Episode 113: Pro Tips and Strategies for Running a Successful Cleaning Company with Expert Kerri Anne Kedziora

Episode 113: Pro Tips and Strategies for Running a Successful Cleaning Company with Expert Kerri Anne Kedziora

Kerri Anne Kedziora:
I lost 20 of 21 employees. I even lost my home. I was actually homeless for three months from April till July of 2020, which is an incredible story all on its own. And when I look back, I can't even believe it. I can't believe it happened. I think so many people have. I can't believe it happened stories from that year. But in 2020 was when I really realized that I needed to take control of my future. And I needed to have stability and financial stability. I wouldn't say freedom. That wasn't what I was looking for at the time. I was just looking for an understanding and a feeling within the confidence to know that my business would survive. And so I sought out education for hiring amazing employees and pivoting to commercial,

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 Profit Cleaners, you've got a special guest interview for you today we're gonna be talking with Carrie out of British Columbia, up in Canada with cap cleaners. And so I just wanted to introduce you guys to Carrie and she's been,

you know, a, a fan of the Profit Cleaners show for quite some time and just has an incredible, incredible story that I know you guys are gonna love hearing. It's gonna be inspiring and it's gonna really just help you take it to the next level and win. So let's introduce Carrie guys with Cap cleaners up in Canada. She's got an amazing story of how she started from basically nothing right before the pandemic lost everything,

lost all of her employees, rebuilt it from scratch essentially, and now has a seven figure cleaning business in a very short amount of time. So this is lit literally in the last just, you know, couple years that she's been able to do that. So again, just proving it's possible, proving you guys can move fast and scale this business. And Carrie has also got some really amazing,

we're gonna the first, we're actually gonna do a two part episode on this because it was just such a long good interview. So the first part of this, we're gonna talk all about Airbnbs and her vacation rental part of her business, which is more what she specializes is post-construction and Airbnb vacation rental type properties. And then we'll also do a, a secondary episode where she talks more about just the culture and the training and hiring of her teams and some of the stuff she does behind the scenes that has helped her along the way.

And it's just incredible. I mean, I learned a lot, an incredible story. I mean she actually was homeless at one point and again was able to bring everything back together in the last few years, build a seven figure cleaning business. And it's just so inspiring and just the way that she talked about embracing the change, embracing the challenges. So inspiring guys.

So I think you're going to really love this podcast. So until next time guys, to keep it clean and enjoy the show. All right, welcome everyone. Today we've got a very special guest joining us who is going to just fill us with knowledge and new ideas and just share some amazing experience and stories from owning her cleaning business up in Canada. So I'd like to introduce to you guys today Carrie Ann,

Carrie, take it away. Tell us about your cleaning business, what you're working on, some of these like you just shared an amazing story with us. I wanna just have you share that again and let, let's get into it. Oh, that's great. Thanks so much for having me. I always love coming to these interviews and being able to help others overcome obstacles to finding their success.

So I really appreciate you having me here. You know, I guess I'll just tell you a quick summary of how I even came to be a cleaning business owner. Like I was telling you earlier, my whole life I have been in in cleaning and in my twenties I worked for my mother-in-Law at her cleaning business. And this is where I learned how to run a cleaning business because she wanted me to take over her business.

She was actually, and still is like one of the most brilliant female entrepreneurs I've ever met. And she had a grade five education. She really made me realize that having the education isn't really what makes you intelligent or successful. That's what I learned, that I could kind of have whatever I wanted in the world. However, back then I just didn't have the confidence in myself to be able to grab that.

Anyways, that's where I learned my foundations. And then for 25 years I worked as a solo cleaner. I was a single mom. I spent 15 years in dementia care, which is actually something I'm very proud of. Learned a lot about communication and a lot about human beings in that era of my life. And then in 2016, my husband and I decided we were moving to the beautiful Okanagan.

We were starting a new life, just a life of freedom from the city in the cement, what did they call it? A cement jungle? Concrete jungle, yeah, concrete jungle. Yeah. We were excited about that. And I said, you know what? One of the changes I'm going to make when we move to Caram was the town that I started in here in the Okanagan,

a little town of 1100 people. I'm not going to clean anymore. I'm done cleaning, I hate cleaning. I've been cleaning since I was five years old. I'm not doing it anymore. And we weren't even in Ami three months when my stepmother who lived there asked me if I would clean her house presale clean. I said, sure, of course I'll do anything for you.

And I did that and the realtor that was coming to take pictures was really impressed with the attention to detail and the quality. And she just asked, could I just refer a few clients? And I said, only in an emergency. Only if there's absolutely no one else, I don't clean anymore. And so she said, okay. She promised me she wouldn't overuse my name and six months later I quit my full-time job.

Well I had two jobs, I quit them both and hired my first employee and cap cleaners came to be. So, like I was saying to you earlier, when I decided to quit was when I actually embraced it. Wow. It's funny how the universe, the universe won't give up on you even when you give up on yourself. I love that.

Yeah, that's very cool. Good point. Cool, thanks. What's the status of cap cleaning today? Like how big is it? How long has it been in business? You know, cap cleaners is quite an amazing story. You know, I'm going to interject that we were really sailing along nicely with residential cleaning up until March of 2020. The terrible year we were then working on,

we had 98% residential clients and 21 employees. And we were just really excited about the growth and where our business was heading. When we lost everything, we obviously lost 98% of our business because the government wouldn't allow us to go into people's homes. I lost 20 of 21 employees. I even lost my home. I was actually homeless for three months from April till July of 2020,

which is an incredible story all on its own. And when I look back, I can't even believe it. I can't believe it happened. I think so many people have, I can't believe it happened stories from that year. So it's another story, it takes too long. I'm not gonna bore you with today, but in 2020 was when I really realized that I needed to take control of my future and I needed to have stability and financial stability.

I wouldn't say freedom. That wasn't what I was looking for at the time. I was just looking for an understanding and a feeling within the confidence to know that my business would survive. And so I sought out education for hiring amazing employees and pivoting to commercial and where we are is a really big tourism industry. So we pivoted to vacation rental and commercial cleaning.

And that was in September of 2020. We were at six employees, we're at about 140,000 in revenue a year. We had decreased from two 40 the year before we built this business back. We're now a million dollar corporation with 50 employees and growing. We're now starting to dip our toes into cleaning large resorts, hotels. And in the next five years I am hoping to take us to perhaps medical facilities,

hospitals, things like that. That's in the dream process now. So there's no plan yet. Sure. But the dream is there with the resorts. We actually are servicing resorts now. That's Amazing. That's amazing. To go from homelessness in one employee in 20, 20 to 50 employees less than three years later, way to go. Congratulations. I mean that's a thank you.

Good stick to it attitude. I think that a lot of people could benefit from you roll over one day and you're like, I don't wanna work today. And you're like, well you didn't lose your house during covid so you got that going for you. Yeah, that's wild. So covid for us in the states was completely different. Every state treated it differently.

There was no unified approach from a government perspective. And so Brandon and I were lucky in Albuquerque, the government, we were deemed essential, we were deemed essential. So because of the activity we did, which was disinfecting, they wanted to keep those businesses open so that we could try and keep other places clean. So we never had to shut down.

And I feel really fortunate for that In retrospect. I kept thinking about, you know, restaurant owners and entertainment venues and how like brutal it must have been at the time. So I'm really glad you made it out the other side and that we're able to have this conversation today. Yeah, I think that's, thank you. That's incredible. Incredible inspiration too.

Like for anybody who's been struggling or like even close to closing their business down or even like having what you, you had happen to you and then bouncing back and just keep going. Like what an amazing mindset. I think everybody can learn a lot from that. 'cause you know, business is hard, but if it was easy everybody would do it. And that's,

that's great. I just love hearing those kind of stories And look at you now, like you said, a million dollar business just in just a few years. You just didn't give up. And I think that's a, a big part of business in general. Just keep going And you know, you continue to hit those milestones. You know, when we hit the million dollar revenue mark,

we were ecstatic 'cause we were very close on the heels of losing everything. So we're like wow, like is this a dream? And then comes the next realization you're growing, you get to points in your growth where everything sort of falls apart and then you've gotta pull on that resiliency again to get through it. And we just went through this this last winter really the big struggle for me was to keep my employees understanding,

don't worry, we're not losing everything. Everything is fine. We're just restructuring. We've had to bring on a couple of more admin and with that comes the new systems and processes, you know, process. Up until this year I always thought there would be a day I would be done with systems and processes. Never. That's not ever gonna happen. Yeah.

That is something we've done well to explain to the office staff is that this is gonna drift all the time. So it's one of our like core values, you know, like a growth mindset. And part of that is that, you know, these processes are gonna change all the time. If you're one who wants to sit back and push a button a bunch of times and hit the easy button,

this is not the job for you. It's gonna, it'll be different next week we will introduce some new better tool for you to use. It's good to know that we're not the only people that have that problem or benefit I suppose. Yeah. And it's good to learn to embrace it. I've always said, and I always do say with every solution comes two new problems and you need to embrace those problems because that is growth.

There's a reason why some of us are employers and some of us are employees and sometimes just getting that message to the employees can be difficult. You have employees that, you know, in the staff meetings you're seeing that they're sort of, you know, a little bit cantankerous and pushing off the new systems and processes and you've gotta remind them, hey this is a good thing,

this, it sucks it's hard work and we've all gotta learn new systems and technology and but embrace it because this is your future. You know, you you want some profit sharing, you want some perks and benefits, let's go for it. And we just had that meeting yesterday and I managed to bring everybody on board and get them thinking in a positive light again,

which is beautiful and excited because we're gonna create that growth that's gonna cause them anxiety again next year. Yep, that's a good point. I mean if you are growing bigger, I mean what was that song back in the eighties? It was Mo Money More Problems. Yes. That's the same setup here. So you want more customers, congratulations, then you have a lot more people with your phone number and issues to call you about so you better adjust.

But these are all part of a, you know, embracing the change from the cleaning nerd perspective side of things. You do a lot of vacation rental cleaning. How do you find that in comparison to like the pre covid residential cleaning? It's a scheduling hassle and there's lots of different things that you have to do in a vacation rental compared to a place where someone lives.

So I'm curious what your experience has been. Yeah, so scheduling for residential, the difference between residential and vacation and rental, there are quite a few differences. But one of the big difference when we're talking about a scheduling perspective, and this is what many people are afraid of when they're thinking about going to vacation rental, vacation rentals actually get more busy during recession or during covid because people aren't traveling.

If you can't afford to travel to some exotic location but you've promised yourself and your family a vacation, why not do a staycation? Staycations are really huge these days. So what I find is for a residential property, these are people that really everything is dependent on their income and their ability to afford your service for them. For many people it's a luxury service and it's the first thing where one of the first things to be cut when they have to cut their expenses for vacation rental,

two beautiful things. There is an up and down, there's a definite rollercoaster ride that if you learn to ride that rollercoaster without fear, it's a beautiful thing. Like I love it. And the thing is, is that we'll see cancellations in tune with the stride of society. So the best thing I can say is back in the covid days here in Canada,

we had actual travel restrictions for a while and they did it two or three times. So we'd have our calendar full travel restrictions, everything empties, like everybody canceled their vacations, then the travel restrictions were lifted and everybody rebooked. And what we learned during those days was to just take a breather. We were like, okay great. We on may long weekend of 2020 was the first time I ever had may long weekend off.

I was like, wasn't it nice of the government to give us four days off? They put in travel restrictions and we just decided let's take a breather and enjoy this. My point is though, that when somebody cancels in a vacation rental, there's usually somebody waiting to scoop in and pick up that schedule. So actually on my calendar our rule is if you get a cancellation for a vacation rental,

it stays on the calendar until 48 hours before because the chances of somebody rebooking are quite heavy and there's no sense in unscheduling rescheduling unscheduling. So we just leave it there until 48 hours before and then we check with them, Hey you sure you didn't get another booking? Okay, off it goes and we move on. I find it to be very easy to maneuver once you get into the busy season.

'cause the calendar comes nice and tight, it's in the off season that is kind of a pain. And in the off season we do a lot of post-construction, clean move out cleaning like we do these odd jobs. Problem with that is that you're always retraining your staff. You know we get into April and May and we've gotta remind them of our policies and procedures,

our clients. I did actually just get a message from a client that said, wow, things are really bumpy right now. And I said, yes, things are always bumpy in the beginning of the season. I promise you we have a full day of training coming up for our employees, beginning of May, we get everybody on board and things will get better.

But it's just the way it is. It's the monster, the nature of the beast here. I envy people in warm climates Florida anywhere that's 24 or sorry year round vacation rental, I envy them because that would be a very lucrative business. Very easy to manage from my perspective. And so I train company owners how to do that in those areas and I'm actually thinking about doing it now.

Hey Profit Cleaners, if you're interested in growing your cleaning business and joining the top 1% of cleaning business owners, well now's the time we're Launching our new business out in Texas and documenting everything. So you're gonna want to join us and you're gonna see how six and seven figure cleaning businesses are built from the ground up so that you can do it too. To get started on this journey with us,

head over to our free Facebook group now and watch the masterclass pinned to the top of the group. Just look up top 1% cleaning business owner club on Facebook or go to Profit Cleaners dot com slash facebook and watch the free masterclass pinned to the top to learn more. So the busy season with that seasonality, is it summer? That's the hot season up there and not so much this ski season.

Yes, May to September is our busiest season, our hot season and July and August are just smoking because of the school closures. Right. July and August we're, I think we usually do between 50 and 60 visits a day to vacation rental properties. Wow. That is a lot. It's awesome. Love it. I that's one that we've tackled a couple times the vacation rental thing,

it's not a nut we've been able to crack really. We've got, I don't know, half a dozen maybe. We have one owner that we work with in Albuquerque that owns, I think they've got eight properties with us and so they like our system and communication and so everything jives well but that's kind of maxed out for us. And the way that we've done it is kind of parse in these vacation rental cleans in between normal residential cleans and so the team's already on the field we can just run someone by,

it's not the same team every time. So we also have the same training gaps that we have. We kind of lean back on very good notes inside the CRM so when you show up there's like this very elaborate checklist so hopefully everyone stays on the same page and we try and guide them with photos and videos and things like that and that tends to work.

But we don't, albuquerque's not a tourist spot. Kind of like your area. We have one big event every year which is the International Balloon Fiesta. And so hundreds of thousands of people come in for a week in October and then they all go away. So most of our business is residential. And so it's very interesting to talk to someone who's built this very robust system around Airbnbs and BBOs,

which I think is super interesting. I was just curious Carrie, how do you overcome the challenges We've always come across with the Airbnbs is the scheduling and we've talked about maybe we need a dedicated team that can just always be on call ready to go to these kind of flippant schedules where it's like they checked out they need it right away or which doesn't kind of mesh well with our normal scheduling of the every two weeks or every week at the same time at the same day.

So how do you deal with that like scheduling aspect of of that challenge? This is such a great question. In the beginning what we did was all of our residential clients, we would try to book early in the morning or late in the afternoon and do our vacation rentals right in the middle because they have a specific checkout check-in date. A really great thing is if a vacation rental property doesn't have a check-in same day,

then they're really easy to manage. You just put 'em in wherever they fit, right? And so our owners are required to give us their checkout date and their check-in date and then we let them know if they do get last minute check-in for an earlier date, let us know right away and we'll get somebody out there. We'll do whatever we have to to get that property clean.

And it is our policy to clean every vacation rental as soon as possible. But if we have flexibility we will take it. So it becomes like a little bit of a puzzle arrangement for residential and vacation rental can really jive together quite well. Once you get a feel for it and you set some specific policies and boundaries, we have specific boundaries that our clients must adhere to.

Our clients have learned that we're the best in the industry here. And you know, I can say that so proudly now. I remember a year ago I'd say that kind of feeling like, ooh, am I telling a bit of a lie? But the truth is we are now the best in the industry here. I feel it, I know it.

And so people want to work with us 'cause they know they're getting five star quality ratings. And so now in order to have those five star quality ratings, we have to have boundaries in place. We won't work with clients who will not adjust to our boundaries and policies and procedures. Yeah, I mean this is just a really good point to bring up 'cause we've mentioned this in the podcast multiple times that you know you don't wanna go outside of your own systems to try and accommodate a customer.

That customer will end up being like the thorn in your side. So Right. It's good to hear you say like look this is how we do it. If you want it here it is. If not, I'm sure you can find something else. Yeah, those types of policies where you make the customer adhere to it, we have the same thing.

I mean you have to pick up before we come over, you have to make sure the sink is empty of dishes, otherwise we're not gonna clean it. We're not gonna pick up animal waste inside your house if you have a, an aging dog or something. And so we remind everyone of that with these little nice little notes that we leave behind and we get to do that because they live there.

So, but how do you handle it when they don't adhere to their procedures? Like let's say you got there and they didn't adhere to like one of the policies. Do you just cut 'em off right there? Is it a warning? Do you try and work with them? Well the first thing that we do is we actually, for every new owner that we have,

we know there's a training period. Even the simplest thing, new owners, if this is their first year ever running a, BB, they're so excited to get guests that they ignore guest ratings. So on Airbnb and VRBO there's always a rating assigned to a guest. So when you're staying at A-V-R-B-O or Airbnb, you want to leave the place tidy and be thoughtful of the rules so that you'll get a good guest rating so you can stay in a nicer place next time.

Yeah, newer hosts Just take whatever comes through the door. Don't do that. They're just like anybody. Yeah. Yeah. We had one time, one new guest, we've gotten used to this now and we kind of educate our hosts when they first come on, but we had one where it was regularly a four and a half hour clean. It took us 12 hours.

The people had only stayed two days, but they had just used it as a party house and I'm sure they must have had 20 people in there. The floor in the kitchen was, I swear, an eighth of an inch thick with stuck on alcohol and juice and whatever food was stuck onto the alcohol on the floor. It was crazy. Sounds like a good party.

Yeah. You know, all I know is it was lucrative to clean up. Sure. You know we made some money but the host learned very quickly. Yeah, why you should always watch the guest wait ratings and we let our clients know as soon as we find out they're newbies, there are so many things that we have to teach them. Make sure that you have three sets of bedding so that if the clients use a second set,

we still have the third to count on. You know, just so many little things. But that guest rating is number one. And our employees, as soon as they get to the property, they rate the guest from one to five and we have specified guidelines for each rating and a three or less they must call the office and discuss the job and two or one,

we are immediately calling the client and telling them this is probably going to take longer and you're going to be billed more. So hold their deposit so that you are not stuck with the bill. Kind of got off track, but I'd like to say this anyway. One of the big things that I find when people are pricing Airbnb and VRBO is that they are accepting the fact that the hosts want to put the price of the terrible guests onto the cleaner.

Yeah. And that is one of my rules is we absolutely will not take responsibility for the fact that you rented to the wrong people. If the people that you rented to trash the place and it's going to take me an extra five hours to clean it, you're going to have to pay. So you better take care of yourself, require a deposit and hold the deposit until you've heard from us.

That has changed so much of the discomfort in cleaning vacation rentals. It has changed the atmosphere for my clients. Clients are always feeling scared that they're going to lose out on their revenues. It just seems so backwards to me that they expect the cleaner to take on that risk. Yeah, yeah. And so I won't allow it, I don't allow it.

Do you charge like a flat fee based on the size of the house and then if they are under that three star rating then you call 'em and say Hey there's this hourly add-on as we clean up after this party. Something like that. Actually I don't, I used to do a flat fee and I found that it just created way too many misunderstandings. So what I do is most of the people on my team are actually trained to do consults so I don't have to do consults anymore.

But what we do is we'll go and do an onsite consult. This is the beginning of training the client, making sure they have enough bedding and linens and all of this and taking a look and getting to know how clean the last cleaner was. We are always more thorough in my area than most cleaner. So there's an initial clean price. But to answer your question,

we do an estimate on the total amount of hours it will take to clean the property. So if I decide that a property should take four hours to clean because we offer five star cleanliness, what we say is if it has been an exceptionally clean guest, we will stay and we're done three and a half hours instead of four, we'll stay for half an hour and look for something to clean.

This is when we'll clean light fixtures, blinds, spot wash walls sometimes go out into the garage and do some cobweb removal, whatever it is to keep the place in continuous five star cleanliness. And so what happens is for that two or one rating, a two rating usually means we need an extra hour or two. A one rating means I have no idea this is gonna take a while.

And we just call them and say whichever it is, hey this might take an extra hour or two, better hold the deposit, we'll let you know as soon as we're done. Or hey, we have no idea how long it's gonna take. This place is trashed and we bill them hourly. So the agreement from the client is that they will pay us for the four hours and they will allow us to spend the four hours.

So no having people checking in early, let us clean the place. The nice thing is, is that because we can keep an overall 100% thorough clean place, even when we have kind of messier guests, let's say a person with a four rating instead of a five rating, we have the time to do the work because the light fixtures are always clean,

the windows are always clean, the walls are always clean. You know, we've got a great system so it works out really well. We still do not call it a flat rate fee because it creates misunderstanding with the clients again. So we let them know, this is gonna take four hours, we will be there for four hours and you will be billed for four hours.

Cool. I love these systems that develop over time, lots of steps in there. And those steps came because of all the things that happened in the past. So if you don't learn from your mistakes along the way, then you're bound to repeat them by letting cleaners clean the next party house. We have an Airbnb that we administer. It's like we clean many Airbnbs,

but Brandon and I have one in Albuquerque and we have the cleaning team do that one. And I remember in the early days we did the exact same thing that you talked about. I wasn't paying attention. I let this kid in, he was 18, had like joined Airbnb that morning and lived in the same city the Airbnb was in. Those are all big red flags that I should have been looking at.

And then we cleaned up the next day, I think we spent two hours picking up cigarette butts from the backyard. It was just a gaggle of high school kids all over the place. And we filled three trash cans with beer bottles and they destroyed some furniture. Thankfully Airbnb was quite responsive, you know, for that as a host. 'cause we, we sent a request for money.

I wanted reimbursement for this coffee table. They trashed and Airbnb wouldn't do it until we went through this like hearing they have on the back end. It's a very silly thing. They call it the resolution center. But we did eventually get reimbursed for the coffee table and as far as I know, that kid got banned from the platform. So he burned his one shot on this party in high school and won't ever be able to use Airbnb again.

So yeah, it's vacation rentals. It's a minefield, but it is lucrative like you say. But again, if it was, if it was easy to do, everyone would True. That's the same for any entrepreneur. Right? Yeah. And I just wanted to point out again, like just your attitude, Carrie is so great, like how you embrace problems like that.

Because a big reason why people don't do Airbnbs or some of these other things like is because there are issues and problems. But if you can overcome those problems, those are opportunities. 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.