Episode 78: Big Wins from Our Business’s Annual Meeting (And Why You Should Start Your Own Annual Meetings)

Episode 78: Big Wins from Our Business’s Annual Meeting (And Why You Should Start Your Own Annual Meetings)

Brandon Condrey:
POS is not that, it's very structured. So it's very rigid. It comes to a lot of tools that are included in the book to help you do that. But it's been great. So if you're not into it, I highly recommend it. I think the sooner that you started as a business, the easier it's going to be, we did it four years in and it wasn't difficult, but you really have to retool how you do a lot of things. And so if you're going to do it brand new, just be much easier to get it going from the ground floor than it would be to do it after that.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. If you're like a smaller local business right now, this is an opportunity because it's harder to implement new systems and build new culture and all this stuff we talk about. That's really key to growing a successful business. It's a lot harder to do when you're bigger, because there's more people not everyone's going to buy in as you, but if you only have five or 10 people in your business right now, that's awesome because you actually have an advantage that you can implement this a lot faster in a lot easier.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Profit Cleaners, you are in the place to be learning from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to up level your game, take it to the next level and win. I am your host, Brandon Schoen, I'm joined by my fabulous cohost in the house.

Brandon Condrey:
Fabulous Brandon Condrey yes. I'm looking real fabulous today. I hope this video is on YouTube. People can see my hair.

Brandon Schoen:
Oh man. Yeah, man. We are back in the Profit Cleaners in the house here. And we're joining you guys today and thank you guys for joining us and sharing your time. And I know we don't have a lot of time these days, but you're here in the right place to be learning guys to be hopefully adding value to your life and your business. And that's what we're here to do. So let's get into the episode today. We have a very cool episode that today we're going to be sharing all about our EOS annual meeting, which we'll get into what that is. It's the entrepreneur operating system. It's a book called traction that we've been going through. We've told you guys about it in the past and it has been amazing. So we'll share all about the backstory of that. But today we're going to go over the annual meeting, what we did in that meeting some big takeaways, some big wins, some things that you guys might be able to take away from it as well in order to improve your business. And kind of the whole idea of traction is get a grip on your business and strengthening key components of your business. Simple, powerful ways to run your company, give your leadership team more focused, more growth, more enjoyment. It's really been an awesome, awesome opportunity to bring our teams together, to get everyone on the same page. And this is actually the system we use every week, guys in our business as well to run our company weekly meetings with the whole leadership staff and we'll get into it. But it's been pretty phenomenal. Brandon, this has been an awesome book and an awesome exercise and project we've been going through. So let's tell them a little bit more about it.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So I'll give you a little recap on EOS in general. So the book Brandon, I already said it it's Traction by Gino Wickman. It, you, a system called EOS. That's the entrepreneur's operating system. When you read it the first time, you're like, this is all basic stuff. I could totally do this, but in reality, it's just a nice little really honed in blueprint on do these things in this order. And it's like a best practices for how to run a business. So essentially the way that it's set up is you develop this vision as part of the launching of it. You have these weekly meetings with the leadership team and then you have bigger quarterly meeting and then you have a really big annual meeting. And so we first started this in August of 2021. We kind of had like a five week practice with it. We did our first quarterly meeting in October last year, and then we were supposed to have this annual meeting in January, but COVID screwed everything up. I got COVID and it was bad. So we ended up moving it to the end of February.

So this just happened week and a half ago. What we did was we found a local consultant that has done EOS in his own company and helped a couple of friends who in his companies. And so we paid him a fee to come help us go through the annual meeting. And it was very, very good. I think EOS for us as a company has been transformative is the word that I'll use.

Like we used to have a pool table up here in the office, and now there's a conference table with a big TV and a camera at the end because we'd take these meetings really seriously. And it's worked really well for us. We've made a lot of good changes and learned a lot of things about the company that we wouldn't have. Otherwise Actually it started with,

I want to say clockwork is kind of when we started getting into that book, start at a similar vibe, but clockwork was a little more, not as applicable the way we like to apply things and learn. I guess I was still an awesome book, but I think when we found this book, it was like, the next version of that was way more tangible and easier.

Like a more of a step-by-step do this next, do this next. The complainant heard about clockwork that you and I also had was that it's too open-ended it was like document your processes. No worries. Just do it. And so EOS is not that it's very structured. So it's very rigid. It comes with a lot of tools that are included in the book to help you do that,

but it's been great. So if you're not into it, I highly recommend it. I think the sooner that you started as a business, the easier it's going to be, we did it four years in and it wasn't difficult, but you really have to retool how you do a lot of things. And so if you're going to do it brand new,

just be much easier to get it going from the ground floor than it would be to do it after the Absolutely. If you're like a smaller local business right now, this is an opportunity because it's harder to implement new systems and build new culture and all this stuff we talk about. That's really key to growing a successful business. It's a lot harder to do when you're bigger,

because there's more people not everyone's going to buy in as easily, but if you only have five or 10 people in your business right now, that's awesome because you actually have an advantage that you can implement this a lot faster and a lot easier. But yeah, guys, we're always talking about books. Most of the top CEOs in the world read 52 books a year.

So this book will probably go over maybe in the book club at some point, but we're going over it with you guys here because we talked about it all the time. It's an amazing foundational part of our business to strengthen the business, to get the leadership all lined on the same page, which is something we haven't had in the past. And now it feels like we're really honed in.

We're really humming and going the same direction, rowing the same direction as the idea, getting everyone looking the same direction on the goals. And it's just like simple stuff. A lot of it's like common problems that every business is dealing with. But this system helps you to identify what's causing those problems and like peel back the onion and figure out what's the actual problem.

What's the actual thing we can solve here. Instead of just talking about all this thing keeps happening in the business. So it's been really cool, just that alone and integrating into the weekly. And then this idea that I love about the book is we have these things that we build out every quarter. And I think analogy is really cool, but it's like,

if you're going to try to get something done and you try to put a bunch of rocks in a jar, this is what we have every quarter are these things called rocks, which are like these big things we need to accomplish. Whether it's get new sales or grow this part of the business or whatever thing it is, it's called the rock. Think about the picture for a sec.

If you tried to put a bunch of rocks into a jar and then pour a bunch of sand into it, right? Think of the sand as the little things that you'd have to do the little action items every day, every week that you'd have to do in order to accomplish a bigger task, a bigger goal. So what a lot of people try to do is put all the sand in the jar first,

do all the little things and then try to fit their big goals. And at the end it just doesn't work that way. Like, and so this book was really monumental and like shifting my perspective on that too, just like you gotta have your rocks, gotta have your big goals. So you put your rocks in first, you identify what your big things are.

You're gonna work on that quarter that year. And then after you identify those, then you pour in the sand and the sand fits and everything fits and it all fits in there. Versus if you try to do it the opposite way, it doesn't fit. And I thought that was a really cool way of looking at it. And that's what they talk about in the book.

And that's what we worked on at the annual meeting. We identified some new rocks and some new things that we're going to work on for the quarter, for the year. What's a good way to do this, man. Maybe we should just recap the agenda and like some impactful things that we learned. And with some wins, I'll walk you guys through this two day agenda and then we'll touch on some highlights on there.

And like what's some big wins were over the weekend. First and foremost, the annual meeting is a two day meeting. So it's two solid days of eight hours a day working as a group. So it's your entire leadership team in one room, very focused. So this was the first time we had the whole team together. I think without one of us being on zoom,

everybody was in the same spot. The other part of the U S that's really big is that they ask you to make it offsite. You don't want to do it at the office, the creative energy. You won't be there. If you're in the office, you'll be thinking about there's this thing downstairs I've got to do, or I'm already here. So I might as well go do this too.

So like day ideas, you get completely away from the office. Totally different place. So we did it at a hotel in Santa Fe. It was very close to the Plaza. We maybe spend a little bit too much money on it, but I thought it was pretty cool. It was a pretty cool setup. So the intent was that everybody would stay there at this hotel.

And then we would hang out at night after the meeting had concluded and kind of do like little team bonding stuff in practice that didn't work out. Half of our team have young kids and they just childcare wasn't enough. So they had childcare during the day. So they could be at the meeting, which was great, but they were commuting back and forth.

So they were sleeping at home, doing family stuff, which is totally fine. They were active participants. So here's how the agenda went down. We had two days, right? So the first day get together, there was some chit-chatty type stuff. We did expectations review. And you know, again, we've got a consultant, he's got a flip chart and he is writing all these things down.

So like, here's your expectations. Here's what everyone needs to like focus on. We did a business overview, we did a financial review. We did a SWOT exercise, which we'll talk about here in a minute, which was pretty cool. We did an organizational checkup where everyone rates the business from this thing called the EOS wheel. It's like a little test.

And then we did the VTO, which is a really big part of us. That's the vision traction organizer. Quick side note. Traction is really huge on acronyms. There are so many acronyms and we're going to talk in acronyms sometimes, but I'll try to explain it under the assumption that you haven't read it yet, but VTO his vision, traction organizer.

So that's where we really dive deep into the organization and we're going to recalibrate our core values and all these things that are going to happen. So we did that as a result of that BTO, you make a one-year plan. There's a ten-year picture, all these things. So we did some things that weren't strictly related EOS. We talked about the ideal team player,

which is a book. And we did a little exercise about that. We did an accountability chart, which is what EOS likes to call it instead of an org chart. And they are different. And we'll explain that too. And then that was kind of the end of the first day. So the second day was we did this thing called start, stop,

continue, or everyone. You had to really be open to getting beat up a little bit, but everyone, for every single person in the room, you, everyone wrote down, you know, start doing this, stop doing that and continue doing something else. That was pretty cool. And then we did identify, discuss, solving, track, identify,

discuss, solving, and that's how you work through problems in the company, problems being issues. And then we talked a little bit about our scorecard or data set that we use to make sure everyone's on track and everyone knows what we're doing. And then at the end, we kind of had a big to-do list and we identified our rocks, which Brandon already talked about.

But those are the big quarterly goals that keep you on track for the annual plan. So which one of those would you like to touch on first? Cause all of them are pretty cool, but I don't know how my new we want to get with everybody. Yeah. Something that would be cool to start with is, and we don't have to go into all of it cause there's a lot here.

But if we just talk about some of the vision, traction organizer, we could go, I feel like that's what we started with was that the first day I can't remember. But The first thing we did was the SWAT analysis. So for those of you that don't know SWAT, and that's not an EOS acronym, that's kind of a general business thing,

but it's SWO T as the strengths, W's weakness, oh, as opportunities and T is threats. So this is one of my favorite things that our consulting guy does is he brings this huge stack of post-it notes and a bunch of different colors. So everyone gets their own color of post-it notes. So on a flip chart, he road strengths. And then everyone,

you have a minute or two, five minutes, whatever it was, everyone write down just one word, what is a strength to the company? And then everyone, you go up one by one and vocalize it and put it on a flip chart. You find it naturally ends up in these little categories, like everyone's on the same page. So a lot of our strengths were trusted by the customer.

So a lot of it was about that. There was a lot about consistent implementation of our product, like consistent cleaning. There was a lot about growth mindset. So that's professionally growing business growing, constantly improving. We've got a lot of feedback from the team about it was cool to work in a company that was treating them like this, that we're not just sitting there like we're good.

We're always trying to make things better all the time. So that was cool. There was another one on here that was innovative just across the board that we were very good at communication between customers and within sight of the business, that there were a lot of benefits and perks to be an employee like there's bonuses and time off and all these things that you don't normally see inside of a service business necessarily.

And then one of them was also our culture. So like we have an open culture, we're thoughtful about the employees and it's funny, like I'm looking at it right now. I don't think Brandon can see it, but it just looks like this confetti of post-it notes on there, which is pretty cool. So that was the S in strength. I mean,

this is like really eye opening. Cause it's like, you like to think about, well, we're really good at these things, but it's also important with the SWAT analysis to look at the other ones, which is weaknesses opportunities and threats. And so weaknesses, obviously we have probably like most cleaning businesses, most service businesses, and most businesses in general right now hiring and retention was a weakness of ours,

consistency issues, automation, to a fault. We said, because we almost use too much text sometimes to the point where we're like, no, we need to get back to like creating amazing customer experiences and doing things that are a little more, hands-on going the extra mile, whatever we can do. And one of the weaknesses, actually our vision wasn't shared properly with the whole company,

Brandon and I, when we started this last year, we created this vision, which we've had for a long time, but we finally put it into words and then we didn't really do a good job sharing it out to everyone. So everyone had some buy-in and that's really important. So that was a weakness that we're actually next month going to be sharing that with the whole company and integrating that in a lot of ways.

So that's going to be really cool. Just the fact that we're in other weaknesses, we've been talking about going into new markets. So right now we're only in Albuquerque in one city, we've had CFO and other indicators that we would be good to diversify. So we're still looking at possibly doing that in other markets. And that would be a weakness is all our eggs are in one basket currently in one service niche.

So that's the weaknesses and let's touch on maybe opportunities, Brandon, because those are pretty cool as well. Yeah. So opportunities, these are things that you're not doing, but are like right there, ready for the taking if you will. So from our standpoint, we talked about doing a night shift. So we have all this equipment, we could hire a second set of people if hiring wasn't such a problem right now.

But if we hiring was solved, we could hire a holes, backup crew people that would come in and clean overnight, or maybe clean light commercial spaces overnight, not overnight, really, but like in the evenings. So sort of a second shift opportunities where employee engagement, like we talked a lot in this meeting as part of the employee retention side of things,

like what are the benefits that we can roll out that we can afford to roll it? So that would be things like, man, we're exploring like on-site daycare and food trucks that come and feed people. And we were just bouncing all these ideas off each other, trying to get there. So that sounds like it's a problem, but it was nice to know that the team also viewed it as an opportunity.

Like we have an opportunity to make these employees like very, very happy expanded service menu was an opportunity. We talked about doing like dishes and laundry or pressure washing and all kinds of stuff. And again, this isn't, you're not committing to doing something during the sexual side. It's more just to get a handle on like what everyone thinks about it. And then,

yeah, we also talked about new markets as an opportunity. So we can go into a second city, we can start doing commercial cleaning and that's a new product offering. So all of that was on the opportunity side of things. Also on, there was a customer experience, just an opportunity. We've been talking a lot about that recently. And we actually just hired someone.

Who's going to be more in charge of creating those customer experiences right now. They're more doing the customer service still and getting trained up. But the idea is guys we've said it before, but I really believe, and I've heard this from a lot of my mentors too. You know, entrepreneurs are going to change the world. How are they going to change the world?

It's through how you make people feel, how you make your clients and your customers feel. And by creating this amazing experience, I don't know. I think all of us can remember a time in our lives when we had an amazing experience at a restaurant or some vacation or some event or business we worked with. And we were just like, oh my gosh,

like I cannot believe how well they treated me and what they did to go above and beyond. That's an opportunity for all of us really. But we just noticed there's a lot of opportunities in places in our business. Every time we interact with the customer, that we can make it an amazing experience. Every time we can do something that they wouldn't expect,

that they're going to go tell people about now. And it just, it's better marketing to a more organic word of mouth marketing, things like that. Also, you know, just creating more loyalty because when people have great experiences with your business, they're not going to complain as much. And if they do, they're going to be more loyal about it.

They're gonna be like, you guys are really good to me. And there's no such thing as a perfect clean or whatever. No perfect business, but easy come easy, go. You're going to build more loyalty into your brand with opportunities like that. So that's a big one that we're working on and then we could tell them, there definitely are threats as well.

So I guess hiring is one of the bigger ones, The big one right now, it's a threat to the business. If we can't get people to like all these growth targets in our vision and stuff, we need people to make that work. Yeah. So hiring, I mean, that's something everybody's experiencing right now. I know a lot of the Profit Cleaners,

people that reach out that's one, you guys always are bringing up, like, what do we do about hiring? How do you get people to show up? What am I doing wrong? Or what can I do better? So we talked a lot about that as well as customer attention, because we've seen as a result of probably a lot of factors,

the economy, the pandemic, the last couple of years, all sorts of things, but just customer retention has been harder. And I think part of that we determined was also because of our higher employee turnover that people just aren't getting the same experience. Like earlier, when we first started this business, we really did pride ourselves on like men everyone's still with us.

It was like one or two years in. And we were like, we probably lost anybody. We had all the same teams and it's gotten harder, but I think that's something we can definitely overcome and continue to work on and build more things into the business to overcome that. What other threats did we have on there? Brandon, There was inflation slash world war three.

So we're a couple of weeks talking about that. And gas prices went up a dollar this week, a whole dollar in five days. I mean, it was good that we were talking about that beforehand, but that was one, there was employee wellness on here. And I think most of that was related to COVID and stuff. And I think we're past all that now.

But again, this is like an open forum for anyone in our leadership team to engage with us about what they think is going to be a problem. Yeah, absolutely. So the SWAT analysis, I went to the university of New Mexico, the business school. And I remember learning about this in business school. And also it's like, this is really cool that we were actively engaging this.

This is very classic business overview type thing that we built in from EOS. Now there's a lot of things in us that I didn't learn in business school. That's exactly why you guys want to be always engaged and learning and from different sources, not just getting a degree at a university because a lot of businesses learning as you go and making mistakes and hopefully you find mentors and people that have gone before you and done it.

But yeah, this was really eyeopening. I really enjoyed that whole process. And then what was the next thing we jumped into Brandon? We did the EOS wheel also, which was kind of cool. I mean, we can give you guys that really quick. So the wheel of EOS, it's six areas that the book has really broken into. And so it's people,

vision, data process issues. And if you have all that stuff solved, then you get traction at the end. And so what we did was everyone had a little quiz, essentially, a self checkup here and you rated yourself ahead, a bunch of questions in there and each one of those areas and you rated yourself one to five in each one of those areas.

And then he averaged it all out and put it on the thing. And so we scored pretty high in traction and issues, which was nice. People was good. Process was good. We had two low spots, which was data and vision. And so vision, I think boiled down to we haven't really adequately communicated it to people. And that's one of our big goals sort of this quarter is to communicate it to the whole company,

which we've never done before. And then the other one was data. Like I pride myself on being a data person I've taken on too much to try and steer it all myself. And part of being like a data-driven company is that at some point you gotta let go of it and let the data kind of tell you the story. So I think one of the results of this is that we need a much more robust data collection system than what I've set up with Google forms and Google sheets,

which is just not really working that way. Yeah. I think just touching back on that vision, I mean, that's like the core of, I think everyone's business that you guys haven't identified your vision, like where it is that you're going and what's your purpose and your reason why, and like, and then explain that to your teams and like, not just how they can make,

if you're the owner like more money. Cause that came up in the business was like, we don't want to just make the owners more money. It's like, yeah, we want to actually share with the whole company the vision, because it should be so big. Our vision should be so big. And your vision, if you're a cleaning business owner should be so big that everyone in your company's vision should be able to fit inside of your vision.

And they can see themselves, their vision being accomplished on their goals being reached within your vision. And so if you can create that cast that big of a vision and then communicating that to your teams and getting people to buy in on that. But yeah, that's something I don't know why we didn't do that sooner. We're still new to this and we're figuring it out,

but it's something we definitely need to share better and put it everywhere. And that was like a big nugget I wrote down is what can we do to continually remind them of that vision, whether it's on the wall, on their screens, on their ID cards, like all through the company. And we're going to do a meeting next month. Like we said,

to share this publicly with everyone and be like, here's how you can grow into the company here. We're going to need more cleaners. We're going to need more trainers. We're going to need people to all these roles for people to grow into and just get people excited about, you know, where we're going. And hopefully that eliminates some of the turnover as well.

People will be part of something bigger. And instead of just another job, we want to create professional cleaners and the best cleaning company in the world to work for. And I think that does tell nicely right into the next thing. So the next part of it was as a group, we went over the vision, the VTO, the vision traction organizer.

So part of the reason I think we didn't communicate the original vision to the entire team was that so much of it is based around these revenue targets. And I think it's hard to tell someone who's making 15 bucks an hour that like, Hey, we want to be a 15, $20 million company. I just don't think they care. Do you know what I mean?

Like who cares? So I want everyone to have buy-in in the company. I want them to be happy, but realistically, I don't know how long people are actually going to stay a house cleaner. You know what I mean? So what our consultant guy had said was kind of a really open my mind is when you communicate it to the team, you have to communicate what's in it for them.

So this is what's in it for you as a side effect of that, the business will be 15, $20 million in annual revenue. So part of our vision was we want to get to in 10 years, we want to be this behemoth. We're going to be like the market leader in the Southwest region. Really? So we want 75 teams and that's going to be 225 full-time cleaners and almost 4,000 customers to do that.

And so part of that, when you draw out this organization, share at the accountability chart, is that look, realistically, if you're planning this out, you can't have one trainer for that many employees and you can't have one person communicating with them. So, all right, we mapped it out. We need to have these team managers that do communications for the date and make sure everything's going well.

We need to have more customer service reps and more trainers. And so when we do this communication with whole company next month, the idea there is that we're going to tell them like, here's, what's in here for you. We need you guys to step up. And one of you, there's going to be more team leads. They get more per hour.

There's going to be more team trainers that get higher wage and you're not cleaning anymore. So like, if you can't stand the cleaning any more than here's how to do it, there's going to be customer service reps that need to be in there. We need bilingual people. There's going to be upward mobility for the cleaner. If you're a brand new person who just came on at the starting wage,

you can see cause it's on the walls downstairs. That's the idea that there is a path for you to continue forward. Yeah, so that was really cool because part of this later exercise of this too, as we were building out the org chart of the whole company, and that's also something we would share because as grow, we need more cleaners, we need more trainers.

We need more people in all these different areas. We can show the teams that and they feel like, wow, there's a place for me to grow into. It's not just a stagnant position. I'll never grow from, which happens all the time and companies and businesses as people are just at these Dennett dead end jobs. And they don't really feel like they're growing.

And that's another thing we want to build into this is even if someone works for the company for a year or two and they leave, we want them to feel better for having worked for our company. They actually grew, they became a better person. Some part of their aspect of their life got better just by being in our environment and our world. And I think that's really cool if we can at least give that to people and hopefully make them a professional cleaner,

if they're cleaners or if they're doing other stuff on the leadership team, be the best at that, whatever that is going back to the vision. Part of it, we share our main purpose. Our cause or passion is actually our tagline, which is claim your weekend, which is all about giving people their time back and people enjoying their life. And time is your most precious asset you have.

If you can always make more money, but you can never get more time. So claim your weekend. That goes for our customers that goes for ourselves and our own lifestyles and our goals as well. And then our niche is sustainable home cleaning. I really liked that word. I love the word sustainable. CEO's think differently. As a small business owner,

you have to stop thinking like one we're launching the Profit Cleaners book club to help transform the mindsets of cleaning business owners everywhere together. We'll read some of the most important business and mindset books so that you can become the leader. Your business needs learn more about the Profit Cleaners book club today, by going to Profit Cleaners dot com slash book club that's Profit Cleaners dot com slash book club.

Yeah, sustainable. We had another word in there before didn't we change it. It was like luxury or No, it was like before the very first time you and I did, I think it was environmentally friendly, but when we analyzed it at the quarterly meeting last year, we changed it to sustainable because sustainable like forked in these bunch of different ways.

So it was sustainable because the employees had a living wage and they wanted to come back and work for us. It was sustainable for the environment because we didn't use toxic chemicals. It was sustainable for the office staff because they all were making more money and had more time to spend with their families and things like that. And it was sustainable for you. And I owning a business with all this financial risk on the line that it's paying off and things are profitable.

All that stuff. You need to have a sustainable business to be able to keep going. If it's not sustainable, that means it's running in the red every year. After year after year, you can't keep that up. You're just thinking more money into an eventually you're going to fold, which is why most businesses fail in the first five years. It's actually,

yeah, I've seen that quote again recently, it was like 50% of businesses fail in the first five years. And then like another 30% fail in the next five years after that. So like in the first 10 years of any business, like most of them, 80% of them fail. It's like insane. You know? So this is why this stuff seems almost like all,

are we talking about this? Like, it's really, really important because if you don't have these core things in place, these purposes, these targets and these visions, it's really easy to get off track. And it's really easy for me just to not finish the race. Yeah. Here's the stats. Cause we always bring us up. It tends to drift because we're never remembering it.

So from the bureau of labor and statistics, 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years, 45% during the first five and 65% during the first 10. So only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. So just by virtue of us doing this process and trying to keep an eye on all these things, I think we're practically guaranteed to get to that 15 year mark,

as long as we keep up with this stuff, this isn't a do it once system where you put it into place and you're on autopilot, like this thing requires weekly attention. And like we're all rowing in the same direction and heavily focused on the issues on the goals of the company, which was kind of like the overarching goal of the annual meeting and EOS.

And I think that was really cool. Yeah. This is huge stuff guys, brand, or just talking over here, it's like, no, this is like the key stuff is like very deep, very monumental stuff that you guys could be working in your business, just like we're doing. And I think it's going to be a huge game changer for you and your team core values that we have on our vision traction organizer.

Or you can just go over a few of those, but open honest communication, one of our big core values, trust and integrity, which is huge going into people's houses, obviously caring, fun place to work initiative, growth mindset. So what's really cool about this guys. This is kind of like your culture. So when you really integrate this into your teams and to the culture of how everyone's thinking about who we are,

like, what's your identity as a company, as a culture, like people act who they think they are. So if you create this identity for your business, well, the culture creates itself and then it just starts happening. And so what we're going to start doing at our weekly meetings and our cleaners have their weekly and their monthly meetings and stuff, we're going to be publicly recognizing the team members for living these values.

So if somebody is showing initiative, we're going to say, Hey, this week so-and-so showed initiative by doing this and everyone's going to apply them and maybe put their picture up. We're really going to start going the extra mile to publicly recognize our employees and show them how much is important to live these core values. And I think this is going to be a big game changer as well for our culture identity and getting everything on track with that as well.

Yeah. So the vision is kind of broken into two parts in my mind. So there's this culture part, which is the core values, your core focus. And then there's a marketing strategy on here, which is they name stuff. So terribly in EOS, that is my one complaint across the board. It's not a marketing strategy. It's like, identify your target customer,

identify the three most unique things about your business and then put a guarantee on it. So that's not marketing in my mind, but the three uniques are really cool. So our uniques were luxury customer experience, professional, fast and thorough cleaning. And then our teams go the extra mile. So the living the values thing, I think we're going to call it the extra mile club and you're publicly rewarding people.

So you have three parts of it. They're focused on culture and the rest of it is all goal setting. So you have a ten-year target. So in 10 years we want to be this, okay. Break that target into a three year picture. So if you split that into three, what does it look like three years from now? Then you take that three year picture and break it down into a one-year plan.

So by the end of this year, here's what it's going to look like. Okay, great. We all agreed on these are the goals for the year and then, okay. Take that on your plan and break that into quarters. So that's this quarter, what are the goals, the rocks for the quarter that everyone needs to accomplish in the next 12 weeks to be able to be on track for that one year plan.

And it's as simple as that we've talked about this before, it's like take a big problem. That's overwhelming you and break it into little tiny chunks that you can work with. This is that we're just taking a big goal that we have, and we're going to break it into little tiny, more easily accomplished little goals. And the thing is, if you hit those little goals and you just keep consistently hitting them growth,

mindset, style, constant improvement, then man, that stuff stacks up and then suddenly you hit the ten-year target and you are this big $20 million company. So we could talk all day about the VTO. And this is already a very long podcast episode. So you guys, I highly encourage you to do the EOS thing. There's a lot more stuff in our agenda here that I want to hit before we ended up.

Yeah, Absolutely. I think we could share more of the numbers, but I think you guys get the point here and be different, your business and your growth and your vision is going to be totally different than ours. So the point is guys, we want to be really big and we're really aggressive. And we want to like take over the world with the home cleaning business,

but we can't do that in every market. So you guys can definitely obviously be doing this in your market and you know, there's more than enough to go around. We believe in abundance and growth and all that good mindset stuff we always talk about. And so that's why we're sharing this out with you guys and being vulnerable and sharing like a lot of our company,

internal stuff with you guys, because by sharing it out there with you guys, it's also helping us to proclaim it to the world and also like make it more actionable and hold ourselves accountable to actually accomplishing these goals. Because now we've told you now we have to do it. Right. So I think that's kind of cool. And that's part of why we're doing this as well.

Yeah. So at the core of the EOS is issues, issues or things that need to be addressed that are getting in the way of us hitting these rocks, hitting these goals. And so the way we had set this up in the meeting was there was one flip chart that we were working off the whole day. That's what we were doing exercises on.

And there was another one on the other side of the room. There was always there that just had the list of issues. And so over the course of these two days, at any point during any one of these exercises, if something came up that we thought needed to pay more attention to it, one on this issues list. So we had two sheets of paper.

There was an issues, which is like a bigger thing that needs some group attention in our weekly meetings, we got to pay attention to that. And the other one was just to dues to do is like, one of them, for instance, was let's ask Corby and the team up in Denver, how they're dealing with hiring right now, because we haven't really talked to them about that.

So we did that. Like, these are just little one-off things that don't need a lot of attention, but let's talk to them about it. So we came up with 14 issues over the course of these two days. And so this was stuff that everyone agreed as a group was a problem and that we need to do it. So the next day,

the second day, we really spent a lot of time. I mean like three hours doing issues. So we took an issue and then we troubleshot it. So I think the one that we worked on was employee retention quite a bit. So that was her way. We have this brainstorming sheet of pictures in here that was just employee benefits. What are we going to do?

And so we talked about daycare thing, flexible schedules. Can we get them an ideal shift? Can we have three shifts? Can we get a workout room with a personal trainer? What about an immigration attorney? Because people are trying to get their citizenship. Like we could help out with that. It's like a mental mind map of the whole leadership committee on like how we can try and help our employees,

not just be good house cleaners, but also really enjoy working for us to the point where you don't want to leave. Like working here is great because my kids get free daycare. And I have this that, Yeah. And we've talked about even getting like a tutor to teach English and then also teach the leadership Spanish. I mean like, so everyone's speaking the same language and there's no like major cultural divides there because we're all trying to learn together and work together as a team.

And that's what's cool guys is you can think of whatever it would be for your company. How could you create the most amazing job for your employees that they're like no other cleaning company I'd want to work for? Like, this is it. This is awesome. I wouldn't want to leave. You can pay them more. You can do other things, but sometimes it's the intangibles and the things that you can create that are just like quality of life stuff and just like a great environment that they can't get anywhere else because people want to be treated really well.

They want to feel like they're part of a culture and a family and something that's going somewhere. And that's a big part of this vision stuff too. They want to see where we're going. That is a big part of it. So like we are trying to create an awesome culture here. And I was listening to a Freakonomics episode today about unionizing companies unionizing.

And they were talking about two really high profile ones, which was Amazon and the Southern one with a Walmart store. And those places they're already paying so much as a result of the pandemic. These are places that have starting wages of like 17, $20 an hour. So it's not just that a living wage will solve all these problems. These were toxic work environment things.

And so people were trying to unionize an Amazon cause they were like under surveillance and they couldn't take bathroom breaks. And your whole day is run by this app at your station. And so it was miserable for them. And so they can't talk to management to undo it. So they were trying to form a union, that culture thing. That is what we're trying to do.

Like we're trying to get ahead of that to the point where it's great that we pay you guys 20 bucks an hour, but you all hate us and our slashing tires in the parking lot after hours and things like we don't want to get to that point. So we're trying to get ahead of it. And that's the point of the EOS issues thing is that you're trying to tackle things head on open.

And honestly, before they become like waits that are really dragging you down, most companies are not doing this. I guarantee you we're the only cleaning company in town. That's doing this. So you could be the only cleaning company in your town if you were doing EOS. And that would put you not like right away, you're not going to be light years ahead of the competition.

Just because you read the book, you got to actually do this, but once you're doing it, once you get that locomotive going of tackling problems before they really come back to bite you just being upfront about it and getting ahead of it, that is such a huge advantage, Little stuff like this. And this is not little stuff, guys. This is like big stuff behind the scenes that is really shifting where your business is going.

But it's the kind of things that a lot of businesses, like you said, just don't do. They don't implement. They don't think it's important. And they just keep chugging along. And lo and behold a year or two later, I mean, I think it's most businesses go out of business because of capital, but it's, there's a so many other issues.

And especially right now with all of the issues going on in the world, like you really gotta be extra were cognizant of like, what can we do to stay on top and keep winning and keep making adjustments and keep tweaking things to make it better. And if you have that mindset and if you keep listening to the podcast reading book, if you keep that growth mindset,

like we're always talking about guys, you're going to be great. Because like Brandon said, not very many people out there are constantly growing. It's like people go to school and then they like stop reading books and stop learning. It's a constant process, even in business all the time, doubling down on knowledge and growth and what you can do to be better yourself.

And also as a good leader that filters down into your teams and they get the growth and they get the advantage of same mindset and the same opportunities that come with that. Yeah. So the second day was we're going to solve some issues or at least discuss them and then get some to do's around solving those things. So we documented all that captured all that.

And then after we really got a handle on what was going on within the company, as a result of us spending two days together, that's when these set at the very end we set the quarter rocks. So that's when we set the goals like, okay, we know where we're going. We got the issue solved with that may have adjusted our VTO issues a little bit,

but we got those rocks in there. And so we've got targets for how many leads we want to put through the company every week, how many applications for employees we need to get. And there's an ad budget behind that. We're coming up with a customer retention plan and employee retention plan. We're working on employee benefits. There's lots of things that we're doing.

And one person is assigned to a rock. So you can't have multiple people working on a goal. You have to have one person accountable for it. And so every week when we do these weekly meetings, you check in with that person here, are we on track to hit that rock at the end of the quarter? And you just say yes or no.

And if we're not on track, how can we help you? Like, are you overwhelmed? Like, do we need to adjust the target? There's lots of different ways for us to track it. But the point is, this is why new year's resolutions never work. You set a new year's resolution. You're like, let me go to the gym every day.

And then you don't write it down. You don't stick to it. You don't break it up to if I'm going to go to the gym every day. Well, I have to get up at five. Like you just like, say it out loud and forget it. So this is not that this is a constant accountability as a group the whole time.

And that's sense. It would be like the new year's goal is I want to lose 50 pounds. That's the rock. And then the little to-dos and the little things below that are what you're working through every week, I got to get up at five. I got to work out, I got to eat like this. I got to drink this much water,

all this stuff. So that's what we're doing in our weekly meetings every week guys is now we have this vision. We have these rocks, we know where we're going, but now it's like every week, we're just hacking away at the little stuff. The little to-do is the little things that get us a little closer to that rock. But if you don't have that rock and again,

this is why people don't accomplish their new year's resolutions. This is why they don't accomplish their business goals is because they lose sight of where they're going. It's like another analogy that I've mentioned before on the podcast is this is a true story. Some plane crashed. I don't know this is a long time ago, but these guys are all stranded in the jungle and they crashed a plane and everybody was took out.

Their machetes is hacking away at the jungle, but they're all hacking away, you know, in the wrong direction. One guy climbs up the tree and he says, oh no, no hack this way because that's strategy looking out and seeing where you need to go. And that's what this does for you guys, is it gives you the vision and the rocks to be like,

oh no, we need to hack that way. Not this way. We need to go that way. And then every day you just hacking away at the leaves. And you're getting a little bit of progress, a little bit of progress until like you said, a year goes by and then three years, and then 10 years goes by. And then you have reached this monumental,

huge goal that wouldn't have been possible unless you had broken it down into these tiny little chunks and smaller chunks after that. And it's just, it's really not rocket science. And that's the funny thing is like so many people that are really successful that I've learned from say the same thing. They're like, it's not rocket science. It's literally like do your five things,

your critical tasks everyday. Do the reps. We always say that, do the reps. So that jungle metaphor there, that brings us perfect into the end of our annual meetings. So the end of the meeting, which was my favorite part was our consultant guy goes around and says, rate the meeting on a scale of one to 10. And then tell me what your favorite part was about it.

And more than one of our leadership team said that it's really exciting that like, I know where we're going, clarity. I have clarity on where we're going. And so that is the machete guys, all hacking in the same direction. Our team now knows. Look, you guys know you were at the meeting. We're all trying to get to this in 10 years,

which means we're trying to get to this in three years. I think you're trying to get to this by the end of the year, which means you're trying to get to this by the end of the quarter. And therefore you should be doing this this week because you know, everybody knows this is the plan. That part is invaluable, man. We spent 16 hours together over a two-day period.

People cried, people laughed. We had food together. It was a really good time. Like we learned a lot about each other. We got some good feedback as leaders about things that we should be doing differently and things that people love that we're doing, that we should keep up. And so it was great, man. I love it. I highly recommend it to everybody.

Absolutely. If you guys remember anytime growing up or in your whole life, when you do a retreat or like some camp when you were younger, like there's always this feeling of camaraderie and rapport and like relationship building like friendships. Sometimes you never forget because of just something like that, you know, just doing a weekend together. So we might do this during the week.

At some point we did it on a weekend, but that kind of bonding and taking the time out of your day, especially with your leadership. I mean, it's so I think critical, especially when you hit a certain point in your business and yeah, I mean, there was some really cool stuff in there, man. I really enjoyed a lot of the exercises we did.

One of them was like you mentioned earlier was just like everyone going around saying, what was it like, start, stop, continue doing Start, stop, continue. Yeah. Like a lot of that for you and I were and continue being really good bosses, continue innovating on stuff. And then you got to be open to feedback. You gotta be open to your employees,

telling you to stop being whatever. Yeah. And for us it was like, we need to stop procrastinating, certain stuff. We need to stop. We need to like delegate better. We need to like grow into our other roles and have other people help us do everything. So we're not trying to do everything ourselves. That was a big part of it.

But even that was really cool. Like people were crying. I mean, people were laughing, crying. I'm like, just like this amazing. I don't know, like whatever you want to call it. It was just really cool because I think everybody grew a lot from, it opened a lot of our eyes to things. There was another exercises we did was the team player,

the ideal team player, which is actually, I think a book we're going to go through with the whole team. But that was really cool too, because it was like, you gotta be humble. You gotta be smart. You gotta be hungry. Those are like three categories of ideal team player. And I would recommend you guys pick that book up to,

I don't know who wrote that one, but that was really cool too, because you get to rate yourself and be like, am I a team player? And it doesn't work. If not everyone on your team is not a team player, everyone's gotta be rowing in the same direction and team players helping each other get there. And so that was a really cool one as well.

But yeah, there's just like a lot of cool stuff that came out of that weekend. So I would highly recommend yeah, every cleaning business, every service business, every business out there for that matter, pick up traction by Gino Wickman, implement that system. If you want to seriously scale your business and take it next level. And I think traction is more geared for like the local business space.

I think clockwork was more for digital online companies a little bit more. And that's what I've heard from other people too. But this one is awesome. Clockwork works better for a solar producer, the train to hand things off to like VAs clockwork has really best practices for any business. And you could be a huge business and running things like clockwork and big companies like Google and Amazon are going to rebrand it and call it something different.

Like I remember reading a long, long time ago about these Google meetings that they would do every week where you go around the table and say, what did you last week? And what are you doing this week? And what's holding you up. That's essentially like what we're doing in our weekly sort of check-ins, but we're coming to you from our viewpoint,

which is, you know, like we're a medium-sized company and we've got 50 employees more growing quickly. And we're trying to like make sure that we get a handle on everything. So it can scale correctly. Like we said, in the beginning as a very, very small company, if you get this stuff into action right now, man, when you do scale,

when you do start to grow, when you hit your goals of growth, it'll be so smooth. So this podcast is not sponsored by traction or Gino, Wickman or EOS or any of the other books that we mentioned. I think that's important to mention out loud, we're not getting any monetary kickback from this. This is just a system that we are doing.

We got told by our CFO, we got told by other people that I interviewed for CFO positions, four out of the eight dudes that we interviewed for CFO asked me if we were doing EOS. And the reason that they're asking that is because companies that do EOS are easy to work with and they are successful. So when you read the book, Gino does a very good job of telling you about success stories in that book and how big companies get way bigger under the EOS system.

And that's not just fluff. So it is important, I think. And so obviously we are fans, but that I think is a good synopsis of our annual meeting. And we learned a lot and you know, we have a lot to do right now, but it's, these are all good problems. These are like good things that we have to do.

We have to come up with a benefit package to keep in happy forever. That's way better than saying we lost 30% of our revenue last month or what are we going to do? It's different. These are different kinds of problems. Yeah. And a lot of it is just being proactive to, instead of looking at only trailing indicators like, oh no,

like our numbers are off from last month. What happened instead of like having that conversation all the time, it's like, what are we doing right now to get more leads, to get better customer experience, to get the customer employees happier. So we have better retention, like all these things that you're proactively doing that offsets that so that when you do have problems and issues that come up.

Oh yeah. But we're already working on like, or you peel it back and you say that that's actually not the real problem. The real problem is over here and we need to fix that. So it really makes like your time, like a lot of times meetings are, people are like, I could have been an email. Like that's what these meetings are.

They're so great because it's not just an email meeting. It's like, no, we got some real stuff done. And we talked some stuff out when we figured out what the real issue is here so that we can solve it and actually move forward. And so they're really productive meetings. The annual meeting was hugely productive, even though it was two days,

it was well worth it. We went to Santa Fe and skied afterwards and did some snowboarding. And that was really fun. We're missing the meeting after the meeting, which was in the hot tub on the roof, man, it was a steamy, hot tub on the roof of this hotel. It was cold. It was snowy. And that's when we were really coming up with some wacky ideas.

Yeah. That's sometimes really good ideas come out as like, maybe like later in the day or we were hanging out with Matt and our sales guy, you know, luckily our wives are awesome and they watched the kids while we were up there having a great time and building the business. So thank you wives for doing that for us. But yeah. I mean,

that's what it's all about is building the team, building the community, the culture, the vision, getting everyone on the same page. And so I would highly recommend you guys pick it up and do something like this in your business. Especially if you're smaller, whatever stage you're at, like this is an awesome system. We would highly recommend it. And then I think that's pretty much it.

Is there anything else we should cover on the traction side of things? Brandon? No. I mean, we could go on, on and on about traction then this particular meeting, this is already like three times as long as our normal podcast length, I think, but it was important for you guys to know. I think it's also important to touch on that.

Like I recognize that we're in a privileged situation, it'd be able to go do this in a nice hotel in Santa Fe. And that we did have someone to watch our kids and that you may not be in that position, but there's a way to implement this offsite doesn't mean that you guys got to get on a plane and go to a resort. Offsite could mean that you go to somebody's house across town.

The idea is just that you are away from your day-to-day office so that you are not thinking about your day to day office. You need to be thinking about the bigger tenure picture. So you guys, Yeah. If you guys get value and I think there's a lot of value we shared in this episode, please share it out to someone who you think could benefit.

If another business owner, you know, that could hear this, share it to them, share the link, leave us a review, subscribe to the podcast guys, because we are moving this movement forward organically. We're not running a bunch of crazy ads all the time, and we're trying to make it a great experience for you guys. So hopefully you guys are getting value,

share the show if you are, and until next time, keep it clean. Thanks for joining us today to get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember keep it clean.

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