Episode 112: Better for Your Home and Health: Discover the Eco-Friendly Cleaning Secrets of Spruce Up Cleaning with Kyle Hopkins

Episode 112: Better for Your Home and Health: Discover the Eco-Friendly Cleaning Secrets of Spruce Up Cleaning with Kyle Hopkins

Kyle Hopkins:
Yeah, I know you guys preach the getting the reviews and so that was what I focused on. That was huge. I mean that's gotten me a lot of just organic customers now. Like honestly not even really paying for them. They just go online and they mention like, oh hey, I saw you. You got good reviews. I read your reviews. And obviously just doing a really good job and making sure everything's good. But then also asking customers, Hey, if you wouldn't mind just leaving us a review and on Google. And that's been helping me a lot. It's probably been besides word of mouth and that's been probably my biggest customer draw. They just mentioned that when they call me and ask for an estimate, I ask usually like, how would you find us? And nine times outta 10, they just mention the reviews. So helps a lot.

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

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win.

So today guys, I'm your host, Brandon Shane. I'm joined by my wonderful co-host, Brandon Condre. And we've got a really cool show for you today. We're actually bringing some business owners from around the world to share their stories, their wins, their challenges. So we've got one of our students today joining us, Kyle Hopkins. He's been working with us for the last year,

the Profit Cleaners. And he had actually been doing the cleaning business solo on his own for a whole year prior to that, trying to figure it out. It'll be really cool for you guys to hear the story of how he jumped on with us and how he's made some major progress. It was a pretty fun conversation, wouldn't you say Brandon? Yeah,

It was great. So Kyle owns Spruce Up Green Clean in this town that I'm gonna butcher. Kyle's gonna get mad at me. It's like Val Prezi, Val Perso Indiana. It's kind of a suburb of Chicago. It'll be two years this month. So he's been going at it for two years. He's had employees for a year. And this coolest,

biggest goal that you'll hear about is to become completely out of cleaning in the next month. So you can hear it from someone who's on the cusp of getting to work on the business full time and leave the cleaning to the experts, to the teams. And it was a really good conversation. Yeah, it was really fun. So if you guys are again,

just starting your cleaning businesses or maybe you are a year or two in, or you're still in those beginning stages, you can hear how Kyle's been working through that and just, it's always inspiring to hear stories of other cleaning business owners, how they're doing it, what they're working through. 'cause a lot of times we are all experiencing the same challenges. And as a famous president once said,

a rising tide raises all ships. So I think it was it Nixon, Brandon? It was Kennedy. Kennedy, dang it. I always get it wrong. But Kennedy, sorry, Kennedy. Nixon's famous For all the wrong reasons. Although I suppose Kennedy is famous for a pretty bad reason too. Yeah, So it's the power of the mastermind principle guys.

It's a whole chapter in Think and Grow Rich, which is a great book you guys should pick up by Napoleon Hill. But the Mastermind is meant to raise everybody to a new level and everybody helps each other to this new level. So that's what Profit Cleaners is all about. Guys, that's our mission is to help at least a hundred of you hit to the seven figure market with your cleaning businesses.

So you're gonna hear Kyle's story, you're gonna hear where he's going. He's got big goals for the end of this year and hopefully you guys can be one of our poster childs, one of our students that comes along and does the same thing. So let's get into it. Let's hear Kyle's story. And until next time guys, keep it clean. Keep it clean.

Alright everybody, welcome to the call. Today we're gonna be talking with Kyle Hopkins and we're gonna be talking all about his new cleaning business. He's been working on the last year and using our systems learning from the Profit Cleaners. We want to hear what's going on. Kyle, what's your story, how the progress is going, and just wanna hear the wins,

the challenges, like everything you've been going through. And I'm sure a lot of people will be inspired by your story. You've been one of our best students for sure. Kyle, I remember you reaching out a year ago when you first invested in the systems and just telling you, I wanna do exactly what you guys are doing. I wanna do exactly how you guys are doing so you can model that success.

So let's jump into it man. Tell us about spruce cleaning, spruce up cleaning. Tell us about where you're at, where you're from, a little bit of your background story and let's get into it. Okay, yeah. Well I am from, originally outside of Chicago. Grew up in Chicago suburb and then I moved to the city for when I moved out and I was a flight attendant.

I did that for about 11 years and got super burnt out. Never really felt like it was for me. I always wanted to start my own business. That was always just an itch I had for for years. Just never made the jump until finally I was just like, I'm gonna do it. And through, through Caution to the Wind and just finally decided to start a business and I decided on house cleaning,

just all sounded like a real good business model, just reoccurring revenue stream And like you guys say, it's like Netflix for your house. People just, you have a customer and they stay a customer for years. And so that was appealing to me. Also, the Eco-friendly side was something that I wanted to do as well. Make myself stand out just 'cause I'm into health.

And so that was something I thought of when I first started that would make me stand out from the competition. And then, so I did the house cleaning part-time for about a year while I was still working as a flight attendant. And then I finally made the jump full time last May, so it'll be almost a year since I've been doing this full time.

It was scary but I just did it and I said I would just figure it out and just make it happen. And so I knew I had to find some mentors, someone that was doing what I wanted to do and just someone to learn from because I was just going on Facebook to try to learn some things and it's just, you get 50 different opinions about something and you don't know if those opinions are even like valid or you don't know who you're getting the information from.

So I just knew I had to really find someone to help me out. And that's where I found you guys. I originally found your podcast on Spotify. That's how I first heard about you guys and all the information in the podcast was just super helpful. And so I decided to look into you guys a little bit more and that's how I found the course and signed up for the course and that's how,

that's how I got to be where I'm at. So yeah, that's my story. Nice. Awesome man. So yeah, like how was that leap going from full-time job to like business owner? Like you said it was scary but like elaborate More on That. Yeah, my first business, I had zero experience running a business, no idea what to do and just like the amount of work it took.

And so it was scary. And so again, that's why I felt the need to just find, find some mentors to help me navigate through all the stuff. I mean I'm still learning new things every day and so yeah, it is overwhelming. I mean there's still times where I'm days where I'm just super overwhelmed and but just fi the experience that you guys have and just the,

like I said the podcast but then also the choruses just lays everything out so well. So it makes me feel like less overwhelmed and it's just these things I would've never, never thought to, have never would've thought of on my own or would've taken me forever. So yeah, it's just super helpful. So tell us about Spruce Up. How long has it been in business?

What's your customer? I mean you, you don't have to share any numbers you don't wanna share obviously, but Oh yeah, how many customers did you have and how many employees and how do you think things are going in general? Things Are going pretty well. I'm moving a little slower than, you know, I'm kind of growing it from the bo like from from nothing.

I'm as, I don't have any loans that I took out or I didn't, you know, throw a ton. I have a ton of cash to put in it so I'm going a little slower. But yeah, spruce up green clean. I filed the LLC in 2021 I think April of 2021 was when it became official and started off just cleaning by myself honestly,

just doing it on my own and grew through word of mouth was my biggest, biggest like avenue of getting new customers. And then I hired my first employee probably a year after that it was working, me and her were doing cleanings. And then right now I have three employees and I have probably about 15 customers re recurring customers right now. So that's,

it's my current situation. So are You cleaning day-to-day still or does your three employees get you out of that successfully? I have two full-time and one part-time and so the two full-time, I clean with 'em and when I have the part-timer cleaning, it's three of 'em. And so then I'm just not cleaning those but I'm posting ads. I'm indeed right now and I'm doing interviews right now to,

I'm still still hiring so open to be completely out. I would say my goal would be to be completely out in like a month. Nice. So that took, you're pushing two years, so it took two years to get there, but a year of employees, so like you had one employee for a year you said, right. And like the first year I wasn't really focusing on growing fast.

I was just trying to test the waters and see if it was even possible. And so when I really focused on, on like growing, I would say it's been like a year of focusing on actually growing. So it's been really, really like a year year of trying to grow the business. So it probably took me a year to get three employees.

So I like it. I remember you saying Kyle, that you had a bunch of five star reviews coming in at some point, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, you've growing your reputation. Yeah. I know you guys preached the getting the reviews and so that was what I focused on. That was huge. I mean that's gotten me a lot of just organic customers now.

Like honestly not even really paying for them. They just go online and they mention like, oh hey I saw you, you got good reviews, I read your reviews. And obviously just doing a really good job and making sure everything's good, but then also asking customers, hey if you wouldn't mind just leaving us a review and on Google. And that's been helping me a lot.

It's probably been besides word of mouth and that's been probably my biggest customer draw. They just mentioned that when they call me and ask for an estimate, I ask usually like, how'd you find us? And nine times outta 10 they just mention the reviews. So helps a lot. Yeah, There's a reason that we do preach that to people so it's good to know that people like yourself are listening and actually pay attention and go for it.

Yeah. So yeah, I mean I do think that's super important and I'm glad that that it actually works. 'cause I mean that's the whole point of the reviews is not just to like have a number on there, it's that people go in there and I like to think that people all kind of generally think the same in terms of buying things online, but I don't do much of anything without researching it.

Whether it's a restaurant or a product or a cleaning company or whatever it may be. So you know, that's a really good job that you've been able to collect those reviews. I think that's rad. And you mentioned Kyle, that you have competition obviously in your market, some bigger franchises. But even what we've seen, and you've probably seen this too,

just getting that initial handful of reviews and just getting going, a lot of times people in your market that have been in there for 10 or 20 years even they only have five or 10 reviews, right? And so it's like if you just put that effort in upfront to build that social proof, those testimonials, that is exactly a huge part of that trust building that you're doing to get people to trust you to come into the house.

'cause people buy what other people buy. So I love hearing that, that you're just asking for those reviews, you're taking action. And I loved also hearing what you were saying too, just by surrounding yourself with that knowledge and the community, you're able to go so much faster, take the right action and that's what you've been doing is you're testing the waters at first and then you're like,

oh this is starting to take off. Maybe I should take it this more seriously. And so you invested in yourself, invested in your business, taking action, like hiring employees, which is really the first step of working your way out of the business and working on the business. So now you're at your off home office working on the business. And tell us a little bit more like what does your day to day look like now that you're not cleaning all the time?

Like what else are you working on and what are the next goals that you're working on to grow the business? Still doing a lot of the marketing and I still work outta my house out of my garage. And so I'm doing the, the laundry and just getting the equipment and and everything. Making sure everything the vacuums are all in working order and the all the cloths are clean and the refilling,

the cleaning, the solutions and things like that. I'm doing that a lot. And then as far as on the marketing side, I'm still doing the marketing myself and still doing payroll and things like that. So I haven't hired anyone besides cleaners yet. I haven't outsourced any of those tasks yet. But it's definitely something on the horizon that will be a next step for me is is getting someone to do those things for me as well.

Awesome Man, that's a good framework. So just to hear you say that I have a plan, these are the things I'm gonna replace next, like yeah, that's so important. So I think a lot of business owners that end up creating a job for themself instead of a business for themself, you just get in there, you get in their routine,

you're like, cool, my day's filled, this is what I do now. Yeah. And so it's important I think to keep your eye on whatever the end goal is. So if you wanna replace marketing eventually, which you can do, you don't have to hire someone to do that, you, you hire a service, you pay for that, you don't have to have an employee.

And same thing with vacuum repair, like our vacuum guy quit recently and now we're just using a local shop to do it, which is a little bit more expensive but it's working better for us. So yeah, I mean I just think that's really important to, these are the things I'm gonna take myself out of next. And as a general rule of thumb for business owners,

delegate the thing that you hate doing the most, that would be the thing that I would do next. Yeah, yeah. De Wanna know why most cleaning business owners fail or get stuck systems. When you don't have the right systems in place for hiring, training, marketing all of the day-to-day essentials, then your business gets jammed. And without the right systems it's impossible to keep moving forward.

If you're ready to add smart proven systems to your cleaning business so that you can join the top 1% of cleaning business owners, head over to our free Facebook group now and watch the masterclass pinned to the top of the group. Just search top 1% cleaning business owner club, find our faces and watch the free class to learn exactly how we took our business from zero to seven figures in just three years.

So tell us Kyle, like what are, what's some big wins you've had I guess on the last year? Like what would be some, some big Things you've overcome or Just realized along the way? Yeah, Having employees, having employees that you know have stuck around going in. I know, I know finding employees is, is one of the more difficult parts of growing a business,

especially in the beginning. And so having a few reliable employees was a big win. It helped me to actually start to see like, okay, this is going somewhere. I was cleaning by myself and even with one another person it was hard to see the big picture but actually getting like a team together was a big win and gave me motivation to, to just keep working at it and then getting more people calling,

calling me for estimates without having to like really bug my current customers and say like, Hey if you know anyone just like you know try to get those referrals. Like people are actually like just going on Google and looking for cleaning around them and then they see me and call. And so just seeing that start, that snowball start to grow with like organic leads is a win as well.

Takes a little bit of pressure off me as far as like trying to make sure I have enough customers because in the beginning I was even worried, I'm like oh you know, there's like all these franchises out here and there's not enough customers out here for me because I'm from like a smaller city, I have about like 35,000 people in my city and then there's surrounding cities too.

But a worry for me in the beginning was wondering if like there's even enough people out there for me but now I don't worry about that as much anymore 'cause people are calling. So that's a big win as well. That's The beauty Really. Once you get that organic marketing in tandem with reviews, search results and word of mouth, that's when things really start to snowball.

And then the next time we have you in the podcast, I hope you're saying like we are turning people down. Like that's really when it starts to get going like a locomotive, you know like you've picked up so much steam, it just can't slow down so now you're waitlist people and the idea is you're trying to onboard a team on a schedule and make sure that everything's working out and so that is really what you're headed towards right now.

So it's good to hear that it's working out. I like hearing those wins that people are calling you without you having to expend both a lot of money and a lot of effort to get it to happen. Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah we just did an initial clean today actually on a, on a house. So I Was just gonna say that's just just a good example too of like the organic marketing which is typically a little bit slower and it's like building reviews and getting your reputation out there and getting your,

your website to rank and a lot of those are long-term strategies but over time it's just like that is the low hanging fruit. If you can optimize your Google listing and get those reviews coming in, that's where people usually go first to look for local businesses and and then it's just, you know, beyond that you can get more aggressive with paid ads and other things but it's like if you even just focus like Kyle you're doing on organic,

I don't even know if you're doing other forms of traffic but it's just proof right there that it might take some time. But when you put in the work there is an ROI it does come back to you, there's a return on that investment and really those reviews are, we say they're gold, you know 'cause it's like the reviews from five years ago are still selling people today.

They're reading all those reviews and and even just as important those five star reviews are those one and two and three star reviews and how you respond to them and how people see you interact. And so even if it's a bad situation, as long as you go in there and reply and you're respectful and you take responsibility, you help solve the problem, people will be like wow that's great.

Like this business owner gets it and I wanna work with someone like that. So. So even negative reviews can be turned around and you can turn really, really bad situations into raving fans and customers that love you and will tell everyone about you. How are you doing those referrals? Are you giving people an incentive to refer you or Yeah, I ask my current customers offer 'em a free clean,

they awesome if anyone signs up because that sounds great to them and it's worth it for me to just give them one house to have a have a new customer sign up is definitely worth it for me. So yeah, that's the incentive. Yeah and I wanted to just say that that's cool 'cause that's exactly what we do. So again you're just modeling the system and it works.

Yeah and I see a lot of times people skimping on that. They're like, I see it all the time with $10 off or $10 like on your next clean if you refer a customer it's like really incentivize your customers and go above and beyond because that customer's bringing you a recurring business, like $5,000 of value a year or more. And so it's like really go out of your way to like make it an attractive offer for them to refer their friends and family and whoever else.

So I love that you're doing that. It sounds like it's working so keep pushing on that. And I was gonna go back circle back to like the team thing. You were mentioning like a lot of people even everybody struggles with the hiring and finding teams. Like how did you go about finding your team and like how did you know they were the right people and like how's that working out?

How'd you put that together I guess and how'd that come together for you? Yeah, So I've been using indeed exclusively, that's how I've been finding potential candidates and then I noticed in the beginning I really needed to move quickly with like getting them an interview and offering them a job because a lot of 'em would be applying to like 10 different places and they would just go with the first one that said yes.

And so I lost a few in the beginning to just another job. So what I do now is once I, I see them in un indeed I'll send 'em a quick little application. It's just like Google form and I use got it from you guys just kind of goes through the basics that like question like you know back, would you willing to take a background check?

Do you have transportation? You know, are you looking for full-time, part-time? Yep I send them that first and once I get that back and go through it and everything checks out, then I do just an interview. I went from in-person interview to Zoom interview because it's just easier for everyone. I liked doing the in-person but it just, like I said,

just getting 'em through that whole process quickly before they take another job is is important. And so Zoom interview and then if that goes well then I start them the week of I do the training with them. So. Awesome. I love it. Good stuff. On the flip side of the wins question, what do you think is the biggest mistake you've made so far?

I like asking people this one 'cause it makes you reflect on how things are going. Yeah, definitely biggest mistakes. I would definitely say not getting my prices dialed in quick enough going into it before I found you guys, I, I actually had a business coach, it was like through score or something and so you know he knew business but he didn't really know the cleaning business and so we came up with a pricing model together and I was like okay,

like I didn't know any better. I didn't know to like call my competition or like do with what you guys told me to do. And so I went with that and ended up being really low and so having to tell customers to raise 'em their prices up a ton but it's, they makes 'em angry and some of 'em were fine with it 'cause they knew that they were getting a deal in the beginning but some of 'em were like that's ridiculous and left.

And so not dialing in my prices earlier would be would be a mistake. It's funny, that was one of our biggest mistakes in the beginning too was not calling the competition and just like how about this? We'll charge this. And then people got 40% price increase letters and were notably upset, which is totally fine. Yeah, that was my biggest one for sure.

Any others are any other challenges or any hiccups or? Oh All. Yeah, I mean employees, I mean just, just a constant challenge having to cover for someone when they're sick just 'cause now you know, I only have three people and so if one person's sick then that's not a full team and so I gotta jump in. And then I'm trying to think of some other ones using too many products in the beginning I will say that,

so when I first started I just went to like Target and I was still eco-friendly in the beginning before I found you guys just go on Facebook, people just throw out like a million different products to use. Like oh what do you use to clean this? And so like I had a bucket full of like eight different things and it would just take me so much longer to clean a house because I thought I needed a specific product for every surface.

And so I just had an over complicated cleaning caddy and it took me longer and it was a pain to get ready the night before. Like I'm like oh I gotta make sure my stainless steel cleaners ready and my wood floor and my tile and my, it was just like all these different things and it was just like it was a pain to carry around and to get prepared the night before.

And so just not simplifying that to like two products was something I learned for sure. Yep. There's so much marketing in the cleaning world, there's a cleaner for everything. Yes. If you look around at it, and I remember Corby came to do an inspection, an inspection, he came to visit Albuquerque, he was walking around our shop a phone and he had a video call with his staff in Colorado and they spotted this stainless steel cleaner that we had on the shelf,

which is like, wait, wait, wait, wait, go back. What is that? You can't have that. And they got, it was funny, we all laughed about it and one of the cleaners actually bought that themselves to go clean a fridge like don't do that man. And so, yeah, yeah, I mean that's a good thing to market.

I'm happy for those companies that make that stuff like Swiffer and all those companies. It's just so much stuff that you could buy for like the DIY cleaning. But when you look at any large scale commercial company, it's kinda like how McDonald's became so successful is they used to have this giant menu with dozens of things and when they really took off they limited it to like three.

Yeah you could get a cheeseburger, a hamburger and this chicken thing and like that was when they exploded, just eliminated choice. People walked in and got this one thing. So the same thing is applying, here's a good lesson to learn and I'm glad you learned it. Yeah, keeping it simple is key for sure. Especially as you grow, I mean as you grow,

I mean like let's say you have five teams, how are you gonna manage like five different cleaners and a million different tools? Like it's just not, not feasible. So yeah, It's like if you wanna scale anything, any business, you have to have simplification of the system so that you can duplicate that same process. And if you have too many products and too many variables,

it's, it becomes very complicated to do any of that. And that's why we also just focus on the house cleaning. We don't do windows and roofs and pressure washing and like a million different things because just like having too many products, too many services dilutes your effectiveness and being number one in that niche. And so when you can just focus, yeah,

like there's a lot less things that can go wrong. There's only so many things that could go wrong 'cause and you're only using a few products versus 10. And this kind of goes back to when people ask you to even apply extra products like hey can you put floor polish on my wood? And all this stuff we always just go back to like less is more and actually the products we use will get all of those residues off those services instead of us applying more stuff that's just gonna make it dirtier.

And more like of a messier situation, when you explain the reason why to customers why you are simplifying, it makes sense to them. They're like, oh this is a better process and like the products we use get all of that done. And even just literally microfiber and water sometimes gets so many things like cleaned, you know, but when you have the other products we use,

it just does everything else you need. And so yeah, I'm glad you're seeing that Kyle, that model of just simplification is how you scale by eliminating those variables so you can grow a lot faster without having 10 different issues with 10 different products. And like Brandon said, Corby definitely told us that in the beginning. He was like, you can walk down the aisle in a grocery store and there's millions of dollars of marketing on,

you know, just on both sides of you of all these products and it is marketing. So it's like when you peel all that back, at the end of the day, less is more. You only need a couple things and you know, a handful of tools to get the job done and make everyone's lives better. So I love hearing that. Kyle,

it's been really good talking to you. I wish you the best for Spruce Up Green Clean and Kyle and I are having a meeting in the near future to go over that pricing, but if you're struggling with pricing, realize that you're not the only one and we can all work through it together on the Facebook group. Yeah. Hey Kyle, tell us real quick,

what are your goals for 2023? Like what are you shooting to achieve, what do you want to get done this year? What's on the horizon? So I want to be completely out of cleaning in one to two months is my goal for that. And then for 2023, I would like to have three teams. So I have one right now, one in maybe like three quarters of a team right now and I would like to have three full teams by the end of of this year.

So nice big goal. Goal. Yeah, I think I Can do it. Yeah, I love hearing that man. So let's just go into those numbers real quick. So Brandon, what are the numbers? One team at full capacity customer, if You're doing five houses a day, one team will take 45 biweekly customers. Now we calculated 'em biweekly equivalent.

So you know, like a monthly customer counts for 0.5 and a weekly customer counts for two. So all of our metrics use this thing called BWE, that's biweekly equivalent. So you're at 15 right now is what you said, you know earlier. So we've got some ground to cover there, but if the goal is to get a third team launched, you'd need 90 to have two completely full and then that puts you into Team three territory,

which is awesome. And I think that's definitely doable, especially as you're ramping up for spring cleaning is happening like right now, right? So this is when people will be poking around. It's a good time to to run a spring cleaning promotion if you haven't considered doing one. Yeah, I would say Kyle, take your 15 customers and make 'em so excited to work with you that they're gonna go tell five of their friends and there you go,

there's a hundred customers for you right there. Right? You know? Yeah. So how can we do that? So I like, I would say get creative, call up those customers, meet 'em at their house, bring 'em a coffee, do something out of the ordinary that surprises 'em and unexpected joy that they're gonna be like, wow, Kyle's awesome.

He said, if I refer three friends I'll get three free cleans and just grow it organically that way outside of doing the normal marketing stuff we talk about. But just leverage what you got in front of you. And that's the simplest way to grow is take one customer and turn 'em into five customers and just overwhelm them with value and with a great experience.

And that's a great way to start. But yeah man, I just wanna say like, it's awesome, it's been awesome working with you and it's been awesome you having you in the group. You've been actually helping us like think through our processes as we like and refine 'em better. And so I just wanna thank you for sticking around and continuing to work with us and refine the process,

the systems, the whole business together and I think you're gonna continue to do really well man. So I can't wait to hear what you do the rest of this year and let's get you to that a hundred customers by the end of 2023. Yeah, definitely. That sounds great. Yeah, it's been awesome working with you guys too. So wouldn't be where I'm at without,

without you guys, so I appreciate it. Nice. Awesome Man. Awesome. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff, head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember, keep it clean.