The 5 Metrics Every Cleaning Business Owner Must Know to Succeed (#121)

Most business owners are flying blind. They see big revenue and assume they're winning. But revenue alone is misleading. You can be turning over a fortune and quietly going broke.

In this episode I break down the five numbers that tell you whether your business is healthy or bleeding out: customer lifetime value, churn rate, cost to acquire a customer, labour as a percentage of revenue, and cash conversion. I explain what each one means, how to work it out, and why getting them right is what lets you finally step back from the day-to-day.

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Transcript

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Welcome to episode 121 of the Self-Made Podcast. Over a hundred episodes in. Still don't have an intro, still don't have an outro, still don't have a clue what I'm doing, but I'm on here once again and just gonna yap away about business, uh specifically relating to the cleaning business. So lots of exciting stuff on the horizon. If you're an avid listener and enjoyer of self-made, there is some cool stuff coming out. I've noticed a bit of an uptick in new listeners in this audience. So if you are new here, my name's Jason. I own a cleaning company in Australia. I have two locations, over 70 staff, and I've just about more or less removed myself from the business. So the business runs independent of me. I've set up a lot of systems over the years, and I've got a great management team in place that allows me to step back. And as part of that now, I've got a lot of free time and autonomy in my life, which is great. And so I like to try and impart a bit of my journey and my knowledge and experience in these podcast episodes. And in addition to that, because I've got a lot more time on my hands, I'm going to be taking a little more of a look into coaching and ramping up that side of things. Because up until now, it just didn't really make sense for me to do much of that because my cleaning business was the main engine that was driving my well, my personal income, really, and it was the biggest ROI generator on my time. And so that's where all of my time was focused. And now that I'm able to kind of step back and just take a bit of a break, I'll be doing a lot more of this stuff. So if you are a fan of the podcast and of my content in general, then I've got good news for you. If you're not a fan, well, terrible news for you. You should probably stop listening now and block me because you're only going to hear more and more of me. So, today's episode, we are going to be talking about numbers, as if I don't talk about that enough. So I want to start this off with a bit of a confession. All right. For the first couple of years of running my cleaning business, and this is going back 2020, well, pretty much 2019 is when I first had the idea for the business, and I couldn't actually start my business until early 2020 because I didn't have a driver's license because I was quite young at the time. So I've really been I've been doing this for a while. And for the first couple of years of the business, I had virtually no idea what was actually going on under the hood. I knew roughly what was coming in as I was growing the business and I was getting customers, and I knew the bank account wasn't empty. In fact, it was filling up. Um, and I told myself that that meant things were fine. And then came my first tax bill, and that was a bit of a rude awakening for me. So I got hit with a big tax bill in my first year, and I had to I had to very quickly learn about income tax versus business tax and all of that. And I thought that because my business was paying like this uh this these business activity statements, which is something in Australia that you do every quarter and you pay, you know, you pay your sales tax and some other things in instalments, I thought that that covered the income tax portion. So I was spending money that I thought I had, which was actually belonging to the Australian Taxation Office. So around the the first year at tax time, I got a very large bill with an amount that I did not have in the bank account at the time because I did not account for that. So that was the first lesson I learned in business, and it kind of just cascaded over time. It was lesson after lesson, and it all came down to numbers. It all came down to math, which was a not a very fun time for me because I did not do well in school, uh, especially didn't do very well in math. So it was a bit of a culture shock for me when I realized that business essentially revolves around math, and I knew I wasn't very good at it. So that was uh a bit of a dichotomy to manage. But it was just like one thing after the other. I learned about tax the hard way by paying a massive tax bill I didn't know was coming. And then later on, I realized I wasn't even charging enough to cover all the overheads I had in the business. And then even later on than that, I realized I wasn't charging enough to cover the wages of staff because I thought, well, if I'm charging 50 an hour and I pay my staff 30 an hour, then 20 an hour is profit. But I didn't realize there were all these other auxiliary costs associated with wages, and in the end, I I was in the red again, and it was just one thing after the other, and it was a very frustrating journey, just going from one roadblock to the next, one mistake to the next. And after the the first couple years in business, I didn't really have a lot to show for it. There really wasn't a lot of profit left over, even though the revenue was quite high, right? Like my revenue doubled every year for the first few years in business, and that sounds great on paper, and this is where a lot of people get caught in this trap. They get caught looking at these vanity metrics like revenue and new customers and the hours that they're doing and and all these things. And this is the this is the illusion of being busy and seeing big numbers and assuming you're winning. But revenue on its own is one of the most misleading numbers in business. You can be turning over a fortune and quietly going broke at the same time. I've seen it happen to a lot of people in this space, outside of this space, and it's a very, very tough thing, especially when you're too far into it. It can be very hard to steer that shit back the other way. So this is one of the things that you really need to address early on, especially before you scale your business and you you build teams, because time and time again, I see people that they do the easy part, which is getting the clients and getting booked out, right? Getting booked out in the cleaning business is relatively simple. And then they get to that first hurdle where they're like, okay, I'm booked out. I physically can't do any more cleaning myself, I need to build a team. But they don't address the fact that they're not actually profitable before they go and build a team. And so it's just one problem after the other, and it creates like a domino effect, this knock-on effect until eventually you you're led to burnout and the business essentially just fails. That's why so many businesses fail in this day and age. I don't know what the the most recent statistics are, but to my knowledge and understanding, 90% of businesses fail after 10 years, which is a staggering number. And the the the reason why 100% of those businesses fail is because the numbers just don't work. Um, there is no other perceivable logical reason that a business would go under besides the numbers aren't working. Because if the numbers are right, if the business is profitable, um doesn't matter what happens if you get sick of it, if something changes in your life, circumstances change, and you have to move on from the business, you can sell it. If it is a profitable asset, you can sell it. So the reason that 90% of businesses go under in 10 years is because the numbers don't stack up. And the good news is the numbers are simple. You only need to focus on a few key metrics because not everything that can be counted counts. But not everything that counts is typically counted by business owners. And that's the whole game. It's not about tracking everything, it's about tracking the right things. Just a few key numbers in your business. And there's really five numbers that that we'll get into in a second that every business owner should be tracking. And I really cannot stress enough the importance of tracking these metrics and tracking them religiously, routinely, consistently. It's the main driver of all of my success. And it's the one, it's the one verifier of any success that I'm having in the business. When I feel like things are going well, I can look at the numbers and I can verify and cross-reference and correlate that feeling with logical statistics and logical data to back that up. The inverse is true as well. When things aren't going well, I've got numbers that I can look at. And the numbers reveal a logic or an equation behind it. If our churn is up, if we're losing more customers, there's usually reasons behind that that we can investigate, reverse engineer, and then fix. So we can course correct based on how the numbers are looking at a glance. And over the past few months, I've been building this incredible software for our business, which is we've we've had it in effect for about a month and a half now, and it's been a game changer for us. We track virtually every metric in the business. Like, you know, Facebook tracks uh like a hundred million data points, right? That's kind of what I feel like in my cleaning business. I want to track every single data point, every single metric that we have. It's a little bit overkill. It's it's way more than you really realistically have to do. So I don't want to scare you with all that, but I also just want to stress the importance of this. And I want you to understand that this is what's allowed me to now step back from my cleaning business. And I've done something that not many people have in this space. I've I've built a business with all employees in the residential space, and there's just not many big companies that go there. We are now the biggest all-employee residential cleaning company in Western Australia. I don't know about the rest of the country. I just focus on my local market. And the reason I've been able to do that is because I just religiously track these numbers. And so we're going to talk about five of the main metrics that you really need to track in your business. And this applies to anyone. Doesn't matter if you've just started out, doesn't matter if you're doing 100K a year, a million a year. These are all equally as important to anyone listening to this. So, number one is your customer lifetime value. Right? So this is a big one. Most business owners never calculate this. And it's the single most important number that you're not looking at. It's simply what a customer is actually worth over the lifetime that they stay with you. It could be over the course of a year, two years, three years, not just the first job, the whole relationship. Right. So this applies especially if you have recurring revenue, but even if you have a lot of ad hoc uh revenue, you can still track the lifetime spend of a customer. Like if you're a lawn mower and someone calls you up every now and then to get their lawn mowed, you can track that value over time and that gives you a lifetime value. Same with even if you do vacate cleaning. If you have a if you have a bunch of real estates that that supply you work, you can track the lifetime value of the real estate agents. Can't necessarily do it for a vacate client because that's one and done. But you want to have these touch points of continuity in your business, these these widgets or these service types that have some sort of continuity that can then lead to lifetime value because this leads into the other metrics that are really important. If you have a business that doesn't have continuity or uh recurring revenue, it's a really hard slog. It is just a constant uphill grind. And look, a lot of people have done it, a lot of people have made successful businesses out of it. All I can tell you is that it's a hundred times easier to build a business on continuity, on recurring revenue than one off work, right? And so anyway, lifetime value, super important, and it's really easy to calculate as well. If you get a client that spends $100 a week with you, right, there's 52 weeks a year, we'll just take out two weeks because there's usually holidays and people canceling cleans and whatnot. So we'll say $100 a week, $50 uh $50 weeks a year, that's $5,000 a year. And if the average customer stays with you for two years, then one customer paying $100 a week, which is nothing, is worth $10,000 to you. Right? Um, the average customer to us is probably worth, I think, about $185. So, and our lifetime value or our lifespan of a customer is around two years. So a lot of money there. Right. And then you can calculate the profit margin on that, and then that leads into number two that you should be tracking, which is your cost to acquire a customer. Right? This is what it actually costs you to win a new client, to actually get them on your books. And I I mean, what does it really cost? Your ad spend, um, sure, but also the time spent quoting and all the quotes that never converted and eight hours of your week. Add it all up and then divide it by the customers that you won. That's your real acquisition cost. You want to put a value on the time that you spend on doing this. And then once you've got your lifetime value and you've got your cost to acquire a customer, then you basically just play with house money. You can rig the game in your favor. It's like, it's like if you went into a casino and you knew what the what the roulette ball was going to land on every single time. And so you just keep putting more and more money on that. It's basically like a rigged system. Once you know lifetime value and your CAC, your cost to acquire a customer. If I know my lifetime value is, you know, $10,000 over two years and my profit margin is 20%, I know that that customer will net me $2,000 on average. And so how much would I be willing to spend to get that customer, right? I'm probably willing to spend $500 to get that customer because I'm basically just exchanging $500 for $2,000 back or $1,500 profit. And this is the game that most business owners are not playing. Most, especially cleaning business owners, most cleaners, they see a clean as just that one clean, even if they have recurring revenue. It's just like this mental block where if someone's spending $150 a week with them, they just see that client as a $150 client. And so do you think they're willing to spend $500 to get that customer? No, absolutely not. Because they're gambling the wrong way. They don't, they don't have the game behind the game. They don't have the system rigged in their favor. And so once you know these metrics, it makes it really easy to scale your business. Right. So if you've got lifetime value and then you want to go run paid ads, you now know that based on your lifetime value, what can you now spend on Google ads or meta ads in order to get enough leads to then get a customer, right? If your if your lifetime value is $10,000, 20% profit, we'll say, $2,000, and you run meta ads and you're getting $10 leads, and it takes five leads to get one customer, then you know, that's $50 to get one customer, right? $50 in exchange for $2,000 over two years. That's a pretty good gamble. That is a pretty good deal that you're getting. And again, most business owners just aren't really going to spend that money because they see spending $50 to get, you know, a hundred, $150 customer as not worth it. And I mean, it usually costs more to get a customer. I'm just pulling numbers out of thin air here. But that's the whole idea here. That is the game. That's really all it boils down to. If you can understand those two metrics, you can scale a business to a million dollars tomorrow. And but the key here is also just tracking your time and put and putting a value on your time because a lot of people in this space, they will do cheap things like they'll hand out flyers, they'll spend a lot of time in Facebook groups advertising their services, but they're not really attaching a dollar value to the time that they're spending to do these quote unquote free forms of advertising. So what you want to do is you want to allocate an hourly rate to yourself for what you do, and then that goes into your cost acquire a customer. So even if you're not spending money on meta ads or Google ads, you're still spending time, which is money. And so just put a value to that and then put that into your cost equation when you're when you're adding up how much it actually costs you to get a customer, right? Makes sense. So you've got lifetime value and CAC, cost to acquire a customer. The next number that you should know is your churn rate. So this is how fast you're losing customers. And the way I want you to picture this is like a leaky bucket. You're pouring new clients in the top through all your marketing and your sales efforts, but if they're draining out the bottom just as fast, you're sprinting just to stand still. Like you're spending all this energy and the bucket just never fills. It just keeps on leaking and pouring out leads and customers hand over fist, right? And calculating this is very straightforward. You just take the number of customers you lost in a period and divide it by the number you had at the start. So we have an automatic thing in our dashboard that calculates our monthly churn and also annualizes that churn. And the way it works is it just divides the number of customers we lost in a month against the total number of customers we have, and then times that by 100. So we get the percentage. So for example, if we had 220 customers and lost six in a month, then our churn rate for that month would be 2.73%. And then it would annualize that and and work out an average over time. So we have something like that in our business now, where we track that automatically. And just to give you a rough idea of benchmarking for the for the industry, a the average churn rate for a cleaning business with continuity and recurring revenue sits around 25 to 30%. And this this is in the residential space as well. With commercial, you're going to see less than 10% churn rates because they tend to be stickier. But with residential, the average churn rate is around 25 to 30% a year, which basically means every year you lose nearly a third of all of your customers. So you have to then replace that, then some if you want to grow. And now that's the average, and we don't want to be average. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably don't want to be average. So we try to aim for 20% or less churn. It's it's um it can be tough, especially when you're a premium price service. Naturally, clients tend to drop off at a higher rate because cost does have an impact on that churn. But that's how you calculate churn, and the reason it's so important is because you want to always outpace that churn. Because if you're not outpacing it, then you're not growing. And if you're not growing, then you're dying, to put it bluntly. So when you know your lifetime value too, the churn rate starts to feel a lot heavier as well, because you know that every time you churn a customer, you're not just losing a hundred or two hundred dollar a week client, you're losing ten thousand dollars a year every time you churn someone. So the goal isn't to reduce the churn to zero, but it's more about just keeping your finger on the pulse and and just being conscious of that churn rate and then you know, implementing systems and processes that you can follow up with customers more, send out net promoter scores and do more feedback surveying and just making sure your customers are happy with the service and also paying attention to the you know the market around you, the economic climate, because every year, you know, you're gonna do a price increase, hopefully in in line with the consumer price index and inflation. And, you know, you'll probably lose customers around that time. And so you just want to have an idea for your churn rate throughout the year. Um, you're gonna find that there's some periods where it's higher and then some periods where it's lower, right? So for us, churn does usually pick up just before the end of a financial year, but then it decreases right after that when things stabilize and companies get their new budgets and people, uh people's households they work out their personal budgets, and everything kind of stabilizes, right? So it's another good number to know. So number one, LTV, lifetime value. Number two, CAC, cost to acquire a customer. Uh, number three, your churn rate. And metric number four that you need to be tracking is your labor as a percentage of revenue. This is the one that quietly kills a lot of service businesses. And most business owners just they don't watch it closely enough or they don't watch it at all. Now ask yourself, is this something that you're currently tracking? Doesn't matter if you're a solo cleaner or you have a team, you need to be calculating the labor as a percentage of the revenue that you're bringing in. Right? In a business like mine, in a business like ours, wages are by far the biggest expense. I think wages are 70% of all of my expenses. And the key word here is percentage, not dollar figure, right? We're all gonna have different dollar figures and and absolute numbers in our business, but the percentage is going to be a constant. The percentage will be a little bit different, but the percentage scales up with revenue, and you want to make sure that it's it's at a healthy margin. And the reason that matters is the the dollar amount will always go up as you grow. That's normal. But the percentage is what tells you the truth. If your labor cost creeps from, you know, 60 or 70% up to 80%, then you've just lost most, if not all, of your margin. And the scary part is you may not even feel it in the day-to-day. The jobs are still getting done, the team's still busy, but you're making a lot less on every dollar. And you you probably usually don't find that out until, you know, tax time. Um and so watching this number tells you whether your pricing has kept pace with your costs. And that's especially relevant right now with the wage increases that are coming through this time of year. Um, so I'm uploading this on the 30th of June. Actually, I think when it uploads, it'll go live on the 1st of July. So the wage increases uh in Australia come out tomorrow, right? And so wages going up, I think 4.5%, something like that. And so if you're not increasing your front-end costs in accordance with those wage increases, then you're just sacrificing margin, right? Your your labor costs are going up, but your service costs, your pricing isn't got isn't isn't scaling with it. So you're just losing money hand over fist every single year. And time and time again, I see businesses that they don't raise their prices like ever. They just keep the same prices that they've had five or six years ago, and they're just slowly burning out. So, anyway, this is well, they're all the important numbers. I was gonna say this is the most important, but they're all equally as important as each other. This is really the number as you start to grow your team that you need to be fully in tune with. And even if you don't have a team yet, if you're just a solo operator, I want you to, again, similar to cost to acquire a customer, I want you to associate your time with a labor cost. Right. So just look at what it would cost you or add up what it would cost you to employ someone right now. And then look at how many hours of labor you do per week. Let's just say you're doing 40 hours of cleaning a week. You want to then apply that wage cost or that hypothetical labor cost to those 40 hours of cleaning you do a week. And you can include your travel time in there as well because we pay cleaners for travel. And you know, you could include your other costs as well. But you want to you want to multiply the amount of hours you're doing by this hypothetical wage cost, this labor cost. And then you can subtract that from the revenue you're generating, and then you work out the percentage from there. A lot of people might be surprised to find that they're only really making 5% net profit on if they were to have an employee doing what they're doing. And so that's the first red flag. And that's something that even if you're just starting out, if you're just by yourself, you should work this out now. So when you do get to that point inevitably, where you're in a position where you can grow the business and you're really busy and you want to hire a team, you already know before that that you're profitable. And so you can start right now, just hypothetical wage cost, multiply it by the number of hours you're doing a week, subtract that from your gross revenue. That'll give you your labor percentage. And if you have staff already and you're not tracking this, you need to be doing this. You should ideally be tracking this every week. We have a payroll tracking tool in our internal system. It tracks the labor hours of every employee, it subtracts their pay slip from their gross revenue generated. It gives us a percentage. And we have benchmarks that we look at. And if people are falling behind that, then you know we investigate, see why they're, you know, not uh cleaning efficiently or staying on time. And then that way we can adjust things and keep our finger on the pulse so that things don't slip behind. And that's how we maintain a good operating margin. So that's why your labor costs are a very important metric that you should be tracking, regardless of what step in the journey you're in. And lastly, number five, and this one again is a silent killer, catches a lot of businesses out, but it's the cash conversion cycle. So, you know, it's just the time of the cash flow in the business. It's the the simple version is profit on paper means absolutely nothing if the cash isn't actually in your account when wages are due. It's about that timing between money coming in and money going out. So think about that gap. You do the work, then you invoice, then eventually you get paid. That whole stretch in the middle is time where you've spent money, you've spent time, but you haven't gotten it back yet. Especially if you have staff and you're paying, you know, payroll every week and it's taking customers three to four weeks to pay you. That's how growing businesses die in that gap constantly. They scale faster than their cash can actually support. So the money's all tied up in it could be vehicles, it could be equipment, it could be outstanding receivables. And then, you know, while all that's going on, they're paying staff every week. On paper, they're profitable. Like in the PL, it sees like, oh, this is all the revenue that we've invoiced, this is this is our expenses, and this is the profit left over. But in reality, they can't even make payroll. And so this is this is why it's important to track how long it takes for money to actually come back to you after you've done the work. And then you want to work on shortening it. That is the key metric. Invoice faster, you know, tighten your payment terms up and really get good payment policies in place that people stick to and be really, really disciplined about that. You know, you want to chase what's owed. It's it's not glamorous work, but it's the difference between surviving a growth spurt and getting wiped out by one. And just a side note, if you've heard of the concept of profit first, it's a great book. You should read it, and it it really does help with cash flow using the profit first system. I might even do a podcast episode on that if I haven't already, can't remember. And yeah, so you just want to track your cash conversion cycle and you know, calculate the average time it takes for a customer to pay you, and you can segment them based on customer type. So if you have residential customers, you know, have an average time for a residential customer to pay versus a commercial customer to pay. We have all of this tracked again in our internal dashboard. Our commercial clients, on average, take 14 days to pay. Our residential clients, you know, take an average of 48 hours to pay. So we've got a pretty good cash conversion cycle. It used to be really bad. Our outstanding receivables as a percentage of our monthly revenue used to be like, oh, I think it was something ridiculous, like 60%. Really, really bad. These days it's around 15 to 20% at any given time, which is really, really good for the for the numbers we're doing. And so it's made growth a lot more manageable, and it's meant that there's actually cash left over in the business and thus profit. And that has really what's been one of the key drivers for me to grow quickly, but also predictably and sustainably. And so those are the five key things you really need to track in your business. You've got LTV, lifetime value, CAC, cost to acquire a customer. We've got what did I say, third? Uh, churn rate. So you want to work out your monthly churn rate and then the annualized churn rate as well. You want to keep track of your labor costs as a percentage of revenue, and you want to keep track of your cash conversion cycle. So those are the five key things every service business should be tracking. And it's the main killer or the silent killer of a lot of businesses in our space. So if you want to win, look at those things. And if you want to go even deeper and really, really win and really rig the game for yourself, go the go the step further. Track every metric in your business. But don't overwhelm yourself, just start with those five or even just one of them. If you're not tracking any of those numbers, the easiest place to start is just to start tracking your average customer lifespan and thus the lifetime value. Then you can just start to work backwards or backwards from there. Work out the cost to acquire a customer, then start to look at your labor costs as a percentage of your gross revenue and just work one by one. Don't overwhelm yourself with all these numbers. Just make like a few little spreadsheets. And, you know, over time you can start to build up that knowledge base and just have those numbers and create a little dashboard for yourself which acts as a source of truth in in your business and just provides peace of mind and also validation and room for growth and a real indicator of what's actually around the corner in your business and what you need to do to drive that growth. So, side note, actually, just while I'm remembering it, I was at a um I was at a business awards night in in Perth about two months ago, and I was sat next to this guy who's a really big-time consultant. He consults to like billion dollar companies. And I asked him the question that everyone asks a consultant. I was like, what do you actually do? Right? We hear about all these consultants and in like, you know, accounting and like all the big four firms and stuff. And it's like, you know, to me, all they do is just they hop on meetings and they have meetings about meetings and you know, more meetings about more meetings, and it's like, what do they actually do? What does a consultant do? So I asked him and he was like, Well, we essentially just diagnose problems in businesses and then provide solutions. And there can be a wide range of problems and solutions, and you know, it's you you need a very vast knowledge of these types of businesses, and usually you specialize in a type of business or industry, and so he's into he's I forgot what he said, I think he's in mining and agriculture, and so he's dealing with billion-dollar businesses. And I I just asked him, I was like, so what's the what's the common thread you see between a lot of these big companies that you go into that you then have to diagnose problems and then fix? And he said quite simply, just numbers, like they don't know where their profit is actually coming from. Like, how crazy is that? These billion-dollar companies, they don't even know where their profit is coming from. And a lot of the time they'll be making, you know, 80% of their profit from one sector of the business, but then there's these other these other sectors where it's like 10% of the profit comes from there, but you know, 50% of all their resources are being allocated there. So most of the time he'll just kill those off. But it just goes to show that even at a high level, companies just aren't really in tune with their numbers in a way that they should be. And so just start on a on a granular level. Just look at these basic metrics and get a feel for the numbers, and you'll start to see just how exciting business gets. When you finally, when it just clicks and you just understand these numbers, and they just become like a core part of your business philosophy and like your north star. And now, like every day I I rush to the computer and I check the numbers from the previous day and the previous week, and we have a management meeting every week where we talk about numbers from the previous week and we're all excited about it. And it's like it is our one true, like our guiding uh light in the business, our north star that we're that we're always heading towards and it's always guiding us in the right direction. It's all these metrics that we have, but it starts with those five main ones. Um, and look, none of this is about becoming some spreadsheet nerd that lives in a dashboard or in Google Excel. It's about the opposite. It's about freedom, it's about creating autonomy for yourself and the people around you. Because when you actually know these numbers, you stop guessing and you start steering. You can finally just step back from being in every single job because the numbers are telling you whether the business is healthy without you having to physically be there to check. And it feels like less of a game of chance and more like, as I said earlier, you just walk into the casino, you already know what you're what bets you're placing, and you don't even need to worry about the outcome because you've rigged the game in your favor. And imagine how much easier it would be for you to sleep at night knowing these things. So here's what I want you to do. Um, don't try to do all five of these numbers at once because it can get a bit overwhelming, and it's just, you know, one thing after the other that you're adding on your plate, and it's just it can be a lot at once. So just pick one number that you're not currently tracking that you know you should be. Just start there and start this week, and then get it down on paper or on a spreadsheet or in an in a note in your phone, watch it, get a bill, get a bit a better feel for it, and just start to track it as as the days go by and the weeks go by. And then come back and do the next one and the next one and the next one. And that's how you build it. And then you can start to implement these into actual spreadsheets or dashboards, and you can build these with AI, and that's when business really gets interesting. That's when things really get exciting, and you can start to move the needle predictably and scalably. So is scalably a word? I've got no idea. Again, I left school at a young age. Um, so sometimes it shows, especially when I start making up words that uh that don't exist in any dictionary. But if I can do it, anyone can. That's that's the that's the real silver lining here. If uh if a little um twerp like me can leave school at 14 years old, just pick up a mop and bucket at 18, start a business, and eventually get to two locations and nearly a hundred staff, I I think anyone can do it, right? I am not that special. I just did a few things and I did them really, really well. And I stuck to them and I was consistent. So you can do the same, but business all just boils down to numbers and specifically a small set of numbers. Because remember, not everything that you can count counts. But oftentimes, the things that do count, people aren't counting. I don't know why I bother remembering these quotes. I I have these quotes because they're like these cute sayings that can like tie, you know, tie a memory to a concept or a principle or something, and it's like easy to remember. That is the opposite of easy to remember. I that is just a uh it's like a tongue twister. So, but you get the idea, right? So that's it for this episode. Um, if this is the kind of thing you want to go deeper on and you really want to build a real business that can function without you and and just scales predictably and stress-free, then stay tuned because some exciting things are around the corner, and I'm very much looking forward to that. So thanks again for listening to another episode of Self Made. And remember, know your numbers. The be all, end all of any business is its numbers. So this is just a game of math, but it's a game of simple math. And once you understand that simple math, things get really easy and you can really put the pedal to the metal. So that's it. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye.