ready to go. So we picked up this load in Jackson, Tennessee, right? And we're taking it up to Red Deer, Alberta in Canada. For those of you new, I am from Canada. I am based in Canada. I live just above Northwestern, Minnesota. What is that noise? That's how we fix things around here. It's funny. This morning I woke up and it was really hot in here. I had the truck running for a couple of hours, right? But it wasn't cooling down. It was so hot. My fan up here in the front wasn't working. So I came up to the dash. I was like, why aren't you working? I just went to the passenger side over there and just randomly just like pounded on it, right? Fixed it, just like that. Fix it, man, right here. Tell you what, these things will fix anything. Almost. I should be careful when I say that. If it doesn't fix everything, it doesn't fix everything. Okay, let's roll out of here a little bit. Oh, oh, there we go. Let's just make sure our trailer's not gonna fall off. I do a tug test every morning, even though I go underneath there and I check. The tug test serves more than one purpose. When you drive away, first of all, before you drive away, you do a pre-trip. You make sure that your trailer is locked on your fifth wheel, right? You walk underneath there and take a look. The tug test is just a second verification to make sure that it was locked, that nobody tampered with it because I've heard stories of drivers that weren't spanked as children, I guess going around pulling people's fifth wheel pins as a joke at night in the truck stop. Like, sometimes you'll get people who steal your fuel, right? I sort of understand that. It's not right. You shouldn't do that, but sometimes people are trying to save money, right? And they're criminals, so they steal things to get themselves ahead. You can sort of understand that, though I don't do that. But why people would go around pulling random people's fifth wheel pins? That I don't understand at all. What does that benefit him or her, whoever does it? It's never happened to me. I've never seen it happen in person, but I've heard many stories of it. Like, I've been online here making videos for quite a while and I've heard stories from viewers who've told me about these things.  That's dangerous. Like, that trailer, if it's heavy enough, it'll stay on your fifth wheel and it could stay on them till you get on the freeway and then all of a sudden slide off and kill somebody. I don't know who does these things, but I've heard of that it happens.  So the tug test just double-check, peace of mind, makes you feel better. It's not going anywhere. And also what it does is it tests your trailer brakes that they apply and when you release them, that they release properly. So for you new people, what I do pretty much is I will just go about my day and I sort of make a video blog, which we call a vlog. Not a V-log. No, it's a vlog. Like a video blog of my day. Things I see, thoughts in my head. Every once in a while, I dish out a good rant. Sort of try to make this industry a little bit more of a happy place. I mean, not every video is going to do that, obviously, but one of my main goals is just to show the positives of trucking. I mean, yeah, there's some negatives that I focus on. Sometimes I rant about them. But I, I know that a lot of drivers on the road are so negative. They cannot stop being negative.   All right, Mr. Van, you got your signal on. I am assuming that was for a reason. You're turning? Okay, good. Sometimes people leave their signals on and they're not actually turning. So yeah, if you want to... Karen wants to be a part of the vlog too. Sorry, I forgot to introduce her. She's a little mad at me. This is Karen. She's my new GPS. Keeps me company on the road. Very bossy, though. Not as bossy as Mandy, my last one. Are you gonna wait there, buddy? Hold on. Thank you. So I'm based out of Manitoba, Canada, which is, like I said, Manitoba is just above western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. And I live right over the border pretty much just barely into Canada from Minnesota. Both countries. I'm an international driver, so I take freight from Canada. Somebody buys something in the U.S. from Canada. I take it down for them. And then somebody in Canada buys something from the U.S. and I take it back up for them. So I go back and forth. This road for 84 kilometers. Absolutely. So by now, you'll have realized that I do all of my measurements in metric, which throws a lot of the Americans off. I apologize. I was just raised with metric. It makes more sense to me in my mind. So we're just gonna stick with that here. But if you're wondering, every mile is about 1.6 kilometers. So, you know, like 30 miles, for instance, is 50 kilometers. 60 miles an hour is about 100 kilometers an hour. You can actually see that if you're in the U.S. and you look down at your speedometer, the big numbers are probably miles an hour, right? On my speedometer, the big numbers are kilometers an hour. But if you look on the inside of your speedometer, if you have a analog one, I think that's called analog, right? There's different numbers, kilometers an hour. Mine on the inside are miles an hour. That's on the inside of mine. Or if you have a digital speedometer, well, you are able to switch it if you wanted to see the difference. It's going to be a good day, though, a little overcast, but I have a feeling this is going to be a really good day. Glad you're here. Once again, don't forget to subscribe. And if you go down below the video to my description, there's a whole ton of links down there to my social media and other ways we can hang out online. I-55 northbound here in Missouri, heading towards St. Louis. So we're south of St. Louis here. Something's going on. You got the police blocking the freeway here and pushing us all onto a little detour. I have no idea where to go from here. I guess we'll just follow the crowd. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Is there another route around here? State trooper. Oh, boy. Traffic's about to get pretty crazy in this little town. So there is a detour we can take. We've got to turn right here and then there's US Highway 63, which is a little east of here, which will take us north. According to Google, there was an accident up ahead at the next interchange. So if we can get down Highway 63 to the next interchange, we can get back on the freeway. But in the meantime, this town is about to get a slight influx of visitors. What town is this that we're in here? Festus, Missouri. Hope you're ready for some traffic. Almost our turn to get off the off-ramp now. This is just a yield, too. They don't even have stop lights here, which makes it a little more difficult because people want to pile in here. Now we've got no traffic. They got lights over there. Okay, so I don't know why it was moving so slowly before. Wonder what are you doing, buddy? Oh, that's what's going on. There's cars coming from... Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, this is going to be busy. Good times, good times. Good thing I'm not in a hurry. Okay, I'm going in here. I'm going in here. Stick my nose in. Be aggressive, check a jash. All right, the light's green up there, but people keep going through the red light. Why are they going through the red light? Wait, are all the lights... Oh, now the lights are malfunctioning. They got cops directing traffic here yet. Oh, just to make things worse. Oh, they got all of this traffic coming off the interstate. And then their lights fail. Oh, no. That's what's taking so long here. Shoot, double whammy. I think I said US 63 before, right? It's actually US 61. Karen's trying to get me to turn right and then go back around onto the freeway, right where we came from. She doesn't know the road is blocked. I don't have her hooked up to my data right now. So, in this case, we're going to ignore Karen. Hopefully she doesn't get too offended. And we're going to turn left and take US Highway 61 up to the next main road, which takes us back to the interchange. Just pass where the accident happened according to Google. Hit the exit number when I exited, but we're at the loves anyway. Another coffee. In 200 meters. Make a U-turn if possible. Up the weasel. In meters. Turn left on. US 169 and then. Take the entrance to the right in 90 meters. I'm in a parking lot, Karen. I've noticed that loves travel plazas have added like service bays like this. A lot of their locations, they used to pretty much just be all about tires, right? That was their thing. They really like tires. Now they do oil changes and stuff too. I'm going to be getting new drives on this truck when I get home from this trip. I'm just going to be going with recaps. I don't like using recaps, but you know, we just put a $20,000 roof on our house and we've got to do our garage roof yet to match. Probably next year. So it is what it is. Recaps will do. Usually I would recommend to put on virgin tires is what they call them. I'm just going to do a little loop here backing against these guys.