Episode 17: Bi-weekly vs. Monthly Customers: Is One Better Than Another?

Episode 17: Bi-weekly vs. Monthly Customers: Is One Better Than Another?

Brandon Schoen:
And just remember, like, people are creatures of habit. Humans are creatures of habit. So you get them into that habit of loving your service. And, you know, even if it's moving them from monthly to biweekly, whatever that frequency they're going to get used to it, it's going to become a habit. It can be really hard for them to quit and move back or quit services all together. So yeah. So obviously you got to deliver, you got to give them a great product, a great experience once you get them in the door. And that's how you keep those really high quality customers. And you keep that recurring revenue base coming back over and over.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners is where you are learning with us from the top 1% of cleaning business owners and getting your time back, freedom back, loving your life. I am joined by my co-host Brandon Condrey..

Brandon Condrey:
That's me!

Brandon Schoen:
And I am Brandon Schoen, your host. And today guys, we are talking about a really cool little topic here about how you should attract customers, which kind of customers should you be working with? Recurring customers. Bi-weekly, monthly customers. This actually came from someone in our Facebook group who was asking, you know, how to attract high paying recurring clientele, and what's better bi-weekly or monthly. So we just want him to, to kind of recap that and go through that question and break it down for you guys and kind of our experience and our story and get into it. So at the end of this episode, you guys want to stay tuned because we're going to give you a quick tip for how to basically upsell people to biweekly Services, which is really the bread and butter. We'll get into that more, but without further ado, let's get started.

Brandon Condrey:
Let's do it. Don't forget to subscribe and leave reviews. We're not monetizing the podcast. We don't do ads. So that's kind of like your ticket for admission. Tell someone that you think might be interested, but also subscribe. So you can continue to get all the good stuff we put out.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome. Awesome. And actually let's tell people a few of these awesome reviews people have been leaving. We really appreciate you guys help on this. It helps us rank better and get more exposure on all the podcast sites. So I'm going to start out with Andre. Hey, called jr. I hope I said that, right? Andre five stars. You said splendid podcast, period. I can't thank you enough for all these podcasts. It will simply encourage you to doing it. I always feel enormously motivated each time I tune in. Thank you, Andre. I'm glad we're motivating you and getting you to take some action to do it.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. The next one's from Willie Garza, this podcast is to die for. This is the only podcast that gave me adoration for episodes, marvelous meetings with mind blowing organizers. Thanks. Really. I didn't know we were mind blowing, but I will take that cup.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, we're turning it up and out here. So guys let's get into it today and the content, what is better? Bi-weekly, monthly cleans? Someone else also asks in the group, do we turn down three week cleans every three weeks or even one time cleans? Do we still do those all really good questions. What should you be focusing on? What kind of customers should you be attracting and how do you get the best ones? Right. Everyone also always wants to know that. So I guess maybe we should tell a little story of how we kind of decided doing this and what our mentor has been doing all these years and kind of what we figured out.

Brandon Condrey:
So our mentor in Colorado, Corby someone has specifically asked about Corby and previous reviews. So there's an episode with just him, but Corby has the mindset of, we're only going to take the best, the best customer to get the best schedule, to get all these things. And so after much testing on his end, they arrived at biweekly. So we're going to do only customers every two weeks. It makes the scheduling a breeze. Everything's great. We turned down everything else Corby has been in business a lot longer than we have. And in the beginning we didn't have the luxury of turning down anything. Like we try to do it, like we're only going to do biweekly, but then we got so many people that wanted something that wasn't that like, really? You don't do it. It sounds great. And I'm like, I mean, it does the money. Sounds great. Cause we need the money. So we did it like in the beginning we took everything, everything. Yeah. Move out one times. Sure. You wanna do it every three weeks. Our schedule is wide open. We can totally do it every three weeks. Yeah. And so we, we did, we, we took it as a way to grow really, really fast. And if you're brand new, like it might make sense for you to do that as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. But I think what we kind of noticed along the journey doing that is we started to have problems as we grew. Right. Just growing pains of, well, this person, every three weeks is now screwing up the schedule for all these other people that are bi-weekly or..

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So what would happen there is like, okay, we've got the person who's getting it three weeks is always on Thursdays. So we have a bunch of biweeklies on that day. And then we forgot about the three-week one and it came up and suddenly we had like seven houses that day. Like, well, how are we gonna do that? Like, we don't have that many. This was when we had one team, how are we going to fit that in? And so we're scrambling to reschedule people at the last second and it just creates these headaches. So yeah, that was the issue with the biweeklies. There were issues with one-time cleans like that. Those are great to fill open spots on schedules. But if you're dialed into the recurring thing, you're only leaving two hours to do X amount of house or whatever it may be. And then at one time it's like, Hey, I need you to, I'm doing a move out. Clean at my 5,000 square foot house. Like great. That's going to take us like six hours. Like we now we're screwed because we only have this one, two hour spot open. So it's just scheduling namers left and right.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think it just, it always comes back to systems, right? Like more efficiencies and systems. You can build the new system that your business, the better, everything runs and smoothly and all that good stuff. However, when you throw in those one-time cleans or those cleans that are kind of like those random schedules, it throws this wrench in the system and it just bounces around and blows everything up. And it's really hard to keep on track with your really your best customers, which are the bi-weekly customers, the monthly customers. We'll talk about those in a like, they're good. But the biweekly is really where it's at for at least what we've noticed, just because let's tell them a few of the reasons. I mean, it's really easy to manage them because their mindset is really like, I'm getting my house cleaned every two weeks. I'm not going to go taking a microscope around looking at all the stuff you did. And you know, they're just, they're usually the families that are busy with kids and pets. They're not, they just need that automated schedule. Right. And they're not there.

Brandon Condrey:
They're looking, they're looking for a system for themselves. They want you to systemize my cleanliness. Like we always say that the cleaning industry is Netflix for cleanliness. Like you are a subscribing to a mopped floor and a vacuum rug and a vacuum couch and a made bed. Like that's what you're getting when you do it every two weeks, we're getting that when you do it monthly also. But when it's every two weeks, like a house can only get so dirty in two weeks. But when you come to a monthly customer, it's been four weeks since we here last time, I don't know how you live in those four weeks, but sometimes we go into monthly's and they are like destroyed. And so they're taking longer than a biweekly clean of the same house would be as also, so that again creates a scheduling issue.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! So like more dust has settled. More people have been in the house on a monthly clean or even a one-time clean the one-time is a really hard because there's even more variables there's even more dust. And it could literally, like you said, a big old house could take six hours a whole team. Whereas our normal clean with the bi-weekly customer we're in and out really quickly. There's not a whole lot of dust. There's not a whole lot of things different in two weeks. So it's a lot easier and a lot less variables, it's just a much more streamlined way to create that system around it.

Brandon Condrey:
Right. There's that the biggest sort of chunk of that, it comes down to scheduling if you're doing it every two or four weeks, At least on a, if you do have monthly customers and okay. They get cleaned on Thursdays. Well, two Thursdays, after that, you know that there's going to be an open spot because they're getting it done, you know, every four weeks. So in that spot you could put a monthly customer that's on the offsetting schedule. So that's kind of how you can manage the schedule because it's repeatable, it's happening every two or every four weeks. Yeah. Every two weeks is great because it's just on there. So you're good. We do have weekly customers. If you could convince everyone to do it once a week, you'd be set forever. But the thing is weekly is just like it's excessive for most people. So the weekly that I can kind of think of offhand in our customer base, which I would say is less than 1% of our customers is once a week.

Brandon Condrey:
Those people are. I remember the very first weekly we got was a retiree. He's a really nice guy. And I was like, I mean, this house is small. Like, I feel like we could do it every two weeks and save you some money. He's like, listen, I'm retired. I don't want to do anything. And I was like, okay, well I'll do it for you. And so we go once a week and we have, for years, he was one of our first customers. He's still happy. And we, that house, it's like 1800 square feet. I think we're there on average, like 40 minutes and it's a hundred dollars. So like the hourly rate is like $180. Cause we're not there for very long. And then the other type of weekly customer, we have are people with a lot of kids or a lot of pets or both. And so if you have four kids and they're all under the age of like eight it's chaos and the same thing, if you live by yourself, when there's no kids, but you happen to have eight dogs that is also going to be a lot to keep up with. Right. So if you can get weekly customers go for it, they are also going to keep up the same spot on the schedule all the time. And they're really easy to clean because again, if the house can only get so in two weeks, it's really not going to be that dirty in seven days.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So it really is, you know, the more frequency, the more subscriptions that you have on your membership model of your cleaning business, the more revenue you're going to generate. Right? So obviously we want to attract more of the recurring customers. How do we even, how do we do that? And I guess we could tell people how we're even pushing people towards the bi-weekly more if possible, you know, like what are we doing, I guess, in the sales and the front end of that, we want to do that at the quick tip at the end, are we kind of jumping into that?

Brandon Condrey:
I don't know if we're already yeah. I mean, you kind of got the gist of it, right? So here's what we take right now in our current existence, we would love to get to the point where we can say that we're only going to do every two weeks right now our customer base is basically a 50 50 blend between biweekly and monthly. So if we have 400 customers, 200 are monthly and 200 are biweekly, but because the biweeklies are getting it done twice as often, we're getting twice as much revenue out of the biweekly customer. Yeah. So our sales guy that we have his goal is to get BWE is what we call it. BWE I want you to get this many bi-weekly equivalents. So a bi-weekly customer is one BWE a monthly customer is half of a BWE and should the unicorn weekly customer come up? That's two BWE. And so that's what we have him focused on is trying to get it to the point where you get enough bi-weekly equivalents through the pipeline that we get a team every six weeks. That's the trajectory we're on. Now. I do think that we will get to a point where we're just going to say it's bi-weekly or nothing. But if we did that now, I think we'd upset a lot of customers and just feed a bunch of business to our competitors. And so that's kind of a move. That's a big move that we don't want to be making in the middle of a pandemic because it's, that's just not right. Like if someone got laid off and they're stressed out and we tell them like, Hey, you have to pay us twice as much now for cleaning, you get it twice as often. But like there's no option. Otherwise we're just going to cancel. Like that seems like it would be kind of, you know.

Brandon Schoen:
Some of the things we've actually done to kind of maybe disincentivize people from like wanting to just do a one-time clean or whatever is we've consistently been raising the prices on those one times or those move-out cleans because, well, they're helpful to fill the schedule, but they're also, like we said, like there's all these variables and it can really mess up the schedule on the teams can be unhappy and things like that. So we try to, if we're going to do those, we charge a lot more for it. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
So let's jump into the strategy. So this is the quick tip, kind of all in one. So you're going to do a couple of things. One, your marketing stuff has set up cause you've gone through our course, right? Sure. All of you've done that. So you know how to get the right customers in there. That's how you can find that out. But once you've got the right customers coming through the pipeline, here's what you do. You disincentivize the ones that you don't want. So we don't want move out cleans. We don't want one time cleans. So we price those high and on the move house, particularly people pay them like they needed them by a certain date. And if they're selling a house for $300,000, the fact that we charged them $500 for a move-out instead of $300 for what would have been a normal first time clean that doesn't matter to them. So they're going to do it. So like, we'll use those to fill the schedule. So that's great. So charge more for the things that you don't want to do when they come along. Cool. Like your profit margin is way higher on those. Right. And then to incentivize people to get biweekly, there's a couple things you can do. All of them revolve around pricing, right? So our monthly service is more expensive than our biweekly per service. So like, obviously you're paying, if your bi-weekly cost is 150 bucks, your monthly for us is like 180. And so if we tell you that like, look, if you got this done twice a month, it's $300. It's less than half of, you know, like the double of it. Like maybe that will tell them to like, okay, fine. Like I can stomach the extra, whatever to do it every two weeks. So that's one way to do it.

Brandon Condrey:
And then when people push back, you say like, why are you charging more for monthly? Who will your house is dirtier in four weeks. So it's going to take us longer. So that's why we charge you more. Yeah. If you don't like it, when we do it every two weeks. Absolutely. And then the other one is like, let's say you do get someone to come in through that wants to do monthly. Here's your quick tip. How are you going to upsell that person by weekly? Like, yes, I can schedule you for a monthly at $180. However, if you can commit to biweekly service for three months, we will give you 20% off the bi-weekly cost for three months. So like if the normal we could cost is one 50, knock 20% off that, then you get to test drive it and ideally your products all dialed in and they're just going to be like, well, I can't go back now because getting my house clean every two weeks is like the best. So I can't go in reverse. And that's how you kind of get people hooked on to the bi-weekly leave stuff. And I think that was one of our very first deals that we offered when we had those door hangers. When we were brand new, it was 30% off for three months,

Brandon Schoen:
I think is what we did. Yeah. We've tested so many different offers, but I think just what you touched on Brandon is actually the very first thing they see, even like the offer that they come to, whether it's on your website or out on social media, it should already be putting in their mind like planting that seed that this is recurring. Right? So it's like when we, a lot of our offers are like, get 50% off your first clean or your $75 off your first clean or even sometimes it's on your second 50% off your second clean. So it's already planting the seed in their mind that this is recurring. I'm going to try this out, but I get my discount on the second one, or honestly, once you just get them in the funnel, like, even if it's on the front end and you're giving a discount on that first clean, you know, you might have a little more risk there that people might not come back. But the idea is that loss leader, it gets people in the door they're going to love it. You're going to overwhelm them with like, wow, this is amazing. And they're never going to want to quit.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So yeah, just using that language first, if you're calling it X amount off of the first clean that implies, there will be a second, third and fourth clean right. So what you don't want to do, I think is just say like, you do a direct mail coupon. It's like you get $25 off of any service. Like that's lazy, go for what you want. Like don't let your dreams be dreams. Like if you want bi-weekly customers doom, like this is it. If you get it done every two weeks, we'll give you this crazy deal for the first like six months or whatever, whatever you want to do. Yeah. The other thing you can do is, you know, how like a gym we'll sometimes do like a membership drive, like no initiation fee is we're doing a sale on memberships. Like this week, you can do that with your existing customer base. You know, Because you're using a CRM that you have all these monthly customers send something out to them, send them an email that says, Hey guys, limited time offer for the month of October, we'll give you 30% off your first three months of biweekly cleans if you upgrade your service, some of them may like, you know, try it and they'd be like, guys, this isn't gonna work. I can't afford it and go back. But some fraction of them will be like, yeah, this is great. I can't believe we didn't do this before. And they'll stay bi-weekly customers forever after that.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And just remember like, people are creatures of habit. Humans are creatures of habit. So you get them into that habit of loving your service. And you know, even if it's moving them from monthly to biweekly, whatever that frequency they're going to get used to it, it's going to become a habit. It can be really hard for them to quit and, you know, move back or quit services all together. So yeah. So obviously you got to deliver, you got to give them a great product, a great experience once you get them in the door. And that's how you keep those really high quality customers. And you keep that recurring revenue base coming back over and over. But that's it in a nutshell guys, that is our tips and tricks and strategies on bi-weekly versus monthly and all that good stuff. So hopefully you learned a lot in that class and this class in this podcast today, if you guys want more awesome value, if you have questions, we're still doing the masterclass Profit cleaners.com/masterclass, you can check us out on all your favorite social media channels. We're on Facebook obviously. I'm going to like that page. We have a Facebook group as well, Instagram, launching our YouTube channel, check that out. And then we're also getting some courses out on the website. So check that out Profitcleaners.com/courses. The more stuff we can do to help you guys out the better. So just keep letting us know how we can serve you guys and hello@profitcleaners.com.

Brandon Condrey:
If you want a podcast episode on something we haven't talked about, we're happy to address it. Yeah. But in the meantime, keep it clean!

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean.

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