Episode 119: Is My Town Too Small to Start a Cleaning Business?

Episode 119: Is My Town Too Small to Start a Cleaning Business?

Brandon Schoen:
What it really is guys, is it's your mindset and if you have a possibility mindset and you believe you can achieve the impossible, even what other people might think is impossible, if it's a limitation, what others might think is a limitation, see as an opportunity, right? So see a small town as you're more connected, you're more efficient, you're more in a targeted area and you have more impact. And then once you prove that concept, then you can go to the bigger markets if that's your goal. But really I think reverse engineer what your goal is. What do you want to be getting out of this? What's your revenue goal? Reverse engineer that down to the customer level and then go from there. But like Brandon said at the beginning, it's literally 50 or a hundred customers. You can have a very, very successful business depending on what your goals are. And that's not a lot. And most towns can absolutely handle 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 podcast. 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. Thanks all for being here guys. I'm Brandon Chain, your host. I'm joined by my amazing co-host, Brandon Condrey in the house. What's up Brandon? Yo, yo, yo. So guys, we got,

we got some time to share with you today that we've get been getting a lot of questions. We just wanted to cover a pretty que you know, often question that comes in and just g dive into it. So we're just gonna get into it. A lot of you guys out there thinking about starting a cleaning business, you guys ask this question, you're thinking through the market research,

the due diligence, and you're wondering, Hey, I might be living in a smaller town, or you're wanting to achieve the success that we're achieving here with with Sandia, Green, Clean in the different markets we're going into. So that question comes up pretty often. People email us, they say, Hey, what about my market? Is it too big?

Is it too small? Normally not too big, but you guys ask if it's too small. I think too small is the focus, yeah, is the focus. So we just want to answer that question for you guys real quick and, and do a few quick q and a call. This is actually something we do all the time on our coaching calls.

So if you like this kind of content, jump into our coaching program, you guys will love it. But let's jump in Brandon. So we have this question that comes in often another potential students. One of the listeners of the podcast said, Hey, I live in a small town, I think it was like 60,000 people, right? And he was like,

can we have the same results that you guys have achieved? And so let's dive into it. Can people do what we've done in a smaller town? That's a good question. Look, with a caveat there, I would say yes. However, let's follow that up with you need to do some due diligence here. So the one I question was like,

hey, our town has like 15,000 people, but the county has 66,000 people. 66,000 people is a boatload of people. Like that's not a small amount of people. So scribbling down some numbers furiously to like read to you guys here. So here's the setup, right? Do some research here. This is what we tell you to do anyway in the course research,

the competition. Who's in that market? How are they cleaning? How much do they cost? How's their service? Generally speaking, I would say small town Cleaners are not gonna be so great. It's gonna be little house Cleaners and they're gonna not be offering full service, you know, like in my opinion. So find that out. If you can confirm that if there's already someone who's cranking it and they've got a giant market share,

that's gonna be hard to go up against. You have to have a compelling reason for people to change, which is often price. But let's say you've done the research, yes, you can get, there's no good cleaning happening there. So if it's a bunch of little towns, you can kind of make it regional. Like you're on Mondays, we're gonna do this little town and on Tuesdays we do this little town.

So the idea is you're not driving back and forth between all the little towns unless they're really, really close. This is different all over the United States. Like in new Mexico there are teeny tiny little like one horse towns that no one's gonna pay for cleaning in and they're 5,200 miles from any other town. So if it's that kinda setup, maybe not. Yeah,

and I, and I think what I always look at when I'm doing market research is just see like in general, if you look around, is there any competition? Is there anyone else doing it? And there probably is, but I would say that's a really good sign. You wanna see competition, even if there was a prominent competitor in the town,

there's likely things that you could do better. There's things that they, you know, if they've been in business for a long time, they've probably gotten lazy. If they're the the the top guy in the town, they're probably missing things or got a little bit lazy like I said. So there's always opportunities like that guys. But this most recent question that came in,

again, we've gotten this question a lot, but it's like, you know what if the population's smaller or you live in a more less fortunate demographic in the country where there, where there's like less money being made, things like that. So people are wondering, can I still generate a successful business and a town may where maybe, you know, people aren't in the highest demographic of income or smaller population.

So I think really yes, yeah, yes, the answer is absolutely yes. Yes, the answer is yes. So listen, you're in a town where there's not a big job industry, people are making less money, you are gonna charge less because your personal cost of living in that small town is also gonna be lower. You are not gonna need to be making a eight figure income if your house costs 50,000.

So you can adjust that to market conditions. But in every single city, there's gonna be someone who wants this service, I guarantee. So let me throw some numbers at you guys really quick. So right now our average invoice is 225 bucks. If we're doing biweekly customers, they get cleaned 26 times a year. That means every customer generates $5,850 a year if they stay on an entire year.

How many customers do you think it takes to get to half a million? These numbers always blow people away. I need $500,000 in revenue. How many customers at that level? 85. So like if you live in a town of 14,000 people, 85 houses is like there's 105 houses in my neighborhood on the two streets out my driveway. Not that I'm gonna get a hundred percent market share,

but like you need 85, that's it. That's half a million. A million is 175 million, which is, you know, our goal for the company, our company this year, that's 854 customers. That is such a small amount. So like it always boggles people's mind. We used to have like this goal for 20 million in just Albuquerque alone. And I think that was like 2,600 customers.

And Albuquerque is, I dunno, 1.2 I think in the metro area, but 2,600 customers in a town of 15,000 people. That's 25% of the population that does not equate to market share. So market share, look, take the 15,000 people you have in the small town, let's say 25, maybe 30% of them are gonna have the disposable income to wanna spend on this.

And then of that 30%, not all of them are gonna go with you, that'd be 100% market share. So that's gonna be split between you and their housekeepers they already had and maybe some other company in small markets like that. But it's 100% achievable and that's why the market research is important. You need to know what that target market is that you're trying to market to and who are they using now and what can you do different?

Like if there's a cleaning company that's already doing it this way, three people, they do all the things, it's gonna be difficult. You're gonna compete on price, which we don't always recommend. Or you gotta go outside the box and come up with something different. We've kicked around so many weird ideas over the years, essential oil, dropoffs and all kinds of stuff.

But there is something in there that's gonna make you appealing to them. Absolutely. There's always, always something that you can do to be different, to stand out. And as Brandon was talking about, market share just reminded me, like normally even in a small town, the market share is gonna be normally the first competitor or two are gonna own about 50% of that market share.

And then the rest is kind of gonna be spread out and d diversified among the rest. But especially if you're in a smaller town, I think there's even more opportunity, especially cuz you might have more impact in that community. You might know more people, word of mouth travels faster. So if you can build a really big purpose, a reason why into your business that maybe the current competition's not doing,

you can, you know, analyze what they're doing, see what you can do better, see how you can be different, more unique and adopt better systems, which is what what we're all about. You'd be surprised how many people don't continue to get better. So that might be your competition in your town. There's also the possibility of like right now we're in Albuquerque and we expanded to Los Alamos,

which is a how many people in Los Alamos Brandon, there's 14,000 people in Los Amos, 14,000. It's a super small town. Santa Fe, maybe a little bit bigger, like 60,000 maybe. We started out obviously in a bigger town you could start out in a smaller town and expand to the bigger cities as well. So you maybe you prove the concept in a smaller town,

get that initial 50 customers, 80 customers, now you're doing great, now you can expand into a bigger city and you have the money and the operations to hire someone even remote to run that and teams and maybe it's an hour or two away, but that would be my approach is bootstrap. Absolutely. If there's an opportunity, there is an opportunity. Just think of literally everybody that owns a house on their own apartment in your town,

regardless of where you live, is a potential customer. Now, not everyone's gonna become a customer, but like Brandon said, reduced to the ridiculous, those numbers are absolutely achievable. When we did this in our initial business plans in the beginning we were like, wow, it's really not that many people. And so when you look at the big picture,

even in a big city, you might be like, wow, there's so many competitors, there's so many people already. And some of you think the opposite and you think, well it's too big of a city. Well actually again, just look at the opportunity. You don't need that many customers to build a very big business in this industry. So that's kinda what we're getting at.

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but remember when we talked to that cleaner in Australia, she was in a teeny tiny town and she was doing very well and so she had also serviced other little teeny tiny towns because they weren't that far apart. So that's kind of like the, instead of being the best cleaner in your small town, be the best cleaner in your region and service the other small towns.

So like the way they were doing it between Los Alamos and Santa Fe right now is Los Alamos gets cleaned on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Santa Fe, which is the bigger market, bigger opportunity, gets cleaned on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. When we max that team out, we're gonna split 'em. We're gonna get a team that just does Los Alamos and one that just does Santa Fe.

So there's ways to do it, you just have to think outside the box. Like it would definitely be easier if you were in a bigger city. But at the same time there's cities where I wouldn't wanna be a cleaner. I don't know if I'd be down with cleaning in like Manhattan, like where you have to like get into high rises and elevators and doormen like that.

It's achievable. Like there're obviously people in Manhattan cleaning apartments and stuff, but like that's just a huge amount of headache for me. Instead of like, you need a mid-grade city man like Denver, Albuquerque, salt Lake, like those not giant metropolis is like New York I think are great. But the other side of the coin is what we're talking about here.

And that is also completely doable. I also think one of the pros of having a small town is maybe a little bit more efficiency is built in right away because you have less area that you can't drive, drive everyone's a lot closer together, so you're already, as opposed to a big city, you're driving 30 or 40 minutes. Sometimes in a bigger city,

in a smaller town you're only limited to that area. So it might actually help you keep it more efficient in the beginning. Yeah, and if you're a member of that community, you are liked by your neighbors and community. That's an instant network of customers right off the bat. Hey, Joe's starting a cleaning company, is quitting his job. Like let's all go give him business Like that is fantastic.

When we did it in Albuquerque, Brandon and I knew each other in our little neighborhood and then it was all Google ads. Like there was not a lot of social engineering that happened. Like in the beginning it was, it was just grinding it out. So in some ways that would also be easier if you had that built in community. Yeah, so I think what it really is,

guys, is it's your mindset and if you have a possibility mindset and you believe you can achieve the impossible, even what other people might think is impossible, if it's a limitation mother, what others might think is a limitation, see as an opportunity, right? So see a small town as you're more connected, you're more efficient, you're more in a targeted area and you have more impact.

And then once you prove that concept, then you can go to the bigger markets if that's your goal. But really I think reverse engineer what your goal is, what do you want to be getting out of this? What's your revenue goal? Reverse engineer that down to the customer level and then go from there. But like Brandon said at the beginning, it's,

it's literally 50 or a hundred customers. You can have a very, very successful business depending on what your goals are. And that's not a lot. And most towns can absolutely handle that. Yep. All right guys, so that's your really quick podcast today on operating in Small Markets. Definitely doable. In the meantime, keep keep it clean. Thanks for joining us today.

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