Hey, good afternoon everybody. Tom Stewart here on the Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Chris Willett and this is Smart Business Moves. Woo-hoo! Hey, Chris! Hey guys, thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. You know you're one of my very favorite business owners. Tom, did you get a new ring? This, yeah, this is actually an aura ring. Are you familiar with them? I've heard of it, but I'm not familiar with it. It gives us all kinds of like metrics of what your body is doing and there's an app on your phone and... Yeah. How are you liking it so far? I'm still figuring it out. I don't know. It's supposed to be what I'm supposed to be doing. It's supposed to be good for me and it's supposed to give me information that can be useful. So we'll say, yeah, kind of like a mood ring. Thank you, Robin. I used to have a number of those. That was like in the 70s one, wasn't it? I totally remember them. Hey, Robin. You learned anything cool yet? About, well, actually it tracks your sleep. And yeah, I'm figuring out a few things about that and certain things that you can do during the day or like before you go to bed that can affect how you sleep. And I still drink a lot of coffee and it's weird. You can have a few beers before you go to bed and the numbers get kind of crazy too. Well, like, what are you noticing? Do you sleep all the way through the night or do you like in and out? What are you... Well, it's different levels of sleep and what your heart's doing and temperature and it's really complicated. I'll explain it, but it's a lot of math and we only have an hour. So we get brought. Yeah, I'm not feeling like you're doing a good job of explaining it, but it sounds like something my son-in-law would like. He likes things that are really complicated. If he likes nerdy stuff. And what you do is, and this is the drill, that's kind of hard to sneak in like surprise gift because the first part of it is they send you a kit to figure out what your finger size is. I can get Sharra to measure his finger when he's asleep. No? Well, say Sharra the cat. And I don't know, it's supposed to rip, I don't know, three, 400 bucks, something like that.  I've never met your son-in-law, but Sharra's awesome and I'm sure that he is as well. So he would be well-deserving. I know he'd appreciate it. All right, he's amazing. He's a nuclear engineer and he loves nerdy, difficult, complicated things. The more complicated things, yes, love it. I'd like to see what he could do with all that data. Yeah, he would do stuff. I promise he would, he would enjoy it. He would have blasts. Well, we're gonna be talking about data today too, aren't we? I think. Yeah, we're moving down the process flow chart and today we're gonna be talking about how to measure, use data from the dispatch process, the dispatching process to get good outcomes in your business. And I've seen some of the really cool stuff that Chris does in his business and he shared some of it with us in the past and he really stays on top of the day of activity. Just to explain, scheduling is what you do, days in advance of the cleaning day. Dispatch is like day of stuff, it's game day, like the jobs that you're cleaning today, that's a dispatch activity and Chris has some tools and there's some cleanup the day after that goes along with dispatch that I suspect he'll be talking about as well. Before we get going though, and we should coordinate this a little bit better, you've got I guess a project of special interests that you wanted to share, is there a link that you could share with us? Thanks Tom. Yeah, let's see. How would I post a link? There's a private chat if you look over in the right and if you can drop it in there. This is a fundraiser we're doing, Allie is a client or a client, she's a tech of ours. We woke up Monday morning, went to the office, went to dispatch and woke up to a message that her house burned down. She lost her apartment actually, lost everything she had. Pretty terrible way to start the week, right? I had to actually woke up that morning, I checked the news first thing I lay in bed for like 20 minutes or so and look at the news before I have to get up and go about my day and saw there was an apartment fire on there. Oh, that's terrible, whatever, went to work and come to find out, it's one of our techs.  The worst part of that day was they got out of an apartment, her boyfriend, her two dogs but they literally woke up to firefighters and they're saying, get out right now, kicked them out, left their cats behind.  Paris and Miley firefighters came out a couple of hours later with them. So I have to tell you, Chris, that this image and your story kind of, I think, worked against you a little bit because what happened was when I read this, I was so happy, I felt so good. No, I'm not even kidding. I felt so good. I'm like, oh, and the firefighters are smiling. I'm like, yay, I clicked out and then I realized, Liz, you didn't donate. And I had to go back. I had to remind myself to go back and go. That's a good point. Yeah. We could, yeah. Oh, God. It felt good to put that picture in there, right? Yeah. There were some other pictures of it burning down and maybe that would be a better coverage. Maybe if I wanted somewhere, a link to go look at this nice picture and get the good stuff. Yeah, that's good, Paul. But I felt, I was crazy. I was like, Liz, you did not donate right there.  You got it right after I created it. So thank you, Liz. That's going to help her a ton. And there's cats. And you're probably up the ante because there were cats, right, Liz? No, I didn't actually. You know what? The cats are safe. And I love me some cats. It's true, but the cats are safe and happy. I can't even imagine. It's hard enough, like business owners, as business owners, when these traumatic things happen, like as a, I don't know, as a technician, I feel like it's so much harder. You just don't have the resources to get your life back on track. I know that everybody says that money doesn't, what is it, the saying, that money doesn't make happiness or whatever it is. But the lack of money definitely does make things a lot more stressful and a lot harder. And I just think as a technician, it's so, I feel so bad. Yeah, you know, she moved here from Louisiana and doesn't have family. And they're in a hotel right now, so that's good. But yeah, I have business owner friends who unfortunately lost their houses a couple of weeks ago on the wildfires that we had here. Did a lot better, right? They're able to rent new homes, they had connections, they're getting their houses remediated or looking for a new house, it's a little easier, right? And it's more like a bummer. It's like, ah, this sucks, this is a bummer, it's a hassle, it's frustrating, it's irritating, it's not devastating. And you have very little, it's devastating, it's like, I don't even know. So yeah, well, I was super, I love that you did that for them, Chris, you know, I'm kind of a, I don't know, some people say we overuse, go fund me or whatever, but I've used it a few with my, I had a person die and I had another child die, I'm like, these people need help. Yeah, I got it from you, right? I mean, we're business owners, we can use this to do a lot of good. I mean, I feel like that's what our company does overall. It's great, so rewarding. So I hope we can get her some help. So, Maddie doesn't fix all your problems, but can certainly make you more comfortable, especially in a situation like this. So, we'll share this link again at the show as well. Thanks. What's going on in your world, Chris? We haven't seen you in a while. I got it, Tom. Oh man. Been spending a lot of time with my baby, Jack. That's pretty much my life right now. He's seven months old, so it's day and night and middle of the night and all those times. I haven't seen a picture of him lately, Chris. I feel like you're slacking in the dad's department. We really need to see more pictures. You sound like my whole family. I'll get him out there. All right, yeah, that's the last hook I needed. Yeah, I mean, break out somewhere. Actually, just grab him and bring him on the show. So yeah, I was supposed to bring him on today. Alyssa ended up being able to grab him. It was gonna be so tough. I'm on this kitchen. You can see our hard floors back here. He'd be slamming his head on everything, so. Poor little guy. He's slamming his head on stuff. He's getting mobile, so he's exploring the world. Soft things, mostly, fortunately, but sometimes hard things, right? Yeah, oh, they got to learn somehow, Chris. Exactly. Bash, what was that? No. I try to shield him a little bit. Not all the time. He does have to learn, but most of the time. Well, and also you wouldn't be paying very close attention if you're on the shelf. I just don't think so. On the floor in the back room. We wouldn't get too far. Yeah, not good. All right, so is there anything else going on out there? You guys, anything COVID-related right now or how's the market doing, Tom? Any kind of rebounding there? It's been all over the place the last few days. Been really crazy. Fed made some announcements today that interest rates are gonna have to go up because of inflation and all of that and markets pulled back a little bit. They call it volatility and it's supposed to be very volatile here for the foreseeable future. And I think, as long as there's no underlying issues, right? As long as it's fundamentally sound, we could just see volatility, but like 2008, there's a bunch of money out there that just wasn't backed at all, right? And that's why everything dissolved. But as long as everything's sound, then it could just be a correction, could be volatility, right? If it's sound. Yeah, I mean, but there's a lot of weird stuff going on all over the world too, but you know, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea takes one. We've gone through some unprecedented events here over the last couple of years. Hopefully everybody behaves themselves in other parts of the world because that can mess things up for us too. Yeah, Omnicron hit us pretty hard. I don't know about you guys, but we took a big loss in January. We did too, us too, yeah. So January is for us, it's historically a slow, slow month, but it's hard, hard this year. A lot of people, you know that in groups, Chris. Everybody's bemoaning in January, right? Nobody is happy right now, it's been January. Yeah, I feel a little solidarity there, right? It's not just me, so we're all going through this, so. But it is interesting. Tell me how many of you see this as much? You do talk to a lot of different business owners, but maybe not as closely as Chris and I do. We've kind of watched it go across the country, you know, kind of started in the East Coast. They had this like bad problems with the employee situation first, and then it started moving across the country. And, you know, it's just barely hitting the West Coast maybe like a week, two weeks ago, the really severe can't find employee thing that everybody has been dealing with for a really long time. So it's interesting that it's traveling like that. Yeah, these coasts, the numbers have been dropping pretty sharply. I understand there's some other parts of the country that are going to be dealing with this for another few weeks. I guess the good news is people aren't getting as sick off of this very analysis as they did the other ones. It's more of an inconvenience and it is a life-threatening thing for most people. I have it right now, so. But you said you're asymptomatic too, so you're feeling great, right? I am, I am. I know that you call that asymptomatic, but then you're like, except pain in my heart. It's kind of fun for me to introduce it that way, right? It makes me seem tough. My heart hurts really bad, but I'm fine. That's all. Just a little separation there between my heart and the fluid around it. I can kind of gut through it though. This is one of my more favorite websites of tracking. What's going on with codes because you can kind of see it from state to state. And you can see the numbers are kind of dropping here. These are the number of cases per 100,000s of people and I don't know, thick of state, I'd say. Check it out. Go back up to Colorado. Oh, and it looks like Kentucky's kind of having what we're having too. You see that table? Yeah. So I was watching that and I was so excited, right? Okay, we're going back down. Hopefully we're going to follow New York and then shot rack up. Yeah, but it's, well, it was really low in December. You're talking about Kentucky, but it's coming down and it's coming out, coming down where you guys are too. You know, you were up in November and that probably wasn't even Omicron. That was probably Delta. Okay, I misread the charts. And then it came down in a shorter time period. Then it peaked, I guess, from the eighth. And it drops like a rock when it drops. Ours didn't. It dropped really fast, but then it leveled out at about the midpoint. It was a little strange. This is kind of cool because you can take this slider and drop back and see where it gets hot and where it does it. And if it's all the way down here, this blue color, that's where it's the worst. So if I go here like today, like South Carolina used to be this color here, that color blue, but now it's turning back to yellow again and that's the difference between like having 1,000 cases per 100,000 per day to like 200 cases per 100,000 per day. So it's getting a lot better where we are. Colorado's got some data missing for some reason. Don't know about that. That's Utah. It's terrible. Oh, okay. Nobody ever knows where we are. That's Colorado. Is this you guys? Okay. You're looking better.  So you guys are getting better. Same up here in Washington. Oh, I know we're getting better. That's cool. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, but look at the Northeast. Gosh, it's still. No, actually these dark numbers are awesome because you down here have a lot of numbers. Yeah.  That's when it's worse, when it gets these darker areas. Well, the colors keep saying blue, but I'm not seeing any blue. So now I understand you're, the blue is on my screen is kind of a green in color. Well, whatever this color is for my cursor is. So the light color is worse. Yeah. The dark color is a guy. So like when you go, it's like the lighter color right now, go back a little bit. But it's not, like yellow is a lighter color too. Yeah. Yellow is like 200 per 100,000 versus a thousand per 100,000. You're much better off being yellow than you are this light blue color. I think we can color it now. Yeah, you don't want to be that color. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting that, it seems like the graph is backwards. Like you think of darker as being more intense. Right? It's a darker color. Yeah. Well, we'll have to, I'll send them a note or something. Thank you. If you could, I would really appreciate that. Love that you always have my back that way too. All right, we should actually get to work. I just realized- Let's talk about dispatching. So Chris, you can take the ball or run with it wherever you want to. Cool. I'm trying to think of where to start. And I think for us, it's the day after. So if I'm looking at yesterday's cleans, I want to go through all of our cleans and see what were they timed for? What did we quote them for? And how long did it take us to clean these houses? And did those align? Do we have any clients? Do we have any odd balls? Are they really high? Are we getting out super, super early? Or are we getting out way too late? It's easy to think, well, it kind of evens out, right? End of the day, who cares? We get out of the sum early and some late. And as long as everything needs in the middle, it's okay. But it causes some issues, right? I mean, if I have a client paying us $300 a clean and we're going out there and spending an hour and a half, they're probably not going to be too happy. And that happens, or it has happened. We're taking a lot of steps to make sure that it doesn't happen anymore. And I feel bad for those clients too. I mean, they're paying us for five, six hours and we're getting out of there an hour and a half, two hours. Like something got lost along the way between quoting and the actual cleaning. And then on the flip side of those clients, and I think this is what most people are more concerned with, because this is where you're losing money, that they're spending too long in their home. Maybe you got the wrong info, they're misquoted, maybe they added a couple pets, got an Alaskan Husky, had some kids, and now you're taking a lot longer in the house than you used to. It's also a good pulse for the whole company, right? So if I start saying, hey, on a given day, we're going over and, you know, three or four houses, those are things we can correct and look at on an individual basis. But if that starts ticking up, like now it's five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 houses, maybe I have a company-wide issue. It's just a really good pulse on what's going on. And when you're looking at it every single day, I've just found that I'm getting super in tune with the company overall. You know, if we have a bad day, yesterday it snowed like six inches and we went over on a lot of these homes and just due to tracking stuff into the house, unloading our supplies, getting into the door, all that kind of stuff takes longer. Driving slower. Yeah, driving's a lot slower, slips, trips, falls, so our guys aren't moving too fast. And so it kind of results in, you know, not a great day or same thing if we have a lot of call outs, you know, it's really great that I can go back to my team at the end of the week and say, hey, what happened Wednesday, you know, was there some sort of like event? And they say, oh yeah, you know, this happened to us a couple of weeks ago. We had a lot of techs out sick with Omicron and that was the day that it really, really hit us and I was able to see it the next day in our dispatch KPIs because we're going over on a lot of houses. So the reason I say that the day after is kind of the start is because I can glean a lot from that data. So one thing that we do is look at all the homes that we went over on. We open up their profile in our system or in Made Central and we can go back in history, see how long that we're taking in those homes on average. Made Central gives us a lot of powerful data that we can use to properly rate, adjust that client. So if we're constantly going over and, you know, Mr. Jones's house and, you know, here's something that happens. We have one tech going over a nut house for the past five queens. And so it looks like there's a really big problem. We need to rate adjust this guy. But then when I go look at things, I just realized that that's a really slow cleaner and it's not Mr. Jones's fault, right? That we're going over in his home, we're just sending somebody slow and they need some retraining, some help, something to improve their speed. So it just kind of opens you up to all of these little micro issues within your company. On the flip side, if they were going over and it's an average speed cleaner, then Mr. Jones needs a rate adjustment. We need to make sure that we're charging our clients for the amount of work that we're putting into their homes. And it's usually pretty easy. All of our clients have been super receptive to this. Hey, it's taking us longer than we expected. You know, here's your new rate. Here's exactly what's happening. You did get a husky. And so now it's taking us a little bit longer to clean your house. I will note that we set that expectation up front. So when we book clients, we always let them know we audit their first three cleans and make sure that the quote that we delivered them is accurate. We adjust down too. We go the other way. Let's say we're getting out of someone's house extremely early, we'll give them a call and ask them, you know, are we cleaning everything that we quoted? And a lot of times they'll say, oh, actually I've just been telling them not to do my basement. You guys don't have to clean it. And we shouldn't be charging them for that, right? That's not fair either. I have a couple questions. Yeah. So first question is, are you using like normalized hours in May central crystal? Like for the three cleans, how are you determining that? Because what if you have a slow cleaner or a fast cleaner? Does it matter in those first cleans? How are you managing that? Yeah, so it doesn't really matter what speed cleaner because like you said, we do normalize that data and made central. So if I send my fastest cleaner and then I send my slowest cleaner together, it's about an average cleaner, right? So my fastest cleaner will get out an hour early. My slowest cleaner will get out an hour late. That place is booked correctly.  Let's say I'm sending a really fast cleaner and they get out on time, both times, right? But I sent the fastest cleaner in the company. Well, if I send it another tech, right? Two weeks later, there's no way they're getting out of that home on time. My fastest cleaner, I don't know how she does it. I'm actually going out in the field next week to look at her because I need to figure this out. I need to systemize this into the company. That's a whole new story. You need to change that language there, Chris. You're not going out in the field to look at her. I think you're going out in the field. Yeah, I'm going out in the field to learn from her. That's awesome. It's okay, get her as a side activity. I like that, that's good. All right, so you are using normalized hours. So I was, because I know that a lot of people push back on this idea of adjusting rates after the third clean, but you don't have to worry about that if you're using a normalized hour. And it's for the exact reason that you just said. Or if you send like a fast cleaner out there, I don't want to change anything based on what a fast cleaner does. And I also don't want to change anything because I've got slow cleaners, right? I'm worried that I'm going to change your rate and then I'm going to lose money all over the place. So, all right, so you do do that. And then my next question is, so walk us through. So I heard you say two things. One, does everybody know what normalized hours is? Or are you getting to that? I kind of assumed you all's viewers knew. Actually, you know what? Sometimes you get so used to talking about stuff that you just feel like everybody knows it. So obvious, but maybe we should. Tom, can you maybe pull up Made Central? That might be easier to explain it. And for anybody that doesn't use Made Central, are you going to be able to pull it up, Tom? Well, I'll just explain it because I don't want to.  But I'll give you an explanation of what normalized hours is and you guys let me know if you want more detail. You know, some people are faster, clean technicians are faster than others. And normalizing the hours is a way of measuring on a cleaner by cleaner basis, how long it takes them to clean homes versus the allowed time to clean homes, the job ticket hour and in some other lexicons. If they're typically faster than the allowed time, they'll have a productivity of a greater than 100%. If they're typically slower, they'll have a productivity that's less than 100%. So when you normalize your times, you're basically adjusting the actual time that's taken to clean a home based on the productivity of the people cleaning it. So, you know, if I have a productivity of 120% and I cleaned a home in four hours, we take that four and divide it by 120% in the normalized time would be something less than four hours. It would be 3.3 hours. So 3.3 hours would be how long you would expect it to take for your normal cleaner, your normal technician, a technician working at 100%. So you don't have those guessing games of, well, gee, I don't know if I need to raise the rate because I had a slow person cleaning it. It takes all that confusion out of it.  There's no way we can get out on time. You know, we need to do something about this. And you can always find something. Everybody can always find something that the other team is not doing. Fast cleaner. Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. And they want to make a point of telling you. That's right. I'm going to tell you. All right, so FYI, Tom, moving forward, your explanation about normalized hours would be way easier with a visual. So next time we are going to pop, I know we want to talk about KPIs and Chris has a lot of really good information to share. So maybe not today, but absolutely next time, do not argue. You need to pop up the visual. Just do math really easily, but other people do not. So like 120% divided by what again? I don't actually, ah. So it's just. I will get you a visual. All right. All right, so while you're doing that, Tom, I did another question for you though, Chris. So you said two things. I think I got a little off track. You said that you look at it every day or the day after, right? For all the information. But then I also heard you say that you talk to the people about it at the end of the week. So on the day after, do you do anything other than just look at it? Or do you decide on the, what you're going to do? Do you guys have a meeting at the end of the week? Can you walk us through a little bit? Your process? Yeah. So the day after we look at it and then we just do a quick dive into any home that we went way over or way under on. We just look for outliers, right? Yeah. So when we're talking about over, if we went over at all, we look at it. And what we're trying to figure out is, is this an ongoing problem? We have a lot of new techs right now. And so we're going over on a lot more houses than usual. The good thing about looking at it every day is I know the reason. I know it's because we have a lot of new techs. Because we didn't have this problem, right? Before we had all the new techs. So that kind of tells me, okay, it's not a quoting problem. It's a, maybe it's our training. Maybe it's just kind of, is what it is. It'll get better in about a month, right? When everybody gets up to speed. We open up every house that we went over on. We look if it's been an ongoing problem. If it is, if they truly need a rate adjustment, we adjust their price and we do that daily. By doing that daily, we're making sure that we're fairly charging all of our clients. And because we pay on job ticket hour, similar to commission, it's the only way, right? We have to make sure that we're charging the right price or else we're gonna be underpaying our techs. And I'm not gonna feel good about that, right? I'd be upset if I have a job that was under-bidding and that affected my pay. It helps us so much with tech pay, with retention. Our average tech pay is like insane since we've started doing this. Obviously, there's a lot more that goes into that. But I'd say this probably accounts for like 20% of our raises that we gave our tax last year. Oh, wow. It's bringing in a ton of revenue so that we can be the highest paying maid service in town. That's gonna get us the best tax. At least it's gonna be a big part of it, right? You're definitely gonna have better luck at hiring people if you're paying more than if you're paying less. Yeah, it'll get more people in the door. Period. Yeah. Whether or not you keep them, that's not necessarily about paying, but... It's certainly not. You know I've learned that the hard way. Yeah. But you gotta get them in there. You gotta get them in the door, right? They gotta apply. All right. All right, so I get it. So you're checking the data every day and then making adjustments based on what you see and what you're finding historically. Is this an outlier? Is it a one-time thing? Do you have any sort of parameters? Like if we're over by 10 minutes, are you making an adjustment for 10 minutes? We're always over 10 minutes. Yeah, we'll definitely adjust that client. Or if we're exactly on time, right? One thing that we found is no matter what we say or do, if the home is underbooked, we want our text to stay the full amount of time that it's gonna take to properly clean this house, right? Because we owe the customer what we've promised them, which is queeting to our checklist, all of the things that we clean in their house. And if it's under-timed, they inevitably will just leave a little bit early, right? And so when you see those houses that are exactly perfect, that kind of signals to me that they got up right on time, probably need a little bit more time. So we might add like 10 minutes to those houses case-by-case basis. Interesting. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that before. And the cool part about this is a lot of times we look at averages. We'll say for the day or the month or whatever, our revenue per labor hour is the number that we are looking for. And we think that everything's good. What we're missing is that that average could be a whole lot higher if you do what Chris is talking about and attacking the ones that are taking too long. There's so much money to be made there. Yeah. I have an example, Liz, if you wanted me to do the normalize thing. Sure. Take me a couple of minutes, but we'll jump into it. Okay. I need to define what productivity is. And productivity basically is how fast somebody is compared to the average cleaner. So if Tom is cleaning Mrs. Jones house and he starts at nine o'clock and he finishes two and he takes five hours to do it. But if the allowed time, the job ticket hour time is four hours, then Tom's productivity is the allowed hours divided by the actual hours or four divided by five or 80%. That means Tom is slower than average. With me so far, is that good? Yep. I got it. I know Chris does it. Now, if Liz cleans the same house, but Liz is fast and she cleans it in three hours, four divided by three is 133%. So Liz's productivity is 133%. So if Tom and Liz are cleaning the same house, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Smith, whatever, you're gonna expect Liz to get finished before Tom, right? Because Liz is faster than Tom. So that's kind of what the normalized time thing is all about. And so we got Mrs. Simpson's house and that has three allowed hours. And Tom, with the productivity of 80%, you'd expect him to take 3.75 hours where if Liz was cleaning the exact same home, you'd expect her to do it in 2.25 hours. Yep. So there's all kinds of examples here. We're not gonna take the whole thing, but the bottom line is just because somebody's missing the number you need to figure out is it because that the house isn't priced right or is it just because you've got somebody that's slow cleaning it? And it works both ways too. Here's an example of, you know, you think that you need to raise the rate, but not really because Tom is slow. If you figure out that Tom is cleaning the house, the job is priced right. Sometimes it goes in the opposite direction though where you got a house that you think you're making a ton of money on, if you take into consideration the fact, the productivity of the person cleaning it, maybe you should even be charging more than you are. Yeah, that was Chris's example, right? You've got a house with three allowed hours and you send Liz there and she gets it done in three hours, that job's under price because she should be able to get out of there quicker than that and she shouldn't be spending three hours in a three hour house. That's a problem job. So I do love this idea of normalized hours, but I have this question. I mean, it makes sense to me if you have made central, obviously it makes sense. But what about people that don't have made central Tom?  He has always long blind. He has always made a really strong point that don't look at every tiniest little data point, that you want to look at the big swipes and the averages, things are gonna make a big difference. Would you say that this could make a big difference? Because I think a lot of people are like, as long as the average is okay, we're good. I'm gonna argue that there was a time where if you didn't have the data and if you were having to do all of this by hand and building spreadsheets and spending every waking minute of your own time and calories doing the math yourself, yeah, you just don't have the time to do it. You can't afford to do it. But in 2022, when you can click a button and have the detail, there's money to be made there. Yeah, I'd give you a, I mean, I came from launch 27 and I'm trying to look at a report right now to see. I don't think I can get a summary of how much money we've gotten in revenue just from adjustments. I think we've just parsing this real quick. I think we're probably somewhere around $70,000 a year, just from doing this every day, right? So our company brings in an extra $70,000 a year that we weren't bringing in last year. And you're not going to go an extra home. That's just free money. Yeah, exactly, right? And there's no burden for it. It's amazing. I did this at launch 27. So we used to do this with launch. We used to do it in spreadsheets, but it wasn't every day. It was, I don't know, once every, it was when there was a problem, right? Yeah, I started noticing. Yeah, so. All right. You hold the clock back a few years. It was about sales and getting jobs in the funnel and booking jobs and just cleaning a bunch of stuff. We have technology now with smart phones and, you know, SaaS based software and we're able to capture data where we're able to squeeze a lot more money out of the homes that we clean today than what we could five years ago. Especially, you know, talking about market volatility and the pandemic and different variants running around. I mean, having more profit margin, it's going to be a good thing to have, right? It's good safety. We're all going to keep the focus there. All right. So the point that I want to make was if you're on, if you're watching smart business moves today, and I know we have a wide group of people that watch. So if you're watching and you don't have made central, don't spend your time here. Don't spend your time doing this. Tom is saying it's actually not worth the additional burden, the labor burden that it's going to take, put your time somewhere else. But if you do have made central, it absolutely makes sense to be doing this on a regular daily basis. Like Chris said, oh, it's only 70 grand. I'll take that. All right. All right. So what else, Chris? What else do you look at? What's important for us to pay attention to? Yeah, this takes, I'd say this takes me about five to 10 minutes a day. So that's that. All right. That's awesome. But it also brought out the issue that we weren't quoting accurately, right? We had way too many homes that we were going over on. So two big issues that it brought about, and I'll throw out that it hurt to look at this when I first started doing it, right? I pull up this report and then made central if you're going over it's in red. And it was just the sea of red, right? We were talking about colors earlier. We all know red is bad. So... Not on that chart. Not on the COVID-estim chart. But yeah, we had issues of quoting. We weren't quoting as accurately as we could. And we also had issues with training. We weren't cleaning as efficiently as we could. We didn't have to because we didn't know there was an issue. So we have some systems going into place stemming from taking a look at this. We're looking at new ways to quote so that we can get better info using things like number of pets and rooms and just really nailing down how we're quoting houses. Those are both on the list of things to do in our company in the next couple of months. And I think by doing that, we're gonna get a lot better client retention. We're gonna get a lot more happier cleaners because everything's going to flow a lot more smoothly. My office staff is going to be happier because they don't have to spend all of their time chasing down clients that we misquoted or chasing problem texts. We're just, it's helping our company overall. Arguing with the texts that it's not fair, right? I mean, that's the truth. I mean, that's part of smart business moves is when we do try and tell it like it is and- That's a good point, Liz. When you're not paying attention to those numbers, you are, you're arguing with your texts. This isn't fair, I'm not getting paid right, and none of us want to do that. We haven't had that argument. Man, I'm not the one to ask, I wouldn't be there, but I don't think that's happened for a year, which is so nice. You know, it helps with retention, both on the cleaning professional side, as well as the customer side. Yeah, it just helps my peace of mind. Nobody likes to argue, right? And your office staff. I mean, we all know that it's hard to replace a cleaning professional, absolutely, but how much more devastating is it to lose a general manager? Liz and I like to argue a little bit. It makes this show more interesting. We do. I like to argue too, you guys. Yeah, I've seen that, yeah. You know, a little bit of argument is for growth, right?  Now, if you're just arguing for argument's sake, well, maybe not so much, maybe not so much. So, which I don't want to do with my, I don't want to do with my cleaning professionals. And I don't want to argue with them just because I'm like, oh, yeah, but I don't want to look at the problem. I don't want to fix whatever. That's not a good plan at all. All right, what else do we, how other KPI should we be looking at, Chris? So back to this, looking at it day of we're looking for, you know, do we have any one-time cleans? Do we have any move-out cleans? What were our scorecards on the last clean? Just getting yourself prepared and ready for the day. It's the first thing that Riley looks at. She does dispatch for us in the office when she comes in in the morning. And it's just getting ahead of issues, right? We have a quick meeting every single morning before we dispatch all of our, sorry, right after we dispatch everybody. Just, hey, anything to look out for? You know, do we have any failing reviews from last time that we need to make sure our texts are aware of? Any outlier issues? And that helps a ton too, right? If we can get ahead of issues, make our clients happy, keep our reputation good, get some referrals out there. I mean, do what we promise to do, clean their house really well. That's what it helps with. So. All right, I want to throw out this idea. I think this is a good place for it too, that one of the things that, Chris, you're making the point that getting in front of it, right? So one of the things that our industry is notorious for is waiting until there's a problem and then going in and fixing it, right? And so looking at the stuff in advance and working to not have a problem is such a smart business mode right there. And a lot of times people are confused by what I mean with that. And so I just want to give an example real quick. On the day of, let's say you have a customer that has not had any problems at all. Their scorecards have been all-force, right? If you use May Central, four is high. So you've had all-force with this customer for the last however many cleanings. The tendency for most companies is to do nothing. Just do absolutely nothing, not change anything. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that. I'm not saying that that's bad, but it's a great opportunity for you just to do the tiniest thing to wow them so that that four becomes in their mind a poor exclamation point. And not every time, right?  Right? I'm definitely not here. Is it like you're punching your vaccination card? Is that it? Is it like a booster? Is that what you're? I say nothing here, I'm not going there. I am not going there. I used immunized on purpose, right? All right, so I do like that day of looking at where everybody is and also getting everybody prepped for the day. You said we all get together. Who's we all? Chris, who all gets together for that quick daily meeting? Thanks, yeah. That's just office staff and myself. And so they should get everybody on the same page. Yeah, exactly. What do you have on the plate today? Where are you on your task and your things that you're working on to further the company? But also, where are you today? What do we have on the docket? What's on deck? Any issues, anything we need to be aware of? And just get ahead of little things. I really like what you said about making sure that we're treating our best clients really well. They should get something special, right? For being so easygoing. Yeah. That's where our energy probably should be going. We do have some little things. We have a VIP list, but I think we've been doing a lot more. Even a little bit. I mean, your happy customers don't really take a lot of, that's why I like to work on my happy customers. They don't take a lot. It's so much harder to have to bring up somebody with a two-score card than it is to just hold that for, hold that for. And they'll go promote for you, right?  So another thing that we gleaned from this report was we started increasing our efficiency overall, meaning more of our time that we had text clocked in was billable to our clients. And so I think ours is really good, but we could make it even better. And one way to do that would be to condense our service area. Because where I live in Denver, we have a lot of people in our service area. So we're driving really far some days and we do have some really happy clients and they do promote for us. But if we can get our service area just a little closer and a little closer and let's say I move into a neighborhood and I go next door and they say, hey, I use Alpine Maids and I go down the street and they use Alpine Maids too. We're gonna take over those neighborhoods really fast, right? So once we started focusing on productivity, it's been a game changer. And I guess the other metric that goes along with that is efficiency. That's what I meant. Yeah. The efficiency is that windshield time. So, you know, it's keeping that to a minimum. How much time are actually being versus driving type thing? When you take the hours, the job hours, the hours spent cleaning and dividing it by the total clock time, which includes your drive time, you want that number to be as close to one as it can be.  But the higher that number is, the more profitable you're gonna be and the happier your cleaning technicians are gonna be. Yeah. Efficiency is a tricky number.  I did, I was, I just didn't. You were popping her out. I was trying to bring it up, it was already there. Hey, Sarah, good to see you. Yeah, you know, because smart guy. Chris, did you by any chance see the smart business moves we did on Monday with Joe Walsh? No, but I wanna go check it out. I wanted to watch it because what he does, combined with what you do, you are going to, because you're already doing so much more than everybody else. I think you add on this additional little layer. I'm not kidding, you know, you know you talk to a lot of people and you add on the little extra layer of the shift that Joe does and you can fast forward through the get to it. I'll fast forward, yeah. Yeah, you'll love it. Yeah, he's, you know, smart guy. He's always got new ways of looking at things too. And so, I'm a big fan of stacking a little, something good and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more.  Works too. Oh, any other KPIs that you think that are really helpful for people to look at, Chris? It's like, I know you have a ton of them. I've seen your- I'm trying to think of for dispatch and that regard. I mean, I look at my PPR every week, right? That tells me payroll percent revenue, right? How much, that's a number one expense in the company. Most of our money goes to payroll. So that's what we need to focus on. And I think everything we talked about today and all of these reports really influences that number. Try to look through my KPIs real quick. I'm clicking off-screen here to see if we have anything kind of cool, kind of different. Revenue per cleaner is kind of cool. That tells you a lot about, you know, how efficient are you and in general, how are your cleaners moving through homes? Do you have an average? I get asked this question a lot, Chris. Do you have an average of what your technicians bring in per day, per week, per year? Yeah. Let's see. Well, people love benchmarks. Oh man, that's a dangerous game, those benchmarks. Yeah, so true. But if you have no idea, especially if you're newer in business, you don't even know, am I doing okay or not? And a lot of times you can't figure out why there's problems. So having an idea of which number to look at first is really helpful for people a lot of times. This is pretty cool. As I, I'm looking through some of last year's data, revenue per cleaner. It looks like at the beginning of last year, we were kind of around 270 a week, or sorry, a day, not a week. So a cleaner would bring in like $270 a day and toward the end of the year, we were up to more like 3.305 a day. Wow, that's really nice, Chris. 25 a day per cleaners is significant. Yeah. Yeah, that's great money. And Tom, you're always harping on this. We need to get more money from each labor hour that is out there. We need to be bringing in more revenue. So you must have just been salivating there, hearing that. Yeah, I mean, from an industry perspective, for an industry perspective, we're competing against all these other industries who get more of a return. I call it return on human capital. They generate more revenue per labor hour than house cleaning companies. So we really need to focus on that as a metric because the more we can generate per hour, the more successful we're gonna be. The better jobs we're making. I mean, it's a win all the way around. On average, they're working an hour less a day too when they made that extra $25 an hour because more tax don't wanna work eight hours a day. They wanna work six hours a day. And we're hearing that everywhere now, right? There is, you guys have both heard me say for at least the last year, it will not be long before the overtime rate kicks in at 35 hours or if not 32 hours because people don't think 40 hour weeks are reasonable anymore. That's not a saying. I'm seeing it. Yeah. We are approaching the top of the hour. Chris, you wanna take a moment and explain who Allie is again. So folks who joined us halfway through this can have an opportunity to help Allie as well. Yeah, thanks, Tom. Allie is a tech of ours. Awesome, awesome tech. She lives in Colorado. She's from Louisiana. She doesn't have any family out here. Her apartment burned at the ground Monday morning. She lost everything. Those are two cats. The firefighters fortunately rescued them but they woke up Monday morning 2 a.m. to firefighters literally in their unit with fire forcing them out. So they're in a hotel right now as they're looking for a new place to live. Allie is not at work. I think she'll probably be back next Monday. So she's losing income and needs to replace all of her belongings, get into a new apartment. So five bucks, two bucks. If it's small, it doesn't matter. Anything helps her. We're just really trying to help her get into a new place, get settled, get back to work. And you forget about that losing. It's bad enough that you lost everything but then you're not working. So you're going further behind every single day. But who can blame somebody for not being able to get back to work the day after your house burns down? Right? I'm like, wow. You need some time to figure out just to contact all the different agencies that you have to contact to live well. So we dropped the link to this GoFundMe page in the chat again. So take a look and encourage you to help Allie out to whatever level you can. And also, you know what? It's very, very helpful to just share the link because getting that link out there for more people, anybody that's ever had a fire, they are going to want to help.  So just sharing is a huge help. Yeah. Well, we are at the top of the hour. Chris, thank you. Thanks a lot Chris. You're doing a lot of good things in your business and gave really good examples of how the dispatch activity which is probably one of the most underrated, unappreciated processes within our companies, within our cleaning businesses, there's a lot of money to be made there and appreciate you sharing that. We're done for the week. We are done for the week. We're gonna be back Monday though for our last KPI show of January for a while anyway.  How fast can I pull up the spreadsheet to find the answer? Yeah, fast, I know. Wow, thank you, Tom. I am the guest on Monday. I'm gonna close it down and we're gonna be talking about profitability and we're gonna talk about how we can tie everything together that we've heard here for the entire month with that to work for you. So you can have more value. You can create out of everything that you do in your company. So that's what we're gonna do Monday. In the end, should we take care? Also, I wanna just real quick. On Tuesday, you guys will see posts coming out from me over the course of the next week and that will be www.ld.live. If you wanna join me in a Zoom meeting, what will Liz do? And bring me your issues. I have a few issues that I'm going to talk about. You'll see them coming out in the next couple of days. But if you wanna join me on that, www.ld.live.live, yeah, that's it. And that will be next Tuesday at the same time, smart business moves time, all right? See you next Monday. Thanks guys. Thanks guys. Hi to Melissa. Thank you, Chris. I will.


Maybe Scott I realized I gave you SJ rather than Scott, which you always type out nicely Okay, all right Just cuz I think just to keep it. Yeah, in fact, I can just do it just to do it Why not fully funds cut off Like Scott's spot you I'm assuming you've watched Scott pilgrim says it was it versus I still haven't seen that movie cuz I'm lame I haven't seen it either. It's really just I'm waiting to it's just a movie with a lot of Toronto in jokes I read the joke. I mean I read the jokes. I read the comics all the way through twice. So I know the material I just never got around in the movie. I Don't even know who's in it it has what's his name? The nerdy guy oh Rest of development. Yes, I can't I think of his name Shawn Blake Tim Thomerson I do sometimes like sometimes when there's like there's a name. It's a Proper noun or something. I do sometimes go through the alphabet like And every once in a while, I'll get it right because it's like I've got that first letter and it triggers something that I couldn't remember before It's very weird Man I did something to my finger now that will not heal. Oh, no, did you I said, you know what? I have begun to the doctor. They might have to pull off the nail. No Gosh and that escalated quickly. I don't Roger was very concerned No, you see like my nail right here Let's see if I'll focus in on it is a split like down that that little mark that splits been there since college When I was playing I was very When I was a very serious Street Fighter 2 player Yeah, I split it by hitting like I was trying to do a fireball with Ken or Ryu and I hit it too hard and it's Really, huh, so I blame Street Fighter 2 on that Oh, you guys take care of your hands, please. Yeah, I Just hurts and I don't know why there's no visible anything. It just feels like I did something dumb to it If you have a cut and then you get citrus juice or something on it might hurt Yeah, or a hot sauce or maybe I Get scurvy or I have the blight Scurvy lack of vitamin C hair falls out. He falls out. Yeah, your oranges. Yeah, if you do the blight though It's just lack of potatoes Is it I think it was I don't think the blight was an actual disease. I think it was just a lack like a drought of potatoes Yeah, like just a lot of a lot of potato fungus. Yeah. Oh, it's a lot maybe was a lot of that Yeah, but I always tell my kids that their french fries have the blight just to irritate them It's a good thing if there's no nutritional value in french fries anyway, so You need your starches, right a little bit carbs you need your carbs Speaking of what we need we need to start the show. So You start your cord you count down start record and then Sarah can do the Intro thing, right? Okay, cool All right, here we go. Let's start it in three two one Mason moody has supported independent tech news directly for five years be like Mason become a DTNS member at patreon.com slash DTNS This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday March 6th 2019 Tom Merritt is off today, but from studio feline I'm Sarah Lane Salt Lake City, Utah I am Scott Johnson and from a very wet LA County area. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang Yes, it is wet here I don't know if it's been raining in Salt Lake City as much as it has in Los Angeles Scott But I feel like we're in bizarro world. It's normally snow But because March is here we start to get really uneven with that like February is the worst month and right now Yeah, so whatever rain you have will probably end up here and then we'll send it to Colorado. They'll get snow It just gets worse from there. So thanks a lot Los Angeles We are sorry in advance what we're not sorry for though is a great tech news show coming up and let's start with a few tech things You should know All right, well, let's get right to it Reuters reports that Bansico the central bank of Mexico. That's right Bansico Always driving cool Is working with Amazon on a new government-backed payment system The system will be called Cody or CO DI and allow users to make in-person and online payments via QR codes More than half the population doesn't have a bank account and only 3.9% of retail sales were made online in 2018 in that country incentivizing more bank accounts Uber will not face criminal charges for a fatal crash involving one of its self-driving cars Prosecutors have ruled that the company is not criminally liable for the death of Elaine Hertzberg who she was 49 Who was struck as she crossed a road in Tempe, Arizona? Also according to the internal Apple document obtained by Mac rumors. They always end up with these Someone's got friends on the inside over there anyway The company will now allow devices with batteries installed by third parties to be eligible for genius bar and other authorized repairs Previous Apple guidelines called for denying service to the devices with third-party batteries regardless of those circumstances I think that's actually kind of a big deal A lot of people do go get the third-party cheaper thing and the fact that they can now go into apple and Get a better one and not be turned away. Yeah for saving a few bucks I think that's it's it's good will. Um, there's probably some other reasons there too. All right Let's talk a little bit more about The foldable phones That will not die scott. That's what everybody it's 2019 everybody has Freakin foldable phone these days or they don't have a phone yet, but everybody wants you to have one Bloomberg sam kim reports that samsung is working on Two new foldable phones. So if you thought that one they just released wasn't enough This is according to sources within the company the company plans to roll out a vertical clamshell foldable by late 2019 or early 2020 That would be my bet Possibly with a second screen on the outside of the device when it is folded Which kind of ruins the idea of folding it but anyway an outward folding device similar to yaw ways Mate x design which we have had a look at would follow the company Will reportedly include an in-screen fingerprint reader and is still working on improving the durability of the foldable panels I'd said this last week and I would reiterate it again Uh, these things need some iteration before I'm going to trust them and it's Nothing about samsung or anybody else making a foldable phone. It's that fold I'm concerned about and with with a lot of use. I just can't see that holding up yet So it's the second and third generation of these that I'm most interested in and it sounds like we may get some of that before the end of the year Yeah, I mean it's starting to feel like groundhog day when when I see these stories because I'm like, wait a second Didn't we just talk about samsung's foldable phone? Oh, these are more foldable phones that are that are being worked on that might have different form factors and and yeah, I I I tend to sort of laugh about the whole thing because it's all still so conceptual because You were you were I or Roger or Tom or anybody we haven't had a year to be like, oh, here's why it was really great Here's why I changed the way that I did things. Here's what didn't work You mentioned having a display on the outside of a folded device like does that really? You know, is that is that a form factor that you're going to figure out later on? It's really helpful even though it seems perhaps silly now. Well, and that's the other issue Especially given the price. Nobody knows what the killer application is for this if there is one Um And so they can show me all the neat little videos of a game that's vertical suddenly getting larger right in the middle of the game That's great But that's going to last me three or four seconds of i'm impressed before I need to know what this is really going to do for Me down the road I I hope for this but not at $1,500. So Uh, I hope they quickly get smaller flatter more durable and Cheaper I want the clamshell design to actually look like a clamshell That's what I want. That's that's what I wanted my foldable phone Let's make them stylish again people at the 2019 tensor flow dev summit today google announced a bunch of tensor flow stuff A new open source tensor flow privacy module was kind of the big one for its machine Learning framework developers can now add just a few lines of code and improve the privacy Of their ai models tensor flow is a very popular developer tool I think it turned about three years old back in november millions of folks are are in there developing Our word has been Installed certainly millions of times for building machine learning applications to create programs like text or audio or image recognition algorithms google's tensor flow privacy will add what they call differential privacy to help safeguard users data, which is a Kind of complex at least to me mathematical approach That means that ai models trained on user data can't encode personally Identifiable information because that gets dangerous google already uses it for a number of its own ai features like gmail's smart reply Aha got it google also debuted tensor flow federated or tff Which is supposed to make it easier to experiment with machine learning and other computations on decentralized data And the company also announced the tensor flow 2.0 alpha or gave a some some hints of what was coming With a glimpse of upcoming changes aimed at making machine learning easier for beginners That would be me Well, that's going to be the next big step I think is them codifying these concepts in such a way that people can use them in more common circumstances, so having a class in a high school that's focused on You know tradition just traditional computer science would love probably to have an entire course On machine learning and what that is if they can make that easy and accessible For that environment. That's a good thing for not only Education now but the future of the technology and where it goes and interest in it and that sort of thing but more over It will be tricky to find all the practical applications for this without easy tools And simple methods to try to implement it and to experiment and to mess around and i'm glad you brought up the The gmail integration because there's a good example of a regular Thing we use all the time gmail is constantly telling me what I want to reply with and I have Sort of have to make a decision if I want to do that or not. Sometimes it's not great Um, but it's a start and I think that's really good Um, this is an important step. I guess I should say because outside of this it's very abstract and complicated and nobody's got their finger exactly on what the future of AI machine learning is So I I think this is a good thing that google is doing and I hope that others in this field uh follow Agreed Google is testing speaking of google Ads that's right. They still make a lot of money from ads everybody. They want to do shoppable ads on google image searches The search giant will place related sponsored ads within image search results. The ads will feature a price tag A little icon on the lower right of the image A user can then hover over the image and see what item is for sale Uh in the image along with the price Currently the test is a small percentage of traffic with uh, a select retailers is all they're going to start with Surfacing uh on brand queries like home office ideas shower tile designs and abstract art Here's how I Forsee this is a possibility for people like me if you're a independent artist and creator and you're putting work out there A lot of times what happens, especially if your stuff memes out a little bit people start spreading it around They take your name off it gets cropped for whatever reason sites will post it without your Permission they end up getting filtered back into the image search on google And I'll sometimes run into my own work and go. Oh my gosh. There's that print I made my name's nowhere on that and no one has any idea that it's mine But people are using it for their blogs and their whatever It'd be kind of cool if when those results came up one of the cool things you could do with an in image ad Would be purchase a 12 by 18 inch version of this print 14 and suddenly Artists are getting attribution There's probably a long distance between what I'm saying and what's actually possible Even with this test, but I would like to see it be more than just oh, you're searching for stuff in the home office How would you feel about a new fax machine? That's great and all but I love the idea of more attribution People getting credit and then maybe even getting You know some money for that Yeah, but when I first read the story, I was like, oh man, don't screw up my google image searches They're they're they're the the wild they're the wild west of image searches. And that's how I like them However, that's also a reason that if I am searching for a new lamp Let's say something that it could be purchased somewhere I'm not doing that within google. I might be at amazon, but I might be at pinterest I I frequent house H O U Z Z all the time for for for home stuff that I usually can't afford But they they have a very nice integrated way that you can click into Some images not all of them to be able to figure out where the retailer is where you could buy this This particular item. So if there was more of that in google image search I would use it for that reason more because most of the time That's not what I would use image search for although Roger you did mention that That that is actually something that could be helpful when you're Looking for something that's a home improvement project, for example And you actually want to make sure you've got the image right So, you know what I was thinking like for one of the things that I often do an image search for is a part Or if I see instructions on the how to do like hey to fix your door hinge You're gonna need blah blah blah in this tool oftentimes they won't include an image I'll do an image search for whatever tool and you get like this is what the tool is It could very well be is something where it's like a home depot or lows You know integrated ad where like oh you can buy this you know torque wrench For 50 bucks at this store or you can buy it off amazon The the only problem and the only fear I have is some of these ads start displacing actual legitimate image search results So they're not at the top but rather all the way at the bottom and then you're just constantly scrolling through yeah, right That's an issue for me as well, but it also is Maybe not a bigger. Well, maybe a bigger issue for me is I use google image searches for references It's like I need to quickly go. I need somebody doing a backflip. I need an image reference to draw this Um, there's a guy doing it and I'll use it for a minute and then it'll go away I may have a weird use case and maybe google's never really known what to do with image search And they're finally finding a way to use it. So I mean I have to change my way of thinking about what image search is actually for But I'd be at least curious to see where this goes Well in alphabet news. Anyway, waymo announced a medium post in a medium post rather He didn't announce a medium post. Those already exist waymo will start selling its lidar sensors to companies outside of the self-driving automobile market With an initial focus on security robotics and agriculture The money earned from sales would help the company lower the unit price of the sensors through economies of scale Although the company has developed several models of lidar. It would only be selling the laser bear honeycomb version It's a short range sensor with a 95 degree vertical field of view and a 360 degree horizontal field of view A minimum range of zero meaning that it can see things right in front of it and features multiple rear Multiple returns per pulse interested parties should visit the waymo website I as I said earlier off air think this is really cool because Everybody always wants to focus on what's the end game for automated cars and stuff like that and driving And we always think it's going to be some company like tesla or somebody who invest millions in these top to bottom solutions It's a car. It's takes you everywhere. You never drive it That's the ultimate goal and I get it and that's great and there's a bunch of companies working on that But what I've seen very little of is companies working on smaller more modular Plug-in solutions and I don't mean that this solution is going to make my car drive itself obviously not but it is a piece of that and perhaps a stepping stone toward The car itself being a much smarter Quote-unquote ecosystem or device And I could see a future where things are much more modular There's a lot of safety questions in that and we haven't answered those yet and we're not going to be able to today obviously but Uh, I like the idea that the choices may not be I'm getting this brand car. It might be I'm eating their chassis their engine and their navigation system and Kind of building your own, you know Your own is kind of set up or at the very least having more control over what you've got if you own these self-driving cars If it's more of a fleet situation if none of us are even owning cars in 50 years Well, then we can have a different conversation about it, but uh, I I like this modular idea a lot What's what's interesting is in many ways. It's kind of how cars are built With with all the with all the extra features that you get uh today For example the whole radar brake assist like oh, you know the car will automatically break for you If you get too close to the car in front of you if you buy this option It's one of those things that was developed By a company and then just sold to forbmw or whatever and they would develop or they would license the technology So the company could then build its own version to integrate with their automobile I think I think you're right. I don't think the future will be a tesla The test will definitely be part of the future, but I don't think it will be the future It's going to be a technology from a company Uh, for example, there's a I forgot his name There's one individual who developed the intermittent wiper that everyone has on their car, right? It's the what it's a wiper mode that Intermittently does it every two seconds every four seconds He developed the original circuit for that and a bunch of cars Supposedly ripped them off and and car companies but ripped off and developed it. But the idea is that one Company one guy developed it and then that technology kind of spread across the industry And I think that's kind of what you're seeing. I think you can see the same thing with Electric vehicles where it's going to be the one company that develops the really amazing storage technology that allows you to You know cram 100 plus miles into an average size sedan on electric power And then, you know, they're going to license it everyone's going to license it and put it in their automobile And that's where you get the economies of scale where you can have literally not just thousands But hundreds of thousands of automobiles and with this sensor What they plan to do is essentially just you know Get it to the point where they can sell it at a much cheaper cost because they're selling it to everyone right I think I agree with that. I think that's uh I mean, why wouldn't it follow that path? That's how most products end up in our hands Is this kind of iterative Added on to licensed out broken apart rethought sort of process Nobody's going to arrive at my house with a package with a bow on it that says here's yourself driving car With every piece of functionality we could ever want Congratulations, it doesn't work that way and whether it's something like we talked about earlier with foldable phones or it's You know getting much closer to automated driving It's going to take a bunch of iteration mistakes failures And hopefully a few successes before we get it Well laser bear honeycomb is a cool name. That's for sure Hey to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com In fact, you'll hear my voice on the headline show tomorrow All right, so this is our discussion for the day and it's all about Good and bad companies or at least how they're perceived By people in the u.s. Axios wrote up It was a it was actually a poll between Harris poll and axios in conjunction with each other of u.s. Adults Facebook's Facebook sort of fall from grace was the big headline But the the the way that the axios Harris poll works is that it ranks the Reputations of the most visible companies in the u.s. So the surveys conducted among almost 20 000 americans It's a two-step process first it surveys the public's top of mind awareness of companies Who are seeing of some range of good or bad in society or somewhere in between Then these most visible companies are then ranked by a second group of americans to figure out their actual ranking One being the best and 100 being the worst if a company isn't on the list then it doesn't necessarily mean that It's a good or bad company It just means that it did not have a critical enough level of visibility to be measured in this poll So of those companies they weren't all tech companies, but a lot of them were And again, like I mentioned Facebook got a lot of attention But there are some there are some very interesting data points in here For example, amazon held the number two spots of companies kind of doing the best as far as the public perceived them Wegmans was number one grocery chain samsung was at number seven microsoft at number nine There's also fastest rising and falling Reputation areas this isn't for 2019 samsung climbed from number 35 to number seven So yeah, samsung's had had a good year since we did this last Netflix and apple both saw small declines, but they're kind of hovering in the 20s Facebook though fell from number 51 to number 94 Which is a very large drop for any company No, of course Facebook is facebook and has had quite a bit of issues certainly in the public eye We've we could it's a long laundry list of of issues that that folks have whether it's, you know, distrust or you know Are you swinging elections and what are you doing with their data and and and we've talked about that at nauseam, but Even so it it's it's a very steep steep decline tesla by the way also fell from number three Which is pretty high to number 42. So it's interesting the way that these social shifts happen quite quickly and sometimes Quite dramatically the same thing with tesla, right? Like they've had similar scrutiny not Not the same scrutiny as facebook is a different market obviously, but But in on musk likes to say a bunch of wacky stuff online affects stock prices things get weird with public companies He complains about that it That's you could see that starting to erode into people's perception of what tesla was before all of that which was this amazing pristine product that Only a genius could come on, you know, like they had that whole shroud And this is that shroud being pulled away a little bit facebook one I feel like has been brewing for years and you know has been A little bit strange But I would actually like to remark that samsung's climb from 35 to 7 is pretty remarkable considering The note 7 nightmare that they went through And seem seemingly at least according to this data have come out. Okay Or at least it just took some time right to like gain the trust back of at least these people pulled on the us Well, I think it does underscore the fact that Memories can be short especially when there are a lot of other companies that can fall in their face Just as rapidly as you do One example is a microsoft. I mean microsoft For for those who might not be familiar with the company wasn't What was the subject of a lot of scorn and on public anger back in the early 2000s all the way up into the late 2000s And in the harris pole that they did in 2011 microsoft pulled in at 16 Now nine going up to nine now. I mean, it's not a huge jump, but it's still a significant Shift for the company and a lot of that has to do with the way the company is now perceived Especially with the way the company's been captained by satcha nudella and kind of the the shifts in the way the company does its business away from a os-centric our way or the highway kind of attitude Versus more of a collaborative and they still might be, you know, the most obnoxious bean counters on the planet that Want a nickel and dime you for everything you have But the public face that they give is definitely more palatable palatable than it was in 15 years ago Oh, yeah for sure I mean, it does also it's just a nice little reminder that public perception, especially in companies who deal with public facing Products facebook is the perfect example of this, but you would I would throw twitter in there and others they are always just one controversy away from Dropping 50 spots on this list like Right, you know in they in fakes, but face books case. I'm just a fake book. That's not good Uh, if they're wouldn't be the first person to pointy and slip On that one. I'll just let that lay over there on the floor. I tripped on it but they The scrutiny they've had is on such a higher level like they've been in front of congress. They've been in front of EU parliament they've had to Uh lay bare all of their practices and then in cases where they forgot about something either Innocently or not Then they're getting after being got after again because they forgot to disclose a thing like they level of scrutiny is Magnifying lens on an ant hill when I was five it was all about just killing as many ants as I could and I feel like Facebook's not going to do they're not going to go up on this list very quickly Um, so there may be a weird example, but I think any of these companies could At any given time just slip up slip down And also you might look at this and say well amazon's doing great number two behind a beloved grocery chain Okay, well are you are you comparing netflix and amazon? And if so Is it original amazon video that you would compare to netflix? So there are there are so many data points in here that in these two companies It's not sort of like microsoft and apple which one's better because The the reason that people might be happy or displeased with the company It could be for a lot of reasons depending on how big the company is and what they offer And I think there's a certain level of how much competition does a company have for public opinion to really Sway their business decisions right facebook doesn't have an immediate You know competitor that does everything it does there's companies that do bits of what it does But not in the same scale that facebook does so there's there's a level of You know it has more opportunities to screw up Well, it someone said kind of an insufferable attitude that well, you know what we're still we're still the only player in town So people are invariably going to come around to us even if not directly And so, you know, you see you see it with other other companies That have you know for the longest time like, you know AT&T when it was mob l it was like, well, you know, we dropped your call. We're sorry But guess what we're the phone company. We are the phone company There are no other phone companies if you need to use the phone you're going to use it with us So, you know, yeah, we're upset. You know, we're we're sorry you're upset But it doesn't really matter us There's only then when you had competition where you kind of lit a fire under their corporate behinds where they started At least publicly tried to change their Their their direction as well as their attitude toward the customers not looking them like more of a You know just kind of a fiefdom but more as customers that they need to keep happy Yeah You know related to everything that we're talking about here is a story today From the Guardian that Whole Foods had cut workers hours after Amazon which owns Whole Foods introduced a new minimum wage, which was $15 and in certain cases for management It was a little bit higher But if you weren't making $15 and you worked Whole Foods, then you then you became $15 minimum wage However, workers have complained of now having fewer hours even though the overall Budget for these stores in some cases really haven't changed and they say well this wipes out our raises all together You know, I was working 40 hours a week and now I get more per hour and I'm only working 32 hours This kind of it kind of screws us up And I think that this is a perfect example of something that if that's if that gets enough traction People will start saying oh Whole Foods is bad to their employees Whole Foods is a bad company You know and will that dock Amazon when we look at this pull next year? Yeah, I think that's very possible like they On the one hand well, whether it's true or not the perception will be Amazon swooped in created a minimum wage that is a living wage and that's good And that seems like a good company practice, but then sneakily, you know reduced everybody's hours nullifying the the good Whether or not that's actually true it may not matter in cases like this because we're really just talking about perception I noticed that Chick-fil-A was number four last year Number 22 this year. That's still pretty good chicken. I don't know what's going on over there Ah, it's because they closed their local branch near me and people were mad. Oh, all right. I wish I had been pulled I I always wonder why don't I get pulled on things like this? I would love to be part of a poll like this never happens Hey, thanks everybody who participates and are subreddit. It's a poll of sorts of its own You can submit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show dot reddit.com Facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show is where to hang out with us on facebook That's your bag speaking of bags I'm back to amazon now. We got an email from kevin who said I just placed my first amazon order and shows amazon day For delivery it felt good for a couple of reasons number one I would have likely been in the mountain skiing on thursday on the expected two-day delivery date Two, I feel like in the future I can help reduce a lot of waste when there are products with different delivery dates I don't think I would have even noticed that this was a new option Had you guys not mentioned it because i'm usually pretty automatic with my orders search add to cart hit order close browser Something did occur to me. However, this will likely be saving amazon a ton of A ton over the long haul. They should really give customers some sort of a price reduction for using this Yeah, amazon doesn't seem to be don't hold your breath. Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath either. We got another email from Uh our boss chip from snowy boston Hey chip Yeah, go celtics. I guess I was trying to think of a good team to the back today I was listening to your conversation yesterday about the ordine stove and how its space saving design would be great for small Kitchens and it hit me. I've seen this before a few years back. I toured kentuck knob a frank Lloyd Wright house built in the early 50s And part of the tour we went through the house of small kitchen which had many Small sorry many space saving innovations including a fold down stove. Let's get some pictures. They sound with this Uh, the electric stove was a frigid air product From the same time period it allowed you to fold down the four burners in uh one at a time So it only took up as much space as you needed on the counter The benefit this 60 plus year old product had over the ordine was the burners were detachable So you could take one or more with you to the dining room or outside to keep food warm. That's kind of rad Uh, obviously the ordine is much more. Is it ordine or ordine? I hope i'm saying it, right? Or we'll say ordine Uh much more modern tech but the space saving concept is the same I always wondered why the design never caught on Hopefully now with the advent of in or advent of injunction cook tops It may love the show keep up the great work your boss chip from snowy boston Yeah chips. I loved those photos. You sent chip. They're so cool. Wherever that house is. I would like a tour as well Yeah, so thanks to kevin. Thanks chip. Thanks to everybody who sends us feedback We love you. Keep it coming. Also. Thanks to scott johnson for helping roger and I hold down the fort today Scott, what else is going on in your world? Well, it's been my pleasure Uh, uh, hope tom's having a safe trip and I would just say if you're interested in anything I have going on these days There are two places to go really the first is frogpants.com everything I do is there If you're looking for art if you're looking for our store if you're looking for podcasts It's all right there and to follow me on the daily. You can see me at twitter on no on twitter at scott johnson That'd be a great handle. Yeah, you could just add me at twitter. That's me Uh, well, thanks for being with us scott our goal each month as you know patrons is to get one more patron Then we had last month. You could be that person. Maybe you're on the fence Maybe maybe it's time to maybe it's time to To check out our patreon and see what all the great perks we have there You can become a dts member and get an ad free rss feed Also special episodes from tom on how how we make the sausage special episodes looking back on tech news of the past And lots more you can sign up at patreon.com slash d t and s we also have a store want to mention that too Daily tech news show dot com slash store our email address as I mentioned feedback at daily tech news show at dot com We're also live money through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 130 utc You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live tom's back from austin texas tomorrow We're also have just and robert young and david sparks talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network frog pants network get more shows like this At frog pants dot com diamond club. Hope you have enjoyed this bro Sure did we did it Chats Showbots Work all Yeah, I think we do pretty good job. Uh, you'd think we'd be all stressed out and nervous just you know It's tom's baby. I don't want to screw this thing up, but it always goes well, so Kentucky where's this house look? Oh, it's in pennsylvania Chalk hill pencil all the vampires are pennsylvania I do a good vampire. What can I say? Well, I want to go to transylvania. Yeah, romania. It's in romania. I it's It's a state Province it's a region. It's a region. Yeah, it's a romanian region. They've tried to make it a little more touristy I think they added a theme park Really? Well, that's not why I would go Well, I mean, they're they're trading off the the whole transylvania, you know, dracula and all that stuff. Yeah mason Sorry, that's you. Hey mason. I just wanted to shout you out Uh, yeah, I I don't know I don't I've never been to any part of romania. So that's just a you know, if I haven't been to a place I'd like to go. Why not? I've only met five romanians in my life How do you how do you know that so quickly? Because two of them were at state one of them was a guest where it was was connected to a guest on call for help Uh, and then the other two well, what if you met a romanian and didn't know it? That's true. There's five romans. I know I've met secret romanians I don't know. I can't I can't think of and I know i'm just probably blanking I can't think of any friend who's I don't know. Yeah. No. Are you saying just a romanian descent or Like romanian like grew up there. Yeah, like, you know talked with romanian accent No, I don't yeah, I don't know. I can't think of yeah. I think of any Come forth romanians show yourselves Oh Strike it rich strike it rich. Uh, sure. So go to show about that chat realm dot net and vote on your titles We have the of course from facebook to face plant That's a good one. Um be made be like mason thanks mason adding to the fold Adding to the fold waymo sensors. I like waymo sensors. I see what you did there uh mo jam Oh mo jam has a good one your reputation precedes you That's a good one that fits right into our thing It does Yeah, that's what I'm gonna vote for I voted for that as well Okay, all right.  Just tell them it rained and you know, what are you gonna do? Well, but it's the inside really that's that's you know, it's the outside Like, you know, they can just hose it down, but I think it's not a rental car They can deal with it. They can deal with it. Yeah, I'm sure they'll find a reason to tell me that they had to like Get a special wash because I didn't But nobody said anything like oh, you need to return if it's not part of If it's not part of the lease like you must have this like you when you read a car It says you need to have at least three quarters of a tank full. Sure. Yeah, right If it doesn't say that it's like well, whatever like, you know, it's not damage.  It's you know, it's it's not like It I've had plenty of time for a little wear and tear in there Not that it's in bad shape, but it's just you know, a little dusty, you know, dog blanket and the back type thing But yeah, they have a return fee That I don't remember hearing about until Very recently and so it's like Let's call the cleaning fee part of that because it's not an insignificant amount of money A return fee like was this is is this because of your situation or that's what they do for every lease I don't no, no, no, no, no, it's it's it's it's just a that's standard what they do is When your lease is up and I don't know if all car companies are the same but Um for my particular lease what they they say is like and then there's a return fee Which of course will wave if you get into another lease Even though it's like another three year lease is so much more money than like Just paying that return fee if that's not what I want to do, you know So they they like barely incentivize you to Just stick with them by waving, you know things that seem like nice fees, but probably don't matter very much It's all a big racket cars suck cars or rack kids.  They make them they just don't last very long and they burn your backsides if you're not careful Yeah, I know they're just not ready Get way more in the case It'll be a lot of fun in no case. I don't know I I always thought about leasing a car, but the thing is I do a lot of unpredictable things with my car So I don't think I would be a good lease person And see I'm this I'm The opposite because I have a hard time committing to anything Uh, I'm a very non-committal car person. So the the whole kind of like Well, you're basically just renting a car and you know, it's never going to be your car That's that works for me because then I'm only committing to a couple of years at a time I don't know it has worked for me in the past We'll see how it works in the future because when I owned My cars over the years sometimes I had them long enough to pay them off And I was like wow, and then it's just my car. That's nice Huh, then a while since I felt that way I bought uh, I bought a certified used Camry because I wanted something that was cheap ish Uh, and relatively low cost on the insurance and maintenance Mm-hmm, and I managed to find one with only 11,000 miles on it. Yeah, I mean that's The the used car never bothered me at all. I don't care. I don't care who was in this car before maze Yeah, as long as it's in good shape low mileage And and and works I remember my friend saying it's like don't I hate used cars like why it's like well How do you know like someone didn't die in it? That's like so what? It's not like it's not like they're gonna haunt the car Well, these aren't real Maybe in transylvania you'd have a problem, but no. Yeah, I feel the same way of um, when people say You know, what if you know somebody died in this house that we're thinking of buying It just doesn't I don't know if I wasn't there I live in an email house. I don't know how much I would care that that might have happened for someone There's a big possibility that yeah the older your house is like someone probably died in it some way I mean, you know, as long as it wasn't as long as it was peaceful. It wasn't like something shady or anything like that But even if it was It really does unless you're just kind of superstitious it still shouldn't matter if you like the house Some people are though like, you know like oh, you know, you you built your house. It means that all die badly It just means it works that way weird happen and why like if somebody got shot or was a murder suicide or something You'd probably want to not know where it happened because every time you'd walk into that room or a bedroom Yeah, it's true It's true. If I was facing something like that. Maybe it would bother me more than I think about it Yeah, unless you're super superstitious or something. I mean, I if I got the right deal on the house It wouldn't stop me from buying the house just burn the room have a priest come in and bless it and they were set Done done I watched poltergeist. I know as long as the headstones. It's not just the headstones. We're all set Uh, is that the story with poltergeist? I don't really remember they built the housing project Which is actually not too far away from me. Uh, they built that housing project on On the sacred like it was the cemetery and but they didn't they didn't exhume the caskets They just took the tombs or the headstones off and built everything on top. Well, that's poor form For sure. I'd be mad too if I was a ghost. I mean like Sarah knows at least a quarter of san francisco is built on reclaimed cemetery Yeah, yeah, they moved all those bodies to south san francisco or colma mostly I don't really know where south san francisco ends and colma begins That area is all it's so weird Yeah, it's basically as soon as you start hitting the cemeteries and you hit like the The one casino nestled between the cemeteries. That's colma. Yeah Yeah, I actually knew somebody who was a um card dealer at that casino Really? He was a strange person. Um, and For lots of reasons. Um, the card dealing part was the least strange thing about him. But yeah, that's where he worked And he always had weird story. This is a long time ago. This was like when I was at college So it was pestering you about deals. I could make a good deal for you. No, he was just a weirdo He was just a weird man who worked at the colma casino When I go home the only people accompanying me on my commute are dead people Although a couple of people a couple of the old Victim from the okay corral or some supposedly buried like doc Holliday or something out there Have you seen just for that? Yeah, but he's just it's just a tombstone and supposedly his remains You know, I I don't know how we all feel about cemeteries and not all cemeteries are created equal obviously, but there are some like like in um Eva Perone's Cemetery Ricoletta cemetery in Buenos Aires. I've been there and it's like one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen Not just her kind of it's a huge tomb thing But just the whole thing towards attraction in in its own way, but it's like wow I mean it was like one of my favorite parts of my time there Then there's other cemeteries where you're like, you know, I'm not not liking this. I don't want to hang out here Yeah, the the cemeteries in New Orleans are like this. They're just Breath-takingly beautiful in the daytime. Yeah at night. I'd rather be anywhere but there Yeah, like they're right. Yeah. It's too. It's too. It's too good too gothic and kind of yeah Well, if it's a if it's all the right notes if it's a proper Cemetery that means event of eventually have fog run over it and it'll just be super creepy I Yeah, I I don't uh, yeah, I mean not that I'm hanging out in cemeteries all the time, but you know Paraliches in Paris where Jim Morrison's buried among many many other people Is that still like frequented like that used to be a big so I only went there once um To the cemetery anyway, and it was in the winter and it was cold and I was alone I just really wanted to go and I don't even remember who I was with but they didn't want to go And so I was like, all right. See you guys later. I'm I'm doing this and I definitely like when you find the You know where he is there were like teenagers like drinking beer and kind of you know Just being teenagers in the general area, but it wasn't like It was pretty mellow You know don't know occult rituals or anything like that Someone Cold rituals occult. Oh, oh, oh, I didn't see anything like that. No, uh, who knows? Here's my one creepy story about Jim Morrison Um, and it's not because I knew him or anything because he he longs for the past before I was born um Is that uh, I used to frequent the uh, the cd uh vinyl swap meets with my my old friend And he was super into it because he would just always trade like bootleg CDs and stuff Um, but we had a table next to this woman who was also selling CDs She had like the craziest stories about Jim Morrison and it was weird because it's almost religious like if you believe in him And you you you follow the path. He led forth. He will always watch over you. Let's say Oh Oh, okay. Yeah, you do realize he was like just a head. He was just a rock star and Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, so it's like going it's going beyond the I was just a big fan It was I believe things that might not be It's not it's not even like oh, I have a say it's like I guess it's jesus like messiah level weirdo Yeah, try try watching that leaving neverland documentary on HBO and then saying out loud to anyone who's remotely a michael jackson fan that Uh that somebody should watch that documentary and you'll see just how far their people worship goes. It's like Yeah, that's into their idols I haven't um, I haven't seen that yet Kind of dragging my feet a little bit very highly It's got it's rough and uh raw and Extremely exhausting and really well made but I think kind of A bit of a required viewing. I think I think it's Maybe I'll watch it tonight other than just anything salacious. It's really just uh It's an a kind of a a drawn-out look at childhood abuse and what it means and what it can do to people as adults and It's not just simply Michael jackson did this thing. It's it's way more than that I really liked it Okay, it'll it'll go on the list All right All right, you know catch up on my other stuff Uh and speaking of other stuff, uh, we want to say goodbye to the video watching folks on youtube Thank you so much for being with us today. Tom is back tomorrow with david spark and Just All right, and uh people in the audience stay tuned. We got more to tell you about three much steers Three we do. Yes Okay