Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'm joined here by Jeff Eberts and Rita Eberts.
Speaker: They've owned and operated carbonated solutions since 2007.
Speaker: They've been in the carpet cleaning business for 35 years.
Speaker: They invented a new cleaning solution that we'll talk more about in a bit.
Speaker: They also went toe-to-toe with a big bad corporation in a lawsuit over that cleaning solution and won.
Speaker: They've had to leave behind a successful business and rebuild it from the bottom up in a very different market.
Speaker: So I wanted to have them on, not just to talk about the ins and outs of the carpet cleaning business, but also just what it's like to get knocked down, pick yourself up, and then crush your enemies and see them driven before you.
Speaker: So welcome to the show.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Pleasure.
Speaker: Pleasure.
Speaker: So from what I understand, you started with a carpet cleaning franchise in California.
Speaker: Was that a good way to get started in the industry?
Speaker: Did they make certain things easier on you?
Speaker: Or would you tell someone, just go independent if you're starting out?
Speaker: Well, depends on what you wanted to do.
Speaker: In this case, it was all pretty much new and innovative and was everything you thought you wanted.
Speaker: A lot of freedom of activity on your part.
Speaker: We didn't have the creativity when we first started.
Speaker: We were kind of a little bit terrified.
Speaker: And so initially, the idea of a franchise was very comforting and reassuring because it was kind of set up for us.
Speaker: And so all we had to do was follow their plan and we would be successful.
Speaker: So the story goes.
Speaker: But it took a lot of the terror out of the situation for us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: Yeah, we were young and married, just small kids and just getting on with life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I can see how it just, it cuts so much of the uncertainty and the anxiety out of the decision, especially if you're, I mean, were you, were you always set on like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur or were you just sort of like, I'm looking for a way to support my family?
Speaker: Looking for a way to support my family.
Speaker: I was actually a builder and just had become a general contractor in Oregon when Jimmy Carter raised the interest rates to 21% and put us out of business.
Speaker: Me and thousands of other people.
Speaker: So that just killed the whole industry.
Speaker: And I stepped from that to this company.
Speaker: through a few various almost accidents and I can get out and make an honest living.
Speaker: And if I worked hard, I could make even better.
Speaker: So you've actually had to do this more than once where you're sort of stepping out into the dark.
Speaker: It seems like always.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We are really good at bootstrapping.
Speaker: We've got that down to a science.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So when you, so, I mean, I want to talk about your, your later experience, but, but I didn't even know about this one.
Speaker: So when you switched from the construction industry to this, were there lessons learned that translated or was it totally unfamiliar territory?
Speaker: Well, we were also developing a lot of faith in
Speaker: spiritual things at the same time.
Speaker: So it was more about prayerfully considering what do we do now?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We followed the best that we could, the promptings or inclinations that we had.
Speaker: And we went from Oregon where the economy collapsed almost overnight, it seemed like to Southern California, which didn't catch up to that for almost 10 years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: before it really hit them that hard.
Speaker: So we were just doing our best to listen and work hard.
Speaker: We had friends in Oregon who were carpet cleaning franchisees.
Speaker: And when the economy collapsed in the building industry for us, Jeff filled in and did some work for him as a technician.
Speaker: And that's how we initially got interest in that building, particularly in Oregon, was very seasonal.
Speaker: And so, you know, it was always a feast or famine experience.
Speaker: And we discovered that the carpet cleaning was far more consistent.
Speaker: And at the time we had, you know, a young family to raise.
Speaker: And so we were we were looking for another opportunity.
Speaker: And that was what prompted our move to Southern California because we would never have gone there otherwise.
Speaker: Why is that?
Speaker: Well, because when you grow up in Oregon and Northern California, Southern California is a terrible place to be.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Just a bias that is held by many in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker: Southern California is no man's land, and we actually fell in love with it.
Speaker: But we were in Palm Desert, which is, if you've ever been there, it's absolutely gorgeous, and we loved it.
Speaker: And it was very lucrative for us.
Speaker: Yeah, so what did it take in terms of, or maybe I could just frame it this way.
Speaker: What would it take now in terms of like startup costs and time commitment if you were to have to do this at that age, that position of life again?
Speaker: What do you think would be involved in that?
Speaker: Well, if you had to start up a franchise, you're talking about a lot of out-of-pocket money.
Speaker: If you have to start up what we're doing now, it's probably the most affordable thing in the carpet cleaning industry to do and gives you the ability to give better results than your competition.
Speaker: So it's kind of wherever you're talking about on our history, we have been learning and still are learning and things are still progressing.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Well, tell me about that offer.
Speaker: So what is the situation that you have that's different than a franchise?
Speaker: Well, for one, franchising, you have bosses.
Speaker: who tentatively stay out of the way, but they tack on fees, costs, overhead.
Speaker: They change things on you that you have to adjust to.
Speaker: All of it costs money and time.
Speaker: And when you're self-employed, you can manage all of that yourself.
Speaker: And the things that they promised to bring you, you can do yourself once you've done it, once you know how.
Speaker: you're educated, it's quite easy.
Speaker: The things that work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when you're in a service business like carpet cleaning is, it's about giving service.
Speaker: And what we've learned is that our customers look for us, period.
Speaker: They love our product.
Speaker: They love what we give, but it's the service that they're after.
Speaker: And a franchisor can't give you that.
Speaker: You either can develop that yourself and present yourself that way or not.
Speaker: But a franchise doesn't do that for you.
Speaker: They do give you an identity, hopefully, that has a good reputation.
Speaker: They supposedly give you turnkey advertising and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: But, you know, we found out that our own ideas were better.
Speaker: And basically everything they give you costs money.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And when you're building that reputational equity.
Speaker: you're building it for them because it's their wrap on the van or whatever it is.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So it, it, it, is there specialized equipment?
Speaker: What, what's like, if you wanted to just go buy this stuff and you didn't want to work with a franchise I'm guessing that's a van, that's some vacuums, like some wet vacs, like what's involved in the business?
Speaker: Well, it depends on how you want to do it.
Speaker: There's equipment involved in several different kinds.
Speaker: There's multiple franchises out there.
Speaker: And if you want hot water extraction, then yeah, you got to do the vans and the hoses and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: We started with a station wagon.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: With magnetic signs on the doors.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And what was in the back of the station wagon?
Speaker: At that point, there was just, it was carbonated tanks, buffer, vacuum, bonnets, you know, the very, very basic stuff.
Speaker: But the thing is, what we wound up doing, the rest of the industry doesn't even know anything about, even today.
Speaker: I mean, they really don't understand it.
Speaker: And it's primarily because of the cleaner that we use.
Speaker: Okay, are more aggressive at cleaning than a extraction unit with 400 inches water lift, you know it.
Speaker: Yeah, I'd have to show you to prove it, but we can do better than that with a buffer and a bonnet because of this clean so
Speaker: And sorry, a buffer and a bonnet.
Speaker: Can you tell me what that is?
Speaker: A buffer, floor buffer, 175 RPM, regular clean tile and in maintenance place, you know, down the hallway they go and they just basically clean floors and mostly they use them on hard floors.
Speaker: but you get a bonnet, which looks like a little shag rug.
Speaker: It's a thick absorbent pad.
Speaker: And that's what picks up the cleaner.
Speaker: Because the, well, the cleaner that we use doesn't need to be rinsed.
Speaker: There's no soaps, detergents, surfactants, no additives whatsoever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it doesn't need to come back out of the carpet.
Speaker: Doesn't need to, huh?
Speaker: And so what we do is like, say you have a, just a 10 by 10 rug that's dirty.
Speaker: You vacuum it thoroughly with a good vacuum, which we have and get all the loose stuff out of it.
Speaker: And then you spray down enough cleaner to thoroughly
Speaker: um, penetrate the carpet pile, but you don't want to get the pad underneath wet because even that 400 inch water lift doesn't get that thing dry.
Speaker: Once they get the pad wet, it's going to stay wet.
Speaker: And so we want, and we're there to clean the carpet.
Speaker: And so you get the carpet pile good, good and saturated.
Speaker: And then you put a bonnet and a buffer on top of that and everything that the cleaner touches, it puts into solution.
Speaker: And the bonnet absorbs it.
Speaker: And with 175 RPM, you got about a hundred pounds of pressure and torque.
Speaker: And it just does a great job.
Speaker: It's like being down on your hands and knees with scrubbing, except the buffer does all the work.
Speaker: It absorbs almost all of it back in the carpets mildly damp when you're done, dries in hours.
Speaker: doesn't leave residues, everything that's gone stays gone.
Speaker: Well, the other advantage is, is that you're not hauling hoses in and out of people's houses and having to run water down their sewer.
Speaker: And you can go up to a seven story or 10 story building and take all of your stuff and not have to worry about that
Speaker: that truck that's sitting there running all of this equipment.
Speaker: So it's portable, but it's also extremely convenient.
Speaker: And the principle is kind of like using a sponge on your counter.
Speaker: You know, it's about absorption rather than extraction.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you're not like sucking up the water, like a vacuum.
Speaker: You're just, you're sort of, uh, uh, pounding a sponge into it and using that to suck it up.
Speaker: Yeah, it's absorption rather than extraction.
Speaker: Well, the interesting thing is you've seen the commercials where they squirt a cleaner on it and the stain disappears.
Speaker: And that's not what happens with ours.
Speaker: You squirt the cleaner on it and the liquid emulsifies the dirt and it stays trapped in the solution until you pick it up.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: It's easier to show you than it is to tell you.
Speaker: Well, maybe I'll post a, if you've got like a YouTube video or something, I'll post it along with the podcast.
Speaker: So when you, if someone's starting this out, is that an expensive set of equipment?
Speaker: Like give me like a ballpark figure of like what it would cost to buy the like bare bones, minimum viable to start that business.
Speaker: Oh, let's see.
Speaker: What was it about?
Speaker: That was a long time ago.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're probably, I would say about $7,500 maybe.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Top of the line stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That would, that would get you, you know, adequate to make a living.
Speaker: And that's your equipment, not this, not the, the older, the hoses and whatnot.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: So, and when someone's getting started, is there a lot of like, as far as the learning curve that a new guy has to overcome before they can operate the way you do, is that a lot to do with like technique or is it mostly just sort of building a reputation and a customer base?
Speaker: Probably a little of both when they're starting.
Speaker: There's definitely a technique.
Speaker: I mean, it's real easy to put a buffer through somebody's wall if you're not careful or pull their stereo equipment down.
Speaker: You can rearrange wiring really quickly with a buffer.
Speaker: So there is a little bit of technique.
Speaker: But when we started, he kind of learned on the job.
Speaker: And it was pretty quick.
Speaker: You were able to make money immediately.
Speaker: We've often joked that this is the only time we have ever...
Speaker: would wake up broke and at the end of the day have four or five hundred dollars in our pocket yeah so yeah that that was it was kind of nice that is nothing like the building trade i can tell you that well because there it's this big long project based right yeah this is just you're in and out
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in terms of, so that's kind of like fixed costs.
Speaker: Tell me about a typical job in terms of like the variable costs, how long it takes as far as labor, how do you drop an estimate?
Speaker: Well, basically, mostly what we do and have done for the longest time is everything is compiled into square footage.
Speaker: I will clean X amount of square foot carpet for X amount of money, basically 23 cents a square foot times, however much I do.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's residential because it's a lot more fiddling around with residential than there is in commercial.
Speaker: Commercial is a little less expensive, but, but that pretty well,
Speaker: takes into consideration everything you've got going.
Speaker: That's your personal overhead, the insurances that you have.
Speaker: Maintenance in this kind of cleaning is really minimal compared to the other.
Speaker: If you have a steam cleaning truck, you've got daily maintenance that you've got to do.
Speaker: And with what we do, it's clean the pads, get ready for tomorrow, that's it.
Speaker: And maybe once every six, eight months, you'll do a major go through just to make sure and look at stuff.
Speaker: But otherwise, it's just get ready for tomorrow and done.
Speaker: So you're spending a lot more time on revenue generating activity.
Speaker: And family.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It doesn't follow you home quite as much as the other would.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So do you try to build a book of recurring customers?
Speaker: Do you have a lot of churn or is it mostly sort of your stable, steady clients?
Speaker: It's always growing.
Speaker: And we send out reminders to the clients
Speaker: people that repeat customers.
Speaker: And we have a good return.
Speaker: We have a pretty high return.
Speaker: Always have had.
Speaker: Yeah, we've always had a good.
Speaker: In fact, when we left Southern California, we had customers call us in Oklahoma and say, how many people would we have to put together to bring you back for a visit?
Speaker: Oh, yeah, they become very loyal.
Speaker: And, you know, that this is such a good they know it's not going to destroy their carpets.
Speaker: And they know, they know us, they know we're not going to come in and steal from them.
Speaker: And, you know, they just, they trust us.
Speaker: That is kind of paramount that people send you keys in the mail to their home.
Speaker: And to know that they can do that without problem or worry.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's something that you have to prove over time, I guess, but it is.
Speaker: Everyone that I've talked to that's in a trade or a service-oriented business like this has said something similar, that it's so much to do with personality and you can pull in a premium just by
Speaker: wearing a polo, wearing some nice khakis, you know, looking clean, you know, there's a huge premium for that kind of thing.
Speaker: So like when you interact with the customer, like are you doing a lot of talking as you're cleaning or are you kind of doing it overnight or like how does it work?
Speaker: Well, it's different here.
Speaker: We're in Oklahoma.
Speaker: It's different in Oklahoma than it was in Southern California.
Speaker: In Southern California, it was the khaki and everything you just said.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In Oklahoma, you listen a lot.
Speaker: Everybody likes to talk.
Speaker: So, and a good listener is a premium.
Speaker: You know, I just, yeah, really, I'll ask a couple leading questions and then I'll go ahead and clean their carpets while they fill me in.
Speaker: So it's just, people are interesting no matter where you're at.
Speaker: One of the things that we found was really successful in our advertising was to include a picture of Jeff or at one point, one of our sons worked with us to include his picture so that people knew who was coming to their door.
Speaker: That matters.
Speaker: And so we made sure that it was very clean cut and not somebody that, because most of the people we deal with are women.
Speaker: they want to know, they want to be comfortable with who's coming to the door.
Speaker: And so, you know, well-groomed matters no matter where you live.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So you had, this is a good, I think this is a good point to talk about this.
Speaker: You had a thriving business in California.
Speaker: Certain somebody gets himself kicked out of the California public school system and you had to leave all that behind.
Speaker: Adam's told me the story from his perspective.
Speaker: I can't imagine what it was like for you.
Speaker: Can you tell us about that experience?
Speaker: Oh, goodness.
Speaker: Well, we have five children.
Speaker: And number one son and number three son were challenging at best.
Speaker: And Southern California was a great opportunity to get into trouble.
Speaker: There was no shortage of people to get into trouble with.
Speaker: And number three son, the one you've referenced, our middle child,
Speaker: We lived in a subdivision that was very close to the high school.
Speaker: And between our subdivision and the high school was a date orchard.
Speaker: Dates are a big crop in the Southern California desert.
Speaker: And this was a beautiful date orchard.
Speaker: Every kid on the way to high school or during high school or after school would go to the date orchard to hang out and do things they shouldn't do.
Speaker: There were a lot of homeless people who would be there or had been there during the night.
Speaker: And there were old mattresses and box springs.
Speaker: And the kids found that it was really cool to jump on those things because it created sparks.
Speaker: And you have to understand that date trees, the way they keep the bugs off of date trees is to spray them with sulfur.
Speaker: So what you have are giant matches sitting there in nice neat little rows.
Speaker: And the kids just think this is a blast.
Speaker: And they were smoking.
Speaker: Yeah, they were smoking and doing things they shouldn't ought to be doing.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And dumping on these mattresses to get some sparks going and get the mattresses smoking.
Speaker: And then the school bell would ring and they'd bury it in sand and rush off and...
Speaker: Anyway, apparently at one point they didn't bury it sufficiently.
Speaker: And, um, that whole date orchard went up in flames.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All those matches exploded.
Speaker: And, and, um,
Speaker: The owner of the date orchard had written us, well, there were two young men involved.
Speaker: There was our son and another young man who were involved in this particular instance.
Speaker: Our son had, they had covered it all up.
Speaker: They'd gone back to school.
Speaker: He had a dentist appointment that day in a different town.
Speaker: And so my husband had picked him up.
Speaker: And when I smelled the smoke and saw the black smoke in the sky, my first thought was, oh, thank goodness he's not there.
Speaker: Yeah, that was until they knocked on my door and said, hey, somebody said your son was at the date orchard today.
Speaker: And he said, yeah, I was.
Speaker: It went downhill from there.
Speaker: The date orchard was a total loss, valued at about $750,000 at the time.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And the owner of the date orchard contacted us and said, I'd like to thank your son and whoever else did this because I was going to have to pay to bring this date orchard down so I could build a housing development.
Speaker: But the people who leased the land aren't so thrilled.
Speaker: So there was that looming.
Speaker: And then it took three days for the city to put out that fire.
Speaker: And so when we were told that we were going to be billed for the fire suppression, we decided that was probably a good time to slip away.
Speaker: There was no way we could pay those kind of bills.
Speaker: It was just not going to happen.
Speaker: And they were determined to make an example of our son in particular, because he actually stepped up and said, yeah, I was there.
Speaker: The other kid pointed his finger at him.
Speaker: And so anyway, it was awful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we had planned to, we had thought we would leave beforehand.
Speaker: We saw what actually made us realize we needed to leave Southern California was on the last day of our second oldest son's junior year of high school.
Speaker: He was picked as a random gang initiation rite.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: And he was waylaid in that date orchard.
Speaker: And this group of gang gangsters had steel-toed boots on, got him to the ground and just kicked the heck out of his head and face and...
Speaker: My goodness.
Speaker: It was all totally random.
Speaker: He just happened to be in the wrong place and he got picked.
Speaker: And we realized at that point in time, he is okay.
Speaker: But we realized, hey, we've got three more kids to get through these schools.
Speaker: We've got to get out of here.
Speaker: No kidding.
Speaker: But it was kind of like, where do we go?
Speaker: What do we do?
Speaker: I was going to ask why Oklahoma?
Speaker: Yeah, we're still asking that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, it was kind of handed to me.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: She was dragging her feet a lot more than she's saying.
Speaker: I was dragging my feet a lot.
Speaker: I was trying to get going, but there's a lot of country clubs.
Speaker: There's a lot of money in Palm Desert and surrounding areas.
Speaker: And I did a lot of the carpet cleaning there.
Speaker: And in one instance, I went into the gate guard, a really talkative lady.
Speaker: who escorted me in to show me the property that I was gonna be cleaning.
Speaker: And we were talking and I was talking about finding a new location.
Speaker: She said, well, if you ever get to Ardmore, Oklahoma, it's the most beautiful place in the world.
Speaker: You might wanna take a look.
Speaker: And so I thought, okay,
Speaker: By golly, that's good timing.
Speaker: I think we'll go take a look.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And that's actually what started that ball rolling for Oklahoma and for Ardmore, which is where we landed, where we wound up.
Speaker: What clinched it for me, though, was, you know, we were in Southern California.
Speaker: And I took a trip by myself with a friend out to Ardmore because I I didn't want to be influenced by my husband, who was ready to leave and go.
Speaker: I was still dragging my feet and
Speaker: What you learn in Oklahoma and a lot of the Midwest is that Wednesday night is church night.
Speaker: And it doesn't matter what church you go to, you are expected to be in church on Wednesday night.
Speaker: There are no school activities that happen on Wednesday night.
Speaker: Everybody is expected to be at church.
Speaker: And so on a Wednesday night, I went out to church and there was this group of teenagers that were there at the church.
Speaker: And every one of them looked me in the eye and
Speaker: And greeted me and welcomed me and called me ma'am.
Speaker: And they weren't being facetious.
Speaker: And I looked around and I thought, oh my gosh, this is where I want my kids to finish growing up.
Speaker: Because it was so amazing.
Speaker: They were clear-eyed.
Speaker: They were clean cut.
Speaker: They were just an exemplary bunch of kids.
Speaker: And it just seemed like, okay, I'm sold.
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: And they turned old Adam around.
Speaker: Well, eventually.
Speaker: It still took a while.
Speaker: It took a little while.
Speaker: Yeah, he groused at us for the first year or so.
Speaker: He wouldn't let us tell anyone he was from Oklahoma until he graduated from high school.
Speaker: He said, I'm from California.
Speaker: I'm not from Oklahoma.
Speaker: But after he graduated from high school and took a trip, when he came back, he was so thrilled to be back where people wave at you and talk to you and smile at you.
Speaker: And he said, I'm from Oklahoma.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's it was an interesting experience.
Speaker: But Oklahoma was at the time.
Speaker: because we were still a franchise, there were no franchises for what we were doing available west of the Rockies.
Speaker: And so we kind of had to look beyond that in order to find a place where we could continue being franchisees.
Speaker: So you did continue with the franchise.
Speaker: Sorry, you did continue with the franchise when you moved to Ardmore.
Speaker: Yes, we did.
Speaker: But there were things happening that pretty much told us right up front, and I had pursued it with the powers that be, that the company was going to be making some massive changes.
Speaker: And we just didn't want any part of it.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: So you were already kind of planning your exit from that.
Speaker: We started from there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we got to Oklahoma and said, okay, now we got the kids, we got here.
Speaker: Now what do we do?
Speaker: And me being an inquisitive kind of guy, came up with a process and a way to do what I had been doing a lot better than doing before.
Speaker: I wanted to ask you about that because I often ask people, if you had to start your business over from the beginning, what would you do differently?
Speaker: And you've actually had to do that.
Speaker: You've had to take your know-how and I don't know, did you take the equipment?
Speaker: Well, the equipment's pretty generic.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, it wasn't proprietary.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And we got basically you spray this cleaner on the floor, you use a buffer that you can get anywhere, you use bonnets you can get anywhere.
Speaker: So really, it's just a few of the products.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I knew I had to leave or separate.
Speaker: And I said, okay, so what am I going to do?
Speaker: And so I thought about it for a while and I went to a chemical company and I bought a few large samples and I put together what I thought would be the nucleus of a good start for experimentation and went into a rental that
Speaker: was white Berber carpet with teenage boys playing the Game Boy and eating their food on the floor.
Speaker: It was pretty atrocious.
Speaker: It was a rental.
Speaker: And I knew how it was going to turn out.
Speaker: And so I used my concoction on it, my version of what was going on.
Speaker: And dang, it worked better than anything I'd ever used in my life.
Speaker: And I thought, wow, did I just knock this ball out of the park?
Speaker: And
Speaker: So from there on, it was experimentation.
Speaker: It was adjustment.
Speaker: It was what did I do and how do I do it even better?
Speaker: And through that process, we came up with a really simple but very effective product for cleaning carpet and upholstery.
Speaker: And I'm sure that there's elements of that that you can't discuss, but maybe...
Speaker: How did you like just the idea that you would just sort of stumble onto a new like chemical compound or something?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How did you, how did that eureka happen?
Speaker: All that we had been taught, everything I'd been told about cleaning and the soaps and detergents and things that everybody uses.
Speaker: And I didn't like any of them.
Speaker: And so what I was looking for was a carbonated solution that gave me a base of
Speaker: that I could add things to that wouldn't get in the way.
Speaker: That was my thinking, that was my thought process at the time.
Speaker: And what I discovered was that, wait a minute, if I get stuff out of the way, I may not need additives.
Speaker: And that's the thought that I chased.
Speaker: And that's what brought me to this project we got now that is, we actually got a patent on it.
Speaker: The same with our little spray rig that allows it to be so efficient.
Speaker: So we got two patents actually.
Speaker: And it was just good enough that I didn't need to do anything.
Speaker: Well, how would I, how would I put this?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: if you had a carpet cleaner come into his, to your house and take his cleaner and fill a glass and drink it, would you be surprised?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I was going to ask you about that.
Speaker: I hear that Adam has, has sort of drunk it as part of a pitch.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It is that safe.
Speaker: If you've ever had a diet Coke, you've had more questionable stuff than, than Mike, my cleaner.
Speaker: It really is that clean.
Speaker: And when we can get it or was using it, we use, uh,
Speaker: food grade chemicals.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, it's, and so it's, I tell everybody it's like a bumblebee, you know, aerodynamically, they can't fly, but look at them go.
Speaker: You know, if I tell you what's in my cleaner, you'll say that won't work, but watch it work.
Speaker: It just really does a great job.
Speaker: So at that point we were off and running.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it was just kind of like, okay, what do we do with this?
Speaker: But it came after a lot of thought and pondering and concern and prayers.
Speaker: And it just was... It was a gift.
Speaker: When you get a gift, you don't say, no, that's silly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Even if you don't see how it's going to work or you think it can't possibly work.
Speaker: Well, it did work.
Speaker: It worked really well.
Speaker: How soon after the catastrophe in California did this idea materialize?
Speaker: We were here maybe what?
Speaker: It was about four, maybe five years.
Speaker: That long?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, because we moved out, we moved to Oklahoma in 96 and we got a patent in 2000.
Speaker: We applied for the patent in 2000 and got it in 2001.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so you spent quite a while building the business in according to the standard model while you were developing this.
Speaker: And so I take it that normal carpet cleaner isn't carbonated.
Speaker: Is the carbonation a big part of the change?
Speaker: Yeah, well, it is, you know, the self-carbonated thing.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: There's some similarities.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, yeah, I'm trying to talk around like I don't want to do anything like proprietary, but but but it's just so interesting to me.
Speaker: Maybe maybe I'll ask you about it later.
Speaker: So you come up with this innovation that dramatically improves the process.
Speaker: When did you first realize you were going to have trouble with your franchisor?
Speaker: It wasn't long.
Speaker: Yeah, we, that was almost immediate.
Speaker: I tried to do some things that would help because I thought that, you know, well, nevermind what I thought.
Speaker: It was naive on my part.
Speaker: And it was, it was, well,
Speaker: I don't know how you'd put this without putting it.
Speaker: I'll have to think about that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, so don't worry about that.
Speaker: Suffice to say, you realize you were going to have some trouble with your franchisor.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And over the rights to this intellectual property.
Speaker: Well, see, now that was how that came about.
Speaker: that that became in jeopardy was surprising.
Speaker: We had gone through all this stuff.
Speaker: We'd moved from Southern California.
Speaker: We had come out here.
Speaker: We reestablished and opened a new territory for the existing franchise and had gone through all this and they took a hard left and we weren't gonna follow them.
Speaker: And so we had to separate and we found this and we were set up and we were gonna go and we were gonna do this instead.
Speaker: And they decided, and what I tell everybody is, and the way I put it, which is more for comic relief, I guess, is that they felt that because they were the nucleus for my discovery, that associating with them gave me the nucleus of my content here.
Speaker: That they should own the rights to it.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: And what we discovered is that if you have something I want, and I have money, all I have to do is file a lawsuit against you that doesn't get thrown out immediately.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: If that happens, then my attorneys file motion after motion after motion after motion.
Speaker: And your attorneys charge you three to $500 an hour to respond.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: How long are you going to stay in the fight?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that was going to be my next question is,
Speaker: you know, tell me about this legal battle because one of the ways these big companies can win is they just keep everybody bleeding and they know they can bleed longer than you can.
Speaker: And so, so how did you survive that process and come out on top?
Speaker: A lot of prayer, a lot of fasting, a lot of effort, but the thing is, you know, it was, it took a long time.
Speaker: And for the first three years, we were very much on the defense.
Speaker: Go ahead and talk about it now.
Speaker: Well, yes.
Speaker: We initially naively thought that they would sit down and talk with us and that we would be able to come to some kind of mutual.
Speaker: We kind of thought they might want what we had and we were wrong.
Speaker: What we realized is that they thought they could take what we had.
Speaker: And so the very first thing they did was challenge it at the patent office.
Speaker: It was a multi-pronged attack.
Speaker: And they were, you know, I mean, we're a mom and pop in Oklahoma for crying out loud.
Speaker: How long are we going to be able to survive?
Speaker: And like Jeff said, honestly, we felt some divine intervention throughout the whole process or we wouldn't have survived.
Speaker: Can you say more about that?
Speaker: Well, we felt in, no, we didn't feel.
Speaker: We knew that this whole thing was, we felt a gift and we felt obliged to defend it.
Speaker: We didn't feel, we never ever felt impressed to get out of the fight because we felt like it was given to us.
Speaker: Jeff is smart, but he's not that smart.
Speaker: It was a gift.
Speaker: And we felt like, okay, we will defend it until we are told not to.
Speaker: And there were many times that we...
Speaker: Our attorneys would counsel one way and we would say, nope, we need to do something different.
Speaker: And what we presented, there were a couple of times where we said, this is what we feel needs to happen.
Speaker: And our attorneys felt so strongly to the contrary that they wrote it down so that we couldn't come back at them.
Speaker: And it turned out that what we suggested was exactly right.
Speaker: So, so we navigated that on a lot of blind faith.
Speaker: Yeah, it wasn't blind faith, but it, at times, it was terrifying.
Speaker: It was very intimidating.
Speaker: We, we learned a lot.
Speaker: At times we represented ourselves because they would wear out our law firm and they'd say, we can't keep up with this.
Speaker: You're on your own until you find somebody else.
Speaker: And we would respond to motions.
Speaker: Can you imagine defending yourself in federal court in another state?
Speaker: With a against against a giant corp.
Speaker: No, I can't.
Speaker: I can't imagine large corporation.
Speaker: Yeah, against a corporation that's owned by a larger corporation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, they were, they should have been able to annihilate us a number of times.
Speaker: And, and we're still kind of dumbfounded that they couldn't, you know, it's one of those things you look back and you go,
Speaker: how on earth did we cross the Red Sea?
Speaker: And that's kind of what it felt like.
Speaker: And this was not, I mean, this was seven years, right?
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: Yeah, we were in our seventh year when it came to an end.
Speaker: My goodness, can't imagine it.
Speaker: Yeah, it was tons of fun.
Speaker: What was really... And we were going hand to mouth.
Speaker: They forced us... We actually filed three bankruptcies overall.
Speaker: Yeah, three bankruptcies.
Speaker: And got the patents out of the hands of our company and back into our hands.
Speaker: And that actually worked.
Speaker: Everybody told us don't do that, but we did it.
Speaker: And it actually worked and the law upheld it.
Speaker: And so it was basically...
Speaker: I'd get up in the morning going, oh, what am I going to do today?
Speaker: Oh, nothing.
Speaker: I'm being sued.
Speaker: And so you have to wrestle with that every single day.
Speaker: But when we started representing ourselves, we took a look at it.
Speaker: My wife being so darn tenacious, she basically said, all right, if I've got to do this, I need to know.
Speaker: And so she started looking into stuff and we started filing motions on our own.
Speaker: And if you want to needle the big guy,
Speaker: do it on your own because they can't stop you.
Speaker: And the judges tend to bend over backwards for the guy representing him so it doesn't have legal representation because they can get into trouble if they do.
Speaker: And so they let you get away with a little bit more.
Speaker: And we started, she would call up their attorney and just, that was funny.
Speaker: I would needle him because he couldn't talk to me when we had representation.
Speaker: But when we suddenly were representing ourselves, he couldn't not take my phone calls or answer my emails.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So I made sure that I just sent the most inane questions and just, you know, I wanted to know about form.
Speaker: What font should I use for for filling out this motion?
Speaker: everything I could think of that would annoy him.
Speaker: And I was very successful.
Speaker: Oh, my goodness.
Speaker: That's hilarious.
Speaker: A little bit of satisfaction.
Speaker: We had been suffering through for over, what, three and a half, almost four years at that point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we were just trying to make them back off and play fair.
Speaker: But as we did this,
Speaker: we discovered that at law, they have a lot of liabilities if they didn't do things right because of their corporate organizations.
Speaker: So we started taking a hard look at that.
Speaker: And we started coming up with counterclaims.
Speaker: And that's when things really got kind of utterly surprising.
Speaker: You know, we came up with, I got...
Speaker: down to a point where we were still representing ourselves.
Speaker: We just missed out on, and we had to come up with somebody that was reputable, and I had this one guy give me a list of names of people in the area where the court was going to be, and he gave me five or six names, and I just went straight to the last name on the list, and I called him.
Speaker: And we had a great conversation.
Speaker: And he took care of a couple of things and said, yeah, we'll take it out of nowhere.
Speaker: And then I found out that he was the head of a patent department in a leading law firm in the area that we were going to.
Speaker: You know, I had no idea who I was talking to.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I probably would have been afraid to call him if I didn't know.
Speaker: But they decided they didn't like the way that we were being treated and they were going to take a shot at helping us out.
Speaker: And so when we sent him, he said, send me your filing.
Speaker: Send me your filings.
Speaker: And when they do that on existing cases, he said, sometimes we even get enough filings to fill a file cabinet drawer.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: In our case, he said, you sent your filings and we had 12 linear feet of filing.
Speaker: That's what the war, that was the war we were living with every day.
Speaker: And it was real.
Speaker: It was just a lot to it.
Speaker: They were shaking their head going, holy cow.
Speaker: So they took all these filings to another law firm and had them evaluate the case with the claims that we had put together.
Speaker: And the response that came back and then probably what made them decide to take the case was that, yeah, you're going to win this.
Speaker: You've got good claims and you should probably ask for tens of millions of dollars.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And yeah, he said, now don't go buy an island off the coast of Florida right now.
Speaker: Which was a good thing we didn't.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, we're more than happy to take care of this.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: But the other thing that happened at that point in time was because they suddenly, with all the research that was being done, they discovered a lot of federal claims that were then included in our counterclaims and allowed us to suddenly, instead of being the defendants, we became the plaintiff.
Speaker: And that changed the whole thing.
Speaker: So in the last year and a half, we were the plaintiff in the case that they had been trying to beat us to death with.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it was just, all of it was about listening to the best that we could, listening to the promptings and the spirit and giving the best that we had.
Speaker: I mean, that's just incredible.
Speaker: I, and, and, you know, it, that is such a scary, like in a vacuum, you
Speaker: the idea of just representing yourself?
Speaker: Because like, there are so many landmines you could have stepped on, right?
Speaker: And just torpedo.
Speaker: At that point, we figured it'd probably be a relief.
Speaker: I've been thinking a lot about the concept of stewardship and some of the power that's in that, I think, is you had this sense that this idea did not belong to you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so like you didn't have the right necessarily to hand it over.
Speaker: Like it's because it wasn't yours.
Speaker: And I think about the sacrifices that people are willing to make for their kids that maybe they're not willing to make on their own behalf.
Speaker: And the refining effect that that can have on people because there's so many people who know like
Speaker: I mean, I'm going through this right now.
Speaker: Like I, I, I should work out.
Speaker: I don't care enough about my body and my health to do it, but I need to show my kids.
Speaker: And so I go do it.
Speaker: And so there's, there's a, I just think that's a really powerful concept.
Speaker: And it's really interesting to hear how that animated your struggle here.
Speaker: Cause I mean, it seems like if, if you hadn't,
Speaker: If you had just felt like this is your thing, then like the sort of rational math in your head would be like, well, just give up whatever, you know.
Speaker: But you fought and you won.
Speaker: Let me just kind of throw in here.
Speaker: When he first started doing this, I was not behind it at all.
Speaker: I thought, okay, he's a dreamer and go ahead and dream a little bit.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: But I never dreamed that he would get... I didn't think it would be possible to get a patent.
Speaker: I wasn't engaged at all.
Speaker: I wrote the patent.
Speaker: He wrote the patent as well.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: because I'm a little more tech savvy than he is, he had me file it online.
Speaker: And it was a very interesting experience because I still was thinking, well, okay, it's gonna cost a few hundred dollars, but you know, that's fine.
Speaker: It'll make him feel good and I'll go ahead and do it.
Speaker: And when I hit the send button on that patent application, I literally heard, you just got a patent.
Speaker: And I thought to myself, oh, my goodness, we just got and I like the word you use.
Speaker: We just got a stewardship.
Speaker: And and and that is exactly what it was when it came time when we got to the end of our lawsuit.
Speaker: And I don't know how much Adam shared with you.
Speaker: They were going we were we were out where the lawsuit was being held in Utah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And a jury was going, we were going for a jury trial and we were doing all the pre-trial stuff.
Speaker: And I was watching our judge who was listening to our attorney give what he intended to present.
Speaker: And I knew the minute that the judge saw we were going to win.
Speaker: we were going to have a jury seated on the following Tuesday.
Speaker: They were already bringing in the witnesses, and I knew that the judge knew we were going to win, and he demanded that we settle.
Speaker: And he did a number of things that were really interesting, but
Speaker: When we decided to settle, our attorney said, what do you want?
Speaker: And our feeling was, you have taken this case on good faith.
Speaker: You get whatever you need.
Speaker: All we have ever wanted is the right to be in business.
Speaker: And maybe we should have been a little more specific because that's all we got.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: was the right to be in business, but we got the right to be in business and the satisfaction of knowing that we didn't, we didn't, we, I feel we did not fail in our stewardship.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, we had, we got a look at the judicial system from every angle imaginable.
Speaker: And some of the judges that we talked to or that we had our case before seem to be excellent people.
Speaker: And others, I mean, they're human.
Speaker: And this guy, when my wife mentioned that she saw that the judge understood, he stopped our attorney, you know, less than five, maybe 10 minutes later, he stopped our attorney in mid-presentation.
Speaker: And told him, he said, while it's true that you may gain an exorbitant award from the jury, because they were asking more than we ever thought possible.
Speaker: And they were asking for big bucks.
Speaker: And he said, it may be true that you will gain this award.
Speaker: What you need to understand is that I'm going to commute it.
Speaker: And that caused everybody to go, huh?
Speaker: And he said, you will probably disagree with that decision and file
Speaker: an appeal to the state appellate court and you have every right to do so.
Speaker: And ultimately you will probably be successful in that effort, but it'll take two years at least.
Speaker: And they need to understand at the end of that two years, they're gonna send it back to me.
Speaker: I think you should go to lunch and settle.
Speaker: And we found out a few things about the judge after the fact and their law firm and those kinds of things.
Speaker: You know, my goodness.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we're not, we're not surprised by anything that goes on in Washington, DC.
Speaker: Nothing happens.
Speaker: They're surprising to us at all.
Speaker: You know, we we've seen all the, all the friendliness.
Speaker: I mean, we've seen that whole thing.
Speaker: So, so basically we were done and got most of the attorneys paid and taken care of and got a promise that they had to leave us alone and that we wouldn't, uh,
Speaker: rattle against them.
Speaker: By name.
Speaker: If there's a slip, make sure it's been edited out.
Speaker: Roger that.
Speaker: That's just such an incredible story.
Speaker: How did you feel?
Speaker: Another piece of this.
Speaker: When the fight is not your own, it seems like
Speaker: it's maybe easier to let go of the resentment.
Speaker: Was it, was it hard for you to just, I mean, did it set your teeth on edge for a long time thereafter or, or was it easy to put it behind you?
Speaker: Yeah, that w as a mixed bag of nuts.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Mainly because
Speaker: Well, we were relieved for one thing, finally, you know, our daughter growing up didn't ever know a time that we weren't doing this mess.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And how badly it affected our family and the things that we had to forego and do to take care of it.
Speaker: But on the other hand, because we had been guided through this or sought guidance and gone through this, we were fully looking forward with expectation towards the future and still are.
Speaker: There's no reason not to be.
Speaker: Let me just qualify that.
Speaker: We don't have a retirement because of this experience.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: What we learned is that if you trust in the arm of flesh, you're going to be very, very disappointed.
Speaker: And I have no idea where our future is going to take us.
Speaker: We're getting to the point where we kind of need to have some plans.
Speaker: But I also know that intervention happens, and it happens in ways you don't expect.
Speaker: We had enough experiences during that lawsuit where we knew divine intervention was the only reason we were still in the game.
Speaker: And none of it you saw coming and none of it you saw coming.
Speaker: It always, it always was a surprise.
Speaker: And welcome.
Speaker: Very welcome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, the reason I ask about that is because I recently had, I mean, I lost my job recently and, and a big part of that struggle was for, for a lot of people is just the, the, the, the rage at the unfairness of it.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And I found that knowing, knowing that God was with me and was part of that, uh, was part of that struggle, um, just made it so much easier to, to handle because I could, I could feel that there was a, a purpose behind it and a, and there was a meaning to it.
Speaker: It wasn't just, you know, damage.
Speaker: And, and I can see, you know, with, with your situation, um,
Speaker: Yeah, exactly what you're saying, that you don't know how it's going to work out, but you've come so far and you've seen such miracles in the past that it's like, you know, how could it not?
Speaker: How could it not figure itself out?
Speaker: Well, we had some anxious moments.
Speaker: Don't think.
Speaker: Don't think.
Speaker: And I particularly had a lot of resentment at times because of how it was impacting my family, my kids, our daughter in particular.
Speaker: Although I see in hindsight, a lot of blessings that came as a result, but a lot of the ability to get rid of the animosity came in hindsight.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: it didn't happen as we were going through it.
Speaker: I was pretty angry a lot of the time.
Speaker: Even though I was recognizing blessings as they happened, I was still angry that we had to do this at all.
Speaker: And it's in hindsight, when you look back and you go, oh, okay, I see now.
Speaker: You're able to let go of some of that bitterness or all of the bitterness, actually.
Speaker: And, you know, there are things that I wish had turned out a little bit differently.
Speaker: But the blessings that resulted far outweigh
Speaker: And, you know, hey, this is a short life and then we move on.
Speaker: So what the heck.
Speaker: If we have to live in a cardboard box down by the river, well, that's the way it goes.
Speaker: I'll hear about that, I'm sure.
Speaker: I would rather, having learned and gone through what we've been and still are going through, I would rather...
Speaker: be broke all my life and die than be one of these rich guys going through his life and die because of his accountabilities, because he hasn't learned what we've learned.
Speaker: You know, existence doesn't stop when you exit mortality.
Speaker: The older you get, the more things you've seen.
Speaker: And that really, it is true.
Speaker: And I might not have believed that so much at 25.
Speaker: But I have seen so much between then and now that, yeah, there's no question.
Speaker: And these people that are running around right now in the news, for example, that have these bazillions of dollars and it's still not enough.
Speaker: You know, I would hate to have to stand somewhere and explain my behavior in that line.
Speaker: Well, and I'd also add that one of the huge benefits of this was that our family pulled together as a family.
Speaker: Our kids were rooting for us.
Speaker: They were as engaged as we were in the outcome.
Speaker: And it created, you know, we're close to our adult kids because they know and went through what we went through.
Speaker: We did it together collectively.
Speaker: And I think that was...
Speaker: significant.
Speaker: Particularly where we'd had a couple of kids who gave us a run for the money.
Speaker: It kind of purged that and made us a more solid family, which how can you ever think that that was a waste of time?
Speaker: Well, every teenager that I've known who had a problem with their parents
Speaker: so much of it was contempt.
Speaker: So much of it was like, I just don't, I just don't find anything about this person that I, that I respect or admire or, or, or want to emulate.
Speaker: And, and to watch someone show that kind of courage and that kind of tenacity, um, I, it doesn't surprise me that, that your kids, uh, found that respect and, and, and we're able to, to,
Speaker: sort of nose up and build that relationship with you because yeah, I mean, just hearing the story myself, it's like, that's so remarkable.
Speaker: And, and, and, you know, your kids got to watch their parents be remarkable people and have a remarkable experience.
Speaker: And so, and I, and I almost wonder if, because like, I don't think adolescent rebellion has always been like this.
Speaker: I think it's a relatively new thing and I'm thinking out loud here, but yeah,
Speaker: I wonder if it is just because parents are so, their real life and the real problems they're dealing with, their kids are just never privy to, they never see them.
Speaker: And, you know, they sort of leave for the day and that doesn't get to happen.
Speaker: They don't get to see it.
Speaker: And so for them to see you do that, I'm sure made a huge difference.
Speaker: That's a good observation and I think there's some truth to that.
Speaker: Our poor daughter, this started when she was beginning middle school and as we took her off to college for her first year of college, we dropped her off at the dorm and then went straight to the courthouse.
Speaker: And so she was engaged in that whole, all of her middle school, all of her high school.
Speaker: It was just, it was ridiculous is what it was.
Speaker: But we're all very close.
Speaker: And I've always said that there's nothing a teenager disrespects more than hypocrisy and his parents.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And they saw that and we shared with them some of the spiritual things that were happening.
Speaker: And they saw that we were doing our best to be true to to what we believed was
Speaker: divine help and that we had a stewardship and um i think they respected that and they also hoped we'd have a great financial outcome i had promised geos for everybody at one point yeah that didn't materialize geos for everybody that's hilarious
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that too, just the sense of existential struggle, that's not something that most families experience together, at least in a way that they're honest about with their kids.
Speaker: And yeah, a sense that we need to figure this out, us, together.
Speaker: We need to figure this out or we are not going to be okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much.
Speaker: This was just a fascinating conversation.
Speaker: I can't wait to get it edited and thrown up for the guys to listen to.
Speaker: Tell me a little bit about, so you kind of intimated that this product is something that you are distributing to other carpet cleaning companies.
Speaker: Is that true?
Speaker: Um, it it's, we sell it online.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You know, we, we clean carpets with it, but we get it out there and we have sold, uh, coast to coast, um, Canada.
Speaker: We had a patent in Canada and we've sold, I don't know, we've shipped to where Australia, but mainly it's, uh, we're more interested in the local market.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: the in the industry itself in this industry all of the teaching and leaning is towards the steam cleaning archaic non-thinking flood it suck it out all that you know it's just and that that's where everything goes yeah and occasionally you get people that really look at this and yeah i could do that and have a little system or something that they had tried or
Speaker: buy our product and discover that it works better than their steam cleaning stuff and then get the equipment to make it work even better yet.
Speaker: Because it makes, we rented a home's carpet cleaning system from a store downtown.
Speaker: You know, you go down there and you rent one of these little things and you bring it home and you back your own store and they sell you all these little soapy products.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And we put our cleaner in there.
Speaker: And it made such a difference that that machine did a really nice job.
Speaker: The biggest thing it did was it left it too wet.
Speaker: But otherwise, it cleaned very well using our cleaner.
Speaker: Our cleaner is good no matter how you do it.
Speaker: But it's best if you do it with the buffer and the bonnet.
Speaker: Okay, so where can people find that product?
Speaker: At carbonatedsolution.com.
Speaker: carbonated solutions.com all right so i i i think there's going to be some interest in this and and and folks are going to want to check it out because we have several um
Speaker: sort of budding entrepreneurs looking for a hustle.
Speaker: So I'm going to send them to carbonatedsolutions.com to look into how they can get started.
Speaker: Our phone number's on there, I believe.
Speaker: And if they want to talk to Jeff, because we've been reluctant to put too many specifics on our website.
Speaker: So it's a very scaled down website in terms of information.
Speaker: We'd rather deal with people on a one-on-one basis and kind of try to help them address what they might need to get going.
Speaker: One of the biggest challenges that Jeff referenced is there's a whole industry that doesn't understand the industry.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they don't want to understand it.
Speaker: They're much more.
Speaker: more comfortable saying, well, I have to have an $80,000 truck, I have to have all of this stuff.
Speaker: And no, you really don't.
Speaker: And, you know, a lot of people don't value something that they haven't paid tremendous dollars for.
Speaker: So, so we prefer to just talk to people on one on one basis as we can and and find out what, what they're trying to achieve so that we can suggest, here's a route for you to try.
Speaker: And so, if they don't find what they're looking for on the website, they can always call.
Speaker: Well, that's music to my ears.
Speaker: I love to be able to send somebody to someone.
Speaker: And I just am sort of a believer in doing things at a human scale.
Speaker: So that's fantastic.
Speaker: And I'm sure we'll have folks headed your way.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about what we're doing here at Exit, it's exitgroup.us.
Speaker: You can register there.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
Speaker: We'll see you next time.
