Episode 2: Why A Cleaning Business and Why Now?

Episode 2: Why a Cleaning Business and Why Now

Brandon Schoen:
That's the other part I love about this business is just the consistent cash flow and revenue standpoint. I mean, that's a true business man.

Brandon Condrey:
It's like Netflix for your house. It's a subscription service where you're subscribing to not being dirty.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And getting your time back to do what you really want to do.

Brandon Condrey:
Right.

Brandon Schoen:
And that's a beautiful thing.

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. Brandon Schoen and Brandon Condrey in the house. That's right. We're here. Episode two. Are we ready to get this show on.

Brandon Condrey:
Episode two? Why now is a great time to start a cleaning company?

Brandon Schoen:
Why a cleaning business and why now? I think we should definitely be starting cleaning, cleaning businesses. If you haven't already started your cleaning business. Now is the time. Welcome to the episode. Welcome to the show guys. We're so happy you're here. Thank you for your time. And we want to just dive right in. You know, when we started our local cleaning business, uh, we're going to be talking about before, during and after a pandemic, what it's like to have a cleaning business and kind of just the whole big picture there. And we're also going to be just diving into some of the craziness that's happening in this pandemic right now and how we're looking at the opportunities, right? Riding the wave and we're going to, I think come out in a much better place than we've ever we ever could have a little bit earlier, like just a few weeks ago, man, you mentioned to me, man, this was going to be our year 2020 what happened? And I think it's turning around, man.

Brandon Condrey:
I think it's taken a turn for the spreadsheet injury. It was upsetting to be going and seeing the trajectory going up, up, up, up, and then all of a sudden it took a turn. But yeah, we'll get into that later in the episode. We've got things, we're definitely moving in different directions though.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! And so again, we talked about this a lot in the first episode guys, but we're going to be touching on it again, just why more than ever, this is such a great time in history and also just in the market of cleaning, why serving your community and leading right now is so critical and also why cleaning business are doing essential work in the community apparently.

Brandon Condrey:
That's right.

Brandon Schoen:
And that's, that's the great news. You know, we can keep going. Uh, how far down are we on our numbers? You mentioned this morning like 20 something.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah we're 24% down from our pre pandemic averages of revenue, right? But we're taking that opportunity to do some interesting things with the community and we'll, we'll talk about that as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. So kind of guys, the main point of this show, if you commit to listening to this episode, by the end, you're going to understand exactly why now is such an amazing time of opportunity, despite all the fear, uncertainty, all these things going on and why really this is a decision that you will need to make. And if you choose to win, that'll change your life forever. If you choose to lose, that's also up to you. I mean, we're choosing to win we're choosing to see the opportunity in this and to take action and we hope you guys out there seeing the same opportunities. We know a lot of people aren't seeing that and that's fine.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I mean, I think it is what you make of it, the situation as a whole, right? Yeah. So I mean, this of we're up here in the upstairs office penthouse and we're going to tell you how we got started in the very, very beginning and how we ended up here, right?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you can just imagine wherever you're listening to his podcast right now, you might be driving or taking a walk or hopefully you're not completely asleep or something listening to this. Maybe you are, maybe you're distracted, but just imagine if you are starting your business and just had the whole blank canvas in front of you. Like what that would look like. When Brandon and I started this business, we imagined having a cleaning business and what that'd be like and having employees and now we're living proof of it. We're standing in our office. I'm looking at you right now, Brandon. Yeah, we're not even wearing shoes and we're up here in the penthouse.

Brandon Condrey:
And there's a pool table out there and a dartboard has a dartboard. There's a whiteboard for brainstorming and stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
I feel like we're doing something here.

Brandon Condrey:
So in the very, very beginning, this room was actually where we launched, so we rent the whole building. It's a two story building, 3000 square feet with a warehouse attached. Yeah. When we first rented it, there was still the tenant downstairs and we actually launched the cleaning company on this floor in this, in this room with hired people up holding chairs and folding tables and all we had, we had a a computer and a printer set up on a plastic table we got from Lowe's and printing out W2's and things like that. And then for the first several months we had three people. One team, we had all the cleaning tools stacked in a corner. It was hot as hell up here cause the AC wasn't working back then.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right.

Brandon Condrey:
And over time we moved downstairs, rented this out, grew everything and then the tenant upstairs moved out on, then we got to expand the owner's suite upstairs.

Brandon Schoen:
So it's like we were kind of like working in the trenches downstairs in the office with our office manager and our teams. And like the first few years getting us going. And it's kind of like we've graduated and we're now here in the upper office and it's like, it feels pretty cool man. The bridge on the bridge of the ship, we're on the bridge. Yeah. So, uh, exciting news. I mean like, just if you guys have ever wondered if it's possible, we're living proof and we're doing it. And again, this is one of the best businesses I could ever say. We've started and I'm sure YouTube, Brandon and kicking butt, man, we're shaking things up and moving and making waves.

Brandon Condrey:
And the whole point of that is that a success in this kind of industry, in those service industries, that it's not glamorous. You have to work at it. It's not the online stuff that we talked about last time too, but we'll guide you through it.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think a lot of success people, I've listened to personal development people over the years. I mean you hear the same thing kind of resonating through a lot of their messages, which is success is not sexy, it's monotonous. It's a lot of the, you heard grinding it out or it takes grit and what does that mean? It's doing the monotonous things. It's doing the same boring stuff every day, day in, day out and not giving up. Even when it's hard.

Brandon Condrey:
You got gotta check it off. If someone's got to do the things, you got to tick the boxes off on on your task manager, on your spreadsheet, on your piece of paper, whatever. Yeah, but you can only envision it so much at some point. You've actually just got to do it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and so we're going to talk more about that in the next episode. Actually to having a deeper purpose and a reason why, but when you have that purpose and that reason why it's easier to push through those things that are monotonous to whether it's even in the beginning we started remember, you know, we're just learning how to do this stuff. I was cleaning toilets even in just like doing the basic bottom level bare bones stuff that really is the fundamentals of cleaning and just understanding this business, right? So we went through all that and we did all of the sales calls and you did a lot of them more than me answering phones, talking to customers, like fielding all that stuff. So we've like been in the trenches, grinding it out and doing a lot of the grit work. And now here we are at the top office. And so yeah, man, just want to encourage you guys out there. There is room on the horizon for for much greater things. And uh, you know, again, we're just so happy to be here and I'm living proof of that. So I'm again, just wanted to touch on mindset really quick. So a lot of just being in business and entrepreneurship in general is mindset. And so I'm a great book. If you guys haven't picked up yet, I wanted to just touch on what's, it's a book called Relentless by Tim Grover and amazing, amazing book. It actually has a really nice correlation to profit cleaners and being a cleaner and just having that mindset of being a winner. So I think we'll actually do a whole episode on that book at some point because it's like I haven't.

Brandon Condrey:
I haven't read it, so that'll give me some time to digest it before we do an episode on it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, exactly. But Tim Grover, he was one of the coaches of the greats, the Michael Jordans, the Kobe Bryant's rest in peace, you know, the Scottie Pippin's all, all the greats and basketball specifically. And it's really fascinating to hear that just what those people's mindsets are and how he quotes them as cleaners, a psychology of hyper achievers and unstoppable mindset is being a cleaner. And I guess kind of the term cleaner comes from, you know, you asked me earlier, what does the cleaner really mean? I mean, think about the janitor that goes around at night and and has the keys to everyone's in a school for example, or a big office building or something. He has the keys to every single person's office. That's an incredible amount of control and power. And the cleaner is really a powerful role that we have as business owners and cleaning the community. We have keys to like hundreds of people's houses. We have a lot of control and power there, but also a huge opportunity to serve. And so again, we'll get more into this book guys, but I just wanted to touch on mindset for a second. Just one of the quotes in that book, the cleaner you are, the dirtier it gets. So Tim Grover touches on relentless means you're never satisfied and you create new and higher goals as soon as you reach your personal best. And if you're good, you don't stop until you're great. When you're great, you don't stop until you're unstoppable. And relentless means becoming a cleaner, so energy instead of emotions. There's a big difference there. And I think especially in this time, it's easy to look at, be emotional and to be like, you know, written with fear or whatever emotions that are out there. And so it's really important to channel those emotions and to energy into action, which is what we're going to talk about here, what we've been doing to take that fear and turn it into communicating with our customers and serving at an even higher level. So that's, just want to touch on that. But yeah, if you guys haven't picked up that book, pick it up. Tim Grover, relentless. We'll go over it more in a future podcast, but really great book on mindset and just really relative to being a cleaner. So I'll pick that up, we'll talk more about it. But anyways, let's dive into this cleaning business. What it's like benefits of having a cleaning business before, during, after a pandemic, right? And what we can tell people. So let's turn the beginning again. Before all this started, what was it like and how was it like selling these services and how is it different now? Sure. You know what?

Brandon Condrey:
I mean we definitely, in the beginning, you know, the goal was to position the company as a way to buy time. There was a book I had read that had stressed that time is the only resource that you can't replace. And so when I was in that sort of mode, I put these stickers all over my computers. I said 1440 that's how many minutes there are in a day. Right? And the goal is if you try and just remember that if you're wasting it on Facebook or whatever, if you're just burning through time, you're procrastinating, you never got that time back. So that's how we positioned it in the beginning. It was a way for people to spend more time with their kids or go do something fun on the weekend instead of like mopping your floors.

Brandon Schoen:
Right.

Brandon Condrey:
And so the whole value proposition when we started was this is the way to buy back time. So much so that it's in our logo it says claim your weekend and our logo. Right. And that was great in the beginning.

Brandon Schoen:
And I would say too, like when we first started this, we were like, okay, just as a market, as a marketing perspective, we looked into Google trends even and pulled it up and typed in, you know, cleaning, home cleaning, commercial cleaning, all the different types of cleaning there was. And it was very clear that this is an evergreen market and what does that mean? Evergreen? While it means that it never dies, it's constant, it's consistently sustainable. And so those graphs on Google trends, especially when first started even more now they're just exploding. But it shows you that the demand for cleaning is just, it never dips.

Brandon Condrey:
It's always very steady.

Brandon Schoen:
Very consistent rate, which is a great sign for a business. And it's a great just key, you know, like you're solving a problem and you can clearly see people are searching this all the time constantly. I mean, that's a great problem to be solving. So when we first dove into that was really reassuring, I would say. Yeah, solving a real problem.

Brandon Condrey:
Exactly. So we had, there was that Reddit post that I had seen, it was from a software developer and he was ultimately trying to push people to use his scheduling product, which we didn't do. Right. But the write up about it, about why you should do this as you'll compete with mom and pop businesses that don't know what they're doing on the marketing side of things, you'll bring a bigger vision to the marketing and advertising to it. That's when we really started looking at it. So that's when we started pulling up Google trends like, okay, well there's clearly this. We started looking at competitors. They all had really terrible reviews, so, right. All right, so there's definitely a hole in the market that we can exploit here. And my mom one time said to me, you will never make any money if you don't manage people. A lot of entrepreneurs I think are attached to the idea of an app or an online thing or whatever and it's, you don't have to deal with the human capital. And I was that way too in the first several attempts on businesses we're going to, I'm not doing employees. It's just me, I'll figure it out. But obviously it became apparent with the cleaning that we're gonna need a lot of people and we have a lot of people. Yeah. And yeah, it's worked out great. So as we just kept going further and further down the research rabbit hole, every sign pointed to, yeah, it'll work. It'll work, it'll work at work.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think going back to that point, if you want to make a lot of money, you have to affect a lot of people. You can't just affect a couple people and try to keep it small. And I did the same thing when I started. My first business has been, I was like, I want to not have any employees and try to be just me and keep it tight and just be my own team. But we've seen with this business man yet, it's totally true. The more people you have, the more people you're affecting, the more customers you're affecting. I mean, the money comes in as a, as a result of delivering value. And that's what we're doing is adding value to these people's lives. One of the things I just wanted to touch on too is I love, especially when I've done estimates, you're really the estimate guy. You go out and do a lot of the sales now and you continue to do that now virtually, which we've totally switched over to, which is cool, but just the push back and like on pricing or whatever it would be like in a normal product that you're selling normally you have to really sell it and really push it. And I think we've done a great job with the marketing and everything to like pre-frame everyone and get them excited about the cleaning before we even go on the phone with them or go in their house to be the estimate. But it's been so nice this business specifically, because it's almost like when you go on their house, they're just like, yes, like please come in and cleaning my house. And you're almost like, you don't even have to tell them why they need it. And like they're just like, yes, please come in. And I love that. Yeah, we definitely,

Brandon Condrey:
I remember like a couple of specific customers, like there's a sales process and we'll teach about this through some other avenues later, but you don't want to give them the price at the beginning. Basically you need to explain how awesome it is. And then at the end the pricing will be like, I can't believe it's this affordable based on all the things that you're going to do. Right? But you get the occasional customer who's like, I remember this guy specifically cut me off. He was like, I used to do sales, just tell me how much it is. And I told him the price. He was like, Oh my God, it's so expensive. Then they started asking questions, do you do this? Do you do this? I'm like, yes, yes. And these other things like you cut me off on the sales pitch where I was going to tell you all the things that we do. Right? And by the end they did become customers even though at the very beginning they thought that that was the most expensive thing ever. Right. So yeah, there is less push back, especially when it's a service that affects a whole family. Like it's one person paying for it, but it's the home, it's where everyone is. And so yeah, if it's clean, everyone's less stressed out. It's just a more enjoyable experience. So it's not just that the demand is there, it's an emotional change that happens.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And it's like once people have you cleaning their home, like you just like you said, like it's like this whole nother experience that people are like, wow, what have I been missing out on this whole time! Right. And please come back every two weeks or whatever it is. You know? So that's the other part I love about this business is just the consistent cash flow and revenue standpoint. I mean, that's a true man.

Brandon Condrey:
It's a subscription service where you're subscribing to not being dirty.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And getting your time back to do what you really want to do.

Brandon Condrey:
Right.

Brandon Schoen:
And that's a beautiful thing. So anyways, that's all that was all pre pandemic. That's kind of what we were going up against. And again, a great market. Great problem to solve. Now let's go into during this pandemic. So what have we kind of like experienced since this all started and we're now at the beginning of may has been going on for a month or two now. So it's like what are the new things happening? What are we shifting and pivoting into as opposed to.

Brandon Condrey:
So we, we had to make a lot of changes and I think this is what is the mindset thing is that if you, you can either approach it as a fluid situation and you're going to have to make some changes or you get overwhelmed with all the stuff and just bail. And so we had competitors that just voluntarily were like, we're just going to push pause and not deal with it. But cleaning wasn't essential business. It isn't essential business. And so the competitor is bailing out or leaving their customers high and dry. They're not going to have surfaces sanitize and things like that. So we had to pick up the pieces and run with it. So there were lots of changes we had to make. We had to get PPE for the teams. We couldn't get masks anywhere because they were all allocated for medical stuff as they should be. So instead of throwing our hands up and saying, well we can't get mass, we contacted a local seamstress and we had her hand make a ton of masks before. Right now, like today if you're online, there are Etsy shop selling and people on Facebook selling mask. But this was, we were ahead of the curve. So we got a bunch of fabric masks made before everyone realized they all wanted fabric masks. And so we let on that. We wanted to get fabric masks. So that was the change there. We bought thermometers cause we had to screen all the employees. This was kind of changing the offering to the customer. So the offer pre pandemic was get back your time. The offer during the pandemic is we're going to keep you safe by keeping our people safe.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And so to like certainty, like we're selling certainty.

Brandon Condrey:
Exactly. Everyone's freaking out. We have no idea what's happening. Here's what we can control. We can control how our employees come into the building in the morning. So instead of everybody coming in in a group of 20 plus to clock in and hang out and get coffee, we now bring them in by instant messenger. One team at a time, they put on PPE before they even entered the building. Everybody gets screened for fevers and if they are running a fever of over 99.5 Fahrenheit, they're out. We send them home for the day and they can come back under certain circumstances and sanitizing, sanitize, sanitize, sanitize. We sanitize equipment, door knobs, light switches, everything in the building.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. Everything in between. Cleans is getting sanitized.

Brandon Condrey:
The tools themselves that we're using. The go between houses get cleaned and we tell the customers that that became part of the sales pitch now instead of the time thing was like, this is what we're doing on the PPE and the sanitizing of the equipment and the cleaner we use, the cleaner we use is environmentally friendly and it has always been an EPA registered virus side. Right. We never had any need to tell people that right before the pin didn't help. No one cared that it was an EPA registered virus site. Right? Some of those words are scary sounding and so maybe you just got a little bit nervous that it was environmentally friendly, but it's a virus site anyway. But so once people started hearing those terms, EPA registered this and that, they wanted to know like is it going to kill the virus? And so we had to shift gears to explaining that these are the tools that we're going to use that are going to help you.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and actually one of the very first things I remember I was doing was we set up a video. We had a web board over here on the wall that we had written up a bunch of things to help people know exactly how we're addressing the situation. The precautions we were taking and really that certainty just to let people know, we know that it's happening and we're taking care of it.

Brandon Condrey:
We put out that video with all the bullets on the white board, here's what we're doing. And it was just more of a visual representation of kind of what we just told you. Right. And then it was serendipitous. But like that day that we were recording that video for YouTube,

Brandon Schoen:
We were at our coffee walk and we came back up the stairs,

Brandon Condrey:
And yeah, we got a message from one of the local news stations that they wanted to talk to a cleaning company about what they were doing. Yup. And the reason we got that was because of our reviews and the SEO. So she searched cleaning, we came up, they asked out, our office manager has the wherewithal to tell us that, Hey, this is really important. This isn't your average message. We got back to him right away and they came down with cameras and we shot a spot in front of that board and that we were on TV later that day.

Brandon Schoen:
Later that day man. It was amazing. And I think that's the kind of action we're talking about is immediately stepping up to lead and serve and communicate even more. I mean we've been sending out more emails and social and just all sorts of different things more than ever recently. But that's what people want to see and that's how to lead during this pandemic and this crisis.

Brandon Condrey:
One of our vendors that we used to use for SEO, he had said that he used our examples to a bunch of other different companies cause they were asking him like what do we do? What do we do? It's like look, watch these three videos of these guys made. This was how to do it right. So it wasn't just that we put out a video, we emailed a video out, we altered our text message reminders for customers to make sure that this is what we're doing. Like it's not just like, Hey we're coming tomorrow. We were getting a lot of cancellations. What was happening is we would send out the normal message. People would get freaked out, right? Because strangers are coming to the house, they would cancel. So we had to change the wording of the reminders to say, before I tell you that we're coming tomorrow, here's a website that you can go to. We're essential, we're keeping you safe, we're keeping our people safe. And that seemed to have worked. So we mentioned that number in the beginning that we were down 24% during the pandemic. The first two weeks we were down like 40% right. So we have definitely shifted things over time.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And we're in some like local mastermind, high-end networking groups. You mentioned some of these multimillion dollar business members that you're also talking with. They're down even more than that. So we're actually doing pretty good, right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we've got, I've got friends that run a dry cleaning business and they're down 70% which is crazy. Wow. And they're still going and we're always talking to him about messaging and how to get these things out and make sure that they can keep going. And yeah, like you had said it at one point, like we need to double down on the customer communication. So it was videos and emails and all that, but we also did live Q and a calls with customers. I remember in the very sort of early days of it. And that was when things were really, really fluid and people just could come on and ask whatever they want. Like, yeah, how are you doing this on the other thing? And then it's just a chance for me to reiterate directly to that customer, right? We're checking them for fevers, that's how we're screening for symptoms or we are using this particular chemical that's going to help. And so that again, just drove home the certainty point so they had questions, I gave you answers.

Brandon Schoen:
We showed up, we didn't stick our heads in the sand or shut our doors and curl up and die in the closet. Like a lot of our competitors that we were just upfront and very outspoken with people, this is what we're doing, this is how we're solving, this is how we're part of the solution. Right? And really going back to that messaging it's talking about instead of we're doing this, here's our covid plan and we, we, we, we, we, it was more turning to you and your and talking to the customers and talking to them and it actually from a marketing perspective, this is the best scenario you could have because everyone has the same conversation going on in their head. So you can enter that conversation and that pain point that they're having, they're worrying about and speak directly to that. And that's the best marketing there is. If you can address directly that pain point and talk about the solution. And that's what we did in our messaging. I think we were very good about doing that as early on. And like you said, a lot of people were looking at that as an example.

Brandon Condrey:
And then, I mean there's some other stuff we did during the pandemic twos, so maybe some things that our competitors weren't thinking about. I double and triple checked everything in our supply line to make sure that we were not going to run out of stuff. So we ordered like a six month supply of that sanitizer. And part of the reason we did that was that we had also told the customers that we were going to give it to them for free during the panic buying days. In the beginning you couldn't get hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes, any of that stuff at the store. Cleaning products in general. So much so that one of our competitors, one of the big franchises was robbed. That's right. Overnight they were broken into and the things that the thieves took were bleach and gloves, and that to me was insane. So we ordered more sanitizer, we gave the sanitizer away to the customers. We said, we know you're having a hard time getting this, keep your recurring service with us. We're gonna supply you as well. So we did that as part of the supplies. We wanted to double check the gloves because gloves were one of the things that were going away with all the medical stuff. But the gloves we use are from a manufacturer that they're not FDA approved, they're probably fine, but they just didn't go through the FDA approval process, so they were not going to get allocated for medical use. And so we double check with them that they've got plenty. And then we came up with backup solutions if that ever ran out. And so the idea is we're not going to run out of anything. We can keep going. So all of our competitors are still spinning their or posting nonsensical social media stuff that just trying to ignore everything, right? We were backing up equipment and backing up. Yeah. Chemicals.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And actually this is the opportunity you guys, it's like almost ripe for like monopoly in some of these markets because so many people have just done this and closed their doors and gone dark. We're out here taking on new customers, growing, putting our branding and advertising out there because right now another opportunity, right when this happened, I went on to our ad platforms and on Google and different places, Facebook, a lot of our competitors just stopped advertising. A lot of people just turn their ads off.

Brandon Condrey:
I think that was the blanket advice to a lot of business owners was there's no point in spending on marketing right now because everyone's stuck in their house.

Brandon Schoen:
Right? And so what that did was there was like ad fallout, meaning like ad costs because there was so much less demand. They just, the cost went down. It's like a very unique time actually to be, not only are people consuming so much more content sitting in front of their computers at home and quarantine, but you just have such a greater opportunity to reach a lot more people for a lot less if you're just willing to take the risk and just put yourself out there, you know, it's a great time for branding and getting your story out there.

Brandon Condrey:
I was guilty of this. We have a business mentor, a guy who invested some funds and he said, well, you should decrease the marketing spend. There's no point in throwing money on that and that's what I wanted to do. And then we didn't. We went the other way and we got, you know, in front of many more eyes because of the cost to sort of deliver that message was a lot less.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Another just really cool story. Just last week we put together a really fun video to make people laugh and to lead in this crisis, right? Like kind of encourage people like.

Brandon Condrey:
Hey, we spent money to produce a, I mean it's not even a commercial really. It's just like a silly video of people dancing of cleaners dancing inside of a house. But it's our most successful social post of all time by time.

Brandon Schoen:
And we just a week ago we posted it and it's had 13 point 1000 views. I just checked like an hour ago and that is insane. We've never had anything like that. This is proof right here. Like if you can put something out that makes people feel like you're part of the solution, you can make them smile, let them know what's going to be okay and like kind of lighten the mood. I mean, that's a great thing to be doing right now to, to lead, you know, and so we just.

Brandon Condrey:
So yeah, we got new customers off that video. We got people wanting to be hired off that video. We got messages about are we hiring new cleaners? And so that was fun. That was a fun way to kind of push it forward. And the video, they're wearing masks and shoe covers and doing this choreographed dance. It was great.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, it was great man. So, I mean that's the kind of stuff we're talking about. If you can get creative and you can think, well what can I do to serve my community and kind of lighten this, this load, this challenging craziness that's going on.

Brandon Condrey:
Get creative and think thing is the most important part there. So yeah, it's a crisis. What are you going to do? Right? Just brainstorm some stuff and try it. Like you know that there's a shortage of cleaning equipment. How do you get ahead of that? Like how do you do that right now before it affects everybody else? We've got commercial suppliers and the one that we use is environmentally friendly, not huge company and so we were good, but you got to check on that stuff. You got to figure out how to double down on communication with the customers, make sure that everyone is comfortable and then the pivot. So we had discussed many pivot options. We looked into hydrogen peroxide fogging systems, which are how hospitals will decontaminate isolation rooms or operating rooms. It kills a really hard to kill bacteria called C diff. And I had known that because of my past life and operating rooms and stuff working in there and we looked into those systems, they're very expensive. We were talking about adding an add on service or we could send like fumigate a customer's house basically. And in the end it didn't pan out because you have to have, be out of the house for hours and then you can't go into it for hours after it stopped because it's lethal to breathe it in. But we kept plugging away and you found a different system that's an electrostatic sprayer that makes the sanitize stick to surfaces.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So like walk around with it.

Brandon Condrey:
Exactly. The only PPE that you have to have as our glasses. And so instead of having to have like a hazmat suit, you walk around and spray stuff. They're commonly used in gyms and daycares. So like after the gym closes, some guy walks through really quick for a couple minutes and all this liquid gets electrostatically stuck really small drops of sanitizer on to everything. That's how they sanitized like weights and machines and floors and yoga mats. Right.

Brandon Schoen:
And so, and that one was way less money than the big machine yet.

Brandon Condrey:
The big hydrogen peroxide fogger we were looking at like $15,000 this one was 700 bucks. Granted it was sold out right away and we're still waiting to get ours, but we did jump into Q, we got into back order queue, bought a system and we're going to have it once it comes in and so then we'll be able to offer this add on service to customers. Hey, do you want a contactless disinfecting of the whole home? The sanitarians were used, which is great. It's a really good product. It's a liquid so it can only go on Floors encounters and light switches, things that are hard and water resistant. We can't be putting it on the furniture. This stuff, the electrostatic sprayer, carpets, rugs, furniture, curtains, all that stuff can get sanitized with the same piece of equipment for a lot less money and that way. That was one of the things that we just, the pivot the first time didn't work out with the hydrogen peroxide. We didn't give up. We moved on to the next thing. We just kept going until we could find something that works.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And even more so while we're waiting. One of my buddies from long time ago, he owns a water extraction like flood company here in Albuquerque and he actually reached out to me and he was like, Hey, we're going to start referring your business. But by the way, we have these electrostatic fogger things and so we're actually working out a deal with them right now to just be able to, until our equipment comes in, if people need that, we can them equipment. And that's something you guys can do in your markets too, if you don't have the ability to get those things right away. Partners with someone who does, everyone's a lot more willing to work together right now than ever. Right. Suppliers like just competitors even. I mean it's crazy. So there's a lot of opportunity to do some cool stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
I mean I think that kind of sums up what we did the whole time. So we got creative, we brainstormed, we communicated a lot to customers, to potential customers. Then we got fun with the communication on social media. We looked at pivots, we made some policy changes with equipment and thermometers and all these sort of nuts and bolts policy things that worked out great as well. And we're still here, like we haven't had to lay anybody off. We're still rocking and rolling.

Brandon Schoen:
Riight. And last week and we want to tell everyone about what happened.

Brandon Condrey:
So we PPP funds, I guess that's part of it too, is like, okay, the government announces we're going to give these forgivable loans away, right? We both recognize that there's going to be a flood of people that are going to do it. So how do we get prepped as much as possible? So we had conversations with three lenders simultaneously. The bank that we used, one that we wanted to go to and one that we had known from a city that I used to live in. So we engage those three lenders, got all of our documents together. No one knew what documents were going to be required, but one of the bankers was kind enough to take an educated guess. Right. So we were able to, a week before they even opened applications, get everything, payroll summary reports, Alyssa W2's, all these things for the paycheck protection program and then the day that it went live, we submitted it to two of the banks and one of them bungled it and they got overwhelmed and they closed it off but didn't tell anybody to. They closed it off, but luckily we had submitted it to the other bank and they actually had their act together. The difference between banks here on the, these are all small community banks. I think the difference was some of those banks were just taking everything by email, like just give us what you got. Like right now we've got to get it in the door. And other banks were just wait a couple of days while we get this website portal up that couple of days, think of America had processed something like 60% of the applications in the first couple of days and they gave away $9 billion in bank.

Brandon Schoen:
While everyone knows scrambling to get a form or something.

Brandon Condrey:
And then those big banks ended up screwing over. The little guys because they were prioritizing, if you had accounts with them, if you had a previous lending history with them, if you were just a nobody from nowhere and you apply it out of the blue, you just got put on the bottom of the pile and so that was a side effect of the government kind of crunching it out so fast was that the rules were a bit washy, but we got it in there. I'm like, that's going to end up being clutch. We weren't going to have to lay people off without the loan, but everybody's hours were reduced and it just making it harder and everybody, but now that we have the loan, I'm one of the other cool things that we're able to do is we're doing free cleanings for nurses, so yeah, we're going to have to pay them the hours. That's part of the condition of the loan, so why don't we actually try and keep them busy during that time. Instead of just, you worked 15 hours this week, we're going to pay you for 40 instead of you just working 15 hours a week. We filled all those gaps in our schedule with nurses and they're all very, very grateful that you're working 12 hour days, maybe more than that during this pandemic. We're going to come in and sanitize all your stuff for you so that when you get home from the hospital it's already done.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and you mentioned last week some of the doctors at UNM hospital, which we also do cleaning for some of their cancer patients, but we're going to reach out to them and try to help some of the doctors and the staff there as well. My dad works for the salvation army and we're going to also be able to donate some cleans to those people on the front lines as well. Yeah, so it just like any opportunities you guys can find to help out if you've got those funds or if there's just any way at all, you can help the community with your services. It really does come back and so just know that if you plant those seeds, they will come back many ways.

Brandon Condrey:
I mean that just goes back to the crisis management thing. I'm remembering more stuff than we did in the beginning. Like there were radio stations and TV stations that were trying to make sure that we're helping local businesses and you found those and we were able to get on the radio, two different radio stations, right? We submitted it to a different news channel that was going to spotlight local businesses, right? And if we had just sat back and been like, we'll ride this out. We wouldn't have even seen those opportunities. But because we were just hammering it every day like how do we fix this? How do we fix this?

Brandon Schoen:
And so that's what this is all about guys. Instead of feeding into that emotion and that fear, which just cripples you and keeps you from taking action instead focus on the opportunity and see what's possible on the other side of this and that's going to get you to take action. And like Brandon said, like every single one of these events that happened from the PPP funding coming through, I mean that was just relentlessness of like finding a way to get our application in and not taking no for an answer. And just all the things like you've been mentioning in the news, that was just us reaching out and just being relentless to reach out and just not stop going, you know? Right. And so that's what we got to do.

Brandon Condrey:
Exactly. And I think it worked out well. So we talked a lot about what we did during the pandemic. What are we looking forward to once this is wrapped up?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, so like after this pandemic, I think this is one of the most incredible parts of this too, is there's now more awareness and cleaning and disinfecting than ever because people, like you said, the virus side thing was never even brought up. Now people want to know do you use the virus? And so like people are really thinking about it and there's this pent up demand that people have been quarantined and they're like, I want you to come in and clean now and now we need to be cleaning every week probably. And like, you know, it's just like hyper awareness.

Brandon Condrey:
So thinking ahead of that curve, we are purchasing another team card. Even though on the numbers, the demand is not there to hire three more people and get another car, but we want to have everything prepped for when state homeowners are lifted for when vaccines are out and this is truly passed us. There's going to be an influx of new demand. And so we want to be able to not only get to our pre pandemic revenue and levels, right, but be prepared to do a whole another batch after that. And so we're looking at buying a car and getting it painted and wrapped and all that stuff so that we're ready to hit the ground running. That's the idea. Whereas other people are going to get just completely swamped and not be able to take calls. Right. And we will.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And just going back to that, Google trends, like I just looked at the other day, I mean residential is still definitely consistent. I mean, commercials blowing up even more. So if that's a business you're in or wanting to look into, we started cleaning offices just to expand it into that.

Brandon Condrey:
Commercial is a different beast, especially if you're coming from a maid service. There's equipment and hours and things and all those problems. But what we could do to pivot, we were thinking like how can we get into the commercial? We started taking on sort of small offices that are basically just a house. So I mean it's a small room with a couple of desks, the bathroom and a kitchen, right? And so there are two businesses that are within a Stone's throw of our front door that we now clean on a regular basis. And they just wanted that sanitizing one. One of them is a friend of mine, he's two doors down. He's got one of their employees, daughters comes in and kind of does the basic sweeping, dusting stuff, right? But no sanitizing. So we came in and did the lights, which was doorknobs, high dusting, all that stuff just like we would in anybody else's house. And so that was how we were able to pivot to a little bit of commercial, not the hardcore, we're not cleaning home depots on the weekend or anything. No, but we still got a piece of that market when everybody else is not.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And you mentioned some of those radio shows he got on. One of them was ESPN and right before we went on that interview we just cleaned their whole offices and they were like so grateful and they were like over the moon, you know about it. Yeah. And that came out in the interview because they were just talking about how much it felt great in their office. It was clean. So I mean that's a great opportunity right there if you can get on the air or the news or whatever it is and actually provide services to those businesses that are hurting right now. I mean radio for example, they're all, their revenue is advertising which is down right now. So if you could donate some services to help people like that or businesses that have a voice, like a radio station, then potentially get your business in front of a lot of people very quickly and very easily.

Brandon Condrey:
We got a customer just today off of that ESPN radio interview, which was like two weeks ago I think. And so people are still hearing that. And so that was our intake form on our website. And how's that? How did you hear about us? And she listed off the specific radio station, you know, by frequency. Yeah. That's how she heard about us.

Brandon Schoen:
That's awesome man. So yeah, so I mean I just think this just comes back to again, why now and why cleaning business is more important than ever to start. And I just wanted to tell a quick story on a side note. Some of these other online businesses I had started in the past, I mean had done app businesses, Amazon business, e-commerce businesses. My wife and I had a Kindle business where we had like a hundred books on Amazon Kindle. And again, just back to these businesses compared to this cleaning business, they were so much quicker and easier to set up and to build out and to kind of start scaling but also very, very quick to get shut down or an algorithm changed. Like we were on the top of Amazon's page one and then the next day were nowhere to be found. Things like that would happen. I have a really crazy story. I actually bought kind of a Craigslist related business, but again, just so much more risk in some of these other businesses. Um, I spent thousands of dollars to buy it. I didn't even know what I was doing. I got into it months later, we were doing a lot of great money and then we got completely shut down and my bank accounts were frozen. It was like I broke the law, you know? So it was like that kind of crazy stuff can happen with a lot of these internet businesses, which we've been a part of or these quick, you know, overnight success stories that you hear all the time on the internet. Again, this business is so much more sustainable. It's so much more long term profits, long term gain and big picture thinking. And that's what excites me about this business. You know?

Brandon Condrey:
I mean it's a, it's a service business. It's, there's nothing crazy happening, but it's just the grinding it out. Like just do it correctly. Treat your people well, treat everybody else well. It'll just happen. It was a slow thing to get going. But now that momentum that we built up coming into the pandemic is what's making us write it out. A lot of our customers stuck by us. The vast majority stayed with us during that time.

Brandon Schoen:
And like other businesses, when we were looking at this business specifically, we looked at what other service businesses could we start that were like this. So like mobile car washing or painting or plumbing or whatever it might be. Right, right. But the problem with those businesses is there's not an evergreen market. For example, painting your house or roofing your house. It might be somewhat consistent, but it's a lot harder and it's a lot less consistent than every two weeks. Someone coming in cleaning your house, right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And you, I mean as a roofer or a painter, people don't need that all the time. All the time, sir. Guaranteed for like 25 30 years. So then you're banking on aggressive onetime business like all the time and you have to hustle, hustle, hustle to get like the next sort of batch in the pipeline when ours, when will you sell a customer? They're there for perpetuity, you know, until you screw something up and then you learn from it and then find the next one. Right? So that's the beauty of selling someone a recurring service, not a one time service.

Brandon Schoen:
And that revenue is just there and so it's so much more easier to gauge where your business is going and how healthy you are, how profitable you are. Instead of just one month you made this much and the next month it's way down and you never know what it's going to be. Right. That's really hard. So this business is great because it's very consistent. Just to touch on franchises for a second too, we looked at cleaning franchises and we started this and that we did is ridiculous as well because they take such a huge cut is really the limit.

Brandon Condrey:
So there's a franchise fee, they're covering your marketing, which means that if you had some clever idea for marketing, you can't do it because they produce it already. That's what you're paying for, right? Sometimes they're taking a cut of revenue and you're competing against other franchise owners. You're locked into a territory by definition. Whereas if you just did something ground up homegrown, right, you can do whatever you want. Like that's what's nice about it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, and just in this specific time, I just thought of this, but with that recent loan that we got to help cover payroll, we started this business even thinking about starting with subcontractors, right? Right. Where you could just not have any employees at all. And there's a lot of people doing that even right now where they're scaling big businesses with all just subcontractors, no actual employees, which is super dangerous and a lot of ways, which we can go into probably a whole another episode. We'll have a whole episode on 10 99 employees and things like that. But if we didn't have the business we have right now, we wouldn't have been funded last week. We wouldn't have the momentum we have right now.

Brandon Condrey:
The way that loan program was written from the government, there were limits on franchises applying in the first place. Right. But there were also heavy limits on if you were using independent contractors, you only got funding for the employees you had. So you, one of your friends has a business and an education business in town and they have, it was like 30 or 50 instructors, but the business itself only has two employees, right? Because everyone was 10 99 and contractors don't get covered. So like if that contractor was relying on you for their sole income, now they're out and you don't even have a mechanism to get them back. This is a very small sort of really, really unique situation with 10 99 but there are a lot of pitfalls with 10 99 so it just happened that the paycheck program was a case in point that it just hosed a bunch of people like that.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So we'll do a whole another episode about franchises and the limitations of going with subcontractors and the reason why you want to do it the way we're doing it. We really spent a lot of time researching this business, getting mentored by someone who's done it and has 45 years experience and just the few years we've been doing it, we've learned so much. And again, it's been really, really an awesome experience. Just getting, now we're at the penthouse of our office and shooting this episode and doing it, man.

Brandon Condrey:
It's been a wild ride and we're on the pandemic roller coaster right now, but all the numbers are still trending up, which is even more encouraging when people are falling down left and right around us. So there's a way for you to see yourself through.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. All right guys. Well I think that pretty much wraps up the episode. I don't know if you have anything else you want to add Brandon.

Brandon Condrey:
No, I mean just, just the normal sort of subscribe to the podcast so you can keep following us in the future. And then we've got a masterclass where there's eight weeks of free sort of training. We're gonna do coaching calls on that.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So if you guys head over to profitcleaners.com/masterclass that is where we're going to be putting these upcoming coaching calls, videos, consulting that we're just doing absolutely free. We want to help you guys out, see what kind of questions we can help with and really help you guys during this time. We want to give back. Something I kind of learned along this journey too is you know it's one thing to grow personally developing yourself. That's a great part of personal development but also contributing and giving back to others and your community. That's an even more fulfilling part of growth and I think personal development and so that's why Brandon and I are doing this is we want to continue to grow. You can only grow so much, you know, learning and doing stuff yourself. When you start contributing and giving back to people, that's when you really, really start growing as well. And so we just want to give that back to you guys as a gift and help you to helps you out. I hope this podcast helps you out.

Brandon Condrey:
In that same vein, just talking about that. That's basically what the next episode is about, the why, the bigger purpose of why to do it. Absolutely is the next episode. So we'll talk to you more about community involvement and and how those things sort of fit in with the overall business plan.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. So thank you guys so much for hanging out with us. Thank you for time and this was really fun and we'll catch you on the next episode and until then, keep it clean.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean. See you guys later.

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