Episode 116: Unlock the Secrets to Growing a Successful Cleaning Business by Learning from the Pros

Episode 116: Unlock the Secrets to Growing a Successful Cleaning Business by Learning from the Pros

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. Thank you for your time today everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm your host, Brandon Shane. I'm joined by my co-host, Brandon Condre in the house.

What's up Brandon? How's it going? That's me. I'm doing good. Feeling good Wind mountain biking this morning. That's right, man. You've been cranking out some exercise in the mornings and you've been in some much better state. I feel like it's awesome. That's right. So I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is on the mindset side of things and do some cold plunge,

cold shower, exercise in the morning before I try and do work. Feel like it just goes a lot better. Yeah, man, I got outta that habit for a little bit and I've been doing the same thing in the mornings. Mo, our personal trainer, he was like telling me to go on walks every day and just like he, he gave me a new exercise schedule too.

But I agree man, when you put that work in in the morning and just start your day that way, like I just feel so much more energized and ready to go and it's awesome. So it's been funner working with you too, man. You're just in a much funner state. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna keep doing it,

so I'm just doing what works, doubling down on what works. Yeah. So we'll keep you guys updated on the cold plunge, but let's dive into the show for now and give you guys an update on what's been going on in the cleaning business. We're gonna give you guys in this episode an update on what's been going on in Texas, the new launch,

and also the other launch in Santa Fe that we've done with the main company. So yeah, we've got lots to share, lots going on, lots of fun stuff. So as always, let's dive into it and get it going Brandon. Let's tell 'em. Yeah. All right, well let's start with Santa Fe then. Huh? So Santa Fe's been going okay.

It's been out there the longest. We did have one of the three cleaners quit, and which tends to be the trend in service industries, is that they never give two weeks. They're just like, I'm out see you, and they just don't come to work tomorrow. So in that particular case, she told us that she was just too old for our pace,

so I respect that She gave us some legitimate reason for needing to not work, which is we're high throughput, we do five houses a day, which is not super easy. And so she bailed. And so we took some creative evasive maneuvers right away because the other two were now like, I'm gonna quit too 'cause this is too much work with just two people.

So what we did was actually Rena's idea. She was like, can we just pay him a bonus every day that they're a two person team And she wanted to do like 10 or $20. And I said, well let's do the math on what we would've been paying if it was a three person team anyway. And we're still bringing in the same revenue as a two person team.

So just split the hourly wage of the third person essentially. So we ended up paying them $30 a day each, so 60 bucks a day on top of it, we're still bringing in the same revenue. So I mean, yes, those jobs while they're a two person team are not as profitable, but if it means that we get to keep our employees and they are hopefully happy about it,

then I'm game. That sounds way better than the alternative of letting them go. So yeah. But otherwise, it's growing. It's growing slowly. We're still working on ads up there and we need maybe some more steady, this is kind of a catch 22 when you're expanding, is that we need a bunch of customers to be able to provide steady work for the cleaners,

but we can't really get the steady work until we have a steady team. So I need, I need three people plus a floater that are consistent and well trained and then we can start pushing a lot of customers towards it. So we're kind of in this middle space where we're working on it. Yeah, absolutely. And also, yeah, just by in doing that,

we were also able to keep the existing customers. So instead of just completely bailing and everyone bails and customers go too, it's, you just gotta keep going with it. They were happy to be paid more, so that helped alleviate that short term. But yeah, it's been just like, I think everyone's experiencing on an ongoing basis, like the hiring and all that is for whatever reason,

a more challenge than it's ever been. So you gotta get creative with hiring, trying out different platforms. So we can share some of those ideas as well. But just we've kind of been like going outside the box as far as thinking how to hire more internally and just figure out different ways to get more interest from people that would be ideal for what we're looking for.

But yeah, Santa Fe's coming along. I mean it's, we've got more and more paying customers coming along. We, I saw a review the other day from up in Santa Fe and was it Good? I didn't see it. Yeah. Yeah, it was a five star review. And so it's not all bad and it's not all great either, but it's in the beginning,

it's always, I think with anything, you know, you're gonna have a lot more, this is what John, our CFO said yesterday. He was like, if you're just purely focused on getting to the point like we have, if we weren't gonna expand and grow, we would just work on efficiencies and would just work on trimming stuff down and making everything more efficient,

more profitable. But when you're in growth mode and you're expanding and you're rapidly growing, there's gonna become more inefficiencies. You're gonna become naturally, you're gonna break stuff, things are gonna go wrong, things are gonna happen. So until we get some of that stuff more dialed in, we're just in a very hypergrowth state right now. So that's natural and that's normal.

So we're working through it and we're gonna share some of that with you guys just as we do it. You guys I'm sure can relate 'cause a lot of people experience the same thing and we're all working through it together. So the other thing that I cool is since you're up in Los Alamos, which is really close to Santa Fe, you were sharing with me the other week that just like some of this local press or stuff that we put out at,

it gets reshared around the town a lot more and like a lot more people talking about it naturally 'cause it's just a smaller town. So I thought that was fun to see. Yeah, we donated some free cleans to a PTA fundraiser. I think we may have mentioned this on a different episode, but then the PTA put out a press release and we were mentioned in there as like,

hey, there's three cleans from Sandia, Green Clean that are going out there. And I would checked on it like a couple times during that night and a lot of people bid on it. So we gave up some time and money on free cleans, but 36 people bid on it that would've not known that we were there. And then maybe they talk to their neighbors that are like,

Hey, how was that? Like it was great. And then they just come back and like, all right, I'll do it. Yeah, yeah. So it's like any press is good press. I mean that's what they even bad press technically, but these are good things we're putting out there. But when we were very first starting out, I mean we tried everything.

We were going to home shows and community events everywhere and I think eventually we kind of dialed in what worked the best for our market. But that is true. You, you wanna always be as aggressive as possible as far as getting the word out and branding, just having whether if you have cars out great, but if you don't, just like getting out to as many community things you can get to and getting that name out.

Especially if you're in a smaller community like people talk and it doesn't take long for word of mouth to travel far. And so that's working on in Santa Fe and I think that one's definitely further along than Texas. 'cause Texas is the newer launch and there's a lot more stuff from scratch that we're doing in Texas that has slowed things down. But it's all moving forward too.

It's all progress. It's just slower in the beginning 'cause there's a lot of moving pieces, a lot of things going on. Yeah, That's a good pivot to how is Texas going? So let's talk about giddy up green clean. Yeah, so giddy up green clean is, we're giddy up out here, we're getting it going. And I think we had a lot going on doing both of them simultaneously.

So maybe that's part of why we were a little less organized than we normally are. But I would say for the most part it's going great. And we had some snafus and issues with just even little things like setting up new accounts 'cause it's a completely different brand out here. We rebranded everything. So for example, like we had our Google My Business account got fraudulently banned temporarily and we had to reinstate that and our,

our new Facebook account, same thing, our nextdoor account, same thing. So it was just one thing after the other like we had to rework stuff and reinstate stuff and it was very strange. But anyways, like those are just things that happen in business and things are gonna happen, things are gonna go wrong, you just gotta keep going. And so we've since fixed almost all those issues.

We've got ads dialed in and things working a lot better. And speaking of all that ads that we're actually working on a really cool version of our marketing dashboard that we've shared in our mastermind group with the paid members of our group and everything like that. But we're developing a version of what we use in-house for our marketing dashboard that we will let you guys know very soon.

We'll release that out to the public but that's gonna be something that would help you guys essentially build a similar pipeline for your businesses for acquiring those new leads and automating a lot of those processes, nurturing those leads down the pipeline to book that estimate and to get on the schedule and be becoming recurring customers and then backfill that with leads. So we have a whole product that we'll share with you guys soon on that and it's just repackaging what we're doing with this new launch in Texas.

And so we're perfecting that system right now. That's part of what's taking longer too is we're just dialing that in and figuring it all out. But yeah, let's tell 'em out what else is going on Brandon? We got ads going, we've gotten out there. Yeah, when we launched we sent one of our best cleaners to Texas to train the team.

She went down there for a week, she was awesome. And then in the two weeks since then, all of those people are gone. So all the people that we trained have turned over for various reasons. There was a safety issue with a domestic violence restraining order and when we got rid of that one, one of the other cleaners was her friend and so she left.

And so the team is all new, it's fully staffed, which is great, but we've got quality issues because they're not trained, they're trained with the videos but we're trying to get 'em hands-on training. So like we're going through what a lot of you guys are going through where we're trying to train people from videos for the first team, but a lot of it's hands-on and you just gotta get in there.

So we are fortunate to be in the position of having another cleaning company, a different state. So what we're gonna do is send one of that same cleaner back down there again. She's going next week, we're gonna train the cleaners that we have. We have five of them on staff right now. And so if we train them and one of them leaves,

there's still more. And the idea is if you can keep the knowledge in the team long enough if someone leaves, then the ones that know it we'll show you like how it's done in the video. And that was a hiccup that we're getting over. So that's going. And then one of the benefits to starting slow like we are right now is that had we gone full all in on ads from the get go,

we would now have paying customers that are expecting all this awesome stuff and they get in there and then it's like not so great. And so that's not good for your review cleans like you want to be delivering the best you can. So in the end, us having these issues with Google, my business not linking our account correctly may have worked out in our favor because we are gonna retrain the team,

get that really dialed in and then push the button on a lot of more advertising. Yeah, yeah. So seeing it as a silver lining and we were like kind of, I don't know, a little disheartened I guess in the beginning 'cause we were like we're pushing hard and things just weren't like weren't taken off as fast. But in the end it's really what it comes back to guys is you don't want to put your product out to the world and advertise and have a ton of eyeballs on it until you really get the cleaning system dialed in and you have your team up to speed and everyone's proficient.

So we did and we're still doing review cleans and neighbors and friends and stuff out here, which is giving us great feedback. It's giving us points to work with on the team. So just earlier this week we went back and technically a lot of the team needs to be retrained anyways 'cause we had to revamp the team. But like Brandon said, our normal procedure and process is we go through video trainings that's auditory and visual learning and then we go out in the field keen aesthetic learning and you capture all that in different ways,

but you wanna do the videos work great 'cause it sets the concepts in place. And then the in-person training was amazing with Maria. I was so thankful to have her out here because when you guys get to that point where you have a trainer that really knows your systems and who knows, maybe we'll send Maria to your company and maybe that's another thing we should help people out with.

But it was so cool because Maria just took charge. She like led the teams, she quickly identified who was the team lead and really is a great manager of the people and teaching the system. So I would say that is really key. So when she comes back out here to retrain the teams again, again it's just gonna be really nice to have that just to get everyone back up to speed and build back from scratch.

But again, it's better to do that now than later and get that in place now before you really start pushing the marketing more because that feedback in the beginning is critical and you don't necessarily want everyone talking about that word of mouth. You want that internal, okay, let's dial this in more and then turn on ads and like the next pieces, which is for example,

the moms group we're, we just got a part of in the community out here, which is really, really cool. Like if you guys can find moms groups and communities or pools of people where you can find great customers. That's what we're talking about doing. And so we'll update you guys on how that goes as we launch it out like the next week.

But just finding where your customers are hanging out and getting in front of those. So we sponsored a group out here, it's just a huge Facebook group slash community neighborhood organization. So if you can find one of those in your town, I mean those are great organic type places to start finding customers and then you can ramp it up with other traffic, other ads,

other ways. But what we've learned I guess is don't do it all at once because it's, it's actually good to ramp up slowly and and work out those kinks in the beginning. Yeah, It's funny we're not above admitting our mistakes and telling you how to shift gears at the same time. So we're working on it. So yeah, I mean by and large I think Texas is going well.

The brand's there, the market's there, we need to get this quality kind of tripped up there a little bit. And then I think once that's in line we should be solid. Yeah, I mean we got, the car looks really cool, we got an orange brightly colored car with the new logo on it, the car topper the broom like we always do.

So that's been really fun to see drive around and it kind of like brings me back to when we started in Albuquerque Brandon and we, it was like that first car we had, we were so proud of it and it was so cool. It felt like we were starting this big business and we only had one car, you know? And so yeah,

it's just kind of like bringing back those memories and then we're doing it differently this time as you guys know. So it's been interesting starting out of a storage unit. It's a little funny when employees are asking like, so where do I meet you? Or where's the office? And I'm like, we don't have an office. Like just meet me at this parking lot over here and we'll go over.

And so I don't know if that's helped maybe as much because maybe people are like, I don't know if these guys are legit or what, but like they know we have the big business in New Mexico so I think that's helped a lot. People see that this is a ground floor opportunity they can grow with. But it's been interesting, you know, so Brandon,

you're usually more hands-on like when we did a lot of that stuff in Albuquerque, you were better at building some of that stuff out. I think we told everyone the, the initial manager we hired didn't work out. So I've been doing more of the management duties and getting the storage unit going and all this stuff that I didn't know I was gonna be doing.

But it's working out. We figure it out. So we've been doing interviews for that As well. No, I mean we'll get that one replaced but like, like hire slow, fire fast. That's the situation. We maybe went a little too fast on that one, should have had an audition or something. But look, either way we are working on it so it's gonna happen.

So it's going on. You guys have got the regular updates. So that's the current update here in the middle of April. We Do have paying customers though. We have several paying customers, we are working through it and we've got a whole lot more that are about to jump on board with this new group. So it's slower than we wanted. But again guys,

it's better to start slow than go too fast and blow everything up and have a bunch of negative reviews and stuff like that so. So that's what we're working through And what else? I mean we're just gonna keep going, right Brandon? I Think that's the update. I mean we'll let you guys know. Like I think the big update will be when that team starts to fill up and we're talking about hiring team number two when we're looking at getting it.

So yeah, I mean stay tuned for that. We'll obviously keep you guys updated. It's kind of like what's going on in our world these days? Yeah, so stay tuned guys, we'll keep you updated. Just if you're out there experiencing these same issues, just realize like this is business and these are problems, but problems are opportunities. And if you think of like an inventor or they're creating something to solve a problem and like you're inventing a business,

you're solving a problem and your role as an entrepreneur is to serve people and to solve problems. And so if you can just think that way and get excited because a lot of people shy away from problems, but as an entrepreneur you should get excited because a problem means an opportunity for you to solve it and make more money. And if it was easy,

everybody would do it. So be grateful that it's not easy. Like not everyone can start a cleaning business and whether it's hiring challenges or technology or whatever issues you're gonna ever gonna run across, it's good. It's gonna mean more money on the back end when you solve that problem for your customers, for your employees, whatever it might be. And that's just a shift in your mindset.

That's why we always talk about mindset guys, is because a lot of this game is mental and it's like athletes and Olympians like it's all in their head. You gotta visualize what you want every day and you gotta write down your goals and you gotta keep working at it and don't get discouraged, don't get burned out. Just keep getting better, keep showing up and do the hard work and the results will come.

So that's the encouragement for you guys as you are on your journey with us. And we're not gonna quit. We're gonna keep going and just get back up every time you get knocked down and eventually things come together better. And I can tell you on the beginning when we started San Diego Green thing, we did not have near the knowledge or experience or confidence even that we have now.

So now this stuff that's funny is like as you get bigger and more experience like that stuff just slides off your back. It doesn't bother you as much. I would say that it, this stuff probably would've bothered us a lot more when we started Sandia. Would you agree Brandon? Yeah dude, we were sweating it in the beginning at Sandia. We weren't paying ourselves.

This is nice 'cause Sandia is still paying us. Brandon and I we're earning a living wage. No one's family is stressed out from a financial standpoint compared to where we were like back then, which was ultra high stress. So that part's going a little bit better. Like you can kind of take your time and adjust it a little bit more. But yeah,

the knowledge curve that we have is just much higher. And so these problems we're running into, they're not, nothing is overcomeable. I mean we can overcome all these things. So we're working towards that. I'm not worried about anything at all, it's just we're just giving you the update in real time. That's the benefit of watching us do this. As you get to hear.

Well everybody quit, we gotta start over. Like the answer isn't sell the car and rethink our life strategy. Like no man, that's a little hiccup. We'll get past it. Yeah, it's just keep on going and like what you said. And another way to say that is everything is figure outable and you can figure it out and you just gotta have a positive mindset,

positive attitude. Look for the opportunity in the problem and you'll find it. And so yeah, we're gonna be sharing a lot more about hiring and we've got some cool guests coming on in the future and just some cool stuff we're working on as well to continue to solve those problems for our business for you guys. So stick around 'cause we are just getting started guys.

Everything with the Profit, Cleaners, everything with the content we're putting out, it's just gonna keep getting better as we get better and you guys get better. So thank you guys for your feedback. We've been having some amazing coaching calls with our group and our members and we're actually gonna hop on one here in like 20 minutes. So if you have not yet Jumped,

yeah, that brings up a good point. If you're not on those coaching calls, man, you should consider buying that course. 'cause we do direct one-to-one support in there. Someone asked us a very pointed question, I've gotten on a couple, one-to-one Zoom calls and help people sort out pricing and building out spreadsheets for people. So those things are, I think people are getting a lot of value outta those.

Yeah, it's huge guys. And it's like if you could shortcut time and compressed time and get the knowledge and the confidence and the clarity that you need to just take the right steps as well as what not to do, like it's going to just circumvent so many issues and problems and help you get to the success part of the road so much faster. And it's funner to do it together instead of doing it on your own.

And I've done plenty of businesses on my own and it's definitely funner to do it with people. So yeah, if you wanna be mentored and work with us, go check out Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass, watch the masterclass and you guys will learn a lot more. You can book a call with me and the team and we'll get you guys going.

We've got some new stuff coming out all the time, so we're just constantly getting better. So yeah, we'll see you guys on the inside of that and until next time, get it clean.