THE CHASING DIRT SHOW w/ Ryan Shank - ShareWillow

24th. Year is wrapping up quick. How are you, my friend?

I'm good, man. It's crazy. My wife said let's start talking Thanksgiving plans, what we're doing, who we're having, all that stuff. I'm like, Thanksgiving? Like, it's just a month away, and then after that's Christmas. So I don't know, Jack, what do you want for Christmas? I got to send you a present.

So I just want the kids to get together, be happy, and, uh, yeah, that we're all good. Older I get, the less I want, the more I want for the other. So I think that's—

that is a very true statement. I'm in that boat too. And I told my daughter-in-law, you know, they've been married 5 years and they were expecting our first grandson, and, um, and her Christmas traditions were just very basic and it was family, you know. But when she came into our family, you know, I have to spoil the new people. And so I spoiled her for a couple years and I said, it's over now though, kiddo, the grandbaby is coming, you're gonna lose.

So No, I think it's, uh, oh, there's, there's Ryan Shank showing up right now.

Let's go.

I've got a special guest today.

Yeah, my bad.

So dude, you're coming in, Ryan, live time. We're hot, the mics are hot, we're online right now, brother.

What's up, what's up? Welcome to the Chasing Dirt Show.

We have Ryan.

Oh yeah, what's up?

Yes, Jerry, this is the first time we're meeting. I know we've exchanged some emails. I'm glad you could join us because I think what you're doing is cool. But Jerry, Ryan, Ryan, Jerry, hey man, I will say this as well. Any company that's less than $2 million in sales, definitely you gotta listen to what Ryan's doing. I, I was— I'm gonna stroke you up, Ryan, like, like in a major way, that it's what you're doing. And maybe others are doing it, but I was taking my decompression walk about a week ago and your video came up. You're good on video, man, so you got full energy. I'm sure you're gonna let that go, but What Jerry and I focus on is commercial cleaning, um, is our, our whole niche. You know, there's probably half a million plus commercial cleaners across the United States. Most of them never get past a million dollars, so that's why I said that $2 million mark. But Jerry and I talk all the time about everybody in the organization has to be selling. And what you brought to the table, and we're going to take a dive into it, and I, I want to say it again, anyone who's less than $2 million, this is a must-listen episode because I I think what Ryan's going to talk about today and what he brings to the table is something that will help your companies get past that million, $2 million mark. And I could be wrong, but Ryan, introduce yourself. And again, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah, man, appreciate you.

Of course, of course. Thank you so much for, uh, for having me. Um, so my name is Ryan Shank. I'm the founder of ShareWillow. So we help companies in the trades create incentive plans for their employees. I actually just saw a tweet yesterday. They're like, hourly workers, you cannot just pay them flat rate. You have to pay them with incentives, especially in the trades when there's a shortage of workers, right? If you have a guy that's going out to do an air conditioning install or service work, and he's just flat hourly, guess what he's incentivized to do? Log hours, right? Not do it within a certain amount of time, not sell a membership, not present a good, better, best option. Not get a review at the end, right? You want to create a scorecard of things to incentivize them that are aligned with your business. So that's what we do. We create these, uh, programs, not just design the programs, but then we'll integrate into whatever field service software— ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, FieldPulse, Service Fusion, whatever you're using, um, and we sync the data in real time so the guys can see, uh, how the reward is tied to the behavior. And we're seeing ridiculous results.

How did you— how long has the company been around? First of all, how did you come up with the idea? Are you— because we are, again, we're not necessarily considered a trade, but we, we are a trade. You know, cleaning is a trade. We just don't, we don't get the same recognition as electricians, as plumbers, as HVAC guys, but what we do is equally, if not more important, than what those guys and gals do. So how did you fall into this, this slot and found your company?

So, uh, the— my first company, I will say I was, uh, employee number— I was the first employee. Uh, it was a company called M Help Desk, and it was in the field service software category. Uh, this was back in 2012. We ended up getting acquired by HomeAdvisor. So working in the trades there. Uh, and then in 2017, I started a company called PhoneWagon that was call tracking software for agencies that worked with companies in the trades, and then we would work with them directly. We got acquired by CallRail. So I've essentially only ever worked with companies in the trades and SMBs. And, you know, the problem at both of those companies were— it wasn't like the leads or the tech really. It was like, how do I find great people? Like, it's so hard to find great people. I have all these leads coming in. I don't have availability for 2 weeks, or I send a guy and he screws it up and all of this. Like, how do you find great people? And then I started seeing some really big companies in home service and Chuck Kuhn at JK Moving and Storage, he posted on his LinkedIn, he has this big profit share check that he presents to his employees. And now it's like $2 million a year that they split and divide up. And I kept seeing just companies like, and I heard, obviously Tommy Mello talks about performance pay and I'm like, all right, these companies that are achieving extraordinary results are all doing some form of incentives and performance pay type. Type things. Um, and but there's no like system of record, there's no easy way to do it. Everyone's kind of guessing their way or manually doing it or doing all these like random spiffs and all this stuff. And but then, you know, when I look at like tech and in that there's like, you know, all this cap table management, everyone's doing stock options, it's like very standardized. I was like, how come it's not standardized for like hourly workers? You know, maybe it varies based on industry, but like It feels like, why is it such the wild, wild west? There's so many more of these companies, and it feels like they need to have incentives for the employees. So I just felt like the— it was a really big market to go after. I like— I've only ever gone after the space, and I just felt like this needed— it was kind of the why now, like the timing was right, especially with PE, by the way, sort of gobbling up these companies, like, to compete. I mean, you're not going to outspend them, you're not going to wrap your vans better, like, you know what I mean? It's like you're not gonna SEO your way. It's like you have to win on people at the end of the day. So it just felt like the timing was right now.

Yeah, and you're approaching this from different angles too. It's not just about— it's not just about incentivizing the sales professional. It's not just about incentivizing that frontline work, but you're looking at things like, you know, again, here's some quotes that I grew up with in my career: nothing happens until a sale's made. Right? Jerry and I talk all the time that everybody should be selling, but selling comes in different formats. And that's where you caught my attention, is selling could be longevity. You know, in this, this cleaning business, you know, there's 300 or 400% turnover. And one of the formulas you showed on one of the— you know, I downloaded your, your, your, your different scenarios, but one of them was talking about a payout based on longevity. So maybe you're not good at, you know, pitching or seeing opportunities, but you're really great at your job. And we want you to stay here a long time, and you get some play for staying into a— into the organization for a while. So talk, talk about the different levels you, you dissect this thing.

Yeah, so yeah, I mean, look, it's definitely not just for sales, and we actually try to pitch ourselves as like, look, this isn't just commission, you know, because look, I, I think the counter— if you look at some of my Facebook ads, in all the comments are like, this is why— what's wrong with the industry, you know, you turn your techs into sales guys, they sell people things they don't want. It's like, it's not, it's not just based on commission and you can counter the commission. Like let's say you, you're concerned someone's going to sell someone something they don't want. Well, don't weight the sales as heavy, you know, maybe have customer satisfaction reviews, callbacks. Callbacks is a huge thing in the trades, right? It means you go there, you do a Band-Aid fix. You don't actually fix it. Then they call you 3 days later. You have to go back for a zero-pay job, a no-pay job. and you, where you could have gone to a $1,000 invoice job, right? So call, you could do it based on callbacks, average ticket. How do I increase average ticket? You don't just sell them additional stuff. A lot of these guys aren't even presenting a good, better, best. They just present them the good, you know, cause like they don't really care. They're like, ah, here you can get this one. It's, it's good enough. Um, but like there's storytelling to it, right? So, uh, or, or tenure, by the way, like let's say you want to pool your, your, your bonus or your incentives, and then you want to divide it amongst your team based on role. Based on tenure, based on, you know, all these other factors. You can do it that way. So we kind of, you know, and now we sort of know what works best by industry, by size, that sort of thing. But it's definitely not just sales, you know. I think like customer satisfaction is a massive piece. A lot of people want to drive reviews, reviews with photos, because those are weighed heavier, right? So they'll pay different amounts for those. Um, again, callbacks, average ticket size, number of hours. So if you look at the task Uh, it might be this type of job. This type of job should take 4 hours. You do it in 3, you beat it, you get something else, right? But it's not just you beat it and you do a bad job. It's like you beat it plus you get a good review plus you don't get a callback. So you kind of factor in all of these different things. And look, at the end of the day, those are great for the business. If you can improve average ticket size plus you're doing the jobs faster plus getting reviews, that business could, could 2x just with the same amount of people. Because you're doing, you know, more revenue per job, more jobs. Less callbacks means you do more net new jobs. If I do 40 jobs a month but 10 callbacks, I'm only doing 30 net new jobs, right? Because 10 of those I have to go back or $0 invoice jobs. If I can now do 5 additional net new because I have less callbacks, that's 5 additional jobs per technician per month. It's like this stuff really compounds.

Hey Ryan, park there just for a second because let's just use a scenario that, that we're familiar with in the cleaning industry. I've got a $15 an hour employee, it's her second job, she's amazing, her building's clean, she, she is— she's budgeted 4 hours a night to clean it, she gets it done at 3, her customer's thrilled, they love her, they give her Christmas presents, invite her to the office parties. All these things. So she's a perfect fit for our organization. And that relationship, when the rubber meets the road, what is— what are one or two things that I could do as a business owner, you know, say, to keep said employee Mary in my organization and happy? Like, everything you're talking about is a perfect fit for our industry. Um, but in the gritty details, what could a business owner who would be watching this podcast, obviously, say to Mary, this is how we want to keep you on, because not only is customer retention big in our industry, but employee retention is probably the biggest thing. And it's a 200-300% turnover rate. And in my organization, we got it down to 80% because we created, um, ways to keep our employees in place. Because cleaning is cleaning, but if it's done right and it's done under the hours budgeted that employee's got to be rewarded somehow. So tell us what that looks like and what your company would do in a scenario like that.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times in, in that scenario, it would say like budgeted hours versus actual, and then, you know, if you budgeted, call it 4, it gets done in 3, there's 1, you could split the difference with them. I think there's also a few things, by the way, especially with cleaning, it, you know, when you're going into someone's home or office or whatever it is, you know, you, you have the direct relationship. So I think a lot of times, you know, we kind of forget, like, that person should be the one asking for the review or asking for the referral. I think a lot of times, like, you just don't ask for it. But I know, like, personally, I'm in a lot of, like, group texts and in a lot of, like, groups in New York, and people are always like, hey, does anyone have cleaning people? And it's like, they've— my clean people have never asked me Do I know anyone else? Can you, can you, you know, do you have any, do you have anyone else? It's so, you have so much permission to ask for that, you know what I mean? Like, hey, if you think this is good, like, we would love this. Um, so I think like, you know, and then what we call that is, uh, well, in, in more of the trades, like tech-generated leads, but whatever you would call it, cleaner-generated referrals, whatever it is. And then, you know, they get something and it's like, they, if, hey, if your client, well, even if you don't do the job, you'll get something. So I think like you know, sort of just being a part of that, giving that upside. Hey, if you do the job in less hours— because, because, you know, I think a lot of times too with, with cleaners, sometimes it's like, you know, they're not like overly incentivized to beat it. It's sort of like, I don't know, it's sort of like, why beat it? You know, why beat the number of, uh, budgeted hours kind of thing. Um, so, so yeah, I think the— I mean, in the most simplistic way, sort of budgeted versus actual, if you beat it, split it. Like, that's a cool, cool metric that gives them that upside. Because I think also, um, you know, the thing that we, we hear a lot is, you know, people ask for raises, obviously, right? And it's like, this is a way to say, hey, let's do something that's aligned with us as well, right? Like, if you do this, we get back more hours, we're able to reallocate those hours to other paid jobs, we're going to share that upside with you.

Yeah, yeah. I like— I, I love that phrase, cleaner-generated referrals, because I don't, I don't know, Jack, I don't think we've ever necessarily heard that a lot. We, we hear employees say that, but most employees, you know, they don't talk to the customer. They just go ahead and do their job, get the place clean. Sometimes the really good ones are not even seen because they're— they just want to get in and make sure the building's clean. So yeah, that's a great— yeah, that's a great option there.

And I think every, every frontline cleaner, they, they hear or they see something, that communication path, like you said, Ryan, there's no incentive to share that up the channel for most companies. And I think that's the That's the part that I like about it is, and again, tenure could be something. I just like the fact that, hey, you know, Betsy might, you know, Betsy or Frank might leave for an extra 25 cents an hour, but they've been there for 5 years and they've been doing a great job. But you say, hey, listen, we're putting $2 million into a kitty, and at the end of the year we pay that thing out. And this is, yeah, does that 25 cents an hour times, you know, 1,000 hours in a year outpace the $2,000, $3,000 you may get from that payout? So I like that piece as well. Do this, I'll flash up the website though, but Ryan, and we'll put your link, we'll put your link and all that good stuff. But if someone's interested, what is that process? So we reach out to your organization, what is that process that I don't, 'cause most of these companies below $2 million, they're in the business every single day. They're like the trades you probably work with now. They're hustling, they're bustling.

Yeah, yeah.

There's not a lot of time in the day to kind of think about this stuff. But if they came to you and said, Ryan, this is what I want to accomplish. How do I get there? What's, what's that flow look like with, with you? And I'll, I'll flash up your website as you're, as you're talking a little bit here.

So the typical flow is you would come to our website and, uh, there's 3 options. Um, I guess a typical flow if you're just already ready is you would, you would do a demo with our team. We would show you exactly how it works. And then from there we go from demo to a plan design. We would design a plan with you one-on-one. And then, you know, we'd get you set up in the software and you'd go live. So that's the typical flow. For more tech savvy, you can sign up directly for a free trial. You don't have to talk to anyone. Sometimes I don't like talking to anyone. Let me just click around. Let me watch some videos. Let me do it on my own. And we'll have templates for a cleaning business. So like a sub-$2 million cleaning business with 4 cleaners and boom, here's what you should start with. Super easy, right? So that's a typical flow. You either sign up directly for a free trial and kind of build it on your own or talk to us. You know, we, you know, I think a lot of people like coming to us. Obviously I think the software's fantastic, but you know, we're this like wealth of knowledge cuz we are talking to, you know, to hundreds of other companies right now. So it's like, ask us what other people are doing, right? And I think a lot of times people will say, hey, what's this aspirational company doing? I kind of wanna build it like that, right? And get there. By the way, I, I was also thinking of one other thing, a little bit unrelated, but I was thinking my own use case, you know, I have clean, like I, I got, when we were talking about tech or cleaner generated referrals, I think there's potentially also the op opportunity, the cleaners in the home, right? So you can generate referrals for other things. Hey, you wanna do a couch? Like I want a couch cleaning. Like we don't do that, but that's this other service. Maybe it's an upsell if you do do that in-house or You know, shoe cleaning, maybe they don't like clean the shoes, but like if they want to do that. But we hear that from our, uh, from our trades businesses too. Like if someone goes in for an HVAC thing, they'll see a plumbing issue or they'll do a checklist and then they can kind of refer, uh, they like generate referrals for like other services, not just, um, from, you know, new, new customers. So it was just something that I thought of, and obviously you can incentivize on that as well.

Like, you know, Yeah, no, we're talking about that as well because I think that's the way we look at it, is it's a non-competing trade but complements you. So landscaper is not going to get upset at a cleaner. Hey, listen, I'll introduce you to my owner because guess what, I don't do cleaning. Same time, the cleaner says, I don't do landscaping, so I'll introduce you to my landscaping company. And there's that, that compounding.

Totally.

You multiply that across 20, 30 different trades, man, that's, that's some, that's some serious volume. But Talk pricing. Like, how do you price this thing out? Again, discovery calls, no charge. I think it's worth looking at. Again, you know, what we find too with those companies less than a million, less than 2 million, our side— I don't know what you see with the trades— is they really don't have a dedicated sales professional. It's the owner selling, it's the owner trying to get referrals, it's the owner trying to get reviews, it's the owner trying to do all of this stuff. But if you were to plug this thing in, what's— what What kind of price point are you looking at? And again, not holding you to it, but, and what does that ROI look like over 6, 12 months typically?

Everything's month to month. I, I love being able to say that there's zero contracts. Everything's month to month. We have to deliver value every single day or any one of our customers can leave us at any time. It's $30 per user per month, $30 per employee. Um, so depends on how many employees you're going to have. Using the software as participants in an incentive plan. Um, we have an optional plan design, very white glove, uh, plan design, uh, kind of package where we'll really dig deep. We'll design the plans, we'll stress test your historical numbers, we'll put in projections, and we'll show you like what it looks like, make sure your labor percentage is never greater than, you know, 20, you know, whatever it is, right? So we have that. That's $3,000. One-time fee, um, optional, but the software to, you know, do it. And we'll assign you an onboarding and implementation person regardless. Um, but yeah, that's, that's what it is to get started.

And this connects right to QuickBooks, is that how it works, Ryan? Is that—

connects to QuickBooks, connects to, uh, you know, Housecall Pro, um, kind of like the softwares that, that they use to manage it. Um, the other— the ROI calculation for me, the big metric is like revenue per employee, revenue per cleaner, right? Can you get more revenue per employee than you're paying? You know, look, we have some people gaining like $100K per year per technician, but those are like in the trades maybe. But like, you know, can you get an extra $5K per cleaner per month, right, in billable— in additional billable hours where you're able to kind of trim down some, you know, maybe get some referrals, all of that? So I think that's the key metric. I mean, look, we're seeing This is a crazy stat. We're seeing like, you know, 10x return, but on $30, you know, and then getting like, you know, $300 is like, uh, or $3,000 is not that hard. Um, so, so yeah, I mean, I think that is the like kind of North Star metric to look at in terms of like, is this worth it?

Do you see— let me ask you this too, because we talked frontline workers, but equally the back office workers, you know, the, the, the accounts payable person, the, the customer service rep answering the phone. The outbound sales call that may be overseas. Uh, have you, have you done anything like that as well, tying those kind of positions into it?

Yeah, most of our customers definitely have CSRs, the customer service reps. Um, to be honest, not a ton of like accounts payable and like more super back office, but more CSRs based on like booking rate, you know, what percentage of inbound qualified calls are you scheduling appointments for, or, you know, based on, you know, the estimate conversions, stuff like that. For sure they all are using— doing plans for CSR, for customer service reps.

Okay, so the best step, next step— Jerry, you got any other questions, man? I just, I just think there's something here. I think it's worth a conversation.

But no, I think, I think it would be worthwhile for people to reach out and at least have a conversation. Um, and, you know, we say it all the time, every person in your organization's got to be a sales, especially in this business. Um, so yeah, I think it's definitely worth— I mean, if I was still in business, I'd be reaching out, you know, to, to check it out. But it would be worthwhile to dig in and see what Ryan and his team could do for you. Um, you know, and I think as more and more people from our industry reach out, maybe, you know, and Ryan could dig in even harder and and, and really understand and help develop a really good foundation for the commercial cleaning side as well. Um, so it's going to help on both sides of it. But, uh, for sure, I think there's a lot here that I— that you can get a good program in place with people. I think it's going to benefit them tremendously. So yeah, I'm, I'm all about it. So yeah, thanks Ryan Shank for, for stepping in with us today.

Of course. And I want to do one last thing. I want to make a special offer for, uh, the listeners of the Chasing Dirt show. I want to, uh, offer 50% off of our plan design package. So instead of that $3,000, be $1,500 for any listener here. Just mention the show and I'll make sure all of our, uh, guys on our end, um, have that. But just as like a, hey, you know, we'd love to really get involved and just kind of reward you guys for, for as listeners of the show. I think that would be a, that's a nice offer.

Yeah, and we, we took a dive into this. Like, I, I bumped into you through your Instagram ad, and again, I downloaded some content. The other thing, I think I saw the podcast you did with the guy who's doing pressure washing, and what— like, yeah, he's, he went public with his information, but that is in the cleaning space. What was that ROI he's seeing overall? What could you— what can you share about, you know, just taking that one trade, that one service? And he does commercial and residential pressure washing, but What can you share what he saw?

Net-net, he's adding $5,000 per technician per month, uh, like per, per cleaner per month, um, after switching the incentives. I mean, they're able to cross-sell. I mean, he, you know, he'll have pressure washing people that he cross-sells and upsells into Christmas lights as well, um, just doing more jobs. Like, you know, it's so interesting, by the way, and I think maybe you guys could do this too, but it's very similar to you guys. You know, he'll start with an office and then he'll clean their home or he'll do the pressure washing for their home. So he's able to like cross-sell the existing customers from— I mean, I have an office that my cleaner cleans my office and my apartment, you know what I mean? So they're cross-selling into the, the same person. Um, so I think that's super interesting as well. So yeah, I mean, they're, they're seeing like ridiculous results.

That's great. Yeah, I love it. Ryan, this is, uh, Jack, what are we, what are we at, $90 billion a year?

Yeah, so this industry, Ryan, so you know, $93 billion is the industry just in the United States alone. So this is a big market that it's, it's thankless. People don't think about it until— I guarantee this, Ryan, you will never go to the bathroom the same now because you're going to think about chasing dirt. I know it's kind of a corny line, but Jerry and I are passionate about this. You're passionate about that. But we're also building the tech stack on our side. Yeah, Jerry and I are doing coaching, and we'll talk more about that, and consulting with with companies both big, medium, and small. But I think this is going to be a topic we bring up to a lot of these guys that we— that are trying to figure out that, that magic ingredients for, for compensating or incentivizing their team. So I, I appreciate you taking this on short notice and jumping on the call with us.

Of course. Thank you guys so much. This was awesome.

Appreciate it, man. Cool.

All right, see ya.