Ep 64 Next Level Franchising w Ron Holt | Mike Up In Your Business #MUIYB

It's a great opening line. I love the lack of structure. I want to start right in the middle of your story. The fact that you are letting your customers determine the salary of the people that work for you is unheard of. I mean, just tell me about that.

Yeah. So it started like a lot of things from failure. We, yeah, I just couldn't get people to care. People meaning the employees that worked for us at the time. I, the owner, cared a lot. Yeah, I couldn't get anyone else to really care. And I was, when I look back on the things, it should have been so clear to me I was doing everything wrong. You know, all the work's out in the field, there's no quality control department, we're hiring blue-collar employees who don't necessarily have the same drive or even vision that I, that I did as an owner. So everything was broken. So why should I have expected it to work? Yeah, it took, it took a lot of self-discovery. It took a lot of reading. Honestly, one of my favorite books is Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Yeah. And that helped spawn a lot of ideas. But one day I asked myself, why don't people care like me? And the answer was pretty, pretty clear because they don't own the thing. And so I said, why don't I simulate ownership. And that's sort of how it all started.

I gotcha. So was Two Maids and a Mop at that point, was it a franchise or was it still run under corporate?

We were, we were very young at that time. We had one location. So, okay. Yeah, I was still in the weeds of everything.

That's amazing. So right from the beginning, Ron, you decided on this new compensation strategy?

Well, not literally from the beginning, but during the first 12 months of operations. Yeah.

Okay, so, so tell me how that was received by your employees.

So, so just completely out of nowhere, I showed up. We have this thing we call a morning meeting. We still have them today. And I had a morning meeting and I told them everything. I said, I've read this book about, you know, purple cows and all these problems, all these failures, the big vision where we're going. And as a result, today's the first day of the rest of everyone's lives here. They were like, yeah, let's do this, let's, let's change our lives together. And I said, I'm now going to allow customers to determine your paycheck. They didn't, they didn't necessarily get the same rah-rah reaction, but yeah, that, that, that was a tough morning. Actually lost a few people. Um, there were enough people that stuck around that we could build from. Uh, the culture started to change very slowly but surely. Uh, people's paychecks actually increased because we, one, we got busier. So volume produced a larger share of the revenue. And then, and then two, people really understood that if they wanted to determine, if they wanted to make more money, then just make the customer happy. Forget making Ron happy, make the customer happy.

I love it. And did, did the people that left, they should have left anyway, right? If they weren't motivated by that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, gosh, it feels like 200 years ago. Um, but yeah, it was, it, it was, it was really intriguing to see what the initial reactions were. There were some people who were like, let's give this guy a shot, he's a little crazy, but let's give it a shot. And others said, this guy's crazy, that's why I'm not giving him a shot, you know. But yeah, enough people believed to stick around. I always kind of point back to those days like almost like building an army. I was the general, had a lot of wild, crazy ideas, but I needed an army to really push forward. I needed a bunch of soldiers. And so there was, there were a few people, believe it or not, there was one person in that room that was almost 18. Well, yeah, it was almost 18 years ago. There's one person in that room that's still with us today. She still works at Two Maids, travels the country, helps franchise owners everywhere. Wow.

Yeah, that's amazing. So let's jump back to day one. What motivated you to start Two Maids and a Mop?

Well, so that's a fun story. I'd never cleaned a house before. Okay. Still hasn't.

I know you know Fred DeLuca or you met with him, but you know, before he passed, obviously. But I remember he said he never made a sandwich before until he opened his first location.

That's right.

Sounds like the same circumstance.

Yeah. So I was working inside a laboratory. I had this nerdy background and I thought I was going to be like a career nerd. And that's, that was life until one day I'm hearing my supervisors, which I also thought were career nerds, talk about Wall Street and finance and all these big, you know, big things. And I'm like, I want to do that too. And so I, for some reason, just totally went nerd out on everything entrepreneurship because it all seemed a lot more exciting than testing lab specimens. And so I made a switch internally that at some point I was going to start a business. Didn't know it was going to be a cleaning business, certainly didn't know it was going to be a residential cleaning business like it is today, but I knew it was going to be a business. And so it took me a while to raise the capital to get there. There's a whole story there if you want to hear that down the road. Um, but to raise the capital, I needed time. And during that time, I matured as a person, um, as a, as a leader, and kind of self-discovered where I wanted to find myself. And there's 3 kind of pivotal things that happened during that time where I was raising capital, meaning saving money. It's a fancy way to say I saved money. It is. One, I actually stole this from the lab itself. So I didn't go to business school. So all these terms that I was learning from all these books I was reading were all foreign subjects to me. And so I was totally open-minded to anything, Professor hadn't pushed me in a different, you know, direction or whatever. And so I, um, I read about this thing called recurring revenue, and I said, hey, I think, I think we have that in the lab. You know, we were only getting a few, um, specimens a day, but they were always from the same people, yet the business was growing, it was thriving. And I'm like, I always thought they need more customers, you know, how can they just survive off 24 customers, right? It turns out they had 24 customers, they were the same 24 people were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with this particular laboratory. So it was like the perfect business model. And so that was number one, this sort of phase one at least, was to know that I wanted to be in business that had recurring revenue inside of it. Two, inside the lab as well, I learned this, that it's really important to be different, to be very unique. I was inside this lab, right? And there were two particular labs in North America, one in Atlanta, one in Chicago. And if you needed this particular type of test, there was only 2 places to send the test to. And so I— part of that was because the barrier to entry was very high. It was a very high capital investment. So I was very naive, probably still a little naive to this day, but I was naive enough to think I could build a business and be inside of an industry that also had that type of situation, that I could find a weakness, expose it, and then become like one of the only go-tos. I wanted to be a category of one, basically. And home services, you know, consumer service specifically, seemed pretty ripe to me. So it had recurring revenue inside of it, so that was check number one. Home services seemed very ripe because most of the folks inside the home services space were doing this on the side, you know, on the weekend. They wanted their 12 homes and that was it. And so I felt like I could build that category one. And then finally, again, a very naive thought again here. I wanted to be in front of something. I didn't want to be on top of the wave or behind the wave. I wanted to be in front of something. And so when I looked across the home services space, I'd already seen the lawn service signs in the front yard. So I knew that space was locked up. I already saw the carpenter, you know, some of the home services industries didn't necessarily have recurring revenue. Home cleaning, house cleaning looked to be extremely fragmented. And there was one article I read, an article many, many years ago now, 20+ years ago, that stated that 95% of the industry was operated by mom-and-pop operators. So, you know, these, you know, people who just clean 4 or 5 homes a week and call it a business. So I said, gosh, you know, there's the opportunity. I don't know how to clean a house and don't necessarily want to know how to clean a house, but the demand I know is there. And I feel like it's even more is coming because if all these people are hiring maid services to clean their home, but the services being provided by this fragmented, um, you know, space, then I could come in here and create something that was very different and unique, be that category of one, and hopefully take over the industry. So that, that was the story behind it.

I love it. Is that a lead indicator of, uh, being in front of the wave, is that the industry's fragmented?

For me, it is. Uh, you know, we, we— that's why I love home services to this day. Um, home services, you know, the word implies that it's not a business. It's the home. Business, they're supposed to be two separate things. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, home services in general, in some cases, are literally operated out of the home. And typically, when that occurs, what I've seen is that a lot of the home service operators don't treat the business like it's a true business. And that creates opportunity for people like us because we can look at it completely different. We don't think about the trade here, you know. We, we think we're very good at cleaning. We have the best products, the best chemicals, but that's not what we focus our time on here, and we never have. In the 18 years we've been open, everything we've really focused on has been almost, you know, cleaning's probably been secondary to everything else— the experience, the technology that we implement inside the business. So yeah, I think it's, for, for the home service industry, it's absolutely a leading indicator.

I'm curious about how you've been able to staff your business. And to give you a little context, I spoke with a woman named Mary Miller. She's the founder of Jankoa. They do janitorial services, 600 janitors in the corporate world. And I remember her saying to me, she goes, Mike, no one's ever woke up one day and said, I want to be a janitor one day. But she goes, this is a vehicle to achieve certain dreams and outcomes you have in your life. I assume this industry by definition is very transient, high turnover. How do you recruit? How do you build such a large organization like you have?

Well, you know, I'm going to pretend we're perfect and tell you all these solutions. And but the truth is, we're not, you know, and so we're always trying to improve, always trying to get better. You know, we're living through really unprecedented times. I've been in the industry for 18-plus years now, and it's never been more difficult right now to hire someone in the blue-collar world. It's very, very tough. Yet the ironic part is demand has never been stronger. So interesting, yeah, consumer demand just skyrocketing like we've never seen before. People who've never hired us before are hiring us now to clean their home, but it's very, very difficult to find someone that wants to really work and do this for a living. And so you, you mentioned Mary Miller. I actually, you know, had the, the pleasure of reading the Dream Manager book a few years ago.

That's right, she's, yeah, she's featured.

Yeah, yeah. And said I, I could do it too, you know, like I'm again naive. I read a book and go, ah, British. And so I read the book. I'm like, gosh, that's what we're going to do. At the time, we had about 1,000 people working across the network. And I said, in our world, we're franchising. So it's several, in our case, 87 franchises operated by small business owners in whatever market they're in. And so it's not as simple as me standing on a podium and saying, let's go. I got to get 87 people to believe in it, and then we go. And so I stood in front of a podium to our 87 franchisees, and I said, I've read this book. Um, usually when I say that in our, in our world, people roll their eyes and they go, gosh, what do you got now? You know, and, but everyone loved it. You know, everyone fell in love with it. Who doesn't? You know, the idea of helping someone chase their personal dreams, providing some type of spark to their life that they've never really experienced before, all that sounds great. Um, the most evil person in the world wants to see a smile every now and then, you know. So, you know, we, we had a lot of buy-in The problem has been really getting the work required to help someone chase the dream has been very difficult because it's a real investment. It's not usually a monetary investment. It's certainly a time investment. And so in our case, again, we need 87 different people doing that and we haven't succeeded yet. However, we have had a few champions that have done it. We've done a lot of things internally to help people chase their dreams. We actually helped someone leave our company The franchisee called me and go, hey, I got good news and bad news. I helped someone chase their dream. I said, what was the dream, by the way? They said they wanted to be a manager. They wanted to lead people and they didn't really have the opportunity at Two Maids and a Mop in that particular market. And so we looked across, you know, the landscape there locally. I reached into my Rolodex and I found someone that was searching for someone with this particular background, and I got her a job. And so this person has a job, but unfortunately, it's not with me. But it's a great story. And that person also has brought other people to our company as well. So there's a lot of secondary returns we get from that. But to answer your question directly, I guess, I mean, one, there's been a lot of technology improvements with us. In the old days, we pretty much like everyone else, you put an ad in the Sunday paper.

Right.

And you hope for someone to call you. In our case, a lot of people called us, uh, and we interviewed them and hired them. You know, it was that simple. And it, it was not real hard, honestly, to hire. It's harder to hire now. So what we've done now, since we're competing with so many other opportunities, we have an internal software solution that, number one, sort of scripts the hiring process. Not only scripts the hiring process, but actually numerically grades every single job applicant because they're going to go through different phases There's going to be some surveys they take. There's going to be some phone interviews they go through. Eventually, obviously, face-to-face or either a Zoom interview based on where we are with the pandemic. And then from that, we have a grading system. It's literally 0 to 100. And then that number tells us who we should hire. So we're not just hiring someone because it's, you know, my nephew's sister. It's because she rated 98 and the other person was 94. So that's probably the biggest step that we've taken over the years.

I love it. With that grading system, what's been the benefits?

Well, I mean, the biggest is now whether we're in Columbus, Ohio, or Atlanta, Georgia, we know exactly if we can pull it, if we can open that particular piece of technology that we own, we can go in and see if they're hiring the right people. No one's forcing anyone to hire the 98 over the 94. It's just, you know, you would think that would happen. And so if we take a dive, when someone says, hey, gosh, guys, help me, we're having some real issues here with turnover, morale's low, whatever, then we look at who they're hiring. And then if we see some all-star candidates that have been left behind, we ask questions. Well, what's the decision-making here? Typically, they're emotional in some manner. Like, totally, right? You know, she had—

I like him.

Yeah, pretty much. And so we said, well, how about we follow this system? Let's follow the system, give it a chance. And then if we give it a chance and we don't have success, then we can talk about why you're experiencing failure. But you're sabotaging yourself, in our opinion, if you, if you choose not to follow that process. That's what franchising is all about, is process. You know, it's— it gets a lot of publicity for some fun things, you know, like the product that someone sells or the service that someone sells. But typically it's not, it's not that sexy. It's all about system and process.

So let's talk about franchise, because I know when you started out, you had no vision, no plan of being a franchise. Then one day, a switch flips.

So, yeah. So again, huge reader. So I had a chance to read a book about the Kinkos story. Paul Orfalea. I always mispronounce it. Orfalea. Orfalea. Yeah. Yeah.

He was dyslexic or something.

Yeah, absolutely. He believed that opening different stores and having a piece of equity in each one of those stores was, was the right recipe. And I'm very gullible, so I believed him. And I had already had a poor experience meeting with other franchisees in the, in the cleaning world. In fact, um, so the original store was in Pensacola, Florida. We're actually based in Birmingham, Alabama now. And Pensacola, Florida, you may or may not know this, is on Interstate 10. And Interstate 10 connects Jacksonville, Florida to San Diego, California. So you can literally see the country if you hit I-10. So I wanted to meet other people that own cleaning business owners. So I hit I-10 and I headed west and I assumed I was going to make it to San Diego. I made it to Houston before I said, I'm turning around. But I stopped off in all these different communities and this shows my age, but I would go to a hotel, go to the lobby, pull out a Yellow Page directory. And the guys that had the biggest ad, the largest, you know, paid ad, I would call and say, hey, I'm in town, can I hang out with you? They all said yes. Wow.

Did they know that you were starting a competing business?

Yeah, well, I said, hey, I'm in Pensacola, you know, I'm this little nobody, and so— smart— you're in San Antonio, you know, so can, can you help me out? Um, and so anyway, I, I hung out with a lot of these guys. Some of them were independents. They were all doing great. Back in those days, if you had a big ad, that means you were doing really well. And so they all were doing very well, usually multimillion-dollar stores. And we call them stores in this industry. But all the franchises that were doing well ironically hated, like, literally hated their franchisor. And so I said, I don't want to be in a business where things are going well and there's success, but there's a combative relationship with the two business partners. And so I read Paul's book about Kinkos. I experienced the negative sentiment I get with the franchisees in this industry. And I say, not for me. Franchise is terrible. And then I happened to run into Paul, or almost said Paul Orfalea again, but I had a chance to meet Fred DeLuca. And so Fred, as you said earlier, is the founder of Subway. And I don't know if I shared this story with you before, but how I met him.

No, I don't remember. Tell me.

So I'm in this hotel lobby in Vegas, and, you know, there's a seminar going on in the background. And, um, you know, I love conferences. Some of the keynotes— don't get mad at me— but the keynotes, sometimes, you know, I want to go do something real. I want to get my hands dirty. And so I go out in the back. I'm like, I'm checking. I'm going to check some email. This was back before you could pull up your phone. You you had to open the desktop to read email. And so I'm out in the back and I'm checking email, and this— and I'm at a table, one of those big tables, and nobody's there. And I'm like, that's it, that's my table. And this guy sits across the table from me, and I'm like, man, come on. And he starts talking and chatting. He's like, what do you do? At the time we had 12 stores, um, and we were exploring the idea of franchising. But in fact, that was the conference, but I wasn't sold. I mean, I had not made the decision at that time. And but I was pretty proud of myself, you know. We had 12 stores. We had been named the fastest growing cleaning company in America by Inc. magazine at the time. And I thought things were, were on top of the world, you know. And so I start bragging, and, you know, I'm from South Georgia, and so South Georgia guys always want to return the favor, you know, got to be gentlemen. So, um, I almost begrudgingly said, so what do you do? Um, she goes, I started Subway, you know, and have 42,000 locations. Yeah, yeah, okay. I pushed the desktop down. I said, let's, let's talk, you know. And He, uh, he became a mentor to me. We talked a lot by phone over the course of the next year. It was about a year later where he actually passed, about a year and a half later. But during that time when he was healthy, we talked a lot about franchising. And he taught, he taught me that a franchisor and a franchisee can not only be successful together financially, but also as a partner as well, you know. So he taught me what a good, solid franchisor could be. And at that point, you know, not only was he a great franchisor, he was the largest franchisor in the world, you know? So I said, I gotta believe. And that's what I did. I just believed that we could build a different type of franchise system. Again, where it's not just about the money making, but it's also about the personal relationship can be strong as well. And we went all in and we ditched all the corporate stores, converted those into franchises, and still have 2 corporate locations, one in Birmingham here locally, and then one in Austin, Texas., and then everything else is a franchise now. And that's, that's been really, of all the things I've done in life, you know, pay for performance plan we talked about earlier is really good. I mean, there's been so many really fun things that, that's happened over my life, but franchising was the best decision I've ever made. I'm so mad at myself for not, uh, not doing it earlier.

Yeah, but maybe it was necessary. Maybe you had to go through that phase to really understand the perspectives of those other people. So, so what did Fred tell you? What did you learn that makes a successful partnership with franchising?

Oh my gosh. I mean, it's I don't have an MBA, but just talking to Fred probably gave me an MBA in business in general. So the main thing he taught me was that over time, I can still remember, I tell this to our franchisees all the time and they like, yeah, whatever, we've heard this 400 times. So the job that he felt he had, and when you think about Fred DeLuca and Subway, you think they got everything right. There's nothing wrong with that business. Right. It seems that way. It's just this American dream come true. When he would talk to me, he would talk about all the failures he's made in life. It was so crazy because I'm like, what? You got everything right. And so the biggest failure he said that he experienced as a franchisor was over time he allowed the business model to transform itself into something completely different. They still sold sandwiches, you know, but in the old, old days when he first started franchising the model, the bottom line for a Subway just one-unit store was super strong. Like, it could transform people's lives. It couldn't just feed a family. It could— you could live the American dream by just owning one Subway. But over time, franchisees said, well, you know, instead of us manually doing this, we can automate it here. I'm a huge fan of automation, so I'm not suggesting not to use your hands for everything. But life got easier and easier and easier and easier for his franchisees. The problem is the bottom line got smaller and smaller and smaller. Interesting. Yeah. And so, you know, it got to a point where a Subway franchisee didn't have to do anything. They didn't have to show up. They didn't have to monitor anything. They could open up a screen and they could see all the KPIs for the day. They can make decisions based on that data and then, you know, push buttons to solve those problems, which again, life's very easy. But the bottom line was a lot different today versus way back in the day. So he said, Basically protect the bottom line. That's your job as the leader. Obviously you want to make your franchisee's life easier, but don't make it too easy because you don't want someone 20 years from now saying, why are my margins 5% instead of 25% like they were 20 years ago?

Yeah, it sounds like it was just kind of— it's getting chipped away over time. I got to put a frog in boiling water versus put them in cold water and make it go hot.

Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, that's interesting. But, but what about the relationships? Because, you know, you're traveling Route 10 there and people are like, oh, the franchisor is a jerk. Your franchisees love you.

Like, so yeah, so he, he told me, I never really thought about it until he said this to me. He said, you know, you make, you're not going to make any money from a franchisee when they need you. You're going to make a bunch of money with a franchisee when they don't need you. So the first, the first couple of years, they're going to be your best friend. They're going to hang on every word. They're going to do whatever you say because they don't know anything else. Unfortunately, their revenue is going to be much smaller because they're a startup, they're a brand new business, and you're going to lose money on that relationship. Once they become a very successful franchise and things are growing really well, they're going to pay you that royalty check and they're going to go, why am I paying these guys? They're going to forget all the crazy stuff during the first 2 years. So the first 2 years you got, you know, first 2 years you're all good, you know, everything's going to be great. So what you have to do is to make sure that there's still value after the second year. That they don't look at the royalty check as an expense. They still look at it as an investment. So his solution and the solution that we've chosen to explore as well is to engage with your franchisees. You know, there's a certain point where training kind of stops. You know, when you've owned a store or a business for 7, 8 years, there's always room for improvement, but you don't need another talk about customer service. You don't need another way to clean the bot— you know, the, the, the sink. You know, you, you got all those things down. And so what we choose to do is continually look for things to add on to the business. In our world right now, it's— you talked about it— dream management. We're looking at ways to improve the employee experience, and we're taking that lead. We take the lead. You know, we're the first soldiers into the battle. We, we get all the wounds that come from that. You know, we make all sorts of mistakes. Sometimes those Our business is—

at your Birmingham location?

Birmingham and Austin.

And so, okay, you test everything on yourself.

I got it. We test everything and anything. Sometimes they're so wacky that people roll their eyes and go, are you nuts? Uh, but we really try a lot of different things, and when they work, then we push it out and we— and then we support that. And so we're always looking for ways to reinvent ourselves, which actually, believe it or not, is not what most franchisors want to do, you know. Change and franchising are two total polar opposite words. You know, you're franchising and static are supposed to be the two things that go together.

Again, as a franchisee, I want to buy the system, right?

And just, right, run an automatic. So we, we tell everybody up front, expect change. You know, that's the only reason we're here. The only reason we ever have the opportunity to scale the business model is because we experimented during those early days. So why don't we stop testing? And so we challenge our franchisees with new things all the time. Right now, for instance, we're going through— I talked about the employee experience model, but we're also going through a new way to engage with the customers. And so, we are doing all sorts of really fun things. But right now, they're very manual. We're connecting— for instance, I'll give you a great practical example. So, we have a system that we were trying to build ourselves. We have a great software engineering department here. And a lead comes into our website. That lead, let's say, is a professor at a local college. Maybe the— this is a real example. There was a dean at a local college in Columbus, Ohio. You may have heard of it, called Ohio State. And, and so, um, well played. She has a, actually a couple degrees from this, from this school. Um, based on her social media platform, she's a huge fan of the athletics team there, the football team. Um, and we've seen some photos inside her home that prove that she's not just a fan, but she's a huge fan of this particular school. And so, um, when a lead comes in and we don't get an immediate conversion, then our— we have a piece of software that kind of scrubs all the social media platforms and gives us a story. It tells us things that we should maybe think about. Interesting. And then we use that to connect. Um, I'll give you a great— the greatest story ever, by the way. Um, if you want me to shut up, just tell me. No, I want the best story ever. So the greatest story ever. So this was in Huntsville, Alabama. It's about 2 hours north of Birmingham, and we had a customer who had visited early in the morning and I guess, you know, got a quote, said, no, not ready, not ready to pay for— because you can book directly on our site or you can call us, whatever, you know. And so we didn't get an immediate conversion. All the information spilled back to the franchisee there, and apparently this particular, uh, customer, potential customer, owned a Volkswagen, uh, what do you call it when you soup up a car? Like when you, when you can, when you get it back to its original shape? When you restore it. And so not only was it a VW restoration company, it was like the preeminent VW restoration company in America. So if you, if you, if you're in Milwaukee and you got a VW that's sitting out in the back, you send it to Huntsville and these guys are like, they've been on reality TV for. That's so good at it. Well, our franchisee in Huntsville loves VWs. That's all she and her husband will drive. And that's funny, loves the old stuff, you know, from the bugs and everything back in the day. And she knows all the words. Like, I don't know the, like, nomenclature of what all— Perfect.

New guy.

That's all. There you go. Yeah, so you know it too. And so she, she calls and says, hey, I love VWs too. I don't— I know that I'd love to clean your house, but I don't have to do that. Can I just come see the showroom? Can I just walk around and see everything that you guys are doing? She's like, come on. So she walks the showroom and she's personally like satisfied, like this is fun, like I want to see all this stuff. And towards the end of the, you know, it was a little 20-minute walkthrough, um, she says, hey, you know, I didn't have a chance this morning, but I— why don't we go ahead and get this thing done? So she, she signs up for weekly service, she pays us a couple hundred dollars a week and it's just one customer in Alabama, but it's just a prime example of how engaging with someone is way better than selling someone.

Yeah, and it illustrates authenticity, right? So you're scrubbing this information, but not to feign that I like VWs. There was a connection made and connections make business. I'm curious, as we start wrapping up here, is the difference between your work today run versus when you had your first one or two locations. What's the role as an owner of a franchise? How's it change over time?

You know, it's such a great question because I've had to change. I've had to evolve over time. When early on I cleaned homes, later on I hired everyone. I would drive to the store to purchase all the supplies. I was Mr. Everything back in those days. And, you know, I was a big-time hustle mentality, you know, whatever it took, you know, 7 days a week. That's all I could think was 2 maids and a mop. As we've grown, I've had to become different. I kind of call myself a mascot now. I'm kind of the chief mascot around here because people want the inspiring stories and all these things from our history. But I've also had to make much different decisions. And I know I can't— even though I, I get pretty far into the weeds, I mean, I just told you two stories about potential customers in completely different markets. At the same time, I've also had to, I've had to respond to the decision-making in a different I've never lived this world before, you know, so every day is almost a new challenge for me because I was corporate America employee who hated it, who wanted to start a business because I hated corporate America, and here I am creating that same thing I hated, you know. So it's a struggle that I have to work with every day because I don't want to build the corporate America that I was accustomed to. And so that, that's things I think about every day here is what can I do to make sure that someone who works for me doesn't have this moment when they walk into the office and go, this is it. The experience here has been so bad, I'm going to start a business, or I'm going to leave for another company, or just quit. And that, to me, is the evolution that I'm still undergoing, is how do I build an organization that feels just like it felt 18 years ago when we were in startup mode?

Well, I think you found a solution, right? So you left that lab job because just didn't like it anymore. But when that other employee of yours left to become a manager, it was because it was her dream. I think you've made that change. If one of our listeners wants to start a franchise or learn about how to become a franchisee of Two Maids and a Mop, where do they go?

Yeah, so twomatesfranchise.com is the easiest way to get information. You're going to learn about the investment. You're going to learn how to connect with us. You're going to see some stories of real people who've probably been in your shoes. Our franchisees are everyone from insurance agents, school teachers, sales guys. We've even had a medical doctor leave the medical profession to open a Two Maids and a Mop franchise. So, you know, it's not— most of the franchisees in our system don't love cleaning the house. In fact, usually when they entertain the idea, there's a little bit of hesitancy. You know, it takes, it takes, it takes us really telling them how sexy this industry is for them to fall in love with it. But once they learn about the potential profits that are here, once they learn how different we are, once they learn how it can actually transform their lives like it has for me, then there's a lot of excitement that comes with that. So twomatesfranchise.com, you can get all the information in the world you'll need. Once you reach out to us, we'll reach back out to you. We have a team of, uh, we call them development people, uh, but the team of development people, um, salespeople, um, who will connect with you, and they'll talk to you. And we've got a whole series. We never— if you, if you go to our website today you're not going to be able to open a franchise until at least another month to two from now. We don't want anyone making emotional decisions. We want people to make sure that they, they make this decision because they want to. Like, it's a real decision. So we take you through webinars, you meet with franchise owners, of course you meet with myself, you learn about our history, you learn about the economic potential behind the business, you go through an entire business planning process before you ever say let's do this.

You know, you said Most people that start this franchise don't want to clean houses, and that's the best scenario. Because if you want to do the work, you just bought yourself a job. But if you want to own a business, do something that doesn't compel you to do the work, but compels you to grow and expand and hire the people to provide jobs. Absolutely. Ron, this has been fascinating. I got a page, a legit page of notes right here.

Um, thank you so much for joining me today, Mike. It's been an honor. Um, I love all your content, so It's, it's a dream come true for me cuz I've read all your books and listened to most of your interviews. So you keep doing what you're doing.

You got a deal.

Thanks, brother. All right. Thank you.