Episode 150: How in The World Do You Clean 75 Houses Per Day?

Episode 150: How in The World Do You Clean 5 Houses Per Day?

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:
Welcome back to another episode of the profit Cleaners podcast, the only place where you can learn from the top 1% cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win. And guys, today I'm Brandon Shane. I'm joined by my co host, Brandon Condrey.

In the house, we're going to be talking all about how in the world do we clean five houses a day, you guys asked. And we're going to wave the magic wand, as Brandon says, and we're going to reveal what's behind the curtain and how in the heck we clean five houses a day. So let's do it, Brandon. So to be clear, that's five houses per day per team?

Per team. Not currently have 15 teams. Yeah, 15 teams on the road. So what's that? 75 customers a day? If we were 100% booked every day, we have some cancellations, and that is part of the magic wand of how we do five houses a day. So let's talk about that first and foremost. Right? We didn't start, like, doing this. We didn't start out doing five. You don't start out with a team of three people, one team, and you're able to do five houses a day unless they're all right next door to each other, because there just isn't enough time.

What happened with us when we started with one team was they were driving up to 45 minutes between jobs, and so we were doing three houses a day, four on a good day. And then I think, if memory serves right, we made the transition to five houses a day when we were at three teams. Does that sound right or am I wrong? It sounds about right. We were definitely, yeah, getting more teams, getting more districts all over town.

And I want to say we were actually like two or three houses a day sometimes in the beginning, just depending on the team and the house. But, yeah, we definitely started at far less and we were trying to figure this out. So I think it was only had three teams. And so that's the first step. The first step is you have to have multiple teams to be able to do this or you have to have a very confined service area.

So you send the one team to, like, one particular part of town, and we're only going to go there on Mondays. The reason we didn't do that in the beginning was it was really hard to contain the marketing. We tried to focus on one little zip code when we launched, but word of mouth spread. The cars are silly looking, so people saw them in traffic and that got calls and we needed revenue badly when we first started.

So we said yes to everything, no matter where it was, like, sure, we'll clean that, whatever. And so the problem, we couldn't contain it to an area. So that was the issue. So we said yes to everything, which resulted in a haphazard schedule where they're driving across town a bunch of times. So the first step was multiple teams so that you could create a service area for each team, a district.

So they're going to go only to this area of town. They're going to stay there all day, so they're going to bounce. Instead of driving up to 45 minutes between houses, we're talking about like five minutes. Five minutes would be great. And that's step number one. Step number one, small confined area for each team. You can move those districts around on any given day so like they don't have to stay in that whole neighborhood the whole time.

They could be there on Mondays, in a different neighborhood on Tuesdays. It's just a scheduling kind of nightmare to solve. So that's step one. Step two is dialing in the schedule, massaging the schedule. We couldn't clean five houses a day if all five houses were like 5000 sqft. That's not going to happen. So I think our average last time we looked at it was like 2200 square feet, maybe even smaller than that.

So you can do five of those a day, that's like 12,000 sqft. So that's, we have a cap in there and it's like about 12,000 sqft is where we want the team at. Anything above that, they're getting home late, they're getting to the office late, they're not spending time with their kids. That's not how we want to treat our employees. They're not robots. We want them to be able to hang out with their family too.

So the massage scheduling is okay, let's say they have a 3000 square foot one at the first house. Well then is there a way by finessing the schedule that we can get four houses behind it that are smaller, maybe four houses of 1200 square feet, and then that'll even out instead of four 2200 square footers after it. So finessing it. This involves moving houses between teams sometimes. And depending on what you've told your customers about who they're going to see, they might be upset for that.

So it's a grind you got to massage the schedule. I want to point out, too, part of that massaging of the schedule, we didn't even do this right away, was eliminating the variables that clog up your schedule, which is most likely like your move out cleans or your one time cleans or your initial one, like the first time you're cleaning a house, it's going to take way longer.

So that throws off the whole schedule. So that's still going to happen during the week. But we have actually moved all of those to Saturdays now. Right, Brandon? So, like as many as we can. Yeah. So we do the initials over the weekend. We try to do the move ins over the weekend. That's a relatively recent change on our end. But you as a small cleaning company, if you're listening, if you, you got the three teams, we're not going to try to add five.

Leave a day free for each team. So, like, team three does move ins and initials on Wednesdays and team one does them on Tuesdays and team three or team two does them on Fridays. So you can accommodate your schedule, move ins and one times are higher margin anyway because you're going to charge a lot more for those jobs because they're not repeat customers. We don't really care about those customers per se.

So. Yeah, that part's part of it. So the other, other flip side of that massaging the scheduled coin is that the really disruptive services we try and silo either on one team, one day, one weekend, whatever it is. So that's definitely part of it. Yeah. And I think it's like we definitely care about them, but we, we put way more emphasis our recurring customers, because, you know, the one time clean customers, if we're late, if we don't do something.

Exactly. You know, it's not perfect, which is going to happen. It's far less impactful versus a recurring customer. Now, their schedule is messed up. They pay every week. They pay every two weeks. Like, that's a, a much bigger deal. Right. So that's where our focus is and that's why we're doing that. I also just want to point out, too, if you're not quite at three teams yet, backing up a couple things that we did earlier on, too, that dramatically helped the speed and just the attention to that, to the detail were some additional systems that we put in place, inspecting things a certain way, checklisting all that, all the ways we needed to look at everything and also incentivizing the teams.

So believe it or not, people, if they have an ability to earn more money and do something a little bit better or faster, they will rise to the occasion. So I think that really helped us in the beginning as well, Brandon, even though we did put that in immediately, I think we saw a dramatic shift when we saw that as well. Right. 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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Like, we should have had the bonus going from the get go. So if you can incentivize your teams with a bonus for speed, the bonus is balanced out between going fast and not getting complaints. We want high quality work at speed. If you just tell them, I'll pay you if you finish 5 hours a day. Cruel. Let's half ass all those. And then at the end everyone's mad and you got more money.

But if your customers are pissed off, that cost you in the long run. So, yeah, there's an economies of scale thing built in there so you'll get more efficient over time. Your teams are going to get it as they practice. Like the cleaning routine is, you know, a bit tricky. So they get that, they get more efficient. We districted, we can add on a fifth house. There's a bonus incentive for them to complete those five houses a day, which means you're making money and the teams are making more money because they hit their bonus.

And like, that's really it. But like, really it's a, the processes and systems of the business are kind of what drive everything. In the end, you want to have a go to, you don't want to be making stuff up on the fly. Like, we know the system is we're going to put the move outs on the weekend or we're going to put the initials in the first spot of the day.

So we have room to adjust the schedule after the first one of the day. So those kinds of systems, the inspection system, the bonus system, of course, the cleaning routine and all that, all that needs to be dialed in to be able to get to five houses a day. Day. But the reason you want to do this is if you're doing four houses a day, each job is $200.

You made $800 in revenue. There's a lot of fixed cost into just getting a cleaning team on the road. They still have to have uniforms, vacuums, cleaning chemicals, rags, a car to drive around. It had to be filled with gas. That applies whether they're doing one house or ten houses a day. So if the infrastructure you've already invested in, cars, uniforms, people, payroll, rent on a building, all that stuff is all fixed, then why not try and squeeze more out of the same machine that you've already built?

So four houses, $800 a day, five houses, $1,000 a day. So by getting $1,000 a day out of the team, you've just reduced, you've diluted the fixed cost amongst more revenue. And that's the idea. And your savings are really going to be in the drive time. So if you were paying them $20 an hour, $60 an hour as a team, and you're driving an hour or half an hour, well, you just paid $30 to bring in no revenue.

But if they were driving five minutes, that's nothing. You spent nothing on that time in between houses, and you. That equaled dollar 200. So the investment is that drive time. So you're trading drive time, which brings in no revenue for one more house at the end of the day with very efficient routing. Like, that's where the magic is. Absolutely. And also, I think the magic is in a couple other things as well.

But, you know, systems like you mentioned, training. We just watched the Olympics this summer, and if you watch those people show up to those races, it's not like they just, like, showed up and ran, like the three or four minute mile sprint. They didn't just do that. They actually showed up every day for years and years and years practicing. So that's what practice and repetition does. It makes you great.

And so it's the same with your cleaning teams when you very first start out, especially if you just have the system in your head, it's not probably a real system, right? You're just, like Brandon said, you're just making stuff up. So you need to have a duplicatable system. And then as you rinse and repeat that system, and your team does that over and over and over again, day in, day out, and they keep showing up, it almost becomes like a habit, right?

Like if you do anything over and over again enough times, it becomes a habit. And so with that habit and that practice, and repetition. Now, your teams are like, I've done the same house, the same customer, the same job notes, like 20 times I've done this motion. I know exactly what I'm doing. And they just start getting into this flow, right? So that is the flow state of cleaning that you want to create with those training and that constant training, that constant repetition, that constantly going back is why we have team meetings every week.

Here's the things we need to get better at. Here's what you guys did really good at. Let's review that process. We got complaints on floors. Let's review how we do floors again. Right? So you're constantly iterating, constantly making that process better, making sure everyone is on the same page, and then focusing on that in the beginning. Like, again, you're not going to be an Olympic cleaning team, gold medal cleaning team, right out of the gates.

So just be patient with yourself and your teams knowing that. And some of these other systems we talk about are going to help you guys get the focus in the right places. Right? So if your teams know, hey, we can make more money, I'm going to. I'm going to try harder because I want to make more. But more importantly, this is a system we didn't even write down on the notes here on the podcast, but it's stuff in the back end.

It's recognition. It's building the culture that this is going to get your team in the mindset of going the extra mile, of wanting to not only make more money, but be recognized. We do this all the time in our team meetings, and it's a huge, I think secret sauce is calling out people and being like, hey, on the team, you guys so and so did great. Here's what they did great, and here's a reward.

And everyone publicly recognizes them. And so there's a quote I love. It's people will work for money and they'll kill for recognition. And believe it or not, like, people definitely went faster on our teams when we paid them more money and had a bonus, but they, I think, really came together. And the glue that holds all this together is the culture, the recognition. When no one's looking, when no one's micromanaging the team, what are they going to do if they know, hey, I'm going to get recognized for this.

If I go the extra mile, that's, like, really powerful, right? And if everyone's competing now to, yes, go faster, but do extra quality and go the extra mile and over deliver, now you have a winning recipe, like a winning culture. And that's like this healthy competition that you guys want to create on the back end, you know. So just want to point that out as well that our teams laughed at us when we told them we're going to do five houses a day.

They were like, nah, in your dreams. Like, right? And we were like, oh crap, like, what are we going to do? We can't do five houses a day because that's what our projections were on. Right? 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.

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tidyyoursales. That's profitcleaners.com tidyoursales right now. Sure. But it did work. So the joke at the beginning about the magic. Wanda, people ask us this question all the time. How do you get to five houses? Like, what am I doing wrong? There is no magic wand. We just told you like ten things that impact how you do five houses. Company culture, scheduling, routing, training on the cleans to make sure they can hit the target times.

You got to pay a bonus. Everyone has to want to go that fast. There's a team lead structure. There's a review meeting every week of all the mistakes we made last week. It's not a set it and forget it system. It needs constant attention. And you hire people to deliver that attention to the beast that is the cleaning company. So in short, yes, totally doable. We do it.

Lots of our students inside of the profit cleaner course do five houses a day. That's how you get to a million dollar cleaning companies, by doing five houses a day. But there's no easy button. This is not easy. The business of cleaning, the business of delivering a consistent service, you know, with high quality is also not easy. So that's why you listen to this podcast, that's why you have mentors, that's why you may have already bought the course that we offer, but there is no fast option like it's, you're going to have to try hard every day and it will get there.

But it is not, you know, like, we have something in the notes here which is like, you should be focused on getting better the first few years, not on getting rich. Like, the service company is not a get rich quick scheme. It's not fulfillment by Amazon. It's nothing. A cryptocurrency. It is try hard get focus on quality, hyper focus on quality and delivering a high quality product to your customers and then scale that.

If you're scaling mediocre cleaning, that's not going to scale well. You're going to get two star reviews. Three star reviews. We want you to get five star reviews every time. Blow the competition out of the water, become the highest reviewed cleaning company in the state. Like Sandia Green clean. Is that happens through hard work? Yeah, and a lot of trial and error and testing and figuring it out and hopefully learning from other people's mistakes, which a lot of the cleaning we did, we modeled other people's successes and a lot of the marketing and sales and other stuff we took from other mentors and businesses we'd had, and we stacked that into this business.

But just think about this for a second, guys. A lot of us maybe start out in this business with one cleaner. Maybe you're going to a team model, but a lot of people ask us that question, too. Like, why would I do a team of three when I have teams of one and solo cleaners or teams of two? And again, we've tested all these variations. 12345 person teams.

The three person team is the sweet spot. You can obviously adjust it to fit your market, but a team is, again, I said this dac quote earlier, maybe I can't remember which podcast it was, but if you want to go far, go together, build a team, right? If you want to go fast, go alone, be a solo cleaner, but you're only going to go so far. What's the difference?

If you're in someone's house 6 hours a day with one person, how much volume can you do? Not very much. Versus if you have two people now, you have a little more volume. Now three people, even more volume. You have more touch points, more details. You're in and out and faster time. People pay for speed, by the way. I would not want someone cleaning my house for five or 6 hours a day.

Sometimes you got to deal with it. But I would pay more if someone could come in with more details, a better experience and less time. And that's what we're talking about, guys, is using the same machine, more throughput, more volume, so you guys can scale and have even better results for everybody, not just your teams, because they're building culture and they're winning, but your customers are winning, and you're more profitable, too.

So, anyways, I think that's how we're doing. Five houses a day. You could probably do a little more than that. You could probably do a little bit less than that. But that's kind of where we're at, and we're just sharing how we got there, how we're doing it, and doesn't happen overnight, guys. It takes time and you got to build up that momentum. So I think that's pretty much covering it.

So there's no magic button. Momentum is the magic. I like that. So, you know, if you want to learn more about this stuff and how we do it, all been documented in, you know, excruciating detail, and you can learn more about that. Profitcleaners.com masterclass. That's where we provide all that info. Yeah, and we just launched our new Masterclass, guys. We did a podcast about it a couple episodes ago, but it is brand new.

We talked about five critical categories to improving your business so you can double or more what you're doing in revenue and slash your work hours in half. That's what we're all about, is getting your time back, putting smart systems in place, training, empowering your teams with these systems so you can focus on your strengths and have a lot more fun running your business. So anyways, hope you guys got a lot of value out of this today.

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Reach out@helloprofitcleaners.com if you want as well, and get on a call with our team. Go watch the masterclass like Brandon said, profit cleaners masterclass and we'll see you guys on the next show. Go scale your teams to five houses a day. We'll see you guys on the next episode. Keep clean. Keep it clean. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings and super cool free stuff, head over to profitcleaners.com.

and remember, keep it clean.