Episode 132: Time to Call The Fuzz?

Episode 132: Time to Call The Fuzz?

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,

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.

And today we're gonna share with you guys, it's a very fun episode. Brandon, tell me the name of this one. Alright, there's a link in the show notes, but I came across this Reddit post, which if you're a redditer, it was in face palm, that was the subreddit. So something that makes you link this, you put your palm to your forehead and it was,

the title was the drugs that my cleaning lady called the Cops for. And in the picture, it's a syringe filled of black stuff. I guess you could interpret it as heroin, I suppose. And what it really was in actuality was thermal paste. And so for those of you who don't know, thermal paste is what you apply to the processor on a computer so that you can put a fan or a heat sink on top of it to dissipate the heat.

So you have to have those for computer to function. And I said it to Brandon as kind of a joke because it came up in the context of cleaning, but then it got us thinking what we should talk about this. Like what are the scenarios in which you might actually wanna call the police? Yeah. We're the ones that you should ignore. So that's what we're gonna talk about today.

Have we ever had this happen, by the way, in our own company? I don't know if we've, we had one customer in the early days before New Mexico had legal weed where they sent me a picture of That's right. He had like a little pipe and some weed. The dude was very sloppy. I actually was shocked he hired us as a client,

but you know that, I don't know, marijuana barely counts as a drug. And I told him just to like, just leave it there. We won't touch it. We don't wanna break his thing. And the Cleaners were all weirded out about it, you know, because it was technically illegal. So that's the only time I think we've had anything close to.

Yeah. So however we wanna talk about, yeah. What are these instances that it would be, you know, even something you should talk about with your teams when they're out and about. There's probably a lot of scenarios where you'd wanna have the teams report something or maybe call the police right away. I do think, actually there was another time where we had teams call the police where some guy was like stalking the team out in the garage or something weird.

Oh yeah, that was like an ex-boyfriend. That's what it was. Scenario and And that, so she had a restraining order that was legit. Like that was a personal safety thing. We absolutely called the police then. Yeah. But what I'm talking about in this episode is outside of those things that are where a person is in danger, obviously, like what are the things that you might see in a customer's home that rise to the level of we're definitely calling the cops on the customer.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, let's talk about the ramifications of that. Yeah. I feel like you're definitely losing that customer. If you call the cops on a customer, you're losing the customer. So you wanna make sure that you're doing this with, you know, like you absolutely need to do it. You don't wanna get in a situation where you're ignoring things.

And so like all of these are bad. Like these are serious crimes that we're gonna talk about that would require calling the cops. It's funny that it started as a funny one because you know, someone misinterpreted a computer part as drugs on therefore called the cops. Right? But there are definitely situations in which I feel like you should call the cops. And so we've kind of talked about a couple of these,

but you guys can chime in, you know, in the comments or in the Facebook group to let us know what you think. Yeah. But you know, one of 'em I think is like human trafficking. I doubt a human trafficker is going to be using the services of a company that's gonna be in their house without them there. But you know,

like if someone's tied up in a basement or something and asking for help, obviously call the police. Like this is a no-brainer for me. I don't think there's a situation in which someone's gonna be tied up. I mean, look, we're straying off real hard in here, like with some personal preferences, but if someone's tied up, call the cops.

And this is like, you know, a good point, like the teams, we use WhatsApp throughout the day to communicate, but they take pictures pretty often or little videos snippets or other than just texting, but all the time asking us like, is this okay? Can we clean this? This isn't the way, what do we do? Or like,

they're looking at the job notes. So absolutely if something were to come up like this, maybe they, you know, just have that open, honest communication with your teams. Like that's one of our core values to very quickly they should feel fine and really great about being like, Hey, does this, like I don't know about this. Is this okay?

And letting the leadership team know, or whoever's at the office, this maybe is not good, I don't know what we should do. And just being able to come to you as, yeah, so do that when in doubt they can definitely reach out. Right. I think another one that we talked about was if the team opens the door and it smells like natural gas,

that's a call the fire department right away situation because that house could explode, but the teams in it turning on a vacuum can cause natural gas to explode in that situation. If you did that, you might save the customer's house and then you'd have a customer for life, they would love you for that. Yeah. So any sort of point at which the teams are in danger from a safety thing,

fire something in the house. I would say that rises to the level of call the police. I mean even like maybe a crazy dog or an animal or something that could, I mean that's like call the customer, call the, not necessarily call the cops. Yeah. Yeah. So like if it was a dog and they haven't let the dog out then right.

Call the customer like, hey we can't go in 'cause there's this crazy dog. We actually have a note for that. Like, we can't come into your house because there's a violent animal that we don't know if the animal's not violent, we haven't met the thing. Yeah. There's a procedure we have, if you have new customers and they have a dog,

we ask that the customer be there the first time to kind of introduce the dog to the team and vice versa. Make sure that it's created. What does the dog sound like when it's created? Yeah. So that one I don't think is police but, but also speaking a little bit outside of the more dangerous stuff, but like anytime the teams do notice something,

this is just something that you should be doing all the time to create a better experience is if there's something dripping or leaking or this has happened a few times with the toilet seats totally broken. We just have, they let the team know and we send our handyman in and he fixes it and we can't believe we do stuff like that. Right. And so yeah,

those are things you should be doing all the time anyways. But going back to the more dangerous things, like yeah, what would happen if, I mean like the syringe is pretty serious, right? Like that's, yeah, so I mean, okay, let's go back to the Reddit post, right? The syringe, let's say that was actually drugs,

it's a black syringe with a hypodermic needle on the end, the one in the photo, there's no needle. It's just to squirt the stuff out. So if there is something like that, I would say that's a call to customer. So take a picture and be like, hey, the team's found this, you know, we're not, if they're really uncomfortable,

we're not gonna clean the house at all. Like we're not doing it. But it could also be, you know, like my mother-in-law is a type one diabetic. She gives herself insulin injections since she's six years old. So she's been doing that for 50 some odd years. So in that situation, I could see a situation where a medical syringe might have been left out that's not drugs,

but the teams don't know the difference to them, it just looks funky, right? And so in that situation, you would definitely call the customer and hopefully they would be like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I'll come out and put things away. Now there are, there's lots of ways that you would wanna call the cops. Like let's say they're manufacturing drugs.

Why would a drug dealer who's making meth or something employ us to clean his house? I have no idea. We're having hypothetical conversations here. Yeah. But the concept is sure man, you could do that. I would call the police there for sure. Like all of those things are dangerous. Being exposed to a large quantity of drugs like meth is dangerous for you.

Yeah. To breathe in. So I'd be pissed if that was Yeah. You know, I'd call the cops in that situation. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I think the trafficking would be the biggest one. Or if someone was in immediate danger or they could see something like that, obviously those are much more extreme circumstances. Yeah. I wanna be clear that nothing like that's ever happened.

We've never had to call the police on a customer. We've never found anything crazy like that. Outside of that one. We found a weed pipe, you know, situation, which was not very extreme. But like, you know, there's very dark things that people do. I think one that you know might come up or I, you know, you might see is like something like child pornography,

like on a computer screen or something, which is obviously terrible and you should call the police right away. Yeah. They need to be able to seize a computer at things. That's one where you don't wanna let the customer know. 'cause then they might be able to cover their tracks or something like that. So all these things all point back to the core values,

which are just open and honest communication. If you are in a good relationship with your Cleaners, they will be able to feel comfortable reaching out to you to tell you what they've found. And then if the team doesn't wanna put themselves in a situation they feel uncomfortable, then we'll have the office make phone calls, you know, on their behalf. So,

you know, as a funny thing on Reddit that kind of got this started and then it turned into like a much darker situation where like there's lots of situations in which you would wanna call the police, but what are they in reality? Yeah. And I think we covered a lot of 'em. And I think the other ones that are not so serious,

like even like you mentioned, just the team being uncomfortable because there's dog feces in the house or something else that we don't clean up. Well there's a reason we don't clean those up. We don't want the teams exposed to that. They could get sick, there could be other harm. So those are like the things we deal with all the time. But occasionally something else worse might,

you know, happen. Or another thing we don't have the teams go out to their cars on, or, or I'm sorry they, they're not allowed to talk on their phones in the house. But you know, let's say one of 'em goes out to the car, go and there's someone out there, you know, harassing them or causing other danger.

Yeah. That would be another great example of just call the cops right away. You know, everyone get inside. This is also why we have the teams lock the doors. Yeah, yeah. And they go into houses because who knows, they could be in a house all by themselves and someone knows and they could walk in the house, a predator,

whatever. And so have all those policies and think through all these things that could happen. 'cause you just never know and you don't wanna put your teams in danger and Sure. Is there any other crazy things that you'd call the police for? I'm trying to think. No, I mean, I think we covered all those, but like, yeah, the flip side of that coin is,

you know, you're in someone's house, there's a high level of trust between the customer and the cleaning company to let you into my personal space. You're gonna see things, dirty laundry, literally, you know, so how can they, we're trying to kind of find a threshold where we're gonna bring in a third party to figure out if this is bad or not.

And I mean, part of me just leans towards, you know, like if it's not hurting the Cleaners, then that's the customer's business. We're not there to do an invasion of privacy and judge them for what they're doing on their personal time. But there are definitely some things that would be very, very concerning. And I think we've done a pretty good job of listing those.

So yeah, just food for thoughts on the weird relationship you find yourself in with your customers and at which point we need to escalate this with law enforcement. Yeah. And speaking of which, we wanna actually hear from you guys. So if maybe you've had a really crazy scenario happen where you did have to call the police or some other story that is just,

maybe we'll have you on the podcast and you can, or we can share your story. So reach out, let us know what crazy scenarios have happened in your cleaning business and how you handled it. Maybe we'll read some on a future episode. It'll be a fun recap. It'll be a part two of, of what we're talking about here. But yeah,

we're all learning how to get better, how to avoid catastrophes and issues like, you know, if you don't deal with them ahead of time and know what to do and have your teams know what to do. So that's why we're talking about it. And kind of a weird topic, but it, yeah, here you go. Needs to be set.

So in the meantime, keep it clean and drug free. Keep it 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.