Episode 135: Strategic Planning for Cleaning Business Challenges

Episode 135: Strategic Planning for Cleaning Business Challenges

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:
Welcome back folks. We're here for the Profit Cleaners podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners. And we're gonna talk about pre-mortem today. Pre pre-mortem. Yeah. Which is kind of a weird thought.

Normally you're like, what's postmortem? That's, you're the biology major, Brandon. So let's dive into it. Okay. So postmortem is a Latin term, but usually when they're saying it, it means literally, it means like after death. So in the context of a medical term though, it's, it's an autopsy. You're gonna cut apart a dead body to figure out what killed him.

So we had just recently recorded an episode about failed business venture and we were doing a post-mortem on, on the expansion effort. And then that brought up this concept of a pre-mortem. Yeah. And so the pre-mortem, this came from an episode of Freakonomics where they were talking to an economist. And so the idea is if you look at how it failed before it actually does,

you might be able to mitigate some of those things. So we're gonna talk through that today. Yeah. And I think this is really, we were talking about this before the the show, but we're both pretty positive. I'm really positive about things. So it's like, why would you want to think about the worst possible case scenario? Well, the reason is because if you can imagine the worst possible thing happening,

if and when it does happen, you'll already be prepared for it. And you'll, it won't be so catastrophic. And you won't be like, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? You'll have a plan and you'll have mentally prepared yourself, you know, going through worst case scenarios. And this actually came up recently in our, one of our EOS meetings,

which is our, yeah, this was a couple years ago. I think it was in, it was in 2021. And so we were doing a SWOT analysis. So SWOT is SWT for those of you that don't know. And it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. And so if you, if you put your mindset back in 2021,

we were still in the midst of covid and things were crazy. And all of us at the table, the leadership group for our EOS meeting had all listed under threats. Recession. Recession, recession, recession. And so our guy running the meeting, our, you know, facilitator had said, okay, let's talk about this. Let's put together, he didn't call it a pre-mortem,

he just said, let's put together a recession plan. If it actually comes to fruition, the US goes into a recession, how are you guys gonna react? And he wanted us to come up with real numbers and steps and actions. And so we had come up with things like, we're gonna switch the marketing messaging from this to, you know, from saving your time to,

it's important to help a local business, you know, stay in and we will help you. So you can keep going and you switch it. Peace of mind. Yeah. More peace of mind. Mind. Yeah. Peace of mind. You can switch it from this to that. We were gonna change the marketing budget. We're gonna up the marketing budget.

Most people in recessions just turtle in and stop spending money, hoard all the money. And those are the ones that fail because no one knows that they're there 'cause they're not advertising. So we wanted to kind of relate to you guys what that would look like. So if you have a big decision coming up, you're sitting there with your spouse, you're planning out the cleaning company,

we're gonna launch this cleaning company. Well, okay, we've got it all. I remember this meeting distinctly with Brandon and I's, and our wi wives sitting around a table. Yep. Getting permission for me to quit my job that was paying me six figures so that I could start a cleaning company that would pay me nothing for a year. So the opposite side of that coin would've been,

okay, the cleaning company failed wives, really sorry that we put you through this. It totally failed. How did it fail? And so the idea is walk through the way in which it didn't work. We launched, we didn't get customers. How could we have gotten more customers? Well we should have retold the marketing and had more budget to execute the marketing from the beginning.

Or we got a bunch of one star reviews with our first batch of clients. And I, no one will talk to us. What caused the one star reviews? We were late, the quality was bad. How could we have adjusted those? We should have really dialed in the scheduling with A CRM. We should have put the cleaners through a much more intensive training procedure.

We should have hired an outside person to come and train. And all of these are hypothetical. There's no wrong answer. Right? But the point is, you want to think about the ways in which it didn't work so that in the event it actually starts steering towards like uhoh, like we're getting a bunch of one star reviews. How do we mitigate this really quickly?

We actually mapped this out. We made a plan for this before and it's very helpful. And like in the Freakonomics episode we, we will put a link to it in the show notes. But he was talking about how they were doing it with an air force, like big strategy thing. And nobody wanted to do it because they thought it would bring the team down that it,

that they don't want to think about it negatively. And I thought about you in that moment for sure. I was like, Brandon would hate this. Like we're, we're just gonna, we're gonna talk about all the ways that it didn't work and bum ourselves out. But that's not the object. The object is not to make everyone sad that the thing we worked on really hard failed.

Hmm. The idea is to think about it failing. What did we miss? What did we miss in this planning that we didn't think about? And so what changes can we make right now? Hmm. So that we know that Yeah, we talked about it failing six different ways. Let's try and put some things in place. You don't even have to do anything.

We're just talking about putting some steps on a flow chart pretty much so that if we start getting one star reviews, oh, we know how to react to this. Yeah. 'cause we talked about it before we launched. Yeah. And it doesn't catch anyone off guard because you've kind of like, it's like premeditated. You've thought like what are the worst case scenarios?

This, this, this, this could happen. And also, this is why we do those. SWOT analysis is not just one time. We do this every year, if not more often. We do it every quarter or every quarter. I'm sorry. Yeah. Even more often. Because you want co be aware of what, what, what are the strengths of your business?

What are the threats? What are the opportunities, what are the weaknesses? And if you're not aware of those things, you're not thinking ahead. Right? In order to be visionary leading your company, if, which you're, if you're the CEO or the leader of your company, you have to be more visionary. You have to see out ahead of where most people aren't thinking.

And so that's, if you're on a boat steering a boat and you're not looking out at the iceberg ahead and you're just like, ah, we'll pass it. No big deal. You're gonna crash and your whole team's gonna go down with you. So this is like thinking of where are the icebergs gonna be? Where are these pitfalls gonna be potentially, even if they're not out there,

we wanna know if we do see one, how are we gonna react and be proactive instead of mostly at the time when you're not thinking this way, you're reactive, which is a much worse, you know, emotional and just very negative state to be in and is reacting, oh my gosh, this happened versus this happened. Like Brandon said, we were planning on this and we know it,

we already mapped out the plan. Now you have confidence to take action to immediately mitigate whatever it is. And so I'm trying to think if there's any other examples of this in our business that we've seen this happen and, and mitigated things. But I know there's been a lot of 'em and, and it's, you know, Texas is the most recent example is we were kind of maybe a little more prideful about going into new market without thinking through some of these things and being more cognizant of like,

okay, this could really happen and this could really happen. So we're just showing you guys if we could go back and, you know, this is, this is not a mistake. When when we went into that market, we learned a lot of good lessons from that. We took a lot of good things from that. But again, if we would've maybe pre-mortem it out.

Yeah. Preor in Texas, we may have Yeah. Solved some of these problems. Right. Wanna know why most cleaning business owners fail or get stuck systems. When you don't have the right systems in place for hiring, training, marketing, all of the day-to-day essentials, then your business gets jammed. And without the right systems, it's impossible to keep moving forward.

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Yeah. So I mean, I can't think of any other specific examples, but I can tell you from a personal level, like I have always thought this way about things. I used to think it was bad. I like, and there's actually a term for this in psychology, which is catastrophic thinking. And that's where you're imagining like terrible things happening to family members and stuff like that.

Hmm. But I always tend to go towards worst case scenarios. And something actually clicked for me recently was I've been listening to a lot of Ryan Holiday and so Ryan Holiday has the Daily Stoic podcast and he has a bunch of books about stoicism, which was a philosophy of like the Romans, you know, when they had a big empire. Hmm. And one of the things that he does talk about the pre-mortem as well,

and he's trying to frame it in the sense that, you know, you gaming out these different scenarios that might happen to you Yeah. In a given set of circumstances isn't so you can self torture with like all these bad things happening to you. Right. It's so you can kind of go through the motions of this is what it would be like if this happened,

here's how I would react. Right. This is kind of what like military training is like, they're loosely connected. Like military training is like people are shooting at you and we're gonna do live fire exercises where bullets are flying over your head so you can really feel the stress of the situation so that when it's actually happening and there are real people shooting real bullets at you,

you're not getting freaked out, you don't panic and you can react correctly in that way. So they're kind of simulating terrible things happening so that you can react correctly. Yeah. And this is loosely related I think, where you're trying to simulate mentally the the bad things that might happen. Here's how I would react. So you kind of get this little toolbox,

you get a, you get a rebuttal for scenarios that are gonna happen to you that are outside of your choice. Yeah. There's a good quote here that fits, which is like, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. We had a rock solid plan for Texas man, and then we got out there and the enemy just throw us apart. You know?

And like had we thought about it a bit more in the terms of this checklist we should have done beforehand, business license, Google my business account, AdWords, bank account, all this stuff that was already said and done, maybe it would've made things go a little bit smoother. So yeah. You know, not to bring everybody down, but I just want you to think about things that could go wrong.

Yeah. And how you would fix them before they even happens. So we're gonna save you the trouble of having them happen to you. Absolutely. And you've mentioned some really important, important points at the end there. 'cause when you're out there on the battlefield, you're literally in battle. A lot of us don't think of it like that, but it is war out there because you're,

you're out there on your own fighting these battles every single day. And I like to say there's no competition if you dominate because, you know, but a lot of people are trying to compete with each other. But it's a battle, right? It's a, it's a fight. It's a, it's a war out there. And so the more you have strategy,

this is why the military, this is why these people at these levels strategize and they, they game out these things, these very high levels, they shoot at each other and they do things. So, you know what it feels like in the moment, like Brandon's saying. So if you're, if you're doing those things, you're more prepared mentally, you're more prepared physically,

emotionally, whatever it is, so that you can continue being in the game. This is why mindset is so important. Just like in, there's such a big parallel with sports and business. 90 some percent of it is mental. So this is all the mental game behind the scenes. This is mentally strategizing, gaming out what bad, what are the bad worst things that could happen.

And now you're proactive. Now you're ready now for the, the now the worst thing could happen and you're gonna just be able to walk right over it and continue the battle and, and keep fighting forward. So I think that's why it's really, really important to the, you know, as much as you don't wanna be negative, you are being positive because you know,

you can't, you can't see the light without the dark and you can't make those, those contrasts and, and those decisions without knowing ahead of time. You know, instead of just getting, you know, totally obliterated out on the battlefield now you have a plan, you have a strategy. Yeah. There's thought through it and I think that's really important.

So yeah, so when you start thinking about it this way, you'll find it mentioned in lots of different places. We talked about the Freakonomics episode, Ryan Holiday. There was a book I read on time management I think. And it was talking about how a lot of people get stuck and don't start because you're imagining all these ways that are gonna go wrong and there's a lot of anxiety associated with it.

And that author who I can't remember to save my life had said, well just do it like game out. The worst case scenario. And I remember doing this mentally to myself before we had started the cleaning company. Okay, what's the worst case scenario? It fails completely. I quit my job, I lost my retirement account 'cause we invested it in the company.

We're about to lose the house. The worst case scenario is you file bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, yeah. Protects you from losing your house and your creditors and allows you time to reorganize. So that actually made me feel at ease. Yeah. Even though in my brain, the cleaning company completely failed, but there's a safety net at the end to reset. Yeah,

I love that. So all of this is just to get you guys to change the mindset a little bit. Think outside the box about ways that you could be trying to mentally mitigate things that are happening. It doesn't have to be a huge thing that we're talking about, a company failing. It could be like, we're we're have a new marketing campaign launching tomorrow.

We're expecting to get this conversion rate. How did it go wrong? And you can gain through little things the same way just to make sure that you've got it covered. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I think everything, you guys should take this, you know, rework maybe your strategy for the, the quarter, for the year game out some scenarios.

And I think overall all these things are gonna help you guys be a lot more proficient out on the battlefield, the business. And yeah, I think just what you said right there too, most people are very, very afraid to start businesses. And this is, I had a mentor many, many years ago telling me this, what, what Brandon said there was,

what's the worst thing that could happen when you start a business? Bankruptcy, no big deal, right? Nobody got hurt, nobody got killed. No, you just restart over. And most people that you hear, the, the, the biggest business moguls out there, if you go read their stories, almost all of 'em have gone bankrupt multiple, multiple times.

And so you get up, you dust yourself off and you keep going and you don't let it hold you back. And so I think, you know, if you guys have that mindset and prepare you ahead of time, you're gonna be unstoppable. And this is the kinda way you have to start thinking. So, so there you go. There you go.

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