Episode 118: Getting Your Cleaning Business Black Belt: Mastering Skill Sets and Leveraging Strengths

Episode 118: Getting Your Cleaning Business Black Belt: Mastering Skill Sets and Leveraging Strengths

Brandon Schoen:
You don't never see anyone go from white belt to black belt or white belt to brown belt like right away. It takes years and years and years of mastering the fundamentals. And like in, in Karate Kid, he thought it was ridiculous. But Mr. Miyagi was just like, no, just do this punch like a thousand times. And there's actually a quote by Bruce Lee and he says, I don't fear the man that does a thousand kicks. I fear the man that does one kick every day for a thousand days. Right? And it's like that, ah, there you that consistency of mastering that one thing over and over and over and over again. Which is another great quote, which is you become great through frequency and through practice and repeating something over and over again. And that's where greatness comes from. But it's the same thing in business where you actually do have to master the skillset in order to get to that goal that your, your goal, yeah, is this big vision of a hundred thousand or a million, whatever it is that's gonna change your life. But in order to get there, you have to master certain skill sets.

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, and I'm joined by my co-host Brandon Condrey in the house. What's up Brandon? Hello. Hello. And together guys, we're the Profit Cleaners and we are on this journey with you. Thank you for your time today listening to the podcast. We are all building our cleaning businesses together, sharing our wins, sharing our challenges,

and this journey and just arising Tide raises all ships guys. So that's why we're here to help you guys out. We learn a lot actually doing these podcasts, doing all the coaching that we do. So we're having a lot of fun guys and we've been getting a lot of great feedback from people. And we just wanna do an episode today. This is the Martial Arts Karate Kid episode,

right? Brandon, we're gonna tell everyone about it is. Yeah. And we're gonna liken it to business is like a giant UFC match. It's like the karate kid in a lot of ways. And we're gonna get into why those reasons. But I think what it comes down to is when you first get into business and when you want to have success,

you have this big goal and you want to achieve the goal, which is usually money. You wanna earn a certain amount of money, maybe it's a hundred thousand dollars, maybe it's a million, maybe it's way more than that. But before you can get in there and start chopping, like Brandon was, we were talking about this just a little bit before,

but like the karate kid, he wanted to go in there and just start chopping people, right? And just the Mr. Miyagi was like, no, you gotta paint the fence, you gotta do the thing first. And so let's break that down, what that analogy is and like how we can relate that to business. Yeah. So I'm gonna blame this on the social media,

movies, Hollywood, whatever, like I watched the social network. The social network was awesome, but not everyone's making Facebook. Even in that movie. Facebook didn't happen overnight. There was a lot of coding that went down on the backend. But the idea here is that you're not gonna go from zero to a million dollars in revenue overnight. You may not even do that in a year.

It just depends on what you got going on. And if we're sticking with the karate kid analogy here, the martial arts analogy, Danny and the karate kid, Daniel wanted to come in there and start chopping people and wax on, wax off is what he did. Paint this fence, wax my car, and then eventually gets mad at him. Like if we're going way back to 1988 or whenever that movie was,

he gets mad at him and says, you're not teaching me anything, I'm just doing all this stuff around your house. And then he starts trying to hit him in this clip in the movie. What he was doing, it was the motions of painting the fence and waxing the car is what helped him defend against all these incoming hits. And so there is this term like there's quite a kid was iconic,

but like, you know, you've, you've been migi by getting taught something else when you thought you were learning something different, right? So that's the same setup here. So like you don't want to go into business. I mean everyone's gunning for the the fences and you're trying to shoot for the moon, but when it doesn't happen in a week, people get upset.

But if you stick with the martial arts thing, when you walk into a new studio, a new dojo, you're gonna learn some stuff. They slap a white belt on you and you wrestle around with kids. You do basic, basic stuff and you have to work your way through that belt system over time. And the belts are really just to prove that you know,

the next skillset required so that when you're sparring someone else, you're not getting like your neck broken because you don't know how to defend yourself as a white belt versus a six degree black belt. I've never taken martial arts. So for those of you listeners who have, I am sorry if I'm butchering things. Brandon has, yeah I do. I come from a martial arts background since I was eight years old doing martial arts,

mostly TaeKwonDo and hop keto did a little juujitsu at some point I did get a black belt in TaeKwonDo and Hop Keto, but it took many, many years, right? I didn't walk into that studio and day one start fighting people and knocking people out, choking and holding people. Like none of that, right? It was start from the basics, like you said Brandon the white belt.

There's a reason you start with the white belt and then it takes time to get to that next level. And eventually that yellow or that orange or that blue belt, whatever it is, every martial arts school is different. But when you wearing that belt that signifies something, it signifies you've mastered a certain number of skill sets to get to that next level.

And so you don't never see anyone go from white belt to black belt or white belt to brown belt like right away. It takes years and years and years of mastering the fundamentals. And in Karate Kid he thought it was ridiculous, but Mr. Miyagi was just like, no, just do this punch like a thousand times. And there's actually a quote by Bruce Lee and he says,

I don't fear the man that does a thousand kicks. I fear the man that does one kick every day for a thousand days. And it's like that consistency of mastering that one thing over and over and over and over again. Which is another great quote, which is you become great through frequency and through practice and through repeating something over and over again. And that's where greatness comes from.

But it's the same thing in business where you actually do have to master the skillset in order to get to that goal that your goal, yeah is big vision of a hundred thousand or a million, whatever it is that's gonna change your life. But in order to get there, you have to master certain skill sets. Just like when you walk into a martial arts studio,

you don't just walk in there and knock someone out or submit 'em, right? You have to start with cardio and building up your muscle and you have to learn how to pin someone or how to sprawl or how to defend yourself or do certain techniques that are gonna be building up to that next point. And so in business, to me, when I think of it like that in this corollary of like martial arts and like mastering each one of these skill sets,

well once you master all those skillsets and you can repeat 'em over and over and over again and you go through these levels of stages of advancing in all those skill sets, well then you can go out into the mat and you can pin somebody because you've mastered your cardio, you're in great shape and now you know how to sprawl and now you know how to get out of another submission and you know how to escape.

And then you know how to do all these things, all these skills that you've built for a long time. So to me it's the same thing in business, like when we're teaching you guys and doing our course and our coaching and everything like that, we're talking about these skill sets, these are the skill sets that we teach guys, which is for business,

it's not a pin, it's not a a sprawl, it's not a choke hold submission, it's sales, it's marketing, it's ads, it's copy, it's mastering finances, it's mastering all these systems within your business that are gonna help you get to that end goal of whatever that monetary amount is. But you gotta do the repetition and the frequency of those skill sets and not just give up right away.

You can't just try it once and be like, oh it didn't work. It's trying it over and over and over and over again and not quitting. And that's a big part of it. And I think a lot of people just quit too soon. Yeah, I mean look, there's so many stats out there. Like most businesses fail in the first year.

50% of businesses fail in the first five years. So that's not because businesses fail on their own, that's because who's running it is not going through these belts like you did it for a year, I opened a restaurant, nobody came so I closed it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like that's a terrible excuse. What you didn't do was market it correctly or you had the food wrong.

There's always something there. But I think in the spirit of growth mindset, constant improvement, if it didn't work, like do it this way, like okay, well shoot man, like can we try it a different way and like see if the results are different. Like this is a data driven part of me talking, let's AB test this against each other and see which option works better,

which one's more efficient. And then you just keep iterating on that. We've talked to you guys before on the podcast about a couple metaphors. Like one of them is this pipeline that's gonna push a bunch of fluid or money through it and you have to build the pipeline, you gotta dig this trench, you gotta source a bunch of pipe, you gotta lay that pipe,

strap it, weld it all together, get it going, put the valve on it, connect it to the source, whatever. And then at the end you turn on the spigot and your water comes out, your money comes out. That doesn't happen overnight. You don't just lay pipe miles and miles of pipeline that takes planning, execution, all that.

The other one we talk about frequently too is the locomotive. If we talk about Brandon, Shane's previous history with drop shipping Amazon businesses, which are super easy to set up, it's also super easy for Amazon to see that your product had this 10,000 jump in sales and then Amazon basics just knocks it off and starts making it tomorrow and then your business is gone.

That's an easy come, easy go situation. The flip side of that is getting a locomotive fully up to speed. Like America was largely very successful as a new country because we mastered the railroad like early on, getting it from coast to coast, well like building that rail took a long time to get the actual railway out there. And then once you start moving things on it,

a locomotive can pull tons and tons and tons of freight. But getting it up to speed is like in the old days, if we're sticking to the pioneer metaphor there, you got a coal in there and get it going and heat it up, it's gotta build up all this pressure and then start turning wheels. The nice thing about a locomotive though is it takes a lot of effort to get going,

but once it's going by virtue of physics, it just has this huge momentum. It takes a lot less energy to keep it moving at speed because it's got the momentum going for it. And that is very much the situation that we find ourselves in right now. Like we're fortunate that San Diego Green clean has worked out as well as it has and it's a lot easier to manage now than it was in the early days.

In the early days it was a lot of putting out of fires. And now it's, I mean like look at if you want to like you could take a couple weeks off and check in with your office staff every now and then and that's where we wanna get you guys to. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I hear you saying Brandon is it's gonna take time.

Nothing, anything worth having anything great is gonna take some time and you guys should know that and have this persistent patience that you're gonna know that it's gonna come, but you're gonna be patient and you gotta just keep hacking away at it. But also it's those skills that you're building along the way and it's also more importantly who you become. When we get into business and we wanna do all these great things,

yeah you're gonna make money and you're gonna do great things along the way, but ultimately more importantly, who you become and the skills that you acquire along the way are what are gonna make you a better person? What's gonna be what gets your business to that next level? And so when we're talking about mastering these skillsets, just like you would as a martial artist,

mastering how to take someone down, how to submit someone how to do a certain hold or get out of a certain hold or whatever it is, those are all skill sets that you have to constantly be refining, right? And so in business you put out an ad and you run it and maybe you put out some Facebook ads or whatever it is that you're trying to grow your business with.

Well think about even just the sales or the copywriting, the copy on your website. Have you honed that in? Have you dialed that into your exact customer avatar? Have you put out ads and tested them and gotten that data and that feedback and said, well this wasn't working. I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try this. And kept going and to the point where you got your blue belt,

got your brown belt, got your black belt in that area and that skill. Cuz that's what we're talking about guys, is you should always be working on these skill sets. One of them is the sales and leadership are a couple that you should always be working on. But within your business to grow it, to get to that, that million dollars or whatever your goal is,

you need to be constantly refining those skills. Sales, marketing ads, copy, finances, there's so many other structures and things in there, but those are some of the core skill sets. If you keep mastering those skill sets, those skill sets are what are gonna get you to the other side. It's not go in there and just get a bunch of customers day one and you want,

it's gonna take time. How do you get those customers? How do you build that business? It's through developing these skillsets within yourself, within your company. And then the best part about business is maybe not like ufc, maybe more like w e wrestling match, but you can tag someone in like, so maybe I have a skillset that Brandon doesn't have or vice versa,

or we need some type of skillset, we need someone to run ads or do marketing. If that's not one of our skillsets, we can tag someone in who is the best in the world at doing that. And you can build your team and bring these skillsets in your business and it doesn't mean you have to do all of 'em. So that's kind of the cool thing in business is that you can build a team.

It's all about the teamwork. It's not about one individual person doing everything, which maybe more is like the martial artist who's figuring out all those things. But I think in business you have a little bit more flexibility, you can tag people in, right? And we do that all the time. We have all sorts of people that we tag in to help us in these parts of our business cuz we might be good at 'em.

But someone else is great Adam. Yeah, I mean this again, we've talked about so many times, but you do not need to do everything. And I think this is one of the reasons that businesses fail a lot or that the owner just gets burnt out. Like this is gonna sound bad, but I don't like talking to customers. I know that I did sales when we started,

but that is draining. Like you just hear so many complaints and it just, it wears on. And so that was when we hired that part out and I did not have to do the estimates and talk to inbound customer complaints anymore, man, life got so much better. But that's me. That is my weakness. And so that was one of the things that I was looking to tag someone in on.

So like you may really thrive on talking to customers, like if you're a true extrovert, you get energy by talking to people. I am not that way. So essentially the shortcut here is lean into your strengths and hire the weaknesses. So you want to be able to replace what you don't do well. Like I am really good at spreadsheets, I love spreadsheets,

I think in numbers, I think in data, a lot of people do not do that. It is a mystery. I have talked to people about spreadsheets and just watched their eyes glaze over totally fine. I am not offended about that. It just means that you, the glazed over spreadsheet person should be hiring someone else to be looking at your spreadsheets and making your spreadsheets.

And then that's the person like your bookkeeper that's gonna be looking at QuickBooks and then will tell you, Hey, based on what I see, this is the interpretation. That's what you're hiring is someone to tell you the secret sauce behind there. They don't need to show you the spreadsheet and walk you through every cell. They just need to say, Hey,

I think we're lacking in X, Y, Z because of this report and we should make this change. That's what the business advisor is for and that's what we're telling you to do here, really. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, if it's not something like what Brandon said there was so huge, like focus on your strengths don't f a lot of people are always like,

oh you gotta work on your weaknesses. Well you can, but you'd also get so much greater if you focus on your strengths because you're already great at that. If you could hone that in and become even greater, you could be the best in the world at that one thing and hire the other people on your team that are the best in the world at those other things cuz they love those things.

And so if you can build a team of people that are all passionate and have frequently practiced that skillset and they're the best at it, then you put together a winning team and you can go so much faster. And that's why we really are big on delegating, hiring, even having outsourcing certain things. And we have a dedicated virtual fractional cfo. In the beginning we were doing all the finances,

but as you grow, you don't wanna miss things, you don't wanna have things fall through the crack. You wanna have somebody that is a master at the numbers at QuickBooks, at forecasting stuff out and budgeting stuff and someone that does it all the time that that's their skillset, that they can very quickly assess something and create a solution and help offer the best possible outcome.

And so when you build your team around that way, you actually do incredible things. And there's a book called Strength Finders that we've gone through and that's a great book to find your strength. If you haven't read strength, I think it's called Strength Finders 2.0 now cause they have another version out. But if it's not through a personality test, if it's through something like that,

find out what your strengths are and do put yourself in a seat on the bus where you're developing those skills and using those skills in your business. And that's where you're gonna be the happiest. That's where you're gonna be the most passionate. And that's the same thing for your team. If someone on your team is really good at bringing in leads and doing the marketing,

well then let them do that. And also part of that is don't stop. A lot of times I said earlier, people will start getting into this and they'll say, oh, it didn't work or I tried it for a little bit. You have to be relentless. You have to be consistently relentless with constant perseverance to continue doing and pushing this stuff through until you do get results,

until you do get enough skills to where you can master it really. And then once you master those skills, each one of those skills again is what's gonna get you to that bigger goal. 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.

There's a lot there. I mean we, we are talking about a lot of stuff right now. So I think the overall message is that you do not have to do it all yourself, but also don't expect it to work overnight. So I mean part of the it didn't work, I'm really mad part of that maybe that it actually didn't work. So before you set these things up for yourself,

tell yourself what success looks like. Okay, we're gonna try this new system, we're gonna hire this person. What does success look like by implementing that system, like some milestone that you are shooting for and once you get there, then like ta-da, you knew that it worked. But if you go into it with a vague sense of we're hiring a virtual assistant,

this is going to make the company better. If you don't have a way to track that, it's making the company better. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to cut your customers hold time on phones from X to Y? Are you trying to increase revenue from this to this? Are you trying to outsource something so your payroll goes down?

Like you gotta know what you're shooting for to make it work. And so that is another way to see if it's actually working. And if it's not change tack like don't, this is an economic thing like sunk cost fallacy. You don't wanna keep throwing money at a bad idea. So it is a good idea to make sure that you know where we're going here.

And if it's not on track, what can you tweak along the way? No system is perfect and systems should be adjusted constantly to fit market conditions, employment conditions, whatever is going on in inside of your business should be flexible and nimble. That is one of the superhero skills of running a small business as opposed to a publicly traded corporation where your hands are tied by shareholders and blah blah blah.

You are not, you can do whatever you want tomorrow. Hey tomorrow we're changing the logo, we're changing the business name. I'm sick of this one, we're switching it up. I'm using an extreme example here. But what I'm saying is you can do that, but you need to know what the trigger point is to know that we need to make a change.

Otherwise you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something works. Yeah, and I think a big part of that too is don't totally get discouraged when something doesn't work. It doesn't mean even when you hear no from a customer, that doesn't mean they're saying no forever. It doesn't mean they're objecting that they'll never use their services forever. But even when you're doing any of these skill sets you're trying to build within your business,

let's say you are running some ads, well you ran some ads and they didn't work. It doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just means that type of ad for that type of demographic with that type of targeting or whatever isn't working. So now you've learned something. Yeah, even on that week, maybe that ad didn't work on that week, maybe it would work the next week.

It just, you gotta switch. Yeah, exactly. And now you have that new knowledge, you have gained new knowledge and even more skills cuz you're like, this didn't work, I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try this until it does work. And every time you try something it doesn't work. You learn something and it gets you that much closer to your goal.

So guys just know this is gonna be an ongoing thing in business, I think in life, you know, you could say this too, you gotta be constantly working it on your personal life, on your communication, on your relationships, on all these little skillsets that you can build in order to have an extraordinary life. And so it's the same in business.

You gotta hone in these skill sets and you gotta put in the hard work and tell him the quote that John always tells us, Brandon when we're complaining about doing the work. Yeah, whenever I bemoan something to John, he always slaps me down by saying, it sounds like you don't wanna do the hard work. Which is very demeaning sometimes. I love John,

but that's a like you little like whack across the face. But it's a good point. I'm complaining about the thing, the very thing that we're talking about on this podcast that hey, whatever I wanna happen is not working the way that I want to do it. Well then do something about it man. Like change it up. So yeah, it sounds like you don't wanna do the hard work.

That's the cool Yeah, and if you shift your mindset and you say no, like I do wanna do the hard work cuz when I do the hard work it's gonna get easier because when you put in the hard work, especially upfront, that's when a lot of the hard work is, is the first time you do something, when you first launch a business especially,

it's not gonna always be easier. There's, you're still gonna come up with other challenges, but it's like as you grow, as you scale, be excited to do the hard work, be excited to jump in and learn the new skill to run up the mountain and build that cardio and like do the hard thing because the more things that you're used to doing hard things,

it's gonna be easier when things come up for you to do. And recently, Brandon and I both to take like cold showers and we do cold water therapy stuff. Part of the reason we do that is because if you can train your brain to do the hard things, then when other hard things come up to do in your life, it'll actually be a lot easier cuz you're training your brain to do stuff that you're like,

ah man, I don't wanna get in that cold water, I'm gonna do it. And then when you do it, you're like, oh, that wasn't so hard. Now I feel great. So that's just part of it. Yeah, so I mean there's a lot of knowledge in there you guys. I wanna throw out one last thing before we close out here,

which is there's a movie that came out in 2011. It was a documentary, it was called Giro Dreams of Sushi. It followed an 85 year old sushi master in Tokyo who ran a three star, a three star Michelin star sushi restaurant that only had 10 seats. You're just getting in the mind of this guy. He is really unique, but one of the craziest things about the movie is he's got these two sons that why don't take over the restaurant when he retires or dies.

I mean he's 85 after all, but one of his sons, the only thing that he's been allowed to do for 10 years is make the rice. And this is like the Miyagi of the sushi world here cuz the world is so critical and he will not let his son graduate to some other part of the restaurant until he masters the rice. And so this kid has been cooking rice for 10 years to try and get to the point where his father is like,

all right, you got the small task down, now we can move on to bigger things. So again, this is an extreme example. I'm not comparing your cleaning business to a 10 year rice cooking master class here, but the metaphor is still the same, which you will see across a bunch of real life examples and Hollywood examples is that you are not gonna pick this up overnight and start flying a plane.

I have said many times that I wanna start flying a plane. I cannot go land a plane tomorrow. You need to learn lots of stuff on the ground before you can even go to the part where you get to learn the basic stuff in the air. And then all of those things get more and more complicated. It takes years to master that stuff.

So don't get discouraged. Keep it up. Yeah, imagine trying to do that Brandon trying to fly a plane without having mastered the ground skills and the taking off skills and the other monitoring or whatever the heck goes on. I don't even know, but you would just crash that plane. And I, that's what happens all the time in business. People crash their businesses and they're like,

well, I tried everything and it didn't work. But it's like, no, you didn't master the skillsets. You didn't continue going when it didn't work and continuing to figure it out until you mastered it. Yeah, the sad part about those people that crashed the business is they're gonna blame it on something else that wasn't their fault. They don't even know that they did something wrong.

Just by virtue of you listening to this podcast, you're already a league above someone who's gonna torpedo a business like that because you are out here trying to actively improve it by listening to someone else who knows better than you do that's like a mentor. And so just by doing that, you're already getting the wheels spinning on the locomotive a little bit faster. So look out outside of your self,

you are not the business genius cleaning person that you might think you are. Those are the ones that'll torpedo it. So yeah, just keep up with it. I think you're on the right path. Yeah. And part of that guys is why we do what we do is we've made this a lot simpler for you. I mean, we had a mentor when we got started.

We still talked to our mentor, but we modeled those systems, we modeled success. And if you want to shave a decade off your life, save you some time model success. Don't try to do it all on your own and figure it all out even though you could. There is an internet out there and you can go, it's an in information fire hose and you can go try to learn a bunch of stuff from there,

but it'll take you time. So it's like, what's your time worth? And ultimately that's why we do what we do guys, is to package this up. A lot of these things we're talking about refining these skillsets, we've packaged it up for you. This is what we help our students with. So when you guys are working with us, if you're in our coaching program with our other students,

like we are sharing with you guys what has taken us years and years of years to figure out these skillsets, these what ads work, what copy works, how the financial system works, how the marketing works, all these systems and structures that are gonna help you guys run your business like a well-oiled machine. And it's gonna keep going without you. So if you guys haven't yet,

check out the masterclass, Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass. That's the whole story where we dive into that more, guys, you can hear the more the story behind how we grew our business, how we scaled it. And that'll give you guys even a time to book with us. If you wanna hop on a call, we do strategy calls with our students.

So check that out guys. Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass. And if you guys are getting any value from this show, please leave us a review. Please share it out to the world. Please subscribe to the show and helps us out a lot so we can keep doing this so we can keep delivering value and helping everyone out. And I think that's pretty much it.

Brandon, right? Yeah, keep it clean. Keep 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.