Episode 1: Welcome To The Very First Profit Cleaners Podcast, The Beginning

Episode 1: Welcome To The Very First Profit Cleaners Podcast, The Beginning

Brandon Condrey:
Learning from someone else's mistakes was huge and when we have our mentor on, we'll talk to them about it, but our growth numbers in the first year and a half were like mind boggling. At one point he had said we got to a point in, I think it was a year that took him 10 years to get to. So yeah, it worked to learning from someone else's mistakes and someone else's successes really boosted us high.

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.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody, what is up? You are listening to episode one El numero UNO profit cleaners. Thank you all for being here today. I want to welcome you again to the profit cleaners podcast. This is the only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners. And in this episode today we're going to be talking about how we started in 2017 how we scaled to a seven figure home cleaning brand in less than three years. And we're going to be sharing with you guys the top three things we wished we knew when we got started, including how to thrive in a crisis and a pandemic that we're going through currently and why now is the best time to start a cleaning business more than ever. Also, you guys are going to want to probably stay tuned till the end because we're gonna be going over a really cool eight week masterclass that we're going to be given out for you guys. Totally free live coaching calls, lots of cool coaching and consulting that we're going to be offering. So stay tuned till the end of that. And now before we get too much further in, I wanted to make some introductions. I am Brandon Schoen the host and I am joined by my co-host, Brandon Condrey, the spreadsheet Ninja, the sales Ninja.

Brandon Condrey:
That's me!

Brandon Schoen:
That's Brandon over here. The Brandons, if you will. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
And together we are the owners of the most successful cleaning company in the American Southwest.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. And I can't believe we're here man. We're finally doing it. This is really exciting. We've been talking about doing this for a long time.

Brandon Condrey:
I know I've been looking at these mic strapped to our desk for the last eight weeks and here we are. We're actually using them.

Brandon Schoen:
I know man, we got kind of thrown off a little bit with this pandemic, but we're here and we're actually really excited man to get started cause absolutely got a lot of good stuff to share with you guys. So let's dive in the focus of this podcast. Here's what's in it for you guys. The goal really is to help you guys grow to a seven figure brand and beyond. Who is this for Brandon?

Brandon Condrey:
It's for newbies that are just trying to get any business started, but it's also if you've had a cleaning company for years and you are just kind of struggling getting over a hump, getting over a goal, it's for you too.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome. And we're going to be talking about, the whole tagline is redefined profit, grow your cleaning business, but redefining profit. We're talking about the good life, health, wealth, love and happiness. This is something everybody wants, but not everybody gets it. So we're going to be sharing how to get it and how to get the right mindset, how to take the right action to do that right now, getting that time back, leveraging smart systems and strategies so you can be happy and fulfilled and have a more meaningful purpose to keep going with this type of business. It's more important than ever. So that's really the big goal of this.

Brandon Condrey:
Yes. So we're going to give you some practical tips and on how to actually run the company. Some intelligent ways to make more profit per customer, ways to increase your customer retention and improve your work culture. All of that will be accomplished with sustainable systems that we will teach you through the course of this podcast.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome. And I think it's really cool is a lot of the businesses, especially that I've been involved with, I've done a lot of internet businesses over the years, which a lot of the times have been quick overnight, short term profit type plays. This business is a long term play, long term profits, more of a big picture business that's sustainable. So that's why I'm really excited about it. More than any of the other businesses I've been a part of. And then lastly, just how you guys can be part of the solution in your community even during these hard times growing a super successful brand that you can feel awesome about, you can feel proud of in your community, with your family, all that you're doing good. So yep. So what else can they look forward to? What else are you talking about?

Brandon Condrey:
We are going to have a bunch of focused future episodes and we're going to be covering things like the details of how we started from nothing to seven figures in less than three years. We're going to talk about how we found our mentor and what he taught us and what you can learn from your own mentor or maybe we could even be your mentor so we can talk about that too. We're going to be talking about leveraging your existing skill set and knowledge and combining it with what we're going to teach you to create your own sort of unique setup. And then, yeah, you're just going to experiment along the way. You're not a franchise, so you're not limited by someone else's playbook. This is your thing. We're going to give you a huge tool set that you can use to go forward. But really if you're going to make it your own.

Brandon Schoen:
I really love that because a franchise is definitely limiting and we're all about being unlimited, having big ability to do whatever you want to do to grow your cleaning business. And that's what's really cool is you're in control. Just a few other specific things like in future episodes that we're gonna be talking about. Obviously how to avoid the biggest mistakes, things that we wished we knew in the beginning that you're definitely gonna want to know really everything, how to get started or if you're already in business, how to scale. So we're going to cover things like business plan or pricing or how to hire, how to clean and the techniques for that or specific systems and tools needed to scale. And those are just a few more things. We're going to talk about things like what's the difference between home cleaning and commercial cleaning and sort of why we chose to go down the route of the residential cleaning and why we think it's actually better in a lot of ways. Trying to think what else Brandon, are we going to cover?

Brandon Condrey:
We're going to cover how to hire the right people to help you automate these things so that you're not going to be working in your office for 14 hours a day. My goal is to never have you clean a toilet yourself. We're going to, we're going to get the right people in place to do that. We're also going to be teaching you cutting edge marketing techniques that will definitely put you above the mom and pops in town that are still using yellow page ads.

Brandon Schoen:
Right!

Brandon Condrey:
Once you get those systems in place, we're just going to tweak and efficiency and make them more streamlined over time so that you can get more time back. You're going to be working on the business and less time in the business. That's the idea.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And then probably lastly, just how to provide that impact, not only for your local, for yourself or your family, but we won't want to teach you guys how to become a local hero in your community, helping people around you. And especially in this crazy economy that we're in right now. There's a lot of good, there's a force for good that you can be in your local town and we want to show you how to do that.

Brandon Condrey:
So who's the podcast for? It's definitely not a get rich quick scheme. We're not going to teach you how to turn on a, an online eCommerce site and make a thousand dollars in a day. That's a bit more involved in that.

Brandon Schoen:
And a lot of people are talking about that right now. I've had a lot of experience with websites in the past and I can tell you it is a scary business to be in sometimes when you have all your eggs in one basket on Amazon or on your one store or your one channel, and then all of a sudden Google or Amazon overnight tells you, Hey, we don't like your product. You're out of business.

Brandon Condrey:
Someone changed an algorithm, right? So now you're not ranking on anything anymore and it just drops through the floor.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, it's tough man and I really love this business because it's totally opposite of that. It's so much more control and more sustainable than I ever thought. Even though maybe it's not as sexy as some of these internet businesses people are talking about. It's got a lot going for it that we want to show you guys.

Brandon Condrey:
So that being said, it requires effort, continual effort on a day to day basis. It's not a flip a switch and it happens. It's a locomotive. We've got to work hard to get this huge thing moving, but once it's going, it's really hard to stop.

Brandon Schoen:
It is. Absolutely. There's the analogy of the fence too. I like that. If it takes a day to put up a fence, the wind's going to blow it over really quickly. Probably tomorrow. If it takes you a week or a few months to build that structure, it's going to stay up a lot longer. And that's what we're talking about here is those long term profits and sustainability with this kind of business that has that structure to it. So...

Brandon Condrey:
Absolutely.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So, um, what else? I mean we've got this crazy pandemic going on right now. We're definitely gonna touch on that more, but we'll get into that a little bit later in the episode. I think we should tell people about our origin story and kind of let them get to know us a little bit.

Brandon Condrey:
So it was the summer of 2016, as I recall that we met Brandon and I both live in the same neighborhood. There's an awesome park right across the street from my house and that backs up to Brandon's backyard. So I had a Ninja, Julie met Julie. I met Brandon's wife in the park with his daughter who was a baby at the time, jumping off and doing crazy things. And that's how we got started talking. Yeah, that's how I met Brandon. And you told me a little bit about yourself with the online background and how you were into entrepreneurship and that's something that I've always been chasing. I've never had the guts to leave my day job at any point, but I was getting really frustrated where I was at. It was a lot of travel. I was looking to make a change and so we just met at the right time in the neighborhood, I think.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, it was very much just an amazing, I don't know what you'd call it, serendipitous or whatever, but we basically jived right away. We were like, Hey, you listen to that podcast, you listen and we just hit it off and you invited me over. We started playing darts in your garage and threw some darts.

Brandon Condrey:
Having a couple beers and beers are coming up with crazy wacky business ideas. We just kept it running list of tool rental and I remember something about some Teddy bear robot thing. Obviously it didn't pan out, but yeah, we had a bunch of weird plans and then you just keep distilling that, keep distilling that and we just kept running along with those. Weird ideas.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think what we decided was we could go raise a million dollars and start one of these crazy platforms or something. That was definitely, there's a lot of cool markets you can get into obviously to start any business. But we really narrowed it down to kind of the classic entrepreneur solution, like find something in your own life that you need to solve for your own. And what is that? What is something in your every day that is just something you don't like doing or you need to solve? And that was home cleaning for us, right?

Brandon Condrey:
So we kind of swung both ways. So if you're in the entrepreneurship circle, you're trying to get into that. Everything online is all about lean and agile and just start and minimum viable product and just do it as fast as you can. And so all those things lend themselves to what you were doing, which was publishing eBooks or selling things on Amazon as a reseller. And we actually went the other way, which was kind of where most businesses are. And that's let's hire some people and see what we can do. So the way that we got to that point was that my wife and I had lived in Denver. We bought our house when we run our mid twenties and I hate housecleaning. And so part of the deal was we can buy this house, but we're hiring someone else to clean it. So we got that cleaning company. They were amazing. And because I was in my mid twenties and that was our first house, I just thought that's how all cleaning companies are. They're all like this, what a cool service. And then we got a bit older, we had our daughter, we decided we wanted to be closer to family. So we came back to Albuquerque and obviously one of the first things we did was get a cleaning company. And then it became really, really apparent that we did not have the same sort of setup as Denver. So we ended up with a couple of franchises that don't pay their people well and the service was bad, or it was really expensive. We got a couple of housekeepers, which were fine, but they're sometimes unreliable. Maybe they're not going to come every time or maybe they're just going to start greet and start tapering off and that's when you're the entrepreneur brain starts tingling and tells you that this is the market opportunity. There's a gap in service here between us in a bigger city. So maybe this is something that we could turn to.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and I even remember one of my neighbors as a state cop and he came over to me one day when we had one of the big franchises cleaning our house before we started this business and he was like, Hey man, are you sure that you want to be using those people that clean your house? Like do you realize just a lot of crazy stuff? Apparently an Albuquerque, I don't know if this is every city, but there's just a lot of companies that are not trustworthy that have a lot of turnover in their teams. Just by him coming over to me and showing that doubt really opened up another opportunity. I thought, wow, there must be a hole in this market that people don't even trust the big companies in town. You know?

Brandon Condrey:
Like, exactly. Yeah, that's huge. You know, and that's definitely something we've overcome. I'm sure we'll talk about that in future episodes about trust with customers. But yeah, that was definitely an issue.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think we looked at some of their reviews and we were like, Holy crap.

Brandon Condrey:
Like you see so many one star reviews from these companies that have been around since the mid sixties you how are they still going?

Brandon Schoen:
And they don't even reply to the reviews like that very poor customer service. It was just like wide open as is what it looked like.

Brandon Condrey:
So yeah, exactly. So okay. We identified the whole, we identified the market right now, how are we going to do it? I've never had employees that I hired personally. I don't know how to deal with HR issues.

Brandon Schoen:
So that was kind of scary. We had to, we both hate cleaning. I mean I can clean, but I'm not that good. I don't know what I'm doing.

Brandon Condrey:
Exactly. No, no. I tried to do the minimum viable product on cleaning. If I'm doing it myself, I will rub the washcloth on the counter enough to make it look like something happened. But no, that was not my thing. So the position we found ourselves in was that I was itching to quit my job and you were tapering off some Amazon stuff and so we were getting disposition of how do we move forward when there's so much uncertainty in the situation. It wasn't our first rodeo. As we've discussed, we've both kind of done some things, but you had two kids at the time and we started kicking around this idea. I had one and then right when we launched your third kid was born.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It was literally if you had any excuse to not start a business, we had like all the excuses which was there was all this chaos going on. Like we didn't have jobs. Like our wives are supporting us to even start this. And yeah, like I was literally in the hospital. I think the first week we were launching in the beginning of June or July. So anyways, my son max had just been born and I remember messaging you on our WhatsApp from the office just talking to him. Like we were still planning out the launch and getting everything ready and it was just a really uncertain time, like really crazy, you know?

Brandon Condrey:
For sure. Yeah, we tried, we unintentionally stacked as many obstacles in front of us to do it. But yeah, it worked. It definitely worked. So yeah, I mean we, in the beginning it was just the two of us. We had that mentor, he helped us a lot and our backs were against the wall. We just had to do it. It was do or die. We had kids to support wives to keep happy before they divorced us. And so, yeah, we just, we just kept going. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think that's really important to note, just what is your big reason why to even start a business like that. So for us it was our family and a business that more than any of businesses we had started that would sustain us and be long term. And like Brandon said, our backs were against the wall. So we had to make this work. And I encourage you guys, if you're starting this business, put your back against the wall somehow. Like force yourself into a position where you have to make this work. Because if you do that it's going to happen and great things will happen.

Brandon Condrey:
That's why all my, I had many side hustles when I had my day job that I was trying to do on the outside. And I think the reason that none of them ever panned out is that I didn't have any skin in the game there. My back was not against the wall. So I could, I could try this over here and you know, put a couple hours into it here and there and then it would wither and die and you know, you move on to the next side project. Right. But this wasn't a side project. It was a, it was the project, the only project.

Brandon Schoen:
We were all in. And if you go halfway in or just put your toe in, it doesn't really work that way. So I think that's a big part of it too. You can't just kind of tip toe around this stuff, you gotta be committed and really disciplined to do that. So yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
The reason why, like if we're going to drill down that a little bit more, cleaning is not sexy. It's not an app. It's not going to get a million downloads in the first week. So, but the reason is ultimately is that the riches are in the niches. That's right. This was the niche in Albuquerque. So the niche was, there's nobody playing nice on the customer service side of things. There's big trust issues, there's pricing problems. There was clearly a spot where we could fit in here if we just do it the correct way. Right?

Brandon Schoen:
So we saw that need and we were like, let's fill that hole and let's figure out a way to get into that. So again, when we first started we were just like, so how do we do this? How we actually really got this thing on. Cause it's pretty cool how we did that.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we completely started from scratch but not really. Re we did have a mentor. So you know the cleaning company in Denver, when we moved down here, we actually called the owner of that company who I still had his email address from when I was a customer and proposed that he showed us how to do this in a different state if he didn't have plans to expand and we weren't going to compete against each other and he was totally on board. And so we got ourselves a mentor and we got 45 years of combined experience between him and his office staff and he's still a big part of the situation and he's going to be on future podcast episodes. So we'll keep the details light on how that transpired. But it was a, it was a really, really good decision.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just on that note, like a quick win you guys can take from this podcast is don't learn from your own mistakes. If anything you can learn like shortcut all the mistakes and learn from other people. There's a quote, one of my many favorite personal development coaches, Jim Rowan, he says it's important to learn from your own mistakes, but it's better to learn from other people's mistakes and even better to learn from other people's successes because it accelerates your own success. And I feel like man, because we did that, it like really changed. I mean I've always sought out mentors, but in this scenario it was like, it really felt like such a, we jumped over so many obstacles and hurdles.

Brandon Condrey:
You mean we got a blueprint, like you gave us a blueprint. These are the tools we buy, these are the chemicals you use, right? And we've honed that in right over our experience here in three years. And that's what we're going to share with you guys here. But learning from someone else's mistakes was huge. And when we have our mentor on, you can, we'll talk to them about it, but we are growth numbers. In the first year and a half, we're like mind boggling. At one point he had said, we got to a point in, I think it was a year that took him 10 years to get to. So yeah, it worked to learning from someone else's mistakes and someone else's successes really boosted us high.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just modeling that success was, I think we could take, okay, this works, this works, this works. And we added in a couple of things like some additional marketing and some other things that maybe he wasn't doing that we were more keen on. Um, from, you know, our past experiences, Brandon, you've been really involved with sales, so you were able to add a lot of that as well. Plus a lot of the numbers and financial stuff. But so we had in our own stuff, it was kind of this hybrid, but man, it's just amazing how much success we've had. This thing just took off and that's why we're here talking about it. Right. You know.

Brandon Condrey:
So we got the mentor, we got the system, and then from that point forward, it's been in the trenches, boots on the ground. We grew it from zero customers, zero revenue to a seven figure business in less than three years. We've won a couple awards. You can, you can tell them about that I think.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, we've actually just our second year of business, we're best of the city. We've now in our third year been best of the city again here in Albuquerque, New Mexico is where we clean and man, just even recently in this pandemic, we've been blowing up on the news and media stations too, cause they're doing great things serving the community and leading there. But yeah, we're definitely taking charge and just leading and doing things the right way I think is a big part of it. There's a lot of these companies I feel like they're just lazy and they don't pay attention to these details,

Brandon Condrey:
But I mean they're misguided. They just, you don't know what you don't know. Right. So maybe you, the listener also don't know what you don't know. And we're here to tell you what that is. But we're sitting at now almost three years later, we're three months shy of three years later. We've got 26 full time employees. We're working through the pandemic thing and we're going to talk about that next, but the future is looking bright.

Brandon Schoen:
We've got six teams are about to hire a team, seven every team has to drive their own company branded car, but we are just growing by leaps and bounds and typically it's like every 90 days we'll hire a new team. It's kind of been thrown off by this pandemic stuff, but,

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, the pandemic definitely threw off the hiring average. But yeah, typically we are hiring another crew every 90 days, so we're growing by leaps and bounds every year. Well, we'll get into numbers in the futures episode. There's lots of, I am this spreadsheet Ninja. There's lots of things to go over there. I'll be happy to share all kinds of stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
We will dive into that soon.

Brandon Condrey:
But let's talk about covid 19. Let's talk about,talk about how that's impacted us right now and everybody else at the same time.

Brandon Schoen:
What a crazy time this has been. What's really cool though as I feel like we're figuring out and we're going to share with you guys how to thrive in this time instead of freak out and panic and go into fear mode like everyone else and a lot of businesses around town actually closed their doors. A lot of our local competitors.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So I mean New Mexico is under a stay at home order by the governor's order and cleaning is an essential business. So we dodged a bullet if you will. But part of the CDC recommendations are that you sanitize high touch surfaces frequently and that's exactly what we do. The cleaner we uses an EPA registered virus side. So that came in very handy. We used to not tell customers about that cause we're an environmentally friendly focused company. But that became very important and it just so happened that the one that we've been using the entire time, even though it is environmentally friendly, it's a green chemical still came into play during the crisis. So we had, we have had competitors that are also cleaning companies that just voluntarily said we're out. You know, if it's a mom and pop shop, if it's like a team of two people and they have 20 customers and half of them canceled because they're worried about the situation, then you're done. Right. So that's why a lot of people did that way. We went the opposite way. And you Brandon Schoen in particular was helping talk me out of the hole as well. But you know, my background is in biology. It's in genetics saw. I was worried about the pandemic from the beginning, but what we started doing right away was just doubling down on customer communication. So we put out videos, letting people know that this is what we're doing in response to the pandemic. These are the policies we're going to change. This is why you should keep on coming like we you are. We are an essential service and you have a need for it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Basically we went from selling cleaning services to selling certainty and to helping people know like it's okay for and what we're doing is disinfecting your home and taking one thing off your plate during this time so you don't have to be as stressed out. We had a lot of people like skipping the initially, but we are seeing a lot more people kind of come back on board and now even more of the customers coming on board. And I, and I think more than ever, this is why I say this, this is the best time in history to start a cleaning business because the demand is now greater than ever for cleaning and it's going to be coming back as soon as this all rolls over and people are wanting their houses cleaned again and we're not as afraid. But the actual supply of cleaners is so low.

Brandon Condrey:
It's gone down.

Brandon Schoen:
Like you said, the mom and pop test. A lot of our competitors have closed their doors.

Brandon Condrey:
I've already gotten phone calls about that, that I used to have a housekeeper but she's not cleaning anymore or my cleaning is not answering the phone. So yeah, we're here to pick up that Slack but also at the same time not just to be a stop gap for that customer. We're going to show them why you should have been with us from the beginning anyway.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So I really think that's the silver lining to all this guys is, is you know, you can look at, Oh this is really bad. Or you can look at the bright side and say, wow, this is actually opportunity. There's always opportunities when there's horrible things happening. And you know, look at the last recession that happened, there was huge opportunities and real estate and all sorts of things. You know, if you look at it that way, there really is, this is a great time to be starting a business or growing one.

Brandon Condrey:
So I mean, the service we're providing is essential. And by actually providing it and not sticking our heads in the sand, you become a trusted and influential leader in the community. And that's what's happened, so right when this started to happen, one of the local news stations reached out to us and asked, what are you doing for employees right now? And we had a truck here doing an interview in 10 minutes. It was crazy. Tell him about the PPE. We're providing that we're screening people for temperatures every day. We're logging people for fevers to make sure that we're not spreading it. The goal is not to spread it. The goal is not just to stay open, it's to prevent the spread by cleaning people's houses to make sure that high touch surfaces, door knobs and light switches are always cleaned with an EPA registered virus site. And that's, that's why we ended up on the news because people wanted to hear from us as one of the highest rated companies in town about what we were doing.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and they're wearing masks, they're wearing gloves, they're wearing booties. They're taking all these precautions like disinfecting equipment in between cleans,

Brandon Condrey:
And disinfecting door handles on cars, like everything.

Brandon Schoen:
Everything. Yeah. And just going the extra mile. If we have a lot of extra things that we're doing to make sure our customers know that it's safe. And like Brandon said, just doubling down on that communication because if you want to lead in a crisis, you need to be communicating. And a lot of, we've noticed like even the biggest franchises are just, they completely went nothing. They didn't say anything to their consumer.

Brandon Condrey:
We follow all those franchises on social media and one of them in particular, it was great. They were posting things like it's national puppy day. Tell us about your puppy in the middle of this. When people are losing jobs and restaurants are closing, that's what they're talking about. They didn't mention the pandemic until we were like three weeks in the stay at home order, which is just, that's just a huge blind spot. That's, that's you getting instructions from corporate saying today's national puppy day, make sure you post the thing on Facebook. And what's worse about their social media channel is that none of the posts get any comments or likes. There's no, no one's even looking at it. So why do it at all? It's just an exercise in futility. Right?

Brandon Schoen:
And I think that's just another reason to have control of your own company as opposed to the franchise. You can be nimble, you can be quick, you can make decisions on the fly, like something happens today and then you can enact something today and not tomorrow or 15 days from now. Like some of these big franchises that just honestly put their head in the sand or just ignored it. And it was like crazy.

Brandon Condrey:
So one of the things we did kind of right away in the early days when there were toilet paper shortages and you couldn't get any cleaning supplies, was we put out a video saying that we're going to give our disinfectant away for free. So we have a six month supply of that vital cleaner and we opted to give it to customers. So we will bring you a bottle or fill one of your own to kind of, we're coming every two weeks to your house. But in between that you can still be using the cleaner that we're going to use every time to disinfect your surfaces. And that was the change that we made right away. Maybe one of the franchise owners had the same idea, but you got to call corporate and get approval to give away your stuff because it's hard to get. One of our other competitors in town actually got robbed. They had a break in and what was stolen was leech and gloves and that was insane. That was crazy to me that people are out there stealing cleaning supplies. So rather than stockpiling and hoarding and creating an opportunity for a crime, we just gave it away to customers and I think it's worked really well.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and luckily we are an essential business in New Mexico, as you said, some States or some countries I've heard like Canada or the UK, like they're not recognizing residential cleaning as an essential business. Commercial definitely is. But I told Brandon, if we're not a classified as essential, we're going to pivot and we pivoted anyways into doing some commercial offices and some spaces like that. Just to make sure we're absolutely essential business that we can continue going. So I would just challenge you guys to just always keep an open mind and see how you can, especially in this business, if you have to do something like that and pivot. We've been having to do that during this time and that's okay. And that's actually great. It helps you keep growing. Keep going.

Brandon Condrey:
It's more than okay. Yeah, it's vital. That's what the entrepreneur brain should do. Like there's always an opportunity in every situation. So you've gotta look at it, how can we change it? So what we did right away was we got into a huge backward or queue for this new piece of equipment that does an electrostatic spray. That's a sanitizer, right? We're, we still haven't gotten that equipment, but that was one of the things that we thought about right away is like, how can we offer this more extensive disinfecting artist's infecting is great. I will stand by it all the time, but because it's a liquid, we can't put it on things like couches or rugs. But this other thing that the other piece of equipment that we're moving towards Canon, so that was one of the, that was one of the early changes we made on the pivot side of things. So, so yeah, there's always an opportunity. Even though it's a trying time when everyone and people are losing jobs, you don't have to be the source of negativity and to put your head in the sand and to just turtle and not think about it. There's, there's ways to keep going to keep moving because of that. We still have all of our employees, we haven't had to lay anybody off. It's amazing, man is going up. So there's a mindset.

Brandon Schoen:
Totally. And again, this is the time not to put your head in the sand and to go into your closet and curl up and die. This is the time to lead and to serve. If you already have your cleaning business, put it into high gear. If you're starting one or getting ready to start one, get excited because this is really a great time to lead and serve your community and be that positive force for good. That's going to help people realize, Hey, I don't have to do that cleaning. Someone else can disinfect my home during this crazy time and I can feel good that my family's home around me and I got done. You know,

Brandon Condrey:
So we don't have to talk about the pandemic forever. It's on everybody's mind. We definitely have some other stuff for you. So we've addressed it. We all know it's out there. Cleaning is an important part. The other thing we want to talk to you about though is the three things we wish we knew when we were brand new and now that we've got a little bit of experience in the rest, we can kind of pass that onto you as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and this is just getting started. We're going to go way more in depth on all sorts of cool stuff in future episodes, but just for now I would say first off, don't try to learn to do everything yourself. So that's kind of what we already talked about. Find a mentor, find a coach, find us and let us coach you. We'd love to help out with that as well. But don't just try to do everything yourself and even if you're starting out, I mean I'll admit I was out to learn the cleaning techniques, I was out cleaning toilets in the beginning just to figure out that technique. But as soon as you possibly can remove yourself from those situations and put someone else in, delegate that position to someone else who's better at it than you find the best talent in the world and put those people in place so you can focus on the higher level stuff and actually grow that business.

Brandon Condrey:
I am a convert on this. I was really, really hesitant. I am one of my faults is that I am not very good at delegating for sure. And the beginning, Brandon Schoen wanted to hire an office manager, help someone that can just answer phones and reply to emails cause that was, I was doing that in sales and so between the two is just you're just slammed all day long and I just resisted doing that until the very bitter end. Like how are we going to pay for it? Brandon tells me, well they'll pay for themselves because we'll have more business cause it'll be more efficient. Like yeah, we're going to have the money literally like right now. And so eventually I caved and it was the best decision we've ever made. It was our first non cleaner hire was the office manager and she's still with us and she loves it here and she's our right hand. I can't, I don't know how he would do it if she wasn't there. So yes you did. You did not have to do it all yourself. And even though you might be a control freak or a bad delegator, you'll figure out a way to let go of that control and you'll be rewarded for it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. It's like get out of your own way sometimes. And a lot of, I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs, this is like a big thing we all struggle with. I mean just trying to control everything and do every little thing. And I learned a long time ago doing a lot of these internet businesses like just starting to outsource and find freelancers and people like, yeah sure I could learn code to do a little bit of graphic design, but I know I'm not a designer. So find that designer who's amazing, who loves what they do, who's passionate and who really is like a true artist and find that person to do the work instead of you trying to be the artist when you're actually something else. And so find your strengths and find what you're really good at. There's actually a really cool book called StrengthFinders I read a long time ago, but it's just books like that where you can figure out and focus on your strengths and don't try to like try to improve all your weaknesses. Find someone else to do that and delegate that and build your team by delegating and leveraging other people's talents and skills. So I'm really so you can grow faster and not be all stressed out. Cause the worst thing is you get all burned out because you're trying to do everything, which happens to a lot of people.

Brandon Condrey:
We see it all the time.

Brandon Schoen:
All the time. And was that print lady that down the street.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah there's a printer in the neighborhood. We had tried to stay local support the people that are on our block and get them some promo material. And I had met her actually because she requested an estimate for home cleaning. So I went to her house and she had said that she's working 12 hour days, 14 hour days, and she owns that business. And I said, wow, how long have you owned it for? And she said 14 years. And so 14 years later you're working 14 hour days unless you're a workaholic and that's what you really enjoy is working that many days. That's not the impression I got. She sounded stressed out. If that's the goal to work, then great. But in my mind that's not my goal at all. My goal is to work less overtime and put the team in place and just make sure that I'm steering the machine the right way. Yeah, that's how you do it. You do it by delegating and hiring the right people.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think we were really inspired. Our mentor and coach, he was actually, when we started this, he was like four hours a week.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah four hours a week. He came in for one hour a day to check in and then him and the office staff actually all took a two hour lunch every day. So they would go work out together. He paid for their gym memberships and then they would all go get lunch and that was it. That was, he put three hours in a day and two of them was basically recreation. So yeah, that was kind of, that was our jumping off point. That was the mental image that we're shooting for is working on the business. Four hour, four hour, five hour workweek. But yeah, totally. So what's the next one? What's the next thing we wish we knew?

Brandon Schoen:
Don't try to do it all yourself. The next one would be, don't try to be a Jack of all trades because if you're speaking to everybody, you're talking to nobody. And that's a good marketing message as well. But the riches are in the niches. That's why we started this specific business in residential, not just residential green, eco-friendly home cleaning. Right. And that's even more niche, you know. So a lot of companies we looked at, they try to do everything. It's like crazy.

Brandon Condrey:
And I'm, when we first started, I remember we got this advertisement, it was a very unique way of advertising. It was a flyer in a Ziploc bag that had some rocks and they drove through the neighborhood and they threw them into everybody's driveway. So that was their way of not paying for a direct mail campaign. But on one side of the flyer it was the husband and he did yard work and gutter cleaning and handyman services. And on the other side was the cleaning side. But they also did pressure washing and like chimney sweeping and just carpet cleaning everything. And so when you're trying to do a dozen things, you can't really hone in on the one that you need to do well. And so that's what we did. The market hole that we identified was not, I mean it was house cleaning at large, but really there was only one other company in town when we started. It was focused on environmentally friendly stuff. And so that was the niche. And so we focused in on that. Yeah, we have a lot of competitors that are out there, but you can't rank for a Google keyword if you offer 25 services because you're going to be trying to rank against competitors in 25 different industries.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So on that note, man, we also, I mean it's kind of like the contrast or what it would be like a flashlight versus like a laser pointer. So get that laser focus because the laser, it can cut through diamond, you know, it's so strong because it's so targeted at what? At the object versus the flashlight is this big broad beam and it's covering all these things, but it's not really strong. It's not cutting through the city.

Brandon Condrey:
It's illuminating things. Or you're showing a little bit of everything, but you're not really getting to the thing,

Brandon Schoen:
right? So it's really about picking who you want to serve. And for us specifically, we're, you know, we're family guys, we have kids, and so we're like, you know, I don't really feel good about someone coming into our house and spraying bleach all over everything and possibly using a rag that they used in this other person's house. And now there's just a lot of things like who would we want coming in our house? And we're kind of the market. We have kids, we have pets and things like that. So we kind of started carving out that niche for just what we wanted. And that kind of became more of the focus of it.

Brandon Condrey:
So it was like two types of niches. So we had a niche on the service side, but we also had a niche on the customer side, right? So we weren't telling everybody in town that you're gonna love the green cleaning that we do. That's really efficient. We focus that in on families that had young kids because they are the ones that are most pressed for time. You just have no time. At the end of the day you got back from both parents working and the kids have homework or soccer games or whatever and you're going to have your precious weekend, your precious like 16 hours of family time on Saturday and Sunday and you're going to use that cleaning that is, that is just horrible. So that's why we focused in on that.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And that was actually the whole tagline of our business is claim your weekend because,

Brandon Condrey:
It's in the logo it's on the shirts, it's everywhere, it's everywhere.

Brandon Schoen:
And that's what we give people. We don't sell cleaning. We're selling people their time back so they can their weekend and they can have that freedom with their family. And that's really a big part of our marketing and people love it. So focus on that. Focus on giving, people don't sell people cleaning, sell them. What's the benefit of the cleaning and..

Brandon Condrey:
You know, some old outages in the sales thing, that was my history. But if the product you have is drill bits, you're not selling them that this is the best drill bit ever. You're selling them, behold that it makes how fast it makes the hole, how accurate it is for engineering. So we weren't trying to sell people cleaning, we're trying to sell them time. You can't buy time, but you can buy, you can kind of buy it with training.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and I think naturally we just saw this progression happening of like, okay, the customers that complain all the time are these, they're usually a little bit older. They're not families, they're not the typical,

Brandon Condrey:
They were, they were outside of our protocol customer.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And so it really made sense to us. Like people that have no push back on pricing or getting started with cleaning services and never have any complaints. Usually where these families or young professionals that were just really busy, they didn't even have time to think about it. They're like, yep, you came great. No complaints. Awesome. I'll see you next time. We don't even talk to these people.

Brandon Condrey:
Some know that's the best case scenario for you as a business owner. You got a customer who's subscribed to your service, they're going to pay you every two weeks on an automated credit card. And then you never hear from them again and they're happy. Perfect. That's ideal. You want to check in with them every now and then to make sure that it's going well. But that's what you want. So yeah, the complaints come in. Our case came from older customers who had nothing but time to walk around and watch them do their work and complain and nitpick. And then on the other end, it was people that came in on some crazy deal that we offered in the beginning, like 50% off of everything for three months. And you're trying to get people through the door. So the ones that had the least amount of cost for the ones that also complained the most. Yeah. So yeah, it was a bit strange.

Brandon Schoen:
The tire kickers, they always speakers, they always complain the most.

Brandon Condrey:
Alright, so we had, don't try to do everything yourself, hire the right people. Don't be a Jack of all trades. Focusing on something. And the last thing we knew,

Brandon Schoen:
Don't wait to get started. I know everybody likes to procrastinate even we do sometimes, but that is horrible. Don't do that. The time is right now to start doing this cleaning business or if you already have one, start kicking it into the next level and just know like we've already talked, been talking about this crisis brings a new opportunity. Now's a better time than ever to start this because there's more demand and less supply of cleaners than ever. People are going to looking for cleaning services. As soon as this all blows over and they're going to be like, and if you can start advertising and getting your name out, even now just to start branding, they're going to remember your brand and when it does come time to clean their house, when they feel good about it again, they're going to be calling you because you put your name out there. You've exposed that, your brand to the community and that's what it's all about. So don't even stop advertising right now. We've continued all of our advertising and all of our channels. We're even probably pushing it more now.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, we definitely, we definitely increased a bit of the marketing and so yeah, that's one of the things like most people are going to cut back on expenses right away. And we definitely did a little bit of that, but we upped it on the marketing because people are going to be looking for this. And so yeah, the time is a certain, now you don't want to get stuck in the analysis paralysis. So like I'm debating between starting this business or getting the franchise cleaning thing and you can go back and forth and compare things all day long, but it works. It works for us to work for you. You just got to get going now.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think the hardest part of almost any business is just getting started and getting that momentum. But once you get that momentum, it just carries you and you just, you start going with, cause you're like, well I can't stop now. I'm on this roller coaster. Right. And so you've just got to start here.

Brandon Condrey:
The longer you wait, the longer you wait. It just means that the goal, the part where you get to profitability or the part where you get in the black is just further away because you delayed starting. I remember one of the biggest hangups for me in the beginning to get going. I was in, I was on board, but I said, well, we got to talk to my wife. We've got to talk to Erica and make sure that she's cool. So we wrote everything down. I had made all these spreadsheets and graphics and business plans and stuff and the call to action for my wife was can I quit my job? Right? She said yes. So I was able to give my notice at work and then we just switched full time into planning this. We went from, I started working on this full time April 1st in 2017 I remember that my last day was at March 31st and then we took our first paying customers on July 5th so it was basically three full months of plan, plan, plan, acquire. You know, we had to get a building, you've got to get some cars, you got to get some stuff, and then we were off and running. But yeah, if we just kept holding off, we would be in a different position now with the pandemic situation where maybe we weren't able to write it out as well as we are.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So I mean if you're even thinking about starting a cleaning business right now, just imagine for a sec where we were, imagine just having quit your job or maybe you just lost your job because a lot of people, millions of people have just lost their job during this pandemic. Imagine having no job, tons of uncertainty, tons of fear. People around you telling you that it'll never work. Why would you start a cleaning business? Exactly. You know, that's, that's crazy. And imagine even like in my shoes, having a new baby, right? That's crazy. Things are all over the place and I was just transitioning from another business and that I didn't know where my next page, I didn't even have a paycheck. I was just living off of money. I was generating online on different websites. It was a crazy uncertain time, but we're still here today guys, and we're still proof that it's possible. We have a seven figure brand under our belt now and in just three years, something we'd never done before. I have never hired employees locally before. I had never, I've had virtual assistants across the world that I've never met before, but this is, this is way different.

Brandon Condrey:
You know? I don't mean to, I mean everyone was saying start an app, do this thing, do the, do the quick lean one. But yeah, you can do it. Everyone's going to get in a situation where you're afraid or there's a big challenge, but you don't have to shrink and think about how no one's answering the phone at the unemployment office because so many people are calling right now. You just, you do this, you'll start your own thing. It's not for everybody, but it does work.

Brandon Schoen:
I can promise you, you will be way more fulfilled and happy in your life if you take control of it and make this kind of like a decision like this where you're actively participating and you're not relying on someone else to fill your bank account or pocketbook, you're in control of that. If you want to make more money, you go out and do it, and that's what drives you. That's what puts your back up against the wall and makes you do it. So yeah,

Brandon Condrey:
So that segways perfect into what we've got going on next, which is our eight week masterclass that's going to be live coaching calls. Once a week. We're going to answer your biggest questions, your most burning questions. You got some ideas after you heard this episode, now you want to know whatever, ask us that question on the live call. We'll answer it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So what we want you guys to do is go to the page. We'll say it here in a sec. You're going to fill out that. What is your biggest burning question? What do you want to know about how to start a cleaning business? We want to know, put that on the page and start joining us. We're going to do these live weekly calls. We're going to get on live. You can ask us right then and there, whatever you want to ask us. We're going to answer the calls you already put in or the questions you already put in, but we'll post the recordings and this will be ongoing for the next eight weeks. We'll probably leave it up after that.

Brandon Condrey:
And best of all it's totally free so we're not afraid. We're not charging you for this. That's basically a free coaching call, a free consulting call. Ask us what you want to know about getting a cleaning company to seven figures, hiring practices, whatever. We're going to address all that for you.

Brandon Schoen:
Right, and so what we want you guys to do right now is head over to profitcleaners.com/masterclass again, that's profitcleaners.com/masterclass so you can get started and again it is totally free. We're just wanting to help out add some huge value, especially during this time guys, and we really believe in this business. We really believe in you guys and big things around the horizon. So get excited.

Brandon Condrey:
Way to go guys. I mean, I'm so psyched you were here for the birth of profit cleaners, the podcast. That's right. There's a lot of big things in the future and you guys were here on the ground floor.

Brandon Schoen:
This is years in the making. So this is really exciting not only for us but for you guys. So we're excited to keep this going. There's so much knowledge and so much cool stuff coming in the future on future episodes. So get ready to be in the top 1% of cleaning business owners around the country, around the world. And let's get this party started, man.

Brandon Condrey:
That's right. So make sure you subscribe to the podcast. We've got a lot of stuff coming in the next couple of weeks, the next couple of months there's a few things we got in the works. We've got some exciting guests. Maybe in the future we've got some very focused episodes about specific things and we're all going to be in the ride together. So subscribe and we'll see you wherever fine podcasts are sold.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right guys, and remember, keep it clean. See you guys. Thanks.

Brandon Condrey:
See you guys.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff, head over to profitcleaners.com and remember, keep it clean.