Episode 14: Beat the Competition with an Abundance Mindset

Episode 14: Beat the Competition with an Abundance Mindset

Brandon Schoen:
There's more than enough for everyone to go around. And when you have this limiting beliefs, like you're scared that the competitors are doing something you're doing, or maybe they said something and it really let it get to you instead of just brush it off and be like, you know what? There's more than enough for everyone. I'm not worried. If we lose the customer, it's just like kind of rising above the noise, right?

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, what's up. Welcome to the Profit Cleaners podcast. Brandon Schoen in the house with my co-host..

Brandon Condrey:
Brandon Condrey here as always.

Brandon Schoen:
As always. And you know, we are the Profit Cleaners apparently when we come together and do these shows and we're so excited guys that would just be offering fresh value, fresh content. You guys know the drill. If you're listening to the show, you're getting some value out of this. It's changing some perspective, some ideas, maybe it had you laugh or learn something. That's all we ask guys. The feet of the show just shared out or leave us a review. Like it, subscribe it, do all that good stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
Yep. You can hit us up@helloatprofitcleaners.com. If you just want to hit us up, ask us some questions, maybe you got something specific you need to address. We're happy to talk to any of you guys whenever. And then we also have our master class going like we always do, and you can still join that. That's just free advice that we do. It's a webinar that we do every week on Thursdays and that's, Profitcleaners.com/masterclass. And hopefully, we'll see you in the chat on one of those meetings soon.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome. And so guys, we're going to talk today about something really cool. It's about how to beat the competition with an abundance mindset and build your building even higher while doing that. So I just want to give you guys a little sneak peek of that, and also jump back into some of these reviews we've been getting Brandon.

Brandon Condrey:
Cause you guys have definitely been listening when we ask you to leave reviews. So one of these is from Craig Baker, great for newbie and existing business owner. I appreciate that Profit Cleaners for sharing everything we know about starting your cleaning business. It surely saved mine. That's big time, man. We saved Craig's business. I think that's pretty awesome.

Brandon Schoen:
That is awesome Craig, making some waves there. We had another one from Yadira Baskin and she says, you should check the masterclass. I just joined the masterclass. It's incredible. Profit Cleaners remains one of my favorite podcasts ever. Awesome. And she says, I truly believe the content covered is really great. You're turning it into my invested time. I cannot recommend this podcast enough. So are you Dira. Awesome. We're so glad that you're getting value out of it and your return on investment and your time. That's what we're all about.

Brandon Condrey:
Yup. Totally. One more from Victor Stevens who says this is my favorite podcast, informational, entertaining, motivational, and anyone not just in the cleaning business could relate to. When I'm having a tough day for my cleaning business this motivates me. The episodes are well-researched exceptionally curious. Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Victor. I'm really happy that we are motivating people. I don't even know if we set out to do that in the beginning. It was to motivate people, but I liked it. That's an unattended sort of side effect of everything, but that makes me really happy that we're getting you guys kind of amped up.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. I think we had people do that for us when we were getting started. And obviously, sometimes you just need that and it's just inspiring for us to guys to see you're getting value out of that and it's improving your businesses. Like that gives back to us as well and lights me up and I get excited about that too. So really awesome. Okay guys. So let's jump into the podcast guys. So like we said, we're going to talk about how to beat the competition with an abundance mindset. So why should we even have an abundance mindset in the first place? What does that mean? And let's talk about that. Maybe we should tell them about the story when we were actually on our coffee walk, we still do these coffee walks, but we really did this all the time in the beginning.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. In the beginning, we would once a week for about an hour, we would walk this big block that our building is on. And I think if you go three times around, it ended up being like two miles. And so we used to do that just to clear our heads not be at the desks or the computers or the phones, and just kind of do that. And like a lot of Brandonisms, a lot of shamanisms came out of those walks. And I remember this one in particular, we had, I don't remember the specific trigger, but our competitors were copying some of our marketing. As I recall, we may have even gotten one of those fraudulent reviews that we talked about in a different episode or a competitor leaves you one and you have to report it. And it was just kind of a bummer that we're doing really good, but people are just getting mad. And so I was kind of down about it. And then you said this thing that I'll never forget, which is you can have the tallest building, but either building your building higher or knocking down all the buildings around you, and that stuck with me forever, man. So the whole concept of it as I took it as if you just waste your time breaking stuff around you, you're not focusing on the infrastructure of your own building. It just makes it weaker. And by focusing on making your building taller, you know, the building, being the business, that everything will just fall into place.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it was actually somebody who was like grabbing us. One of our local competitors, like stole our tagline and like changed it a little bit and was like riffing off. And then yeah, maybe it was some negative things that were being said online or something. But yeah, I think that's the natural tendency man is we want to just like get really upset and we feel that emotion and we just want to like go crush the competitor and go say something mean about them. And that's like the literal..

Brandon Condrey:
The lizard brain is like, let's go leave one-star reviews on there. Yeah. We, Oh man. I remember one time we talked about like following their cars around to try and leave, to leave door hangers on their customers' doors that were specifically marketed at them being like, are you tired of X, Y, Z with this cleaner, try this instead. Yeah. Just been that time that we would've spent following people around on a car could have been much more well invested in the office making blog posts or making sales calls. Like there just could have been so many other things that we did instead of that ended up doing that, which was good. That would have been a total waste of time.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. We actually had one of our competitors following our teams around you remember this? And we had like an infiltrator from another company, like spying.

Brandon Condrey:
Like a mole. We'll know we'll make a different episode of the future, but remind us guys, don't forget. We had a mole from one of the franchises,

Brandon Schoen:
But I think it would, it gets back to for me, man, is what it was developing. That abundance mindset, which is there's more than enough. There's more than enough for everyone to go around. And when you have this limiting mindset, limiting beliefs, like you're scared that the competitors are doing something you're doing or maybe they said something and it really let it get to you instead just like brush it off and be like, you know what? There's more than enough for everyone. I'm not worried if we lose a customer, it's just like kind of rising above the noise. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
Totally. Yeah. So how do you do that? You focus on what you focus on is what you get. So if you focus on the competitors, like you talked about, you're just going to get roped into this. What are they doing? What are they doing? You're just now spying on people and you're letting your own business kind of wither over here. Cause you're left it on autopilot instead of actually paying attention to it. Right. So don't waste the energy there, focus on your own business. That's where you should put the energy. So if you focus on making it bigger, that's what you get. You get a bigger, yeah. More efficient, more qualified business. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it's just such a better use of your energy because you're directing that energy to a positive end result, which is back into your business. And when you do that guys, like what I noticed anyways, and I've heard this in different business talks and stuff before, but like when you're innovating your business, when you're only focused on your business, when other people are following you, that's a good thing. You should be flattered. You should be like excited that other people are copying you because you're probably six months or a year or even further ahead of them. So by the time they catch up to you, you're already going to, you continue innovating and you have that abundance mindset. You'll already have another six months of innovation or better systems or better marketing ahead of them. And you just continue to move ahead and you don't waste your time looking around at everyone else. Like what are they doing? What are they doing? You're just focused on your business. And like you said, you just keep stacking that higher and higher and higher. The energy is much better put to use. I think, you know, let the other people do that. You know, don't become that in your business, put the good energy out and just keep stacking it. I think that's what it's all about, man. So yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
So how do you do it? How do you develop the abundance mindset? So right. One of the things we talked about in the beginning, and this is kind of, you know, business 101 is that you should focus on solving your customer's biggest pain points. And that sounds obvious, but a lot of companies forget to do that or they get sucked into doing something else completely different or you get distracted and start offering chimney sweeping and cleaning and like all this other stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So really, Yeah. Just focus on solving problems is the best thing you could ever. Yeah. So really your specific cuts, they have different pain points than yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
So put yourself in your customer's thing. Like what customer do you want? Like in our case, we're after the young families with young kids that just are strapped for time. Yep. So you gotta imagine being them, what are the pain points? Got grandkids and dirty diapers and all this stuff. And the dust is all piling up and it just falls by the wayside. So if we can come in and take off all this stuff off your plate and then I'll make them happier. That's in the beginning pre COVID, we were selling time. Like you could have your time instead of cleaning on Saturdays, when nobody was working, you could actually hang out with your family instead. Yeah. So focused on solving the customer's biggest pain points. What's the next?

Brandon Schoen:
Another one would be find a niche in the market via storytelling and specialization. So you're already in the cleaning market, most likely, or if you have another service business, that's fine too. But really guys, the most powerful marketing ever is storytelling and people, no matter where you are, if you say, Hey, come here real quick, I'm going to tell you a story. People always want to listen. They're always quick to listen. They're always really ready to receive stories. And especially when you specialize it to your story and your local market, it's going to resonate with people even more. And people can't really copy that. You know, they really can't duplicate even your uniqueness or the local flair that you put on some cool story that you have. That's your unique story. It's maybe it's your family story of how you started this business or maybe it's a story of how you guys are involved in the community. Like we're doing UNM cancer patients that we help. Right. We're from here, we're local. So we tell stories about that. We integrate the local story of our city, you know?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So that's how to like tell the potential customers how you got there. But the other thing in that, you know, sort of bullet point was to find a niche. So cleaning is definitely a niche, but that's kind of a big, vague term. Our niche is environmentally friendly, residential cleaning. That's what we do. So I remember one of the best reviews we ever got was a customer's daughter had a severe allergic reaction to something in this new house that she just moved into, say it was paint related. I can't remember, but it was bad. And so they had done a lot of research. They hired us because of how we do things. And we went in there and went above and beyond. We did things that we normally never do. We had to wash the walls. Like we had our mops going up and down walls and you know, we adjusted price for this. It was an out of the ordinary job, but that woman's father left us like one of the best reviews ever about how we like really cared. And she was able to come home from the hospital and like not have this reaction again. And so that kind of niche is what leads to those types of customers and those types of reviews.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! Absolutely man. So tell stories, specialize your brand by telling stories, and niche yourself. The more niche you are, the better the riches are in the niches. We always say that!

Brandon Condrey:
The riches are in the niches. I forget who said that originally, but that's where they are.

Brandon Schoen:
It's a good one. So what's the next one Brandon?

Brandon Condrey:
Don't compete on price. So if you were just trying to get it cheaper than the next one, so they'll book you instead of them, it's just a race to the bottom about who's willing to crash first. So that's also kind of leans back to the niche thing. If you have a specialty, then you pay specialist prices. It's like how your general physician, you pay a $10 copay. But if you see a surgeon it's a $75 copay, right? So that's what you want to be. You want to be specialized and you have to set yourself apart. So in the masterclasses, you know, for those of you that are in there, there's some sales stuff that we talk about. And one of those things is that you don't want to open with the price. If someone calls you and says, Hey, how much does it clean my house? And you're like 50 bucks. They're like, great, thanks. I'm going to call around and see, get some other prices, right? But we try to tell you to give them the pricing at the end, after you told them what they're going to get for the price. So we're going to do high dusting, which a lot of people don't do because you have to have special tools to get ceiling fans. And you know, we live in the Southwest and that architecture style kind of has really, really high living rooms with beams. So we have to get all those. And we do X, Y, Z all the way across the board. That's super special. And that's, by the time you get to the price, I have literally had customers say, wow, that's a really good deal for all that we get. But if you just opened with it's 200 bucks, they're gonna be like what? My neighbor's got someone who cleans the for $70 every week, but that's not the point. The point is not to get the customer that wants $70. The point is not to get listed on Groupon where you can get four cleans for 25 bucks a piece like those are gonna be the bottom of the barrel customer that you don't want in the first place. It might take you a little bit longer to get the right customer, but don't compromise and take the ones that are going to really like, just be a headache all the time.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. You actually want to run from like, as far away as you can from the customers that are only wanting the cheapest price, because by far they're the biggest problem customers. They will complain the most. You'll never be able to make them happy. And again, they want to pay the least for the most. And so, yeah, the price thing also while you were talking about Brandon is just building value. So I was going to sell you an iPhone and I said, you could buy this iPhone, or you can buy this iPhone, but this iPhone I'm going to include a hundred thousand dollar trainings from the best marketer in the world and the best sales guy in the world, then you're going to get this cool. Like if I actually had stuff on that iPhone that was valuable more than it's just like a widget or it's just a thing, like something that's pen, that kind of thing. Right. That's what we're talking about guys is differentiating yourself through building that value. So like you're saying, when you go through the sales presentation, you're building that value the whole time where you're showing all these extra things we do, but think outside the box even, and be like, what else could we do to build value? Maybe you throw in something free. Maybe you partner with other local business that adds something in to work with you. And then they're like, wow, I get even more value. Sometimes people pick the products just because of the bonus or whatever it is, you know? So add some cool value in there on top of it and get creative. And then it's not about price anymore, right? It's about value. So that's a good one.

Brandon Schoen:
What else? What else we got number four, which is change to stay ahead. So constant innovation to create a win-win better experience and more value, which is what we were talking about guys is continually focus on your building, continually building that building taller, and taller and taller and stacking it, right? So you're not looking around like looking at what everyone else is doing. We're focused on the win, the road ahead.

Brandon Condrey:
Cleaning and any service business really is all the fractional market, which there's a bunch of providers, a small market, they're all competing for the same chunk of business. You got to get ahead of that. And the way you do that is by everything that we've said so far, but also changing. So like one of the things we did is we used a software that was recommended to us in the beginning and right away, we knew that like, this is just not old, the updates aren't coming, like the educational videos, the software people had given us were from like 2014. So the three years the interface hadn't changed. And so we were trying to find something that was more adjusting to the market. And so we found the one that we're with now Service fusion and they offered something that the other one didn't, which was text messaging to the customers and automated text messaging. So we could tell them that, Hey, we're on the way, or, Hey, your clean's tomorrow. The notifications beforehand dropped our cancellation rate by a lot. And then notifications on the way are just really comfortable for people, especially now with pandemic, when everyone's working from home, you know, they're going to be here in 15 minutes. So if you don't want to be there, cause it's loud and you have a call to do like, you know that you can pack up your stuff and clear out and everything will be fine. So that was a way that we were just trying to beat out the competition. How do you beat it out? And then again, during the pandemic, we had to make a bunch of changes. That was like a perfect case study on trying to get ahead of everything. It's not a set it and forget it system. You don't want to just, alright, we clean houses. Here's how we do it. Boom done. And just ride a wave for like 10 years. Like you're going to have to adjust along the way. You need to test new products when they come out, you need to see if the cleaner that you're using is the best one for what you're trying to do. Maybe some other chemical company came up, that's even more environmentally friendly than the one you're using before.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And we're not saying guys like, don't look at what everyone else is doing ever. Like it's okay to notice. But what I like to do is notice what other competitors are doing and then ask yourself, how can I do this better? What are they missing? Or what's not quite there that I could do better. And like you said, man, it might be, yeah, everyone's using cleaning products, but what's a better product that I could use or what's a better thing I could put in. That's going to deliver a better result and make people feel the whole experience better. Right. So yeah. I mean, that's what that, one's all about another one, what's number five. Brandon?

Brandon Condrey:
Providing great customer service. So we've talked about this multiple times. Like you should be saying, you should be syncing this as a pattern by now, but yeah, like great customer service is kind of what the customer that we want, the sort of younger customer, just what they expect. Like you expect free returns on packages that you get online and you expect that if you had a problem that you can get on some companies chat and just like solve it, like right away. That's kind of like where the market's headed. Right. So yeah. Provide great customer service, fix the stuff that you break, tell them that you broke it beforehand. We have for a long time provided flowers. When we clean, it's a little, like one flower in a water tube and a little cardboard stand that says, Hey, we cleaned your house today. One of the things we did when we set that up with the florist is that we kind of arrange these different bouquet sizes for whatever. And so sometimes a customer will call to say, Hey, I have to cancel next week. I'm sick or whatever. We'll send them a get well, bouquet with a quick it's 10 bucks to us. It gets delivered on they're like, I can't believe that my cleaning company wished me like to get well, right. We've had customers die. We've had customers pass away. Unfortunately. And in those cases, like a family members calling in to say, Hey, we're not going to do it. And some cases they'll ask us to like, can you do a move out clean on this house so we can kind of go get it ready to put on the market. We'll send, you know, like a bereavement bouquet for those and say, Hey, really sorry for your loss. Hopefully things get better. We've had customers have babies and we send flowers for that. Like, congratulations, here's the thing. And so that sticks out in people's mind over and over and over again. And that's just one small example of like great customer service. There's lots of ways to iterate on that. But that's what you should be doing.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. I was saying earlier, like storytelling is some of the best marketing. I read this and want to Gary Vaynerchuk Chuck's books recently. And he said something along those lines. He's like literally the best customer service slash marketing is just care, just care. You know, like a lot of businesses don't care and they don't go extra mile to give that unique customer experience. And they just don't care. So if you can just care a little bit more than your competitors, you're already like way ahead of the game, because people can feel that even if it's just a phone conversation you're having with them, like they can tell them the tone of your voice, the energy project, it's the smallest details all the way to yeah. Offering flowers or something extra to go the extra mile. But that's the customer service we're talking about is just caring, you know, thinking bigger. And then like the last one would be listen. So listen to your existing customers, talk with your customers so you can retain them for life. You can't figure out how to beat the competition if your customers are leaving you obviously. So really those customers are like perfect insight and feedback for what you can improve, what you can do better. And just the whole process.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Right. You can do this a number of ways. The primary way that we do it now is that we send out an automated survey after someone has their first clean. How was your initial clean? Answer these questions for us. And then like, we at least get some feedback from you. And then if there's something that we really need to touch on, we will call and go over that with you. But you could go bigger. We have talked about it before. We've never managed to pull it off. Cause COVID, you know, like we're eight months into this now, whatever it is, whatever the math is, six months into it. And so things kind of got put by the wayside. But one of the things we talked about doing was let's tell all the customers that we're gonna meet at this coffee shop. We're going to be here all day, come down whenever you want, we'll buy you a coffee. And we just want to talk to you and see how you like our service. Like, and then that might be a good opportunity to ping new ideas off of them. So you could say, Hey, we got this electrostatic sprayer. We want to charge you 150 bucks to like completely disinfect your house. Is that something you'd be into? So that'll allow you to potentially test new products or price points. And then I do want to add, like before we had started this business, when I was listening to a ton of business podcasts and entrepreneurs, podcasts, like whatever, I could get my hands on. One of them that I liked a lot was called the fizzle show. And it's more about business in general. It's not focused on cleaning companies or anything else for that matter, but they have a great podcast episode that you should listen to called customer conversations. I forget the episode number, but if you just Google the fizzle show podcast, customer conversations, it will come up and they had a whole hour long episode talking about why you should do it, how you should do it. And they have a course online that you can take two if you want. And I did find a lot of value in that and hopefully you will too.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome, man. Well, I think those are some good points to leave everyone with. And really just circling back to what we were talking about in the beginning is guys, when you take your eyes off the road, you swerve off the road, right? You get what you focus on. So if you start turning your eyes off the road and looking at what everyone else is doing, your hand, just kind of drifts to the left, to the right, and you don't even notice. And then before you know, it, you're crashing into a wall and crashing and burning, and that is the worst thing that can happen. So focus again on building, you're building higher. Don't worry about smashing down the buildings around you, spend that energy more wisely and more efficiently and put it back into your own business. And the rest of the people will just be wasting their time trying to catch up to you is basically what it comes down to. So always be improving, innovating new ways to service your customers. And yeah, just another way to keep winning.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Thanks for listening guys as always and keep it clean we'll catch you on the next one.

Brandon Schoen:
Yep. Keep it clean guys.

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