hosted by myself robbie harris the president of cfi and jessica james a well-known veteran of the cleaning and restoration industry thanks robbie good evening everybody my name is jessica james and i've been in the cleaning and restoration industry my entire life with a family-owned business in 1982 my brother and i took over our carpet cleaning and restoration company and i've been affiliated with cfi since about 1990. tonight i want to talk to you a little bit or you're going to be talking to us a little bit about the single truck success program i want to show you or i i want to thank you for joining us as we talk about the single track success program and we interview our panelists steve marsh whether you have one truck or whether you have 10 trucks steve is going to show us how you can realistically net about 200 grand a year from each truck now both roby and i are true advocates of this program because early on in our careers building our businesses we actually went through the single truck success programs and have built very successful businesses for ourselves so steve thank you for joining us this evening can you tell the audience a little bit about the single track success program you know who the training is designed for why a company would want to use the program you know why is this program so phenomenal at making profits well thank you first of all very much uh for having me as your initial guest to your launch of success wisdom it's a privilege to join you guys i've been looking forward to this opportunity and um i think this is really great what cfi is doing providing these webinars of you know all different topics and um i'm i'm really excited for you and again it's a it's gonna be a great time i think so uh yes it was actually i think that seminar you were holding up was originally produced about 17 years ago and what i was doing is i was finding that a lot of carpet cleaners were topping out of their business netting about 50 000 per truck now remember this was back 17 years ago and i had been able to take my business to netting over a hundred thousand dollars uh with just myself and people wanted to know well how are you doing that and so my when i originally put together that six hour seminar uh that was to show people you don't have to hire somebody at that point to make more money that you can do it by yourself and so that was sort of the starting of this so the program that cfi has available to all of its members is really the single truck success system because we've added a whole bunch of things to that original seminar that you had purchased way back now are you going to go over some of those things tonight for us that's the hope yep awesome and so uh we've gone way beyond uh you know just getting it to you know netting a hundred thousand dollars for a one truck one owner uh business is now we're up over 200 000 is very realistic for anybody who's living in a any decent sized city in the u.s you should be able to pull that off so that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today and kind of what goes into this system that i think is very unique and i think is going to hopefully find you know people who are trying to get started in business we have something very special about how to get them launched in a matter of months instead of years the thing that sort of makes this program is it's step by step it's not magic and we just lay out all of the steps and so to get you from zero to making profit which i define as paying both your business and personal bills uh jessica how long do you think the average business takes to get to that point oh gosh before it's paying its bills and making a profit um from my experience especially working and consulting with other businesses it's usually several years before you can get to that point um and that's with no help so i'm sure your program is going to boost that right along as both of us ruby and i have learned yes absolutely and the other problem that i saw was for decades the u.s you know um government measures you know the success of business and they have found that we see only 15 companies out of 100 get to the point of being successful wow 85 percent failure rate now this is small companies it's large companies but it's that's just horrible and that actually seems to be what the figure is for all of the businesses starting up that i've observed in my actually being in this industry so um there's some things that they're sort of missing out on but i want to go back to your question was who is this for it's for startup companies it's for those companies who want to stay a small business that's why i named it single truck success 85 percent of the carpet cleaning companies in this country are mom and pop single truck operations and everybody is always like marketing oh you can have you know 10 trucks and put your feet up and make a zillion dollars and don't have to work hard and i go i'm going to talk to the mass of the people that no it's just me i'm not good at holding down their jobs i don't play well with others so i wasn't a good corporate person and but the principles apply to a company of absolutely any size and actually i would encourage companies that have more than one truck think of each truck as an individual business because listen to this strategy so you have a successful single truck and you say oh i want to keep growing what does the person do he takes that single truck brings on another one and now he has two non-profitable trucks you go no you keep that one truck profitable you don't touch its clientele except maybe take the overflow and you start a whole new business with the second truck and when you do that you can actually have two different pay scales you know pricing scales all sorts of things open up and i think if you look at it and you say how can i make the most money possible from each vehicle and then you keep having more and more successful trucks and you bring on a new one and you start it just like a brand new business so even though you have 10 15 trucks you should be looking at each truck under the single truck success system and so that's what i'm going to try to cover a little bit tonight if i recall the system had four categories that really broke running a business down so that you could easily run your business um by taking i forget i think it was like 99 steps um to get to being successful in a very short amount of time um are you going to talk about those categories and those steps this evening well if you like what i can do is actually take you to the website that again this is available to all cfi members and one of the things uh roby you know you were talking about that there's an introductory offer and what we tried to do is to make it so inviting that a new business you know whatever uh you can get in for ten dollars i can't why not that's that blows me away for three months and you know if that's all you want to pay suck this program dry listen to every seminar every bit of training go through all the steps be making a zillion dollars and say hey i don't need this program anymore i don't need to see if i you know support and all of the great webinars and other things that are going to be available and you can quit and you get it all for ten dollars and if you follow the steps you should be able to do it right about three months go from brand new to making profit in other words your net worth is no longer going backwards and the other thing that a lot of new companies you know struggle with is they think they have all the time in the world and what happens is when you're starting a business you generally stop a job that you were getting paid before and you have this burden of business expenses and nobody else's unless you have a working you know a spouse who's bringing in all the money but you're going backwards and you're you're using up all your savings you're going into debt to make it possible so there is a real urgency is to get to that breakeven point as quickly as possible because otherwise you know if you take years you're going to be years in debt and just to try to get out of it so you want to do that as quickly as possible and that's one of the great things that this system just gives you an easy process to do it truly in a matter of months yeah that's what uh i don't understand a lot of people when i come coming up we started off you know really slow you know we had used equipment a lot of guys they think that because uh they want to start a business they have to start all brand new stuff to get out there and they have no clients so now they have this 80 000 truck and van and they sit in the parking lot and it just looks all shiny and new but they're not working so how do you get clients that's the whole thing is to get the clients before you buy all your equipment so someone that is looking to get into the cleaning industry this is a perfect program for them because it helps you pick up your clients before you even start working before you even buy your equipment you have your clientele ready and prepares them for you to come so if i remember some of the benefits that they can reap by by you know exploring this program absolutely what i'm going to do is actually take you to the program and the way you get there originally is you're going to go into the cfi website which is cficonnects.org and you're going to go to the store and if you're already a member either have been a member or you have this startup offer that they they have you go to the store and go down to the very bottom of that page and it will say single truck success program and you click on that and that'll let you into the program so if technology works for me i'm going to take us to that all right and this is where you'll end up and you'll have to you want to give it it's going to you'll have to sign up again specifically for a single truck success and and you're going to give it information because you're going to start shaping this and what i hope you'll see is this whole website is interactive and it's going to guide you through how to build your business and to make your business more successful and so if you notice at the top this is what we call the dashboard or actually when you first show up it's going to give you a kind of a heads up of what to do so it's the getting started checklist and what you do is you go through and you say uh watch the getting started audio seminar which is uh the single truck success seminar that uh jessica was holding up earlier then there's another video on how to get uh jobs and then there's another one on how to clean like a pro now if you have you're new in business or whatever i taught the cct class the two day carpet cleaning class for 15 years and what i did is i condensed all of that great training that was in two days down to a 93 minute video and so this will teach you everything you need to know we deal with pile reversal we deal with spots and stains and how you get it out how you deal with the you know the customers and the whole process through it in 93 minutes and so actually if you were to memorize that 93 minutes of me talking you would probably know more than 95 of the carpet cleaners out there and that's all it is just keep playing it over and over and you will you can take over my classes so i kind of want to point out not only does the single track success program discuss the business aspects of performing carpet cleaning and building your business but it talks about the technical aspects as well how to actually perform the services so it's a full full burrito package you get everything the works that was that's a good way to describe it kind of going down the checklist and as soon as you you do these there's a little check that you can box that you can check to say hey i've done this this allows you to move on so you can i i've always run my life on check lists and you know i start off my day and i hear i have my checklist of you know 10 items or whatever and i go through and i get certain emotional pleasure from checking off each thing matter of fact if i do something that's not on my list i write it on the list just so i can check it off so anyway that's motivating to me and that's how i design this it also helps you move along and once you accomplish it and you you've done what the the task is requiring you to do you move on to the next one you don't have to specialize in it you just get it done and i'm going to show you what what these are but this intro then it says explore the website then the next one is go through all of the tasks and there are 99 tasks that seems like a lot to some people but to make more money than the job you had before i i can do 99 things just do one a day and that's almost three months and you you got it and then um watch the the featured training under each of the categories and uh then at the very when you're doing that then you go back and whichever the task you have not completed yet um you would start saying which one do i want to do next and uh so when you're all done with that you can check that off and you're back to your dashboard there's really five main pages that we're going to review here and but what you come in every time is to the desk dashboard and as you start filling in and doing these tasks uh you what will happen is you can see here on the right hand side this was my company so one of the tasks is to name your company now most of you have been in business you probably have a name joe's carpet cleaning or whatever mine was magic wand services and uh so you when you fill that in in the task this is sort of what i tell my clients my coaching clients i'd say you should have your goals up on the mirror that you see them every morning as you're brushing your teeth that focuses you on what you're trying to accomplish so this is pretend this is your mirror and i want you to come in this every day so i you know you put your logo in there and then here's your goals you know what's your goal that you're shooting for so here i just put in 130 000 a year uh what's your monthly revenue at this point in time so you know where you are and say 14 000. and then what's your average invoice can you fill that in and then the current number of customers that you might have at this time if you're just getting started it's my mother you know one and so you want to see that number going up and this is just that you want to keep your eye on it so it's the thing to keep you focused hey steve um we have a question from benjamin um benjamin wants to know how long does it really take to complete all of these tasks like does it really take just three months or can it take longer can it take shorter what is the average that somebody could complete these tasks and start building a better business well i'm thinking of having a competition of who can do it the fastest and depending on kind of different levels of where you're starting but uh if if you were to do just one of these tasks like name your company you know another one is what's your phone number you know i mean how hard are these can you do one of those a day i mean at the end because when they talk about that you're building a business that's what you're doing you're putting the bricks in and each one of these tasks is a brick into building your your profitable company and you do that at the end of it you will have all of the customers you need and that's what i'll i'll show you kind of how we're going to what the strategy is behind that but it will all all work together but um so benjamin as quickly as you want to you can get through it if somebody was brand new did not know how to clean carpets and had no customers if you were to follow it and pay attention to the two things that are going to be time consuming i think the other 97 you know steps in a sense it's not quite that many part of these of the marketing um can be done in a matter of like a week or two if you are can just sit there and get these things done but what takes time is learning the cleaning skill and the other thing is is to build your clientele i mean the sources get enough so that your schedule is full because that's the key thing we want to do that as quickly as possible and that you can have a full schedule in a matter of a couple of months and i'm going to show you a little bit about that the program goes into great depth there's all these videos and everything that talk about it and i'll show you more but these are here on the dashboard these are the the key videos uh and then as soon as you watch it again just go up and then click the box unless you know you've done that one because you're going to start forgetting which one's which you will want to go back and watch these videos multiple times single truck success isn't a video it's an audio seminar so you want to again i hope i keep you company while you're driving between jobs you know for a long time i remember that there you go and there are four of these two yeah i know you've listened to a whole lot of i think my favorite one is when you were uh up there in grants pass i think that's on the first uh the first single truck uh that you have out yeah that was a live that was a live seminar awesome yeah that was good is that your first seminar that was where that was the one that we uh recorded for the single truck success was from portland i think it's on the the third cd the third section that you actually hear a truck mount running in the background they were right there wasn't it at like an airport or something like that nope that was at a dealer a dealer yeah it was it was good there are four categories uh when we grow up in america and we go through the educational system we are trained to become good employees and i think that is the problem with why we have so many companies that fail is we have i'm going to call it brainwashed how we think and we have been shown to look at this we come to school what do we do we stand in line in kindergarten and all standard attention quiet and then we march into our class we get into our seat and we sit there we don't talk we don't ask questions we just absorb information right and we go all the way through school and what they do is tell you we're going to teach you how to be a specialist in this one thing and whatever your job is you're looking at a little sliver of what is being done in the whole corporation and we're trained that you show up to work you get a paycheck no matter if you accomplish anything or not and so and then what did you know you don't invest in you you showed up this is i get paid for showing up these are all the things that don't work well if you're the owner the owner has to think of the whole company and that's why we have it broken into four categories here you have to think about the strategy what are the executives what's the board of directors of a corporation pondering this is choosing you know who your clientele is going to be how much you going to charge what services are you offering and then the next part is the business part the admin part this is the part i personally have a very big dislike for this is doing the billing it's the data entry it's the answering the phones it's sending out the you know marketing materials and the follow-up but anyway it has to be done so i'm responsible for it i don't necessarily have to do it but somebody does and it's my job to make sure it gets done then there's the part that most we get trained to do from this education system is we focus in on operations and even if people ask you what do you do oh i'm a carpet cleaner no you're a business owner the carpet cleaner is the guy you might hire but you you have to take care of it but this is an important part so you have to learn the skill you have to have the systems you have to have the equipment so that's a part of the business and then the part where most people are clueless on is okay so you say you're the world's greatest carpet cleaner you need customers so part of the business is marketing that's what gets you your customers and keeps you in touch with them so it's those four categories and these steps fall into all of these different categories and so um if you go down to the bottom of any p if you ever get lost you just go to the bottom of the page and there's these four categories and you would click on that and that takes you into the other p can we explore some of these categories a little bit for the audience so they can see what the categories are what the steps are what you know how we progress through the program well all right all right well for you jessica they're going to pay their 10 bucks what do they get yeah okay well let's click on one of these things so this is the strategy and this is the thing um let me see here okay i gotta say kaboom boom what's it okay there we go i have too many things working on my wi-fi here right now so it might works a little slow uh so here are uh here's the the page and this is the we're looking at the strategy so this top bar here says we're in strategy and we're doing we're looking at the one-time tasks so we're looking at those 99 tests that we have to complete and then later on we'll come back and we'll look at there's also special training that you should then pay attention to that also because this all goes to build more information the tasks are things we accomplish the training are things you need to learn so uh the training you want to really go into that and get that down and make that part of you again we're trying to brainwash you to be an owner and so that's what i'm trying to do and a lot of this training is think like an owner not the employee you do that success becomes a whole lot easier so here we're on under again strategies so uh there are three subcategories here so there's the financial and you see there's a there's four you see how many tasks we have there one two three four five tasks uh the shape of the business so i click on that subcategory and here we have you know a bunch more tasks anything that has an asterisk by it means it's really important and you really want to focus in get that done as soon as possible uh you know there when you click on one of those does more information come up to lead you through that specific task yeah um actually let's look at the vision statement so here now you have your instructions for uh whatever that task is so it says use the sample vision statement to develop your personal vision statement post this in a spot where it can be viewed on a regular basis and the more details you can provide the more helpful it will be and then what you do is you go down here here's the resource that you need you can click on that vision statement and that becomes your worksheet and then you can actually type it in and modify it here and this is my example of what that vision statement would look like and then as soon as you're done you would check the check the completed box and then you go down here where it says save my program that's very important you got to click that otherwise when you go to another page whatever changes you made in there will disappear so you got to get in that little habit of checking this box to make sure your your check mark and whatever you fill in stays permanent you you forget that once after you spent an hour on it and you'll learn not to do that yeah i gotta work on that six week vacation time yeah that you know that's an important part of it it's very important i need to work on that so you close it off again you know you click on it and it disappears then you just go down to another one now again whichever order you go in almost doesn't make any difference so you feel like what kind of mood am i looking for something easy and you should go through and kind of glance at all of these steps when you're first that was one of that on that opening to-do list is just to go through and see what they are and then whichever ones you've already accomplished check them off and then forget about it they're done none of these you should ever have to go back to and then you just say what's left and then down at the bottom of each page this is your progress bar so when you're just getting started and you say okay you know we're going to be in the carpet cleaning industry and we're going to clean carpets and upholstery and add protector and we're going to charge this price and this you know pretty soon this green line starts going across until all of those checklist items have been taken care of been checked off so it's kind of your visual how we doing on this thing how many of the 99 have we done and so that's what it it is down at the bottom so that's that's our encouragement i was talking to jessica before and we were thinking oh we're talking about some video game that we're playing and when you filled in the right word it goes fantastic outstanding awesome we should put a few of those in here too there we go the third subcategory is value and um this is where it says you know to come up with your price uh the price for the upholstery are you gonna do protector how fast are you gonna clean that's what i call a cleaning pace so each one of these again you click on it um it will then give you your task to accomplish and as soon as you've accomplished it you check it off and on some of these it's going to say what are you charging per square foot you know and is it cleanable space and you'd fill that in and then all of this information will be stored in here on your personalized program where that comes in handy is if you have a business coach or somebody helping you with the business you can like let them see the screen and all this information will be stored here testimonials all this other stuff this is meant to be your workbench and so fill in that information don't let it get scattered all around and it will make the rest of your life go a whole lot easier should we look at another one yeah you know we bought a lot of information on how to build the business i think everybody's always interested on you know in how can i market my business how can i capture clients what's the best way to move about capturing clients do you have some of that information or can you show the i know you got it there can you show the audience um some of that information as well well what i want to show before we get off of the um this uh what we call this the strategies division is there is again single truck success and here's also the workbook that goes with that so you can click on this and download that and print it out sometimes that helps you again this becomes a workbook that you can put a lot of this information in and you can go back and find the different parts you want to review um but you wanted to go to marketing so you go down before we pop over there i just saw a question pop up in the chat box and that was a question from charlene our past president and she's asking why is service territory so important why is well big question okay i worked um my business was in the san francisco bay area silicon valley essentially and i had a job scheduled my day's schedule one time where i had a partner and we had four jobs scheduled for the day and we ended up it was like in the four corners of the large the south san francisco bay area we were in the furthest corners and we spent over two hours just driving between those four jobs and it was just an insane day and sometimes when you get started you might be having a territory that's out a little further you might have friends relatives something like that that you'll go a little bit outside of your area but as you start to develop your business to become more efficient you start making that territory get smaller and smaller and smaller and uh toward the end as i got my business uh you know well on the way and profitable um i would 90 no it was it was uh probably 85 to 90 percent of my jobs were within 10 minutes of where i lived wow i i did move to very close to my target market but um so it's kind of like i had practically no time driving and that gives you more time for your personal life or to put an extra job in uh to do all the other things so time is your one of your most precious assets so restricting your travel area goes a long way in the beginning you take whatever you can get but as you go along you want to start thinking can i get that closer and closer and steve i wouldn't back that up with some information that you actually gave to my brother and i when we were running our company we had a multi-truck company we were running 12 trucks at our peak um and i remember you always told us treat each one like its own company so we kind of took that information and when we were running all of our trucks each of them um basically ran a service area that they were dedicated to and that made running you know multiple trucks a profitable just like running a single truck company profitable um so you're not you know stretching yourself out too far yeah individual territories because i've seen them cross over and you go what are you doing where you're going in somebody else's area they were right there you know and uh for a while my wife worked with me in the business and she was my admin doing all that stuff i so much love to do and she was scheduling and because we scheduled weeks in advance she was able to look and say when a customer call up she would know where does this person live and she would schedule all of the ones in san jose in that certain part of san jose on a particular day and if a customer called up and says i really once as soon as you can get there she knows where they live and he says well we're not going to be out there until such and such a day and when you're scheduling in advance that gives you that flexibility so there were sometimes i would literally drive around the block or just go across the street to do a job and she was very good her background was in sales and so uh if we had a certain job we knew another customer is coming up on this time to do it and she would call up that customer and says steve's going to be across the street at mary's house on you know thursday in two weeks uh do you want steve to come over and do yours and she would normally yeah sure and so it would be going right across the street you just go hmm now every once in a while i would have to i've looked at the schedule and go what i'm driving 15 minutes to get there and it was somebody canceled at the last minute and she had to fill it you know but there there's an arc to this oh what in the program what are the ways of not always calling somebody to remind them hey you know steve's going to be in your area was there a way that you kept up with your clients yeah that's what uh you know part of the marketing is i'll we'll spend a little bit of time on this well you know we only have a limited amount today but here i'm now in the marketing i went down to the bottom of the page and clicked on the mar the marketing section that's what who wants it so here we are and this is broken up into subcategories because you want to focus in on a particular you know as you're trying to accomplish these tasks do the ones that are similar to each other you know sometimes is easier and just bouncing all over the place at least from my mind so the subcategories are printed materials your website branding the company image customers the components in other words the different parts that you're going to need for your marketing and social review sites uh the other place too is you really want to pay attention to this uh video uh this one is source based marketing and you know we could spend a couple of hours just giving you the overview with source-based marketing first of all if you go read these are i think there's four articles in this one that i did for clean facts describing uh source-based marketing what most people do is they think you know here they have this expensive truck like roby was talking about and it's costing a monthly a lot of money and they're sitting there watching tv at home because their phone's not ringing and what people say is i need jobs and so this one guy was talking to had been in business for i think six or seven years and i was having coffee with him and he said steve i need more jobs and i looked at him i go bob what did you do with all the ones you had and so he was had the wrong thinking he's thinking of customers what you want to do and this whole source-based marketing is you're not looking for individual customers you're looking for sources of customers so sources might be yelp it could be uh google you know pay-per-click uh you know all we have there's hundreds if not thousands of potential customers are sources of customers so a source once you get that you say that source provides five jobs a month or maybe one every five months so there's different volumes of customers you're going to get from but you don't want to think of the individual customer you want to think of i need more sources of customers and the two best sources are repeat and referral and what we're looking to do is make it so 85 to 90 percent of our jobs come in from repeat and referral that's a source so once you have those developed those just keep coming in every month after month after month resource you know new customers being referred in but you when you are just starting out in business you have no customers so there's no referrals and there's no repeat yet so when you're first starting out you have to look at how do i get the first customers and you have to advertise and that's what this source-based marketing everything you need to know about marketing this one here in particular is going to go into great depth on how do you get those customers on all the different ways and a lot of our marketing these days when i got started in business there was like the yellow pages well the yellow pages came out in february and what happens if you start business in march oh that's all over because now it's a year before that yellow pages is going to come out and i think they you know they the sales guy you had to get your ad in by like september or something like that so even if you started in september first and you got your yellow page ad it's still going to be five months before it's published so i'm watching a lot of tv actually i had i had a great tan back then i was going to anyway but it takes a long time but today most of the advertising is digital and so therefore you can try let's say google pay per click and in a matter of two weeks you can like put a budget out and you can test it and you say i'm going to test to see if google pay per click is a good thing to do and you do it for two weeks because they don't care everybody coming to it is a first time person where it used to be if you had an ad in a newspaper or a magazine the salesman would say it needs to be out there for many months people get familiar with it and they're gonna call we don't have to do that everybody's just googling i need a carpet cleaner in san jose bam you know and and they go there and that's a first time person so you can test out the success of google pay per click in two weeks time and so the program will help walk you through those steps how you test it how you decide what a good return on investment the return on investment is uh you know how much money do you pay for a job how much of that goes to advertise and it goes through the whole thing so all of these these uh training materials and then you go up to the training here let me just click on this real quick and then we got to go look at those other options um so here's here's more articles on advertising uh company image growth follow-up answer roby's question earlier and social reviews uh there's a lot more articles will be adding to this but a lot of these were the articles that i wrote for clean facts magazine uh that were you know had pretty good information in it so that's the other place you go for information suck it dry once you read the articles check it off uh unless you you feel like oh this is in the middle of a project and you need that for like your blueprint for for where you're going but let's drop back down to the bottom and let's go over to uh the business progress just to show you uh what those checklists are again there's the one-time task that we're looking at now and then the training i'm just going to click on that again that again there's a lot more places for you to learn this isn't to answer a specific task it is for you to understand uh the business part better and to remind yourself as a business owner you have to keep up on these tasks you can't just kind of sit back on your your shackles for you know a couple of months and expect your business to run well you have to constantly continually be nurturing your business and one of those ways is by running through these tasks and reminding yourself to just get out there and do it well on these these tasks here the 99 once they're done they're done unless you departing i remember we always like looked back at the marketing saying oh shoot we forgot to send out you know we forgot to do our social media marketing or we forgot to do you know the parts where you have to uh the systems that you have to develop and we talk a lot about developing those systems also but i just want to show you some of the tasks here is the startup so company name yeah magic wand carpet clean my dad came up with that uh so i got that so you you'd fill that in and you check it off fictitious name i gotta file it so i can use open a checking account okay that takes you gotta run down to the you know to the the county yeah and you gotta get it published in a paper and then you go to the bank with a little certificate that you got it now you can get a checking account in that name what's your phone number a checking account you need the liability insurance vehicle insurance these are things you just have to some of these just making a phone call and so bam bam i could do all of those in one day no problem right rowie you did yeah yeah okay yeah but so with me on task here you know i know we've covered a lot tonight and uh didn't get to everything but i want to start kind of right winding up because we're getting close short on time so so my question to you steve is yeah why is single truck success you know why is that the uh benefit for cfi members well really single truck success is a part of what you guys are doing with success wisdom holding these webinars part of it is it's great to interact with the people who are calling in and online right now but they're all being recorded and a lot of these will have very specific topics so these will actually help supplement the single truck's success by giving more information now there is that one other webinar that we had two weeks ago meet the experts that's bringing in experts in the industry so they're talking about a very specific thing like rug cleaning was the last one and so they're going to talk about what it is maybe they'll bring in you know they uh somebody from clean facts magazine or an instructor but you get the top person where this your guys webinar the one i love the most is you guys are going to be interviewing business owners and we get to see how their businesses are run i had to start my business and i didn't have i didn't work for anybody we had to make it up and what i loved about being a cfi member is people would share with me how they're running their business and i go oh you do that really and then i'm writing it down i got to do that i hadn't thought of that one so it's getting information like that into your webinar uh is is really important and i know there are going to be more webinars added matter of fact i'm going to be having one that i will be doing kind of like group coaching uh so instead of the webinar format we're using here where we only see each other here as as you know the speaker the panelists and you guys um that one will be like a zoom meeting so we can interact and i can see all the people on the call and we can answer where people are running into challenges in the system so they all fit together so really what it is you guys go get the equipment and you get the cleaning solutions see if i will teach you the technical stuff the business stuff we will support you and uh single truck success sort of becomes the foundation to make this all work together and it's a growing thing absolutely so the one thing i you know the 99 steps these are suggestions for business is isn't that a lot to get started with or maybe should be less well you know the way i look at it is even people that have been in business a long time you want to look at the 99 steps to see if you've done them all and i have yet to find somebody that says i've done them all there's always probably about 10 to 15 of them they're leaving off and if you leave them off they're going to have problems in their business that part of their business will not run smoothly they may be making money but if they were to go ahead and do that that would make things run smoother but i think about what how many steps do i have to do if i want to go from san jose to disneyland in southern california i go i bet you i have to fulfill at least 35 to 40 steps just to take my family to disneyland and it's about that easy so if you want to go anywhere in life you want to have any sign of excitement you have to accomplish things but hopefully you've seen like we just said where's your office going to be in your bedroom you're going to take a part of your family room for it i mean this is that's one of the tasks these are not hard and so uh 99 i started out with 129 and i think it was aaron gross close says oh that's way too many so i condensed a couple of them down eliminated i didn't eliminate i joined them into so it's down to 99 had to be you know marketing thing 99 hey steve before we wrap this up we've got about two more minutes of um the topic conversation and we've got just a couple of questions that i want to make sure get answered before we wrap up we've got one from um uh bill hi bill nice to hear from you nice to see you um what are steve's thoughts on the lifetime value of our clients and then there's another question from uh benjamin about does this mean the single truck success program has 90 99 steps i think we kind of cleared that one up it does have 99 steps but those steps um expand on expand on other services that need to be performed or provided the 99 steps are for somebody who's starting up and again even a company that might have 10 trucks it would be worth their while to look at what does marsh think i need to have so they need to go through and and check those out but it's all of the rest of the training up here you know not the one-time task but this other training all these videos the idea of source-based marketing can totally change how a multi-truck business or anybody who's been going for years and then the follow-up what's involved in the the training again you want to listen to those over and over again um and bill was asking about the the value of a customer uh the thoughts of a lifetime value of our client yeah i there's in some of the training here i go through that and the idea is that if you have a one-time customer you barely pay for your expenses going out on the job but a lifetime customer is one that calls back again and will might refer you to somebody that person let's say they call back 10 times you have no advertising expense there's no quoting time you don't have to go out to the house you just book it over the phone you go there and you almost make the entire amount from that customer and they're repeated let's just say every three years and if you're in business 10 years you know that's 10 times the lifetime value of that one person uh is huge compared to a person who only calls you one time and you had to pay advertising money to get it and so that's why you want to really focus in on who are you target marketing and again that's all covered in the training in this program and don't forget the driving out to do the job and doing it well we've had some great conversations this evening we're about to wrap it up and before i hand it over to roby our president for our closing i just want to remind everybody that we do have another meeting coming up or another webinar coming up um on the first wednesday of january and that webinar is going to um have a variety of different panelists we're actually going to have three panelists from very successful companies and they're going to discuss their add-on services and their up-sales um which ones worked best for them which ones didn't work quite so great for them and talk about a different variety of upsells and add-ons that you can you know implement into your business services so join us next uh i i don't have the calendar in front of me but it's the first wednesday of the year the first wednesday of january at six o'clock um join roby and i and i want to thank you for being here and i'm going to pass it over to roby um all right i really appreciate it jessica i appreciate it you know these two people have been a real inspiration to me uh cfi has joined the cfi years ago and i didn't see the value in it and i came back in 2014 and you know i'm here i'm kind of kicking the screen but i'm happy to be here proud of it uh and just remember guys the entire single truck success system is one of the extremely valuable benefits you receive as a cfi member so don't forget to take advantage of the 10 cfi introductory introduction membership by visiting to see by website cfi connects.org all right guys i appreciate it and if you're out there and if you're considering becoming a a business owner carpet cleaner refrigerator rug cleaner cfi is excellent man i i cannot tell you the friendships that i have i am proud to be the president of the cfi and i can always remember steve talking about all the fun times they had when we were doing our training years ago and he would say you know see if i was great i was like oh well well yeah look where i'm at now so i appreciate you guys so with that we'll see you next month and uh over and out appreciate you guys