Episode 134: BIG Lessons from Expanding Our Cleaning Business

Episode 134: BIG Lessons from Expanding Our Cleaning Business

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.

Guys, we have a really exciting show for you today. It's kind of sad, but it's also really exciting because I just love these intros. Yeah, and and if we're gonna share with you guys what has happened in Perspired over the last year, 'cause last time we were talking about this, we were going bananas about how we're expanding. And now we're gonna tell you what we learned.

We're gonna share going to Texas, what we learned, what's happened over the last year. And we're actually recording this back at our, kind of like our headquarters. It's our headquarters studio in Albuquerque. So this is the studio where we record all the Profit Cleaners course videos and stuff. But we're doing an update for those. So while we're here, we're recording a podcast.

Yeah. You said you wanted to find out what Perspired in Texas, that means sweating. That's right. What he means is transpired. Transpired perspired. Well, I was sweating a little bit. You wanna start with these quotes? Is that what we're doing? Yeah, I think I've done a lot of reflecting on this and I personally have had a hard time doing this podcast with you because I don't know why,

I've just been delaying it because, yeah, this is a weird one out of Brandon. He's normally like, go-getter, execute, execute, execute Mr. Positivity. So we're all gonna have a little bit of grace for Mr. Shane today. Thank you. Thank you. So we're gonna open up this podcast with a couple of quotes just to lighten the mood and just encourage everyone,

including myself that it's, it's gonna be okay. We're gonna keep moving forward and making progress. So this is another one we shared in our coaching group recently. I love this quote. You talking a lot about progress and making progress is taking action. And just keep going. Don't give up. So Winston Churchill, great guy, he said, perfection is the enemy of progress.

So if you're always trying to be perfect, you're gonna become stagnant, you're gonna freeze and you're not gonna do anything and you're just gonna spin your wheels essentially. So yeah, the the analysis paralysis, analysis paralysis. And then we got one more great quote. Alright. The other quote is, I have not failed but found 1000 ways to not make a light bulb.

And that was allegedly said by Thomas Edison. Yeah. So I think it was in some part of the press talking about how it's taken him forever to make a light bulb. The question was probably along the lines of did you fail to make a light bulb? No. But I found a thousand ways not to do it. And that was before he actually succeeded in making a light bulb.

Yeah. So guys, no matter what where you are in your business, continue taking action, action is what changes your business. And really progress equals happiness is another quote. I think Tony Robbins says that. But I love that quote because a lot of us are looking for ways to be happy in our business. And if you just keep chunking away at it,

if you just keep taking action, even if you make a mistake, it's not a mistake if you learn from it. And that's one of the biggest things I've learned from this is these are all really great lessons and we're now better for it. We're more organized, we're more focused. So we wanna share with you guys what happened, which is we're no longer in Texas,

right? We're gonna spill the beans right now. We're no longer in Texas. Yeah, we talked about it over many episodes. We were expanding into Texas, launching a new brand, we're gonna record all the stuff along the way. And we did all that. I mean we recorded all these things, but in the end we ultimately decided to close down the cleaning operations inside of Fort Worth.

So there's lots of reasons for that, but we'll get into it. Yeah, I think we had really good intentions and at the time I was living out in Fort Worth and it still is a great market, but just the timing was off specifically for my family, my kids, everything. We were actually starting the business and then as we were getting into it,

a big thing happened, a big event back home in New Mexico. We were excited to move back, which unfortunately that didn't turn out very well either. But long story short, we got distracted. It wasn't the right timing. Had I been out there longer and didn't have to come back for what we came back, maybe it would've still very well worked out.

I wasn't out there anymore. Nobody was out there. And we need someone boots on the ground to continue making the business work. So yeah, I think we're gonna dive into some what happened, what we learned. And also I want you guys to stay tuned until the end of this episode because it's got a cool little gift we're gonna put out there.

If any of you want to maybe take this on or have us help you, we're gonna share something cool at the end. Yeah. So stay tuned for that. So here's the thing, right? San Diego Green Clean was going well, we should obviously expand this. That's obviously where you go with the business that's doing it. I just think part of it was that we went too fast.

So we had simultaneously in New Mexico expanded from Albuquerque to Santa Fe as kind of a test like well what does it take to actually do it? Let's figure it out. And then it's like, okay, well we figured that out. Let's go to Texas. It should be the same thing, right? So we were kind of expanding into two markets at the same time.

We've got attention split between three cities now, Fort Worth, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Los Alamos. We're trying to make all these work simultaneously and it just didn't, we had things that were easy in New Mexico, we difficult in Texas. And I think the biggest one there was the business license, which is so silly to say out loud. But Texas Bills itself is this very business friendly state.

And this took forever and ever and ever weeks, months to get this paperwork thing cleared up. And that was a big problem because what we had was we got ourselves stuck in this loop where we hired cleaners, we got them training both with the training videos and we sent our trainer out there to train them. Then there was some turnover, they left replace it,

send the trainer out again. Okay, we got a team in place, now we need some business. Google won't let us run ads because we can't verify the Google My business account because the state is not processing our business license paperwork in a timely fashion. And from my side, we did all of this correctly. We had a business attorney that was helping us out doing it.

We weren't just DIYing this along the way, it's just that the time the Secretary of State in Texas took to process. It was literally months. And we're checking in with the lawyer, did they do anything? Is there, is there any way to speed this up? Can we pay for a rush fee? Like we're really getting hammered here by not being able to run ads.

So we had things going on a word of mouth basis, which was okay, it was taken off. But we had quality issues because the team was overturning, the teams overturning 'cause we didn't have enough business to keep them fully employed. It was just this conundrum and these cycles were feeding on each other. And then on top of all of that, we hired a manager,

flew him to Albuquerque, got some training that failed in the first week. Just we really made a bad hire on that one, which was really unfortunate because he seemed like a great fit. However, you know, in hindsight obviously it wasn't a great fit. But yeah, he actually had like a midlife crisis kinda happen while he was in training and it yeah,

the day before came up. I think his wife left him. Yeah man, it was just like, it was a perfect storm of how many complications can we throw at this at the same time and still keep going. But Brandon and I are optimists. So we just kept trekking away. We were hired a replacement manager that was okay. Got her on board,

did some training. It turns out she had some health issues, which you're allowed to have. Obviously, I'm not saying you can't, but it resulted in her missing, I don't know, half of work all of the time. Yeah. So that was part of it. That was, and then in the midst of all of that, Brandon moves away from Texas back to Albuquerque also.

Totally allowed to do that. In the beginning we were like, we can make it work. We'll take turns flying back to Dallas and figure it out and boots on the ground, you need a vested interest in there. We still didn't have an office, we were out of a storage unit. And then finally our CFO was just like, look guys,

we tried, do you really want do it in Texas? Like there's other places we could expand to, maybe we should rewind this. And then we really started thinking about it and in the end that's what we decided to do. We just rolled up shop just wasn't the right time. We had so many things working against us that it's like fighting an uphill battle when we didn't need to do it.

This wasn't the only company. We had a very successful company that we were kind of neglecting to try and get this one up and we were just fighting it the whole way. It felt like we were fighting it. And I think that's a really important point is a lot of times, and this is very typical of a lot of entrepreneurs, it's like shiny object syndrome.

And like you get something going and then you leave it and you start doing something over here and this starts dying and try to catch two rabbits and you catch none kind of thing. So we had a lack of focus is really what it was. And so when we took all this in, we thought about it, we actually really did refocus on the home brand and we really retooled a lot of our system because really I think we were in the middle of kind of transitioning to better systems,

a new software. We were launching all these things that were gonna help us be more organized. But we were kind of premature in going to a brand new market without having some of those things kind of like in place and a little more organized. And I think right now we are in a much better place to do that. We're still outlining some of our training on our training videos for our teams to just duplicate a lot of those processes.

So it's a lot easier in the future to do that. Yeah, a little bit too early. Yeah, we just, we, I think we just jumped the gun. Yeah. Like we had talked about for Texas, let's get all these things. We're gonna get theran stuff dialed in, the software, dialed in, make sure it's all super rock solid before we duplicate mistakes that we made in Albuquerque into a new market.

But instead of doing that, we went with minimum viable product. Like just get it out the door, let's do it. Right. And so we tried to get it up and making money as fast as possible. But again, I mean we kind of covered that with this chicken or the egg problem. I need cleaners to have customers but I need customers to have cleaners fully employed.

And we didn't have that set up correctly. There was just a whole host of things that, I don't know, we played it on hard mode and we didn't need to do it that way. Like there was no reason to do that other than speed. Yeah. So yeah, I regret nothing. So like I think one of the reasons that you were really hesitant about this,

this is that it was gonna come off to you guys, the listeners as the business gurus screwed up and don't know how to run a business and that it was gonna come off really negative. But that's not my read at all. That wasn't our CFO's read. We learned a lot about this and we're gonna expand into another market inside of New Mexico in 2024 and we're gonna take all these lessons that we're gonna recap with you and make that change going forward.

And then you will also learn from all this. So as we're going over this, I just want to make perfectly clear, I don't view this as a failure. Yeah. I view this as we tried something, it didn't work, we changed tack. The failure would've been to just keep throwing money at it to make sure that it succeeds right? And in the end I think it would've done the exact same thing.

It just would've been more expensive to do it. So I think we're in a much better spot. Yeah, absolutely. And really like there's a lot of positives that have come out of it just on a personal side. Like I'm closer back to family and back to home and loving my life again. And like, not that I didn't love in Texas,

but I do miss my home and you know, close to Brandon again. We can meet up more, meet up with our team more and things like that. So that's awesome. But also we learned so much and we were able to, now we are in two new markets in New Mexico, Santa Fe and Los Alamos and we're looking to do more this year,

but we've kind of just refocused on our home market. Yeah. And we're like, this is where we're really good at what we're doing and we're gonna retool some things, revamp our team a little bit. And then even though it wasn't the Texas market, it was still other markets we were still expanding into just as well. And those markets are doing well.

They're growing. Those are having great progress. So I think that is definitely a win in all of this. Alright, so here's our takeaways. Here are the lessons that we learned. So if we were gonna do it again, what would we do differently? So I think the biggest thing for me would be to have all the infrastructure in place before we spend any money.

We were doing these simultaneously. Brandon was on the ground getting cars and equipment and a storage unit and interviewing people. And I was sitting at a desk trying to get the business license stuff. And we were doing that in tandem, which is minimum viable product. We we're trying to do it very, very fast. This really screwed up the tandem side of it,

trying to get the lawyer thing. So instead what we should have done is let's get all the ducks in a row. Legally speaking we need the LLC filing and all this. We need to be recognized by the state. We need to make sure that we have an address that Google's gonna recognize so that we can get the Google my listing. So we should have had the Google business listing up.

Yeah. And running with the state before we spent a dime on cleaning equipment. That's what I think we should have done first. Yeah. So that, that's the first takeaway. Getting more of the basic stuff. We kind of put the cart before the horse and we were getting the cars ready and other things ready before even like business license and stuff.

Yeah. Because we just thought it wasn't gonna take that long. Yeah. We made a big assumption like in New Mexico, I can go to the Secretary of State's website, plug in some details and have a business license in like 10 minutes. And in Texas it was not like that. It was a huge pain. I can't believe it was that hard.

But anyway, we're past it now. Yeah. And on top of that it, like Brandon said, it just made other things harder primarily, you know, with our Google my Business, that's a very easy way to quickly start getting new customers, building that presence. And so without that it was like we had a website but it was like, it just made things a lot harder to build trust with customers when you're brand new.

Like when they're looking you up. Things like that. And just not having that, well nobody could review us anywhere because we didn't have that up either. So it was, yeah, we lined up the review cleans but they couldn't go anywhere to leave the reviews. Yeah. So that infrastructure was the missing piece. I think the other missing piece was we didn't do enough of the review cleans.

Obviously we, we screwed up by not having the ability to have them leave reviews. Right. But we should have had way more people. I think in Albuquerque we did neighbors that we knew, but we also did deserving populations like teachers or firefighters. So had we reached out to some community like that and gone a bit bigger, we had the infrastructure in place.

We got a lot of people that can leave reviews now when the Google my Business listing is active, it's got 65 star reviews on it, then we start feeding ads towards it. I think those are the two big things we would've done differently is Yeah. Infrastructure in place all the way. All the backend admin stuff done. Yeah. And ready to go.

And then making sure that we got a bunch of reviews Yeah. To launch so that when we did the ad spend that there was cleaners are now getting the reviews, we're paying them, we've got some runway to pay them. Yeah. And then we use the reviews to point back to the ad spend and then it starts building, which is what we did at Sandia,

Green, Clean. But I don't know, we strayed. We're not perfect. We're human. Yeah. And also, this isn't even on our notes for the talk, but like we did stray from other things too. We talk a lot about culture and just like we hired the manager too fast, I think we were just kind of scrambling to find cleaners because we didn't know where.

It was hard actually to find people even in a bigger city because a lot of people were driving from further out. Or because of that there was a couple people we hired that just did not fit the culture at all. Just a random side story. I had to go and pick up one of the cleaners one morning from like a halfway house and it was not a good situation.

There was people coming out of the house, I don't know if I ever told you this Brandon. No. But there were people coming out of the house asking for cleaning jobs and stuff. 'cause they were like, Hey you guys do cleaning, you need some help. And it was just, I was like man, what is going on? This is a bad situation.

She was like smoking on the job and things like that that we just making everyone else mad. And so again, we violated our own core values by not finding the right people moving too fast. And that's a big mistake, trying to just get people warm butts in the seats or whatever. Like instead of finding the right people and being patient to find the right people that match your core values.

Yeah. So I mean I think we know what we did wrong. I think we know what we would do differently. We've kind of covered some of the positive takeaways, but the positive takeaways were Brandon's back in a place that he likes. And we were able to take that energy and refocus on the new market, which was CFA and Los Alamos. And those are really thriving.

The other one I think was finalizing the software changes that we made. So when we had launched in Texas, we had this scattershot software solution where some things are coming in podium and some things are coming in Zendesk and thumbs things are over here. And our poor customer experience reps are losing their minds 'cause they have to check six different platforms all the time.

Just cycling through it. And we've now condensed all that to be much easier. So the next time that we go to expand we'll have a lot simpler, you know, interface for them to deal with. Yeah. And that's in an upcoming podcast guys. So stay tuned for that. But we're gonna show you and go behind the scenes of like what we actually did to really,

really simplify our marketing and our lead process and closing those sales. So that's a really exciting thing. But I think not having that and some other things like that infrastructure wise really hindered our ability to grow fast. And just, again, people were too spread thin and too bogged down and like we were really taken away from our main business. So I think it's good that we stopped that refocused,

retooled things and now we're in a much better spot. Yeah. So we've got the machinery dialed in a little bit for the next push. You know, in the next market. I feel good about it. Like I think the trepidation on Brandon's part was to not tell you guys so we could find a way to positively spin it. I'm just telling 'em like,

look man, you guys like us 'cause we're authentic. Let's just tell 'em that. Yep, yep. We tried this thing, it didn't work out. We know why it didn't work out. It's not like this is a mystery to us. We know exactly what happened and what we would do differently. Yeah. So we got that squared away. I think it'll go better for the next one.

Good news is if you're listening to us and you haven't started a cleaning company, then you just got to learn how not to expand into a new market. Congratulations, that was free, but we're happy to help. You know? Yeah, exactly. So we've learned a lot. I think you guys have learned from this as well. And a lot of that is we still documented a lot of that different pieces of building out the brand and the website and different things we did in the beginning with the cars.

And so that's still captured in our new training in our course. So like it's still very valuable. It's still is very much gonna work. But again, just coming from this perspective now, you know why we paused that stop that market refocused and what we would do different and better. We're doing it. We're, we're already going into new markets this year.

Yeah, totally. We're, we will keep going. We'll still have updates for you guys as we expand. It's not the, we don't quit after a failure. If you do that, you end up being a hermit or something. You just, you can't let one thing get you done. You gotta keep going. But that all brings us to this weird unique opportunity that we have now,

which is in Fort Worth. There is a totally encapsulated starter kit for a cleaning company ready to go. There's a storage unit filled with chemicals and tanks and mops and microfibers. Everything that you need to get going. There's the brand and the logo has been done, the professionally built out website is done. We took the car, we cannibalized the car for New Mexico.

So we brought that back and repainted it for New Mexico. But the layouts for the car, all the graphic plans for the car is done. And we can cannibalize all that and bring it back to New Mexico. But I think it might be more valuable that if one of you in Texas has interested in, you know, starting a cleaning company, this is a really interesting opportunity because it's a business in a box.

It's literally a one car size storage unit is the box. Everything you need is in there. And we're happy to talk with any of you if you would like to purchase that and run with it. Or maybe there's an opportunity where Brandon and I can keep a portion of that company and act as silent partner advisor types on the backend. We're flexible is what I'm saying.

Yeah. So if any of you're interested in becoming the Texas brand that works. 'cause you've, we figured out some mistakes along the way. There's definitely room to Yeah, absolutely. So I think it would be an exciting opportunity, especially if you live in Texas. I don't know if it would work outside of Texas because you'd have to ship that, but it could work if you guys want us to.

The branding is also very heavily Texas. It's, it's true. So yeah, it would probably work better somewhere in the Midwest or or in Texas. But yeah, we're happy to talk to you guys about it. So if you're in that position where you haven't started a cleaning business yet and that sounds appealing to you, reach out, send us an email at hello at Profit Cleaners dot com and we'll get the headline but just say,

interested in the Texas brand or interested in in working together, whatever you guys wanna title that and we'll be in touch, we'll talk through it. And I think it would be a really fun project for the right person. So yeah, in the meantime, keep it clean. 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.