Episode 127: The Biggest Mistakes While Growing Our Cleaning Business

Episode 127: The Biggest Mistakes While Growing Our Cleaning Business

Brandon Schoen:
We have a really cool episode with you guys today. I think it's gonna be really fun. It's a little bit nerve wracking 'cause we're gonna talk about our biggest mistakes. We're also gonna talk about some of our biggest successes, but we're gonna talk about mistakes we made along the way and I think it'll be fun 'cause you guys are gonna hear things that we screwed up and what we learned. And ultimately that's the beauty of mistakes, is they're actually not mistakes if you learn a lesson from them. Yeah. So these are in no particular order. Some of these were worse than others, but we're just gonna give them to you and talk a little bit about each one. So Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condre.

And Brandon Shane. 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. Take it to the next level and win. Guys, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for your time. I know your time is precious, but we're all doubling down on knowledge so we can take our business to the next level.

I'm joined by my co-host, Brandon Condre in the house. What's up Brandon? Oh, you know, the usual, just being a guru, allegedly The alleged gurus. People have called us gurus recently, but we just wanna remind you guys that we're actually in the business with you as opposed to some of the gurus out there. We're actually in the real,

in the game with you and it's real world stuff that we're talking about you. So just keep that in mind. Hopefully makes this content that much more valuable and relatable and realistic being that we're building our business alongside you guys, which is really awesome. So you get cutting edge knowledge and innovation as we're doing it. That's the beauty of the mastermind in in this podcast and just all the things we're doing to share with you guys.

So let's do it. So this is from Ray Dalio. He's a big investor business guy from his principle of the day. I just saw that this the other day and I thought this was an awesome quote. So he says, everyone fails, anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you're paying attention to. And I guarantee they're also failing at lots of other things.

The people I respect most are those who fail. Well I respect them even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one. So it requires much more character to fail, change and then succeed than just to succeed. People who are just succeeding must not be pushing their limits. Of course the worst are those who fail and don't recognize it and don't change.

That's the principle of the days from Ray Dalio. So I love that little quote and just a great reminder guys, that it takes a lot of courage to fail and change and keep going, but that's what it's all about. That's the kind of the secret recipe to business is just don't give up. You're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna fall down. Just give back up and keep going.

So let's dive into our brand and let's tell some of these big mistakes we made as we grew our business. I'm excited for this One. Yeah, so these are in no particular order. Some of these were worse than others, but we're just gonna give them to you and talk a little bit about each one. So the first one is not hiring more people soon enough and that's a reference to office staff I think.

Like we should have hired, we should have launched with someone in the office to answer the phone, but we did not and it slowed us down quite a bit and I think I was the breaks on that one mostly because you know, people are expensive and we had a shoestring budget so that was part of the problem. Yeah, we actually did a whole coaching call today about delegation and we're talking about this.

We did start, and we'll talk about this in a little bit with cleaners, but there's other things we didn't delegate soon enough. And I think, yeah, Claudia, who was, she's our manager, our operations manager now, but we didn't have her start that way. But man, she paid for herself. We always say that to ourselves like we didn't hire her soon enough.

Like if we could do it all over again, we would've hired her a lot sooner when we hired her. Just everything took off. We weren't missing calls, we were getting back to people. It was just amazing. So again, just another testament to the teamwork is in the dream work, get your team going, hire people. The sooner you delegate,

the sooner you guys can scale and grow. So that's a great one. Next one is we paid cash for cars. I think it was the first two cars in the beginning, right? Brandon? First Two, yeah, we've talked about this one on a previous podcast episode too, but I think we had like $60,000 to start with to mess around with and we spent 20 of that on cars.

In retrospect, what we should have done was finance those, even if you had to use your personal credit score to do it. Finance those have a $200 a month car payment and then spend the $20,000 on marketing instead. So we just took a big chunk of our investment budget, tanked it into some cars, we still have the cars. It wasn't a bad purchase,

it's just that from a cashflow perspective we should have financed them. It really would've freed up a lot more capital for more revenue generating activities. Like even though the cars are great branding, they do generate leads and attention, they're remarkable. But again, some of that cashflow, especially in the beginning when you have a lot that you need to build out,

it could have been more effectively used. So. So that's a great one. What's the next one, Brandon? Next big mistake. Wasting money on the wrong platforms and having the wrong customers in the beginning. So we changed software I think pretty regularly. I think a lot of businesses don't do that but we're in the middle of transitioning right now to another software,

which I hope will be like the end game software. But we definitely were, we didn't know, we didn't know, you know in the beginning you start out with what you think works, go for it and then it's just a costly thing to transition from one to the other over and over and over again. You gotta call the customers and get credit card numbers,

it's not a fun experience to go through. So really put in the research on which software's gonna meet your needs. Yeah, it's way easier to just pick the right one from the start. Think about building a house if you have to go back and rip up the foundation after you've built it, that's a really bad scenario. The other part of that too is just some of the platforms we were using like for lead generation,

honestly, places like Angie's List, HomeAdvisor kind of places, they just ate up our budget and we didn't know how to use 'em effectively and we were fighting over leads with 10 other people and tons of other contractors and stuff. So when we started controlling our own lead flow and controlling our own customer intake, that was when we really changed the game. So knowing,

you know, again in the beginning we were just testing everything, experimenting 'cause we didn't know what we didn't know. But the more we did, the more we realized the best customers are on these channels and if we control those channels, the better result we're gonna get. Next one would be a fun one. We actually talked about this on our coaching call the day two,

but we hired the wrong fractional CFO in the beginning. We actually started with our finances and our bookkeeping with a company called Bench, a Canadian company and then you can tell him a little bit more Brandon about, I think you kind of like helped with that initial fractional CFO and then we ended up with John, right? But we just did not have a good fit and it didn't work out.

If you guys don't know that bench is a, it's a Canadian company but it's like an all-in-one bookkeeping company that integrates with QuickBooks and I actually like bench, we just outgrew it. They just didn't offer the CFO stuff. They were only bookkeeping. So if you're in need of a bookkeeper, I think they're a great fit for a lot of people. But we went from bench to hiring a fractional CFO and I went off of a recommendation from someone else and as soon as we started talking to 'em,

they just had such a bad attitude man. Like they were telling us we had to cut so much stuff, cut marketing, cut this, cut that like we're in dire financial issues and I didn't feel dire financial problems. I felt great, everything was going great. We were like picking up new customers. I mean it was the middle of a pandemic.

That part was a little scary but that scarcity mindset is like man, it's like a virus, it spreads. I was getting freaked out, Brandon's getting freaked out and he's Mr. Positivity over here, but it was Brandon's idea to get rid of that one. I'm like good call. So we canceled that one and found John who we've been with for a few years and it's totally different.

John also said you're in some financial trouble but here's what you gotta do to overcome it. Get some more sales and coaches us along the way to get to the part where we overcome those things as opposed to the other one, which was just like stop advertising. Yeah it was like we gotta throw everyone overboard, we gotta burn the ship. It was like that's what it felt like.

And John was much more like helpful in actually coaching us through what we gotta do and taking you know, proactive action instead of reacting, which is what the other CFO was doing. So that was a really big move and I felt a big shift as well, especially with you Brandon, like just a lot less stress when we were working with John. So that was a great move for sure.

Yeah. Yep, totally. So the next one is trying to do too much, not staying in our lane if you will. So we were doing move out cleans and saying yes to whatever came through the door, just trying to build the customer base, you know, just drain time and energy resources. We had people going to parts of town that we didn't wanna go to.

We were doing like post construction cleans, they're like breaking a bunch of equipment, making people mad and it was crazy stuff like it was out Construction, clean was the stuff of nightmares. I have flashbacks to that one every now and then. Yeah. So just don't take on anything that you don't don't think you need, you know what I mean? Like just stay where you know what's gonna work.

Yeah guys and the riches are in the niches when you bring a flashlight versus a laser. When you have laser-like focus you can can cut through diamonds and that's we we were trying to do too much. Same thing with you guys might be doing in your business focus and specialize in one thing, become the best at that and you guys will make way more money.

That's what we realized too. So that's a big one for sure. So beyond that, let's see, we have not having a solid financial system in place early on making things more stressful. Again not getting a fractional CFO soon enough and not jumping into profit first. We started doing this, I wanna say it was like maybe a year in. I remember it didn't feel like we had the finances dialed in early on it was a little bit scary.

Yeah, so I mean no man in the beginning we were, we were having troubles making payroll troubles, paying sales tax. We just didn't put in the effort And so we've learned a lot about that since then. But you know, profit first helped us quite a bit. Really doing the market research so that you have pricing set correctly out of the gate.

That was half of our problems. We had pricing way too low in the beginning. That's critical. So yeah, just having your pricing for profit, having that financial system in place so you're managing cash flow better. Once we did that, a whole lot of things changed. The stress went way down, it got a lot more fun. So that was a great one that we got in place,

you know, maybe a year or so into the business. But so the next one, what's the next one Brandon? Not putting the bonus system into place. This goes very well with the financial issues we were just discussing. The issue with the bonus is that we didn't have any money to pay it. We were barely making payroll, so how could we possibly pay a bonus on top of it.

So when we finally were able to put it into place, it solves a lot of quality problems, a lot of speed problems out of the gate. So if you're gonna pay a bonus, go with it from the get-go. Don't, I mean if you feel like you need one, don't hesitate to add one. But if you want one, definitely get it sooner than later so that you're not just struggling in the meantime.

Yeah and I remember like this bonus system, like we kept delaying and procrastinating 'cause we were like, we're, we're so busy with everything else, we don't have time. But then we started getting more complaints, things were happening, issues kept popping up. And so literally our mentor was like, Hey you guys put that in place, it'll change everything.

And it's, and it's really true, like as soon as we did that, I felt like a huge momentum shift changed and quality went up, complaints went down, people were more incentivized like money talks. So that was a great, great thing to put in place and a mistake we did not do early enough for sure. So beyond that, hiring good friends,

another mistake, it's not always the case. I think you can definitely work with good friends, but we had both Brandon and I hired good friends, even family members that ended up not panning out and it soured our relationship. Yeah. So I just don't think I recommend it unless they're a perfect fit and you know it's gonna work out. It's easy.

Like it's easy to talk to someone that you know and, but I think the problem is if they're not doing what you need 'em to do, it's kind of harder to switch to the disciplinary side of things of being a business owner and you know, trying to get 'em to fit into the system. So I think my general recommendation there is just don't do that.

Don't hire friends or family. Yeah and it could work out but like I said, for us it didn't and and we would go back and do it differently and and keep those relationships more intact. So number nine was not delegating things soon enough. An example is we waited a long time to do this with sales, we did it with cleaning right away in the beginning,

but we waited on other things. Even like scheduling, you can tell that story Brandon, we, we always talk about that story but delegating is huge. Yeah, I just think you just need to do that as sooner than later. So you know, Claudia was our first non cleaning hire. That's not true. We had a VA before that, which we still have same VA you know seven years later.

So the idea would be don't delay, hire someone that you want to delegate for right away and then if they don't work out great fire that person and get the right one in there. But if you put it off and then made the wrong hire, well now it's just gonna take even longer to get there. So just do it sooner to later I think is the overall,

yeah Just be be bold, pull the bandaid off, feels a little bit scary. Good. 'cause that means it's important And the sooner you do it and the sooner you hire out your weaknesses and focus on your strengths, the sooner you can really scale your business and work on the business instead of working in the business. So that's a great one as well.

Number 10, what's number 10 Brandon? Not focusing enough on sales training and better ways to convert our marketing dollars. We had kind of had a policy of, we had so many people coming through the door that we were just like, here's your estimate buy and the ones that accepted cool, we'll service you, that's great. But we were paying money to get the ones we,

all of them to come through the door. But we were kind of ignoring the other ones because we shouldn't have the bandwidth and our conversion rate was like 65%. So 65% of people were converting without us trying hard. But that made us complacent. And then when things start to dip, like you know, covid struggles or the economy takes a downturn, you really wanna make sure you're following up with every lead and sometimes they just need a little nudge.

People genuinely forget about it. They need to talk to a spouse, whatever it is. But they're not gonna do it if you don't poke 'em a little bit. Like hey, just giving you a call, haven't heard back, what did you think? It's super expensive. Like it gives you options when you get 'em on the phone but if you're just emailing it to 'em and saying goodbye,

then you're not covering it Very well. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a cool statistic I learned recently and this is again why we're focusing a lot more now on customer experience and sales, but 80% of sales guys are come between the fifth and the 12th follow up. So if you're only following up like once or twice, you're totally missing the ball, right?

And so as we've come along in our, in our business we've realized like we grew really fast in the beginning and we were a lot more boots on the ground. I think Brandon and I were doing a lot of that and creating more, more of those experiences. But as you grow you don't have as much time for that. So it's really important to train your team and just create training that helps them create those magical experiences for your customers.

Every touch point of the customer experience from phone calls to like after the clean to in between the cleans, the before the cleans follow up, whatever it is. So that customer experience is huge. So we've really gotten a lot better at creating those experiences and and really die on that in and that's helped a lot. So number 11 is too many tools systems,

we were overwhelmed. We recently actually were having issues answering the phone and missing sales and a lot of lot of calls like just getting missed. And it was because you know, we're, we're very forward thinking on like technology and and systems to make things more streamlined and better. But sometimes we get caught up and overwhelmed and we actually take too much action.

And we actually got into a scenario really even in the last year where we had like so many different softwares and things and we're trying to simplify that now just simplify the business and the systems so we're not doing triple data entry and stressing out the teams and things like that, right Brandon? So Agreed. Yeah we trying to solve a problem, I'm all about optimization,

that's great, but when you get to the point where you've got five tools that your reps have to bounce in between to get a customer to close, like it just, it was convoluted and expensive. So the one I mentioned before, we're in a, we're in a software transition right now when we finish that we're gonna be able to cut something like $2,200 a month in other tools that ended up just being extraneous.

We were able to combine all that into one. Yeah, exactly. And it's also gonna make a better experience for not only the reps but the customers. It's just gonna be make it so we can follow up easier, we can nurture those leads easier. So if you have too many things going on, it's gonna be a distraction. So focus, focus is the key.

Which actually, well that's not the next one, but when you eliminate those things you're gonna be able to focus a lot more. The next one is number 12, complicating the customer experience role instead of everyone doing it all the time. I think we've kind of gone back and forth a lot on this Brandon, we, we tried to hire a, we have a full-time rep and I feel like it's just,

we just, everyone has to do it all the time. That's the best way to do it. But may, maybe I'm wrong but we, I mean we talked about this internally a lot, whether it was better to have a dedicated salesperson or like the Swiss army knife customer experience person that can do everything. And so we first went with the dedicated salesperson and that worked out great until it was working out too well and there's only one person doing sales and we were having leads having to wait up to two weeks to be able to just get the pricing and then by then of course they'd like move on to someone else like it's just too long,

it was too much time, you know from initial contact to here's your pricing. And so now we've gone the other way, the other part of this Swiss, the dedicated salesperson thing is like you don't know who's on the other end of the phone. So if the person's picking up the phone but someone's like Hey I need help rescheduling, okay let me transfer you.

You're just making people mad. So instead we trained the customer experience reps to be just that set up a good experience for the customer whether they are calling to yell at you because you did something bad, they're a new customer, you know they need help rescheduling, you need to be able to do it all And that is the path that we're on and I think it's working out better for us.

You know, we're having growing pains, it it, we've had some turnover in that department and we're still flushing out the specifics of that but we're trying to basically build like a call center internally. We're not farming that out. I want people to get their house cleaned by us. That's part of the benefit of being an employee and it leads to knowing more about the experience.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's just part of our culture more now too. You know, just going above and beyond having that growth mindset. The more we're all learning and and learning new ways, new innovative ways, creative ways to create those experiences for people. It doesn't have to cost any money, it could just literally be the tone of your voice and how you handle people on the phone and how you talk to people and how you make 'em feel,

you know. And so we've really gotten a lot better at that and I think, like Brandon said, we're continuing to refine that but we're just realizing more and more how important that is. So, so yeah. So that's a very, very important one. Wanna know why most cleaning business owners fail or get stuck systems When you don't have the right systems in place for hiring,

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Just search top 1% cleaning business owner club. Find our faces and watch the free class to learn exactly how we took our business from zero to seven figures in just three years. Other than that we have number 13. Brandon, you can talk about this one a little more. Raising prices the wrong way and losing lots of customers. Yeah, we've done,

I mean we've been in business a while. Next year will be seven years, so we've been six and a half right now. So we've done price increases, shoot man, I don't know, four or five times and a couple of those were over covid and those were all justified by covid. But the first one I just wanted to normalize everybody, if you're this much square feet you get,

you pay this. So some people ended up having like 40% price increases, they quit, obviously that's to be expected. And then another time we just set one out that was just like your prices going up on this date. I think that might've been the same one. I think now what we do actually, which is a little bit better, it's a small price increase that we do more frequently.

We try and do 'em every year so no one's cut off by a big price increase. And we just tell 'em, part of the reason is you just, you just gotta tell the customer this is why we're raising your prices. We're not doing it just because we want more money, we're doing it because we had to increase wages to keep pace with the very tight labor market.

We are adding these new tools, we bought this new software that's gonna do whatever for you. The point is you gotta communicate with the customer, you gotta tell 'em why this is gonna work out for them. Absolutely. Yeah. And that was, that was key. We kind of shifted from the very first time doing it, not really communicating very well to being more communicating,

telling people why and like you said, Brandon doing it in a on a more normal frequency. So it wasn't such a huge jump and people understand, especially right now with the economy, people definitely understand it's very normal and if you haven't done a price increase in the last year or two, you should definitely do it. 'cause you're not gonna stay in business unless you do.

We gotta keep up and people will understand. So that's a great one for sure. Number 14 is not having a clear structure of roles, responsibility of who's doing what until we started the EOS, which is the entrepreneur operating system. A great book Traction by Gina Wickman that we always talk about. But I think kind of what happened Brandon, is we,

we were, as we were growing, we just started like branching out and doing all these things, both you and I and, and then Claudia and then you know, we just, we kind of got lost and who's doing what and like who's responsible for what and we don't know who does what. And so it started getting confusing until we organized it and now we actually have a like a hierarchical,

like a structure of the company structure and it's helped out tremendously. Yeah, I mean that's, you said it perfectly, it's just, you know, too many chefs in the kitchen and I'll do sales one day, Brandon, I'll do sales another day and then the customer calls back, shoot which one did you talk to? I can't remember which one you talked to.

All of that was just back to the EOS. You build a, you build an accountability chart is what it's called. Not an organization chart but you know exactly who does what and who they report to. And then on top of that there's one in here, I'll just bump it up, it's number 17 but number 17 is not doing weekly meetings for EOS soon enough so things get off track.

So like it's very much related to this one. So the reason that EOS works is that there's four people inside the company that are the leadership group. The leadership committee. And every week we get together, go over any problems that came up, discuss it as a group, agree on a solution and move forward and then we all track who was supposed to do what in those meetings and make sure that things get done so before that stuff slipped through the cracks.

Absolutely. And we really like EOS, we are not sponsored by Gino Wickman, although maybe we should be. Yeah we should probably reach out to that guy. He's sell a million copies of that book from this podcast probably. But yeah, just again, more structure in your business. If people don't know that's your job as a leader guys is to help people be in the right seat on the bus so they know where we're rowing.

You cast that vision and you just, everyone keeps going but if you don't have that structure in place and you're not meeting consistently to handle those issues, like things definitely get off track and that that's definitely happened quite a few times. So that's a great one. Number 15, we only have two more here and then we're gonna talk about some things we did do right.

But number 15 is not doing insurance correctly and getting hit with a big audit at the end of the year. You can talk about that one Brandon. I don't know How to explain this one other than like I just had no idea. Like it was the first year we were in business, you get commercial insurance, nobody told me about an insurance audit.

So if you are listening and you're getting ready to start a business business insurance is not like getting insurance for your house or car, your house or car insurance premium is set, you pay this much next year you renew, then you pay this much. But an insurance audit, what they do is a lot of the numbers that your insurance premium is based off of revenue and payroll.

So I estimate we're gonna make this much in revenue and we're gonna pay this much in payroll. Cool. Your premiums are this and then you get to the end of the year and it's actually like a punishment for being successful. Okay, we're gonna do the math here. Your revenue was like double what you said it was gonna be and your payroll was triple what you said it was gonna be.

So you owe us this much that first year we had a $18,000 unexpected insurance audit which was like whoa. And so the way that we did it correctly, and you too can do this, is we just switched to a better insurance broker and we asked for real time reporting. So as you're going along you file reports that say this is how much we made in revenue,

this is how much we paid in payroll and they adjust the premiums on the fly. So at the time of the audit you end up ow like 500, a thousand dollars, not 20 grand, which was killer in our first year. That was a very, that was a very big financial mistake for Sure. That was a hard one to swallow. But again guys,

you learn from all these mistakes and you just keep going. Don't let these things like tear down or make you stop 'cause the vision is, and the reason you're doing this is much bigger. So I love that. So last one before we get into some good things here. Last one is not building core values and culture early on or early enough and really harder to make changes like this when you're bigger.

Because when you're smaller, you're more nimble, you're more quick, you're not like a big corporate brand where it's like takes, it's slower and harder to move. When you're small you can really put those culture, those core values into place. Do it as soon as you can. The sooner you do it, the more you're going to again create that culture.

You're gonna attract the right people, the wrong people probably won't even get hired or they won't last very long 'cause they won't align with your culture. They just won't, they won't wanna be there, you know. So any issues that we had I think early on with employees was, 'cause we didn't have that culture there yet. We were still figuring out who we were as a company and a brand and the,

we only put those in place just I think a few years ago. And I think it just really solidified a lot of things for us. More structure, just more clarity on what we're about. And then when everyone knows what you're about, it's easier to create those customer experiences when everyone knows you go above and beyond. It's easy to create those experiences,

things like that when those core values are there. So I think that was a really big one. Yeah, this one goes back to e os too. This is an EOS thing and it feels very corporate-y. So like if you've worked at a big corporation, Brandon used to work at hp, I used to work at a pharmaceutical company called Genzyme and they all had core values in there,

but those companies are huge and maybe it doesn't matter that much, but it felt corporated putting those things out there. But when you really thought about it like these are the values that we want to convey to people and you post 'em publicly and you convey it to your people, it just makes things a lot easier and everyone gets it. And more importantly,

we put in a reward system after the fact so that when you are doing something, when you're living up to a value, we publicly nominate you. We give out gift cards for those things. And yeah, that ended up being a good change for us. And I, I felt silly doing it in the beginning. Like we're gonna make a poster that has these core values just like x,

Y, z publicly traded company. But it does work. There's a reason that all those companies do that. These are best practices for big companies that will work for your small company. Yeah. So start doing it when you're small. Don't wait till you get bigger guys 'cause it's harder to implement and core values are just, it's so important to get those in your,

in your business. It's gonna help. It's kinda like the glue that holds everything together. It's like intangibles and nuanced things that you can't really describe, but it's very, very important. So put those into place. Let's rattle off a few of the biggest things we did right Brandon? 'cause we didn't do everything right. We learned a lot of from lessons from those mistakes.

But what are some things we did right? We did go all in. Both Brandon and I had dabbled with side businesses in the past and side hustles and Brandon and his wife had a bunch of very small Amazon companies that they would build up and sell and build up and sell. But this one we went all in. I quit my six figure day job and we,

this was it. This is the only, the only game in town. Yeah. And when you guys do that, when you give yourself no other option, you put your back against the wall, you burn the ships, you can't return back. You gotta do it, you gotta make it work. I think that's when the magic happens because you,

you don't have any other options and it makes it a lot easier. You just gotta take action and move towards your goals. So that's what we did and I think it really worked out even though it was kind of hard in the beginning. But that's like anything, anything you know worth doing. Anything worthwhile is gonna be hard. It's gonna take extra time,

it's gonna take longer than you think. So that's what it's all about. Number two, we had many, many mentors still do to this day, have many different coaches that help us. We have different masterminds we're in, but we had a mentor in the beginning that helped us kind of figure out the cleaning and the systems 'cause we had no idea what we were doing and that we're,

there's a lot of unknowns and so we probably could have figured it out. But again it just helped us model compressed times, save time on figuring it out and spending a million hours on YouTube or whatever. We're gonna find out how to clean and train our teams. And so that was a really big jumping off point for us. Yeah, like you,

I'm a smart person. Brandon's a smart person. That doesn't mean that you have to go it alone. You should talk to someone else that's been in business before. Talk to someone that's been in cleaning business before. You know you can learn a lot from someone who's done it before you. Like you don't have to reinvent the Wheel. Not at all.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Do what someone else already did. There's a, a phrase I love or a quote I love. It's the pioneers are the ones that are faced down in the mud with arrows in their back. Don't be a pioneer, just follow in their footsteps and you don't get to get, you don't have to get shot. So just do what works,

you know? So number three, never cleaned, gave up control and delegated most things right away. Building a real team. I think this was a huge one because a lot of people start out doing the cleaning. We did a little bit 'cause we wanted to understand the process, but we immediately hired a team, we immediately had cleaners. We delegated that right away and I think that was a game changer for sure.

Yep. I mean that goes back to the first one, which is going all in. And we went and constructed the business from blueprint stage to scale and you can't scale if Brandon and I are cleaning toilets. So we hired a good cleaning team with experience from the beginning and now we have 14 teams all with experience and it's working out very nicely. Yeah,

You can't work on the business and do needle moving tasks, revenue generating tasks if you're working in the business all the time and working in the trenches. So it's important to understand that, but gotta work your way out and replace yourself at some point. So yeah, so that's an awesome one. Number four is we got branded cars. I think this was awesome because even to this day we are highly,

highly recognized in our market because when people say, Hey, what cleaning company do you own? We tell people what we're doing, we just tell 'em, oh the the green funny looking cars with the the red mops, the red rooms on top and people go, oh yeah, I've seen you guys all over the place. And it's like the most amazing branding piece.

Like people just remember it. You see 'em all like if you drive around their town, you see 'em every day, you see 'em multiple cars every day. They stand out like a sore thumb. And I just think it's awesome. They generate extra leads all the time. So that was a great one. We Get asked a lot about those cars.

Why can't I have my employees use their own cars to save money? Because no one knows who's there when they're not actively getting outta the car, carrying a broom. It just looks like a car on the street. So the benefit of those branded cars is that while the team is inside working, collecting money for the company, doing that job, the car is out front looking like a billboard and then the neighbors keep seeing this car come back every week.

They're like, well man, if John across the street is using 'em, I should start using 'em because he's really picky. So there's no downside to having those cars and it, I find it the like lean super aggressive, no expense contractor models just don't, they don't jive with the scale that we were going for. I feel like those things cap out at a certain amount of time.

Then there's little, little tiny things like having the branded cars along the way that really make A difference. Yeah and I feel like things like the cars, the uniforms, all the little touches and details, acting big before you are big. That's what helps attract a players. People wanna be part of something great and if they see like, wow you guys are really all in like nobody else is doing these kind of things,

you already appear to be a bigger brand. That's what it's all about. And that's gonna help you guys scale a lot faster versus trying to, trying to be cheap and try to take the shortcut route. You know, like doesn't always pan, pan out. So next one guys is we hired the right people, not always, but for the most part we hired the right people and we focused on building our team and we focused on building our advisory board.

We focused on building our leadership team, we focused on continuing to build, you know, our cleaners and trainers and people to help with that part of the business as well. But getting the people in place, you know, building the team as fast as possible, dropping our ego and being like, you know what, we can't, we can do it all,

but why do we wanna be a control freak and try to do everything? Let's delegate, let's hire people, let's build a real business. And I think that was a huge game changer for us as well. Yeah, be picky with the people that you're gonna get in there but get 'em in there fast. Like you don't, don't hire people that don't know what they're doing and that,

you know, you're like as strong as the weakest link in the chain. So you gotta get good links in the chain. But we're better than the, you know, greater than the sum of our parts. Like all of us together are better than, you know, just adding one plus one plus one. So yeah, I think that was huge.

Yeah, absolutely. It's all about the team guys. And that's if, if you think about anybody who's done anything great, most wealthy people, they leverage people, they leverage time, they leverage other people's money. It's the same with building the business. You gotta leverage that talent and you're only one person. So focus on that team. And the last one,

we've talked about it a lot, we've mentioned it already in the other things, but we, we got so much more structure and so much more focus in our business. When we brought on the EOS entrepreneur operating system and profit first into our business to help manage cash flow, I think those are some really, really important systems that just helped bring so much clarity and confidence to what we were doing.

Would you agree Brandon? Yeah, 100%. We put those into place years ago and we still talk about them every podcast episode pretty much. That's because they were like, these are part of our institution now. They changed the way they changed the DNA of the business and we can't go back, we won't go back. It was a really good change for us.

And so you should consider implementing those in your world too. I think at this point in the game, like we're on the verge of outgrowing profit first. We're kind of making our own system with our CFO and you will also get to that point. But at when we started doing it, that was huge. But EOSI think is here to stay, man EOS has just been such a good change for us and I highly recommend that you guys look into it as well.

Again guys, the more structure you have in your business, each one of those things is a system. It's a structure in our business. It streamlines things so that we can operate at the speed of excellence and we can go faster without the wheels flying off. So don't forget to put those systems in place and put that structure in place. It's hard work but it's worth doing because it's gonna bring everything together.

So yeah, I think that pretty much wraps up this podcast guys. I think that was a really fun one, diving into big mistakes and some other wins that we did along the way. But like we said at the beginning, guys, it, it's not a mistake, it's a lesson. As long as you're learning a lesson from all those things as you're building your business and more importantly if you're modeling and you're falling in the footsteps of those have done before you,

you're gonna have a lot more success. You're gonna be able to save a lot more time and take more action because you're gonna be more confident. 'cause you're basing that on real experience and real knowledge. So, so the more you can do that, the more you can surround yourself with guys like us coaches, we do that all the time with our business.

We're always trying to grow. The more you do that, the more you can fill up your cup and you can pour into your teams and just keep growing and and be untouchable, basically unstoppable in your market. That's why we do these things and continue to get better. Ultimately, it's not about the money, it's about who you become on the journey.

I think both Brandon and I can vouch that we, we've gotten better, we've gone through some hard stuff, but we've gotten a lot better, you know, doing this business and getting through some of the hard stuff. So that's what it's all about. Yeah, if you wanna learn even more or if you like the idea of the mentor, you should check out our masterclass,

which is at Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass and we talk about lots of this stuff every week. Private coaching calls, there's all good things In there. Absolutely. Guys, if you wanna level up your game, check out the masterclass. If you getting value out of the show, guys, share it out. Leave us a review. We don't run a bunch of ads and crazy stuff to annoy you guys,

so just please help us out so we can reach even more people, we can bring even more awesome guests on and just keep growing with you guys. Take it to the next level and win. So until next time you guys Keep it clean. Keep it clean. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings,

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