Episode 141: The $19 Clean Scam: The True Cost of Too-Good-To-Be-True Deals

Episode 141: The $19 Clean Scam: The True Cost of Too-Good-To-Be-True Deals

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business. Make more money, have more time. This is the profit Cleaners podcast with your hosts, 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. I'm your host, Brandon Shane, and I'm joined by my co host, Brandon Condrey, in the house.

What's going on, Brandon Condrey? Oh, just another day in the life. School's getting out. Last couple days of school here, so they're all half days. So my schedule's all thrown off while we wait for summer camps to start. Yeah, absolutely, man. We're getting into the summer season, which is exciting. It's a great time of year to be growing your cleaning business. If you guys made it through the spring, caught the wave.

We're now in the summer, which still is a great, you know, lots of customer acquisition, so we're. But, yeah, the weather is warming up. Brandon and I are up in the mountains, but it's like 75 degrees here still today. So I think it's like 100 degrees in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A lot hotter down there. But, yeah, let's get into it. I was working out at the gym yesterday, and I saw this big advertisement on the tv for, like, a home cleaning business, and I was like, whoa, somebody is going big and wide with their marketing campaign here.

And I wanted to learn more about it. So I was a little bit nervous at first because it was like $19 to clean your house. So we're going to talk about that. Our $19 cleans coming for your business. And some people have pointed out, especially in our group, like, should I be worried about this? How are we going to compete with $19 cleans? So let's just get into it, Brandon.

Let's, like, talk about some of these cleaning businesses that are sprawling up all over the Internet for $19 cleans. Should we be worried about it? How are we going to even compete with this? Is this crazy what's going on here? So let's dive into it. Yeah. So you've seen these before. I think we've actually talked about them before, but I remember the first time that I saw it was on Facebook.

And I think what we should do is we're not going to mention any specific cleaning company. A, I don't want them mad at me and sending some lawyer because we don't have a favorable opinion. Spoiler alert. And also, you know, there's multiple, like, there are four or five of these that we have come across. And so. But the tip off here is $19 clean. For all I know, these might all be the same company, but as I'm googling around, they're headquartered in different places.

One is in San Francisco, one's in Michigan, so who knows? But here's the pitch. Here's what Brandon saw at the gym. Get your home cleaned for $19. Oh my gosh. How is that possible? $19 is so affordable. This is a contractor model wrapped in borderline deceptive pricing and, you know, fancy marketing. So running tv ads is not cheap. So the fact that they're spending that money on tv ads right away is this is just another gig economy job.

This is Amazon, Flex or Uber or Grubhub. If you want to work a job that involves cleaning, you can sign up on these platforms in as little as ten minutes. That's awesome. I want to make money cleaning houses. How motivated do you think people that can get a job in ten minutes are going to be to do a good job? The one in San Francisco, for instance, has a 3.1

star rating after 3200 Google reviews. That is terrible. Wow. So here's the pitch, right? The pitch on the website is amazing. They're going to do all this stuff, they're going to clean this and clean that and they're going to get into these detailed areas. The reviews tell a different story. Here's what they're the borderline deceptive processing. It's buried in their faq. They're not actually hiding it, but here's what you do.

Cool. We're going to give you the $19 1st clean for 2 hours. If you buy a membership to the platform, the membership is at least $50 a month or more. And then what the $50 a month gets you is a discount on the cleaning. So normally we charge $30 per hour for cleaning. If you pay the $50, you know, month of membership, then you only pay $20 an hour or $18 an hour for cleaning.

And then they go on to tell you that 100% of what they charge goes to the cleaner. So the cleaner is definitely making $18 an hour and this company is only making the membership fee. The reason this works is the company behind the scenes is maybe one or two people that slapped up a website and paid for some marketing and they built out a platform or they're using someone else's platform like booking koala or launch 27, to just connect people to cleaning.

And so here's my concerns, do they vet people? What kind of background check is coming back in ten minutes? If you can sign up in ten minutes and get a job and get access to my house, what's to stop you from taking all the stuff inside my house and disappearing? You know what I mean? How rigorous is the getting on the platform as a cleaner, there's no training, by the way.

There is zero. Like, this is how you have to clean. It is actually illegal to train 1099 contractors, so they're going to send them a list. The contract that you're agreeing to, Mister Gig cleaner, is you got to clean the toilets, this and this. With what? What cleaners are they using? I don't know. You don't know? Yeah. That's really hard to build value when you have no idea who's showing up, what they're using, what process, what the experience is.

You have no control over it. And this is, again, why I haven't actually a story of this. When I was living out in Fort Worth the last couple years, or with Texas, there was a company exactly like this that my wife and I tried. And every single time we used the company, it was a. It was a nightmare. Like, it was a different person every time. They were always late, they were always changing the schedule.

Highly unreliable, using bleach and chemicals. We could smell it when we came in the house, even though we asked him not to use those things. Yeah, it was just. And then when we did have issues, we'd have to reach out to the main company and it was such a disaster. It was horrible communication. There was all this back and forth. So, anyways, that was my kind of experience with similar kind of company.

And I just say that this is clearly why we don't run a business like this, because it's highly variable and really hard to scale. And kind of, when Brandon and I looked at these models in the very beginning, we looked at this model in 2017, before we launched the brand, and we were like, should we do this? Should we do this? And we saw the people that were having results in this business were clearly struggling.

They were not selling their businesses for top dollar. They were getting out more often than they were starting them. So kind of the moral of this story, guys, is the easier it is to start, the harder it is to scale. And the harder it is to start, the easier it is to scale, because you're going to have something much more sustainable. This is kind of why we went away from this model.

But it is really interesting. Looking at this marketing, this website, you can see what they're doing. But one of the questions I'm asking is what kind of customers are they attracting? If you're wanting to build a business like this and you slap up a site and you're, you know, you don't have to hire anybody and you don't have to have any control over the process, but it's so cheap.

Like, you're competing on price, not value. You're probably going to attract the tire kicker customers. The people that want the cheapest want the most value for the least amount of cost. Right, Brandon? Like, to me, that's not a great customer to attract. Yes. So that's a big red flag for me. As you know, we don't love adding new services to our business, but in the case of breezy blue, we're all for it.

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But, you know, the cost was so little. So with these, like, yeah, you, they're trying to get people to pay attention to the ad with the eye popping number, get your whole house clean for $19. No way. Yes. The answer is no way. That is not possible. So if you cancel your membership within six months after getting the $19 clean, they're going to charge you the full price, which, depending on the company, is either just bumping up the hourly that they actually took or like $500.

So it just depends on which company that they're using. So they're trying to trick people into doing it. It's really cheap. My concern as a homeowner is I have no idea who's coming in, what tools they're using. Are they even going to have tools? Am I going to have to provide stuff? They don't answer the questions to this on the website. They just do not. This is one of my favorite ones.

I looked up the theft policy of one of them and this blew my mind because it's like, this is part of our pitch from San Diego Green clean is like, look, we have 100% insurance. We're going to cover you. And even if it's not our fault, we're probably going to cover you because I want to deliver an amazing customer experience to the end user so that they keep coming back over and over and over again.

Here are some of the this is the theft and damage policy. This is bad. A. They want you to deal directly with the person that cleaned your house. So if you have an issue, they don't want to talk to you. They want you to message the person that was in there. So let's say it was the ten minutes I came in, took all your cool shit and left.

Well, they're probably not going to reply to you. Maybe that was a burner phone they used to sign up. Okay, great. Next. Here are the exclusions. If you can't get a hold of your cleaner. Okay. A. You have to be in good standing. You, the person who got stolen from, you have to be in good standing with the company. No outstanding balances and you haven't violated the terms of service.

The terms of service are probably a 30 page legal document. So you probably violated it by not looking at it. So cool. We don't have to pay you out. This is another gotcha. Gotcha. You didn't follow the terms of service. I don't have to pay. Sucks to be you customer. Goodbye. But this is my favorite. Here are the exclusions. Losses of cash. Cool. If I had a pile of money that went missing, they don't cover that.

That's awesome. They don't cover fine arts. They don't cover sentimental value. If they lose your pet, that's on you. Sorry. Uh, let's see, what else? Oh, this is a good one too. Uh, let's see. I need to find the specific one. It's, um. I can't find it in a list. This list is huge. This is like a legal document. Oh, here it is. Losses for items that retain their functionality.

So I have a stainless steel fridge. You scratched every single panel on the front, but the fridge is still refrigerating. Things not covered. Cool. I just spent $3,000 on my fridge and it's brand new and you just scratched all of it. I just have to live with that. Great, man. Like, it's just so crazy. Like there's so many exclusions on here. Yeah, that, like, why would you do it?

But people aren't looking into this. This is buried in the faqs and I booked a $19 service you stole my laptop. How do we know your laptop was there? This is just like a gimme. And this is why the company has a 3.1 star rating. And more importantly, googling around. This is also why they have a huge class action lawsuit. Two big companies, which we're not going to mention by name, have a big class action lawsuit for them not paying people because they're not paying by the hour, they're paying by the contract.

So they're not covering your car as you get there. They're taking advantage of the cleaners by telling they're going to get paid well, but you have to cover your own car. The cleaners are not paying insurance so that means that your house is not insured. The insurance they do have is the contract referral agency has so many exclusions that it's going to go wrong every time. A lot of these 3.1

star reviews are all related. This is funny. So Google picks out certain keywords in reviews and I'm looking at the 3203.1 star reviews. The biggest keyword that they recommend is scam. 334 reviews mention the word scam. And so there's just one star reviews over and over and over again. Don't trust this specific cleaner or the agency. Their thief Sam will charge your credit card without permission. Cleanings, mediocre at best.

Yeah. Be careful. Do not allow them entry without someone home. And there a neighbor here in Fresno hired a lady from this company. She showed up with two men and robbed her house. This sounds like a dream. If I was a junkie and I needed to steal some money really fast, I'll sign up for a cleaning. Tell me how to get in. I'm going to take the stuff that I can sell really easily and by the time you get home from work, it's already gone.

This goes totally against the grain of what we are trying to do by being a high customer experience company. I want you to be a customer for life. I do not want to get your $19 so that I can send someone to steal your stuff and hope for the best. Like this is just over and over, over again. This is from a law firm stole funds and have no phone or contract reporting to all consumer protection and home contractor review boards so others aren't harmed more than what I've learned that I am anything but the only one that this corporation and franchises have injured by theft rod in violation of consumer protection laws.

When you have lawyers writing that kind of review, man, they are mad. They are so mad at you and they're saying like, okay, here's one with a bunch of photos of how bad it was. Like, this is just pictures of dust all over the place. And honestly, it's not even that bad. It's just that the person expected it was going to be amazing for $19. Obviously it is not going to be amazing for $19.

So why, why are we doing this? Like this person saying, I hired a cleaner for 7 hours. She only worked for four. I was billed for seven. This is a recipe for disaster. So this is some tech bros. In California making up a platform to quickly get some money. And a lot of people fall for it because the marketing is good. $19 for a clean. Oh my gosh.

Inflation is so bad. I could really use a break. I'm going to pay dollar 19 to get this clean. Surprise. They either didn't do the work, did a bad job, or stole stuff from you. Yeah, man, like, that is a mouthful for me. I'm getting dizzy because of how much ammo they have given me for how bad this is. So to answer the question of the title of this podcast episode, is the $19 clean coming for your business?

They're advertising in your city for sure. Are they coming for it? No. Like, I, this is no competition for you. If you're trying to run a reputable business with repeat, you have w two employees and training and insurance, and you are trying to be the best that you can be. This is not a threat. And if someone is saying, I just saw a commercial for $19, I'm going to go with them.

Cool, man. Give it a shot. I will give you 50% off when you come back and want us to clean. After they cleaned, not only do you not know the best tactics for your market, but it's also all too easy to waste money and get zero results. Once we started working with tidy, your sales, all of this changed. We saved time on following up with customers so we can close more leads.

We now have total control of our marketing system so we know 100% what's working for our market. And best of all, the team at Tidy, your sales is incredibly knowledgeable and they'll work with you one to one to show you what works so you get results fast. To learn more about working with the incredible team at tidyoursales, go to profitcleaners.com tidyyoursales. That's profitcleaners.com tidyyoursales right now. Exactly. And this is really key, guys.

I mean, you can absolutely take everything we're talking about here as ammo for educating your customers. Because education is huge. Like a lot of your people that you're talking to, they don't know what they don't know. And this is why it's so key to hop on the phone, educate, nurture, add value, talk to the customer, see what their actual problem is. Because you can add value and then really it's not a commodity anymore.

You're not competing on price because sure they might call ten other companies, they might come across this one, but you, if you've educated them on absolutely mister customer, you could potentially save a $100, but it's actually going to cost you a lot more working with one of those companies or one of these other cleaners over here. They're not insured. There's other issues, especially these kind of contractors. There's no training, there's no quality control on what kind of supplies they're using, who's coming, who's vetted all those issues.

You just mentioned, Brandon, in those reviews, those are nightmares for customers. That's a horrible experience. So what you're able to do, guys, is pivot from, again, these are not your customers. This is not our customer base either. If you're trying to attract these kind of customers, great. But what's going to happen is you're probably going to get the college kid that it's like, whoa, 6 hours, you can clean up this major party that I just had for $70 or whatever it is with the membership.

You're going to attract those one time kind of like tire kicker customers that want everything done. They're going to be horrible customers and they're probably not going to return and become a recurring customer. To me, this is exactly the kind of customer that would attract if I was attracted to that and I'm not on their booking page. It's like top rated cleaners is one of their benefits? Well, maybe, but how do we know how they've been trained.

There's no quality control. There's no way to guarantee that. Affordable pricing. We never want to tell people we have affordable pricing because we're not competing on price. We're not trying to be the cheapest. We actually want to be the more expensive brand because people associate price with value. The most expensive cleaners are probably the best. So we don't want to be cheap. We don't want to want to attract cheap customers either.

And then easy online booking, well, we don't want to do that. We don't want to give people an instant quote or instantly let them because that's how we build value on the back end is we have set times. The same team coming. There's not different people coming inside your house all the time, right? We know who's in there, we know how they're trained, we know they're vetted, we know what products they're using.

There's a tremendous amount of value that you're offering. Peace of mind, trust, all these things that people count on when you're coming in their home. And when you look at an offer like this, it sounds great on the surface, but man, it is a can of worms. Like Brandon said, this is a disaster waiting to happen. So when you see this, I would not be at all concerned or like frightened or be like, oh my gosh, how am I going to compete with this?

Because this is just leverage for you to be like talking to your customers and educating them and be like, actually, let me tell you about that. Here's some major risks that you might encounter hiring one of these platinum, one of these contractor platforms. And in fact, if you are running a contractor based platform, you know, you're competing directly with this too. How are you going to compete again with, there's a lot of people all over the market starting these brands and just like blowing up and just being like, hey, we're in every city, everywhere and just instantly book well.

If you're in a contractor model, that's going to be hard to compete with versus if you're doing and building a truly sustainable business, hiring real teams, real processes, real structure in your business, real, real people that you know, that's a way more valuable business for you to run or an asset for you to sell in the future. And there's really no comparison. It's like a completely different game that you're playing.

So that's how I look at it. So I mean, it's just, it's good to know what's out there but not a concern at all for us. And if you guys are listening to this, like, I would just take this as a, I think, I think we've, we've beat the contractor horse to death, you know what I mean? Like they, I wouldn't trust this as far as I could throw it.

Top rated cleaners is a joke to me when you can register and be on the platform in three. In ten minutes. So in ten minutes be on the platform. How could you possibly know that it's a top rated cleaner in three minutes? This is a high throughput contract model. I want you to sign up as a cleaner, get jobs right away, go out, pay for it and then I want to be able to sign up more people.

I don't know how it's sustainable given the reviews. And in fact, two of these companies that were involved in the lawsuit, they were the same company. And I wonder, why did they start a second company? The reviews got so bad. For one, we had to start a new one using the exact same website. These websites look identical. The back end identical. I bet if we dug into the LLC registrations, it's the same place.

We have to do that because one got so many one star reviews that we had to start another one offering the exact same thing. So, you know, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. So, you know, don't take this all, like, you got to really consider these things as a customer, you know, as a potential person booking these cleanings, that's high risk. As a cleaner, it seems like easy come, easy go.

You got to really follow through. And I just don't, I just don't see this working out long term. This seems to be like a fad. Yeah, it does. It seems like a trend to fad. It's definitely doesn't feel like long term, like you're not going to be acquiring long term customers from an offer like this. It just, to me it's very. Yeah, scammy feeling like almost like a biz op or something.

Just like quick, easy button. I'm going to push the easy button, get the thing. Like, you know, those kind of things never last long, right? It's not sustainable. So everything you guys hear about us talking about our business, how we're building it is long term sustainable, long term vision, not these short overnight, you know, get rich quick overnight kind of quick things. Like, we're not doing that. We're in this for the long haul.

And again, this is just, we're showing you guys this because I want to encourage you guys, like, you're going to see these kind of things, you're going to, you're going to feel like, wow. On the market. This is not good. Oh, my gosh. How am I going to compete with this? You don't want to compete. You want to dominate. You want to build so much value for your customers, such a great experience that there is no competition because you guys are way ahead of the game.

When people look at this compared to what you're doing when you're building a real sustainable business, there's no comparison. It's a highly, much more highly valued people are going to stick on long term. That's what you're after. The bread and butter of this business is Netflix for cleanliness. Cleaning your house, you have the same team, same process. You can trust it. And that's what we're all about. So, you know, if you guys want to attract one time cleans and run a mediocre business, that's a great business model.

But if you want to go all in and, you know, be dominating the market like I'm talking about, that's doing the hard work, spending more time, like that thing I was saying in the beginning, if it's harder to start, it's easier to scale. So do the hard work. Don't try to take shortcuts in business. Everyone else that it's taking shortcuts, they're going to have major issues. These are the major issues we're talking about.

If you guys are spending the time to do the hard work, you're not going to be mediocre. You're going to be excellent. And that's what we're trying to encourage you guys to do. So. So there you go, guys. That's how not to run a cleaning business. There are lots of examples if you want to search online for $19 home cleaning. If you want to learn the opposite of that, how to run a scaled cleaning business with repeat business, the Netflix for cleanliness, then hit us up@hellorofitcleaners.com.

and we will be happy to show you. Absolutely. In the meantime, 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 profitcleaners.com. and remember, keep it clean.