Evolving Client Expectations | E28 – Hard Refresh – An ISSA Podcast

Sa.

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Hard Refresh. Today we have Lisa McQueen joining us. Lisa all the way. Hailing from Australia, she is joining us from the future. As we were just saying before we started recording, it is Thursday morning for Lisa, and it's Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening for Karina.

Yes.

So tell us what happens in the future, Lisa.

Oh, okay. I can let you know. Okay, I can let you know the lotto numbers, what the draw was last night. Yeah, it's great. It's great. Be here in the future. We love it.

That's awesome. Well, go ahead and introduce yourself. Just take a minute. Obviously, from Australia, but what you do, what Clean Corp is and your history and how long you've been doing it.

Thanks. Well, thank you guys for having me on. First of all, I'm really, really excited to be chatting with you today. I am the CEO of Clean Corp, which is my family business. My husband started the business nearly 31 years ago now. And we started from, you know, like, like, everyone, like a humble little mum and dad kind of business, except I wasn't involved for the first 13 years. And then Hamish called me in and he said, listen, can you get involved? We need some more sales and marketing, and we need to. You know, I really think this business has got what it takes to go big. And so I did, and I brought all my sales and marketing experience in. And, yeah, I mean, we've just been. You know, we. We started in Sydney, we went national, then we went into New Zealand as well. And, yeah, it's just. It's like. It's a business. I love what I do. I love the industry. And, yeah, I'm really excited to talk about, like, all things Australian, cleaning businesses and technology and everything with you today. It's gonna be fun. I love it.

I love it. So I gotta. I gotta go back a little bit. Lisa, I don't know if you remember the first time we ever met, but I think it was 2014, 2015, and it was at an Infusionsoft conference. Now, they're called Keep. If you're any one of our listeners familiar with the CRM world, but you. You had flown into what they used to call it Icon. Yeah, that was. I had a couple team members, and I think that was the first time we had met in, like, a hotel lobby. I was just like, hey, you're a commercial cleaning business. And infusionsoft had done this whole brand video with you guys out there. It was really cool. And then I think it was just last year, the second time I saw you in person and maybe some. I say. But you were at the cleaning profits event.

That's right.

That's right.

In. In Denver.

Yeah, so exactly. I've been to quite a few events in the US but that one that you. You mentioned, the icon conference in 2014, that was huge for us because I don't know if you remember, but they. They used to run the Ultimate Marketer and then they changed it to the Icon Award. Anyway, that year, I think it was a ch. It was like their changeover of the name, but we won it that year and at the event. There were a number of cleaning businesses at the event that year, which Hamish and I were really surprised about. So we found that we had this very, very friendly crowd. And then, you know, people all through the crowd who was like, go for the cleaning business, go for the Aussies. And, yeah, we won it. Which was. It was just. It was just an amazing, I think, recognition of what we had been doing in the space and how we'd been able to innovate in, you know, within our industry. So, yeah, it was really cool. And then last year I spoke at that event, the Cleaning Profit event. Very cool.

What I love that your background is marketing and branding and business development, because I think there's, number one, when you're in that craft or that skill set, it's. You have a specific job to obviously articulate and communicate what your brand is about. But one of the things that you touched on very. As soon as you introd yourself is the love for our industry. And if you're in that marketing and branding space, you get the. In my. For my opinion, the privilege of communicating the beauty of our industry. And I think no one does it better than someone that has, like, that knack for marketing and branding. It's just like such a beauty and art to it. So I'm super excited to see, like, how your brain works and how that you incorporate that, because it's a. It's a really beautiful skill set. Honestly, I love it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, look, let's face it, there's not out. Out in the world, like, outside of our industry, there's not really a lot of people advocating for. For us as an industry. There is some misconceptions there that have been, you know, they're. They're very old thinking, very old misconceptions. So it's up to us, you know, those of us who are out in. In the. In this space in a bit more of a public way, like you guys are to. To Be sharing the fact that this is actually a really innovative industry and an industry that has a lot of career progression opportunities, a lot of marketing opportunities, but people don't think that way. They, they look at us as a boring industry. And I love the fact that we can challenge that and we can change the way that people think about the industry. And, and I mean, what you're doing out here is doing just that. So it's really cool to see that. I know.

I think we all have an opportunity, a stage. Right, Kaden?

Yeah.

Yep, yep, 100%. Well, before we dive in, we have to do AI roasting. That's what Lisa's decided to do, which isn't a shocker to me. She's definitely gotta be an AI user for someone who embraces technology. So let's take it away.

Okay. All right, now I'm gonna read it because, you know, chatgpt was very verbose. Okay, here we go. Here we go. Lisa McQueen, the woman who took one of the world's most boring industries and somehow made it look like a lifestyle brand. Yes, she's proof that you can make cleaning feel cool. And no, she won't be stopping anytime soon. Basically, if Lisa had a personal brand tagline, it would be turning chaos into strategy and somehow making it look like it was her plan all along. She's the type who walks into a room and instantly sees 12 things that could be systemized, branded, monetized, and then turned into a keynote. Her idea of small talk, asking strangers what their tech stack looks like. Lisa once tried to take a break and accidentally created six part growth strategy in Bali Tree story. If there's a shiny new SaaS tool, she's already signed up, integrated it, and recommended it before you've even finished reading the landing page. She's the only person we know who took a traditionally boring, unsexy industry and made it look fun, sharp, pretty and kind of aspirational. See cleaning, but make it brand led. So yes, she's making the unsexy look polished, the tedious look smart, and the spreadsheet, she's probably got it color coded, branded, and somehow inspiring.

Oh my God. That is incredible. That is not a roast. That is a love letter. That feels like a love letter to me. I'm like, I love Lisa. Oh my God. That was so good. That was really good.

You can tell, you can tell by that that I, I clearly spend too much time on AI.

I mean, mine is the exact same. I love it.

It's. I've just out of the ones who have chosen to do the AI roast. I think you just taught me that. I think I need to send you the prompt to give to AI.

Yeah.

Because all of these are way too nice. I. What. What is it? The. The night of the Oscars level of, like, celebrities getting on stage and being like, hey, be a little mean.

Yeah, yeah. There's no. There is no mean in there. This is legit. What came out of AI when I asked it to.

I'm telling you, like, you have mastered AI so much that it's writing. The roast should have been a roast. It's actually a love letter. That's level of your, like, elevation is your AI turned into your rose turned into a love letter.

When I read it, I thought. I thought she. This sounds nice. This sounds really nice. I asked it to roast me and come up with.

And then you're almost scared to ask it again. You're like, I'm gonna leave it there, because I feel like that he did a good job.

Actually, Karina, I went back and I said, can you make it a bit spicy? And.

Oh, you did.

It wasn't. It wasn't any spicier than that, to be honest.

Oh, my gosh. So it really does love you a lot. I love it. All right, Kaden, let's get into it.

There was a. Here's an article on AI that my team sent out this morning, and they were talking about the personalization of AI, Talking about how it's. It's kind. It's like, reaffirming and, like, why it is. Why. Why do you have to call AI out to be like, hey, be more aggressive. Be more like, fight against me. Like, give me a different thing. And it said, well, in a lot of ways, it's repeating just, like, maybe more so human behavior in the sense that, like, we don't always just go out and disagree with someone and be mean in that way. And so anyways, this is kind of an Interesting article. AI's honesty is to the level of what hopefully the kosher ness of most human beings are towards each other.

Yeah.

Is. It's trying to replicate that. Anyways. It's a little funny. Well, we are going to dive in. Korina, take it away on events that are coming up for the committee and things that are happening, and then we'll dive into our topic.

All right. I met to go in the correct order the next couple events. I say that because last time when I did this, I was all over the place. And this time I'm going to do in.

I fly in On Sunday, this is when you can meet.

This is a social calendar of the week. Just kidding. Okay. The tech and innovation committee is hosting some really awesome sessions. Starting off with our very own superstar Kaden doing an unlocking tech secrets insights from three leading softwares with Tony from Smart Inspect and Matt from Orange qc. So they are putting down their weapons of battle and coming together and talking about all things quality control. So it's going to be a really, really great session. It is November 10th. That's Monday 1:45 to 2:45 in the north convention Islander A North convention center. And then the next day we have the clx. This year CLX topics is going to be data maturity and the relationship you have. We have incredible facilitators do check that out. And again, CLX is a cohort learning experience. Last but certainly not least, real world examples of AI. We just talked a little bit about that, but Kaden and Ryan, Sager, Vincent and Sanjaya are doing a session on AI in action. Real world tools for real time results. Kaden, you're gonna be everywhere and I am here for it. Good for you.

I am. I just. We usually, I'm, I'm usually at the booth and for our company and this year I was like, guys, you're on your own.

Yeah, good.

And, and we're also recording some hard refresh episodes. You know, it'll just constantly be in, in the educational experience and recording. I'll be all over the place this year.

You really will.

I did, I did get the privilege of being nominated to the top 30 emerging leaders.

That's right.

I voted for incorporate that into our schedule.

So yes, yes. I'm so proud of you. So well deserved. You are a bright light and I forget that you're so much younger than me, even though I feel like we're the same age. Dang it. I hate that about you.

I got us. I got asked today. I. So last year I told everyone I was 33 when I was really 32. And then when my birthday came around, my hairstylist told me this morning she was like, how old are you? And I was like, let's see, what year was I born? Oh, oh, I'm still 33 anyways. But yeah, it's a, it's a great honor to be a part of that group. You know, I don't know how long they've been doing it. At least a few years.

I think this is the second, second or third year they've been doing it.

Okay. So, so really, really cool thing and I hope it continues to grow, and for Issa. But today's topic, we are diving into technology again on how it meets client service. So last episode, we were talking about a similar topic. And honestly, we could talk about this topic probably a hundred times in a row with different individuals and glean so many insights. And I've said it often, it's not what's taught, it's what's caught. And so this is definitely one of those topics that's worth catching more details on again and again and again. So, Lisa, we're gonna dive into this, clearing the cash moment, the hard refresh of today, on where technology meets client service. And so I wanna start off with a similar conversation as last time on the expectation on how that's changed client experiences in commercial cleaning. You mentioned over 30 years in business there. There's a lot of depth and experience there that I wanna dive into on how these client expectations have evolved and changed over the years.

Great. I mean, I don't even know where to begin, guys, because this. This is such a juicy, meaty subject to go into for us. I think putting the client experience together with the technology has really meant that we've been able to add so much more value to. To our client experience. Like back in the day, back when I. When I joined the business and back when Hamish started it, I think the expectation level of clients was much lower. And as we've developed, as you know, our industry's developed and expectations have risen exponentially over. Over those years. Clients of today, they're so different to the clients of, say, five years ago. And that expectation, so meeting them, meeting our clients today where they are, has. Has really changed like that. They're not cool with you walking in with a, you know, a pad and a pen and. And doing things, you know, doing things. They want to see their suppliers using technology. They want to know that they can get a great, great report, like a great monthly report from you that's accurate, that can tell them stuff like information that they can use, especially for a facility manager. So what we're. What we're seeing is there's a much more greater demand today for things like monthly reports and just reporting overall than what we would have been doing, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago even. And it's become one of those things that sales, the sales team are really, you know, they're out there and they're talking to customers or prospects every day. And this is what they're hearing. This is what they're hearing that they want to be able to Work with a company that is as advanced as, or maybe not as advanced, depending on the company that you're talking about, obviously. But they want to know that they're working with an organization and supplier who has the capability of keeping track of everything first and foremost. And also. Sorry, Karina.

No, I was just gonna, I think to your point, like, I think it provides depth, right? Like the relationship, what you're providing is more depth, that gives it more substance, more value, obviously. But you're essentially expanding past a surface level relationship into a much deeper strategic relationship with the use of data or with the use of technology, is what I'm. I'm understanding.

That's right. That's right. And in the past, you know, a lot of clients would, they'd be wondering, they'd wonder when did the cleaners arrive, when did they leave? Because maybe something's happened or maybe it hasn't happened and they want to, you know, they want to be able to check. So having, having the availability of this data, it just means that, that the transparency on the service becomes so easy to provide, so seamless to provide that they don't have to second guess. And certainly when, and probably there'll be some cleaning business owners who will hear this and be nodding along, but when you have a new client and you bring a new client on board, sometimes there can be a bit of that buyer's remorse. Because the person that brought you on board, maybe they've been burned before and they hope that they've done enough due diligence that they've chose in a firm that is going to be better than who they had in the past. But there is often that feeling of, oh, I'm not sure, I'm not sure. So by having, using technology, and this is certainly how we use it as, as a way to bridge that gap between the possibility of feeling a bit of bias remorse and the reality of I can relax because these people have got it. They, they know what they're doing in that instance. It's a really powerful thing. Feel really powerful. 100%.

Yeah. One of the things I just thought of was a, as you were speaking, Lisa, this, one of the things you talked about was, was transparency. I would love if you had a story around how technology helped improve transparency with a client. Like, what, what was the before and after in the relationship? Like, was there a bottom line that it did in revenue for you guys? Did. Were you able to expand, like any stories there you can share about, about this?

Yeah, definitely one of them. We use swept. I know you've had Michelle on the show, so I know she's a. Yeah. Friend of the show. Friend of you guys. So we use swept and when we first implemented swept into the business, and this is going back a few years by the way, we were, I think we were the first business in Australia to put swept into our organization. So we implemented it and we didn't have a champion behind it. So we'd be getting people to log in and do their thing, you know, do all the things that you're supposed to be doing. Yeah, but the more important part of having that technology was actually having the reporting being done on a daily basis. So beforehand we would just provide those reports if a customer asked for them. And you know, we had a situation where we were doing multi site and we, they knew that we had the reporting and everything. And again, remember, this is early days, but we weren't, we weren't automatically sending out reports to them. We just thought if they need a report they'll let us know and we can, we can get it out to them. Well, they did need a report, but it hadn't been communicated and we hadn't asked the right question. So it was absolutely on us. We came so dangerously close to losing that client because they had, because it was multi side. They were, there were so many stakeholders involved. So, so one site would love you, the other site would be ambivalent about you and you know, everything in between. Once we, once we kind of went to the cliff edge of losing this contract and realized the importance of, you know, being able to provide that daily. It changed everything. We retained the client. We still have that client today by the way. We retained them and we were able to show them. Oh, there was, you know, there was a misclan. So we, we were telling them before they even noticed that something had happened or that something had been missed or something was needed. You know, we would, we would be able to say to them, hey, there's a plumbing issue on level four. So it really helped to do that. But the only way that you can do that is to know that you, it's not enough just to have that tech. You actually have to have someone using it every day and reporting on it and communicating it back out into your customers.

And I think even like if you talk about the depth of the relationship, how we started there, you're talking about how it starts with accountability and transparency which ultimately led to a proactive approach to service the members. Right. And that I love about it because you start to get more granular, you start to get more strategic to how you serve. And that's one of the things that I, I always try, try to challenge people in terms of technologies. Data, if it's static, it serves no purpose. So if you have a dynamic relationship with it, meaning you're actively looking at the information and trying to see ways that you can change your strategy, serve better, communicate better, that ultimately kind of like elevates you from a, a user's perspective. Right? Like you can start to see the world a little bit differently. And that's kind of what I was thinking about as you were talking too. I'm like, that's awesome. That's exactly where you want to be, right?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, having the data in there is, is one thing, but if you don't, if you don't use it for anything, it is, it's, it's, it's almost useless. So it's helped us too when we've been in rebidding situations. If we've gone, the customer has gone back out to tender. We've just been through this in the last month actually, and we're able to run a report. We know, we know precisely down to the last minute how long it takes to get that site looking great. So when we're doing a rebid, we know well, okay, we think we can make a saving for the customer here. We think we can find an innovation for the customer there. So we use it to not only report on exceptions of, you know, whatever exception happened overnight, but we also use it for that, that type of forward planning and rebidding strategy as well, which helps, helps clients get, you know, squeeze a bit more out of their budget if they need to. Or it helps us show them where we can maybe pull back a little here but add a little there. And that's something that facilities managers, they love that because that is so granular, that information that they often don't have that at their fingertips, but we are able to provide it to them. I think that's what.

Okay, so I wanted to ask a follow up question. You mentioned initially starting with Swept, and then you talked about like when it took someone's dedication to like be in it every day. And I think this is such a critical piece. This is all over the AI world right now. Everyone's like, what right tool do I use? Do I use. Well, I want to go build my own connections and use AI. Do I use replit? Do I use lovable? Do I use curse? Like it doesn't matter because what you just described is everyone's Real problem, which is choosing and then just acting like just go actually make it not shelfware. And what I love about that is because what you guys did is like, it wasn't about the tool, it was about we have to get to this outcome of what we're, we're striving to achieve. So if anyone's listening and Lisa, you could probably even talk about your, your choice in switching CRM is a big deal. When you went to Salesforce and I remember you sharing that story on LinkedIn, like, these are, these are major decisions, but decision fatigue is real. And so if like for our audience of like, oh, what tech, new technology do I use? Yeah, that matters. But more so it's like, what's my implementation plan? And do I have someone committed to actually go and make things happen with the tool I have chosen? To me that was just like the gold nugget. I hope everyone caught that from. That is decide and then go all in. Go figure out every single button it can do.

Absolutely. Because if you don't do that, you will be one of the people who says, I got that CRM or I got that SaaS, you know, tech. But it didn't work for me. And the reason it didn't work for you is that, you know, you can be interested in it or you can be committed to it. You have to be committed to it in order to bend it to your will. And I think that's a, you know, it's a really important piece of the strategy. And you know, implementing any CRM, any tech into your business, it is, it is part of the strategy. Right, because you're bringing it in so that it can, it can help you, maybe save time, it can improve things, whatever. But if you don't, if you don't commit to being a champion of it or having a champion within the business, I think that you are, you are really going to be selling yourself short and you'll never achieve what you probably could achieve. It's hard, you know, and you have to, in this world, you really do have to choose your hard. Right. Like Salesforce is not easy to master. I don't think any of them are initially. And if you, but, but if you have a champion there, someone working alongside you, someone who's interested enough to push the limit on it and ask the questions and you know, do do things like that, then you can really get so much benefit, so much value out of, out of your tech stack. And it's. Well, you know, we've always been all in. Like, we, we we're going into it. We're going all in on it.

Well, that's what I was thinking. Like, for me, we're talking about two things here. One is platform optimization and being committed to really maximizing a software. The other is having a stakeholder and ambassador. Can that person be the same thing? Absolutely. But I think that's where a lot of organizations get it wrong in terms of if you don't have someone that is your advocate or your leader or your brand ambassador of your drive to be innovative and kind of like your tech person in, to put it very simply, then it's very difficult to carry out the mission of technology because technology is not a siloed thing. It needs to be. It's a seed. It needs to be cultivated, it needs to be watered, supported. It needs to be communicated internally and externally. So if you don't have that one person or department or something that rallies everyone together, it oftentimes falls short because no one is nurturing this thing that needs to be nurtured.

And to that point too, Karina, it's important if you, if you're bringing a new, you know, a new CRM or something new into your tech stack to manage the change management inside of the business becomes crucial. So it's fine for leadership to say, oh, we're going to, we're going to bring Salesforce into the, into the business, that's great. But you can't expect your people, if they've come from keep, which is what we did, they've come from keep, which is a much, much, much simpler, smaller system. I couldn't possibly expect the team to just jump on it and know what to do. It took us, it took us months to really change, manage it into our everyday. And, and I think you need to understand that, yes, as a, as a business owner, as a leader, yes, you are going to be paying for a CRM that you're not getting much value out of in the early days. If you understand that and accept that and just take that as part of the journey of, you know, adapting a new system, then it makes it a lot easier on your people. It also makes it a lot easier when you have to explain it to the cfo.

Yes.

That this is how it has to be done. And certainly from our perspective at Clean Corp, we came from a highly, highly automated organization. Like, we literally systemized everything from an internal perspective and external perspective with.

That's amazing.

Yeah. Everything that we did had been automated, you know, like everything. So then we had to take that and recreate that into a system like Salesforce. Now you can imagine the enormity of that. We just, we simply couldn't do it overnight and took a long time. And actually in the process of doing that we found that there were things that hey, Salesforce does this really elegantly, more elegantly than what we had over here. So you know, there's definite upside too. But then you managing that downside where people go, oh, but that other system, it was so easier. It was this or that. So you've got to manage that and make it, you know, that, that kind of nagging feeling from people who are used to this system and don't really want to adapt.

Yes. Talk about, I mean talk about emotional intelligence though, right? Like that's something when the change management that, when Kate and I talk about it a lot because that's happened to me multiple times now, being in the consultant space and coming in and working with organization in terms of tech stack and you know, big projects. And I always say the culture piece is really critical because it's a change management and you're talking about emotions that you're talking about. People are set in their patterns, their behaviors and when you introduce a technology or change something, people get very protective and they get very nervous. And so understanding emotional intelligence in a change management or any new application is super critical. And people don't oftentimes realize how big of a deal it really is to the people when you change a product.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's, it's huge. Like we, we brought in last year as part of our reporting process that I spoke about earlier. It takes a long time for us to, especially for big multi site organizations, it takes a long time to pull together a monthly report. It's just not, it's just not as simple as a few buttons and it's done because there's a lot involved in it anyway. So we would get to each month, the end of each month, it was monthly reporting time for, you know, for our customers. And I was noticing that there was, was a lack of energy, if I put it that way around getting this done, I'm putting that nicely. That was like, oh God, it's monthly report time. So, so because we love tech, I love tech. So we started thinking, okay, what can we do? What can we implement around that that will elevate what our output is and what we can offer our customers. But more, more importantly in this instance, what we could offer our internal customers, our employees in terms of not having to do as much work to get these reports out. So we we developed a bot to, to put like to go into our different software and pull out. That's so cool.

I know.

It's so cool.

You are light years ahead. Holy smokes. That's awesome.

So, so the bot has its own logins for our. Each of, you know, each of the softwares that it needs and then it goes in, it pulls what it needs from each of the, you know, each of the stuff from Salesforce, from Swept from Zero, pulls it all in together and then puts it together into our PowerPoint presentation. And then that gets sent over to the national operations manager and the customer service manager who's responsible for that customer. They check it and verify like the bot didn't get anything wrong and then it's done and off it goes. It has saved like days of work, days of work for the teams. You know, there's things like that that if you're scared to try it, then you'll be stuck doing it the old way, the slow way.

Yes.

The huge payoff here was, look, of course it was the speed of, you know, like just being faster and being able to get it out faster. But the big payoff was my team who had been responsible for putting these reports together, could now actually spend time doing things in their roles that they wanted to do right rather than this labor intensive job that they had been doing. So it was, it was just a huge win. It was a huge win.

Well, the, the coolest part about that, and this is like the subtle message, I'm going to pull this out for all of our listeners. Guys. Lisa was doing it manually before. So many people just want to go straight to the automation and magically it appears you gotta put the work in before to be like, hey, we understand this process very clearly. Then it was so much easier to be like, we can't keep doing it in this manual way before. But now it was much clearer for you guys to be like, hey, you know what? This is how we can automate. We're going to go build a bot that can go in each of these systems. But you did the work. So many people are afraid to do the work because of the time and energy it takes. But once you do it, clarity comes into the picture that says, hey, now that we've got this down manually, I've. I'm thinking I'm seeing a way to automate this. And you, obviously, you guys are master crafters at creating that. That's really cool.

I know. I was going to say, I think you need to teach a masterclass on this. Lisa Because I'm so in, I'm so interested now in this bot situation and I'm like. And so when we're manifesting the podcast for Lisa, she told us she's going to do a podcast. So I'm very, very intrigued for your first podcast because I think that there's a lot for you, Lisa, to talk about. I'm so, I want to like shadow you for a day and get all the behind scenes bot automation. Can you even imagine where you're, where they're at right now? Kaden? Like that. When did you guys go through the bot?

When was this? In October, October last year?

Yeah.

Okay.

Cause I can't even imagine what you guys are have going on right now.

It's awesome. It's so awesome. You know, here's the thing. People who know me well, they would, they, they've heard me say, oh, I'm terrible at maths. Okay, I'm terrible at math. I don't know, I'm, I'm awful with numbers. I'm terrible at maths. I can't do it. I hear, because I'm on LinkedIn a lot, obviously I hear from a lot of cleaning business owners in over there and people will send me messages, say, what should I do? How should I do this? I'm not any good at tech. I hear that all the time. I'm no good at tech. And I honestly, I'm no good at maths, but I can still run a company. Like, the thing is you can get good at things, right? You can get good at things. And if you keep telling your things, I'm no good at tech, well, guess what? You'll never, you'll, you'll never, you'll never get over that bridge, right? So I think that a lot of people need to put that self limiting belief away and just be a little bit kind and say, okay, well I don't know everything I need to know yet about it, but if I just start, I'm going to know more next week than what I do this week. And that's how you build and grow. So all those years ago when we started with the Keep CRM system, I had no idea what I was doing. Zero. And so everybody has to start from, you know, everyone has to start from zero. That's just how this works. So if you're, if you're listening and you're thinking about it, just, just, just get out there and try it.

I love that. And, and starting from zero means you don't go from 10 as the next number one. One's the next number, everyone. I'm not good at math either, but I know one is after zero. So, you know the idea that you're using multiple softwares to run your business and then you say, hey, we're manually pulling things from different software because we have a client experience that we're trying to level up this expectation. We were doing it manually. Now you're coming in, like, how long has it been on this revolution of the chat bot? How long did it take to implement and pull that and pull the pieces together for you?

It took us about six months because it was built specifically for us. It's not something out of a box. Right. So it was, it was built and developed precisely to what we needed. And there were, there were, I think there were three iterations. The first one was. Yeah, didn't work. So, you know, I mean, like, that's the thing. You, you also have to invest. It's not cheap to do stuff like this, but, you know, it, it isn't. But the thing is that the payoff, we're going to have the payoff for years to come. So it, it was definitely worth the investment. But yeah, it, it took about six months to get it right. And, and then, you know, every now and again there's a little bit of tweaking that goes on. And if we, if we have a, a new customer, customer come in, perhaps they need us to report on something that we're not reporting on now, then we would need to do a little tweak there to, to make sure we bring that, that extra data in. But it's, you know, like, it's something that. I think that this is how the world is moving ahead. When we, when we put the bot, you know, the idea, when I put the bot, the idea of the bot to the team, I didn't have any pushback from the team, from people thinking, oh, gosh, I'm going to lose my job. Because again, the change management that, that goes into adapting anything within the business is. Okay, let me, let me answer all your questions. Let me give you the reason. Like, you can't see it here, but over there is a huge whiteboard with, you know, with our strategic plan ideas. And, you know, about two years ago, that bot was sitting on that, on that very same board over there. So, you know, these ideas don't just happen like that. There's a plan, there's a change management, and then there's a process to getting it happening.

Those were the gold nuggets.

There was a lot, all three of those. I hope there was.

Yeah, I mean the, this is like one where someone has to go back to this masterclass of what Lisa is teaching here. It's, it's one step at a time and if, if there's one thing. Cause we, we gotta wrap up. But if there's one thing that I would hope people just heard is that the long term payoff is worth it in an industry that is so reactive to our customers needs. And you've got to, you've got to, it's not going to magically happen. You have to carve out time to make these investments regardless of what you're using, regardless of the technology, whether you're building from scratch. Because the long term payoff, you get to, you know, look at Lisa and be like, gosh, I wish I could just accomplish what she put in the work.

Well, exactly, the work. That's what I was going to say too. Like an idea is just an idea, but you have to be able to execute. And that's like as Lisa as you're talking, I'm like, man, I bet she can execute better than most of us because it's, it's very hard and everybody has great ideas, but you have to be able to take it from its, from its idea origin, conceptualize it, then execute it and maintain it. And that's very, very difficult to do unless you're, you're disciplined and disciplined. And consistency is a major variable when you're talking about these things. Cause it has to be systematic in your own way. Like we're all different in the way we're wired, but you have to have a plan and you have to be consistent.

Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. And also, I mean there, there is the element of being able to say, yeah, we did it, we started something and we finished it. Having unfinished business, whether that's with your text stack or anything else, it doesn't.

Sit right with me.

I like to make sure that we get, we get to where we need to go and we have, you know, we're meeting all the time. Especially as we're going through that implementation process. It is, it is a fully planned out rollout. No matter what aspect of it you're talking about. We're not just flying by the seat of our pants. We're planning for it. We're planning with each other to make sure it gets there. And then we celebrate A guides. And by the way, I'm sitting here looking over here, there is glitter and like sparkles all over the floor because we do, we actually do celebrate. So we just finished a big tender and so we celebrated it. But when we get a plan in place like it, like the tech plan or the bot or whatever, we celebrate when we hit that goal, you know, it's a little pat on the back for all of us that we got there.

I love it. You have to celebrate those milestones in progression because if you don't stop, then they're just going to get old and all of a sudden that that isn't recognized. But everyone, that was an incredible discussion. You have been nailed it a business masterclass here. So, Lisa, thank you so much for the time and the energy in preparing for today's episode to share your insights. And that's a wrap on today's episode of Hard Refresh. Thanks everyone for joining. And the last plug. I will say Lisa is a huge, consistent advocate for the cleaning industry on social media. Worth a follow. Free free advice. Content constantly being poured out. Her whole heart and soul is out there on LinkedIn. So go give her a follow on LinkedIn. You'll be greatly rewarded by the content she produces. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. Thank you, guys.