Hi, good afternoon everybody. Tom's start steward here with smart business moves Okay, we'll see if we can pick it up from there got loose Trotter. Hey, how are you? Well, how are you guys with her fancy hat? What's the story with the hat? It's the fourth of July Tom. What's ahead? Is that okay? That's the fourth of July. Nobody told me Oh We have a super awesome special guest today with a rocket hat is well. Hey Debbie. Thank you so much for joining us today You're welcome. Thank you for asking me. Love being here Well today look at this Leslie figured it out. She knew it Yeah, I had good clues. Will you hear what my clues were Debbie? What I didn't even know so you don't even tell them who the guest is you just dropped clues Yeah, but I wanted them to figure out who you were so I kind of gave good clues. I said Let's see first.  Not your name initials, but And then I That you had owned and operated or operated more than five companies in the amount of time that I had known you I Told them that you were I finally told them you were in Texas.  Yeah, I knew they'd guess the wine was a dead giveaway For a lot of people right Okay, so we only have a couple people live so far actually I'm not I don't have us Connected I need to connect sorry and Tom. I'm gonna try and do this without making noise Oh, come on. You always We all know all right you guys so throw out your questions We are only going though as long as we get questions for today because it's the Fourth of July weekend There's one we just take a moment to talk about what's coming up next week because you know if I don't do it Now I'll forget and it just won't happen Okay, sounds good So you want to walk us through who we got next week week Liz? Sure. Let me get us connected here. Well, let's start off Courtney. Why is it going to be joining us Monday? she has a lot of work and helping businesses automate and she's gonna be talking about automate your freedom and she's got a lot of people I know that that work in her program and I'm looking forward to that Who's this on Tuesday? He's actually on the call right You can see on the right-hand side of your screen Debbie there is private chat and also live comments. Oh Okay, well it the private chats are not coming. Oh, there's the live. Okay, got it So I had it clicked on private. So everybody Yeah, yeah All right, she's already started some people are starting. Okay. So we have Ernie So Ernie is when we were talking to him about what he wanted to present about he said that he is a Jack of all trades master of none and when we were talking to him the other day. I'm like, oh my gosh It's true. He's done everything But he's gonna talk about unprecedented times requiring unprecedented customer service because right now He wanted Hey, Molly, these are unprecedented times Yeah, so that's for today. Yep, it's gone and then oh Greg's name is spelled wrong. We'll get that fixed Greg I'm sorry Greg Shepherd. No H E. It's a S H E P A R D And then his topic is two is better than one using a second company to capture cost-conscious customers But I love this topic. He is so smart He opened another company and he competes with himself So when a customer says, ah that price is out of you know, just crazy He's like, well, I could give you a referral to this other company He's gonna talk to us about how that works But it's a lower price point And then the guest on Thursday is my daughter her name is Shara That's actually her middle name on there. Her last name is read all and we'll get that on there and top 10 sale strategies from top salesperson and I got her numbers today that I'm gonna give to Tom Last year she did she closed sales on over 40 million dollars So I think you guys will follow that she has some valuable insights Like four zero million four zero million. Yeah, $40 million. So Yeah, she's got some some good stuff for us there and then we have a secret guest next week again for on spot All right, so hey guys lots of people on here already Tom. Let's get started We already have I have a couple questions that people couldn't be here sent me to but I know I see that we have Leslie If you guys have questions pop them up here because we are gonna close it down early for the holiday We're not gonna make Mrs. Saradone over here work on the holiday if we don't have to All right, I gotta start that glass of wine soon I have to get my glass of wine in my hand and just a little bit now. It's not two o'clock here. So full disclosure Where are you? Oh, that's right late over there. Yeah Yeah, I'm in Texas. So it's four o'clock. It'll be five o'clock here by the time we end this so I'm good All right, are you gonna pop up our first one for us Tom? Let's say I think she's asking about swag Where do you purchase from? Yeah Yeah, who wants to go first, okay Well, I use Bang here.  I use you printing Use discount mugs calm. I also use a few people local depending on their price points So the couple are really great sources What's your favorite swag Debbie? Any kind of a Yeti cup because people are saving those so somebody gave that to me as a vendor as a gift because I do business with them over The Valentine's Day and they gave me a Yeti cup with their logo on it That's not going in the trash like most of the cheap cups So anything that you know people would value enough anything, you know, you would keep because we get all kinds of swag They were like, oh, that was nice. We throw it away or it goes in a drawer, but a Yeti cup goes by the pool. It's it's fabulous Excellent. You ready Liz? Let me write it down the right order so we don't mess up again, Tom, but yes You know, I don't need your list Yeah, right Yeah, I'm ready Okay, so I also like discount mugs also I use for imprint. I don't have favorite sweat But I am cheaper than Debbie is Yeti cups are pricey I do kind of like that idea though of giving them something that they're not going to get rid of I had one of the things that I'm really not a fan of is stuff that has my name printed on it Which I know goes against the idea of swag But I like it when people want it because they the cool thing to keep and I trust that they're gonna remember that I gave it to them. So if I am gonna print on it, I'm gonna print it somewhere where it's not Not like look it. I'm giving you this marketing thing and I'm asking you to mark it for me But I'm pretending like it's a gift. I try not to do that. So I have never given away anything as nice as yeti for Networking or maybe for employees There's my proof that I don't go over now, let's see how very good Let me follow let me follow up that type of gift because of the price point would be something like a Local realtor who's already referred us 10 clients this year. So yeah, the price point has to match who you're giving it to The amount of money they pay you The amount of money we make off of them Yeah, big money big gift that makes sense to me We get a lot of swag from You know, Vista print we get some stuff from them. There's another company. I think it's called market I'm a RK dash Can't swear to that in terms of what we do we tend to go high volume low price point type stuff ink pens grocery bags Cheap sunglasses with your name on it your your name has to be on it And if not, we don't even count that as swag, you know post-it notes stuff like that We go after business to business type of counts stuff that we call resumersial property management groups Real estate companies things like that and we like to drop food off Donuts are one of our favorite things and we get one really crappy donut And we put it in the bottom of the box and it's got our name on it and it sets around the break room for a long time Do you really do that Tom or did you just hear about that from Derek? No, Derek heard about that from us that was We started that when we were in the temporary labor business and we carried it over to resumersial That's very that's a very common practice in the temporary labor business drop it off in the break room with like a licorice Filled donut in there and that one donut stays there in the box for a week Those people who don't want to throw it away, but All right, good we did good for Leslie. She said we did excellent.  Yep, I'm ready Okay Okay for scheduling We use for the different companies we use lots of different programs currently we use we've used castle quick made central and made easy and I hate to do this because but you asked the question So I am gonna do a little bit of a pitch Definitely, I have to say that I'm made central is hands down best software I know love I know of lots of them because I work with a lot of people that use different softwares But made central is my favorite. It's pricey, but it's it's a good software Sorry Tom no worries. I'm not gonna forever about it Paula, thank you very much for the question much appreciate it Yeah Basically, I Work on a team that that that has built in and sells made central so full disclosure. I can't be I'm biased on this and Yeah, it's from a price point standpoint It's an expensive piece of software, but we argue that You'll for a lot of companies you'll have more money in the bank at the end of the month And you did in the beginning of the month because of that software Versus other software options you can have so we'd like to say that it's a very good value for a lot of companies It it's very integrated products got a ton of functionality Takes a while to implement and it's a big commitment, but for the right companies, it's a really good fit Thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that You're ready to have me Sure Absolutely. Okay, so I used Service EO, which was the desktop version for probably close to 20 years I was one of the one of the original users and I loaded it on a floppy from a floppy disk And we use that for many many years my staff loved it and then a few years ago They stopped supporting it and I had to move to the cloud. You know, it's always a painful transition So about three years ago. We did lots of research. We ended up with service autopilot It my my staff picked it they interviewed all the different software programs that were available at that time and They chose Service autopilot and then we integrate with simple growth for all of our email automation. So we've been using that now Maybe not quite three years, but they love it. I haven't used it, but but they love So good reports good in that's important to us that the reporting is robust And so that's what works for us Excellent Hey, Tom, I know we have some other questions on here And I want to make sure we get to them all but I have this one that I think links up here really quickly Somebody asked me what are the other Softwares and apps that you use other than scheduling like do you use QuickBooks ring central Asana Google Drive, what are the other things? I and Debbie had just mentioned that she uses simple growth So I thought this might be a good time to bring that up Yeah, yeah, we can do that Okay, it's coming Is that it? Okay Okay, I get to go first this time because you went first last time See how The reason we're having a discussion this seems like it should be really easy, right? Well Before we're done, we're gonna prove to you that for some it's not No, I'm keeping For every week we fight about who has to go first But we're not doing it today. It's no fun if we're not fighting Okay For starters, we use QuickBooks online Regardless of what scheduling software you're using I think everybody needs some type of accounting software We use Syngrid we use Twilio that handles everything from email to Voice messages to to text all of that by the way integrates in with with with made central In production, that's that's basically it it all looks like it's one complete Software package three made central but all of that is is integrated into it We use a lot of the office 365 suite type stuff just for like desktop management Software you're familiar with word expel things like that share points part of that for for document share Okay, Debbie you're next Okay, well we use QuickBooks online We also have blue skies, which is a service and a platform and they do our outside Recruiting for a job Candidate so use blue skies for that and then they also have a portal which helps you to manage the candidates We have just Are in the stages of adding pipe higher which is one of our CBF numbers that developed a Software program for managing all of your job candidates and your employees after the recruiting is Done by somebody else so this brings them in it scores their job application So you can pick from your eight nine and ten scores before you bother to waste time on calling them or interviewing them And then it manages everything from their 90 days Hiring process and all that so pipe higher and then of course we use constant contact for anything non automated emails that we get from simple growth and Simple growth is that other integration with service? Pilot also launch 27 we have their integration on our website for booking online and getting quotes online and That's about it that I can remember Debbie even hanging around with Tom too long Did I miss I was I was looking at my list and I wasn't watching the clock. Sorry Comes up Liz is on me, but you're good Debbie. No worry Works for the guest. All right, so one bonus I'm going last is that you have a chance to think about all of the stuff So I'm gonna kind of go through mine quickly We use Google Drive for all of our stuff to integrate everything We use a sauna for project management. We use QuickBooks. We use response a bid for bidding We use Twilio We just signed up with simple growth because of Debbie's event and one of the events that she just recently had What was awesome? So we signed up for that We're not using quality driven now, but I'm still going to say that we do because it's we have in the past and it's Super awesome product Survey monkey we use we use Roboform for keeping track of our passwords We use TeamViewer because I'm not in the office a lot of times we use people matter for Managing recruiting and that type of stuff and we use cloud art and fun stuff for the employees Wow Debbie, did you notice that she started speaking before I started the clock? Oh, well, then I go early and here I was I was waiting for it to start like an obedient student to talk Okay Heather's got a question for us And her question is what are some of the things you did after reaching a million dollars to continue growing?  Yes After I reached a million dollars I had a mindset for many many years that that was kind of the threshold so I really just Expected my team to maintain because I had this mindset that it was kind of like the ceiling and I started cleaning for a reason because I didn't I needed a project so I started that I got heavily involved in air CSI I'm the president and so I just went and did other things and eventually I bought speed cleaning and Basically, I became a hundred percent absentee business owner Then just a few years ago. I thought well, maybe I could be an absentee owner and keep growing the business So now we do 1.8 million. We ended last year at 1.8 million We should still be able to hit our two million dollar target And it we do it. I do it as a hand hands-free business owner. I do not work in the office at all I didn't even know they were closed today for 4th of july so Um, I started cleaning for a reason bought speed cleaning And got involved with arcsy. That's what I do with my time when I hit a million Very good And I'm super impressed that you guys are still going to meet your two million dollar goal even going through covid So it'll be a stretch kind of It'll be a stretch, but we think we think we can still hit it. So we had our highest First time clean week last week in the history of our company Where we we booked more initial cleans for our company than we've ever done in one single week So we have hope everyone else needs to have hope All right, so everybody on the call right now Um double double cross your fingers and set send extra awesome vibes that debbie meets that two million dollar goal She wins. We all win.  Okay. All right I'm waiting for my time. Okay, so um, let's see. So I Did not do a lot to tell you the truth to grow. I was kind of like, oh, I'm just gonna I got complacent and just sort of stepped out a little bit And then I started meeting other people and doing other things and connecting with other people and that was like more energizing and doing more things and So like like debbie, I hooked up with a rcsi And I know tom did as well. Well, he did it way early, but um I hooked up with tom. I hooked up with David kaiser is actually one of the first people that reached out to me and said hey lis I like to work with you a little bit. And so I just started working with other people that reached out to me and um Started doing other fun stuff and now I reach out to other people that try and do fun stuff and and grow everybody's businesses because I'm like what I just said one if one wins we all win There we go We had a million dollars a long time ago. Um She was probably 20 years ago One thing about growing the bigger you are the more customers you have the more customers you have to lose It's harder to go to two million and beyond than it is hitting the first million. So um Early on we started doing what we called residential work still painting space that people live sleeping eat and bathe in but like apartment communities uh military housing uh property management groups Vacation rentals airbnb stuff like that. So we diversified a lot more in in business to business um started uh about five years ago Developing our software to allow us to run multiple branches. We're cleaning homes in several different geographic areas all in the spirit of house cleaning It's hard to get a lot in a minute isn't uh You know it I know it and I did forget to say because I didn't I like you we hit the million mark about 20 years ago But I also started doing business consulting and training I started out part-time like liz and now I do it full-time so um And what this proves for everybody who's asking this question Is once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur just because you hit your goal Does it mean for most of us that we're going to go sit on a on a beach somewhere and sit my ties Even though I always said I would know We go and sign ourselves up for more work so If we were on the my time program we wouldn't be here at the moment would way That's probably And people are always asking it. Oh, why do you work so much? And I don't think they believe us when we say because we like it I want to it's fun You know, I I I'm loving that people really yeah get that message that We we love to work Yusuf was here earlier in the week. I think it was Wednesday And he said he worked like 60 hours a week and it was like You know and he did it because he wanted to do it and he enjoyed it. Yeah, it didn't even feel like work and Yeah, I'm sitting here thinking 60 hours a week. That's not that much That's a half that's that's part time for you tom And I think he's the biggest He's the biggest company. I know and he still works 50 60 hours a week. So Um, it's amazing. All right. What do we got from urney here? What has been the biggest challenge to your company during covet 19? Both cleaning companies and consulting businesses Okay, okay. So I finished that means debbie's up this time, right? Yeah, um, so I will say The biggest challenge is to have worked so hard in 2019 Get our big goal of 1.8 million and my staff did that because my goal was 1.75 for them and they said no It's 1 8 and then to watch almost overnight Watch our sales drop in less than a month by 38 percent That was the most painful experience knowing I spent 14 grand a month on marketing and two months That was a big waste and we couldn't cancel the contracts because those were contracts We could turn off google ads and facebook ads but you know spending 14 grand on a month and the phone not ringing and people not working and That was really a nightmare um, but We've set new goals. We pivoted like buffaloes And we did all kinds of training with our staff and we're almost we're only about 5 below where we should be And in terms of the consulting business It's actually grown my consulting business. It didn't hurt it and grew it which is sad, but it's true All right before I go on to my question I just have to point out tom that if you go last that doesn't mean debbie's first That means i'm first because now it's going to be debbie lis and then tom you're going to be last again So this is why we find out time because lis keeps a record, but Liz I was testing you and you didn't say anything I did Lag Okay, you want me to go next? No, I'm happy to go. I was gonna have to go first. Now I get to go second Okay, go All right, so um biggest challenge for our company has been Trying to walk the line between You know making everybody feel good and safe, but still staying busy and keeping business going and You know hasn't always been easy and not only Keeping people safe, but then the money aspect too, you know when unemployment came in and said hey How about you don't work and we'll give you an extra 600 dollars a week So and then people really do feel unsafe. So just all of the balancing Of this communication between the customers the employees Managing how people are going to get paid making sure that people get paid fairly they feel safe just that whole thing That has been our biggest challenge And then for our cult coaching we're kind of in the same boat as debbie We're doing more coaching um people need more help now not less And again, that is that for us we um had to make the decision or we made the decision to uh close up shop for for several weeks and That was tough going through that exercise and then starting things back up again And you know, we're located primarily in the southeast and You know, covet is worse now than it was when we were closed. So at the moment, you know, the biggest challenges are every day getting the count as to Who's tested positive both on the client side as well as the employee side who's been exposed to what And um It uh, it's just becoming the expectation every day that uh, we have to deal with that and figure out how to manage that From a revenue standpoint, you know across the board. We're 90 or better in terms of booked revenue And i'm not even sure how that happened but uh, just managing the disease itself is the hard part It's close tom, but you did it. Good job. I kind of like pick up the pace up there at the end Yeah, you did it though All right, what is the key of success in residential cleaning? Marlowe's berating herself right now.  Are you sure tom? Is it my turn? Yeah, it's your turn. You go ahead All right, um, what is the key of success in residential cleaning? Oh Gosh should have been more serious instead of joking around. Um I guess the key to success I would say Is first and foremost pay attention to your numbers Because anybody can get a business up to a certain level without paying attention their numbers and just sort of you can sort of fall into A certain level of success But if you don't start knowing where your profit margin is what your payroll percentage revenue is What your expenses are What your actual income coming into your business is you run into some pretty significant problems Before you even know it because we cash flow so well in this business A lot of times people think they have money when really they don't A lot of the answer stage you're in in terms of You know, are you a small company you starting out or are you a larger company? as a rule though The business is fairly straightforward. You need homes to clean. You need people to clean them You need to get them in the right The right ratios you need to understand your numbers You need to understand what your cost of good sold is you need to understand what your client turnover rate is your employee turnover rate A lot of it if you had to bottle it down to one key It's just execution we heard from use of wednesday. I thought it was excellent You know, he's kind of like a five million dollar plus business over a hundred people working for him And they're not doing anything particularly flashy. It's just the blocking and tackling is taking care of the of Of the basics day in and day out being consistent having the discipline to be consistent doing that day in and day out Excellent. It says boring Little tiny incremental details that add up to massive results So I would say a hundred percent of high achievers know their numbers Period not most of them a hundred percent of high achievers know their numbers But once you know what the numbers are then of course like tom said you have to take action So I wrote two things down as the owner The business the key to success is number one Building a team you have to be able to build a team You got to be able to attract the right people and keep the right people and then number two You have to constantly what I call mine the gap Mine the gap. So you have to know where you are. That's the numbers You have to know where you want to be. That's the goal And your job is to constantly work on that gap of where you are and where you want to be So that 1.8 million from last year. We want to be at 2 million 20 thousand was my staff My job as the leader is to mine that gap and build the team Very good. I love that debbie That was perfect timing And I loved I love that message too. I love that idea of mind the gap mind the gap That's so great and keeping everything moving forward. That's awesome. I love that And also I did want to say real quick. I just want to jump on what you said tom about usif You know, he hit pretty heavily on this idea of consistency So I really want to just make sure that everybody heard that if you weren't on that call remember over 5 million dollars y'all He's saying that consistency matters I should have said that too. I'm mad that I didn't good job tom Okay. Well, that's okay. It was that's that's why i'm here Thank you for letting me off the hook. I appreciate it. He was inspirational though there's so many people that Are looking for the magic bullet and what's the next hot thing that's going to get me there and You know, yeah, he knew what he was about. He knew what his business was about and he didn't go chasing that shiny thing Or going after the squirrel. He just kept doing his thing Basically what we call that is Everybody else is looking for the shiny easy tactics to get to the top and he Is just focused on the boring simple Basics and doing them all the time every day over and over again and that's who wins big Yep And he's got his 10,000 hours and by now because he's been doing that same stuff over and over again He's a master in his job description is is rather narrow But one of the things he does is he interviews All new hires everybody that that gets hired in his company He still interviews every one of them and I just Think that's awesome Yeah, that's kind of blew us all away. All right. Let's let's get we got a lot of questions here. I digress Okay, oh dubby sarah mitchell's here. I love you to bits. So she's just saying hey, she's just tuning in Great to see you sarah Okay, um Liz, who would you like to go first now? Mr.  That means I go I'm going Right. How hard this is Yes, we pay uh Vacation We get like six vacation days a year if you've been with company for six months Christmas bonuses, um We do a lot of different things for Christmas and some of it is is cash involved. Um, so yes Can I have the rest of this time on account maybe use it for another question, Liz? Okay, yes, you can but you might have to donate it to debbie because she's the guest she gets more time I'd be the one just telling you Okay, you ready Debbie Yeah, um, we of course also offer vacation It takes you three years of my company to get two weeks of paid vacation. You do start out with one week And we do have some other benefits. We actually add retirement and then we have what we call phantom shares in the company It's not real legal shares, but they're phantom shares So that someday when I do sell my business 40 percent of what I sell my business for will be divided up by the months That my employees have been with my company as long as been with us three years or more So some people who've been there 15 20 years cleaning will get 30,000 40 thousand dollars Others have been there, you know 40 months will get a certain amount. So we have phantom shares retirement paid vacation And we don't do Christmas bonuses, but we do anniversary and longevity bonuses I love that idea from you a long time ago. That's a genius idea I got the idea from Jeff Campbell. So I can't take credit for it. He's the one that gave me the idea Good good good blessings to Jeff then because it was a great idea Yep So yes, we do pay vacation We start out with a week and then you earn an additional day every Every year, but you also can earn additional paid days off By meeting certain criteria throughout the year. So you can earn up to four weeks total We do not do bonuses for Christmas not cash bonuses We did at one point in time and asked me off Facebook live why we decided not to do that and read a book called drive by daniel pink And you won't also do bonuses for Christmas anymore either We do do other types of bonuses though And we do other rewards at Christmas time instead of doing a bonus We do a party and we do gifts and then we do your award Very good I was easy Love it Sean day He uses so tell us Debbie you so tell us too. Don't you? Yes, and I love it Yeah, so But that's not a question. So tell us It is a review management software Uh, you could send a link to your customers ask them to review you But the unique aspects of this is they can choose to do the review as a video review And then it publishes publicly to your facebook page. So video obviously is pretty compelling Yeah, they're kidding That's easy on low phone super easy. Yep. Yeah So mantha has a question And Debbie you're up next. So this is fitting If you were going to start another related business right now, what would it be? Not sure what a related business might be Right, so here's what I'm going to say to that Um, the the key to that question is in the word related if you have 30 years of expertise over here don't go over here and start something you have no expertise in That's just my recommendation and they're done that failed So if you are going to start another business, I recommend that it is related and you are able to play off the expertise you've been developing So as an example, I bought a wine business a few years ago and lost $250,000 because that's not the business I have expertise in but All my other businesses are very closely related.  I have a consulting business I only work with the residential cleaning field Um, I started a nonprofit which is a business it is only in the cleaning space I Do compete with myself All right, I know I'm all right if I was going to start another one I would do window cleaning just because I know window cleaning companies that make a lot of money Uh with very little labor, which I really like that idea. Um So we do windows in our business, but I think it'd be nice to just have a window cleaning company My second thing that I would do would be a handyman business Because my husband has some related experience. It would be able to I feel like it would be really Um, can't think of the word I want right now synergistic with um My cleaning business and I'd be able to refer back and forth But after listening to chad and diana yesterday. I'm like, oh kind of like the idea of this test control business because you two people making How much freaking money? a lot a lot The technician can make one technician can generate a quarter of a million a year in revenue and test control Wow That's fabulous person. Yeah, that's fabulous. I wish that was true in residential cleaning That would be a game changer it would be Everything I currently do has something to do with house cleaning, you know, we're in house cleaning business through castle keepers Uh, we licensed the software through made central Distributorship and now a lot of uh, online training through modern cleaning Uh cleaning business today um You know the the coaching that I do with with with liz and and derrick I'm not sure if there's anything out there left to really do without going into other home services And that really isn't an interest to me If I ever did anything else and then this would probably be the only thing I was doing And I don't think that I'd ever get to this point and maybe it would be trying to be a fishing guide I thought that would always be fun. Um, but i'm not to that point yet Don't see that happening for a while Can I use your extra few seconds to share one business that I'm actually in the process of developing? Sure It's queen related. It'll be quick. So, um, I am now a part owner co-owner in the gift of clean Ernie Hartung is in that as is chuck Willis and I really believe in that I actually registered the domain made service gift cards dot com about 12 Or more years ago and I always had this vision to bring Like 1 800 flowers but 1 800 made service to the industry and I was just too distracted with more important things So it's like i'm not chasing another sparkly object, but it was always a dream and a vision So i'm now a small part owner in that venture We actually had a one of our like a board meeting this morning about you know, how to grow it So launching made service cards dot com or the gift of clean so that people can Buy a cleaning through a gift card for their aunt in new jersey when they live in texas Yeah, I'm familiar I'm familiar with the the organization They're they're they're quality people. I know Ernie's been working with now for for a good while And it's just hitting the tipping point if you guys are able to reach critical mass it could be huge It could be good. So i'm excited about it and that's that again related to the cleaning field Yeah, that's good Really good. Thank you All right Did we have another is we had a quick question from brian there Does anyone use click up or lack? So I went last that means you go next les Yep Okay, you're ready Yep, it's gonna be hard to get fit us all in No, no, I don't I am just now looking at Um, and I don't I can't my brain can't do slack Okay Okay, that means now that I am up You are but we did it wrong because heavy didn't really go last last time Okay No to click up we use slack in Made central we use we didn't use that to talk internally with the made central staff We do not use either on the house cleaning side And my answer that question is no to click up. Yes to slack when we worked more closely with the va We no longer have that va. So we're not using slack. I would like to use it with my team to communicate But we don't we were only using it with the va and I did forget the technology We also use on our website is one of those chat Bots or whatever you want to call it where we have a va that manages the chat feature on our website That was another technology we we use and I forgot about So we don't um you guys we don't use So, you know brian none of us use click up But Courtney wisely is going to be on on monday and she uses click up and she's going to be talking pretty Pretty extensively about it. I think so if you're interested in more more about click up Oh, this next question I think is just for debbie because I can't imagine how it would relate You or me because there's only one person here with an office in texas. So we'll just that's in Yeah So for the very first time, you know, I've been holding field trips at my office for more than a decade now We did our field trip at our office virtually and we did it last Friday and I was like, I wonder how this is going to turn out I think we were able to have 34 people there Which normally we have to charge a lot and only allow 14 or 15 And so I would say the future is very bright We wanted to test this out first within our cbf private community But the future is very bright that we will do more field trips virtually it I was like, is this going to work? It really worked well. So yes in the future Okay Thank you for having been doing In our mma. That's a great question in our mma groups. We have been doing every thursday We've been doing a virtual office visit So between all of the different members and it's been awesome, but the only problem is i'm getting way too many notes now Way too many things to change do fix bye Okay, i'm trying to reach something without everybody seeing i'm wearing shorts. So I won't reach it You think i'm just dressed in a suit But again, we went to your shorts. Well, you're not wearing a backwards sweater like i'm getting That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm like, I gotta always remember don't stand up I work from home, so you know somebody Somebody rang my doorbell yesterday a workman and I forgot, you know, I'm like dressed in a suit on the top And I'm wearing these shorts the answer to the door. I'm sure he thought what is wrong with this woman Yeah, when you're working from home, the rules are different with coveted, you know, it's all yes Sometimes it's pajamas on the bottom and suit on the top Yep I would show you my pajamas right now debbie, but i'm trying to to be good since you're not showing your shorts I won't show my pajamas. Yeah, no So We're uh Getting close to top of the hour. We can probably squeeze in one more question Paul is asking about recommending video training programs in spanish Who's up gliss? I'm all confused. I'm completely lost You can put me up the first if you want because my answer is so easy. I know I think I was first left Said no, but I'll go again. Okay Um, I don't really know about any video training programs in spanish So I I've got no great recommendations for this. Uh, what I can tell you is That was a weird one Ever training that you're using If you're using it in english or in spanish just don't rely 100 on the training program. You still have to have some human contact to move people forward and to get that Long-term memory engaged video does not engage long-term memory. It engages short-term memory. So That would be the only thing i'm going to say english or spanish And i'm sure debbie will be able to help us here much better than I can Okay, I can We're just playing make it up our own rules. Uh, jeff campbell and I rewrote the book speed cleaning Which was the traditional book for the homeowner and we rewrote that book Uh, just a few years ago. It's called speed cleaning for the pros and I got my name on this And so we had the boat transcribed to spanish and then we had the dvd, which I have the english version Because oh no, that's the spanish version. We have the spanish version of the speed cleaning for the pros and this is basically the train the cleaner version And so I agree with lis you know with kinesthetic learning. It's not good enough just put people in front of a video This is just one of three things you need to do when you train your staff So books and dvd in spanish, but you also need somebody hands on to show them And uh, so written visual and then hands on A little promo and a little fluff for speed cleaning. We got the spanish. So proud of that Yeah, actually so many people need it too. So i'm super glad that you had that It was a lot of work, but we we paid a lot of money to have it done right so Yeah Hey tom, do you want to go why don't you start talking tom? Why'd you mute yourself? I knew that I was testing to see if you were paying attention Speed clean is an awesome program. Um, I remember having the bhs tape the very first one that jeff did A whole bunch of years ago. Um, I think Sharon timberg has some uh training videos that are in spanish as well Um issa has has a lot of training material as well and a lot of their material is is in spanish also Tom you did really well considering that you spoke for the first 30 seconds silently That was good. Were you reading my words? Could you tell what I was saying? Something really profound and it was like frustrating that you were I was so so despondent about the whole thing. Yeah So Tom, I think we're out of time and and we don't have any questions popping up. So this is a good time to be out of time Um, if you haven't subscribed to cleaning business today now more than ever You're gonna want to do that Because we're gonna have some some pretty cool announcements to make on monday some new stuff that we're doing with cbt That's gonna make it uh even more valuable to you by subscribing. It doesn't cost you anything Uh email first name last name. You get our newsletter every week. It's got really cool information if you don't know about our downloads page for um smart business modes i'll drop the link here for all effort too and It's got all the downloads that And other articles that we've been following up here over the last uh last few months I guess wow time flies when you're having fun, right? Time flies when you're in an unprecedented global pandemic Twice in one call tom. Good job. All right Um, so debbie, what are you can tell everybody a little bit about what you're doing right now? So I know you had talked about you have an event scheduled for for september, but What do we do we have a private event scheduled for september for cleaning business fundamentals members But if you just go to debbie sardone.com And uh get on my email list. You'll find out when we have our public trainings like last weekend. We did a two day Actually, I'm sorry. We did a one day training event train the trainer So most people are training the cleaner, right? They're training the person who does the cleaning but Nobody's training the trainer and they don't really know how to train effectively So we held that we have quite a few events Of course, we have our big event in march next year in dallas And so just go get on my email list and then cleaning for a reason I'm still serving on the board of directors. It's now called issa charities But um, please get involved with that organization. It will lift your business up The you will your staff will love it to be a part of that and so I'm still very actively involved in what's now called issa charities and cleaning for reason is is my My heart program my heart project So oh and find me on facebook and join my facebook group and you'll get more tips and stuff So thank you for letting me say that Yeah, and tom you need to put on her link debbie sardone.com link on too Because she has more things in them Oh, but the the maidcoach.com works it's it all goes the same place It kind of redirected me And I guess I should have said I guess I should have said speed cleaning we have plenty of cleaning supplies and we have now added disinfectant and other E which we never had before so we have that as well Do you have lots of availability for your ppe debbie? We do we have plenty of disinfectants now. We did have a hard time getting it We would get a big pallet in and then we'd run out in like a week, but we're not having problems anymore So we have masks plenty of gloves Disposable gloves and plenty of disinfectant and our disinfectants. I think Like 64 cents to make a gallon of disinfectants. So we have plenty speak cleaning com All right You guys have a safe 4th of july weekend. Um, remember covid still floating around out there. So don't Let your guard down Social distance do all the necessary precautions Get your 4th of july hats out. I got a fine one or get one or something. I'm Missing out on that Debbie, thank you so much for it for for being part of our discussion today You're awesome I am honored and I'm an advertiser on cleaning business today. So go there read great articles that they Provide so and thank you liz always love working with you your doll Thanks, guys. See you. Thanks everybody. Bye. Happy 4th


Here are a couple of light-hearted jokes about observability. Why did the metric go to therapy? Because it had too many issues with its counterparts. You're not booing me, you're booing the AI, and it will remember this. Why was the log file so popular at parties? Because it always had the latest gossip down to the last detail. Remember, humor can be quite subjective, so it's funny for one person, it may not be for another, especially in fields of specializes of observability. How are we on that mic working on it? Let's go some more. The AI will remember that, too. You know what, it's not answering, so I think it hurt you. I think you hurt, I think you hurt Chad GPD's feelings. Okay, we got, we got one more. All right, this isn't, this one's pretty good. How do you comfort a JavaScript bug? You console it. Why did the time series database break up with the alert manager? It was tired of its constant overreactions to a little bit of jitter. Finally, why did the developer go broke? Because they used up all their cash. Again, you're, you're hurting GPT force feelings here, everyone. All right, I think we are ready. Testing, testing. Can you hear me? All right, take it away. Sorry, I'm going to rescue you from that. Okay, so this is going to be kind of like, let's take your real quick through sampling 101, and then I want to talk about some advanced sampling techniques. So, so to start, we just kind of need to level set a little bit about sampling, what it means, that kind of stuff. So imagine you have a big bag of marbles, and you want to know how many marbles are in it.  Now you want to know how many black ones are in that bag. Well, you pick a random sample, and you count the fraction of those that you sampled compared to how many you believe are in the whole bag, and then multiply by that number, and you will get a reasonable approximation. And it kind of depends on the size of your sample, right? If you have a bag of 10,000 marbles and you pull 10 out, you're only going to get to within the nearest thousand or so. But if you take more of them out in your sample, you take as many as you can, and you get, you know, you get closer to the right answer. One thing I want to address when I talk about sampling is to be slightly pedantic about it. To sample means to choose a sample. So you keep the sample. People often say, well, I'm sampling out these things, or I'm sampling heavily, meaning I take many fewer of them. And I try to really avoid those terms because it just, it's confusing. People, you know, when you start using those words, people don't know that that's what you're, you're, you know, which side you're going on and you always end up getting confusing. So I really prefer to use the words keep and drop when you need to be clear. And if I mess up in this talk, it's because I'm human. I do the same as everybody else. But the other piece of it is sampling rate, sampling probability. And to some extent sampling threshold are all different ways of talking about the same thing. You have a fraction of, of items in your estimating how you're, you're taking a subset of them. What is that subset? So if you're choosing one in 10, your sampling rate is 10. Your sampling probability is 10% or .01. And, you know, your sampling threshold is either, you know, 90 or 10 depending on how you do it. But those, those kinds of numbers will all come up when we, when we talk about this stuff in general. I suppose I should tell you who I am. I work for Honeycomb staff engineer and I'm the lead on the project we call refinery, which is Honeycomb's sampling proxy. And what I'm going to be talking about today is a bunch of the things that we can do in the Honeycomb sampling proxy for a really advanced kind of sampling. But we're going to start with some basics. So you're managing a network of microservices and you can imagine that there are a lot of them and a request comes in from a customer and that thing talks to your web service, which talks to your login service, which talks to your database and all these things go flying around the world and you're getting all of these services sending, we're going to call them spans, log messages, however you want to do it, but basically they're recording what's happening and passing that on. So you can assemble all of those requests together and make a trace and say when this happened and all these other things happened and this is actually what Honeycomb does for a living. And so this, I'm just going to show you this more live. So this is a trace in Honeycomb. So you can see the request came in to the checkout service and you can see that there are different lengths, the width of a bar is how much time it took and you get this stacked trace of, here's some calls, here's some processing that happens and then here's a longer processing call and then when it's done some more processing happens with shorter traces. And so this is a one user action that has caused what's the number 53 spans. So now you're sending all those spans to somebody like Honeycomb and that is fine. It's cool. You get a lot of neat information but now multiply that times thousands of users per day and you know, internet scale and you can quickly be talking millions of spans and now how do you deal with that? Because if you're paying by the span, at some point you need to control that. So the way to handle it is by sampling it. So how do we sample? The first and most obvious mechanism and it's available in all the libraries including all the hotel libraries is to head sample.  If it's a one, we're going to keep that span. If it's two through six, we're just going to drop it. So you do that and you're taking 160 amount of data escapes your system and gets into your back end but now when you get to the back end in order to get your data back you need to multiply by six. So you need to know that you were doing a sampling by six. So if you do that at the span level and you just do that randomly for every span, it works if your data is first randomly distributed and you're sampling off and the spans are all independent of each other but that's actually not true, right? We caused those spans and they're all dependent on each other. And so when you have a trace like we were showing a minute ago you have all those services and if you sample them randomly the probability that you will have sampled an entire traces effectively zero. You know, the more the more spans you have like with 10 spans at a sampling rate of one in six it's like 61 in 60 million traces will be intact. You know, by the time you get up to 50 you're talking, you know, number of atoms in the universe. So you need to figure out a way to sample whole traces. Now you can still do that with head sampling. You can use the trace ID which is passed around and shared by all the items. You can use the trace ID or some piece of element you share among the whole trace to make a pseudo random decision and make the same decision for everybody. So the one in six is based on whether the trace ID starts with, you know, five or the one in 16 or whatever it might be. So you can get or drop entire traces and so then the traces that arrive are intact. A span is chosen or dropped based on whether it's part of a trace. So yay, we got now we have intact traces. We can do our telemetry. We can multiply everything by six and we're great. Right? Not right. So when you have low probability events particularly when the low probability events are lower probability than your sampling rate then what it means is that you don't get those events.  But if you're sampling at one in 100 that means 99 out of 100 errors aren't getting sampled and like on any given day if you have a million users in a day you're not even getting any of them. So I just want to show you what that looks like. Let's go over here for a sec. And so this I sent a thousand traces. I sent 1% of them as errors. And what we see here is what I did is I ran this through the refinery and dry run mode and it basically sent all the traces but it marked some of them as having been sampled and some of them as not. And so what we have is the ones we kept these are the ones that were so we kept this collection of traces. We dropped this collection of traces. We kept two errors out of that thousand but they were close to 10. In fact, there were nine errors total. These were the ones we dropped. So good. We got we sampled some errors but the problem is that the errors are the part we actually want to see. Tolstoy put it pretty well. You know, all happy families are alike but all unhappy families are different in their own interesting ways. And the book was about the unhappy family because that's the interesting part. So we should be telling the interesting stories and that's what we need to be able to do. We need to be able to sample and keep the stuff that matters, you know, because all of those 200s, who cares? All your health checks, hey, long as they came back healthy, you're happy. So now we want to do tail sampling and for anybody who doesn't know it, Honeycomb is big on dogs and we name all our services after dogs and so you have to have a dog in a Honeycomb talk. All right, so we're going to send all our telemetry to one proxy or to a proxy system that is doing tail sampling and what we do is we aggregate all of the spans in the trace in one place. We look at them in context and then we can figure out what's interesting and make intelligent decisions about what to keep and what to drop based on, you know, how interesting they are based on how we've decided what interesting means. So one way we do this and Refinery has its features called rule-based sampling and you can literally write down a set of rules and this is a fairly common kind of thing if you're talking like an internet service, if any span has an error to keep it, if there's an error, you know, status code over 500, keep it. If any status code is in the 400 range, well, that's a user error but maybe they're interesting so like sample them more frequently. Health checks, yeah, you know, once in a while you probably want a couple of them in your data set just so you know they're happening but mostly you can drop them and a lot of people do actually just drop them completely. We don't care if health checks ever leave our system, we don't want to pay for them and then everything else maybe you pick a rate of 100, whatever your rate is that your volume that you can manage with the content of your data. You know, the bigger you are, the higher that number is and it works, it works pretty well but it doesn't work if things are changing rapidly. It doesn't deal well with surprises. It doesn't deal well with that customer who suddenly decides that they're going to send you, you know, a million spans a minute and so you need to do something. One of the things actually I should just mention is this, you have to attach the sample rate to the trace because now if you're sampling at different rates you need to know how to compensate for that in the back end so that you get reasonable data when you look at the combination of things because otherwise your errors are going to look a lot more frequent if you're sampling, you're keeping every error but only keeping one in 100 and the other thing it's going to look like errors are half your data or a lot more than that. So now we get to the real meat here. What if your data isn't predictable? What if it's too complex to write general rules or it's changing too often or your bursty traffic or in a lot of cases the people who are running the sampling system aren't the people who are generating the data in the first place and so you don't know what some engineer, you know, on the other side of the world is turning on and may like overwhelm your telemetry. So this is where dynamic sampling comes in. So this is where we let the sampler make the decision as to what we're going to keep. And so we take a set of key fields. We think about what matters to us and a classic example if you're talking again about HTTP is well, let's take a look at the URL. Let's take a look at the maybe the verb. Take a look at the error code response from the HTTP result and maybe if there are any other error flags or something we're trying to track. And then you attach that to your traces and then you can use that combination of fields to determine unique key for everybody and then you evaluate sample rates based on that key. So we do this mathematically. What we do is we take these keys and we collect and we watch how many happen and excuse me, can I get a slide out of order? Yeah, no, I'm good. We take these keys and we calculate which things are most common, which things are least common and we make sure we keep all of the least common ones. But the most common ones we can fairly heavily reduce the amount of samples we keep. So then you end up with, okay, well, you know, 200s to my login service, you know, one in 100 of those, but obviously 500s from some other service over here that's crashing, we want to see everything from those. So I want to go back to my other thing here. I'm going to show you kind of a sample. So what I did is I sent batches of a thousand traces and just simulated things. This one has URL paths of like just the first part of the path has only had a cardinality of two and the second part of the path only had a cardinality of four and then I have some errors in status as other fields and I'm using that as my error key. So now I'm showing you a graph which shows for this thousand traces I sent what the distribution of the various fields was. And you see that in the compensated thing, it says, okay, I got 192 of the ones drawer clear with a 200 status code. Later on we'd see drawer clear is probably down here as a, you know, here's the 201 status code. There were 22 of those. And now I can look at this and I can say, remove the compensation. Don't do the math. And in this case, we have drawer clear. There were actually only 28 of those that made it to my back end, but because we knew that the sample rate on those was, whatever number we used, I'd have to look it up. But anyway, there were 192 of them. So like I said, seven. So the sample rate of the, of this particular value is different from the sample rate from some other less common value. So if I go back here for a second, you'll see we have these different counts. And notice it goes all the way down to the ones. Every sample was kept, every unique combination of keys was kept, but the ones that were popular were much more, we kept many fewer of them than we kept of the ones that were rare. And the way this works basically is we just, we track it for 30 seconds or some number. You have control over that. You record how many you have in the various buckets and then you use those buckets to deal with the next 30 seconds and you meanwhile record those and then you use those buckets to deal with the next 30 seconds so it adapts over time. And actually we have a bunch of different samplers that have different adaptation models depending on what your particular needs are. And I'll show you that in a minute. One of the things I wanted to note is this key strategy actually fails if you have too many keys. So here I did a sample, I sampled, I said the data I sent had a cardinality where the URL cardinality was over 100 or was 100 and then the company, then you have the additional combinations of what were the error codes and what were the status codes so that we literally have, you know, probably 500 different states of key in this batch of a thousand traces. So that's way too much combination to actually get good data out of it and to draw the thing. And so the thing I want to show you is so for the first set of data we have this graph which shows the average sample rate here in the bottom graph. The first 30 seconds the sampler is just going, okay, tell me what you want. I'm just going to do six because you said it was six and then it figures out what the average sample rate that it can achieve and it's achieving a sample rate of about four because of the low cardinality-ish of the key field we chose it. This one here, the cardinality of the key field was much higher and notice we can't get the sample rate up because basically we're sampling every key at somewhere between one and two because there's just too many keys to do this thing mathematically, you know, sanely. And so the sampler is trying as hard as it can but it just can't get the sample rate up there at this volume. Now this may be a fine strategy if we had millions of keys and we're sampling at these rates that would be okay. But because there's so much difference between all the data none of the keys can be like pumped up into a range that actually reduces your sample rate in a meaningful way. So let's just go back to here. All right, so generally what we're doing with dynamic tail sampling is, you know, we're catching the most interesting data types the more common events are dropped more frequently the less common events are kept more frequently and are anything new anything uncommon is guaranteed to show up. But if your cardinality is too high it's a problem. As I mentioned before, we have a bunch of different sampler types in refinery that do dynamic and they basically combine current data with past data or don't in different ways. So we have an exponential moving average a couple of samplers that do that. We have a couple of samplers that are designed to limit throughput where you can just say I would like my numbers to work out to, you know, 10,000 spans per minute or whatever number you want. And so the throughput will, they will optimize for throughput rather than sample rate. Some of these other ones will be more in sample rate and then we have a windowed throughput sampler which was actually donated by a third party that does a different form of moving average. It basically keeps a record of the last like, you know, several rounds and so it adapts better in certain circumstances. It was generated by one large customer. So since we're here talking a lot about hotel today, the hotel collector has a tail sampling processor. But in today's world, it can't add sample rate to the output. You can use the thing Tyler was just talking about. You can use a transform processor to add a sample rate, but then it has to be a constant sample rate because they don't talk to each other. So we can't do this dynamic sampling concept in the hotel collector today. Now, good news is I'm on the sampling SIG and we have a spec revision or an O-TEP that's out right now which is going to allow us to attach a sampling threshold which as I said is equivalent to sample rate to traces such that it can propagate through your system. And so that solves half the problem and the other half the problem is that the collector, the tail sampling processor composes samplers by making a series of individual binary decisions and it's really not a good way that I've found so far to figure out how to attach the correct sample rate based on having made a sequential series of binary decisions. So I want to try and think about that as to how we can get this into the tail sampling processor as we go forward but it's going to need some serious rework. So if you're going to give feedback on the talk, I'd love it if you'd shoot that thing and pass that on. And if you get a chance, come by the Honeycomb booth and check out the stuff we're doing. We're up in 22. Questions. The question is how are the keys selected? The keys are controlled by configuration. So you decide as the user which fields are meaningful to you as keys and then for any given trace, the assorted combination of all of the values of those fields for all of these fans in the trace is assembled to make the key. Yes, there is. So they are per trace and there is a semantic assumption that when you have a given field name that that field means the same thing on all the elements of the trace. So if you have a status field, for example, and it's not actually a status code in some cases, you might want to do something like in your telemetry to copy that to a value that's unique. I'm sorry, would you try anomaly detection? Okay, integrating random sampling with anomaly detection is the question and generally in that circumstance probably what we would do is say you should probably use the rule-based sampler and write rules that define the anomalies in particular that you're looking for. We're not doing AI automatic detection of anomalies based on the shape of your data overall or anything like that. We're just... You could specify a rule that says these are the things I care about and then basically set the samples on those to zero. Somebody here at the mic? Hey, great talk, thanks. I want to ask... So you described a lot of head-based sampling, head-based sampling, dynamic sampling. This all happens in the agent on my infrastructure. Typically in head-based sampling, either it happens at the point of telemetry where you're adding telemetry, the library you're using within your application, you can actually set a sample rate there or you may have an egress agent within a pod or something like that that is like a local collector and you can set a sample rate on that. I say head and tail, but really sampling can happen in a variety of places along the pipeline. So my question is, I think, maybe I have functions as a service, maybe in a cloud, maybe a couple of quads, maybe a local environment. I don't want to set up infrastructure for the collector, for the agent to sample. Is it possible that I just send everything to Honeycomb and configure the sampling in your cloud? Not today. No, it's been discussed from time to time, but it's not something we're doing today. So I'd have to set up an infrastructure where I put up your agent or the hotel and configure it. Right. You're either running a collector and doing it there or you're running a refinery as an endpoint within your services and then refinery is passing that data onto Honeycomb. Okay. Thanks very much. You're welcome. Great talk, by the way. Quick question. You've mentioned the rule-based sampling and the dynamic sampling. In some cases, don't you need the rule-based sampling to kind of augment some of the dynamic stuff? Yes. If you're doing... You don't want to collect all those successful samples because it's not going to give you any good use. Right. The question is, do you sometimes need rule-based sampling anyway even with dynamic sampling? And yes. And in fact, what we often do is you write a rule to capture those particular circumstances you want to make sure you don't miss or particular rules we say, look, this service over here is too chatty and I really need to, you know, cut it down. But then what we have is the idea that within those rules even you can say and then fall back to a dynamic sampler once you, you know, if the rule doesn't match these conditions, now use a dynamic sampler to do that. So it can become your fallback to other things. Together? Yes. Yes. That works today. Yes. Yeah, we don't have an adaptive model for adapting rate in that model. It is basically a counts kind of thing. So you can do that sort of detection in the back end. Once it happens, you can cause, you can send alerts and things like that but you would have to then modify configuration and deal with it. I think I'm getting the cue. No. Oh, wait, one more? Okay. Hi, thanks for the talk. Can you clarify which parts of what you talked about are open source and self-hostable and which are honeycomb specific? All of this, the refinery is in fact fully open source along with our dynamic sampling library Dyne Sampler Go which is also open source. And then as I said, you know, Tyler who works with me and I, we both work and our whole team works on the collector and we're sort of chewing through how to move this stuff forward so that we can get it into the collector entirely. Yes. That'd be great. It's great stuff. Thanks. Thank you very much.


After a number of people within Trump's inner circle tested positive for COVID-19, the latest of which being Stephen Miller, there was a real question as to whether or not the vice presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence would even happen. But thankfully it is happening and there's a lot that I want to talk about because I want to go over what we can expect from tonight's debate. And I also want to talk about the kerfuffle surrounding Plexiglas and whether or not each candidate would have a Plexiglas barrier around them because that makes sense. If Mike Pence is part of the administration where they are currently unable to contain COVID and they're not doing contact tracing, you think that they would want to take extra precautions to protect Kamala Harris and the moderator from Mike Pence potentially exposing them. Now I get, you know, he tested negative and they are constantly testing the candidates. But you don't know if somebody exposed you after you tested negative before the debate given how many people in Trump's administration have COVID-19. So I would want to take extra precautions, but Mike Pence doesn't want to do that. And it seems like Kamala Harris, as well as the Commission on Presidential Debates, do want to do that. So for more on this situation, we go to the Washington Post who explains Vice President Pence is requesting that no Plexiglas dividers be placed on his side of the stage at Wednesday night's Vice Presidential Debate. After an announcement Monday by the Commission on Presidential Debates that dividers had been agreed to as a safety measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Mark Schor, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, said the Vice President's team does not view Plexiglas dividers as medically necessary given other safety measures at the debate, including a 12-foot distance between Pence and Senator Kamala Harris and daily testing of both candidates. The Commission and the Biden campaign both said Tuesday they understood that the Pence team was in agreement with the notion of Plexiglas barriers, but the Pence team suggested they did not want any such dividers around the Vice President, regardless of what Harris does. Quote, if she wants it, she's more than welcome to surround herself with Plexiglas if that makes her feel more comfortable, short said, but it's not needed. Now, I see their point about it being a little bit too much because sure, if you are putting them 12 feet apart, that's pretty safe. However, if I'm Kamala Harris, I'm opting for that Plexiglas because again, we don't know where Mike Pence has been. He's getting tested frequently, right? But we don't know if after he tested negative before the debate, he came into contact with someone else from Trump's administration who had coronavirus. So if I'm Kamala Harris, I'm not taking any chances. I want that Plexiglas barrier. And guess what? If I'm Mike Pence, I'd want that Plexiglas barrier as well because guess what? The American people do not believe the Trump administration is taking this seriously. So what do I do if I'm Mike Pence? Even if I think it's unnecessary, and maybe it is, just for optics sake to prove to America that I am willing to take this seriously, go above and beyond to make sure that we contain the spread of the virus, I'm putting up the barriers because it's not that big of a deal. But he's saying no, she can have it because I think it'll make her look foolish. That's the implication at least. He didn't say this explicitly, but is it gonna make her look foolish? Or is it going to make it seem as if she is trying to take it seriously? Like you have to understand that there's a real optics issue here and Trump and his team aren't helping with that battle. So, you know, this is fascinating to me. I think that the Plexiglas divider is a good idea and you know, if I'm Kamala Harris, again, I'm opting for it. Now getting into the substance of the debate first and foremost in terms of what I expect, I expect a better debate than the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden because Kamala Harris is much more charismatic than Joe Biden by a lot and Mike Pence, he is a lot less loud than Donald Trump. They may have the same exact belief system, but Mike Pence is less belligerent. So there may actually be a debate that is at least somewhat substantive or at least not the dumpster fire that the first presidential debate was. So my expectations are a little bit higher, although I will say the bar is pretty low. Now, here's the thing. I think that a lot of people going into this debate are expecting Kamala Harris to clobber Mike Pence. And I do agree with that analysis because I think she is a phenomenal debater. When she's at her best, she's one of the best debaters in the country and she's charismatic. She knows how to make a point. She knows how to put on the show. But she doesn't always bring her A game. So at that first debate in the Democratic Party primary between her and I think it was 10 other candidates, she annihilated Joe Biden to the point where a lot of us thought this might actually be the downfall of Joe Biden's campaign. And sure, it was a little bit overly rehearsed and too scripted. But still, she was able to strategically not just say the right things at a debate, but get her opponents back into a corner. And she made it difficult for them to get out of that corner. Now, if she does that to Mike Pence at least twice during this debate, I think you can sufficiently say she won this debate. However, you know, even though I expect her to bring her A game to this debate, there is a possibility that she does face plan because, you know, towards the end of her campaign, before she decided to suspend her campaign, I remember her just having a really bizarre debate performance where she was trying to pressure Elizabeth Warren to agree that we should ban Trump from Twitter or something insignificant like that. And even if she still used all the correct tactics that you use at a debate to get your opponent into a corner, it didn't land because nobody really cared about this to begin with. And Elizabeth Warren kind of just shrugged it off. So, you know, if Kamala doesn't read the room, then I think that she won't easily win as we're all expecting to. However, having said that I do expect her to win. But there is a caveat and there is an area where she could utterly face plan if she doesn't plan accordingly. Now, in this area, health care, this is a concern because what Mike Pence and Donald Trump has been saying about Joe Biden is that he's a socialist. Or if he's not a socialist, he's controlled by the radical left. Now anytime Trump says this, Joe Biden says, No, I'm not. I beat the socialist. So what happens in this debate, if Mike Pence says, you guys are socialists, you support Medicare for all. What is Kamala Harris going to do because what she does here could make or break her in terms of winning this debate. If she says, No, I don't support Medicare for all, then she's doomed because then Mike Pence can say, but you supported it in the primaries. Didn't you propose your own alternative to Bernie Sanders, which you said was Medicare for all? Weren't you defending Medicare for all at the debates against Joe Biden attacking your plan? What does she do there? Because either way, she's going to come out looking wishy washy and it's not going to be a good look because if she just automatically does what Joe Biden does and says, No, I don't support Medicare for all. You're wrong. You did say that you support it. Now we all had our doubts that you were genuine and you weren't just trying to get the left to support you, but if you do that, it's going to be a disaster. So there's a couple of ways that she can handle this to not look completely wishy washy because she did flip flop on Medicare for all and make no mistake about it. Even if I doubted that she actually supported it in the first place, she flipped on it. So how do you get out of this not looking like a hypocrite? Well, she can either brush this aside and attack Mike Pence because, of course, his plan for healthcare is non-existent and Trump's administration signed onto a lawsuit that could overturn the Affordable Care Act, which will eliminate protections for patients with pre-existing conditions. She could just sidestep that, brush it off and attack. That's one way to handle this. Another way to handle this, which I think will be the best way to handle it, is to not run away from Medicare for all. She can say, you know what? I don't necessarily agree with Bernie's bill. That iteration of Medicare for all maybe goes a bit too far, but I do personally support my own version of Medicare for all, which I believe is universal healthcare. Now, Joe Biden and I, we don't agree. We don't see eye to eye on this particular issue. He supports the public option and in theory, I support that as well since I am his running mate. However, I want to push him to do better. So yeah, we just have a genuine disagreement here, but I'm going to be pushing closer for, you know, a Medicare for all type plan. Now, if she says this, she's going to look better because guess what? If Americans think you support Medicare for all, if people come away from this debate thinking that you support Medicare for all, that's really good for you. That's really, really good for you because guess what? Medicare for all is a very popular policy. A majority of Americans support Medicare for all and during a pandemic, you don't want to instinctively and reflexively run away from Medicare for all. If you leave it so that way, there's an open question and make us think you're willing to debate Joe Biden on this issue and perhaps even challenge him, you're going to look better. But if you run away from it, as I suspect she will, but hope she doesn't, if this comes up, then you're going to look wishy-washy.  Now, here's what I will say. Overall, let's say this disaster scenario comes to fruition, which is really the only true pitfall that could leave a lasting mark on Kamala Harris. Is this going to matter in the end? I'd argue no. Even if she faced plans on the question of healthcare and Medicare for all, I think that overall, her debate performance will be good enough to where people can give her a pass for that. I think on COVID-19, her and Biden have both been consistent and Americans want leadership here. So, as long as she goes into this debate acting like an adult when it comes to dealing with this pandemic, that is where she'll have a leg up. Black Lives Matter may come up. She could basically both sides this easily and at least somewhat appease most Americans watching. She's not going to appease everyone. She's not going to appease leftists like myself who want to defund the police. But what she can say is, look, I was the top cop in California. I was attorney general. But as a person of color in America, I see how communities of color and black Americans are disproportionately targeted by police. If she at least seems at least somewhat sensitive to the Black Lives Matter movement, which I think she will project that, then for the most part, she's going to do just fine. And at the end of the day, the vice presidential debate isn't as important as the presidential debate, particularly that first debate.  He interrupted more than 150 times, according to Chris Wallace, and that turned off a lot of people. Hence why Joe Biden is seeing a pretty substantial bump in the polls.   But I think there will be some interest in the vice presidential debate. So I think that she does overall have to do a good job. And I suspect that she will do a good job. But she needs to be prepared. I suspect she will. And she needs to not botch the healthcare question, given her wishy washiness on this issue, that has plagued her campaign.  The GOP will go back a year, and they'll find debate footage of you on that stage defending it against Joe Biden and John Delaney. And you don't want that for yourself. Now, will that land? Not necessarily, because I think most people understand that Republicans don't even have a healthcare plan. So the bar's really low. But still, you don't want to give them any ammunition, and you don't want to run away from a policy that is extremely popular. Joe Biden has consistently done this. He's ran away from Bernie Sanders at town halls and condemned socialism saying, I beat the socialist. Again, you don't want to run away from things that are popular. This is politics 101. And that's what Trump doesn't understand this time. So don't be dense and do the same thing that Joe Biden is doing, Kamala. So we'll see overall, I expect her to perform very well against Mike Pence. Again, she's one of the better debaters in the country. I think she does a really good job. I think she's charismatic. And I think that she can potentially really help herself and Joe Biden cross that finish line, assuming there's no catastrophes take place. But I am hoping that there will at least be a little bit more of, dare I say, a civil discussion at this debate, even though that word now has negative connotations because of everyone screaming about civility and decorum. But I mean, just to see two adults disagree respectfully after coming away from that Joe Biden Trump debate, that would honestly be refreshing to see it would be a breath of fresh air. So bring the plexiglass, come prepared, and make sure you can point out the failures of Mike Pence since Trump did appoint him to lead the coronavirus task force. I mean, there's so much for Kamala Harris to work with. I can't imagine her not bringing up his failings in multiple areas. Like this is easy. Like this is the easiest difficulty. She has charisma. Mike Pence does not. She, you know, I think is a more skilled debater. We haven't seen Mike Pence debate that much. So we'll see. I'm certainly looking forward to being at least entertained, but hopefully it won't be a dumpster fire.