Episode 110: Updates on Our Cleaning Business Launch in Texas

Episode 110: Updates on Our Cleaning Business Launch in Texas

Brandon Schoen:
We've been out building a list of people, Gabe, the new managers, got a list of people we're working through. And so yeah, that first week, that's exactly what we'll do is have those teams trained up, dial in the systems, the training, make sure that they're, you know, feeling really good about how they're delivering the service and creating that customer experience and just everything we teach you guys about. So once we hit the ground running with that, then they'll be in paid houses the following week. That's always the plan is get 'em trained up and get those reviews coming in and then, you know, backfill with the marketing and hopefully you've already done some organic marketing. You can always add paid marketing and traffic to that as well. And we'll definitely do 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.

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.

I'm your host, Brandon Shane. I'm joined by my co-host, Brandon Condre in the house. What's up Brandon? That's me. Hey man. Looking good today over in Los Alamos. How's the new office location working out? It's good. Everything's looking solid up here. I got a standing desk that goes up and down and yeah, it's the one I,

it's the Covid desk that we had at my house when everyone was working from home, but I like it a lot actually. I go change position lots of time. Awesome man. So we're doing this episode today guys. We are in the midst of lots of stuff. Brandon just pulled his neck so that's why he's grabbing The neck. Yeah, if you're watching this on YouTube,

I'm gonna be doing a lot of this, But you know, sometimes building a business you pull muscles and you, you stretch out a little bit, but it's okay. Yeah, that's why you stretch and you get trainers and you eat good and stay healthy. So anyways, we're gonna get into this podcast guys. We're gonna talk about some amazing new content stuff we're doing in the new location.

As you guys know, we just launched another location in New Mexico in Santa Fe, so we'll give you a little update on that. But the main point of this podcast guys, is we wanna just unload everything. We're doing everything behind the scenes with the brand new location out here in Fort Worth, Texas. We're like 20 days out and it is getting real,

it's starting to feel real and this is kind of a, the brand new location. This one is completely separate from our New Mexico brand. So we're starting from scratch and we wanted to share with you guys the journey, how it's going, what we're working on. And really it's been fun the last few weeks. I've been talking to a lot of you guys on the phone doing strategy calls and Brandon and I have been doing coaching calls and just helping a lot of you guys out getting your new cleaning business started.

And so I just wanted to say it's been awesome talking to you guys and I know Brandon and I have just been having a lot of fun hearing your feedback, hearing how you guys are starting and growing your cleaning businesses. So let's get into a Brandon, let's tell him how the new location's going. We're 20 some days out, what are we working on?

How's it going? What are some challenges maybe we're overcoming and just get everyone excited out there who's starting their cleaning businesses or growing alongside with us. Sure. So when you say starting a location, we're talking about the next location, The next, yeah, yeah, the new brand new rollout of the Texas brand out here in Fort Worth. Yeah, so everything's starting to snowball in Texas.

You know, like lots of things are happening at the same time. So we bought a car, I did that on a ski lift, I recorded a video for that. So maybe you saw me giving you an update from a ski lift, but I was able to buy a car by email with my phone, which was pretty cool. I love that.

And then, let's see what else. We have engaged a business attorney. So we got that set up, we could do it ourselves. They told us how to do it ourselves. We had a 15 minute like introduction call and they told me where I needed to go to do the stuff I needed to do, but my time is valuable and so is yours.

So we just opted to pay the attorney instead and they're gonna file all that stuff for us. So they're gonna get our business stuff set up in Texas, which essentially is San Diego Green clean filing as a foreign entity inside of Texas. The Texas cleaning company is completely different, but this is just a, I don't know, it's like legal trickery, trickery is the wrong word.

It's just, it's how companies do it. You're just doing business as a different name so people can write checks to that new name. But from a legal standpoint, insurance, all that stuff, it's all San Diego Green clean still. Yeah, And I think we just did that in the spirit of moving fast. You know, we just wanted to get into the market as soon as possible,

prove the concept, kind of minimal viable product idea. And then as soon as we're up and going, we're gonna set up a more real entity structure here in Texas, maybe even a headquarters at some point or somewhere else. But just, you know, for as we grow there's different higher level strategies for, you know, those entities and how you use them and you know,

all that good stuff. So we'll keep you guys updated On that. Yeah, we'll have lots of data on that when we decide to change the corporate structure down the road. But for right now it's all San Diego Green Clean, just operating under two different names. So yeah, we got the lawyer working on that. Texas is very, I don't know,

unregulated business friendly, some people would call it, but we do not require a special license for cleaning. They don't even have business licenses in Texas. All we need is to file with the Secretary of State and to die you could do business. We do need to get a sales tax certificate, permit, whatever it is. So, but the lawyer's gonna do all that for us.

And then we got the car, we got the logo is really, really close to being set done and then we're gonna start painting and decorating things. Yeah, We've been kind of going through all the details in the course as well with you guys, but we we're crowdsourcing a design for the logo, so that's been fun to watch come alive and we're showing you guys how that we start with that and then we go picked up the car this week,

dropped it off, it's getting painted right now, so we're matching that color, Pantone with the logo. Then from there, you know, we've actually, this whole time, the last month or two Brandon, I have been doing market research. I'm actually in for it worse. So we're, we've been testing different companies here and having 'em come clean my house and just taking lots of good notes and seeing,

you know, where the opportunities are, where the problems are that we can position ourselves better and more unique in the market as we come into it. That's really good data we've been getting as well. And then another big thing would be we did a bunch of interviews for a manager out here, right Brandon? So we got on ZipRecruiter And yeah, and then we hired one.

We Found one, believe it or not. Yeah, so How many people did we interview? Eight, nine? It was Eight or 10, something like that. And we had a couple no shows. Couple no shows, which I think is interesting even as a, you know, you're applying to run a branch of a company and you're still get a no show on those things.

So, but yeah, we hired one, we liked him a lot. He starts on Monday, so we're recording this on a Friday. So in three days time he's gonna start with Brandon down there doing some interviews for cleaners. We're gonna try and get our team lined up and then the week after that he's gonna come to Albuquerque and we've got a five day sort of training regiment spelled out for him there and Claudia's gonna train him up on all things manager.

And then the following week we're sending one of our, I don't know, gifted cleaners, one of our team leads is gonna, it's not our trainer, Rena's got some family stuff going on, but one of our team leads has offered to go to Texas. So we're gonna send her down for a week. She's gonna drive down there with her daughter and you know,

we're gonna put 'em up in a hotel and pay meals and all that stuff. And then she's actually gonna go out with the new team, make sure that they're trained up to our standards and then go out with them for every single clean for a week. So it will be lots of training cleans, review, cleans, getting in there just so that when we are finally ready to go with paying customers and ads,

there's a solid base of reviews and experience in there. Yeah, Absolutely. So like we're in the process right now of just building that buzz and that momentum as we get, you know, everything finalized with the website, the marketing, the logo, we're building out that marketing plan. So that's really is, you know, a lot of those initial cleans are for marketing purposes because we start with doing free cleans and our community for neighbors,

friends, things like that. And so we've been out building a list of people, Gabe, the new managers, got a list of people we're working through and so yeah, that first week that's exactly what we'll do is have those teams trained up, dial in the systems, the training, make sure that they're, you know, feeling really good about how they're delivering the service and creating that customer experience and just everything we,

we teach you guys about. So once we hit the ground running with that, then they'll be in paid houses the following week. That's always the plan is get 'em trained up and get those reviews coming in and then you know, backfill with the marketing and hopefully you've already done some organic marketing and you can always add paid marketing and traffic to that as well.

And we'll definitely do that really guys, there's so much low hanging fruit with organic marketing in your neighborhoods and your communities and just Facebook groups on neighborhood nextdoor threads, places you can get in there and talk and let people know you're coming to town, build buzz, you know, start building that list of people. That's how we do it guys. It's as simple as it sounds.

That's really it. And you can always get more aggressive with other, you know, paid marketing and things like that. But I think the, a good goal Brandon, would be let's launch this team with 20 or 30 paying customers when we launched beginning of April. That would be awesome. That sounds Good. We are three weeks out so we got very limited time to get that up.

We don't have a website up yet, I don't think. Do we? It is just about up man. It's kind of coming together with the logo and everything. So yeah, As soon as we get the website up we can push some people towards it, get 'em to fill out the form and all that. But yeah, I mean I think it'll go fast.

We've got some interested parties down there already. This one will be different than the Santa Fe one. I actually think it might go faster than the Santa Fe one as a from zero brand. Like there's no, we don't have a reputation in Texas so we'll see if we're able to go faster than the Santa Fe one. Yeah, It'll be interesting. I think from the initial time when we launched Sandia we did,

it's for whatever reason, when you're launching something brand new, I feel like there's just a lot more thought that goes into it. A lot more momentum you're building. So you know, if you do everything, plan it out right And you could make those contacts and get out there. I mean that's what it's all about in the beginning. So just I think,

yeah, it's gonna be fun to see how it goes. We're gonna let you guys know how it goes and report back as we always do. You know? Yeah, there's a lot of other stuff going on in the background like as we finish those logos and stuff, we're gonna order uniforms. We just ordered a bunch of supplies. Claudia's actually shipping it out to my house right now 'cause we don't have an office out here.

So let's tell him Brandon, like why we're holding off on the office on this launch instead of getting one right away, which we did in the beginning with Sandia. Well, I mean two reasons really. We are trying to bootstrap it to show you the podcast listener what is possible with bootstrapping and how you do not need to be a big corporation with big backing to pull it off.

And the other part was, you know like we chased down funding a couple times and that stuff just takes forever man that funding takes a long time to get over the finish line and I was tired of people telling me no or asking for this, that or the other thing. Instead we're just moving forward so we're using our employee retention tax credit funds and I have a breakdown of you know,

what our targets are for spending for that and it's not that much. Yeah and that's a good one. A lot of people have been asking, especially on our coaching calls and stuff, they're like, how much do I need to start? What if I only have 10,000 to start? And we want to just tell you guys, there's lots of ways to start this business.

Lots of ways you get after it. But let's just give them kind of an overview, Brandon, of where they might start. Maybe the middle ground, maybe the all in version we're kind of where we're at. I Will say this is specifically covered inside of the course. So if you're on the fence about buying the course, we do deep dives on this stuff in there.

So in the course we give you three different levels. Like I've got five grand, I cashed out retirement account, I got 30 grand or my parents cashed out a retirement grant, you know account, I have a hundred grand. So we give you breakdowns for what you're gonna spend on all those and there's just, you know, each one of those versions is totally doable.

You just have to make some sacrifices along the way. In the case of Fort Worth, what we're targeting to spend there is just under 35,000 bucks we have it dialed into about 33 k. What that gets us is one month of manager salary, $5,000 and actually $6,500 in purchasing. So that's like all the cleaning supplies, some office supplies, we might need a new laptop here and there.

We cover car payment for two months, 600 bucks worth of gas, which is roughly two months, a thousand dollars for marketing setup. So that's like getting the website going, paying for the logo, so on and so forth. The biggest chunk though by far is an ad campaign. So like a a kickoff ad campaign which is a $9,500. So we are budgeting $9,500 to blitz the market with ads,

letting them know that we're there. There's a couple of things we have in there. We have legal fees, a hundred bucks that's probably gonna be closer to like $600 after talking to that lawyer. But we've got wiggle room in there, some insurance we cover for two months on the car and then we cover six weeks of wages for the cleaning team and then we have a $5,000 contingency.

The message that you're getting there is we got a little bit of runway built in six weeks of runway with the cleaning team and a bunch of ads. And so the idea is if the ads work, if the service works, the reviews were getting works as soon as they're getting paying customers, the cleaners are covering their own salary so they're not on salary,

they're hourly. So we wanna build in a little bit of time in there though because if you hire good people, you don't wanna turn around and have them quit 'cause you'll only have enough work for 10 hours a week or something like that. So we are gonna use the teams in the beginning to do door hangers. I don't know, make some public appearances if necessary,

but ideally the ads will work the way that we want them to work and then we will have paying customers. Yeah, Absolutely. That's pretty much what we do all the time is when we launch a new team, have the training and to fill that time in between. Yeah we have door hangers, some organic strategies, gorilla marketing that tends to work.

You know, it's not the best highest return on investment but it definitely, when you're brand new, you know everything that you can do to be aggressive and get your name out there is powerful. So yeah, in between cleans they'll be doing door hangers, just the car itself. A lot of people ask like do I really need a car? This is a good question Brandon,

like I would say not technically of course you don't need a car, but how valuable is that car Brandon, even from day one when we launched it in Albuquerque Market, Wanna know why most cleaning business owners fail or get stuck systems? When you don't have the right systems in place for hiring, training, marketing, all of the day-to-day essentials, then your business gets jammed.

And without the right systems it's impossible to keep moving forward. If you're ready to add smart proven systems to your cleaning business so that you can join the top 1% of cleaning business owners, head over to our free Facebook group now and watch the masterclass pinned to the top of the group. Just search top 1% cleaning business owner club, find our faces and watch the free class to learn exactly how we took our business from zero to seven figures in just three years.

You guys should know by now that from our standpoint having a branded car is highly valuable and we definitely recommend that you get a car if you are super duper bootstrapped, you do not need a car from the get-go, you can drive your personal vehicle but you need to at a bare minimum put some magnets on the side of the car and a car topper on top.

All of those are magnetic, they're removable, you take them off when you have to take the kids to school or whatever. You don't wanna be a cleaning company, that's fine. So in the course when we talk about the $5,000 bootstrap version, it's exactly what you do. You just use the car that you have and put some magnets on it. But as soon as you go up to the next tier,

we want you to get that car and you should be looking to get that car as well. That is a huge branding piece. It's just a billboard that's always out there. Yeah, if you just think about if you want to immediately surpass your market and your competition, just do something like that, nobody else is willing to do that. Most of your competition isn't even willing to do free review cleans because they're just gonna wait in 10 more years to get a hundred more reviews I guess.

So if you guys wanna push past people, do what other people are not willing to do and push harder and be more aggressive. So the car is a perfect example of that. I would say. Yeah, from the very first month in business when we started we had lots of calls, people seeing the car in traffic, it stood out. And even to this day,

probably every week we get lots of new customers that you know, just see the car and you can see it in traffic. We talk about it all the time. So as soon as possible guys, like this is a lead generation marketing tool for your business. It's gonna help you stand out and as we always say, act big before you are big.

So it's just sending that message when you show up in a branded car with uniforms, with the right systems, the right equipment, you guys look like a professional company. Even if you're brand new, I mean that's, you know, immediately gonna tell people that you're serious. You mean business, you're trustworthy or you're reliable. All the things that you wanna paint the picture of someone have going that trust going into someone's house,

you know you really have to work on that was one of The first things we did for Texas was figured out the name, make sure we could buy the website. Then we immediately started a logo competition and then we bought a car without, we actually have it at a paint shop right now and we dropped it off there before even knowing what the paint color was gonna be but that they were cool with it so it worked out.

Yeah, I mean even when we're doing these review cleans, which is gonna be the week before we're open for paying customers, we want to show up to those review cleans being the real deal. Like that's a soft opening for us. But that doesn't mean that I'm gonna show up in one of the employee's cars with no uniforms and no branding. They're gonna be dressed like we are taking paying customers and the cars is gonna look like we are taking paying customers and that will then influence people's reaction to filing a,

you know, filling out a review so you'll get higher stars. 'cause you know like yeah these guys are brand new but look at what showed up in my front door. Like it's not a joke. Yeah, it's like which comes first, you know, do you hire, you get customers first or employees first and we always start with the employees but when you have something like a car that is just a big branded billboard sitting in front of your customer's houses for hours every day and you know,

just advertising to all the neighbors and it's is great word of mouth gets people talking, it gets neighbors asking, Hey how do you like that new company? As opposed to literally every company that I've tested out here so far has an unbranded car, it's just missed marketing opportunity. Nobody knows someone's cleaning my house, nobody's gonna ask me. And so this alone,

just by having this car parked out in front of people's houses during the week of free review, cleans could easily generate five or 10 or 20 customers just 'cause people are noticing it, right? Yeah. Plus, I mean they see it repeatedly. Like I saw the car in Los Alamos for the first time when I wasn't expecting to saw it drive in around town on Thursday and then we did get one from a neighbor.

I was out in the driveway washing the car and she asked me like, Hey you're using a cleaning company, right? I'm like, I am. She's like, do you like them? I'm like, I do but I'm really biased 'cause I own it. But I happily explained, you know what we're all about and she signed up so that car works.

Yeah, go for it. But like from an overall progress standpoint, that's where we're at. So website's about to go live, the car is getting prepped and painted where we don't do wraps. So the paint's gonna take two weeks to cure before we can put vinyl decals on it. And so we've got all that time so that the vinyl decals are going live the week that we're doing those review cleans.

What about laundry? Let's tell 'em about laundry. Yeah, ordering's happening, that's all coming to Brandon's house. And then laundry, we went back and forth on this. We did get a bunch of quotes from some microfiber rental companies potentially thinking about scrapping our laundry service completely back in Albuquerque. Man it's expensive. So we're a big company. One of the sales guys actually told us that if we went with them,

like we would be bigger than the hospital system in terms of microfiber rental volume. So he was all too happy to give us a quote. But the quote that we ended up getting was for $900 a week. So 900 bucks a week gets us, that was cheap laundry rag rental, it's all picked up by them every day. We don't have to do anything and they bring it back clean.

I doubt they bring it back folded, but they bring it back clean and as rags deteriorate, they take 'em out. All of that hypothetically is great. We tested some samples with the teams, they didn't really like 'em, the quality is lower than the ones that we use. Again, that hyper, it shouldn't matter. Like if we're destroying rags,

they should be taking 'em out. But you know, $900 a week, that's $47,000 a year. And we calculated internally that we were spending on a bad year about 37,000 on laundry and that includes wages for people to like do the laundry, a replacement machine parts buying our own rags. And that was a bad year that we looked at because we had to replace a washer and we replaced all the rags in that year.

Replacing all the rags on our end was about $6,000. So even with that bad math, it was $10,000 cheaper to do it ourselves. And realistically it's more like $20,000 cheaper on your average year to do it ourselves. So for Texas though, we're just gonna pay one of the team members, whoever wants some extra hours, extra cash, you're gonna get a bonus to do,

do the laundry and you can do it in one of two ways. Take all of it to a laundromat and run a bunch of machines at the same time. Save yourself some time or take it home and wash 'em at your house and then bring them back. And so we're gonna attach a stipend for that. You'll get an extra whatever we're gonna work out per week,

50 bucks a week, a hundred bucks a week to do laundry. If someone wants to do it at their house and you know they've proven to be, you know, reliable employee, I'm happy to buy them a new washer and dryer that will handle that load because doing that many loads like it will, it's not, you know, if you've got an old machine,

if we're gonna run it into the ground. So that's what we're doing. Yeah, It's definitely a good option is, you know, for people that are looking to do laundry but don't want to actually invest in a whole laundry system is do that exact thing. So get a laundromat in place or or an actual washer and dryer that is in your house.

Absolutely a great way to bootstrap it. And that's what we're gonna do guys, is just start there. We have an amazing laundry system in Albuquerque. Again that was probably, we had an office when we started and that was kinda the next step. Corby said, set yourself up for success. We did it however, I will. I think it's funny that,

you know, even Corby to this day, he has a different laundry system too. He's, he has somebody that comes and takes the laundry for him and, and washes it and he brings it back and folds 'em kind of like a, a mom and pop service or I'm not sure what it is, but It's a company up there but like he's not renting the rags so it's still their rags.

But someone performs a service, a laundry service, so they come in and pick up the dirtiest, wash it and bring it back. So they found out someone that works well for them to do that. We're probably gonna be going that route in Texas for a while. So if we can find a company that'll do that, that sounds great, as long as the pricing is right.

But realistically, we're just gonna offer it as a bonus to the team and you can get extra money, extra hours by washing these rags if you wanna do it. And then down the road we are gonna get an office in Texas eventually, I think we're shooting for when we have three teams. So when we have three teams, that's enough for us to take on another rent payment and store the cars there overnight and then we'd be looking at getting another laundry system in-house maybe.

Or if the laundromat team thing is working out great, then we'll probably just roll with that in the future. But we're testing it is the whole point. We're, we're not guessing at how it's gonna work. We're actually gonna do it and then make that decision on our own. Our manager that we hired here is, he's already, you know, he's sending us stuff like that,

you know, even though he knows we're gonna wait on the office, but he sent us a really cool real estate listing the other day that has great frontage on a road that's gonna get a lot of traffic. That would be a really great branding place. So that's just something to think about. You don't need to start, like even our office in Albuquerque doesn't have any frontage.

People don't ever see it, it's in a very industrial area. But if you're able to, you know, swing some type of deal where you have something, you can get frontage, maybe you could partition the office and split rent with someone else. That's something we've talked about in the future. Maybe working with a plumber or someone else that needs a bigger facility that we could co-own it with and maybe it would make more sense that way.

So there's different ways to do the real estate and the the buildings guys, but like we said with the cars, you don't need it. I think the, the office is probably the, the very least needed of all the things that we we're gonna start with. Would you say Brandon of cars and uniforms and, Yeah, I completely agree. So cars,

uniforms, those are the basics. You gotta get those in line before you can do anything else really. Yeah, And yeah, really, I mean, so that's pretty insightful. You know, so if you guys are looking at starting a cleaning business, you can start at a very low cost. You can start somewhere in the middle. You can also go all in and treat it like a franchise.

That's what the franchisees do. They, you know, you gotta spend a hundred thousand, 200,000, gotta be more liquid. So we're showing you guys how to do it for far less and you own it a hundred percent, you're not paying royalties. So I think that's pretty awesome that you can start a business like this and, and these this time of the world and it'd be very low cost capital startup technically.

And it's very easy to scale this business. You know, you just gotta have the right system. So that's, that's why we we're helping you guys, that's why we're coaching you guys and helping you take those next steps. So what are those systems? How do you train your teams? How do you hire, how do you do all that stuff?

And so there's other stuff that we're building out too. There's a rate matrix for this market. There's a, the CRM we're building for this market. So all that stuff guys we're covering in the, the new program, we're showing you guys all this stuff documented step by step how we set every single thing up, the logo, the website, the CRM,

the, you know, everything from, you know, the A to Z. So that's what's really neat about this new launch is we never really did that in the beginning. So we're showing you guys how we're doing it now and it's kind of a, it's, it's interesting for us too. We're learning a lot 'cause you, the best way to learn is to teach.

So we're teaching it to you guys and we're simultaneously learning, you know, how to run this business better ourselves. And it's been really fun. Yeah, I'm excited to see how it goes over the next 20 days and, and we'll keep you guys updated. Brandon, have you been enjoying the coaching calls we've been doing with the, a lot of the new students I have that those have changed a lot recently since we kinda launched the new course and you've been like taking those calls a little bit more.

The coaching calls are much more interactive so people are asking good questions, challenging us to give you good answers. So yeah, please keep coming to those calls. There is one every single week. Yeah, There it's, it's awesome guys. I mean it's just fun to see. I mean I'm even learning stuff from you guys and just hearing how you guys are doing your businesses differently.

I was surprised to hear like even people still working full-time jobs, running, cleaning businesses, I mean people are doing it and it's possible, you know, so it's just, it's fun, fun to hear how you guys are doing everything. So if you guys are interested, definitely hop on a call with us, Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass. You can watch the masterclass case study of how we scaled to seven figures in less than three years.

And then also if you wanna book a call and talk to us and see how we can strategize with your business, take you where you are now to the next level. I'll go to Profit Cleaners dot com slash call. And yeah, if you guys are getting value these out of these podcasts, I mean we share a lot of what's going on behind the scenes,

but if you're getting value, if you learn something, if you got better in any way, please help us out. Leave a review, subscribe, share it to the world, tell people about it. Help us create this movement, guys that we're gonna help a lot more people. We wanna help at least a hundred people, that's our mission. At least a hundred people to create a seven figure brand with their cleaning businesses.

So come along for the ride. It's exciting. Let's go together and let's do it together guys. 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.