Episode 107: Expansion Update 2023 Progress In Santa Fe New Location

Episode 107: Expansion Update 2023 Progress In Santa Fe New Location

Brandon Schoen:
We always say start with the Cleaners and then backfill that team. So that's what we're doing here guys. We're hiring the team first. We're getting 'em trained. We actually hired internally too because we had Fernando step up one of our team leads and he's gonna actually help go up there and and help get everyone going and trained. So if you can ever hire internally, that's always a big pro tip right there. Get your internal teams on board first and then backfill the rest. So, but yeah, so we got the team in place.

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

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners. The only place where you can be learning from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win. Guys, welcome to the show today. Thank you for being here. I'm your host, Brandon Shane and I'm joined by my fabulous co-host. He's looking amazing today. Brandon Condrey in the house You sent a Canadian,

when you introduce it, Pursued, I said a little Canadian accent there. I've always wanted to go to Canada. I haven't been there yet. I've Been in several Slams. Canada's cool. So Canada guys, but we're not going to Canada yet. We're still expanding the clean new business guys, we wanted to drop a really cool episode today and just share with you because so many of you have been reaching out asking what's going on with the new clean new business and how's it going?

And we've been talking about it for a while. We're actually expanding first in new Mexico. So we wanted to talk about what's going on in new Mexico as we expand to Santa Fe and we're not in Texas fully yet. We'll get there. But we wanna just talk about this week. We're like a week out from being up in the new market in Santa Fe in Los Alamos,

which is actually where Brandon Condrey is recording from live right now at his new house. So that's pretty cool that now Brandon and I both are no longer in Albuquerque, the business is still thriving and running without us. So that's proof in the pudding right there guys, of setting up those systems so your business can run without you. But yeah, we just wanna just overview guys a progress update,

what's going on in the business, maybe some wins we've had some challenges we've had. Just get you guys thinking like what it's like to start a brand new business or expand a a new business. So this one's a little bit different because we're not starting from scratch, we're just moving from Albuquerque to about 45 minutes out to a another location, another town.

But I thought it would be fun to just recap what's going on behind the scenes guys so you guys can stay up to date of what's happening. So Brandon and I are gonna jump in and just tell you some of the highlights and what's going on with the new expansion. So let's tell 'em Brandon, we just had an e o s meeting this morning with our team.

We're rolling things out. We're like a week out, right? Yeah, today We're recording this on February 13th. So we're supposed to go live with the new city up here on February 20th. So we have a week left. Yeah, so our meeting this morning we got an update from Claudia. She gave us a budget of things she needed to buy for the new team.

So we cleared those funds for her. We got an update on hiring, we hired the new team, they did it in one fell swoop. We even got a floater out of it, which is pretty cool. So I think we got our payment in there, like our wage pricing in the correct bracket so that we got the response that we needed.

I will say that we did have a little bit of a snafu with the hiring, but we weren't sure if we was gonna like, we put out some job ads initially, probably too low on the pricing of what we were gonna pay and also we weren't putting it out broad enough. So we changed that a bit. We were paying more now and we put that out on more Facebook groups and Craigslist,

indeed different places. So now we got a lot better response after that and the team went up to Santa Fe and hired and we were afraid we weren't gonna have enough people but everybody showed up so that's really cool. Yeah, the kid, like a job fair if you will, they went and found a local restaurant and hung out instead. The owner was really cool.

We're gonna clean the owner's house for free cuz he was really nice. Let him hang out and do interviews in his dining room for three hours and charged him five bucks after they had like 10 coffees and a bunch of tea. So cool dude. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so it didn't work out smoothly but that's the whole point. We had to adjust tactics so we thought we could go in at this rate,

we got zero hits on it and then we widened the posting and then upped it a little bit more like you know we're, we're in the business to make some money for the business and so you don't wanna throw away the whole farm on the job offer right away. So, but yeah I think it worked out pretty well. Yeah, So that's definitely going well that's exciting because we always start,

people always ask should we start with customers or Cleaners first? We always say start with the Cleaners and then backfill that team. So that's what we're doing here guys. We're hiring the team first. We're getting 'em trained. We actually hired internally too because we had Fernando step up one of our team leads and he's gonna actually help go up there and help get everyone go on and trained.

So if you can ever hire internally, that's always a big pro tip right there. Get your internal teams on board first and then backfill the rest. So, but yeah, so we got the team in place. What else is going well? Brandon, we've got a lot of research going on. You've been researching the market up in Santa Fe and putting together a new rate matrix,

right? I've been trying, I've been trying to put the game. So we always tell you guys and in the course too you'll find us telling you you gotta call the competition to be able to set your pricing right. So I have tried this revealed a bigger hole in the market I think is that our biggest competition in Santa Fe. Same vein, you know,

multiple people cleaning, following a system, doing environmentally friendly cleaning. They just don't answer the phone. So when you call, it just goes straight to voicemail. It doesn't say like when our phone went straight to voicemail we told them we don't answer the phone, we're gonna call or text you back. So at least we explained why we weren't answering the phone.

This one just says leave a message and I don't know man, like I'm a millennial, I don't wanna leave a voice message either pick up the phone or text me. Those are the two options that I wanna do. So nobody got back to me. I was trying to get pricing for a couple different houses there. And then the other, the other part of that too is that I'm busy.

We are running a business that's growing and we're tr we're in the process of recording a big update to the course which we'll talk about a little bit later. And so that's been taken up a lot of time. So I maybe went the quicker, easier way of getting our pricing set for Santa Fe and we're in a unique privilege to do that cuz we've been in business for six years.

So I've got five and a half years of payroll data to do this. And so the way that we did prices for Santa Fe was all right, we calculated our average hourly of what Cleaners make in Albuquerque and then what percentage of revenue goes towards paying that hourly. And we're a little under 50%. That's where we tell you guys to be. So 48% of revenue goes towards paying Cleaners.

Well then we, we know what we're paying in Santa Fe which is significantly higher. It's about two to $3 higher than what we're paying in Albuquerque cuz Santa Fe's a lot more expensive. Santa Fe's, I don't know like the Aspen of new Mexico. It is very celebrities live there, there's lots of art galleries and stuff. So it's expensive. So cost of living up there is significantly higher so you gotta pay more.

So we reverse engineered what our rates should look like based on what that higher hourly cleaner rate is. So the difference between the rates and Cleaners ended up being about 15%. I think it was 14.63 if you wanna get really specific with it. So consequently what we did was we raised all of our prices just a flat increase across the board 18%. So we're gonna go 18% higher for the Santa Fe market.

We think that's lower than the cost of living difference. So I found a cost of living calculator online that says Santa Fe's 26% more expensive than Albuquerque. So we're still under that threshold. So it still should be a deal for some people that should keep us at our margin that we wanna get with our gross Profit margin with Cleaners. And now it's all about marketing.

Now we got the numbers set so now we're just getting cleaning leads through the form and making sure that our schedules got some people on it from day one. Yeah, which is a really exciting part that if you guys are starting a new cleaning business or if you're expanding for that matter into a new market, this is something you should be thinking about which is pre-selling those cleans just Elon Musk did with the Teslas,

he sold millions of dollars of Teslas like way before they were done. Lots of businesses do this all the time guys. So think about doing this with your cleaning services. So what we did really guys, is just set up a page on our website for the new location. It doesn't even have any fancy marketing or automation or nurturing on the backend. It's just a quick,

just gonna grab people's who are interested. We're putting this out to our email list to our current customers on social media, things like that because people know people up in Santa Fe so our current customers might have a family member up there, things like that. So we're getting some initial organic new leads in just doing that. And then very quickly we are gonna expand our targeting on our marketing,

on our ads, things like Google, things like Facebook ads. All we really have to do is expand our targeting and then we can bring people into that same marketing funnel and really just determine when we're talking to 'em and setting up their clean, oh you're from Santa Fe and then we give them a slightly different pricing for Santa Fe. We're using our say same crm,

we just added a new location inside of it. So that makes it really easy for this particular expansion. A lot of this stuff is a lot more streamlined than starting from scratch cuz we're just expanding on building on what we're already doing. So that's really nice. But yeah, so we're gonna start outta the gate guys with paying customers. We've also discussed if there's any pushback in the new market,

we're gonna incentivize people if they do object or pushback, we'll give 'em a special first adopters pricing to to take action and do it right now. We'll get 'em signed up and they'll, they'll get an additional percentage off for the first handful of cleans, something like that. Yeah, We don't anticipate having to use that very much. And I'll tell you why.

If you google Best House cleaning Santa Fe, the cleaning companies that show up on Google Maps up there at the top, we're looking at reviews in, there's one that's a sponsored ad on here that's got three Google reviews, but the top ones are 95 Google reviews, 86 Google Reviews, 23 we're gonna roll in here and as soon as we hit go on Google my business,

it's got 551 reviews is what we have. So we don't anticipate having to use the, I don't trust you, it's this isn't going into a new market like as a total unknown. We're rolling in as the big dog in the state and we're just going into a new city. And so hypothetically when someone sees our ad and then they go Google us and do a little bit of research,

they'll see that our ratings are through the roof and consequently they'll trust us more implicitly than their other ones or that might even be enough for them to jump ship based on their current house cleaner if they're unsatisfied with. But there were only three options in town. So that's we're up against and I really think that those Google reviews are gonna push us quite Far.

Yeah really and that's a good point. Brandon is one of the biggest sources of organic traffic that you guys will see once you optimize this piece of your business online is the Google My Business, which is the little maps that show up when people search a local business house, cleaning in your city, whatever it might be. And so what's really beautiful about this is this,

you don't have to set up a brand new Google My Business listing. We're just adding a new location to that as well. Just kinda like we're doing in our crm, just adding a new location and couldn't be easier guys. So all of those reviews are gonna filter over to Santa Fe's market and basically overnight we're gonna be number one in the market. So that's really exciting to see that because that took years and years and years of building.

We really are gonna, I think just start hitting the ground running because of things like that because we have the those reviews and everything that's gonna carry over from Albuquerque. So that's really why we did it this way guys, is we wanted to start this first expansion into a local market right inside of New Mexico like Santa Fe and make sure we had all our ducks in a row before we went all in on Texas,

which we'll do another episode about that. But our primary focus right now is Santa Fe. We've got some of our original marketing stuff we did in the beginning, like we've got door hangers and things we're gonna fly our neighborhoods and maybe some parking lots and stuff up there with just to get the initial word out. Those don't always have the highest return on investment obviously,

but just like be as aggressive as you can, like getting your name out there. Sometimes in these smaller towns guys, you're gonna have a lot more impact than you think as opposed to a big market. When we very first started in Albuquerque we did some door hangers and flyers and we put up thousands in the first week and we probably got a few customers right off the bat from up.

So it's not gonna have a huge take. But that's why we also pair this with the digital. That's not our strategy is door hangers. But like this is a multi-faceted thing and if they have a gap in their schedule, like all right guys, go hit this street and hang up some door hangers, it'll be good. Yeah, So that's also another thing we'll do with the teams as they're starting out,

if they have time in between houses, cuz scheduling's gonna be a little while off in the beginning because we're building the customer list and getting 'em filled on the team. So in between cleans, if they got have an opening, if they finish early that day they can go do some marketing for us, leave these on people's doors even as they're cleaning houses in a specific neighborhood,

we'll have 'em run around and do five or 10 of these door hangers just on houses around that they're cleaning because people are looking out their window seeing the car and then they'll see this on their door and it, it's just a real easy way to get, get her foot in the door. So just some ideas for you guys there. We've got all this stuff really well documented in the course.

We give you guys our templates, everything we're using to do this. So just so you know that all that is documented further in the course. And then another thing that was interesting, I thought Brandon today was we were talking about the team, like the team size and normally we clean it in teams of three, but because we're gonna be doing a lot of initials and we just don't want to have the risk of maybe someone calling in sick and screwing up the flow of everything,

we're probably gonna start with a four person team, right? Yeah. So this is a temporary thing. We're not switching our systems from three to four, but for this team we found a really good fourth person that wanted to be a floater and rather than tell them no and try and get ahold of them later, we knew that they were good. Like look,

let's hire 'em, we'll bring 'em on. We'll roll with four person teams. Initials take significantly longer than your regular upkeep. Biweekly clean or weekly clean. And so normally the way we're doing in Albuquerque is initials in move-outs we try and do on the weekend cuz there's lots of time on that schedule to be able to really do it right. Sometimes they're only doing two houses a day,

two to three houses a day depending on the size. And that's not gonna work for us from a cash flow standpoint in this new market. So the plan is we roll with four people, do the initial in less amount of time that would've taken us to do the normal biweekly clean and we'll move on to when we get more flushed out there. Then when the schedule's more full,

that's when we'll go to the normal system, which is there's a floater there if someone calls in sick. And the also thing that happens too, like it just happens, we've hired four people but we could get to the end of the first day and one of 'em could just walk off the job that's happened before. So we've kind of hedging our bets there in case one of them doesn't work out.

So that's our plan right now. We will roll with it if it all goes well, we will fill out their schedule in about two to three weeks and then immediately look at getting a second team going and then we'll have one floater for six people, which is normally not how we do it. Yeah, Want some of our best teachings and live coaching for free?

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That's Profit Cleaners dot com slash facebook. And really guys, as we're rolling it out, one of the things I wanna mention that we're doing to some of those first customers are gonna be paying customers, but just like when we roll out into a new market, you wanna get reviews, right? So we have a lot of reviews but you can never have too many because you always wanna be aggressive building those reviews.

So there's some people that are gonna definitely do free cleans for reviews, they'll probably end up staying on because that's the whole point is once you start getting your house cleaned, you're hooked usually like I don't want you guys to not coming to clean my house, so we're gonna do free cleans. We're also finding influencers. So what does that mean? An influencer?

Finding people that are in the market in Santa Fe, Los Alamos that are movers and shakers. People that you know are in, they have clout, they have leadership in the community, maybe people know about them and they're in certain business groups or they've had a business even in that area for a number of years. So people look to 'em as an authority.

So what we're doing is finding and seeking out business owners influencers of any type that would also just allow us to showcase our skills, let us clean their house. They don't even have to give us a review, just talk about us like share us with your business, refer us out when people ask for house cleaning. So that's like reciprocity. We're trying to build with people that are known in the market as well and that's gonna help get us out a lot more as well.

And other than that, I mean we've, we're doing other stuff in the background to market it guys, but we're gonna be doing a press release here this week. We're gonna document that in the course as well and show you the the right format to use. That's a little trickier to do cuz you have to publish it just the right way so that all these media outlets love it and will take it.

But that's really easy once you have that up you just send 'em that link and that's a lit, a really great way to get in the press and the media because these news outlets and sites are always looking for stories. So if you pitch a good story, our story's gonna be like, hey, our winning cleaning business is moving to new cities and now in new Mexico and that's something they're gonna pick up.

It's like feel good, fun story. A lot of 'em will pick up. So we'll get some additional back links, some additional press from that. So yeah, all this is building up to getting into the new market up in Santa Fe. I'm sure we're gonna have some snags along the way. One of the things that's also interesting is we don't have an office up there Brandon,

so tell 'em what we're gonna do as I go between in the meantime to get that going. Yeah, so We're kind of testing out a blueprint for our long-term growth if you will. And so what we're gonna do here is we're trying not to get an office until we get three teams. So that would be the goal. So three teams in between there.

What we're gonna do is we're gonna get a storage unit. They're really easy to sign up for online, especially if you go with a national company and we're going with extra space, I remember it. Extra space is the one that allows you to sign up online and at the end of this lineup you actually get your unit number and your door code and all that.

You don't even have to talk to anybody. So that door code will be distributed. And so we're gonna use that storage unit as a local warehouse. And so that's where we're gonna keep spare vacuums and cleaning supplies. So if they need anything during the day instead of having to run to Albuquerque or something crazy like that, we will just dispatch them to the storage unit and then someone from Albuquerque will come up once or twice a week to check in with the team,

refill supplies at that storage unit, bring back broken vacuums. And then once we've proven the concept, we know it's gonna work in this market, then we'll go about finding a real office that we can grow into that's helping us a couple ways. One rent is expensive and if we don't have to pay that in the beginning, then we've got more money to work with for marketing.

And two, in the unlikely event that we really missed the mark here on the market research and it's actually gonna flop terribly, then we don't have to wiggle our way out of like a three or five year lease by paying an early termination fee. So it's a win-win situation. Yeah, a lot of people ask us about this like by getting an office and I think,

I really think we set ourself up for success in the beginning Brandon when we got that office and it was way too big for us in the beginning. We rented out half of it, it was a little bit of a hassle, it was a a big drain in the beginning. However I think it did put our back against the wall. We went all in and it really did push us to do what we did.

However, you don't need an office, this is proof of this like a lot of people, you can start in your driveway in a storage unit like however you need to start to bootstrap. And as you grow, like Brandon said, as it's proven, then you have the revenues, then it makes a lot more sense. So we're doing that in the Santa Fe market.

We're also gonna do this as we go into Texas we're, we've thought about getting an office but we think it's just, again, it makes a lot more sense cashflow-wise even though we know that we're gonna hit it outta the park. We want to make sure that we can serve capital and we have a lot more of the volume of services going out into the market before we do that.

So that's pretty much it guys. There's probably a few other things. I dunno if there's anything else you wanna add Brandon, but we just wanted to give you guys an update on what's going on. Yeah, I will say there's a caveat here for laundry. One of the reasons that we went with that big office in the beginning is we were going big.

So we wanted a place to store cars, lots of cars and a place to do lots of laundry. We did $10,000 of plumbing alterations to that building to be able to hook up five sets of washers and dryers out of the gate. That's because that's what Corby was doing. Remember we're modeling success from Corby long term. Both companies have changed. Corby is now using an offsite laundry system.

So they still buy their rags but they use a different company that cleans and folds them for them and brings them back. And we in Albuquerque are actually looking at renting, we're looking at microfiber rental and we will certainly report back with an in-depth episode if we make that switch for you. But if you are brand new and you're considering this like bootstrap version of an office by getting a storage unit,

then one of the things you can consider when you're small is you're doing the laundry yourself at home, which is totally doable. You're paying your team lead a little bit of a bonus to do the laundry themselves at home. Totally doable. You could also sign up for a microfiber rental out of the gate and it's just gonna be pricey. Like you literally pay eight to 25 cents per rag per week.

That's how they price those things out. So we're doing all that math for you. We're getting quotes from five different companies that service Albuquerque. So that may influence your office decision, but if you are going big or going home, then maybe you do need that big office with laundry capabilities. But if you're just in there testing the waters, then maybe the storage unit with doing that laundry at home works out for you.

Yeah, Absolutely. And guys, if you are just getting into getting your cleaning business started right now is an amazing time to be doing this because it's the beginning of the year. Like everyone's still coming out of hybrid nation mode. But if you get your business out on the ground running, like we're in the next coming weeks, the next couple months even,

you're gonna be positioned in a really great spot because that's when the huge wave of the rush of of the spring comes spring cleaning, as we all know, everyone's excited about that stuff. So just get it going. If you're thinking about it, stop thinking about it, start taking action. There's a quote I read recently, it's like action always cures fear and anxiety.

Postponement and delay increases it like fertilizes fear, right? So you want to take action guys, if you're thinking about this at all, if you've been thinking about it for a while, like just do it like you've got everything you need. When Brandon and I started, we had very little, we had a reluctant mentor that we had to like pull everything out of and be like,

please help us. And he was like, I don't know if I really wanna help you guys, but maybe you guys are gonna do this or maybe not. I don't know. So you guys have us telling you exactly what's going on, exactly what we're doing. We've documented all this stuff, we're continuing to document it in our course, which I think is a good segue into that Brandon,

we're like literally putting the finishing touches on that today, tomorrow, the next couple days. So if you're listening to this podcast and if you're ready, reach out to us right now. I know we've been saying this for a while, but like literally reach out. We're getting everything going this week guys, so you can reach out, we're gonna hop on a call,

do a strategy call and figure out whatever that blueprint is to get you making six figures or more a month with your cleaning business and just model after that success. And that's exactly why we've put everything into this course. We revamped everything we were doing, putting all into one spot for you. And we're also just documenting all the nitty gritty details of everything we're talking about too right now,

like with Santa Fe going into Texas on all these new markets. So it's really exciting guys. It's ongoing. We're gonna be adding to it as we go. But jump on in, come on alongside us. If this is all making sense to you, if you guys are getting excited, we've got a new video coming out, jump in our Facebook group,

watch that video. If you haven't joined the Facebook group, I think it's Profit Cleaners dot com slash facebook, you can jump right into that group. That's where a lot of people are getting a lot of momentum. And then if you're ready to jump on a call with us, go to Profit Cleaners dot com slash book I think is the link or call.

Both of those will work and I'll set you up to get into our call sequence and we can set up a strategy call. But guys, start getting excited. 2023 is gonna be an amazing year and if you want to jump in even just message us if you have other questions, just message us. Hello at Profit Cleaners dot com, let us know I'm in,

I'm interested and we'll get you guys going. We'll help you get set and get everything built out so you guys can be set for success this year and model after that success. That's exactly what Brandon and I are doing. We've continued to evolve it. We still have mentors, we still have lots of coaches around us. So that community and that knowledge is key though guys,

that's exactly how we were able to go so fast, so quickly. So anything else, Brandon, what you wanna tell 'em? We're gonna be doing more coaching calls as well on the back end of that. So we've been doing 'em like once a month. We're gonna be doing those just about every week now cuz we had a lot of members tell us,

Hey, we want you guys to do more coaching with us. So we're listening to your feedback. We're always making everything better with that program. So keep an eye out, keep a lookout, we'll let you guys know literally in the next few days if you haven't heard already what we're doing and we'll get you guys into that working with us, set up for success for 2023.

So I'm really excited about everything going on there. So anyways guys, that's the progress update. So we'll do another one soon. As Brandon said, if you're getting value outta this, guys, subscribe to the podcast, share it out, leave us a review, we'd greatly appreciate it. And until next time, 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.