Transforming An Underperforming Business Into A Profit Machine

Let me ask you a quick question. What would it look like to 26x your current results? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen as Dan Kennedy interviews Kat Smith. Kat Smith is the author of Grow Your Salon Fast. She took on a salon when it was losing $9,000 a year and, well, you can imagine she 26xed it. There is such an interesting story about how do you provide a turnaround and how do you make that turnaround possible following direct marketing principles and some of the traditional ones as well. We're going to get into the full story so you can review your business and say, how can I take just one of these principles and change everything? Maybe not 26x, or maybe. Let's jump in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons.

They're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened He opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this month's Diamond Call. I have with me and will introduce momentarily Kath Smith, who bills herself as the Queen Bitch of Everything. I'm not sure if that's self-identification or someone has tagged her with that, but we'll find out. And broadly, we'll be talking about the rescue, the turnaround, the fixing of underperforming businesses. So here we are. We have Kat Smith, who is a little jet-lagged, she tells me, having flown back and forth across 22 time zones in the last few days. She is the author of an industry-specific book, Grow Your Salon Fast: The Quick, Dirty, Uncensored Secrets to Effortless High Street Domination. High Street being the classy place in London, despite cutthroat competition, insane regulation, and obnoxious clients. But whether you are in the salon or beauty or professional practice business or some other business, most of what we'll be talking about can be stretched and applied. As background, she is not a hairdresser. She took over a failing salon. I can never convert money, but so I'm going to just call it dollars, but at about $90,000 a year in gross and a loss of $9,000 a year when she got it. Took it over in a recession and turned it over to a successful, busy salon with about $400,000 in gross and $77,000 in pretax profit in just a few years. And when she sold out, it was worth 26 times what she had bought it for, which is a nice multiple on purchase of a flea-bitten dog. So she's obviously very smart. I spent a couple days with her in seminar event, and she's a lot of fun. She's a little dangerous, and I think we're going to have a great conversation. So, Kat, welcome to the call, and thank you for being here at whatever time of day it is, wherever you may be.

Thank you very much for having me, Dan. That's a very interesting introduction, and I hope I live up to the dangerousness and the fun part of that.

So let's just start with your, a little more background origin story from whence you have come to what you are now doing.

Well, sure. I'm not going to go through the whole dirty sort of details, but if I start where I was in London, so I'm actually from New Zealand, that's my home. Uh, but I lived in London for a very long time because my mum was British, so I could get this whole thing about going to live in the UK with a British passport and not having to have a time limit on that. And I was working there and I decided I didn't want to work anymore, and I went and had a baby with my husband. And I thought I was going to be the most amazing mother and I was going to just go and, uh, do mothery things all day, every day, and then realized that's actually not what I really wanted to do at all. As much as I loved my daughter, I really needed to do something that used my brain a little bit more than just singing nursery rhymes on a daily basis. And I was offered an opportunity to purchase a salon. So as you do, I kind of jumped at the opportunity thinking this will be really simple. I could do this. I could work from home. I could still be with my baby because the opportunity was with a friend and he was a hairdresser. And I thought, well, he can be the brawn of the outfit and I'll be the brains, and I'll just do the nice things like network with other people and talk about hairdressing and get people to come into the salon to have nice things done to them. And I started the salon, was actually like you say, it was a flea-bitten dog, it was completely run down. It looked like, I don't know if you have them in the States, a Chinese chip shop they call them in the UK, where it was Painted bright red on the outside, very strange sign up on the fascia board, and bright lights everywhere, and really, really awful. But also, it was a salon where it was a cash-only business. There was no client list. They had everything on bits of paper spread out across the desk. There was no follow-up. There's nothing. So it was no wonder it was making a loss. And I thought, well, I could go— just go in there and I'll turn it around. It'll be absolutely amazing. And the reality was quite different, actually. I found that having to do the work, there was a lot of work to be done, and I couldn't just be the stay-at-home mum and just work the part-time and have this successful salon. So it was a little bit of a shock. I can remember one day I was standing on the escalator going down into the London Underground, which is the train service, the metro service. And at that particular point in time, I'd just taken it over. It was making a little bit of money, there was cash coming through, and I thought, gosh, this is really easy. I just, you know, I just— why didn't I think of this before? I just have other people working for me, making money, and money's coming in, I can pay the rent. It's a real scam. Why doesn't everybody do this? And a few months later, it was a very different scenario. I was going down the same escalator, and I was in a real panic because the money wasn't coming in. All of a sudden, there was a drying up of cash flow. There was nothing happening. I thought, what's going wrong? What am I doing wrong? So I had to endeavor to go and find out what I needed to do to turn this around, to make this salon actually work.

And at that point, and I think a lot of, a lot of people on this call won't be panicked, but they will be in realization that whatever business they have, it ought to be doing better than it is. Um, by now it ought to be easier than it is. There are some aspects of the business that they're aware is underperforming and a little frustrating. So the process is probably the same. So at the moment of realization, uh-oh, this thing is not going to be an easy sailboat ride and I'm going to have to dig in and do some major stuff. Um, talk me through now, post-realization. Um, what did you know to do? What did you have to go find help with doing? Kind of what order did you tackle your unearthed problems in?

Well, the first thing I did was I had to look at What I did think was, what's working right now? What was working in the salon? Where was the money that actually existed? Where was the priority? So I didn't actually know about the 80/20 principle at the time, or the law of the vital few. That came a bit later. But I knew that there were things that were being done that were working, and then there were things that were being done that were not working at all. And I had to look at very closely and take the things that were working and do more of them, and do them better than they were being done. And the things that weren't working, look into those and say, "Okay, well, what do I need to do to fix that?" And that was actually— that was quite a big task. And the epiphany came for me, and it was through a very, very, very clever piece of marketing that arrived on my doorstep. So it was kind of like out of the blue. I wasn't— I wasn't ready for it, I wasn't seeking it out, it just happened to arrive. And it was a letter, it was an envelope, it had a handwritten address on it, it had a stamp, and I opened it up and it was a piece of a newspaper tear sheet and it had a little Post-it note on it saying, "Hi Kat, I saw this, I thought of you. This guy is brilliant, check out his website. Signed, Jay." And I had a look at the newspaper clipping and it was an article about a direct response marketer who's very successful in the UK. And I went round all the JAVE I knew in my phone book and I rang them and I said, did you send me this piece of newspaper clipping? And of course they all said, no, we didn't, but it sounds amazing. And when I realized that it was actually a piece of marketing and the whole thing was a concept of direct response marketing, not from anyone that I knew but from this particular marketer, I thought this was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. It was absolutely genius and it was so elegantly done. So I had to sign up to what this guy was offering.

By the way, we're very familiar with that tear sheet mailing in the United States, but having actually been involved with that one, I can tell you that you were not the only person amazed by it in the UK. Hardly, hardly anybody has seen that seen that thing before. It found virgin territory, um, uh, there. And, um, but it— despite most everybody on the call being very familiar with it, I do want to caution everybody that it's still new to the person it shows up to for the first time. And the sneak-up mail approach and the Newspaper tear sheet or magazine tear sheet is alive and well and doing well here. But so that led you to source or sources of, gee, here's how to do direct response that you really hadn't seen before.

Yeah, that's right. And it opened up a whole new concept to me. A lot of the stuff that I was learning about seemed such common sense. Silly, but I didn't realise that this was a thing, that this was actually an area of study, an area of doing things, and a way of doing things that was based on results, and that it could be done in any business, which is like you said at the start there, even though my niche is in salon, this can roll out to any business out there. You know, we're all the same. And a lot of the information was your books yourself, because that's how I met— introduction to you and to other people in the industry. So that's where I started out. And a lot of those things, the first thing I did was, okay, well, this is what's working. I learned about the 80/20 principle, and I learned about some various strategies and some tactics that I could use straight away, and so on, to start that cash flow again.

How, any resistance from partner to changing from traditional to non-traditional advertising and marketing?

To a certain extent. I have to give praise, the praise is to my ex-business partner now because I sold my share. Terry was very good. He said, you know, you go and do what you need to do. I'll just work on the floor. And for a while that worked, but as time went on, we did need to do things. And I— what I chose to do was to make Terry the face of the salon. So everything was about him, his personality. We sold— we did the marketing based on his personality of the salon. I wrote a book and it was his voice, it was his experiences, it was his stories. So he became the face of the salon. So he had to buy into what I was doing because he was the one that was fielding the clients and the clients' questions. So he had to have an understanding of what I was doing. And he says, and he'll agree with me, that he did have resistance to a lot of what I was doing because he felt a little bit uncomfortable about being put out there. And there was a lot of stuff that we were doing that was so unique to any salon on the high street. And we were getting a few comments from competitors about what we were doing. So we knew we were doing something right at that point. As soon as competitors start to squawk about things, you know something's going well. But what he didn't realize and what I didn't realize was how much impact it had on our clients and how much they loved what we were doing. And it made them buy into us even more, which was why things started to take off and become more successful.

So let me ask, almost as a little detour here, but some of the specific things, just 3 or 4 things you did that did have a lot of impact that were unusual for salons to do in this place and at this time?

Well, there was 3 things that strike me immediately. The first thing was our referral process, and it's not unusual because most salons have kind of a very loose referral system, but they— and that's probably the operative word, it's very loose, it's not formalised, there's no process, there's no system to it. And what I did was I knew that a lot of our money came from referrals and repeat business, So I formalised the process. We designed a card where a client, current client, was given these cards to hand out to their friends, and it was a double-sized business card with a serration down the middle, and you could cut it, they could rip it in half and give one of the cards to their friend or family and keep the card for themselves. So when the friend came in, they'd present the card, they'd get a discount or a product or whatever it was we were offering, and then when the client came back in, they'd get their portion of it. And I— what I was struggling with was getting the reception team to actually remember to give out these cards, so then I incentivised them. For every card they gave out, they got a pound. So as soon as I did that, there were cards going out left, right, and centre. I was having to buy new cards on a weekly basis. And then we were running competitions for referrer of the month, and we were having that in our newsletter and being recognised in that way. So there was a lot— the process was written down, how it had to work, what happened next, and what happened next, and then what happened in the future. And we made a lot of money, and that's— and the salon is still using that system to this day, I believe. The second thing we did—

yourself, you won't lose your, your train of thought. The principle behind that that I often talk to people about is Whatever is happening essentially by accident, if you pick that up and you, as you said, formalize a process for it, if you get deliberate about it, you can make the same good things happen a lot more on purpose. And there is a lot in many businesses that is fundamentally happening by accident. It's okay. It's good. Hey, referrals are coming in and everybody's focused on other fish to fry. Whereas if you just focused on formalizing what was happening loosely or informally, that might be the very best way to spend your time. And the other point that I wanted not to elude people is, so how long has it been since you've sold your share in the salon?

I've been out for 2 and a half years now.

Okay. So 2 and a half years later, the same process is still being used. And that's—

Correct.

That's a beautiful thing about process is the work that gets done once these things can be evergreen. They can continue and function for years and years and years, and that's why it's worth investment to get to formal process. So back to your list, you had 2 more.

Yes, so the second thing was that we started, we formalized also the follow-up service that we had. So we were finding that we'd have one-off clients who'd come in and then they wouldn't be spoken to ever again, so we didn't know if they were gonna come back in again, or if they hadn't made a booking at the time of when they were paying at the till to leave, whether they would actually come back for our service. So I— we again did a process where we had a specific set of follow-up where we would contact the client with a phone call a week later to see how their service was and were they still happy with what they had. We'd put them on our daily email list, and we would send them some information in the post and that sort of thing, and then a card a few weeks later, so a nice handwritten card. And the relentless follow-up that we did with that was when we asked them, when it came into the salon to fill in their personal details, we asked them for their email and we started following them up with daily emails. And I know it's a bit tactic and it's something that a lot of businesses don't want to do. But what we found with doing daily emails to our clients is we started to create a little community because the emails were around Kerry and her stories. They were fun, they were interesting, and there was a call to action in each one of them to remind them to, you know, whatever it was for that month, what we were doing, whether we were selling a product or whether we wanted them to rebook, or we even did charity events and asked them to donate money and that sort of thing. And we knew they were working because we had a sudden spike in rebookings, but also towards the end of the first year, we were facing quite a large tax bill for various reasons, and our boiler broke down, so we had to pay quite a lot of money because it wasn't covered under insurance. And I realised we didn't have enough money in the bank to cover all of this, so we I did a campaign with daily emails. I sent out 15 emails, one each day for 15 days, asking people to pre-book their appointments for the coming year. So this was December, November-December, and this was a time when people probably not that keen to spend a lot of money 'cause they're buying Christmas things and all the rest of it. But we wanted them to buy their appointments for the, for the following year, we would book them in. We would give them to them at the current price which we were selling them at, and we told them that we would be raising the prices, so their price would be protected for the coming year. And we would manage those bookings for them, so even if they didn't really know the dates that they wanted to come in, we would pencil them in and then would operate a concierge service where we would remind them what was coming up and whether they'd like to change it or not. And they had to prepay all of that. And out of that campaign we made £72,000, double that American, in prepaid bookings.

You know, so I'm always amazed at all of the businesses as a consumer, as a customer, that either make no attempt to book my next purchase as I am ending my current purchase. Or if they try, they immediately give up. And that's the restaurant you're dining in. I've yet to have an attempt made to book the next reservation while they're presently, um, the dry cleaners, the dentist, there's sort of a half-assed effort made at the dentist, but as soon as I balk, they retreat. And why more businesses don't press that issue is beyond me. The prepaid sale, in your case, driven by desperation as inspiration, but as a cash flow surge strategy and as a generate your growth capital from within strategy, again, is one that's greatly underused, but you pulled it off brilliantly in a business people would think you can't do it in. And again, it's a greatly underused— whether you want to call it a strategy or a tactic, a lot of people don't do it. And yet prepaid services obviously exist all over the place. It's really what timeshare is in condominiums and cruise ships and vacation homes.

Vacations.

It's a way to sell the hotel room out to be used 3 times a year for the rest of your life. So congratulations on that. It's very clever.

Thank you. And we used it again and again as well. So, you know, we keep doing it each year.

Yeah, there's a long story I'm not going to tell, but the punchline is it's a shame to go to all the trouble to develop something that smart and only use it once. And so I'm not surprised you used it again, and there's no reason not to, not to pull it out of the drawer every once in a while. So your third one was writing a book.

So nobody does this. Nobody in the salon industry has written a personal book other than the top hairstylists or beauticians like Vidal Sassoon or Nikki Clarke, you know, they have books on their beautiful pictures and it's all glamorous and what have you. But this book we wrote was— so the daily emails served a double purpose. We took 90 of the best responded-to emails that we'd written over the last— or I'd written over the last 4 years, and top and tailed them, so took out the, you know, 'Dear client' and the 'kind regards' and the 'PS' and the call to action, and they just became stories. They were little short stories of 90 little short stories, and interspersed with those 90 short stories were 10 top tips on how to— as in our case, it was about hair, so how to manage your hair and get amazing, wonderful, healthy, shiny hair. So there were little snippets of what you should do. And at the end of that was a call to action to come in for a free consultation, to do a particular test, a hair strand test, so we showed them how to do that, and then come in for a consultation to see what the salon was about, and then we'd go from there and sell them onwards from there. And I did it over a summer of living, so I live in what I call a giant sandpit, I'm not gonna say where, because there's a lot of things wrong with this country, and one of them is censorship. And in the summer, where it reaches 50 degrees Celsius, and I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it's very, very hot, and no one is around, I sat and wrote and collated this book, which I guess is something that that not many people would sit and do. And I always talk about saying that, 'Do the things that others won't, 'cause you'll always get the things that others don't get.' And we produced this book, and it was a little pocket-sized or handbag-sized book. It's bright pink, and it's '101 Naked Confessions of a Gay Hairdresser.' And this was particularly designed to go out as a lead magnet to new clients and— but also for existing clients to give out as part of our referral process, so that they could give them— give a friend or family member or whoever they were referring to something solid and something interesting. And it was fun, and as the name suggests, it's a little bit off the cuff, and Terry is gay, so that was, you know, that's a good thing. And it was— it went amazing. So, and obviously they still have that in the salon, and they still giving that away to whoever wants it. But it created something very different, and it set us apart from everybody else. And we had clients talking about, well, you know, this is great. I get a book from my hairdresser, and I get a daily email from my hairdresser. And we had clients saying, I stopped my whole office. So we had women from all around the world coming to the salon. So we had royalty, we had very high-class businesswomen from the States coming through, from New Zealand, from Australia, from all around the world. And they would say, 'I stop my office at 2 o'clock every afternoon. I get this email and I read it out to everybody, and everyone goes, wow, that's amazing. You know, out here just, it doesn't do that.' Or we get emails saying, 'I'm sitting down with my cake and coffee at this designated time every day to read this email, and it's a great part of my day.' And then they had the book and they would give the book to their friends, and they would think that this hairdresser person, this guy, what was he doing? This is really off the wall, this is off the cuff, I must go and see them. So we picked up a lot of people with this particular thing, and it was not particularly hard to do because we'd already written the information, we'd already done the emails. And it wasn't that it was a particularly educational book. It has got tips in there, but it wasn't an intellectual book. It was just a book, and the fact that it was printed, beautifully done, and in people's hands, it was something that was very tactile to give out, created a big sensation for us, which was brilliant.

So I want to unpack two things there for everybody. One is that you did something with this book that most people do not grasp the influence of, which is you made it about something other than 22 things you need to know about hair. And in this case, you made it about your personality. Your hairdresser guy, your partner, and his adventures and confessions. I was on the phone earlier today with one of my clients in financial services, and I goaded him into doing more and more and more with his personal story, his life story, and his personality, and less and less with pie charts and graphs. And facts and figures. He is still sort of surprised by the impact of it, but I got him to do a book that simply is my life in it. It is in brief, it is his origin story, his life story. He is finding that that is the book getting passed from one client to the other rather than the many books he has more about The nature of what he actually does. And that is the book that is really being persuasive. He said to me that someone recently who signed on to have him manage a great deal of his money had gotten the book from— as a referral. And his comment to him was, you know, I read your book about your life. And you are— I'm just going to say it exactly the way he said it to him— you are one resilient bastard. And he said that in an incredibly admiring tone, and that matches up values with the person who had— the entrepreneur who has made a lot of money and is now getting it managed. And so this is— then glad asset. Great Legal Marketing has done a good job with non-legal books in the mix to help promote his practice philosophy, if you will, ideas about life. People do not understand the power of doing this. Most, if they're in the auto repair business, they do a book about maintaining your car. If they're a chiropractor, Doctor, they do a book about how to take care of your back, etc., etc., and they do not grasp the importance of this other kind of book, which you did brilliantly. The other thing I want people to catch is how you violated, perhaps initially by accident, the secular religion about local brick-and-mortar businesses, which is the 5-mile radius or the 10-mile radius, and all of our clientele is only going to come to us from micro-local. And you had them, as you said, dropping by while visiting London from the States, from other countries, perhaps regular— they're in London 5, 6 times a year. They're coming to you 5, 6 times a year. Now I don't know how much of that $400,000 revenue these non-local customers represented, but I'll bet it was not insignificant. And people buy into this idea that if they can't hit a customer throwing a rock at them from their doorstep, they're too far away to get them to do business.. And that's just not the case. So we'll leave marketing. Obviously you had a lot of impact on this business by bringing it smart marketing. Having read your book, the other area where you had a lot of impact was actually on staff and on management, on the people side of this this business. Maybe you could talk about that just a little bit.

Sure, because actually that's something I get asked a lot, particularly from other fellow learners and private clients, is about staff. Staff are a pain in the arse. That's pretty much the bottom line, because they're people and they have their own agendas and they want to do their own thing, and it's usually not your thing. So yeah, there's lots of ways of dealing with staff and making things happen for them so that they feel like they are the only people in the world and that they want to work for you. But the thing that I found was I had to again have a process. So I had to find out what motivated them, what I could do to get them to do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, and how I wanted. And that wasn't particularly easy. One thing that you might not know is that in my previous life I was a psychologist, and I dealt with people with major psychiatric illnesses. And a lot of the things that I learnt through therapy and behavioural therapy and cognitive therapy and things like that is particularly relatable to staff. The only difference with them is that they're not medicated.— and they— the thing—

yeah, it's true. Yeah, maybe they should be.

And maybe they should be making it easier.

And yeah, I had several guesses about your previous life, but behavioral psychologist was not, you know, was not one of them.

I've done many things, but that was definitely— yeah, that was my training, that was my professional thing that I did. Yeah, so it's kind of a tricky one because if you've got a brick-and-mortar business, you can't do everything yourself. You do need to have these people working for you and making money for you and making a profit for you, and you want them to be doing it in a way that you want them to do it. So the first thing I did was start writing processes down for everything we did, from opening the salon door in the morning, what the key was that they used, where to go and get it cut if needed, a new one, that sort of thing. Turning the lights on, turning the music on, that sort of thing. So every single process was done. It was very tedious, but it went all into a manual, and they all had to read it, and they had to look at it, and they had to understand it. And if they didn't understand it, we went back and wrote it again. And in fact, I gave it to what I called the lowest common denominator in the salons, the person who was the least educated and the most likely to stuff it up, and got them to go through it and to act it out. And if they could do it, that was great, that went in the folder. And if they couldn't, we had to rewrite it so that person could do it. So it became very, very basic. This is what you have to do every day. This is the way we want it done. This is the way it has to work. So that was the start, and I brought over some things that I used to do in another job, which was I also worked in the travel industry, and this particular was a very progressive travel agency where I worked in corporate realm. They would do things like have one-on-ones where we'd be taken out and have a one-on-one with our manager, and we'd talk about our goals and challenges for the month and what we wanted to do, because we were on a commission basis. And then what training we needed, and we just— we'd have a time where we could talk about ourselves, basically. So I did this with my staff, and that was quite unique to them because they'd never had this before. They never had worked in a corporate arena, so they didn't know that this existed, and that was great. So we would go out for these one-on-ones. We'd go to the coffee shop and have a coffee at the same time, and they'd get to talk about themselves. And what their goals were and what their fears were and what their challenges were, and then we'd come up with a plan for them for the month. What I wanted them to achieve, what they wanted to achieve. We'd break down their figures and say, 'This is what you have to make for the month. This is how many new clients you might need. This is how many upsales you need to do.' They had a very clear idea of what they were doing and how they were doing it. And they would get that piece of paper and they would have it for the next month, and each month we'd revisit it and say, 'Okay, what have you achieved?' was this too difficult, was it too easy, what do we need to do for the next time. And combined with that, we would have two weekly staff meetings, and the agenda was set, and they had to send in their agenda items prior to the meeting, and if they didn't send it in, it didn't get discussed. And we didn't talk about things like, 'Make sure you put the brushes away when you finish with them, make sure you clean up after yourself, make sure you wash the cup.' We talked about things like, 'What can we do to make things move more smoothly? How can we get that person to come in again? What do we need to do to get repeat business? Why is there a block when somebody's asking to rebook their appointments? What is it that you fear? What can we do to make this easier?' So there was a lot of collaboration—don't like that word, but a collaboration around—they got to see what we were trying to achieve, how they were part of it. So there was a number of things we did, and then it started to incentivise them. So found out what motivated them. It's not always about money for them. It can be about recognition, time off, that sort of thing. So I got to understand what pushed each person's buttons, and they were very different. There were some drama queens in the salon, and there were some very shy shrinking violets in the salon, and they responded differently to different things. So I had to understand that. And then put the incentives into place to make sure that they were being motivated by those incentives. Yeah, so those are some of the things we started to do. But prior— and then we had started having a little bit of staff turnover, which you always get in a business, and I had to look at recruitment as well. And I had to change the way we recruited because everybody just used to put a an ad on this particular website, and you'd get thousands and thousands and thousands of CVs or resumes, and most of them would be completely inappropriate. So you'd spend a whole load of time wading through this information that wasn't very necessary. So I had to change the way we did our recruitment process, and I actually got some information from Barry Schreymus, who's quite famous 'Big Over in the States' about the way you should recruit people, and I did things differently. So I started approaching current clients and said to them, 'You were at another salon prior to coming here. How were the staff there?' And then I went and poached them, and that worked amazing. So I didn't have to recruit. I didn't have to, in terms of, you know, putting an ad out there, I didn't have to do all this process of weeding out. And then there was some other clever ways of getting people to send in their resume. And to contact us without having to go through thousands and thousands of things. So the whole process from recruitment through to training of the staff and what they got out of it, through to their motivation incentives and keeping the staff and retaining the staff, that was all one big formal process. So we set that all into place, and it's quite a massive, massive thing. It's actually something I sell as a product now.

Well, you know, you used the word tedious and I have a very rich client who has a sign in his office that says there's a lot of money lost by not doing the boring stuff. This is all about process and it's brilliant.

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