Why Generic Software is Hurting Your Painting Biz

Chris Kiefer (00:00.762)

Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer and I am here with Michael Fortenberry. First of all, Michael, you're the founder of Prodiv, right?

Michael (00:12.752)

That is right. Thanks Chris. Appreciate it.

Chris Kiefer (00:15.002)

Yeah. And I'm super glad that we made the, uh, the time to make this happen. You came across one of my colleagues, Nathan at a recent, uh, painting, uh, mastermind group not too long ago. Um, and yeah, I, he was telling me like, Oh Chris, you should check this out. And, um, this is, uh, you are like a case study of what I try and tell people every single day in the automation world, which is if you find a quote unquote all in one solution,

I guarantee you that it actually is not all and even if it is doing quote -unquote all of everything that you would need it's probably doing a lot of things not very well because that's just the nature of focus and whatnot and I firmly believe that the Where we are at with software is this transition from a verticalization of software is trying to do it all to a horizontal ization of like

Integration is king. Automating data in and out of your apps that you're using in your tech stack is the priority. And that's what we love doing. So that's my, you probably heard all that from Nathan, but for those listening, when Nathan was telling me about what Prodiv does, I was like, this is a super interesting tool, big time saver, and also a fantastic tool for painting companies to use to figure out.

how they're doing and are certain crew leaders outperforming the rest and all that stuff. So enough of me rambling. Any other opening remarks, comments on what I just said before we dive into it?

Michael (01:54.192)

You know, I guess I'm fortunate that I can add some deeper credence to your core thesis that I used to run. I was president of a couple of divisions of a company called RealPage. We were a vertical SaaS platform for multifamily operations. And at that company, we built everything. We built the entire stack of solutions that you could need to operate a apartment complex. I routinely competed against platforms that

were stand -off, one -off tool sets. And frequently, yep, they did one thing. And usually they did that one thing better than we did the rest of the thing. And so if I wanted to win business, I had to sell someone on the idea that the integration of my whole system is better than trying to cobble together the pieces. Because 15 years ago, 10 years ago, when I'm doing this, cobbling those pieces together was extremely complex. And...

Chris Kiefer (02:27.77)

That did one thing.

Chris Kiefer (02:49.018)

Hmm.

Michael (02:50.224)

The reality is I usually couldn't beat someone on a feature to feature basis. I won because I had integration incumbent within my stack of technology. Today, I think that has evolved a great deal and there are still certainly some strong vertical platforms out there, but in the absence of an open API, I think they place their business model at risk. There's a path forward for...

Chris Kiefer (02:58.552)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (03:13.018)

100%.

Michael (03:17.424)

for the core platforms to be wildly successful while being open to the best practices that they can then pull in from other places to help serve their mutual customers.

Chris Kiefer (03:28.954)

Yeah. And I think, uh, I love that context of, and the timing is interesting. I heard this book by Andy Groves, who is the, um, CEO of Intel. He is called only the paranoid survive. And he talks about in for computers and the hardware. There is the first, the first thing is like in, in, or the verticalization, like, Hey, there's this thing called a computer. We should do that. Right. And it's like, what do you mean? Like, what does that even mean? Like, I don't know. We're going to build the whole thing. Right.

And it doesn't take too long for people to be like, wait, every piece of this is like highly specialized. The dream, and this is also interesting. I think that everybody is after the all in one because you hear stories of like what Apple can do when they go from the sourcing of the material all the way to the sale of the product and everything in between or Tesla. They custom build their entire operating system.

Michael (04:03.568)

it.

Michael (04:20.56)

Sure. Sure.

Chris Kiefer (04:24.858)

And so we hear like these massive efficiencies that are possible by getting the one system that does everything, but those are billion dollar companies. And you know, unless you're approaching hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, you're not a tech company. And for all the, you one to $10 million painting companies, you need to find like, I get so excited and just like my mind is blown with like QuickBooks 10 years ago when I started my business.

Michael (04:35.44)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (04:53.946)

The fact that I could pay, I don't even know what I paid for like their starter thing, but it's like 20 bucks a month or something to have access to literally a billion dollar tool on day one. And it just works 20 bucks a month. And it's like, then you do that with every other niche thing that has come out since then. Um, and I, and I think that because of AI and just like the ability for any function that's needed or needs to be served in the business.

Michael (05:01.232)

Not much.

Chris Kiefer (05:23.514)

there's going to be other tools that are going to go laser focused on making it so user friendly. And to your point, if you have an open API, that's your ticket into the whole ecosphere of just like plug in the data to where you want to go. And yeah, I think that's awesome.

Michael (05:42.608)

We actually have quite a few times folks say to some version of the sentence, well, we're thinking about, we talk about building something like this, I think we do something like what you guys do. And I've recently had a very large software platform in the landscaping space say, oh yeah, we're building what you guys do. I was like, really? I don't think you are. Yeah, and I kind of challenged the CEO. I was like, I tell you what, I'm actually gonna show you my whole system.

And at the end of that call, if you think what you're building is better than you, then you'll have seen mine and you can go build it. But I think you'll probably want to use mine and stop building yours. And we, yeah, so they're not building theirs anymore. So they stopped. He took one look at it. He's like, yeah, we're not building that, you know, and it's just because that's all I do. I do one thing. We try to do one thing really, really, really well. And I'm happy to show what we do. If a competitor wants to pop up, see, I'll show it to you. Good luck.

Chris Kiefer (06:17.818)

I love that. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (06:23.69)

See? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (06:33.914)

It's a niche.

Michael (06:39.024)

You know, we have spent years figuring this out and overcome ridiculous challenges and made so many mistakes to get to something we know is special. And we started this platform inside our own painting company. Um, as a, we just, we needed to create a cultural connection between our crews in the field and our company goals. And we realized they wanted to get paid more. Yeah. They guys will get paid more. And we need them to think about things like.

Chris Kiefer (06:39.148)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (06:52.826)

Hmm.

Michael (07:09.008)

quality, safety, production, et cetera. Happy to. Yes.

Chris Kiefer (07:09.21)

And you want, most businesses want to pay their guys more, especially if it aligns with the vision and the mission of like, what's our quarterly goal? If I can ensure that we hit our quarterly goals, everybody gets a bonus. Like that's what, that's been that way forever.

Michael (07:22.896)

Yeah. We've taken it. We've taken it to a granular level here where the quarterly thing, I think that's where a lot of people default to as owners. We tend to default into these quarterly kind of longer term views of our business. That's not how our workers see the world. They see the world on Friday. How much do I make on Friday? And when you separate somehow those two things, you're misaligning incentives. Our incentives as business owners are slightly different. I need the

crew to focus on how do I make more money on Friday? But I need that action that they take to do that to align with how I make more money for the quarter. So the productivity, the quality, the safety, the communication, the teamwork, the things that actually make us money as contractors need to be central to the way that they approach their job on Tuesday. And I think it's cute that you get are nice. It's very friendly of you to give a quarterly or an annual bonus based on how the company does. But that's just coming out of your profit. I

Chris Kiefer (08:01.722)

Love it.

Chris Kiefer (08:21.56)

Mmm.

Michael (08:22.16)

I want to align the way that your job budgets are tied to how they perform and how everybody makes more money very quickly, very granular. It's a constant reinforcing engine.

Chris Kiefer (08:32.346)

Love that.

Yeah, no, I think, um, there's, uh, just to, I don't know if Nathan told you about the review software, reputation management, the, there's hundreds of them out there, hundreds of these tools that gets you Google reviews, right? I was at, I was the marketing director for a painting company, a web foot over in bend, Oregon. You can look them up online. And when I started there, this was back in 2019. They had 67 Google reviews after 15 plus years in business, 67.

Michael (08:44.592)

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Chris Kiefer (09:05.178)

And there are like a $9 million painting company at the time. Like they, they had plenty of opportunities to get more reviews and they had 67. And I remember being like the, you know, I was just like shocked. Like I'm the marketing guy. I'm supposed to get us more clients and more leads. And it doesn't even, it looks like we're competing with like the chuck in a truck down the road. Who's been in business for three months and he's already got 40 reviews. Like what are we doing?

Michael (09:08.496)

Yeah, yep, yes.

Chris Kiefer (09:32.346)

So I had made this review software for dentists and it was super niche. And like, I was trying to pull in all this, like the people's names in the office for the patients to mention and talk about long story short, I integrated it with web foot. I customized the code and everything so that it could be streamlined and automated. And in a matter of two years, web foot went from, you know, uh, 67 reviews to over 700 and then

Next thing you know, I realized that Webfoot's the number one rated painting company in the country. And all of these little improvements that I made specifically for painters of like pulling in the crew leader and the sales rep and the person they talked to on the phone, all the data that was in the CRM and the project management system, I was extracting that and putting it into the review request to just make it that much more personal and include a picture of the crew and all this stuff.

Michael (10:25.936)

Very personal.

Chris Kiefer (10:29.21)

And so I was like optimizing the heck out of this one particular use case of painting. And then we're the number one in the country. And so then every other painting company is like, what are you guys using for reviews? And so to your point in the last two years, my wife who has done all the sales now, Nathan's taken over all that. Um, my wife would talk to people and they're like, Oh, your reviews. Yeah. So our CRM, it's an all in one. It has a reputation piece. It sends out a request and it's like,

Oh, really? Why is it that you're only getting 1 % of your customers to leave you reviews? Because it's not optimized. It's not working the way that you can. And that's like now we've talked about pay for performance reviews, literally, like if you can get that narrow, pick anything else in your business. And I guarantee you in the next like I had a call. So like our business Boolean, we are my goal.

Michael (10:59.984)

That's cute. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (11:24.928)

to I'm gonna stay in painting for as long as humanly possible with the opportunities that are coming to us because There's a hundred and something softwares that painters have inquired about looked into whatever that I think are viable. There's Way more than that that they're confronted with but in the painting world There's hundreds of options and you need like seven to twelve to run your business and I want to be the expert of

Michael (11:49.36)

Yep, about right.

Chris Kiefer (11:52.058)

all apps that you might consider as a painter. We've, we know that inside and out their API is what they can, what they can't do. You tell me where you want to go as a business owner. I'll tell you what tech you need to do it. And we'll get all of it talking to each other seamlessly, make the map of how the data is going to flow between everything and like send you on your way. So that's like, that's the, and I feel like because of that,

Michael (12:13.392)

I'll you next time.

Chris Kiefer (12:17.658)

I'm seeing apps and yours is another one. I'm just like, I can't wait to go tell all the people that we talked to, what are you guys doing for pay for performance? Have you heard of Prodiv? Like, like people don't understand the apps that are going to be coming out in 18 months or 24 months that are going to automate parts of your business. You didn't think were possible. If you don't have a good foundation of how you'd structure information in your business, good luck trying to integrate that.

Michael (12:27.792)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (12:46.2)

It all comes down to the plan.

Michael (12:46.8)

You leave margin on the table. You leave growth on the table. You leave free time on the table. The things you want to accomplish with your business, frequently the platforms are kind of in the way. They're tools to get there, but if you're not using them correctly, you're slowing yourself down. You're causing yourself more headaches. So if you can align that, there's a tremendous amount of value and it facilitates...

you getting to the goals you have as a business owner. Our one little part of the world, we do one very specific thing. We help your team in the field understand the budget and their actual in a way that makes sense to them. How much did you think this job was going to cost? How much did you actually spend to get it done? And what did they earn as a bonus by beating that budget if they did? So it's a very straightforward thing. It seems simplistic.

If it is just sending Bob to paint one bedroom, you know, apartment and just one to one transactional, okay, maybe you do that in a spreadsheet. The minutes that you've got four people across two pay periods and six days and doing a couple of different cost codes, making different wage rates, you know, and who some worked few hours and some work less hours, it's all of a the complexity goes way past Excel. And...

What we found the key to a strong performance pay system is really four things. Whether you use our system or just trying to do this on your own. One is you have to make it simple. It cannot be overly complex for your team to understand how they make more money. Like the system has to be focused on very, very few moving parts. We focus on the labor budget. That's the main thing we look at. Second is it needs to be transparent to the crew what they make.

If it's not clear to them what money comes to them, dollars, actual, I can see what comes on my paycheck. They don't believe in it and they don't change behavior. Remember the goal is a behavior change. The goal isn't just to have a bonus program or incentive comp, it's to change behavior at the job site. To do that, they need to, it needs to be simple and it needs to be transparent to them. And third, we find that the system needs to be frequent. There needs to be a consistency to when they receive this.

Chris Kiefer (14:50.168)

Hmm.

Michael (15:09.808)

bonus, this incentive. So if you're only paying them annually, it's too far apart. We, right, I don't get it, we pay weekly, you know, bonuses. It's, you know, maybe they're a month in arrears, but it's consistent, you know, they're consistently seeing value. The fourth thing, and probably the most important, is it has to be a cultural approach for your company. You have to want pay for performance to be almost a defining aspect of how you communicate. So you need to lean into it and all of your conversations with your crews.

need to come back to, what's our budget, what's our goal? What's the quality standard we have? How do we make sure we're safe? What's the communication we need? What are the equipment we need to be successful on this project? How do I communicate safety, teamwork, production quality, all the things that the conversations about that back to how we make more money has to be a cultural approach.

Chris Kiefer (15:42.936)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (16:02.01)

Hmm the you said you ran a painting company

Michael (16:06.128)

Yeah, we still do. We have a big here in New York City. We do mostly multifamily turns. But I just, yeah, more commercial to the extent that it's multifamily residential. But yes, it's we do a lot of NYCHA, which is affordable housing here in New York City, a lot of prevailing wage painting. We probably have we'll probably have 130 people in the field this summer, just ballpark. We do some renovation work. We have a whole renovation group as well. So.

Chris Kiefer (16:11.706)

commercial.

Chris Kiefer (16:21.656)

Okay.

Chris Kiefer (16:28.826)

Nice. See, I want to, I also think that what you, uh, I talked to many people that have said, Ooh, I'm, you know, I'm working on building my own software or have a software idea or whatever, like something along those lines. And I always am like, you probably do have a legitimate idea. Question is, are you a painting company or are you a software company? Cause you can't do both, but you can make, you can.

Michael (16:56.078)

Luckily, I had done both. So that helped. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (16:58.682)

But you do it. You don't have people running in your painting business, building the code for your software, right? You can run it if you, in my opinion, maybe you have some bleed over, but you can inform, have the painting company inform the development, but you have to run them as two totally separate businesses. And you can't be delusional to think that, oh, I'll just hire a developer, pay him $100 ,000 and then I'll have the perfect software ever. It's like, and then.

Michael (17:04.048)

No, no, we...

Chris Kiefer (17:27.962)

How do you keep it maintained? And what if that developer quits? And like now you're running your whole business on a tool that you coded. Like good luck keeping up with the other apps that are dedicated teams of 50 developers doing the same thing you're trying to do with one, you know?

Michael (17:31.458)

Yes.

Michael (17:43.568)

That's exactly why we didn't make any money for three years. And it took us two years longer than it should have to get to where we ended up. Because we made a mistake of trying to do the one inside the other. When we finally separated them out, it's when Proton just took off. We finally cracked the code on it and we had to separate the companies. So my partner, David and I run the software company. Now we have two other partners that run the construction side. So then finally separated it and we have.

Chris Kiefer (17:56.762)

Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (18:09.498)

Nice.

Michael (18:12.88)

been scaling quickly since then.

Chris Kiefer (18:15.322)

And what industries are you, is it all home service?

Michael (18:20.304)

We've got everything from commercial electricians with 400 electricians running around the country to Bob's landscaping. We don't really care what the trade is. We all face the same core challenge. We're hourly workers. We're trying to incentivize them to be productive and they want to make more money. We all have a labor shortage. We all need to get the

better quality work done, we need to get our jobs done on schedule. We're all facing those same dynamics. The fact that you build roads isn't really materially different than if you are putting on a roof. It's from a labor kind of management standpoint. Now, the interfaces are slightly different. If you're doing 20 landscaping jobs, mowing Mrs. Ms. Lawn 20 times a day, the way you interface data,

we view those jobs looks different in our software than if you build one road for two years. But to us, it's still a labor budget. Maybe it's lots of little labor budgets rolled together, or maybe it's a big labor budget broken into pieces. But for us, it's a labor budget, and it's an actual amount of time that we track against it.

Chris Kiefer (19:38.266)

And so the scope of what you like, when we're talking about focus, what is the scope of what you're solving? So obviously pay for performance. My mind immediately goes to like, so are you doing your, are you time tracking or are you integrate with time tracking or are you doing expense tracking as well? Does it integrate with QuickBooks? Like where's the, uh, where's the, the sandbox.

Michael (19:56.976)

You'll love this. Yeah, our Sandbox, we actually only do the tracking of your performance -based system. So we pull your project data from whatever ERP or CRM system that you've got your budget, so your employee information, your budget information, and then we have your time tracking from wherever you track time. Even if it's a piece of paper and you want to send us a spreadsheet, that's fine too.

Chris Kiefer (20:10.81)

project, yeah.

Michael (20:24.528)

So our goal is to integrate out to other platforms. We probably build another integration a week right now. So it's pretty steady flow of trying to build those out, open APIs when we can. Sometimes we have to do things more creatively, but we do. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (20:41.306)

And do you guys have an open API? Yeah. And so the, so literally it's the inputs are budget time materials.

Michael (20:51.184)

Actually, just we don't do material. It's just employee employee information. I need wage rates. I mean, Bob Smith makes $22 an hour. And I need to know what was your budget for the job? How many hours or dollars did you think this was going to take for this Costco for this whole project, whatever it is. And then I need to know how much time did they actually clock into that job? Three pieces of data, really. I mean, at the end of the day, that's our basic piece. And we're only pulling we don't even have to

Chris Kiefer (20:56.634)

Okay.

Chris Kiefer (21:14.424)

Hmm.

Michael (21:20.08)

push anything back.

Chris Kiefer (21:21.69)

Got it. Yeah, I'm thinking that the, the output, so all of the, is there an output other than like a dashboard or like each crew member has an app that they're looking at?

Michael (21:32.56)

There is.

Michael (21:37.264)

Yes, the crews get an app where they can do it over text via to a web browser where they can use our app. It's optional. The crew can see the labor budget for every job they're on. We call them pro pays the every pro pay they're on. They can see the labor budget. They can see what's been used so far. And we let the crew set their own goals down to a worker level. If you want the worker can go in and say, I think we can do this job 10 % faster or I want to make a $300 bonus. How long do I have to finish to get to that target number?

And the software will tell them exactly how many hours they have days, et cetera, to do that with the crew size that they have based on how many hours they think they're going to work. So it lets them set goals as a crew. That's the big moment where they're looking at the budget and they say, wow, we've got 300 hours to do this. I think we can do it in 250. If we do, what's the bonus we split up as a team? And then the worker can say, wow, I get 250 bucks of that. All right. Now, what now I start to think.

Chris Kiefer (22:20.258)

oooo

Michael (22:35.696)

The minute that I'm thinking that minute that happens, you're winning. You're already winning is that even if they blow the budget, even if you're wrong, even if it rains every day and it screws about whatever it doesn't makes no difference. You've already won because they brought their brain to work with them.

Chris Kiefer (22:37.85)

I love that.

Chris Kiefer (22:51.258)

I think that's so, I did not know that piece of it. That's fantastic. So you just build the, with the business, let's decide how are we gonna, like what's the sliding scale of like for every hour under goal, what's the dollar amount that is divided up amongst the project team, correct?

Michael (23:10.768)

They get to set, we call it the bonus pool. The pool is set based as a percentage of what do you want to share with your team and what do you keep of their savings? So if you think it's $10 to do this work and they do it in $9, what do you do with the leftover dollar? How much of it goes to the crew? How much of it goes to the company? Even if it comes to the company, you might give it back to the crew later for other reasons. But we see, and we see companies that pay a hundred percent of the savings to their team because remember you're,

It's not coming from your profit. It's coming out of your labor budget. So your profit, if you thought your profit was, you know, 22 % on this job or 18 or whatever your profit target was, GP is 40. That's great. That's protected. You just hit that number because they came in under your labor budget. So what if they make more money? Now, some companies have labor challenges. They need to get their GP up a bit, et cetera. So maybe they split that a little bit with their crews. But we've seen,

Chris Kiefer (23:43.93)

Yeah, totally.

Michael (24:10.448)

So far on our system, just going back through 2023, which is kind of our first full year in business with this, we've seen our average productivity lift of around 14, 15%, average wage growth of about 12, 13, 14%, depends on the trade, and labor costs flat to down. What that means is my crew's making more money per hour and my labor costs are flat to down. You pull two or three, 4 % of your labor budget out and your team makes more money.

So think about, I mean, as like a huge win and that's normalized. That's not even a stretch. We have companies that over -performed to that and it's fun.

Chris Kiefer (24:48.73)

That's awesome. So then the, um, uh, the, every, like the app or the controlling of this is you, you're just, you're not even, cause I had heard someone say, you guys do job costing, you're not job costing, you're just doing just the incentive and the pay for performance. And that's, it's just literally like this very cool interface, very, uh, friendly to the workers to decide, okay, well, how, how much, how long do we think this is going to take? Let's see if we can hit it.

If we miss our goal by five hours or whatever, we still were under the budget, so we still get a bonus. That's the focus. And then job costing, that's not in your playground. That would be done somewhere else still.

Michael (25:29.52)

People. Yeah, I think if you don't have any job costing in your company today, I would humbly recommend you start. So, you know, that's, that's, I mean, I don't, let's put it this way. I've never met a huge successful company that didn't have strong cost controls. Like it's just, that's just the price of fame as you grow. And if you lose control over what you're actually making on a per job basis, then you've got, you have other problems too.

Chris Kiefer (25:37.562)

Do it.

Chris Kiefer (25:46.554)

Yeah, I completely agree.

Chris Kiefer (25:59.768)

Yeah, yeah.

Michael (25:59.92)

So our, again, our focus is performance pay. That's the one part that we do. We think we have something unlike what anybody else has ever built and for sophistication. So we probably will at some point. The payroll report is so simple that we just haven't found a big demand yet that needs to be integrated. It'd be cute, I guess, to be able to push the bonuses automatically. But...

Chris Kiefer (26:11.034)

Does it integrate with payroll?

Chris Kiefer (26:22.906)

Okay.

Michael (26:27.792)

In the end, it's just they run a payroll report and they just send that to accounting to say, here's the bonuses for this month.

Chris Kiefer (26:33.818)

So is the app telling you this is how much money you made with hours plus bonus or just the bonus or both?

Michael (26:37.968)

Yes.

So we actually show a couple of things. And one of them may surprise you how important it is. We show this is all your jobs. These are the ones you made money on, the ones you didn't. Clients can roll jobs against each other if that fits your business model better. So say we did these six jobs this month. These four, we beat the budget. This one we broke even. This one we lost money on. You can net that number and pay on the net if you chose to. You can...

And because some companies are just a little bit nervous about, well, what if I blow the budget on a different job? You know, then I paid, but I don't have a savings. So, okay, fine. Then roll them together. You can do that. You can pay bonuses weekly. You can pay them monthly. There's a point.

Chris Kiefer (27:18.17)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (27:25.048)

Your recommendation is to go shorter timeframes.

Michael (27:28.688)

Yeah, it's even if you don't pay at all, you could pay 50 % of it, for example, weekly. This is actually kind of the way we view the world. In the end, you do what's right for your company, but we look at, we pay about 50 % of our bonus weekly, a month in arrears. So it's always a month arrears. That way, if I have a quality problem and you go back and fix something, I mean, just, so if you earned it in this week, 30 days from now, it's on your paycheck. So it's all, but it's every week after that, you're getting whatever you earn from that week, a month.

Chris Kiefer (27:47.322)

What's month in rears?

Chris Kiefer (27:53.594)

Okay.

Four weeks ago, yeah.

Michael (27:58.48)

Now, the reason we do that is because we have a quality issue. There's insults in cabinets and they installed the doors upside down. That's not right. We got to go back and fix it. I want the crew to hold each other accountable to quality because it's their money. The truth is they don't care about your money. I hate to break it to y 'all listening, but your workers don't care about your money. They care about their own money. And if we can get them to view the labor budget as their own money, they'll treat it different.

Chris Kiefer (28:09.306)

I was going to ask that too.

Michael (28:28.592)

In fact, they don't want to go back. I have a carpenter on video who kind of said the quiet part out loud where he said, his name is Frank, he said, my approach to quality changed when I went on the pro -pay is because it cost me too much money to go back. And I was like, wow, Frank, welcome to my world. It's like, do it right the first time and beat the budget out from an hour standpoint and you make more.

Chris Kiefer (28:42.618)

Hahaha.

Chris Kiefer (28:51.514)

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think that the, um, uh, the, from like, when you are as the crew, the, the fear, I'm assuming this is probably the number one thing that people say is like, so now my guys are just going to try and do a 300 hour job in a hundred hours and make whatever amount of money. And it's like, we're all like, sure. People think about that, right? But they're also not like,

Michael (29:16.556)

Sure they do. All right, people ask all the time.

Chris Kiefer (29:20.026)

they're not, they're going, they want to make sure that they're doing things correctly. And I assume that like, what's your, is the suggestion as simple as what you just said of just like, this is how you should handle it. And then, uh, if they, like, if they totally like, I mean, I guess if you totally botched the job, like just horribly, you get fired or whatever. If it's like that bad.

Michael (29:23.664)

Yes.

Michael (29:40.624)

Yes, there's, yeah, let's, let's take the extreme examples out and just say, well, real life, if they, they start to cut corners because they think that's how they're going to make more money. They learn very quickly the same way we learn as owners that the quality drives our success as much as productivity, if not more, they learn very quickly that they have to do it right. And we, I've seen it play out in real life and our clients see it play out. They will hold each other accountable because somebody.

Chris Kiefer (29:46.586)

What happens then?

Chris Kiefer (29:58.968)

Hmm.

Michael (30:10.32)

on that crew wants the bonus because they're, they know baby needs shoes, right? I, I, I need, I want to make the extra money. And I know if Bob doesn't put that second coat on in that back room, Mrs. Smith is going to complain and we're just going to have to fix it. And our bonus is done. So you can be more or less strict with our software about how you approach those things based on the nature of your crews, et cetera, the nature of the kind of work you're doing. But yeah, if you,

aren't getting the job done right, you can't make a bonus, you have to do it right. And we have clients now that are looking at, can I tie my five -star reviews to my bonus payouts? Can I, yeah, so we don't do that yet, but that is definitely on our kind of the roadmap of the way we view the world, is what other policy processes do I wrap into how I pay bonuses? Maybe I pay part of the bonus straight on production, and part of it maybe is tied to things like attendance,

Chris Kiefer (30:50.746)

That's, I was just gonna ask you, do you guys?

Michael (31:09.712)

or quality scores, back reviews, et cetera, or preventive maintenance, or did you clean your truck this week, or whatever policy things you want. What you have now is a pool of money that didn't cost you anything because it's created by the production lifts that they did, but you have a pool of money to work with. And how do you apply that?

Chris Kiefer (31:28.154)

Yeah, cause so this is that's fantastic. Cause I was going to say what we do, cause our, the mission of Boolean is to free you up to do what you love. So we do that with the review software to just automate that. That was the original thing. And then it was like all this other automation and just eliminating data entry and repetitive, like the number of places that information needs to get moved from app to app to app. That all needs to go away in my belief. Um,

Nobody likes doing that. Anyways, they love solving interesting problems. They love going fishing with their kids They love you know golfing or whatever. That's what we all are trying to do right and so we need to free everybody up to do more of the stuff that you everyone loves but what people have what we have done is Clients pay, you know $20 or they get a $50 gift card or something for every review. That's for their project, right and so

we've made it very easy to like, we're tracking the new reviews coming in on Google, and then we want to be able to match which crew member was, does that belong to? So my, this is now we're getting into like future protive Boolean integration ideas. But the cool thing would be, can our software ping yours, the web hook, that's just like, hey, this employee ID just got a review for this project.

and it sends you the project job number, the employee number, and says five star review, boom, and then on their little dashboard it says, ooh, you just got an extra 20 bucks because, you know what I'm saying?

Michael (33:03.216)

Yep. It could be accelerators. It could be, you could just release more of the bonus pool to them. Maybe normally they're normal standards. They get 65 % of it, but you can get up to 85 % if you get a five -star view. There's a lot of triggers that something like that could pull that would be very efficient for a company to implement. We actually have a beta program running, just started with using XOXO Day, it was a rewards platform.

Chris Kiefer (33:18.554)

Mmm.

Michael (33:31.632)

we're going to tie in non -monetary rewards on top of the monetary rewards. And we think that's got, there are interesting things you can do with points. Let's think of points. Or any points can be applied to, points are then as this nebulous currency I can use for whatever. Yeah. So maybe I'm going to use it for to get companies, you know, shirts, or maybe I'm going to use it for, you know, save up my point to get a cruise around the world. I don't know, whatever. You know, it's, the structure is.

Chris Kiefer (33:38.618)

What's non, like a time off? Oh, points.

Chris Kiefer (33:46.298)

It's like the credit cards, yeah.

Michael (34:00.912)

we believe dollars have to be at the center of a rewards program because we're still dealing with safety needs as a Maslow hierarchy kind of issue. People need to make money to feed their family in housing and pay the bills. Once you start to solve for some of that, then I think there are other things you can begin to apply that tack other parts of someone's brain with rewards. And we think that the...

points the non -monitor side is going to unlock some new things there.

Chris Kiefer (34:32.666)

I love the, but, or I should clarify that is the functionality, or like, let's say that we did the heavy lifting of which employee got the review as of today, can we send a web hook or an, like, or I don't know if it would be through your API to say like, oh, this is true for this job. And then you would say, therefore,

XYZ happens on the performance or on the pay side or is that not ready yet?

Michael (35:02.256)

It's not today, but the lift in between here and there is not very long. It's a before the summer ends kind of, you know, all of that should be there in place. It's not sooner. So, yeah, headed that way.

Chris Kiefer (35:08.888)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (35:15.834)

That's awesome. Um, and it's also, I'm assuming that like you could, yeah, sure. We could add more money to the pool, but the other piece that I'm at least this is my assumption, the interface and the look of it and like the, it's almost like the slot machines, right? I feel like the, the cool part would be like that. It looks like there's a big gold star or something that like you see like, Ooh, we got the gold star bonus or whatever. Um, and that just like the,

I feel like there's, I'm sure I haven't seen the interface that you guys have, but I'm sure it already is that's what people are focused on. Like, what are you highlighting? What, how is it broken down? How much information do you show to give them enough, but not overwhelm them and that type of stuff. I feel like is just from looking at your website, you're obviously thinking like that.

Michael (36:02.448)

So.

Yeah, and we've actually brought on board a guy who helped develop the gamification for the rewards programs for some big, big fast food organizations like McDonald's, Starbucks, et cetera. He's one of the world's best gamification for hourly workers in terms of apps. And he's working with us on, kind of we'll call it version two and version three of what that interface is going to look like. It's going to be really powerful.

Our thesis is investing down to the worker. So the way that we view the world is what can we build for the crews in the field to help them? And we have this beginning point of we're going to help you to make more money by giving you rewards and some control of your own income. But then layering on top of that will be a series of things that I think if you looked at our long -term product roadmap, it is a consistent investment into.

Chris Kiefer (36:32.634)

I love that.

Michael (37:01.392)

into the worker to the point where we hope that some days people need our APIs to plug in a whole host of other things to improve the lives of the workers in the field. We think they're the most valuable asset we have. We need to be taking care of them. We need to recognize them, reward them, support them in a host of different ways that aren't easy to do necessarily today.

Chris Kiefer (37:25.018)

Well, I'm keeping an eye on the time here. We're going to move towards the wrap up questions. Three book recommendations.

Michael (37:35.472)

Book recommendation. So, business book, the book called Reimagine, actually have it sitting right over here. Great book. Tom Peters, he wrote another business book. Some people say it's one of the greatest business books of all time, but McKinsey, Harvard guy. And if you've ever wanted to rethink your company and just

imagine the world in a different way. Tom Peters, just brilliant guy, highly recommend any of his business books, but Reimagine was one of my favorites. I'm a big Teddy Roosevelt fan and I think Mornings on Horseback, just a great picture into a man who had a life well lived, incredible what he accomplished and what he overcame. He was certainly blessed with wealth.

but then what he overcame in his asthma and kind of being a sickly young guy to, you know, to what our stories of him, you know, robust, athletic, you know, charging up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, it's, you know, becoming president. But really, you know, a fascinating story. Roosevelt's a fascinating character. Third book, fiction book, read Moby Dick if you haven't read it since high school.

It's a great story and Melville is a writer, unbelievable writer. I've never seen anybody write one sentence that takes a whole page and it doesn't feel like there should be an extra comma. It doesn't feel like a period is missing. He's just a brilliant writer and you'll be a better writer after reading Moby Dick if nothing else. So, surprising tale.

Chris Kiefer (39:23.77)

That is an interesting, obviously classic. I haven't even thought about that since high school, like you said.

Michael (39:32.496)

Yeah, it's worth reading again as an adult. You will take so much more from it. Incredible stuff.

Chris Kiefer (39:37.626)

That's awesome. And favorite movie.

Michael (39:42.892)

Favorite movie is probably Sicario. Really like that one. Benico del Toro, Megan Blunt, it's Heavenly Blunt. Yeah, strong movie. Yeah, the DEA thing. Yeah, a lot of reasons it's my favorite, but it was a good two hours. It's worth doing.

Chris Kiefer (39:53.562)

Is that the drug cartels or no? Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (40:06.234)

I'm just looking up the, this was the other one in 2015. Yeah.

Michael (40:11.76)

Yeah, the second one wasn't as good, the first one. Yeah, strong stuff.

Chris Kiefer (40:17.498)

Sweet. And then if people want to get in touch with you, what's your preferred method that they do that?

Michael (40:24.144)

We obviously love people to check out our websites, protiv .com. But if you want to email me directly, michael at protiv .com, P -R -O -T -I -V, super easy. Happy to answer questions. Happy to talk to them about how we can tie their systems together through Boolean or otherwise, and make this an easy implementation. Our software usually takes about an hour to set up. We're integrated. It's a really quick implementation. The culture side is the lift. So if they're interested in trying to figure out how to

Chris Kiefer (40:50.808)

Mmm.

Michael (40:53.232)

Culturally build a performance based compensation and pay system in their company. Give me a shout. Love to do it with you.

Chris Kiefer (41:01.658)

Um, I'm gonna, I'm probably going to introduce you to, uh, my wife who's still doing more of the strategy and the product roadmap for our, our software. Um, and, uh, yeah, I'm just, I'm excited to, uh, to share this episode with our past clients. And, um, there's literally like, I think yesterday it was either this morning or, or last night, Natalie said that, um, she had talked to two more clients that we were talking about.

how can we make this easier for you to pay your people? Because they every, like, anyone that's crushing the software, the review game, they're obviously using ours, but also they're doing some sort of, it's exactly like everything that you're saying resonates with me from like what I've experienced when I was in the painting business, and then now trying to help painting businesses. You have to align the dollars with the goal.

you know, and then I also heavily believe in the feedback loop. If your feedback loop is, let's exaggerate is a year and it's like, so, uh, looks like we didn't make any money. Sorry guys. Let's see if we can do better next year versus like a month or a week or a day or every job. Yeah. It's like, yeah. In the job. Like, Oh, we're off track. Like let's pick it up. You know, I think that's fantastic. Um, so anyways,

Michael (41:59.214)

I'm set.

Michael (42:15.504)

Every job. How about intra -job? How about intra -job? Yeah, we can do that. Yes. Yeah, we can do that. Yes. Yeah. Love it. Charlie Munger said, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcomes. Yeah, so, you know, RIP Charlie Munger. Smart guy.

Chris Kiefer (42:32.346)

Oh.

Chris Kiefer (42:36.73)

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Michael, super fun. We didn't get to talk about sailing at all, but I really appreciate you coming on. And I'm thinking that we'll probably be seeing you around at other industry events. And yeah, I appreciate your time and knowledge.

Michael (42:50.04)

Looking forward to it.

Michael (42:54.288)

Bye, Chris. Have a great day.