Success Wisdom with Scott Gwilliam and Elliot Atlas

hi everyone welcome back to uh success wisdom welcome to the cfi webinars our presentations that we have going on uh every wednesday on the for our excuse me it's the first wednesday of every month um we have had some technical difficulties this evening so i want to thank you for your patience um i know many of you are familiar with zoom and zoom is not always an easy platform to work with and so we're just rolling with the punches and making it go right but tonight we have some really exciting guests to uh to introduce you to so i'm jessica jessica james your host for the evening roby will be joining us in just a second if we get all of the uh technical difficulties worked out then we uh will see roby joining us um tonight i want to talk a little bit about some of the exciting guests that we have um we all know that the business landscape has kind of stuttered a little bit for many of us in our companies with all that's going on in the country right now um when roby and i were thinking of what would be a good you know webinar to our cfi membership we thought of you know this would be a great time to have a webinar on add-on sales and up sales so i am very excited to introduce to you our guest this evening um we may have a second guest joining us we'll see if the technical difficulties get worked out but first i want to uh introduce you to scott william he is joining us from phoenix arizona scott has a residential and commercial flooring cleaning company called carpet tech but during our little pre-meet that we had the other evening i learned that scott also has another company called rugworks and this is his passion cleaning area rugs his education he has a lot to tell us about how we can improve our companies by adding this very lucrative business uh or service um into you know into our list of services our menu of services so scott welcome it's uh wonderful to have you this evening thanks jessica appreciate you guys having me um yeah like jessica said i'm from phoenix arizona and i have transitioned from a floor cleaning carpet guy into the textiles of rugs and it all kind of came with the transition in flooring itself and how hard surfaces have really taken over and if you're going to have a floor cleaning service these transitions are going to happen so let's either get into stone cleaning and polishing or really push laminate and some other things or area rugs was a great uh avenue for me so it was something new and it was something exciting and very lucrative so um i've got a lot to talk about so let's talk you know what when you were building your business did you decide to add on now i know a lot of our audience does do other type of flooring materials did you decide to add on like you know we had the whole stone and tile craze but it's been about 15 18 years ago when natural stone was just the huge flooring that we saw out there you know did you decide that you wanted to add other services before your area rug service or was area rugs just where you went to first you know the very first thing that uh triggered the area rugs was really the the transition in the flooring industry itself but when i started this i was um 13 years old cleaning carpets and so at that level working with my dad i was just learning everything i possibly could and going to school and i realized that by the time i was 18 i was kind of my brother's boss and he's older than me and that was kind of cool and i was making good money and so i just kind of hung on his coattails in the carpet cleaning world and we really had a fantastic thing going um on the commercial maintenance end of things but during all that we always worked in high-end residential we did a lot of doctors and lawyers and dentistry and large buildings and worked with a lot of these people and um ended up cleaning their homes and so when we did their homes it was always high-end residential carpet cleaning and commercial work and so in that i was always trained never to really surface clean wool rugs on the wood floors and the stone floors and you really can't get pet urine out of rugs consistently with a truck mount in a home on a rug and so it just wasn't the safe method so i found myself walking over a ton of money in these homes and i found in phoenix we transitioned to travertine and laminate flooring and the carpet just went away and so i found myself in multi-million dollar homes 6 000 square feet and they had carpet in their master bedroom and in their master bedroom closet and that was all i was getting out of these as a carpet cleaning company sure there's hard services to sell while you're there but they can mop those and so fouling wasn't my favorite thing to do i was really big into customer service and education and i loved educating people on the carpeting at the time but to be honest with you i got a little burnt out in the summertime in arizona we call it the summertime blues and it happens every year to almost every carpet cleaner in arizona that it gets really hot out here and you almost wish that you had something else to do and fortunately for me my father is also in the flooring industry and uh he had always seen the resurgence of rugs coming back and they were really big in the 60s and 70s and then the brawling carpet took over so when i saw the opportunity to grow my business from just a carpet cleaning business and i could learn something totally new that was very related and similar but it was all new education for me i saw that you know the education in learning where rugs was were from was one thing education for a little bit like for our audience for the business owners out there that want to add this lucrative service you know i i know you've told me a little bit of your education but can you tell the audience a little bit more about um how you found the education the um you know how the education worked for you how you fit it into your busy lifestyle yeah absolutely so i've always wanted to be an educator myself and my father taught a lot of courses when i was younger he was actually the president of cci before cf iowa cfi and so i grew up in carpeting and education and when it came to learning about rugs i actually spent eight months learning about rugs before i ever even hosed down my first area rug in a full immersion process so that all came through um just kind of social media really helps facebook is fantastic but obviously the iicrt is a great platform um this is not a plug i just think it's a great place to start to see if you're ready or interested in getting into it and they have a great rct course to get introduced to rug cleaning there's great education and aaron gross was my educator and he's just fantastic he teaches all the way up to the master master run cleaner program which is which is like the graduate degree but um in that there's a lot of good social media stuff out there there's the rug room there's lisa wagner and a textile pro group and so there are just fantastic platforms a lot of them have platforms on social media and they're doing classes regularly so there's there are good courses out there there's good training available and um in the rug cleaning world all the classes are gonna you're gonna learn something new and different if you go to ten rug cleaning facilities you will see 10 different operations and how things are done so there is there's more than one way to skin the cat but it's always good to see all the different operations so if you're just a truck mount guy and you want to clean rugs you know three or four a week or even three or four a month but you want to do it the right way there there are there are great places to learn about that and um i'm actually looking into some of that education myself so um in the future look for rug works you know maybe you can uh give us a little you mentioned a couple of social media groups um can you just kind of mention those again so those in our audience that are are taking notes can uh kind of hit those websites yeah absolutely i didn't want to start plugging people around i didn't want to overstep my boundaries i don't know if i'm allowed to tell you all these things but i've got some great places to go for rugs especially the rug room is absolutely the most trafficked site that you can go into in facebook and we do a weekly webinar in fact there's one going on right now or it just finished it's called um um sorry i can't think of the name room live very simple it's questions and answers if you have a question about a rug you post it on their facebook page and ask them to talk about it and you show up on wednesday night and we talk about the problem we give you the answer and it's like it's pretty amazing and then um there are other good pages a lot of them you kind of have to take the course to get into lisa wagner has a fantastic program called rug secrets and it is um on her website if you go to i don't know exactly what it is but if you just look it up online google rug secrets um lisa wagner and she's got an amazing blog and amazing information online that people can access you can use it as references and if you go through her training and her courses you kind of become part of her group and if she ever gets referrals in her area she sends them to you and so she has on location training annually the guys in the rug room have the um rug restoration seminars and cam mayville and those guys offer two or three classes a year and um then there's aaron gross close and ellen hammer can who get who have the master rug cleaner program and that's kind of we'll call that the college level so i would i would always recommend anything yeah start i would i would really recommend starting at the iicrc level and lisa wagner's rug secrets and then get into those social media facebook pages and you'll really you'll really see if it's for you but it it's it's a lucrative business that's great advice thanks scott um i don't want to talk a whole lot about cost but let's talk a little bit about investment when it comes to um the equipment that a a company would need to buy or purchase to you know maybe just a single truck you know a single truck operator owner operator all the way up to maybe a company that is running you know multiple vans and has the excess cash to spend on you know the you know those beautiful toys that we all want to buy one day can you talk about that yeah yeah we've got um that's kind of the beauty of the rug world right now it was it's i'm not gonna say it's antiquated but it's always been you need a wash plant you need a centrifuge and you need a big rack to hang things on and it takes up space and it takes up money but in the last 10 years we've really come up with some amazing cooling one of the one of the tools in particular and washing rug watching rugs is not the most it's not rocket science but getting rugs dry is very scientific and if you're a restoration guy and you understand drying things out it absolutely helps but getting rugs dry and getting that majority of the water out is absolutely imperative and using a wand over a rug is not always the best way to do it so there's a tool called a rug sucker and it's a perforated pvc pipe but it's much more durable than that and rugged industries produces that product now but um it's a fantastic tool you can use it with your truck mounted unit and you're just extracting water that have been fully submerged rugs and it's getting them very close to centrifuge dry as far as drawing that that water out and um so i started i kind of pride myself on starting my my rug cleaning business only five years ago and in that i had a truck mount a rug sucker and i built the wash floor and i did it all for about five thousand dollars and um since then i've been able to kind of build my volume from ten rugs a month to about 100 rugs a month now and so those things have grown and um some of the tooling has advanced but if you come to my shop we're still using a sloped wash floor that i built myself out of wood and put a big uh pond liner over it and it's 14 feet by 20 feet so it can it can harvest some big rugs and then we're still using a rug sucker with a mighty electric truck mount and that's all run inside of the building off of 220. so it's not a real fancy operation but we're producing 100 rugs a month and we're actually expanding into the space next to us i did just purchase a centrifuge but for five years it's not a necessary tool and so with simple rug hanging racks that you can do and hoist things up and a rug tucker tool you can really wash rugs correctly and do a really good job for five thousand dollars or less and then kind of if it's for you and if it works for you you can build on that and of course the sky is the limit you go to robert mann's facility in denver and he's in a two million dollar facility so i think we know a lot of the same people how have we just not met before i'm sure we've seen each other yeah um you know i have a personal question um i many of the audience knows i ran a carpet cleaning company area rug cleaning company for you know over 30 years i absolutely adore cleaning area rugs and i had my favorites do you have any favorites like fibers designs um do you have anything that like when you see it come into your shop you go that's mine i get to clean that one yes yes i do so on as far as favorites i guess there's different levels of favorites and our good friend ellen american's father would say um he likes dirty rogues and that's his favorite run so i'm gonna adopt that a dirty rug is now my favorite rug for sure but um as far as rugs that i adore and i really enjoy i'm a big fan of old persian tribal rugs so they're usually smaller formats they're usually low not count but and they're usually beat up and tattered and torn but they're they're my favorite they kind of have a little bit to uh have more character i live in arizona and sorry to tell you yeah of course of course and i live in arizona so i do love navajo rugs and i kind of pride myself on cleaning those and caring for those and being knowledgeable about those and um but to be honest with you in a rug cleaning facility when you see a good character come in the door that's 100 wool axe minster even if it has an attached fringe to it they wash up so well they're very color fast and they're just old school and they've just been durable and fantastic so i love kerosene because they're simple and a lot of people have them i love old tribal because that's what i love and i really just love dirty rugs i remember anything i had to pull out like my magnifying glass and you know my specialty you know low low moisture technology tools or you know hand tools something i really had to like get down you know what with that being said let's talk a little bit about um i know i can talk to quite a few of the screw-ups that i've done on area rugs and uh give a little bit advice maybe you can give some advice on today's area rugs and maybe identification and where to kind of draw the line when you're looking at an area rug to say you know what i'm going to need a little bit more experience in cleaning that that area rug absolutely that's a great question so i think that all starts from being a carpet cleaner and making that transition to rug cleaning and i think the real question and the basic question is can i clean this on location or it doesn't have to go into the facility and with that question i think you're going to really learn the the limitations of one the sub flooring underneath the rug and i never surface clean a rug in a home on wood floors i don't care if they're laminate wood floors i don't care if they're real wood floors i just love the wood too much to do that and asking for trouble too yeah it's absolutely asking for trouble and the same goes with some stone floors i don't really want to scratch it with my tools i don't really want to be getting it wet leaving it wet for long and if there's pet urine in a rug it just always has to come out of the house so with that being said i think the first part in learning what rugs to do and how to clean them is going to be knowing the limitations of surface cleaning a rug especially coming from carpet cleaning world to you know building business and upselling rugs the more you become an expert in a home know about their rug the more they appreciate you and if you know more about their rug than they do they'll trust you with it so if you say it has to leave the home because of xyz and you can make sense of that through education then that is absolutely the best avenue for selling that rug i don't like to tell them they need to pay four bucks a square foot and i have to take it i explain why it should go into the facility and give them options of the pricing and if it can't be cleaned in the home i just tell them i can't clean it in home and here are my other options so and then when it does come into the shop and we're dealing with rugs we're dealing with a lot of funky fibers right now you got 2 000 names for rayon and that goes into the viscose tinsel lyocell all those names are all forms of rayon and they're difficult and when they attach a cushion to the backing of them and add a layer of latex and they hand loom them it becomes very very difficult so there are some limitations on these newer rugs and there are limitations when it comes to drugs that have diet lead issues so without getting too long and boring and classic you know teacher-like there are a lot of things in the pre-inspection process that you just have to pick up on and so um i have i have damaged one rug in my facility and it was a synthetic fiber and the dyes transferred and it was all poly and it just made no sense and i couldn't get them to move and so other than that we do use low moisture tools on navajo rugs that aren't very soiled silk rugs that aren't very soil there are a lot of low moisture tools and methods that we use in our facility and they are not full submersion immersion cleaning processes so we have seven different techniques the end user doesn't always need to know how their rug got cleaned they just need to know that it got professionally cleaned now when you started introducing this service to your customers um and you know what i just want to excuse me really quick and say you know what um team i have on my chat that elliot has joined us um maybe chauncey maybe you can uh communicate with him to get him in um on our uh on our platform um otherwise um scott would you have any advice to speak to about um maybe companies out there that want to start adding this service what would be the best way to introduce this service to their customers i think education is probably the best way what i did when i first started cleaning rugs correctly is i had to stick my tail between my legs and i had to go in and say look i know i have cleaned this rug on your floor before but for me to properly clean this rug we're going to have to take it out of the home and here's my new process and i had to i had to kind of i kind of had to tell them i was wrong because there were times where i was cleaning rugs that probably shouldn't have been cleaned in their home on safe flooring but i was just doing it in a manner that wasn't sufficient and i learned that i could have damaged the flooring underneath it or the rug itself and so i think through education and telling them that you're learning more about rugs was really good and then obviously you can find where these rugs come from they come from rug dealers and they come from designers and working with those people and using those resources in your valley is going to be very imperative to building your rug company so work with designers and and become educated and the more you know about their rug the more they trust you wonderful we have a couple of questions that came through on the chat so let's grab those really quick before we uh get to our next guest elliot so scott some great information we have some questions um come on one comes from andrea she says just a thought in arizona or just a thought that in arizona the drying conditions are different than in northern california in northern california we could not easily dry in winter any advice yeah absolutely so my drying process is not primarily laying rugs outside and letting them dry you have to have a good drying set up as far as hanging the rugs having air flow through there even dehumidification and heat heat really does help so without a centrifuge i just use the rug sucker it's just a tool to get the majority of that that first 95 of the water out the drying process overnight should always take place inside in a controlled air drying environment and um there's a thought in a process in rug cleaning that washing rugs is really not that difficult drying them is and getting them dried fast and with heat is the best way to do it and i hate to say it but it costs money you got to put a heater inside of a drying room on a drying rack and get the air hot air in and the humid air out so um that is a problem for me right now as well it is 40 degrees overnight and we do have some control issues but we do we fight with them with dehumidifiers and heaters so um we're working on that understanding the psychometrics of how moisture moves out of those fibers is is an important part of the education of of you know area rug drying absolutely um i might recommend taking a wrt course um or there's a lot of information on um just uh to andrea there's a lot of information that you can find on those social media platforms as well as you know of course any iicrc instructor will always talk to you or feel free to give you know either scott or mia collin will be glad to walk you through on how to set up a drying room with the appropriate dehumidification and ventilation processes so that uh it's it's not an easy task but if you know what you're doing you can get it done very quickly and efficiently um elliot are you still with us all right um let me look and see we have one more question for you scott um what is your average turnaround time on an area rug clean the way you're currently washing them so we always tell people seven to ten business days which is two weeks to turn around and obviously that just depends on the rug size and when it came in i'm going snow skiing all next week and so i'm not gonna be here so that might be on that two-week turnaround time right about now but i do have a few technicians that will be doing some wash for us and um yeah i always tell people seven to ten business days and if it comes earlier than that great and um we typically don't miss that two-week part so all right well thank you very much for that that for your advice and your willingness to share all of your information on adding that service to kind of your menu of services for our carpet cleaners out there in the cfi uh cfi membership absolutely thanks for having me oh yeah a pleasure please stay on we'd love to uh have your participation when uh we go on to talk to our next guest which is elliott atlas elliot atlas comes to us from marin county california he's got some great information to talk to us about adding a different type of service onto your list of services and that's window cleaning now um elliott let me flip this down here just a little bit um elliot uh owns a company out there in marin county called atlas window and carpet cleaning and elliot is a veteran cleaner has run very successful cleaning companies in multiple states for over 40 years doing carpet as well as window cleaning elliott kind of did things a little bit backwards than many of us would do he actually had a window cleaning company and added carpet cleaning onto his list of services hi elliot welcome this evening hey there hey everybody i many apologies to everybody scott i'm sorry i missed some of your uh great talk and uh your interview sorry i mean i've got it i can witness it i've got this piece of paper saving seven o'clock and getting on the call with jessica at 6 45 and i don't know what happened we just had technical difficulties and we're so happy you're her elliott this is not what i was going to wear exactly or i was going to shave a little bit or you're a beautiful man elliott you're a beautiful man i got to get on you know so elliot let me ask you what made you think that your window cleaning clients would accept carpet cleaning as a new service like how did you how did you finally drop onto carpet cleaning when you decided to add services onto your company well you see uh um back back when i was doing window cleaning back in boston massachusetts i was doing that for about 10 years but actually before i started window cleaning i did carpet cleaning so i had a bunch of experience doing carpet cleaning even before i became skilled in window cleaning so it was always something that i had on the side i always had a little portable portable machine with me in case i needed to do it myself etc etc so so at some point uh when when i decided to expand um i had to just come up with you know to try to keep another guy busy i wanted to expand and keep two men busy so it is a lot of work to get new customers as we all know it's it's a ton of work and well to turn to turn that same customer into another you know and onto another service that seemed a lot easier uh does that mean that every window cleaning comp person or client is going to be a carpet cleaning client no but i could catch some so i felt uh now i know you have a very successful company in marin county i i remember that um right now about what portion of your window cleaning clients are actually carpet cleaning clients or vice versa you know it's it's hard to say there i mean there are window cleaning clients who do not use my carpet cleaning service and vice versa there's plenty of carpet cleaning clients who do not use my window cleaning service so it's really hard it's really hard for me to figure that out i haven't quite studied it to the nth degree but if they're uh let's put it this way right now i'm i'm keeping one one man busy with carpet cleaning pretty full time and with window cleaning i usually can keep three guys busy during the during the year so there's there's and i'm a very small company i'm still very tiny i would like to grow even at my retired age uh you know so because i think i'm gonna work till i die so uh you know that's that's my thought die with a window cleaning wand in your hand you know what if a company wanted to break into the window cleaning services um what type of learning curve is there is there education out there available is there any education that you would recommend um how would one learn about performing window cleaning services well in all honesty in all honesty it would be a whole lot easier to turn a window cleaner into a carpet cleaner rather than turning carpet cleaner into a window cleaner in all honesty that kind of skill is a it's it's it's a simple skill but it's a precise skill because um there's two-sided it's a two-sided monster it's you know carpet cleaning you can kind of you know you can kind of gauge oh yeah that's pretty clean and all that but window cleaning once that sun's pouring through it could be a disaster and that's why a lot of people fail with windows are there any classes that one could go to or just just like the carpet cleaning industry there's a window cleaning industry one one one could learn the one could learn it and i will i will add to it that not only is it highly skilled but also a lot more risky you know there's there's ladder work there's being on roofs um and there you know so it has has to be a you'd have to be a certain special person to want to do window cleaning and to do this high-risk work okay now i don't go now i'm not talking about buildings or anything like that but just even residential work like second story building you know yes houses exactly so and that's something i never thought about i should have probably thought about some questions to bring that into the interview because that makes a lot of sense you know you're not just cleaning the windows on the ground floor you've got a lot more into it than just you know there's there's a lot to learn a lot to prepare for um is there something like the window cleaners association of america that will give classes or is there an association that you would recommend that somebody could reach there's the international window cleaners association i don't know about classes um they they they are they are turning out to be like the uh they are having educational tools uh uh available so i i don't i don't i'm i don't i haven't studied it and i'm researching yeah i will let me let me add on let me just add on a little information because we're talking about add-ons you know there are add-ons there are add-ons that are that take high skill and then there are add-ons that take low skill and say for instance like we do window cleaning but you know we also do rain gutter cleaning now that's low skill so or we do solar panel cleaning that's low skill so these are these are great add-ons especially when they don't need a lot of skill you know i'm sorry to say on carpet cleaning you still need a lot of skill with upholstery cleaning and you still need a lot of skill with area rug cleaning so i don't know something that i just heard you say that i've never even thought about before is solar panel cleaning now in many states california as well as nevada and arizona solar panels have absolutely boomed um elliot i'm sorry you're not prepared for this maybe we didn't talk about it because i i wasn't aware of that but can you tell us um in just maybe just a couple of little minutes about solar panel cleaning yeah uh well we you know i sort of sort of my uh one of my work is sort of uh initiated that i wasn't doing that way back because of course there weren't that many solar panels while i was window cleaning so um yeah it that's a pretty it's a pretty simple skill except for the skill and the balance of getting up on ladders and being on roofs and and if you don't have that type of stamina and i will say sometimes um when i went back into window cleaning a couple years ago i had to relearn how scary it is to be up on ladders sometimes so i mean if you can get past that it's really simple it's really just kind of washing washing the solar panels with a particular solution and rinsing it off and la da da da that's it and you're doing a great great service because people actually get more energy if those solar panels are clean that is i find that to be terribly interesting living out here in las vegas everybody has solar panels i have never once heard of a company that does solar panel cleaning um out here in vegas so i'm just astounded by that i'm gonna start that company tomorrow yeah and you know window cleaners can do that on the side they're already up on roofs you know cleaning gutters cleaning skylights it's it's just a it's just a it's uh one of those fantastic add-ons you know in that company i just don't um i think i have to be a i don't know about carpet cleaning i don't know what low skill that thing there is about carpet cleaning yeah you know maybe i don't know we've got a question uh on our chat we've got a question from elliott or excuse me from uh jose and he said jose soloranzo okay okay um he says uh water fed pool technology has come a long way in the last 10 years would you recommend this to carpet cleaners looking as an add-on service again it's a i think if you're in the window cleaning business i mean that that's that's a thing that you know we don't do a lot because it's it's we don't think it's as good as squeegeeing uh washington squeegen though it comes in handy and i know a lot a lot of companies do it and it's very very popular and um again i don't think it's a service that you can just do alone i mean you have to have the skill of either even cleaning inside windows and squeegee skills and all of that so can that be learned yes all of this stuff can be learned it's not i i don't i don't mean to say it's really hard it all can be learned uh it's just with window cleaning for the outside stuff a lot of work you just got to have that stamina to be on ladders and go up on groups yeah that makes a lot of sense whereas whereas as a you know i've been you know once i gave out all my window cleaning where all my focus was on carpet cleaning so i was basically and could there be some damage in carpet cleaning oh yeah you could do yourself carpet cleaning for god thank god to sure day thank god to this day i haven't burned myself all right one more question and that is um like for you you offer a variety of different types of add-on services what what have you found personally to be the best way to market those those add-on surfaces um you know something like postcards or value packs newsletters online coupons what's worked for you elliot what's worked for me mostly has been uh especially to my own clients uh has been uh you know newsletters email newsletters um actually this is an interesting thing that's worked for me recently um i think i think i started this in a year or two years on my phone message where if you listen to my phone message i i will say hey you you've uh you're at atlas window carpet cleaning we we clean carpets we clean we i name four services that we do and that is a that's an incredible thing because all of a sudden it wakes up people oh i need my oh i was calling for carpets i need my windows done so that's it it's great as long as it's short list you know if you're going to put it on your phone message which we don't want too long uh you want it to be a short little message so that's one way to you know state your main services the other way is of course when you're on when when you're talking to clients oh we're on your roof do you need do you have solar panels uh or you know or gutters or you know it's also good to remind people when you're talking to them but i would say the newsletter is reminding people of the services always stating the services that we do uh you know if it's a slow season giving discounts um it's not it's it is mentioned in my website uh um um something like that i mean just like what everybody knows about marketing yeah great advice well elliott thank you so much for joining us this evening some really good food for thought on up sales and add-ons that that you know we may be able to integrate uh intric we may be able to add into our companies more thing yeah totally i just i just want to say to anybody you know adding on something is a little risky it always feels risky go for it worst case scenario i mean one at even one point in my life i was trying to do see sailing cleaning i don't know if anybody uh in the audience ever tried that well that that didn't work out too well i just want to say but it was worth it risking is always a good thing it helps you it just helps develop you so if if you feel like trying something try it worst case scenario i mean we we were trying tile cleaning it just so happens we we didn't want to do it anymore now i know a lot of you guys do tile cleaning and fantastic i'm glad you're successful with it but i'm just saying go for it add-on worst-case scenario it doesn't work you know what elliot that is like great advice in our company we had a lot of different services that we performed but the ones that we sold were the ones that my technicians like to do or i personally like to do um you know if you have an add-on service that nobody wants to do and tile cleaning is a bear it you know you've got a lot a lot you have to be careful with um and so you know if if that's not the right add-on for you just focus on another add-on and you've given us some great great ideas on different add-on services so thank you very much ladies and gentlemen i want to welcome roby roby harris into our panelist chat room tonight robbie harris is the president for the cfi he got caught in all those technical difficulties as well um so we're glad that we finally have you here roby nice to see you hey good seeing you everybody appreciate it good job elliott i appreciate you taking the time hey scott how you doing good road good to see you man good to see you too good to see you man hey i appreciate you taking the time to do this for us and uh we met you know back almost a year ago in a rug cleaning class yeah that was uh probably one of the most intense i i think i went to sleep probably about four hours a night maybe and all i saw was rugs you know so it was pretty much drilled in our heads still uh tell me scott let's get going here so oh you know what ruby we interviewed scott we you missed the whole show bro we already did it but it's good to have you what's your question let's talk about that class we've got a few a couple of minutes um let me ask does does any of the audience have any questions that they'd like to put in if you do have any questions for elliot roby scott me please feel free to drop those into the chat box how you can ask a question is if you go down to the bottom of your screen kind of wiggle your mouse around down there and your zoom bar will flash up and you'll see a little box that says chat just click on that and you can ask a question um so feel free we've got about six more minutes left feel free to ask those questions otherwise i'll give it back to roby for our closing and go guys sorry ellie if someone asked you what the best uh i was gonna say elliot someone asked what the best product for window washing is i don't know if there is one but well you know a good deal of the window cleaners all across the country use dish soap sorry to say little dabs of dish soap um it's it it's actually helps the squeegee glide and um i personally if i if i'm in the window cleaning when i if i do window cleaning i actually get something that's made for window cleaning so uh you know from the shops but most of the guys use something like joy or dawn or things like that or palm olive or uh real simple like that i mean does the job does the job yeah i have a friend who met a guy who i don't know the name of the rug cleaning facility but they did something crazy like 500 rugs a week and all they used was blue dawn soap to wash the rugs wow and i was blown away i don't know if he was pulling the guy's leg and he didn't want to know a secret but it has been tried it does work it is safe i don't know that i would use it on my rugs but revenues that you leave behind what about the residue i i don't i i don't know how they were neutralizing and rinsing but that was uh what he was told and so i don't know blue dawn soap's good but i don't think it's for everything i i think we'd all be surprised at what people use all over the country with the different services i mean i've heard some funny carpet cleaning things that's the truth gentlemen i do have a question here don't mean to interrupt you um but i just want to get to it really quick and this one is for elliot it says um elliot do you offer screen repair as an add-on surface and is that a good profit maker um we formally we do not i mean no we do not i do think it's a good i do think it's a good add-on if you're if you're in the window cleaning business i think that's a pretty pretty good add-on that you could do i mean i know some people can do it right at their right at people's homes or uh but yes yes good add-on i don't know much about it we have helped people now and then or sometimes we have a a hardware store that gives good really good prices for screen repair so that's and it's it's it's not like there's a ton you know when when this add-on that really means just add-on it fills some gaps it doesn't it's not all my add-ons aren't as good as the window part of the business or the carpet part of the business they just they fill in some gaps all right excellent last words scott do you have any last words before we hand it over to our president to uh to close out our webinar well when you're asked if you have any last words you must have last words so i'll find something but today was about add-ons right and so like uh elliot said i don't think you should be scared of adding on services i think you can kind of dabble in adding on services one of my favorite lines of all times is whose favorite chair is this and that's not saying that's a filthy chair that's not saying you really need me to clean this chair that's just sparking conversation for the wife to tell you that her husband sits in the chair all day long and by the way can you clean that as well while you're doing this carpet so i think simple little things like that be personable with people and education education education get the education go in the red room live get some rug education go to iicrc classes go to the conventions when they ever come back they come back but get education and um you know it helps to educate and sell instead of trying to just settle i think giving people education and then making decisions off of your uh knowledge is a lot better for both of you great thanks scott roby i'm going to hand it over to you for our closing thank you jessica i appreciate it most important thank you guys for your patience uh sometimes technical difficulties uh they run in the way so i want to say thank you to jessica and a big thank you to our panelists elliot and scott thank you scott and thank you elliot meant a lot to me and uh i had i had to pull elliot's arm but he he was right there and scott did great yeah and scott appreciate you taking the time and uh taking the time to do this for us means a lot and don't forget about our next month in february february third at six o'clock we'll see you then thank you guys appreciate it thank you jessica thank you