Episode 15: Owning Company Cars: Are They Worth the Investment?

Episode 15: Owning Company Cars: Are They Worth the Investment?

Brandon Schoen:
Just another reason you should be doing this because even just one small car payment or something like this, you can start getting going under your business. It's going to start building that history of building your business credit. So some of the pros for the cars are the brand recognition, just constantly, you know, the more standout, the more remarkable you can make them like Brandon was saying, the more weird, the more that makes people's eyes go like what - do a double triple take! Like what was that thing that just drove by the more local you can make it, make it feel super local. This is what the franchise is can't do. And this is how you can really play up that local cards.

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 keeping it clean in the house. Welcome to the show. And I am joined by my cohost..

Brandon Condrey:
Brandon Condrey, also keeping it clean on this side of the office.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. And Brandon Schoen your main host over here on this side of the office. We're up here in the upper studios of the cleaning business as always. And we have lots of really cool stuff to share with you guys today, specifically, today, we're going to be talking about company cars and why should you get a company car, or maybe you shouldn't. And we're going to be talking about all the different pros and cons of that and the amazing benefits of having a company vehicle.

Brandon Condrey:
Totally. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
And how it can actually really help drive a lot more business for you. So that's really, we're going to dive into in this episode guys. So before we get too much further in, we just want to remind you guys and thank you guys so much for leaving your reviews and subscribing to the podcast. If you haven't done that already, please do so. And before we get too much more on the reviews, Brandon why don't we read a few more reviews off.

Brandon Condrey:
This is one of my favorite parts. I'm glad that we started doing this. So here's one from Philip Parker. Don't listen (in caps). If you're not ready to take action, don't listen to this podcast. I'm so thankful to have stumbled upon the Profit Cleaners podcast are a huge help to my cleaning company. And can't wait to hear more. Thanks, Philip. We try.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. You know, I think people are going to listen, even though you told them not to, but that's a good one right there, for sure. Thank you, Philip. And then Doreen Gonzales, she also says, hashtag keep it clean love it. And she says, love the Profit Cleaners podcast. It sounds casual and it's not difficult to tune in their approach to every key point is truly fascinating. So thank you Doreen.

Brandon Condrey:
James Corby says it's educational. This is not just a podcast. Profit Cleaners is a free advanced education. You could always tune into. Thanks, James. I like to think of it as a free advanced education as well, but I'm glad to hear that you guys are like getting value out of it. That's nice.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. We really believe self-education is the future. So if you guys are putting, you know, you're not going to learn this in college or in a classroom somewhere. So this is definitely the way of the future. And you're gonna get a whole lot more value doing this, to educating yourself this way. Then the traditional routes that are available today. So one last one we'll do Jesse Elman says, love it. I love the genuineness of the Brandons and showing people about what they do and that they can relate to them so glad you can relate to us. That's awesome. I can't wait to hear more from this podcast.

Brandon Condrey:
I'm glad. So genuine. That's the key to being, I guess we were friends beforehand, so we're very casual about it. If you guys looked at our notes, sometimes they're comically, like it's like two bullet points and we'll turn that into 45 minutes. So that's why it's genuine. We're actually telling you what it's like to run a cleaning company because we run a cleaning company.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It's coming from our hearts guys and we're doing this and we hope you can feel that. And we hope you can sense that we're really no different from you guys. We're just going out and take an action and report in the results to you guys, so hopefully you can do the same in your business.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So keep it coming guys, like leave a review, tell your friends, subscribe. It's nice that people have stumbled upon it and then subscribe. So if today is your first listen to us and you have just stumbled upon it. Welcome to the Profit Cleaners. We're going to tell you about company cars today, and we're just going to jump right in.

Brandon Schoen:
Let's do it. So I want to start off with a quick little story because the other day on our Facebook group, which another plug, by the way, if you haven't joined the Facebook group or liked our page on Facebook, definitely do that. Now we've got a lot of cool stuff over there in the Profit Cleaners TRIBE if you have insider secrets questions, things that were revealing that you want to know, like all that good stuff's in there. But anyways, guys in the Facebook groups, somebody mentioned, you know, they saw a picture of one of our cars and they were like, man, that's a stupid idea. I would never get a company car. I'd rather just pay my employees more. And so I want to elaborate on that a little bit and speak to that point. Cause I disagree. I think we have a much different model than that, but we want to tell you guys why and why we think it is actually a great idea to invest in a company car.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, totally. So let's just go over the basics here. There seems to be two camps where the car thing sits. So you have company cars heavily branded, easily recognizable. You have employee cars, which are not branded at all, or in some cases like in the bare minimum, you stuck a magnet on the side of it. And so you've got a magnet and I suppose it was like maybe an in between like maybe the company does have a car, but you didn't go to the lengths of branding it. So maybe that's why, but those are basically the three camps. And so if you've seen our stuff online, you know, that we fall into the, you know, treat the car like a billboard side of things, but we're going to tell you why we do that.

Brandon Schoen:
Even in the beginning, when we very first started, even just with our very first team training, we had a magnet that we slapped on the car, but the goal was never to just keep it as a magnet. It was always just like a placeholder in the transition to the next car, actually.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And we still do it like in the event that one of the cars has some mechanical issue and goes down for the day. We don't just call the customers and say, Hey, sorry, you can't get clean today. That'll make them very mad. Instead, we ask for volunteers on that team, which one of you wants to drive your own car today. We'll reimburse your gas and we'll stick the magnet on your car. Yeah. So you go out people, at least someone's like, who's this weird car pulling up, but they see the magnet. They're like, Oh, it's the normally scheduled cleaning crew. They're just driving something different today.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think just, I guess we can get more into it and the pros and cons, but just off the top of my head, man, like that comment about I'd rather pay my employees more. Well, it really comes back to the employees when you invest in the cars, because now they're not to cover the wear and tear on the vehicles and the maintenance and the tires. Yeah. You have a little more control because they can't be like, Hey, my car is broken today so I can't come clean that would totally throw you for a loop right.

Brandon Condrey:
The I'd rather pay my employees more. There's a couple of weeks things that come into play there. So legally speaking, you're in the U S they're driving for company purposes. You need to reimburse them. The IRS mileage rate for gas, which I think is 55 cents a mile right now that 55 cents is supposed to cover fuel maintenance, all that stuff for that vehicle. Right. Some companies don't do that. That's a bit on the shady side of things. I don't recommend going that route. You need to do that. But one of our competitors in town.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Tell them that story. Cause I feel like that is the best example right there.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Yeah. So they had posted a job ad. We always scope those out just to see what they're saying. And they're like, we're the highest paid cleaning company in town and their rates in the ad are like, we'll pay between $17 and $21 an hour, depending on experience, which is great. But they're posting all this stuff on indeed. And indeed kind of has a section like Glassdoor where employees can leave reviews. Let's see their side of the coin of doing that. And so a couple of reviews for working for that company had stated, yeah, you get paid 20 bucks an hour, but what they don't tell you in the ad is that you have to use your own car. You don't get reimbursed for gas. Like that just comes out of your wage. And you're responsible for covering insurance. That same competitor, we had a former employee tell us, or I think it was a former customer, actually a former customer had told us that one of the employees, cars got stolen at a job site. Yeah. And the corporate insurance did not cover that car being stolen. And they had carried the lowest insurance. And so their insurance didn't cover it being stolen. So that's a crappy way to treat your employee, man. So even though our hourly rate is lower, like we start at $12 an hour. There was a bonus that pushes them to like 15, 16 bucks an hour, depending on performance, their take home is higher because we cover everything. So we pay for every Monday, we take the whole fleet to Costco, which is a mile and a half away and gas, everybody up. We do that on a corporate card so that we get points to use for vacations or flights or whatever. And then we cover the insurance. You get better insurance rates because we're covering seven cars at a time. And so the rates are pretty decent when you're doing it that way, even though it is a commercial vehicle. So we pony up a lot more ongoing expense, I suppose. But I think it makes the employees happier. Yeah. Plus we control these cars. So I know what the maintenance is like on these cars. And so we're very likely to start in the morning when I want them to start and show up on time, if you're trusting an employee's car and they're driving something that's 25 years old because that's what they can afford. Then, you know, it's cold. The car's not going to start. They may not show up on time. There are lots of disadvantages to doing it though.

Brandon Schoen:
Lots of disadvantages. And we could jump right into that. But I think what you said, right, there was just a couple of interesting points. Like you're spending a little more money of course, but look at the longterm, big picture is that's an expense as you grow now you can expense that and that write that off. Totally. That's big part of business, right. Is putting that money back into your business. And then the other thing you said, like yeah, losing that control, just imagine how much control you actually lose and just the different experience when that car pulls up. And it's just like this ratty old, like broken down almost car versus a company branded car that looks professional. That's clean right. That shows up when they say you're going to show up and that's just a much better experience for everyone.

Brandon Condrey:
So that's one of our inspection points on that bonus is that the inside and the outside of the car clean so they wiped down the cars every day to make sure there's not like dust from rain on it before. So they look right. Not like Washington waxing them all the time, but just like taking one of our wet microfibers and wiping it down. So it looks like it's been touched. Our graphics guy recently came over to update some stuff. Cause we won best of the city again. And he had said, man, these graphics are only rated for three years. He's like, you must watch them all the time. I was like, we wiped them down every day. He's like, it's working really well. Cause they look like they're brand new. Right. So that saved us some money there too. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
So yeah. Yeah man, I think just going off of that, so let's tell everyone we just launched team seven to seven yet we had to get another car. Of course, as we get kind of filled up on the schedule, we kind of gauge it so that you know, this next team that we've got to buy the car and we'll go into that and we've got to paint it and you gotta put stuff on it and get it ready so that the next team can come on board and well,

Brandon Condrey:
Let's just do it. Let's just tell you how we launched another car. Yeah. You get to 95% of capacity in our customer software. When we realized that we're at 95% of jobs availability in that case, we're like, okay, now we're going to pull the trigger on doing the car. The car thing for us takes two to three weeks. So the place that we get the cars is Hertz, right? So these are formal rental cars. They are usually not more than two years old. They may have high mileage for two year old cars. So like the one that we just bought was a 2018. So it's probably two and a half years of Hertz, you know, fleet rentals and it had 35,000 miles on it. That's not how you're going to drive your car, but right. It doesn't matter. We've talked to many mechanics about this and they basically said anything that has less than a hundred thousand miles. If it's not 10 years old, you're good. Cause like modern cars just tend to last a bit longer. So we buy our cars from Hertz. I don't care about the color because we're going to brand it. So this one that we got was white. We immediately drove it literally from the dealer after signing everything and took it straight to our paint guys. So we have paint, they paint the car, the exact same base color. Some of you in the background are going, why would you do that? Why not wrap the car? Yeah. Great question. We looked into that and we did look into that. So for our tiny little Nissan versa is $3,500 to get a good looking wrap on there, Which do you think it costs us to paint it every time when I tell this to people, they are flabbergasted 700 bucks. It costs us $700 to turn every one of these cars into the exact same car, this teal color that we have. And then we have a local graphics guy that does all those stickers. So like, it looks like a wrap, but really it's paint and some big fancy decals on the side. So there's something there like vinyl, you know, high quality, pretty graphics. And that's like $340. So for less than a grand, a little bit over a grand, I guess call it 1500 bucks with taxes. We have now turned the car into a company car. That's going to look like the rest of them.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And tell him the other one thing I feel like this is the distinguishing feature that really makes us stand out. Cause this is what you guys want to be thinking about. But from the very beginning we started putting on these cool.

Brandon Condrey:
Our mentor in Denver. Hey, you guys get these cars, make them look weird. That's all I could tell you. Just make them look weird. So they stand out at the time their company was driving late nineties, early 2000s 4 door champagne, colored sedans. So they were particular about the color to try and save money. And what they ended up doing was driving like a Saturn or a Honda accord, whatever, as long as in that champagne gold thing. And then they had this car topper, they put on top of it. That was actually, it's a ski rack, but they would put their brooms in the ski rack. Right. So there's just these cars driving around and they have little logo on the side, a little sticker. So what we did is we kind of did that, but the racks not functional, we're not putting real tools up there. Like they actually keep their tools in that rack. So what we did was I got pizza delivery, car toppers that are blank from a company. And I bought a $8 broom from home depot and I poked it through the thing. And so all of our cars, every single one has this thing on the top, a car topper that has our website and phone number really big and then a broom. And it sticks out in traffic like a sore thumb, which is the point like the point is to get free advertising. It is a billboard driving around the city all the time.

Brandon Schoen:
All the time. And it feels like even just today, I was driving down for sale over here and I see it like almost everyday, man. I'm just driving around town to like random places and you see it and you can see it from way across the street, like 500 yards away. It's like this big green thing with our branding and the little thing on top, the broom and people all the time when we tell them what we do, that's how they know what we got.

Brandon Condrey:
I've seen your cars for years.

Brandon Schoen:
I've seen your cars. Yeah. And it's like this really amazing branding marketing thing. That's kind of happened over the years, but like what you started with one car and obviously people didn't see it as much when there was one, but now we've got seven driving around and it's just this much more exposure. People can't tell you how many times we've been. Especially in the beginning, we were in the office and people would be like, Hey, I'm sitting behind your team right now. The drive-through.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I'm gonna wear these, they're getting lunch.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I need some house cleaning. Or remember this other lady called me on the street. She was like on the highway and I'm like, you're driving on the highway behind her car. And she was like, yeah. And I really want home cleaning services.

Brandon Condrey:
And so yeah. So the other benefit of having it, okay, you're going to get leads like restaurants and they're going to be driving around. But the other thing that we're doing is we don't let them park in customers' driveways. You don't want them to block in cars if someone's trying to get out of a garage and leave to go to work or whatever. But the other benefit is that when it's parked outside on the street, long ways, like parallel parked that side of the car is now just facing traffic. So any people that walk by are going to do it and you and I live in a really good school district and I happen to live right across the street from the school. So in the beginning we scheduled my house to get cleaned, right when school was getting out at two o'clock. And so that way there's a ton of parents that are seeing this car. We'd always joke that we should just have all five of them, like park at everybody's house before school let out, even if they weren't getting clean just so it looked like an advertisement. We never did that because they were too busy, actually cleaning people's houses. But that is an idea. So that's one of the many benefits is that it's a billboard. It's consistent.

Brandon Condrey:
The other thing like when you do that, branding is like, we've now got relationships with a car dealership who has all of our info on file. When we need a new car, I literally text our sales guy, Hey man, I need another one. And he's like, cool, we'll have it for you tomorrow. And then I show up tomorrow, they've already filled everything out. Our paperwork's the same. So they know me. I've got a relationship with them. We bought enough cars from them now that when we buy them, now they're not, they don't require personal guarantee anymore. So it just, the business buys the cars, which is great. So that means my personal credit score is affected. So they just have that on file. They fill out the contracts either to the commit for 10 minutes while my mom won't sign things, keys by you guys. And like, I don't even test drive them anymore. Like I know that they put them through inspections, everything works. Yeah. Drive it to Maaco, got a relationship with those guys. We get the manager's special pricing that they've maintained for us for years. And so we just drop it off. We get to cut the line. Right. We had called to schedule getting them in there and the guy who answered the phones like, Oh man, we're really booked out. It's going to be like two or three weeks. I was like, Oh man, that's not going to work. So when we came in, though, like the manager that I know came out, I was like, Hey wait, can we get it? He's like, I don't know, Tuesday. It's like three days away. Like perfect. So, you know, they know what to do. They have the color codes, they just do it. And then the graphics guy, they come on a Saturday, even though they don't work on Saturdays to come put decals on all the cars. And so by using the same people over and over again, you also develop that crucial business relationship.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And you're working with local supporting other local businesses. And just when you said that you just gave me an idea for another podcast that you can do in the future, which is building business credit, which is just another reason you should be doing this because even just one small car payment or something like this, you can start getting going under your business is going to start building that history of building your business credit. So we'll get more into that in a future episode. That could be a whole episode. We'll talk about, but since we're talking about the pros here, I'll just recap some of them. So some of the pros for the cars are the brand recognition, just constantly, you know, the more standout, the more remarkable you can make them like Brandon was saying, the more weird, the more that makes people's eyes go, like what do a double triple take? Like what was that thing that just drove by the more local you can make it, make it feel super local. This is what the franchises can't do. And this is how you can really play up that local card. So talked about other pros, more control. You have less issues with the cars, oil leaks, things like that, that you can't really control pissing off customers basically. And then we talked about expensing it, right offs. And just again, that constant presence as your teams are driving around town, they're advertising for you at the same time.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And I would also argue that like the employees are happier because their take home is higher. So like on the other side, on the con side, like yeah, you might have the cons, let's talk about that. Let's do the cons. So the cons are, you're going to pay for it. You have to pay for insurance. You have to pay for maintenance speaking to me and let's do a quick sidebar. I want to, I forgot one business relationship. We have, there's a mechanic in our neighborhood, literally on the same block that we're on. And when we first got this building, we'd set up with them right away. And I said, listen, this is what we're going to have. Can you do it? And so what they do now is they have a calendar on their end. So they're going to call every six months we go in, they do it on a Saturday just for us. Cause they're Monday through Friday, they literally have a key to our gate. So they're going to come pick up all the cars themselves. I don't even have to do this. They're going to come pick up out the cars, bring it over there. They do basically a huge inspection, like as if you were about to sell the car and an oil change. And so the inspection is going to reveal all the problems. And so what happens is they'll do this on a Saturday. They do all the oil changes. I go in on Monday. All right, man, what was the damage pay for the oil changes and all that. And then I get this list of these are the repairs that are needed this last time around, which was just a couple weeks ago. We had a bunch of safety stuff come up that you don't want to sit on. So like we needed tires for four out of six cars. And so we paid for that. A couple of Nita breaks. That's also a safety thing. You don't want to mess around with that. Some of them were like creature comforts. Like one of them's got a door latch that doesn't work. So like you can't use one side of the passenger rear seat. We've ordered the part for that. We'll do that eventually, but it's just nice to have someone watching your back to make sure that those cars are running well. And like we have a relationship with them too. And so they're also less likely to be like, I don't know, Amanda needs a new engine for $10,000. Like you're not going to get ripped off if you know that, Hey, I'm going to pay you like two to $3,000 every six months, depending on what's wrong with the cars. And so like, we're a very good customer for them. And so..

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, exactly. And just imagine, you know, on the employees side, you know, they're probably already trying to save money. And if like, if you're making them pay for the car and the gas and the maintenance, like they're probably going to cut some corners, just human nature, right? Like they're going to try to save some money or they're going to put it off. Like we wouldn't put it off, but they might put it off. So it actually really could jeopardize them or the company because they might get into a really bad accident or they might down the road. It could just get so much worse if you don't control that piece of it.

Brandon Condrey:
If you're not requiring them to carry a certain levels of insurance on their personal stuff and they cause some major accident we'll do it and you're getting sued. Like they were doing company work. Then your company insurance is getting suits. You might as well just like avoid that and just pay for the good car insurance that has the high medical liabilities and all that stuff. So that's what we do. We also have full coverage on the cars. Like you don't, a lot of people are like liabilities cheaper, but full coverage means that if one of them is in a, you know, God forbid like terrible accident or something that we're going to get a rental car to replace it and slap the magnets on the business still goes like, we still continue to move on. So, all right. We're off on a tangent. So we were in the middle of cons. You're going to pay for insurance. You're going to pay for maintenance if your employees no, no. We're talking about cons of buying the car. Mostly. It's just money. Really like the trade offs, I think are bigger. It's tax, write offs and branding and advertising all the time. It's hard to calculate how valuable that is. The flip side of doing it. You know, where they're driving their own cars. I think we covered that. Like you could cause accidents, they could get their car stolen. They're gonna be mad at you. Yeah. You're going to pay them more, but they're going to be pissed because if right now it's great. Because gas at Costco is a dollar 65 and Albuquerque, but you know, two years from now, if it's $4 a gallon and you didn't raise, everybody's pay by $4 an hour or whatever. They're not going to be happy that they're having Willis take, you know, with us, take home like ours is, they're not going to the employees won't experience that market variability gas. Right.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So like you mentioned trade off another word I really like in the business realm is the opportunity costs. You know? So the opportunity cost of not doing this is you're just going to get far less brand exposure, less opportunities for marketing. And it's free marketing guys. It's just like these cars are parked in neighborhoods all over the city all day long. And it's a likely the neighbor's going to come out of their house. They're going to see the car. They're going to be like, Oh, Jill's getting her house cleaned by Sandia Green Clean I'm going to go talk to them later. If it was just some other random car, they might've never even known. It was a cleaner, no interest. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
You see a car there like every week you're like, somebody must be doing something, right? All the teams have brochures. They have sales brochures in their cars. So someone does stop and be like, what do you guys do? Like here, call this number to set up your estimate. Like they're all little like salespeople all the time. And they'll tell you what we do and how happy they are to work here and all that good stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
Let's tell them about a really big mistake we made in the very beginning with these cars. And we were like, ah,

Brandon Condrey:
We had our lump of cash that we had gotten from our investors to kind of get things off the ground. We bought the first two cars cash. We just paid for them right away. And so I thought that was good that we, from a cashflow perspective that we wouldn't have this monthly payment to deal with. But in retrospect, our monthly payments on these cars, zero down is like $200. And so for the amount that we had paid for those cars up front, we could have just taken that money and put more into advertising or hiring an office manager sooner than we had done. Like that money would have gone a lot further. So that big mistake was not financing it. So our advice to you is that when you're starting or anytime, really, especially now with interest rates being so low, is just financed the cars every time. Like you'll pay them off naturally over the course of working with them. And they're just making you way more money than, I mean, the cost of one house, one house a month is the car payment for every car that we're doing. We're doing way more than that.

Brandon Schoen:
So yeah. Yeah, exactly. And again, I look at it, you're building business credit or if you just have to start with personal credit, but either way, you're building some type of credit and history there. And then like you said, you're leveraging that money. You're leveraging the bank or whoever you're financing it. So you can free that money up and that capital to put back in your business somewhere else where it's mostly needed in a lot of other places let's face it.

Brandon Condrey:
Especially in the beginning. Yeah. We could have done a lot more with that. We would have been able to go a little bit faster than what we ended up doing because we had kind of shot ourselves in the foot by buying those two cars. Cash is great. Cause we were able to do it. It was nice that we had access to it. I just was, it was a bit shortsighted on the thought process, I think on my part.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, Exactly. All right, man. So we talked about a lot of stuff we talked about. We get the cars used from Hertz. Let's tell them real quick. I don't know if we're still planning on doing this. We had a goal at one point, like by 2025 to be like all green hybrid electric cars.

Brandon Condrey:
I still think it'd be awesome. Electric vehicles keep advancing. Like we're not going to be sending them around. And Tesla's like right now a good one is like the Nissan leaf, which would kind of correlate with what we got going on because they're roughly the same size and shape as the verses. But we'll see what we can get. Like our mentor in Denver had gone in and bought like 11 Leafs, I think the exact same time. And he got a crazy good deal from the dealer at the time. And that was also when the really, really high federal tax rebate was in there for electric vehicles, which is that kind of goes up and down depending on the state. Right. So I still, that is still a wishlist item of mine is to get the cars to be all electric or something in the future. Right now the ones that we bought, they get 40 miles to the gallon. So we're still environmentally friendly in a combustion way as, as much as you can be, I guess.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just real quick, I wanted to touch on, we had a quick question from one of our students and was asking about our cars and they said they were asking, do they like them? Are they big enough? What about ladders? What about vacuums? What about mop buckets? I'm guessing, he's wondering if they all fit in there.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Right. So we have teams of three, the versa will sit five. It has 60, 40 split rear seats that fold down. So what the teams do is they fold down the single passenger rear seat. That's where you put the long stuff, like the vacuum in the mops and the brooms and all that stuff. I don't know what this particular student is referring to in terms of mop buckets. The mop buckets that we use are teeny tiny. They're like a beach pail that you would take to the beach. They're half a gallon. That's what we use for mop buckets. If you're talking about the big commercial yellow ones that squeeze the mop out, it's going to be tight in there with ladders. We don't use ladders. We have a very small stepladder that folds flat, and we can put links to some of these products from the show notes for you, but it basically folds flat completely. So it's really low profile. So it's great for sorting in the car. If you need something bigger or you're like in the window washing business or something, then I don't think I'd be looking at a small hatchback. Like you could get away with something like the Ford transit connect. Those are those little like, like, you know, hashtag van life, like people that live in their van. There's a little version of that, which is kind of like utilitarian and they're flat on the top. So it's great for putting a rack on it for ladders and things like that. It's still because it's kind of small. It would get good gas mileage.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I was going to say that It would be the other possible alternative, which, which is just get a rack and you could put some of the longer stuff on there, but really everything fits in there. The teams put their caddies in there and all their equipment and it all fits it. Even with like four people in there, sometimes it'll all fit, Right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. We do. We do occasionally send out like when teams are new, like the trainer goes with them. So there's four people in a car and it does fit. It's a little cramped, but like ideally you're driving 10 to 15 minutes between jobs. You're not going to spend all day in the car. Yeah. The thing you could do with ladders is just get creative. Like I know that there are telescoping ladders that fold down really, really small. That's true. And they might be more expensive, but in terms of sticking them in the car, is it going to save you more if you had a higher MPG vehicle than if you bought a vain to hold the ladders and pay more in gas, like you just kind of have to look at those from both ways. But we do like the verses we'll stick with those. We have talked many times about getting a Ford transit van and a little one and for like a field supervisor or anyone who's running around doing Airbnb supply runs or something like that. So we've talked about it. I just don't think that's ever going to be our main fleet. It's kind of like, Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
And just a little caveat there. We're not attorneys anything to do with CPAs or anything like that. But from my knowledge, the bigger vehicles like trucks or the transits, I think it's over 6,000 pounds. From what I've read, you can depreciate those vehicles a lot better, a lot more than you could like some of the smaller vehicles. So if you're in that position where you need like trucks or bigger fleet vehicles, that's just another tax incentive advantage you have there. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So really what you need to do is for your own situation, your own business, analyze what they're going to do. What's the goal of the car? Is it just to get people to the site so they can do what's inside and you're really going to shine on the final product was great. Then they take whatever car. But if you want to do that and have that car sitting out front and all the neighbors peeking through their windows, being all nosy, wondering why that green car has been there for, you know, three times a month, they're going to call you and ask. And so yup. Analyze that. And then in terms of the size of the car, that's up to you and your business. Like what equipment are they carrying around all the time? If you're using floor buffers and things like that, you definitely need something bigger than a Nissan versa. But in our case, we're carrying minimal stuff. It's microfiber, that's lightweight. It's a couple of mops and a vacuum, two vacuums one's handheld, and all of those are lightweight. So we don't need a huge cargo area for storage. That's just really what it boils down to for our situation. Yours might be different, but just, I encourage you to just look at it from a bunch of different angles and see where it is. Look at what your competition is doing. If you're thinking about just slapping some magnets on some stuff, pay attention to the next time you go in for your commute, how many random cars did you see with magnets on the side? And did you remember any of that information? Because that tends to be what like contractors have on the side or lawn care businesses. And so there are a lot of those businesses and there are a lot of those magnets and traffic that no one's going to see. But when was the last time you saw a turquoise Nissan versa with a broom on top passing you in traffic? Like that stands out a little bit.

Brandon Schoen:
Right? And we have the bright, local colors on there, the reds and the yellows. It's very eye catching and it's very local feeling and that's what we want. That's what we wanted. And it definitely does the job. So yeah, guys, I think that's pretty much it today. I think we covered a lot of really great stuff. And just the three tips we already kind of covered. Just want to reiterate, we don't park the cars in the driveways parking lot on the side of the street way better marketing potential. Another tip is just have your teams do a quick wipe down on the cars at the end of every day, just to keep them fresh and clean looking also realize people are gonna walk by these cars. So we've also told our teams not to leave trash and stuff all over the vehicles. So, you know, it just has a better impression on first impression on people when they're looking at the brand. And then lastly it sounds really super simple and self evident, but you got to put your website and your phone number, on the cars.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. You gotta do that. Otherwise it defeats the purpose. So I saw a guy doing sprinklers. I was like, I need my sprinklers done. He looks like he knows what he's doing. I drove by twice on this truck. He had all this stuff. He did bullet points. He does all these things, but there was no phone. There was no websites. I couldn't figure out a way to do it. So put it on there. The other tip I'll say is if you're are considering going to, you're going to paint them a wrapper or whatever, and you're struggling on colors. We got our color from the license plate in New Mexico. New Mexico has like five or six different license plate colors. And we chose the one that was turquoise and the red and the yellow in the center of the license plate. So that's where we got ours. So check out your state. Maybe you have a variety of license plates that you can choose from. And that kind of is also just a trigger that people know that it's local. Like I've seen that color on the license plates before and that's how we got it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. That's another amazing point. A marketing trigger that color. It's going to trigger them to remember your brand and remember that local presence that you have a, that's almost like this psychological thing you can do with your marketing too, but yeah, lots of great stuff guys. So hopefully that helps answer your questions about cars, company, cars, pros, and cons and all that good stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
But if not hit us up and we'll be happy to readjust.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely.

Brandon Condrey:
But until then, keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean guys and real quick, check out the masterclass. If you haven't checked it out yet, we're doing

Brandon Condrey:
Profitcleaners.com/masterclass

Brandon Schoen:
We're doing free live questions and answers, and we're showing you guys how to grow your cleaning business way faster and get way more recurring customers and really, really kick butt your local market. So check that out guys. And like you said, Brandon, let's keep it clean right?

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean! Thanks everybody!

Brandon Schoen:
Thanks everybody!

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