Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of CloudNative SecurityCon North America 2023. Obviously, theCUBE's coverage with our CUBE Center report. We're not there on the ground, but we have folks in our CUBE alumni there. We have entrepreneurs there. Of course, we want to be there in person, but we're remote. We've got Ben Hirschberg, CTO and co-founder of RMO, a CloudNative Security startup, well-positioned in this industry. He's there in Seattle. Ben, thank you for coming on and sharing what's going on with theCUBE. Yeah, it's great to be here, John. So we had written you guys up on SiliconANGLE. Congratulations on your momentum and traction. But let's first get into what's going on there on the ground. What are some of the key trends? What's the most important story being told there? What is the vibe? What's the most important story right now? So I think, I would like to start here with the, I think the most important thing was that, I think the event is very successful, okay? Usually, you know, the CloudNative Security Day usually was part of CUBECon in the previous years. And now it became its own conference of its own. And it really kudos to all the organizers, okay? Who brought this up in, actually in a short time. And we were, it wasn't really clear how many people will turn up. But at the end, okay, we see a really nice turn up, okay? And really great talks and keynotes around here. I think that's one of the biggest trends, okay? Which is, having started like in this conference, already we're talking for a while is supply chain, okay? Supply chain is security. I think it's right now the biggest trend in the talks, okay? In the keynotes. And I think that we are, start to see companies, big companies, okay, who are adopting themselves into this direction, okay? There is a clear industry need. There is a clear problem. And I think that the cloud native security teams are coming up with tooling around it. I think for right now we see more tools than adoption, but the adoption is always right following, okay? The tooling. And I think it already proves itself. So we have just very interesting talk this morning about the OpenSSL vulnerability, which was, I think around the Halloween, which came out and everyone thought that it's going to be a critical issue for the whole cloud native and internet infrastructure. And at the end, it turned out to be a lesser problem, but the reason why I think it was understood that to be a lesser problem real soon was that because people started to use S-bombs, store software composition information in the environment. So security teams could look up in their systems, okay, where they are using OpenSSL, which version they are using. It became really soon real clear that this version is not adopted by a wide array of software out there. So the attack surface is relatively small. And I think it already proved itself that the direction, okay, of everyone is talking about. Yeah, we agree. We're very bullish on this move from the cloud native foundation, CNCF, to do the security conference. Amazon Web Services has reinvented, that's their big show, but they also have reinforced a security show. So clearly they work together. I like the decoupling, very cohesive, but you guys have coopscapes of Kubernetes security. Talk about the conversations that are there and that you're hearing around why the different event, what's different on KubeCon and cloud native con than this cloud native security con? It's not called KubeSecCon, it's called cloud native security con. What's the difference? Are people confused? Is it clear? What's the difference between the two shows? What are you hearing? So I think that there is a good question, okay, where is cloud native computing foundation came from? Obviously everyone knows that it was somewhat coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes, okay? It was a clear understanding in the industry that there are different efforts where the industry needs to come together without looking, be very vendor specific, okay? And try to sort out a lot of issues in order to enable adoption and to bring great value. And I think that the main difference here, okay, between KubeCon and the cloud native security conference is really the focus, okay? And not just on Kubernetes, but the whole ecosystem behind that, okay? The way we are delivering software, the way we are monitoring software and where Kubernetes is only just, you know, maybe the biggest clog in the system, but, you know, just one of the others. And it gives a great overview of what you have in the whole ecosystem. Yeah, I think it's a good call. I would add that what I'm hearing too is that security is so critical to the business model of every company. It's so mainstream, the hackers have a great business model, they make money, their costs are lower than the revenue.  So it's about time we can get focus to really be faster and more nimble and agile on solving some of these security challenges in open source. So I think that to me is a great focus on that. So I give total props to the CNC.  And so this brings back up to some of the things that are going on. I want to ask you, as your startup as a CTO, you guys have the Coupscape platform, how do you guys fit into the landscape and what's different from your tools for Kubernetes environments versus what's out there? So I think that our journey is really interesting, okay, in the solution space because I think that our mode really tried to understand, okay, where security can meet the actual adoption because as you just said, okay, somehow we have to sort out together, okay, how security is going to be automated and integrated in its best way. So Coupscape project started as a Kubernetes security posture tool. Okay, just, you know, when people are really early in their adoption of Kubernetes systems, okay, they want to understand, okay, whether the installation is secure, whether the basic configurations are look okay and giving them instant feedback on that, both in life systems and in the CICD, this is where Coupscape came from, okay? And we started it as an open source project because we are big believers of open source, of the power of open source security. And I can, you know, I think maybe this is my first interview when I can say that Coupscape was accepted to be a CNCF sandbox project. So ARMO is actually donating, okay, the project to the CNCF, I think which is a huge milestone and a great way, okay, to further, you know, the adoption of Kubernetes security. And from now on, okay, we want to see where the users, ARMO and Coupscape projects want to see where the users are going, okay, in their Kubernetes security journey and help them to automatize, help them to implement security more fast in their way, the way the developers are using working. Okay, if you don't mind, I want to just get clarification. What's the difference between the ARMO platform and Coupscape? Because you have the Coupscape sandbox project and ARMO platform. Could you talk about the differences in, Sure, sure. So Coupscape is an open source project and ARMO platform is actually a managed platform, okay, which runs Coupscape, in the cloud for you because Coupscape is, it has several parts, okay, one part is, which is running inside the Kubernetes cluster on in the CI CD processes of the user. And there is another part, okay, which we called the backend, okay, where the results are stored and can be analyzed, okay, further. So ARMO platform gives you a managed way, okay, to run the backend, but I can tell you that the backend is also will be available within a month or two also for everyone to install on their premises as well. So because again, we are an open source company, okay, and we want to enable users. So the difference is that ARMO platform is a managed platform, okay, behind Coupscape. How does Coupscape differ from closed proprietary source solutions? So I can tell you that there are closed proprietary solutions, okay, which are very good security solutions. But I think that the main difference if I had to pick, okay, beyond, you know, the very specific technicalities is the world view. Okay, the way we see that our user is not the CISO, our user is not necessarily the security team. From our perspective, the user is the DevOps and the developers, okay, who are working on the Kubernetes cluster day to day and we want to enable them to improve their security. So actually our approach is more developer friendly if I would need to define it very shortly. What is this risk calculation score you guys have in Coupscape? That's come up and we cover that in our story. Can you explain to the folks how that fits in? Is it Coupscape, is the platform and what's the benefit? What's the purpose? So the risk calculation is actually a score we are giving, okay, to clusters in order for the users to understand where they are standing in the general, you know, population, okay, how they are faring, okay, against a perfect hardened cluster. It is based on the number of different tests we are making, okay. And I don't want to go into, you know, the very specifics of the mathematical functions, but in general it takes into account how many functions are failing, security tests are failing inside your cluster, okay, how many nodes you are having, how many workloads are having and creating this number which enables you to understand where you are standing in the global, in the world. What's the customer value that you guys pitching? What's the pitch for the ARMWO platform when you go and talk to a customer? Are they like, we need you, do they come to you? Is it word of mouth, you guys have a strategy? What's the pitch? What's so appealing to the customers?  So John, I can tell you I'm, maybe it's not so easy to say the words, but I'm nearly 20 years in the industry, okay. And I've been always around cyber and the defense industry. And I can tell you that I never had, you know, this journey where before where I could say that the customers are coming to us and not we are pitching to customers, okay. Simply because people want to, this is very easy to, very, very easy to use, very understandable. And it very helps the engineers to improve security posture. And they are coming to us and they're saying, well, awesome, okay. How we can like use it? Do you have a graphical interface? And we are, we are pointing them to the ARMWO platform and they are falling in love and coming to us even more. And we can tell you that we have a big number of active users behind the platform itself. You know, one of the things that comes up every time at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon when we're there and we'll be in Amsterdam. So folks watching, you know, what we'll see on site. Developer productivity is like the number one thing everyone talks about. And security is so important. It's become by default a blocker or anchor or drag on productivity. This is big, the things that you're mentioning. Easy to use, engineering, supporting it, developer adoption. You know, we've always said on the Kube, developers will be the de facto standards bodies by their choices, because it's developers make all the decisions. So if I can go faster and I can have security kind of programmed in, I'm not shifting left. It's just, I'm just having security kind of in there. That's the dream state. Is that what you guys are trying to do here? Because that's the Nervon. Everyone wants to do that. Yeah, yeah. I think your definition is like perfect. Okay, because really we had like this for a very long time we had this world where we decoupled security teams from developers and even for sometimes from engineering at all. And I think for multiple reasons, okay, we are more seeing big convergence. Okay, the security teams are becoming part of the engineering and the engineering becoming part of the security. And as you're saying, okay, the day-to-day world, okay, of developers are becoming very tangled up in the good way with security. So think about it that today, one of my developers at Armo is creating a pull request. Okay, his code is already scanned by security scanners for the test for different security problems. Okay, it's already, you know, before he already gets a feedback on his first time where he's sharing his code. And if there is an issue, he already can solve it and this is just solving issues much faster, much cheaper. Okay, and also you asked me about, you know, the wipe, okay, in the conference. And, you know, no one can deny, okay, the current economic wipe, okay, we have. And this also relates to security teams and security teams has to be much more efficient, okay. And one of the things that everyone is talking, okay, we need more automation, we need more better tooling. And I think we are really fitting into this. Yeah, and I talked to venture capitalists yesterday and today, an angel investor. Best time for a startup is right now. And again, open source is driving a lot of value. Ben, it's been great to have you on and sharing with us what's going on on the ground there, as well as talking about some of the traction you have. Just final question, how old is the company? How much funding do you have? Were you guys located? Put a plug in for the company. You guys looking to hire? Tell us about the company. Were you guys located? How much can you have? So, okay, the company is here for three years. We've passed A round last March, okay, with Tiger and Hyperwise Capitals, okay. We are located, most of the companies located today in Israel, in Tel Aviv. But we have like great team also in Ukraine and also great guys are in Europe. And right now also Craig Boggs joined us as an open source VP for, and he's like right now located in New Zealand. So we are really a global team, which I think it's really helps us to strengthen ourselves. And I think this is the entrepreneurial equation for the future. It's really great to see that global. We heard that in Priyanka Sharma's keynote. It's a global culture, global community. And so really, really props to you guys. Congratulations on Armo. And thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing insights and expertise. And also what's happening on the ground. Appreciate it, Ben. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Okay, cheers. Okay, this is CUBE coverage here of the cloud native security con in North America 2023. I'm John Furrier for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more of a wrap up of the event after this short break.


Faith abandons all self-merit, faith abandons all self-righteousness, and faith draws us to the Lord Jesus Christ for His merit and by His merit alone. Faith flees with all the soul's poverty to Christ's riches. It moves with the soul's guilt to Christ as reconciler. Faith laids hold of Christ, faith clings to His word, faith trusts in His promises, faith follows Him as Lord. It's impossible for man, isn't it, in His natural state? Think about that response with me for a second, repentance and faith. We're called by God to respond to the gospel in repentance and faith, and look at all that that entails.


I'm with Liz Trotter. We're smiling. It's Thursday. It's snowing and it's smart business moves. Yay. Yay. Lots of stuff going on today. Sorry about my phone there. Never, never, never a dull minute. No, but it's not impacting my, the snow is not impacting my, um, anything actually, it's not, you know, my you're inside. Yeah. But sometimes it makes my internet go wonky. I mean, do you have like teams cleaning today? Yeah. Okay, so people showed up to work. They came to work today. There was no snow this morning. So it started snowing about 730. Okay, we start work at 730. So I cried. So yeah, they're, they're coming home though. They're all on their way. It's two o'clock. Everybody is on their way back to the office. Not everybody. There's one, there's one team out there who's got four wheel drive. They're like, we're doing it. We're fine. Go ahead. Enjoy yourself. You're my favorite. So it's snowing right now. Oh yeah. What does it look like? I'll show you Tom. Let's see. Wow, that was like a postcard. Yeah, it's beautiful out there. Yeah. Super nice. Doesn't look like you got a whole lot on the ground. Um, yeah there is that what you're seeing there is where you can see it coming through. That's actually a driveway. And the driveway doesn't, I mean, not a driveway. A railroad tie that's like covering or on the edge of the driveway. So everything's full. It's almost to the top of the, to the railroad tie. You're getting, you're supposed to be getting like over a foot, right? Yeah, 14 inches is what they're saying now. So we'll see. Craig's asking a question. What world does this have to do with KPIs? Maybe that's we are doing KPIs today. Craig probably come up with, you know, some type of equation, you know, the amount of homes you clean is inversely proportional to the amount of snow. It's on the ground and you've got 14 inches coming. So I don't need to spreadsheet to predict that you won't be cleaning many homes tomorrow.  Don't be quiet. It's true. I hope you don't really ever get to work before then. See? I think he's been here before though. All right. I changed Tom into like getting started fast today. Let's get to work. Let's get to work. So, you know, this is all about KPIs for profit and make the green numbers go up and the red numbers go down. You're going to be more profitable. We've been focusing on low to direct payroll to revenue because there's a long list of things that you can do within your business to drive that number down.   That's kind of the thing. I love that because you don't have to do all of them. You can do the ones you want to do. That's good enough. Start there. Start with the ones that are easy that you like to do that you can push off to somebody else. That's my favorite, right? Which ones can you easily get someone else to do? Those are my favorite. Do those first. You know, it's kind of like the New Year's Resolution or Lint or something like that. You want to like pick something that's kind of easy to deal with. Don't want to make it too hard. Yeah. Like don't cut out sugar for the year. Yeah. Or for, I guess we were just talking about Lint. So it's not as long exactly. So Facebook user only 14 inches. Is that you Robin? Sometimes you show up as just a little head there. And isn't Tom, isn't Robin in Canada? He's Robin? Yeah. No, he's in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh. Okay. Pennsylvania. They get a lot of snow over there too. So yeah. It probably didn't seem like a big deal. People at places that get snow all the time, y'all are more used to it. They've been sending out weather warnings. Hey Robin, they've been sending weather warnings out here since Monday. I know the banks are all closed tomorrow. The post office is closed. Everything's closed tomorrow. And that was set yesterday, I think. So kind of funny. All right. Back to KPI. Sorry, Craig. For you guys who are in a Facebook group, if you go to this link streamer.com Facebook and give it permission to share your identity, you'll show up in the live stream and Facebook user. You'll show up as you. Which is cool. You want to do it? I've done it before. It's just a little step. Yeah. Okay. So we were all over productivity and we were talking about how productivity will we increasing our productivity is an excellent way to go your direct payroll to revenue and it's a way of creating more value for all your stakeholders. Your cleaning professionals will have an opportunity to make more money or more money per hour anyway. Get a better return off of their investment of time. Your business has an opportunity to be more profitable. And arguably if you're working on training and methods and focusing on productivity, you'll be doing that with a mind towards quality and meeting a scope of work. So your clients are going to be getting better services well. Just kind of tie it all in because I know it comes up. It's like well if I'm paying hourly certainly if I can clean a home faster I'm making more money. But if I'm doing some type of incentive pay like commission the pay is the same, isn't it? And yeah, technically it is. But if you are able to consistently achieve higher levels of productivity say that you know you were doing 700 square feet an hour and you're able to get it up to a thousand square feet an hour then a house that used to take you you know like four and a quarter hours or a little bit more you could do it three hours then if you're paying 35% you would on a $200 house that was what you were charging the pay would be the same 70 bucks for both but look how much more they're making per hour at the a thousand square foot as opposed to 700 and moving forward when you're hiring people and training them using this better method you could start them out at a lower commission say something even as low as 30 but they're making 20 bucks an hour as opposed to 16 so that is what I would call a win-win and those are the ones that we're looking for because really there is no such thing as a win-lose in this game it's either a win-win or a lose-lose. Which is awesome. Am I explaining that in an adequate way? I believe so anybody feel like they want to talk about this a little bit more we talked quite a bit yesterday we went back and forth around hourly and commission and how to get the different types of teams to be productive and solos versus teams we didn't one thing we did not talk about yesterday that I was shocked didn't come up was the size of a team so I thought for sure we would hear something about if I send three people into a house they take the same amount of time as if I send two people into a house I've heard a lot of people say that over the years and I've also heard a lot of people say putting one person in the house means they can get done faster labor hours faster fewer labor hours than any other team size even teams of two so I was kind of surprised we didn't hear anything about that yesterday so what do you think that's the case what do you hear because it's true I mean in a lot of cases it's true no it is true you really have to manage that time because there is a lot of stuff so I can just give you one really quick example that would explain it I think really well so if you have four people for example on a team there are four people walking into the house so that's walking into the house once walking into the house twice walking into the house three times walking into the house four times let's say that was only one minute you literally just spent 4 minutes walking in the house where if it was one person one person would be walking into the house one time and it would have only Your walking time is a really big contributor to the size of your teams. The team members can't move around very much. They have to go to an area and then clean that area and then leave. Another person would have to go to an area, clean that area and leave. Y'all know that if you have teams that are, like even a team of two, if you have one person going upstairs and one person coming downstairs, who wants them to not take all of their equipment with them upstairs? Nobody wants that. Because if they don't take everything, the second they walk back down those stairs, pick up whatever it is that they need and take it back upstairs, you just lost money. So the more people you have, the more opportunity for wasted movement in the house. That's one of the big first reasons. And if they're not coordinated and not organized, there's gonna be a lot of that. Also, you have to have enough equipment. If you don't have enough equipment for your teams where they have to come and borrow from each other, same problem. If you have a 4,000 square foot house and one team has the cobwebber, the one cobwebber and the other team needs it, they gotta walk over there, get that cobwebber and bring it back. Even if they don't take it back to the other team, they still had to go get it. Same thing with all the other stuff that you use. Those are the basics. There's an old saying that a group of people does not make a team. Oh yeah. And it's easy. When you're using solos, the idea of how are we gonna workload this? How are we gonna divvy up the work in a way where everybody's being most productive for the entire time? When you're a solo, I mean, there's still a lot of tricks to being productive in terms of reducing steps and using the right cleaning products and all that. But at least there's no question in terms of, well, who's gonna do what work? The solo is gonna do the whole thing. You do two people, then you gotta split it up half and half. You do three, then it gets a lot, starts getting a lot more complicated when you add a third person. If you normally have a cleaning procedure based on a set team size, regardless of being one person, two people, whatever, you add an extra person. And if you're not trained to be productive with that extra person, that person's time is gonna, I don't say completely be wasted, but a lot of it will be. And that's kind of where you hear this thing, two people can clean a home in three hours, add a third person, and it might not take them three, but it's gonna take them longer than two. And that's because of that lost productivity, because they're not used to working in that team. In the other part of having more people on a team, the next is efficiency. Remember, productivity is the allowed time divided by the actual time. Basically, how fast do you actually clean the home when you're on a job cleaning a home where the efficiency is taking into account your drive time. And every time you add people to a team, then the presumption is, you're gonna be cleaning homes faster, so you're gonna have to clean more homes in a day. You know, if a cleaning professional by themselves can clean two homes a day, then two cleaning professionals should be able to clean four homes, three should be able to clean six. Every time you add extra homes, that's more windshield time, that's more drive time, your efficiency is going down, all things being equal.  So I have cleaned with some large teams. I've even cleaned some big houses where we've had two teams of five clean before. And you really have to have a tight, tight space that they're cleaning. I mean, if you have a team of five out cleaning 10 houses, even if it's all in the same neighborhood, by the time you load up, move, load again, if you've got more than three minutes, right, that's still a half hour of windshield time. So they gotta be tight, tight, tight. You can't just throw jobs on the schedule, not even close. So it's tight to have bigger teams. There's a lot more intention that needs to go into everything having to do with the cleaning once you have more than one person, even two people, right? Yeah. So I think that pretty much gets us through the idea of productivity and what that's about and why that is important and how that affects the payroll to revenue. Okay, so now I do wanna point out to you guys a reminder that while we're going through this, we don't wanna just talk about the why and the what. We want to talk about, I mean, the why and the how. We wanna talk about what. What is it that you can do and what can you take out of our productivity discussion that we've had, it's been at least a day, if not two days, Tom, that we've been talking about productivity? Yes. What can you do? What can you change in your company to be more productive? We've given you a lot of ideas, a lot of suggestions. We've told you why you really need to be more productive. Now, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna go about doing that? What kind of changes can you make in your company? If you want to, if you wanna be more productive. I'm assuming after listening to us drone on and on, for two days, about the importance of productivity. Whoa, hey, I'm talking, just leave me alone. Okay, well, we're double dipping on productivity because you get a double bang for that.  So that makes the top number go down, but it can also make the bottom number go up. And I kind of showed you that here on this spreadsheet. So you win on both sides of the equation, but if I'll go back here, we've got some pretty good tips on training, the tools of equipment, the right pay plan. A lot of us just communicating and measuring outcomes and sharing outcomes, setting expectations, creating accountability. It doesn't happen by itself.  It has to be intentional. You have to be doing it as a plan, right? So it needs to be a smart business move, not just something that happens to you. You don't want to just get luckily profitable because then you can get unluckily unprofitable, right? Yeah, if you're not making it happen, if you're not making it happen, you're profitable, it's just an accident. And there's no guarantee that it's gonna stay that way forever. Sometimes as sooner or later, our luck runs out. Alrighty. So, and you know what? We're gonna finish payroll to revenue today. Ooh, all right. Gosh, one, two, three, yeah. Well, I mean, I really think that this amount of time that we spent on here was really, really, really well spent because like we've said, ad nauseam, this one number is the single most important number. If you can control this number above all other numbers, even if you didn't ever look at another number, if you control this number, you're gonna be okay. Well, you've heard me say it, Liz, I love all my KPIs, but some more so than others and this is my favorite. This is the best. This one's the best, y'all. Another thing that you can do to charge more per hour is to do a market analysis. And there's a whole long technique on this. We've got presentations on this and we don't have enough time to really get in the weeds on all of this, but the long and the short of it is you need to know what your competitors are offering from a scope of work and how that compares to the scope of work that you offer, the type of service that you offer or what they're charging for, right? And you need to make sure that your prices are in alignment with what the market is currently bearing for that, what your competitors are currently charging for comparable services. You don't wanna be the low-cost provider. I'm gonna pop a market analysis, or competitive analysis workbook in the comments for you, Tom, and you can post it. Hey, Leslie, good to see ya. Hey, is Leslie getting snow today? Say it again. Is Leslie getting snow today? Is it going that far? That's pretty south. I don't think they get snow down there. Could be, but I could be wrong, but I don't think so.  They could have Portland, don't they? Yeah, they do. But you remember, Portland's only two hours for me. As little as an hour and a half if there's nobody else on the road, and then it can be up to three hours away. So it's really not that far. Okay. I'm just trying to find it here, Tom, there you are. Okay, let's see if I can just move it like this and drop it in here for you, even though. I'm waiting. So while I'm waiting for that, I mean, the general point is you wanna make sure that you know that you aren't selling your service for less than what you could be. There's an argument out there.  That was kind of a JC Penney thing back in the day when one of his golden rules, if you're familiar with some of his business philosophies. But I would argue that you got a responsibility to all your stakeholders to be charging what the market will allow you to charge for the level of service that you're providing. Boys are counting on you to do that. And really you're doing a disservice to your customers if you're charging less than what the market would bear because you aren't gonna be able to create the type of jobs and provide the type of service that they would expect you to be providing. It's really a virtuous circle. And I mean, I gotta say it because it's a big thing is you're doing a disservice to our industry too. We all need to be charging somewhat in line with what the market will bear. I mean, of course, I'm not talking about price fix in here, y'all. So anybody that might be hearing me wrong, that's not what I'm talking about. But I am saying that you need to, oh yeah, yep, that's it. You can hold that. But this is a PDF so I can put this I can put this in the resources of cleaning business today as a download. I'll do that. Okay, that'll work. All right, I forgot what I was saying. I got distracted. You're doing a disservice to the industry. Oh, and I was saying that, I'm not talking about price fixing. There will always be the people that are going to charge $10 an hour and there's always going to be the company, there's going to be the lowest charging company and there's going to be that highest charging company. So I would prefer that if you're a professional cleaning company that you'd be up on the high side, right? But personal preference here, I would prefer that your company in making more money have higher net profit, be able to pay more money, be able to give better training and to be raising up our industry as a whole. All right, that's my big speech right there. I'm all about that and truly, I mean, we have an obligation to the industry truly. You know, it's not all benevolence either.  You know, the better we take care of our industry, the better our industry takes care of us. Absolutely. So like, should we do a shameless plug for RxC right here? Yeah, sure, go ahead. No, you do it. You're always so impassioned I like it. I do, I kind of like it. Well, I'm not in a, you know, I'm not in a right frame of mind at the moment. That's okay, you can do it on the lab. I just don't approach, but if you're not a member of RxC, you really need to take a hard look at it. It's arcsi.org, Cinestry Trade Association.  You get to meet some pretty cool people and these guys are working hard for us to professionalize the industry, which is in all of our best interest. Absolutely. The majority of my, I guess online friends, vast majority, I met through RxC. The people that I trust the most in our industry, I can't think of one that I didn't meet through RxC in some way shape or form, but I'm sure there are some that I met some other way or through friends of friends, but the ones that popped in my head right after that, I met through RxC. I mean, I think it's safe to say that if it wasn't for RxC, we wouldn't be here doing this right now. No, absolutely not. We would not, yeah. Some businesses can charge less because they have different cost structures. Individuals, small companies working. Absolutely, some companies will call themselves companies maybe that don't pay any kind of, don't have any overhead. Don't pay any taxes. Don't do whatever it is and maybe they clean by themselves. But if you're one of those companies that can charge less, I would argue you still have an obligation to charge what the market can bear and just be profitable. I mean, if you're able to charge less, the odds are that you aren't able to do large, large volumes of work because the larger companies that have the ability to clean, a much larger number of homes might have smaller margins.  But if you're a smaller company and you've got relatively no income, still charge what the market can bear. If nothing else, you deserve it. You're earning it. It's not about what your cost is, it's about the value you're providing. And I think a lot of times people forget when they're by smaller companies and they're by themselves and they're charging less money, they're thinking, wow, I'm still making more than I would make it a job but are you really, by the time you factor in all of the other expenses and all of the other benefits that you're not getting from a job, are you really? My experience has been that no, you're not because you're gonna have to be putting all your money into wherever, social security, where are any of your benefits, you're paying all of this extra money for supplies that you wouldn't pay in a job, there's just, you need to be charging more. For you, not even just for me, not even just for the industry, for you. Otherwise, why not have a job? Why? Why put yourself through all this? Why take the risk? Because there's a lot of risk, a lot of risk. Yeah, and the risk, you don't see the risk every day, you know, on a good day, it's not an issue.  I mean, you know, you never know when an unprecedented event might be around the corner. We know a lot of people, Tom, also that were solo cleaners, they were cleaning, independence, they were cleaning on their own, they got injured, you know, hurt their back, got sick. I can think of one woman that got cancer. What do you do then? If you haven't been making enough money to be able to put some money into healthcare and into savings, what do you do? So you really need to be thinking about how you're gonna manage yourself. 100%, yep. Preach, Leslie. Yeah. Yeah, thank you guys. Enhanced sales process. Now, certainly the more you sell, the more revenue you're generating, but that may or may not really mean anything about charging more per hour. But if you're looking at revenue per hour as a metric in something that's important in your sales process, there's things that you can do within your sales process to get more revenue out of each customer. You get each home you do, each hour you spend in the home. So many things. So I'm just wondering how Tom is gonna try and keep this small. That's what I'm wondering. So who here hasn't read like 10 sales books? So let's see how Tom's gonna keep this little. And this kind of gets back into your pricing too. And, you know, at the end of the day, when you're pricing a job, right, at the highest level, the idea is to figure out how much labor am I gonna have at home? How many labor hours am I gonna have? And that implies what my labor cost is going to be, which sounds awful a lot, like my loaded direct payroll to revenue, right? Yeah. And once you figure out what your hours is going to be, you have some type of hourly rate that you apply to that. Now, is it always the same hourly rate? Should it be? Does it have to be? Or maybe it should be a different hourly rate based on certain circumstances. Yeah. Well, I mean, what about cleaning on Saturdays versus cleaning on Tuesdays? Well, I mean, I can make an argument for that. Hi, I've been calling around all day looking for a cleaning company. My mother-in-law is coming into town tomorrow morning and I desperately need my home clean today. If you want your house cleaned tomorrow morning and it's snowing here and it's 2.30 in the afternoon right here, your price just went up. Yeah. And because it's snowing, your price might have gone up a lot. You know, I think a lot of times we're really too quick to say, no, we can't do it. My thinking on this is always let your client or your prospect say no. That's nice. I don't think I've heard you say this, Tom. I like it. I've said it. I believe you. I just, you know, I don't pay attention to everything you say, Tom. It's kind of like you. I'll ask you a question about, you know, we really need to do something.  That happens. You know, we do all these workshops and foundations, all those other stuff that we never really pay attention to. Oh my gosh. How many times have we said that too, right? Okay. Yeah. If somebody wants to get their home clean tomorrow morning, don't say, well, no, my schedule's full because you know, and I know both that you got a customer on the schedule for tomorrow that will move their cleaning. You know, maybe you need to offer them a deal and say, you know, I'll phone an oven cleaning or I'll deep clean something or who knows what you need to offer them because things happen anyway, right?   And I'm gonna have to tell you though, Tom, I know at least a couple of companies that this is sort of their USP is that they don't ever move a job, ever, ever, ever, ever. For any reason. No, that's fine. You can do that. Yeah. You're not gonna be as profitable as you could be. Well, you could be, but I mean, that one thing isn't gonna decide whether or not. If you can develop a culture where your customers as a rule will be more flexible in consideration for things that add value to them. You can create more value for them, but if there's the aggregate value being created is greater than the additional value you're creating for them, they both win. Absolutely. If you can get an extra 100 bucks for that morning slot with this person who desperately wants their home clean, you can go back and say, hey, I'll give you 50 bucks off your next cleaning if we can move you to Monday. And some customers might say no, be nice to that, but a lot of them for 50 bucks would. And that's gonna be a question. It's not something that you have to do. You don't have to push them. We call that bumping, Tom. We bump them off the schedule. You don't have to bump them off the schedule. You can ask them if they would like to earn an additional $50. If they would like to have $50 taken off their price or if they would like to get a deep clean done and on blah, blah, blah, you can ask because some people wouldn't love that. If that person wants that emergency service and if you can get a big enough premium for them, you've got enough money where you can come up with a solution where everybody's having. Yeah. And normally that's not part of the thinking. We see people resisting this more than we see people getting on board with this idea. This getting stuck in a narrow mindset of, yeah, but I don't know how to do that. We can't do that. We just don't do that. But could you? Maybe you could. Why not? Why can't you? The current, a lot of us think about, well, gee, we need to discount our service for high frequency recurring revenue. If somebody wants to be a weekly, I got to give them a deal. And you can present it as a deal, but actually what you want to do is charge premium for low frequency recurring. And it looks the same, right? Well, the bi-weekly, the other week is a lot cheaper than the other four weeks. So it's a better deal. It's a better, it's a bargain. It's a better value. Don't take the hourly rate you're shooting for and tie it to an every four week and then discount off of it. Take it and put it on the other week or maybe the every week and then add to it. Add money. Yeah. So people are missing out on that discount, right? So they're losing money by going to a lower frequency. So this is no different here. No different, you guys, than like the question that you always get asked, right?  Is it half full or is it half empty? Well, I mean, obviously it's both, but which one do you want to talk about? Let's talk about it being half full. Why do you want to talk about it being half empty? How does that help us, right? So it's the same idea here. Yeah, call that a yes mindset. Try to say yes. Yeah, I like that. Go ahead, Tom. And keep in mind here, all of this is about getting more per hour for your service. And I think that that gets lost a lot of times. We're just busy dealing with the whirlwind and I just sold a job, great. Do we even stop and ask, well, what did we get for it? And what's that going to equate to in terms of revenue per hour? And did we miss an opportunity maybe to get a little bit more for that? And if we look at every job that we sell through that lens, through that thought process, we can learn to find ways to get a higher bill rate and still create in the mind of your prospects and your customers that they're getting great value. Absolutely, I love that. You know, Leslie was talking the other day about how she gets a premium for her service. And I'm sure she differentiates her service because all things being equal, it's like you clean homes, you eye clean homes, well, what you're going to charge and if you just blurt out a number and that prospect says thanks and goes somewhere else and asks the same question, then you're selling commodity at that point. They're going to go for the lowest price, right? So if you want to get more per hour, you need to be able to explain the value you bring. What do we do? From a service standpoint and the service and the value you add is much broader than what you clean, the dirt you remove. Such a good point, Tom. It should be. If what you're talking about is just what you clean, you're missing such a huge opportunity because what you bring is so much more than that. Like depending on your market too and depending on what the other companies in your area bring to the table, right? If, if, and it can be just so, so many different things based on what the people in your area want, what they, you hear them complain about, what you know the other companies do or don't do, any of those things can bring value to your company. A lot of it comes down to trust in the, you know, the fear that can be created by engaging a cleaning service. It's like, dear God, I'm getting ready to give these people a key to my house. I'm getting ready to let some strangers in the most intimate parts of my home on a regular basis, you know, I'll pay a premium if I can have something to hold on to that makes me feel confident and comfortable that I can trust these people. That's more important than the dirt you remove. I mean, you got to do a good job of cleaning and provide quality service. Quality service is so much broader than just removing dirt. Yeah, absolutely. So Tom, what are some of the ways that people can begin to build that trust or show that trust or give people a feeling of faith and trust? Is there anything other than reviews? I mean, I know that everybody thinks about reviews when they're thinking about trust. What are some other things they can do? Reviews are a good place to start.  You know, you've been doing it for X number of years and your service that you can trust. Know your trade. Know what surfaces are in a home that you're cleaning. Know what the different parts of a vacuum cleaner are really called. Know what the different products are. Understand, understand the trade so that you can speak intelligently on it. Also, if you are communicating about your, our, our trade in writing, spell things correctly. The things that have to do with our trade. Spell vacuum the right way. Spell, spell all of the different things that we do, that we should know about the right way. Those things also lend trust to what you are saying. They give people the idea that you really are who you say you are and that you really know your stuff. Yeah, when Liz is saying you, you need to be thinking broader than just you as an individual, you know, the people in your office need to be able to speak to these points. Your cleaning professionals need to be able to speak to these points. Because that's really where the rubber meets the road. You need to build trust. When you're cleaning professionals are in a home and they're able to talk to, you know, the resident, talk to your client and explain these are the parts of a vacuum cleaner and this is the type of surfaces, you know, has an alkaline base and we've got to make sure that we don't use an acid on it because we do that, it will etch the surface.  All of that is just holy cow. These people know more about cleaning than I even knew that existed in this built trust. Yeah, you need to know all that stuff. Yeah, I'm never going to ask anything about cleaning again because I don't want to hear that much about cleaning, right? You want people to think that. Yeah. And you know what? When they're talking to their neighbor, they're going to be telling that story. That's what they're going to talk about. Yeah. So I, you know, and I'm going to go back to the PAC program again and in those types, that type of training and it's not prescriptive, but it's helping people understand, you know, the science and the reasons why behind we do what we do. And it's like, well, you know, I'm clean homes without that. Well, you know, it's some level, yeah, maybe, but that's how that level of understanding is how not only you get better outcomes, you could be more productive and you're going to have no less bad outcomes, but you're also differentiating yourself in a marketplace. And the differentiation isn't about getting the certificate, although that's part of it. The bigger part of it is how people interact and behave and communicate every day once they have that level of understanding. It's a combination of the expertise and the confidence that is imbued in you because you have this expertise and this knowledge and this information. Yeah, Leslie says it's her area of expertise. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, you'll learn that stuff and it goes a long way. I always have my UV light and protein pen to show how we check our work. I love that. Love it. Love it. I love that too. That's super cool. Another way that we can reduce our loaded direct payroll to revenue is reduce the scope of work. If a customer is going to pay you $150 to clean their home and if that's all they can afford, okay, well, maybe you can't get any more money out of them but maybe you can reduce the amount of time that you have to spend in their home, right? Yeah. If you can do that, you're getting to the same point, same place. Yep. There's lots of different ways to reduce the scope of work. I think that a lot of times when people think of reducing the scope of work, the only thing that they can think of is don't clean a room. All right, so how about we don't clean this room or we don't clean that room?  So you can reduce the level of cleaning. So instead of doing a full scrub and removing every single thing on an area, you can clean to a lighter degree. That's one very, very common way of doing it. Another way of reducing the scope of work is to... I had it and I lost it. I had a really good one. Oh, is to not do all of the things within a room. So for example, you have a room that is lightly used but somebody wants it cleaned instead of doing their normal service of lifting all the rugs, taking them outside, shaking them with your big rugs, vacuuming them, lift up the corners, vacuum underneath and mop. Instead of doing all that, maybe just vacuum. Move as vacuum around things. So rotational cleaning, sometimes deep, sometimes light. Yeah, that's awesome. Any other ways that you guys can think of? Oh, absolutely. Different things that you do. Baseboards, doors and cabinets, right? Yeah, cobwebs, right? Lots of things that people can opt out of if they want to. And maybe if you do do them, even like baseboards, am I dusting them, am I washing them? And this gets into the reducing the level. There's so many different things that you can do when you're discussing with a client to get work out. And a lot of times we do things that add to the amount of time and add to our cost to clean a home that your customers might not have to see any value in. They don't care about at all. There are a lot of things that we do, a lot, a lot, a lot of things. And really, you're not cleaning everything in a home right now. Even if you feel like we are the highest quality, we do everything unless you're charging, I don't know, I wanna say, we have a house that we do almost everything. Not everything, but almost everything. 1,500 square feet, we charge 279, I think, every week. We do a lot in that house. We do a real lot in that house. We move all the clothes off of her rods and we clean the rods and we put all the clothes back on. We take the caps off of the laundry detergent and we clean the threads and we clean the cap and we put that back on. So we do a lot in that house and we don't do everything there. So chances are good, you're not doing everything already.  But I promise you, there are some things that you're doing that people don't care about. Like, me? This sounds bad, I'm gonna say this publicly. I don't care about dust.  If you don't dust, I don't care. I won't even notice until it's like that thick. Then I'm gonna be like, hey, where'd this sheet of dust come from? What's up with that? But usually don't care about dust. You don't care about dust. I don't care about dust, at all. One mark in my sink? One mark, any mark for any reason?  Just the tiniest mark. My sinks are always pristine. People are different. People care about different things. All you have to do is look at your friends, right? Your friends spend different amounts of money on different things. You have friends that will spend obscene amounts of money on purses. You have friends that will spend obscene amounts of money, according to you. Obscene amounts of money on cars. You have friends that will spend an obscene amount of money, again, according to you on their hair, right? So we all care about different things. If you can figure out what your customers care about, you can reduce the scope of work because you can do what they care about and not do what they don't care about. Oh, what we're talking about here is what I would call high value low cost deliverables.  And that doesn't happen day one. That's a relationship that you build over time. Just saying that the scope of work is part of it. And the other part, which kinda goes along with that, is the different service sets. And that's kind of a fancy way of saying, I might be cleaning your home every week or every other week, but I'm doing different stuff every time I'm there. And in the customer's mind, you're doing all of this stuff and you are, but you're not doing it every cleaning. So you're able to get a premium in their mind because you're doing all of this stuff, but your cost really isn't as much as maybe they would perceive it to be because you aren't doing it every time that you're there.  You're, again, with the rotational cleaning, rotating different things that you're doing. This is kind of like just getting the maximum amount of revenue per labor hour in the middle of the world win when you're worried about people not coming to work tomorrow and I got holes in my schedule and I could get the payroll done by such and such at the time and this all stuff just kind of gets lost and the shuffle, but this is where your profit is. I did want to point out just real quick, Tom, where Leslie's talking about baseboards, doors, cabinets or time consumers that they can opt out of. I love that. I love that she lets them opt out of that stuff so that they feel like, oh, that's awesome. I have control and I can get a deal. I don't care about that stuff anyway. They still know it's there also. The reason why I like that she lets them opt out is because they still know it's there and when those things start to get dirty, they shouldn't get more money for it down the road. So I love that. So a lot of times what, how we present something can make a really, really big difference. Letting people opt out is awesome. That is genius. That is genius. And when you're opting out of things, to some degree, they're going to expect to get a reduction in cost. Yeah. But say you're charging $50 an hour, but for your pricing purposes, and if you're doing fixed rate pricing, you can give them a reduction in cost, but you don't have to give them $50 an hour on the reduction side. You give them $20 an hour on the reduction side, and they still think they're getting a deal. They are getting a deal. Yeah. They are getting a deal. That's why it's genius. But you're making more money per hour that way. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. That's awesome. Awesome, awesome. Add on services. This is kind of an afterthought too. A lot of times it gets lost in the shop hall. I know you guys do a fair amount of this. I know that Mindy's pretty good at getting people to add refrigerator cleanings, oven cleanings. You gotta, I've seen your list. It goes on forever. Goes on forever. Yep, we got a long list. But it's hard to come up with add on services. You gotta really create a list, and you gotta be listening and looking for how to get those added on. Or, I mean even better, create them as part of your basic system. I think we have like a job form that goes out with, like if they want anything extra done, there's a job form that goes out every time they get a reminder. And like when they get a reminder email, and they can just choose the thing and it tells how much money it is. I think that works really well. So a way to be able to get them. It's good to be able to get them as often as possible too. When you're in the house, you're already there. There's no additional drive time. Right, your efficiency goes up. The longer you can stay in that house, actually working and producing revenue. Not just staying in there for the same amount of time. Ah, job reminders, time of sale newsletter. That monthly deal. Every month have a different add-on that you're promoting, get your teams involved, get to a ref share with them. On your ads, you can do a different ad, right? Each month you can do an ad. We used to do this, we don't do it anymore, but we used to have a different special on our, every month we would change our answering machine message. We would have a different special on there. We don't get as many calls anymore as we used to, but. Well, on your website? Yep, website is good. Yeah, just basically we got deals, always looking for deals. Always. And really here is a next level way of getting people to take deals is telling them that this deal is just for your recurring clients. That you don't ever give this deal to new clients, because there are a lot of clients that you have that get frustrated that all of the deals go to the new clients. Sign up for service today and get 20% off. Get one free cleaning. If you have five, all the different deals that you see out there. And your customers see all of those deals out there. They love it when they're getting a deal. They're your most loyal people. They're like, why am I not getting a deal? I can't tell you how many times I've heard that when I quiz people. It could be for all kinds of different profiles of clients. You know, we're doing a special this month. We always do a special for clients who just had their three month anniversary with the service. And normally we charge $70 to do an oven clean, but for your three month anniversary special, we'll do it for 50. Absolutely. Why not? Absolutely. It makes people feel like they're getting a special too. That they're important to your company. That you value them as a customer. That they didn't just, once they send up for your service, you're like, okay, good check done. Never gonna think about those people again. They like to feel like they're still special. Do you get your clients birthdays? We don't get our clients birthdays. We used to, but we don't anymore. It was too, yeah, we struggled with it. We weren't good at it. I know other companies do it. We were not good at it, so we don't. Certain industries like insurance and stuff like that where they have to have that information anyway. Do it as a promotion and stuff on your birthdays. We don't do it either, but I've often thought it would be so awesome. Do you have the names of everybody that lives in the home? We do. We have the names of everybody in the home. We have the names of the pets. Also, we have a lot of the kids birthdays because a lot of times the kids are born while we're cleaning there, right? So we know when they're born. So we do give out like a coloring book or something to the kids on their birthdays. Kids' birthdays is kind of easy to get. And pet treats. Pet treats is really good too, or pet toys, right? Catnip or whatever for the cats. Cause that's so, you could buy those on Amazon for nothing.  Oh, hey, with a little ball, right? Just wanted to leave this for Rollo. Tell him I was thinking about him. We're at the top of the hour. Thanks, Tom. One last thing on these add-ons, never charge your, I say never, don't charge your hourly rate for these add-ons. You can always get a premium for these. Don't even, you want to know how long it takes for work loading purposes, for scheduling purposes, but you can charge more on an hourly basis for these add-ons than you can for your normal service. Absolutely, and there's no reason not to. All right, y'all, that was a fast hour. You guys were awesome, and I really want to thank you for hanging with us through direct payroll, loaded direct payroll to Revenue. This was a journey. I gotta go back. We've spent a few weeks on this, right? Yeah, absolutely. But next week, what are we starting on? We will find out Monday. Monday, all right. What are we gonna do? It's gonna be one of these. It might be any one of these green numbers. It might be another one of these red numbers. So y'all realize that was one KPI. Yeah, some of the, you know, some of the, most of these, I don't know if any of these KPI's is gonna be as involved as loaded direct payroll to Revenue. I mean, it's gonna be more than a day for sure, but... And a lot more combined, rate increases, right? We're gonna see a lot of combination here. But that LVPR, that's a biggie. Okay, guys, thanks. Enjoy the rest of your week. Be safe, you know, don't hurt yourself shoveling snow. We'll be back here Monday, five o'clock Eastern. Bye-bye. Bye, y'all.


This is when it gets interesting is when you go to tapping them with it and just you don't let them get away and she knows to stay tight enough around me, but I can also move her feet when I need to. So that's the key to this is just being able to move them off of you but not pull on them because if you pull during this, you take away everything that you've done before. So she needs to get comfortable with me just being here and tapping her with this little feed sack and every time she thinks about moving, I'm just going to move with her and make her move and then step here to that stop. Just like I did earlier. I'm not pulling and having to hold the side of her face and all that good stuff. I want to be able to just, and the deal is, I mean I could even use a cow stick instead of even having a flag on it because all I'm trying to do is an extension of my arm pretty much, you know, and so I'm going to use the stick more of it than I am the flag and just make that stick really touch everything. You know, I want to be able to get in between her hind legs and her front legs and like as you can see, she really doesn't like her front feet right there. You know, I'll try to slip the saddle on her. Here's the pad. The pad shouldn't be that big of a deal, hardly ever is.