Episode 191: The Underdog Victory: How We Won “Best of the City”

Episode 191: The Underdog Victory: How We Won “Best of the City”

Brandon Schoen:
A lot of us are like, oh, I don't want to deal with that one star review. I don't want to. Like, maybe you don't even want to reply to it. But it is so key that you guys are replying to those one. To every single review you should be replying to, but especially those negative reviews, because I can't tell you how many times that we've had negative reviews. Our team has reached out, responded right away, made it right, went above and beyond to fix the problem and let people know, hey, we care, we're sorry, but we take responsibility. And those people end up becoming a raving fan.

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

Brandon Schoen:
What is up, everybody? We're back with another episode of the Profit Cleaners Podcast and we're doing the Future Proof cleaning business episode. So we're going to jump in right away, guys, with how we won Best of the City, kind of the underdog victory, and how we won Best of the City recently in a whole new category, actually the main category of house cleaning that we've never won before. So it's kind of a big accomplishment for us. We're really excited about it, and we wanted to share that win with you guys. So let's tell them a little bit more about how we won Best of the City, Brandon, and dive into how we did that.

Brandon Condrey:
Sure. So just to be clear, when we say Best of the City, we are talking about a local publication, which is Albuquerque the magazine, which I am pretty confident is a franchise. So I think there are other, you know, whatever, insert your city name followed by the magazine. And so they do this Best of the City promotion. Like, voting's open for three months, I think, and then once the issue comes out in, like, November, it's like an end of the year thing. They throw a big party. And so this is Best of the City for restaurants and garbage trucks and, like, there's so much stuff that you can vote on in there. You know what I mean? And so we have always competed on three categories, which is Best Green Living Services, Best Customer Service, and Best House Cleaning. We have won Best Green Living Services every year until this year, with the exception of one year we didn't win it. It was like 23, 24. I can't remember which year, but that one we got top five. But this year, to our surprise, I didn't even know we did win Best House Cleaning. And so that was kind of a big Point of celebration, we've never done that before. It took us eight years to get there. But yeah, that's the announcement is we won that thing. So I can go through the steps if you want to, Shane, but you can take over if you want.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, yeah, we'll go through the kind of how we did it and a little bit more details on that. For the longest time though. Yeah, it was, I don't know if we want to mention it was a major cleaning franchise that we were competing against that beat us every year. And of course they've been around for 30 years and they have a huge full pitch page ad and we're pretty sure there's some type of, you know, backside connection happening there with the magazine that they're.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, they were spending $8,000 every issue on a double page spread and they were cleaning the publisher's house, so I knew that part. So was there some backhanded number tweaking going on? I don't know. They don't tell us the numbers. They don't even tell the sales guys the numbers. So I suspect there are many a, a bribe going on in the back end of it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, you never know these days. But you know, we're gonna still, the biggest thing for us guys is to take that, that win and just share it to the world. Sharing it to you guys. But also we put a new decal, a little medallion from the win on our vehicles. Everyone around town sees it as the cars drive around. That medallion goes in our offices, it goes on our website, it goes on our social media. We tell the whole world about it. And I think this is also a huge part of our culture, guys, is, you know, just the teams, when they walk in the office, when they're driving the cars around, they know they're the best. Right? And that's what we want them to understand is you guys aren't just cleaners. You're the best. You're the best professional cleaners in the world. This is what we're training you with, is the best systems, the best cleaning, the best mindset to go and take the, you know, basically a cleaning company and make it amazing again and create these amazing customer experiences for people. And. But that's social proof, right? And that's social proof when other people see that this is what other people buy. What other people buy, right? So when you guys go to Amazon, what typically happens, you type it in, you type in what you want to buy and then like you don't have time to scrape through thousands of reviews. So you usually just pick the top reviewed one. That's probably what everyone else bought and has the most reviews. It's probably the one for me. Right? That's just normal psychological thinking there of going through the buying process. So the more you guys can build up your social proof, which is testimonials, reviews, different awards like this, Best of the city, best of your town, best of whatever it is, maybe there's a certain type of cleaning you can get certified in or something like that that just makes you stand out. This is what helps people make the buying decision of who they're going to work with. At the end of the day, if they have three people to work with, they're going to go with probably the one that other people thought was the best. Right? So people buy what other people buy. Make yourself the most reviewed in your city, make yourself the most awarded in the city and get out there and just start finding where can you get yourself in front of these awards? Where can you get more reviews and constantly be thinking, like, how can we get more social proof? Cause that's what's going to help you guys increase conversions and sales and get way more customers in the long run. So. So that's why I think it's so important. I'm still super stoked that we won it. Brandon. I know it was a few months back, but they do a huge party. They like launch it out. We didn't even know we won. My dad was going to go down to the party and he didn't even. They didn't even have extra tickets for us. It was funny. But then we found out the next day and I was like, oh, actually, like, Brandon was like, we actually did one, you know, know, win. So it was really, really kind of a surprise. So. But yeah, let's go into a little bit more of the strategy, tactical stuff behind it, Brandon. Like, how did we do this again? I know we've talked about this on another past episode when we won, guys, but let's just remind people, like, how we did this and some of the best practices for it.

Brandon Condrey:
All right, so the first one for sure is community engagement. So you have a customer list, you have emails, you have phone numbers. How are you using that? So we always send out emails and text messages to the customers when it's voting time to remind them to do it. We may or may not have run a promotion for it once upon a time. Like, I know we've done one for reviews, but I don't know if we've done one for prove you voted for us or voted at all, I guess. And then you can get X discount. But the idea is this should not be a one and done situation. You don't want to reach out to your customers once a year when you need something from them, you want to be reaching out to them consistently. So like we have a little newsletter email that goes out with like little tips and tricks for how to keep your house clean in between Sandia Green Clean visits. And because we stay engaged with our customers, they tend to engage back and vote for us, which is really nice. And then the other side of it is your personal network. So you own a business, you are a pillar of the community. How many are. Did you join a BNI group? Do you have other people in there? Can you ask them? Like, hey, can you ask, can you guys vote for us in this poll and ask your friends and family members. Like, they're usually logged by the ip. So you can vote more than once, but only once per ip. So if you yourself wanted to go rogue on it, show up to a university computer lab and just vote once on every single computer down the line. You know what I mean? Like maybe that would work, but it's typically a bit more efficient if you are asking your customers to vote on your behalf rather than trying to solicit votes one at a time. But yeah, like that's where it starts is we email the customer base and then even that community engagement thing goes back to the customer experience too. Because if you are not responding to complaints and not responding to scheduling issues all through the year, they're not going to want to vote for you if you ask them once. So this is like, this is the pinnacle of the customer experiences. You've built the system, everyone likes it, prove it now, vote for like, that's how it works. So that's an ongoing nurture thing that you got to do the whole year.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, think of it like all year long you guys are making deposits, deposits, adding value to your customers, right? Oh, they skipped a clean. We're not going to charge them more. We're going to make it a great experience. Oh, we had a complaint. We're going to go back and fix it right away. Deposit, deposit, deposit, deposit. Now you're going to ask, you're going to say, hey, we want to win best of the City. We, we're so grateful for you being a customer. Would you mind doing us a favor and doing this thing for us? Vote for us. Right. But like Brandon said, if you hadn't made all those deposits all year round of Building those customer experiences and adding value. It's going to be really, really hard to make that withdrawal and make that ask, right? So think of it like all the time, right? Like this is something you should be. Because you're going to eventually need to ask your customers for a review, a favor, vocal vote for us. Can you make a video review for us? Can you do part of this campaign we're doing? Can you guys help us? Right? So there's so many opportunities. You're going to need to ask a favor from your customers in the future. So always be thinking, how can I make the experience better? Like Brandon said, we were sending out emails. We had multiple emails going out every month over this three month period. We had social media blast going out posting about a hey, vote for us. We had personal text messages going out by sms. We actually made a little mistake on this and probably sent it out to too many people at once. It would have been better to drip it out like 10 or 20 a day instead of we, I think we sent out quite a bit all at once and got some people upset about that. But the point is, even the people that you know, we learned a good lesson there. But also the point is you might make a few people upset asking, but in the end, if it helps you guys win, it helps you build that social proof. You can still make it right with the customer if you made them mad or something, asking them the wrong way. But you can learn a lesson from it. Like we did, right? And so all those things, we also leave these little, we have table card tents with flowers in them. But I think this last year we just had little cards that we set out on the table. Just leave something behind that asks them to vote for you. And ours is a very simple ask. It's just like, hey, you know, thanks for being the best customer ever. Claim your weekend and vote for us for best, you know, best of the city. And so we can keep helping you get the best cleans and keep me invested in the city, something like that. Something very simple with the QR code, a link that takes them to the voting. So those are some of the more basic things we did. And then Brandon, you can keep rattling off the other things that we did as well.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, so the other one that we do, and we've done this all the time and we've told you guys to do it too, but that's trying to get more reviews and the right kind of reviews. And so right now we're using tidier sales and it has a review function built in. So after someone gets a job done, especially if they're a new customer, they'll get a request for review. And ideally you're leaving that review really close to the time after you got home and saw it for the first time is the ideal way. And then inside that system on the back end, it's not going to bother them for review anymore because it knows that they left. You don't have to use a system for that. But man, it makes it a lot easier if you do. Like the idea is to make it easier for the customer to leave a review. And if you're asking them like hey, just type okay, open up your computer and then go to Google Maps and then click type this and then search that and click this what tidy your sales does. And there are other systems that do this. Like I know, nice job is one of them. We used, we used to use one before that called Podium and it just shoots a text message and they can leave a review really quick on their phone and that's super slick. The other part of that thing, that's nice and it seems to be in a gray area with Google's terms of services but if someone leaves you like a one, two or three star review, it will alert the office before posting the review so that you have a chance to go intercept whatever issue that customer's having and then make it right. And then they'll hopefully leave you a five star review after you fix their one star review is the idea. And then that's the simple side on the sending them out. But there's also another side of it where if we do get a negative review, we reply to that publicly, we try and work with the customer directly to fix it so that and then you're trying to talk em into the ultimate goal there is. Can you log onto your one star review and change it to whatever you think is better now that we've fixed your problem. And sometimes those things do slip through the crack like we're getting back to people with complaints. So they never become a one star review. But some people just don't want to deal with it. They don't want to talk to you, you know what I mean? So like they'll just post it publicly rather than actually calling to complain. Because I don't like complaining either, you know what I mean?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And quick side note on that, you guys, a lot of us kind of like are like, oh, I don't want to deal with that one star review, I don't want to like maybe you don't even want to reply to it. But it is so key that you guys are replying to those 1, 2. Every single review you should be replying to, but especially those negative reviews because I can't tell you how many times that we've had negative reviews. Our team has reached out, responded right away, made it right, went above and beyond to fix the problem and let people know, hey, we care, we're sorry about, we take responsibility. And those people end up becoming a raving fan, like one of our better customers. They, you know, they'll stay with us for a long time, they'll tell lots of people about us. And it's really just in those kind of hard, challenging times where there's a bad experience, if you go and fix it, most people will go and fix their review. They will, they will be like, is that reciprocity? Wow, you guys reached out. You cared. I'm going to go fix that review because you guys really are awesome. So just a quick side note on the reviews. Definitely do that. Guys, if you're not doing it because it, it definitely works and you can take a bad customer and turn it into an amazing customer. Totally.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. All right. The other thing we do is we try to partner with local businesses and we didn't do so much of this in the past because we've tried it a bunch of different ways and it always blew up in our face. But Brandon, Shane here has got a new method of doing it which he'll tell you about in a minute. But the idea is don't overthink it. We want to try and reach out to another local business that shares the same customer base, but not necessarily you're competing against. So you're not going to do this with another cleaning company. So for instance, right now we're trying to cook one up with a guy who's in my firecracker business group who owns a local brewery and he's done these cross promotional things with like yoga studios in the past. So the idea would be you're going to offer some kind of discount brewery guy and we're going to offer some kind of discount and we'll send it out to our customers in advance. So like all San Diego Green Clean customers will get whatever he decides is an appropriate gift or reward at the brewery. So come in for a free pint or get 50% off or whatever it may be. And then in turn their stuff will go out on their social media. They have a way bigger social media following than we do. And the idea is, you know, all the customers of this brewery get this deal from Sandia Green clean. It's a 50% off or a first one free or whatever it is that you want to cook up with those details. I think the most important part to make this work, to grease the wheels with the other business owners is do not try and exchange money over the thing. Brandon and I tried to put together once upon a time, the Justice League of Service Companies. And the idea was everyone would pay in a really nominal monthly thing to cover printing expense. And then each printing run would have focused a different like all eight companies would be on the back and if you flipped it over, it was one company's spotlight on the other side. And man, that was. We just could not get everyone to agree on anything. It was ridiculous. So instead the offer we're sending out to businesses now is like, we'll cover all the print costs. We just need you and your social media manager to do it with us, to like engage with us at the same time. It's got to be coordinated, yada, yada yada. So and then as this pertains to Best of the City, once you have those strategic alliances with the local businesses, then when it's Best of the city time, you reach out to them. Hey, it's Best in the City voting. I will vote for you, you vote for me, and then we can send it out to our customers again. Your customers vote for us, my customers vote for you type of thing. Yeah, that would be the dream. And now you're competing with a bunch of different. You're, you've got multiple audiences from multiple businesses all focused on voting for one thing, which, you know, just amplifies it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. And this is so undervalued and underplayed, guys, I think is the strategic local alliances. Like people like doing business with local businesses, other local businesses like to work with other local businesses in town. Everyone can help each other out. So get creative with this one. I think we should actually do like a whole podcast on the case study we're doing right now with Sandia with the local business partnerships and things we're doing. But really what struck us as really interesting was we have a profit cleaner student. I won't mention his name or all the details, but basically he did a case study with a local service business where they cross pollinated, cross promoted each other. Same thing we're talking about here, guys, where whether it's an email or an SMS text, SMS text messaging will work a lot better because people read those and open those a lot more. But see if you Guys can cross promote and have them send out an offer to your audience. Maybe it's a free window cleaning, carpet cleaning, pest control, whatever it might be. And you do the same thing to their audience. 50% off or free. Free is obviously going to get much better response. You don't have to let, you can cap it at a certain number, which is what we're going to be testing here this month in March and we'll let you guys know a lot more about that. But I think just getting creative with local businesses. Find another local business that has a similar audience that you, that has a service inside or outside the home consistently. And if people are taking care of their landscape, they're probably taking care of their inside of their house. Right? If people are paying money for window cleaning, they're probably more than likely going to have their house cleaned as well. So just think of like what would be those collaborations, you know, and then again we'll, we'll do a whole episode detailing out the strategy there. But this is a key part of, you know, just getting the word out, getting people talking about you in the community. And the more people talking about you, the more people using your services, the better. And when it comes voting time, that definitely helps. So, so that's strategic alliances. And then the last one or one of the last ones was content and pr. So again, we already talked about putting out social media posts. You can run ads, we've done that before. I can't remember if we actually ran ads this last year for that one. I'd have to double check. But social media posts just get your message out there. It's getting easier and easier to do this guys, with AI and all the technology these days. So if you're not posting, if you're not asking people for reviews, asking people to vote for you, it's getting easier and easier and easier to do this. And then yeah, local press, press releases are huge. Get local press channels talking about you. If you guys do anything in the community that is helpful, that is, this is something. Again, we're sparking up with the local community campaigns but do something creative like we're going to just get the teams out cleaning part of the community maybe once or a month or quarter or something captured on social media. There's a huge campaign going through New Mexico right now with the Breaking Bad campaign. If you guys remember Breaking Bad and it's like leave litter on the land and has like the guy.

Brandon Condrey:
It's an anti littering thing. Like keep trash out of my territory is what Walter White says at the end.

Brandon Schoen:
That's pretty awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. So like, find things like that that are going on in your local community and just play off of that or see if you can collaborate and partner with those organizations and say, hey, we do cleaning, like can we be part of that or help you promote that message? And that's what we're going to do with that campaign is reach out or just make our own campaign if they don't want to collaborate. Right. But like just start thinking of ways that you can get out in the community and get people talking about you. And if you're doing generating goodwill, if you're serving the community, those press channels are going to want to talk about that story. They're going to want to say, wow, let's showcase this local business that's doing free cleans in the community, that's helping these people in the community, that's picking up trash at the park with their cleaning teams on, on their days off or whatever it is like you guys can get really creative with getting people to talk about you. And this is what we did a lot in the beginning. We're starting to do it a lot more again now. We were featured in the Best of the City magazine in the early days. We had different news articles and things coming out because we were doing this. And so just encourage you guys to get out there and get people that you by creating goodwill in the community. So anything else, Brandon? That's kind of some of the out of the box stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
So like, I mean, we gave you some big ones that should be pretty obvious. Like you're obviously going to engage with your community, you're going to get some reviews, you're going to talk to some other businesses and you need to have a social media presence. One thing that Shane didn't mention, it's just like the community engagement before where you know, you need to be on it all the time so that when you ask for something, they're willing to do it. Same thing with social media. You don't want to make one post a year where you're like, hey, it's business city voting time. And then they're looking at your feed. And the only post before that was better in city voting from the year before. So you do need to be putting out stuff content like this SEO likes content, the AI stuff likes content. So the more content you're putting out, the more engaged they are. So then when you go and ask for something, people are more likely to actually do the thing. But the last thing that you could potentially be doing is come up with something that we haven't come up with. Think outside the box. Like set up at a farmer's market, go to where your customers go, hang out, pass out cards that say, vote for me, vote for me, vote for me. Maybe you could have a Starlink Internet connection out there and a laptop and you're just handing out whatever lollipops, something like, just go on this thing and vote for me. But like, this is a terrible example now that I'm saying this out loud, because if you're trying to make them vote off that one laptop, that'd be the same ip. So they need to do it from their device, but you could offer the Internet connection if they don't have one. Like maybe you're at some festival or something. But you know, don't. Don't take what we said as gospel. That's written in stone. You only do these four things. Get crazy, man. You just need to get your idea in front of some people and ask them what to vote for and how to do it. And you're giving them clear instructions. Like that's what I would be focusing on.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, I love it. And what Brandon said there is key too, guys, like just so many local businesses don't even email out to their customers. And like, this is a great strategy in general. Just like there's so many businesses right now that are kind of like, I don't know, just stagnant or they're, they're not growing. But it's. The idea is you could buy a business right now and just put on technology, put on better systems and strategies like email your customers, leverage social media, leverage marketing, leverage AI, and you could take that business and double or triple it very, very quickly. But instead of going and buying the business, just do that to your own business. Just start leveraging what you're building. This is your business. Make sure you're emailing your customers, communicating to them, even in between cleans. What could you be doing to add value? Or just check in with them and see how they're doing. Right. And so we're going to be sharing a lot more how we're doing this and how we're. You guys might be in saying like, oh my gosh, how am I going to do that though? I don't have enough team or times time to do that. So a lot of what we're going to be sharing in the coming weeks, guys, is how you can be leveraging the new technology, the new AI to do this so you don't have to have a lot more money or a lot more people to help you do this. So we're going to dive a lot more into those details. But take it or leave it, guys. But I think this is a huge win and, and hopefully some takeaways and some nuggets that you guys can take back and integrate in your business and just take massive action. And that's kind of the actionable takeaway today, guys, is go take massive action on generating goodwill in your community, doing something to get people talking about you doing some of this community engagement, you know, just whatever it might be. Take one of these ideas that we've mentioned and just go start doing it. Go get talked about in your community, go get people voting for you and just make it a better experience for people, right? So that you can ask for that review, you can ask for that vote when the time comes to make that withdrawal. And you've put in so much value in the meantime. So. So yeah, I think that was a really fun episode. Get out there and go win best of the city, Best of your town. It's a huge, huge win and medallion and social proof icon you can leverage to get more customers and build trust. And I highly recommend you guys do it.

Brandon Condrey:
So one other, one other thing I want to mention is I talked about Albuquerque, the magazine, but you may not have that particular publication in your town. So they're like, Albuquerque also has one. It's put on by a newspaper, but I don't see anyone advertising that. The medallions from the newspaper, it's not the one. So like you could have multiple vote for the best of the City, whatever polls going on, but you need to find the one that everyone else is talking about. And I think the easiest way to do that is look for other businesses that are promoting the fact that they won. Is it on a billboard? Do you see it on other people's cars when they run radio ads or they tell you they won Best of the City from XYZ publication? If they do that's the one, then go compete for that one. You want to be where everyone else is. If you're advertising that you want the best of the city from some publication that no one reads anymore, like that's not going to get you very far. You do need it. The social proof part of it is that it's from somewhere where that's handing out the awards to lots of businesses. So just something to keep in mind.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Love it. All right, guys, we'll get out there and go win best of the City. For your town and let us know how it goes. Let us know if you have any strategies that we didn't mention that worked well for you. We'd love to learn more and share it out to the Mastermind and podcast so everyone can win together. I think that's pretty much it, Brandon. We wrapped it up, so we'll see you guys on the coming episodes. We've got some really fun ones coming up, so stay tuned and keep it clean.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean guys. See ya.

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