Episode 100: Is It Time To Grow? The Dos and Don’ts of Cleaning Business Expansion

Episode 100: Is It Time To Grow? The Dos and Don'ts of Cleaning Business Expansion

Brandon Schoen:
Tell people and show people the perceived value is higher and that's gonna help them feel great about paying whatever that higher price is. And a lot of times people associate value with price. So if you're the lowest guy priced guy in town, well people are gonna say, well, probably isn't that good of a service if you're gonna be charging the higher prices, you just have to create that perceived value through your marketing, through the story you tell to your customers. And it could be really, really simple. Just, just tell people like, Hey, if you're gonna work with those guys, this is what it's gonna be like. Here's what it's like working with us. That's higher perceived value. People will pay for that.

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. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners. 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.

Guys, thank you for being here today. I am your host, Brandon Shane, and I'm joined by the amazing, remarkable brand and Condrey in the house. Drum roll. Shane always has these really elaborate introductions for me. Then I always just go like, Hey, anyway, I'm here. I'm, I'm the other Brandon. I am also a coho.

You know, Brandon's a little bit more down to reality. I'm a little bit more out in the the clouds visionary floating around sometimes and doesn't always make sense. But hey, we're here and I'm excited to be here guys. I know Brandon's excited too, but that's why you know, we are the team, the Profit Cleaners. We're here to share with you guys what we're doing in our business,

how we're growing our cleaning business, how to take it to the next level and win. So let's do that. Brandon giddy up. So today guys, exciting show. We're gonna talk about is it time to grow, how you can boost profits and some expansion dos and don'ts if you're thinking about growing and expanding. We're gonna share with you guys what we're doing currently,

where we're at and as far as like expanding how we're gonna be doing that in the future pretty soon. And it's gonna be really exciting cuz we're gonna share a lot of that with you guys on the journey. But we just want to talk today because we are the Profit Cleaners, we want to talk about how you can increase profits, what are some of the biggest ways you can increase profits in your business currently And if you are thinking visionary type stuff,

expansion, how to grow into the future, we're gonna talk about some of that stuff as well. And it's gonna be a really, really action packed, value added episode where we're gonna just share lots of great value with you guys and I think it's gonna help us too cuz we're always trying to increase profits. We're always trying to grow and take it to the next level.

So let's do it Brandon. All right, we have our little list of bullets that we talked about and Brandon put on here. There's four ways to increase profits. I'm gonna go a little bit further behind that. There's two. So in business school 1 0 1, your profits are income minus expenses. What you have left over is profits. There are two things that you get to tweak.

Revenue. That's income and expenses. Those are the two things. Like if you really break down any of the things that we're gonna tell you, they fall into one of those two categories. They are either increasing revenue or decreasing expenses. So that's how you do it. So the four that we have on here, the four top four ways to increase profits,

acquire more customers, that's more revenue price higher, that's more revenue increase the frequency of cleans, also more revenue. And the fourth one is reduced costs. So you have a top line, you'll hear people say top line revenue sometimes if you're looking at a a Profit and loss report and you know an income sheet in QuickBooks, that's the very top thing at the top.

That's top line revenue, that's sales. So that's money that comes into your business. And then the bottom line is Profit. Everything in between is expenses. So I don't know, we'll just go like, I don't know, one by one acquire more customers. Yeah man, go for it. Like that's what a lot of this is based around. We have an entire course called the 10 x course,

which is all about marketing and that is to get your product in front of new eyeballs and want them to click yes, I'm in. That's acquiring more customers. Yes, absolutely. And like to get better at attracting those customers, you have to really dial in who is your ideal customer? Create that profile, which we do this with you guys in the 10 x course.

We, we share with you our customer profile of our ideal customer. But once you know that, then it's really easy to target that customer and you can spend way less money to get exactly to that ideal person that you wanna talk to. That's gonna be the best customer, that's gonna pay the most, that's gonna complain the least. Those are those ideal customers.

So yeah, how do you acquire them? You create marketing and branding that attracts them and if you want to simplify that and you want to just throw marketing out all together, the best way to grow your business is through word of mouth marketing, through a customer experience that people talk about organically. Without any marketing people just cannot believe how amazing the experience was working with you that they're gonna go tell five other people.

That's the best way to grow your business right there. But when you throw other things on top of the fire, some rocket fuel will say that's when you can really scale fast. And that's the other marketing we talk about when you're doing paid ads or other organic stuff on the internet or just just locally, there's lots of cool stuff you can do. And so we cover a lot of that stuff in our,

on our podcast sometimes we cover a lot of it obviously distilled down really, really well in the the 10 X course. But yeah, like acquiring customers, getting new customers, that is the lifeblood of every business really. I mean you gotta have customers to survive Like one little bullet point, dumbs it down to like this really simple thing like get more customers stupid.

Like some businesses struggle with that to the point that they go out of business. Like this happens with restaurants a lot. Restaurant businesses are really difficult and especially like during the pandemic, if you built your restaurant in a place that the whole business model was built off of high foot traffic, all that went away. So yeah, you have to acquire more customers getting your customer avatar is collected to do that.

That keeps the top of your funnel. So like in sales there's a funnel, you put new leads in the top, you have an estimate with 'em, you give 'em pricing, they ask some questions, you get 'em scheduled, you get their initial clean done and then you convert 'em to recurring customers. Not everyone that goes in the top of the funnel is gonna come out the bottom.

That would be a hundred percent conversion rate. If you have figured that out, please let me know. We would love to talk to you. But the majority of it, that's not the case. You're gonna talk to a thousand people over a month or whatever that number may be. I'm just, I'm just making up numbers here. You talk to 500 people in a month you might convert a hundred of them to recurring customers and then your conversion rate would be 20%.

So how do you increase that? That's the 10 x course really. But that's, that's a big one is acquiring more customers. And then the next one is to increase your prices. We've talked a lot about this. I think there might be four episodes on price increase in the podcast, you know archives and realistically you can't, you can't sleep on your numbers.

So if you don't do anything, especially in the time of high inflation that we're in now you're losing money, someone's eating that inflation hit and if you don't increase your prices then it's you. And if you increase your prices then it's your customer. And then really once you do that, the customer's gonna decide whether or not they want to keep paying for you.

And you may get a little bit nervous that you increase prices and everyone dropped off, you lost everyone. All that did was free up your calendar for someone who's gonna pay the new pricing that doesn't know that you just had a price increase cause they weren't an existing customer. And oftentimes the ones that cancel come back, they'll go try someone else and be like,

all right you guys had it down, we really like you now you gotta back that up. You can't be increasing prices with a two-star Google review. You know, I mean with an average review of two stars, you need to be like top-notch to be able to justify increasing prices. People are not gonna pay for mediocre quality. So they'll let you know that though as soon as you increase prices.

We always brace ourselves for the couple of weeks after price increase that you're gonna get an influx of complaints just because people are now paying more for it. They're looking around with a magnifying glass, making sure that it's like top notch and that always fades out. It's just a temporary thing to get used to paying the new price because hypothetically with inflation your wages are rising at roughly the same pitch.

And that would be ideal if your customers had increased wages to work with as well. Absolutely. And like a lot of people in like I was thinking the same thing, like how do you, how do you increase prices without people freaking out and being like, oh my gosh, I'm not gonna pay this. Like well somehow increase or add a higher perceived value to your product.

So how do you do that? Well it's really simple actually. And we did this from the very beginning. We even had in our original brochure a comparison of us versus them like us and our company, how we do things, here's our systems, here's how we clean your house, here's how the competition does it. And a lot of stuff is just,

just point out stuff like that to people and they're like, what you mean the other guy's gonna use a dirty mop to clean my house and you guys are gonna use like clean microfibers, the other guys aren't gonna show up on time and they're gonna leak oil in my driveway and you guys are gonna show up every time and do be reliable like, like stuff like that.

If you just point out the reason why you're different, the reason why you're better then a lot of the competition that's perceived value. When we did our price increase letter, we tell people anytime we've ever done a price increase, we tell people to add that perceived value. Here's what we're doing. We're improving our customer service experience on the back end. We've hired better people and we pay our teams the best and they are the best hire perceived value.

We used the best tools and we just, we just invested in a new product or something like whatever you wanna say, tell people and show people the perceived value is higher and that's gonna help them feel great about paying whatever that higher price is. And a lot of times people associate value with price. So if you're the lowest guy priced guy in town,

while people are gonna say well probably isn't that good of a service if you're gonna be charging the higher prices. You just have to create that perceived value through your marketing, through the story you tell to your customers. And it could be really, really simple, just just tell people like hey if you're gonna work with those guys, this is what it's gonna be like.

Here's what it's like working with us. That's higher perceived value. People will pay for that. Yeah. So yeah, anytime you do a price increase, you definitely want to tell the customer why. And we are big fans of telling the customer why in every case like whatever the situation is that you're about to break some bad news to a customer or perceive bad news on your end,

just tell 'em why you're doing it And usually they understand it, it's not a big deal. Alright, the next one we have on here I think is maybe the most difficult, which is increase the frequency. Someone came to you and signed up for once a month if you can talk him into going biweekly, cool, you just got double the revenue outta that one person without having to do any extra sales work.

So how do you do that? I mean if they're on a budget, I don't think they're likely to go to biweekly, I just think that's the reality of it. But if your goal is to put 'em in there, then give them a sweetheart deal. Like you send out an email marketing to your existing customers like hey have you've been on monthly for too long?

I'm the dog hair is piling up between visits. Did you know we offer cleaning every two weeks and if you sign up today you'll get the first five at 20% off or something like that. You can always dangle a carrot for them to want to be able to do that switch when you're talking to customers or you have your customer service person talking to customers,

they just need to have an open ear. Like if they heard someone say something like we just had a new baby or we just got a new dog that is an in, that is an open door for your person talking to that customer and be like, congratulations, that's so awesome. Did you know the dog hair piles up really fast? Usually consider getting your house cleaned every two weeks instead of once a month.

Or you should enjoy that time with that new baby as much as possible. And so let us come out and clean every two weeks instead of once a month. And that's just, it's just a question. The worst case scenario is they're gonna say no but the best case scenario is they might say, you know what, I didn't even think about that.

That's a great idea. I didn't want to hang out with my baby more. Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And so like just creating those offers that match that time of life for that person. Because a lot of times those are gonna be life events or some type of trigger that happens in their life that will make them buy more services when they wouldn't normally buy.

Yeah, just like you said Brandon, just talking to your customers, knowing your customers, that's such a great way to do it. If you have a lot of customers and you can't talk to 'em all, well just just know that you can do creative things around, like Brandon said, if they have a life event like and maybe you're documenting that and their customer profile,

that's an amazing way to do it. I don't know if you've ever noticed but like I have like dentists or like people I've signed up for before and they like ask you what your birthday is and then you actually get like a text message or a thing on your birthday that sells you something. But, but still like it's like that's the kind of thing you need to be thinking about.

And then also if there's, we got holidays coming up, you know, like people definitely buy more stuff during the holidays. So we're even talking right now and I think this would be a great podcast, we could do Brandon, but just talking about how we can promote, you know, more people buying gift cards for family and friends cuz they're hard to shop for or during the holidays people are having more company over so their frequency would go up so you can say hey get more cleans like,

like offer some offer that they can get a holiday clean for less or something that would trigger them to out of the ordinary, you know, it's not normally something they do but it's the holidays, families in town so they're gonna have more frequency of those cleans. So those are just some ideas there guys for what would trigger that increased frequency and how you can kind of take,

you know, use that to your advantage cuz people are gonna constantly have those things happening and the holidays are a great, great time to do that for sure. So we'll be doing that this holiday season. We're actually gonna also do that with reviews as well. We're gonna be, you know, asking people. Yeah and when you do that you need to deliver though,

like we're gonna increase your cleans for the holiday that needs to be amazing. Someone's gonna come into their house for Thanksgiving and be like, holy crap, your house is so clean. And then they get hooked on the idea that man, it's just clean all the time. And then they're like, you know what, that was awesome. I'll, I'll just keep going every two weeks.

So that does happen, like I said, I think it's difficult. The last one is reduced costs, reduced expenses. This is one that you need to be doing like all the time. This isn't like a thing where you like look at it once a year and be like, yay, we did it. Like you could be, this is a function of QuickBooks you need to be looking at and that's why we do it with our C F O.

We're always looking at expenses to see how they're changing over month as a, as a percentage of our income. Ideally we want things to stay flat or go down in terms of expenses. And this is just just one where you may not even know what you can get. And so the most recent example I have is, man, at our volume we were paying something like $9,000 a month in credit card fees.

And when you break out that math dude, that's a lot of money. Like that's money like we just talked about at the beginning, the the bottom line versus top line. So anything that gets taken out in the middle means it doesn't end up in you. The business owner's pocket at the bottom. So you know, 9,000 bucks a month was 108 grand a year that we were paying in credit card fees.

Now from a percentage basis it was competitive, it's just that we are a high volume cleaning business. So I called up our credit card processor and told him, you know, like I don't, these are, it is so expensive, like I may have fib a little bit and told him that we had a had a competitor call us up and give us a better quote.

What can you do for us? A he called my bluff and asked to see the quote from the competitor but I just didn't give it to him. I, they looked at our statements for the last month and what they did was they reduced our rate by 26%. So instead of paying 9,000 bucks a month, we paid 6,700 bucks a month and at our current volume with zero changes,

that would amount to 26,000 more dollars on the bottom line. So I, I increased our Profit by 26,000 bucks by making one phone call and you know like there's a trade off there. Like I, we did have to sign a contract with our payment processor that we're gonna extend out with them another two years, which is fine, we've known with them for five years.

They do great work. Like there's ideally a credit card processor is, I don't know, like the spark plugs in your car. Like you just never think about it. They work every time and you just don't have to deal with it ever. And that's what they've been for us. They've been solid in the background for years and they were happy because of our volume,

our increased sales volume was enough on their end to justify the reduced cost. So that's just one example of dozens that we have of expenses, phones, electric utility, can you get your, you know, can you sign up for budget billing with your electric and water bill so that it's flat and easy to budget for. The biggest one though by far is labor.

Like when you're running a service business the most, your biggest expense is gonna be payroll all the time. And ours is about 69% of revenue to cover everybody. And so if you can reduce that then you're gonna crush it. And the basically the only way to do that is efficiency. You have to get more efficient. So that is the cleaning systems tied in with the bonus system and complaint tracking all of that over time just leads to people being more efficient.

If you have recurring customers that'll stay with you for a long time, the longer that that team gets to see that house more and more and more, they get more efficient every single time. And that is huge. Like we have a facilities manager or we had, we've talked about him before, but he did vacuum repair and things like that. Well he gave us two weeks notice.

He found, found a better job, he's got a kid on the way, I don't blame him, you know, he's gotta move up in the world as well. And so instead of replacing him, Claudia came to us and was like, hey, I don't think we should hire anyone to replace it. Here's my plan. And she had a plan for these two people to cover laundry,

this person to cover vacuum repair and in the end Scott actually stayed on and he comes in on the weekends to fix vacuums and we pay him, I don't know, 10% of what we were doing for him and that boost to payroll, that lack of what we were paying him before that goes to the bottom line. Congratulations, you just got rid of a,

you've made a $35,000 a year job into a $10,000 a year part-time position. So that added another $20,000 to the bottom line. So those are things on the expense sides that you need to be looking at constantly and perpetually all the time. Yeah, absolutely. And until you do have someone helping you do it, like a cpa, CFO type person, just do this process on a weekly,

on a monthly basis. Like look at how can we ask that question? How can we trim the fat? How can we get rid of some of this stuff? Do we really need this right now? And then the benefit too is as you are in business longer, as you have more volume, like Brandon just mentioned that example, we have so much volume now with this credit card processor that they're like,

yeah, we'll give you guys a deal. Like same thing with insurance, same thing with everything that gets more efficient with economies of scale as you grow a business that you just get more efficient. Everything that costs come down, like in the beginning, something that was a a huge cost that you had to pay a premium for now is discounted because you've built trust with that vendor or that whatever it is,

you know. So that's a huge reason why we talk about the the efficiencies though. That's why not just being efficient in your marketing but being efficient in your cleaning process and delivering the service is so key. And that's why we put all that in the cleaning systems course as well because that is a huge system guys, that is a huge reason why we're able to be profitable because let's face it,

you can make a ton of money, you can be bringing a ton of revenue and it sounds impressive, but if you're not profitable it doesn't matter. And there's a lot of businesses that bring in a lot of money that are not profitable. I think most of them are like that. Most of them bring in the revenue and then they have, I don't know,

paltry bottom lines, which is I think like the 2080 principle, the Pareto principle that's probably the majority business owners is that there's a difference between being an entrepreneur, which is taking on this risk to get this asset that's gonna make you money versus being a business owner. Which in my mind is just like, I made myself a job, I was really good at doing this for someone else and so I started my own and now I do that for myself full-time and I pay myself,

which is awesome, but you have to be in there 40 hours a week and you're not, those are the guys that own businesses for 20 some odd years and not driving Mercedes around. You know what I mean? And maybe that's intentional, but Profit is the goal. You are listening to a podcast called the Profit Leader. So I hope that this does not come as a surprise that we're trying to tell you this,

but yes, that is our goal. We did not start this business with the goal of making ourselves a 40 hour a week week full-time employee. Like that was not the object of the exercise. Yeah, and that's a huge trap. I mean like, I don't know the exact percentages, but it's like the actual number of actual real entrepreneurs in the world is like 7%.

It's a very low number. Most of the people that you see that are running businesses out there are not actual entrepreneurs. They're not actually creating jobs, they're not actually doing what you would think like Brandon said, they've just created another job for themselves. And maybe you feel like that too. And that's what we wanna get you out of is start learning how to build systems,

start learning how to delegate, start learning how to empower other people to run your business and have your business run itself so that you can live your life and you can do what you love doing. So that's another reason why it's important to be profitable because that's gonna give you access to doing those things and living a better life. Hey Profit, Cleaners, it's that time of year where we express our gratitude for everything you guys do for us.

We love our community here at Profit Cleaners and to show you guys just how much we appreciate you, we're making this year's annual Black Friday course sale, even bigger 2023 is the year to take your cleaning business to the next level and our courses are the best way to make sure that you hit all of your goals. So head to Profit Cleaners dot com slash thankful to learn more about our post Thanksgiving weekend event and to make sure you don't miss out on finally enrolling in our flagship courses,

That's Profit Cleaners dot com slash thankful. So let's cover a few other couple ways to grow and boost profits and we're gonna, we're gonna get into you guys, this is gonna be a fun part, just some of the, where we're at right now, we're actually looking to expand our cleaning business and so let's, let's kind of segue into that, like how you could do that in a couple different ways and what we're doing right now.

Yeah, how do you expand Because these are other ways to grow. Yeah, Yeah, totally Other ways to grow for sure. But in terms of expansion, originally when we started the business we had all these forecasts about you know, getting to be a 20 million cleaning company in justice one city, which I do think is achievable but probably not as fast as we'd originally forecast.

So you know, with the advice of our cfo, we have started to look around at things like, you know, should we be in other cities, other markets? And we've told John past episodes that we're looking at that and we've, we've got some exciting stuff coming up to kind of give you more details on that. But yeah, I mean we're looking at moving into other cities and so that is kind of a hedging your bits system.

Like you multiple places if one goes up, maybe the other one goes down, if they're far enough apart, maybe there's, the seasonal shifts are different so one will stay higher pace through the slow season and their slow seasons are different, you know, so we are looking into that. So the, I think the question for you guys is when do you do that?

So why did we start looking at it? A, our growth rates were starting to taper off. Like at the beginning we were tripling year over year doubling 50% growth. And I think this year, although big numbers is probably gonna be our slowest growth year, it'll be something like 30% and that's, that'll be the slowest year we've ever had. So when you start to see those diminishing returns,

like if you're looking at a graph, there's a, it's really high in the beginning and then it starts to like plateau and then you may have reached to market saturation in your market. You can keep hammering away at it with marketing and all these things to really like get water out of a dry sponge, you know what I mean? Like you can try and get water out of a stone,

but really once you, you know that the system works, you've got it super dialed in, it's very efficient, highly profitable in that market. Maybe you just can't get to everybody or you've gotten to everyone that's gonna be able to do it. All right, well let's start looking at another thing. So our growth rate is tapering off. We've got the systems dialed in,

we've won a bunch of awards locally, but why don't we spread that award-winning service to other places? That's really the impetus of us like starting to look around. Yeah, we exactly had that discussion. We were like can we just grow into this market even more? Can we expand to Santa Fe or like some other cities around us, which is good as well.

But we wanted to truly diversify because just like in anything, you don't want all your eggs in one basket. So if we have all of our eggs in one market, that could be problematic if anything ever happened in that market. So if you have a proven concept, double down on what's working right? So take that proven concept to a completely different place where it's diversified,

it's it's not attached and take that proven concept and and prove it again and make it work again. So that's what we're really looking at doing. We looked at taking over other companies, we actually had discussions with other cleaning business owners that wanted to sell their companies to us and that's a great way to grow fast if it works out. There's a lot of things that you gotta take into account if it doesn't work out that way because you don't wanna fork up the money right then and there.

You don't have the time to transition a existing company over to your new model and your systems. Well the other way to do it is just start in a brand new market, just start from scratch, which is a lot of work obviously it's more work, but you could also look at it like, well then you gotta create everything from the ground up the way you want it and you kind of,

it's a different pace that you're gonna be go moving at. But I think that's, you know, still a really good spot for a lot of people. That's where we started too. I mean we started from scratch. We didn't take over an existing cleaning business when we started so it takes a little more time but it's also when we're already running as fast as we're running,

we can hit the ground running with a new market like probably even faster now because we have really dialed in the systems we can really move a lot faster. We can put the right people in place even faster, but there is a huge danger to doing that. And this is actually something I just wanted to share a quick story with you guys too. There's a couple reasons that businesses fail and it's like a huge reason I like we've shared with you guys why like I think it's like 80 or 90% of businesses fail in the first five or 10 years.

I don't know what the exact statistic is, it's ridiculous. I don't, I think 80% fail in the first five years. Yeah, it's insane. So it's like how is that even happening? Well the biggest contributing factors are usually lack of capital and the other one is expansion too fast. Like expanding your business way too fast because you think you have a down and you don't have a down and then you end up spreading yourself too thin.

And so sadly this actually did happen. One of my family members, I'm not gonna name any names, but I have someone in my family that has a business in new Mexico as well and they recently had this happen, they wanted to move into a new market and they were going into a completely different market without having proven their concept and their business to the point where like we're talking about where you're profitable,

you've dialed in your systems like they were just, you know, I think a lot of business owners get caught in this trap, but you like you get some momentum, you start thinking like kind of getting maybe a big ego and like thinking, oh I can do this and I don't need anybody's help and I, we got plenty of time and plenty of money and all this stuff.

And then yeah you, you try to do take on too much too fast and that is another problem. Like it's a lack of capital problem too. You move too fast now you don't have the money to do it properly, now you've robbed Peter to pay Paul. So now your other business that has been in business can't even run because you're taking money outta that to start this other one.

And so that's a sad story but it's a reality for a lot of people. So we obviously wanna caution you guys like don't try to expand too fast, don't try to move too fast. The most important thing you can do right now even listening to this podcast is work on honing in and refining your systems and honing in and delivering an amazing product, an amazing customer experience.

And once you get that and you get the rest of your systems dialed in and you get to a point where you really are showing profits every month you are, you know, that's where we're at. Well this is finally the discussions we've been able to have because you know, sure we've been generating a lot of revenue but we've also been reinvesting that money and growing the business faster than a lot of people would've grown it.

But it's only now like in the last six months or a year that we've even started entertaining that question, like in our CFO has really been pushing us to expand. But we just wanna share with you guys like what we're thinking before we do this and what you should also be thinking before you do this cuz you don't wanna diminish your profits, right? So Yeah,

on the growing two fast sided things from our standpoint, just from a, I don't know, my personal level of risk, I wanna make sure that the business that we have now is solid. Solid systems. Like I can bounce out for a couple weeks and not hear from anybody. And the business grew while I was gone. That actually happened recently.

I'm in the process of moving right now and I took two weeks off to fix up my house to get it ready for listing to get fancy real estate photos of and I was not around, I didn't come to meetings, I didn't answer phone calls, they knew that this was happening. I came back and checked our dashboard, Hey man, business went up,

sales went up, congratulations. I didn't do any of that. So I want the business to be super duper solid, really dialed in and then when you go to clone it, you know all those really dialed in systems go with you. The downside of doing it too fast is if you haven't figured out how things are gonna work internally, it's still this like constant evolution.

Things are changing really fast. You're gonna clone every single problem you have to a new location except now you have to deal with it twice cuz you're talking to the manager of this one about the problem and then you're talking to it again at this manager. It's like that scene in office space when Peter gets talked to you by eight different bosses when he screws up,

they're all gonna call you when something goes wrong. You need to make sure that you are mitigating that and that the way to do that is to really get the one, the first one you're launch site ultra super dialed in before you clone it. Now look, this is not the model of venture capital businesses that try to get to a hundred million in revenue in five years.

I'm not talking about an app where expansion is just buying more servers, I'm talking about people. You need a grip load of people to do this and you don't want a snowflake of a person that was so unique and so awesome running one that you're not gonna find it at the next one. So these are just, you know, like we're doing it,

but like it would took five years to get to having this conversation. Obviously the pandemic had a serious like, you know, tamping down of those urges. But this is something that we do not take lightly and we're just to the point now where because the profitability that banks are actually looking at us with lines of credit and things like that. So when we actually get to the expansion part,

we'll talk about that too. Like this is what it looks like from a self-funded versus external money type of situation. But that, that's what we're thinking about. That's what our train of thought is on our side. Yeah, and you touched on something too that I want to just reiterate, like I think is really important right now for everyone to hear and I think we could do a whole podcast about this,

but the truth is, yeah, we did go through a really crazy time in the last couple years, but a lot of people, unlike us, a lot of cleaning businesses put their head in the sand, they ignored it, they were like, we're just gonna play it safe. And they, you know, they didn't, they stopped their marketing even.

They like just wanted to see what was gonna happen. And whereas we doubled down, we ran more ads, we did more marketing, we acquired more customers and we took market share from our competitors. And so I think that right now, even though the world is crazy, it's probably gonna keep be being crazy. Like don't let that stop you and let that be like open your eyes to see the opportunity because that's actually your opportunity.

Whether you know things get better or not in the next year or two or wherever, like your opportunity is the fact that things are crazy, that chaos is gonna make a lot of people have uncertainty and it's gonna leave an opportunity for you to come in and take advantage of that and kinda like, you know, conquer these new markets or even even conquer your own market if you haven't gotten to that point because a lot of your competition is gonna play it safe.

Whereas you can be more aggressive and bring that certainty. And even if people, you know, like let's say, you know, cleaning is a luxury product, so are people gonna cut back on a luxury service and a time of uncertainty in the economy maybe, but also like a lot of people that use cleaning are, they're, they're, they're making a lot more money than most people.

It's, it's like upper middle class or upper class people that pay for cleaning services. So I feel like even more more, you know, like if people have that doubt, like you should be excited that you can go into your market or a new market and totally dominate and be aggressive in this time when a lot of people are gonna play it safe.

Because I know throughout history that's when the most millionaires are made. They're made right after crashes, right in the middle of recessions, right at right in the middle of crazy things happening in the world. That is when the most wealth is made. And so even though that's kind of the case right now in the world, like things are crazy, we're not stopping,

we're still thinking of expanding and that's exactly why is because there's an opportunity there and when everyone else is scared, I think there's a Charlie Munger or Warren Butt. Warren Buffet says that like, when everyone else is fearful, be greedy, be greedy when everyone else is fearful. Like be aggressive when everyone else is, is laying low and playing it safe.

Be aggressive, you know, so that's what we're talking about too, guys, is expanding in a time when people might be scared to expand. Like it's actually a great time, it's the best time in history to start a business when things are crazy cuz there's more opportunity. So Yeah, that was a lot of info. This is a 35 minute episode now.

So there were lots of strategies in there about reducing expenses and some, we touched on a couple different strategies on increasing revenue and then we gave you a bunch on expansion. You know, that's how we're doing it and you're listening to us, so hopefully you find value in, in the way that we're going about these things. And if you've got a different thought process on this and you're gonna start a franchise and open 50 locations next year,

I mean, I want to talk to you about that too. Like I want, I'd like to know how you have mitigated these issues that we've talked about. Cause I think it'd be very interesting to get someone else's point of view on it. Yeah, absolutely. And like, like Brandon said that this, this is like a long-term play too, guys.

Like you're not gonna, the building a business, especially a cleaning business is, it's like building a house. And I like this, this idea around it, but if you're gonna build a house, you're not gonna add on a second story to your house unless you have the foundation, right? Right. So make sure you got your systems dialed in,

make sure you are delivering a consistently good experience for your customers. Make sure your marketing and your branding and your everything that you're doing to run your business is dialed in and then build onto it, then add on to it, then expand. And if you guys need help doing that, we're here to help. We've got the Profit Cleaners courses out there.

We're happy to help you guys acquire more customers, be more profitable in that way, or reduce your costs in other ways by being more efficient. We have the cleaning systems course, so I mean we're putting this content out to help you guys. We're packaging up everything we're doing to do this in our business so that you guys can win as well. So if you guys haven't checked those out,

always feel free to go to the website. There's show notes on the website. We recap all these episodes for you guys. We have tons of free cool stuff on the website as well, other than our courses. So head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and if you guys are getting value share the show, leave us a review, subscribe and we'll that just helps us,

you know, to keep this movement going, keep helping everyone because we're all in this together guys. And so we wanna win and help you guys win together. And I think that's pretty much it, Brandon. So yeah, keep it clean. Keep it clean. 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.