Episode 23: Addressing Often Encountered Difficulties in Starting Your Cleaning Business: Live Coaching w. Shawn Thorton

Episode 23: Addressing Often Encountered Difficulties in Starting Your Cleaning Business: Live Coaching w. Shawn Thorton

Brandon Schoen:
You got to just really work it, man. You got to realize it's kind of a hard game because you're competing with a bunch of other people that get the same leads. So you're not in control of the leads necessarily, but if you are really on top of it, if you've got someone like watching the leads coming in, like if you're really responsive, you'll get a lot of those jobs and it's a good way to go. However, you're still gonna pay a little bit more than if you just take control of it and actually set up your own marketing ads, your own Facebook ads, Google ads, your own next door stuff, stuff where you're owning the lead in the traffic, as opposed to farming it out from a big farm that everyone else is farming from the same batch, basically, you know, like HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack. Those they're good, but they're not the best.

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:
All right, everybody. We are getting started. We're going to do a quick coaching call today. Thanks guys for joining, Shawn. We've got some other people hopefully hopin' on, but if not, it might even get some more private coaching, some more one-on-one stuff. So that's exciting. So yeh! We're going to get this thing going. I'm getting Brandon on here so we can get the questions going. If you do have questions, make sure you get those ready, Shawn and everybody who's on the call today. Hey Shawn, what's going on, man? How you doing?

Shawn Thorton:
I'm doing well. How are you guys doing today? We're doing awesome. Awesome, man. Tell us a little bit about your business. I've seen you in the group, man. Thank you for joining us and yeah. Tell us a little bit about you and just what we can do to help you, you know, what your goals are and anything we can talk about. Yeah. So I stood and listened to you guys as podcasts kind of, I think right when you guys first started really launching these a couple of months back here, I'm based in Michigan was actually me and my two brothers. We started our cleaning business really at end of may at our first clients here at the beginning of June. Name of company is Revitalize Cleansing Services.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome.

Shawn Thorton:
So yeah, we really just hitting the ground running here and then we've actually grown faster than what we even expected. So there's obviously a great thing. We've had obviously had some challenges in that. So that's kind of the reason why we started listening to your podcast and other podcasts in the industry and really sat into one of your groups here about a month and a half back and decided to really kind of take the leap and join the masterclass there. So just had some questions for you. Just got to understand like how you guys really kind of get started. Some of the things that would maybe have some issues with his to see if we could be able to pick your guys's brain and maybe to gain some insight.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely man. So revitalize, you said revitalize cleaning services is the name?

Shawn Thorton:
Yeah. Revitalize Cleansing Services, but we also own the cleaning services as well. So we have it as a DBA cleaning services because we know people sometimes mess it up as they clean versus cleansing. But when we did it, we wanted to try to have something that was a little bit different. So we chose the word cleansing.

Brandon Schoen:
Awesome. Yeah, man. I love it. I love, I love the whole feel of it. Like revitalize is a great word, so awesome, man. I just pulled up your website. It looks really clean and really well put together. Cool. Cool. So you guys just started in, you said, May?

Shawn Thorton:
Yeh really like our first clients that we get were over Memorial day weekend. So yeah. Been in business just about five months now.

Brandon Schoen:
Wow man. So you guys started like right in the midst of the chaos.

Shawn Thorton:
Yeah. So we were actually talking about kind of getting into business before COVID hit and it was just something that we'd been talking about. And then as soon as it hit, we were like, well, we think we really need to make this happen. Plus it also came out of necessity because all of us have full-time jobs, but during the height of it, each of us at some point were furloughed or let go of our jobs for a period of time during that. So we're going to go, we need something for stability. We didn't know if we're going to be able to get our jobs back. And then you just wanted to be able to really build something for ourselves and our family and for our future. So we kind of got into the business.

Brandon Schoen:
So you guys weren't, were you doing cleaning before you had other jobs?

Shawn Thorton:
So we have other jobs and we're still all three of us still have our full-time jobs as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. Oh, wow. Okay. So you kind of running this in the background until are you planning on going full-time with it or?

Shawn Thorton:
So we'd like to actually what we've actually added on here recently is extruded. We brought in my wife as a full-time employee to really run the operations, the day-to-day operations. So we were not being taken away from the current jobs or not being able to answer the phones for this cause we're doing something else with our day-to-day job so,

Brandon Schoen:
Cool. Right on. That's awesome. So you get your first full-time hires going?

Shawn Thorton:
Yes, absolutely. The first full-time hires and then we've got quite a few part-time is on there as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Okay. So you got part-time cleaners how's that working out? Like, are you having any issues with people showing up or not being full-time if they're not full-time yet or?

Shawn Thorton:
So I'd say that the issue is just really getting people just in general has been a challenge. We've been posting in a variety of different places and it's been a really big challenge and it's been surprising to me because my background for the past 10 years has actually been in recruitment and staffing. It's like, this is still some of the hardest that I've actually positioned. I've had to feel because a lot of the roles that have been more senior level positions and trying to go to these hourly roles, it's just been difficult to get people, to show up for the interviews or if they show up for the interviews again, the next day show up for their first day. But I said, the group of part-timers that we have right now, I've worked out pretty well. And most of those have just come from referrals.

Brandon Schoen:
Okay. Interesting. Okay. So that's really interesting, man. Like that's proving, you know, you can start this business kind of as a side hustle while you got other stuff going on, which is really cool. I think a lot of people to see that what are some of your like biggest challenges right now that we can help you with or things we can help you overcome? Maybe if we can shed some light on that.

Shawn Thorton:
Is that one of the big things is really just finding, I said, employees that want to work. Cause we still need some more individuals because we're at the point where now we're, can't really bring on somebody. Full-time just yet I'm another person full-time but we do need a couple of part-time people to be able to support the additional work that we have coming in until we can maybe grow one of them until a full-time position. So it was just really been a challenge of getting those individuals.

Brandon Condrey:
What's the compensation for the people hiring out for starting wages.

Shawn Thorton:
So for our wages where you're starting anywhere between 12 to about 14 hour for our part-time individuals.

Brandon Condrey:
What's the minimum wage in your city, or county?

Shawn Thorton:
In our state it's been $7 to $9, honestly, I can't remember, but we're definitely above them, the minimum wage.

Brandon Condrey:
So that's good. Why do you think it's not working out and giving you a recruiting background?

Shawn Thorton:
I would say really. I feel like just as a lot of people that will say, they're going to show up for the interviews, we get them scheduled. We have basically interview days that we do essentially every Tuesday and Friday we'd have postings on indeed, Facebook. So we reach out to these people and they'll schedule on using Calendly. So we use that they'll schedule and we have them schedule every 15 minutes. So they'll go on their schedule, say, they're going to show up, we'll give them text reminder invites, but then I'd say there's been a day. We had 12 interviews and only two people showed up. So I think we're just getting people to show up to the interviews has been our biggest concern on that. Certain if it's just, I know a lot of people in our area are struggling to hire across all industries. So I'm not sure if it's part of COVID and people not wanting to work or what it can really be in this sector. That's really kind of in this, I'd say $10 to $15 an hour pay range for these separate roles. Just seems like a lot of people across our community are struggling to hire in all industries.

Brandon Condrey:
We definitely have the same issues. We post jobs. We get people that will look interview times just like you do. We've done that during COVID as well as they have to book a time on Calendly. And then there's like a 10 to 50% show up rate. I mean the one thing that I would say like in any sort of challenge like that, if you can throw more money at it, that's what I would suggest is probably what's lacking. So if you hunt around on indeed and stuff for other service type jobs and see what you're paying and like maybe they're all going to hotel housekeeping or there's other things that might be hiring. Like, I don't know, you suggested Detroit, right? It's manufacturing still going big up there.

Shawn Thorton:
So when you're going big, I said, I probably one of the biggest things that might be a detractor for us is Amazon has like three centers that they've just opened up here in the Detroit area. And they're, they're advertising like crazy. They're sending out flyers, I've gotten text messages from them telling me like, Hey, are you interested in working? I go to the gas pumps, they're advertising on the gas pumps about their job opportunities.

Brandon Condrey:
Do you know how much they're opening offers for?

Shawn Thorton:
Like 15 an hour?

Brandon Condrey:
Okay. So if you know that you're competing against Amazon, when you post some job ads, you probably want to be a bit vague about it because Amazon may actually call you out because they're that type of company. But the working conditions at Amazon, as far as I know are not very good. They, the climate control is an issue in those big warehouses. You have to haul ass the whole time. Like you got gotta package a box every like 16 seconds or something crazy like that. So you can pitch yourself as a more relaxed environment and the sort of working conditions than a large warehouse we're going to be in that same boat. Amazon's building right now in our town, like a 2 million square foot building. I think it's going to be the biggest building in the state when it's done. So we'll be right with you sooner than later.

Shawn Thorton:
Yeah. So one thing that we're even trying to do in our ads is kind of put it as like, you know, we treat you as more than just an employee. We talk about giving additional bonuses and things on those lines. And then when people do come in to interview, we let them know it was like, we're pretty laid back bosses. We're not going to be mean boss, going to be sitting there yelling at you what to do or things like that. Two things that we really ask for is just being open communication and being honest with us and upfront, if the situation works, we can't come in. Or if the schedule doesn't work, letting us know ahead of time, instead of just doing a no show or not showing up for the work. So we try to communicate that to people.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. All that sounds super reasonable. The only thing that I can think if you're already kind of addressing, I would say specifically pitch it against a warehouse job in the job. And if you're not mentioned that already, like if you think it's going to Amazon specifically mentioned the warehouse, the only other thing that I think might be holding you back because it it's, part-time, where's the disconnect between part-time and your end and being able to like hook people in there for cleaning full-time?

Shawn Thorton:
It's really also really being able to have like a steady straight eight hour shift is still, we do residential as well as commercial. We really started off really focusing on just commercial and really picked up the residential piece because people just started reaching out to us just via Yelp and things like that without us even really doing any advertisement at first on there. So at first we even turned down our first like two residential. So like we really want commercial and then more stuff started coming in and like, well, we don't want to turn down money. We really started focusing. And then like, yeah, we should probably do both, but we have commercial clients that we've actually locked. We have a school that we clean. We have a couple of offices that we clean. We have doctor's offices, things like that. But they range from needing to be done in evening time things on those lines. So it'd been able to say, we're going to have a straight eight hour shift or somebody can be a challenge just because also our residential is kind of hit or miss. We've got some days where weeks where we've got a ton of residential booked up and then we have some weeks, or we don't have really much going on in the residential side.

Brandon Condrey:
Here's the thing. So you are like in the growing pains part of this. And so what I would suggest is that you need to try and fill the schedule. Like that's kind of a no-brainer so like the course that you're taking with us, we'll kind of help you do that in terms of like getting more people in there. But what we did in the beginning when we had people that were full-time, but we didn't have a lot of time to fill, we would have them do advertising for us. Like we have door hangers in between jobs. So like if you have the revenue to pay those people in between the gigs, like you could just focus on door hanging, which I don't know how that's going to work in commercial side of stuff, if that's like your focus, but it is effective on the residential side. So that's an option, but like, these are good problems to have, like you're getting business, you're just right at this tipping point with the hiring, it's usually just like throwing more money at it. Like you might be able to find someone who is what's the school situation like right now with COVID where you're at?

Shawn Thorton:
Some of the schools are in session. Like, so for example, one of the schools that we clean are currently in session, you know, days a week, some of them are kind of like two days in school, three days off. And then there's a couple that are kind of remote. So that's really kind of up to the individual school district and how they want to operate.

Brandon Condrey:
So what you could pitch it at, in the ad for the employee is that if you have a kid that saw this weird schooling schedule, we can work with you to try and get you in there. When the kid is actually in school, we can try and get you working on those off days. And then the promise would be that as you grow with a work part-time and sorting this out, once schools go back to normal, which is hopefully like sometime next year that we can just slot you into the full-time spot if you're still into it. So, I mean, this is kind of surprising to me that you're having a problem with part time workers, because there's a sort of feeling around the industry that that's desirable. I know because of people having a homeschool kids or schools are only online and you might be able to just work, you know, from like 2:00 PM to 10:00 PM or something like that with the commercial. So yeah, it's tricky. So like, you're, it's like right there, I feel like it's so close. It's a combination of scheduling, getting more people on the revenue docket so that you can do that. And then it's also trying to find the right people between a combination of pitching yourself as not Amazon also that maybe there some bonus structure that you can throw in there. Like, I don't know, like we'll give you a hundred bucks on your first paycheck. If you complete your first week or even little bonuses like that week, we'll get you $20. If you complete your first day. Like if those are kind of the challenges.

Brandon Schoen:
I'm going to, I'm going to put in the chat here, our employment link, which you might've already seen before, but that's still, we use when we do hire people on Craigslist to Facebook too. We just started testing out the big job post site that posts everything. I'll think of it here in a second ZipRecruiter, we started testing that more, which gives you a lot more exposure. Potentially. You might want to try that. However, it's a little pricier than we'd like, so really I'll tell you how we started, man, which was we straight up just posted that kind of a link, which has those questions you want to kind of like qualify the people. Maybe that's what you're not doing on the front end is really qualifying them really well because when you get the right people filling out the form, like the questions that we ask on the form, we have them in Spanish and in English, that's going to qualify them. That's already going to put them in that mindset of like the kind of quality of people that you want to be attracting. So check out those questions and maybe add some of those if you're not adding them. And the other thing I thought of when you're talking, this is just, we've never started with a, you know, a part-time team ever. Like we've never started like that with, even from day one, we were like, we hired three full-time people. And although it was a little crazy in the beginning, there was quite a bit of grinding going on. Cause we had to in the same boat, you're in where you're like, well, we don't have a full schedule yet, but we have a full team. And so I feel like right there, you might be, might be able to eliminate that problem. If you're attracting number one, you're qualifying the employees and the people that you're the leads that are coming in. Number two, if you're hiring full-time people because already that might be a different mindset. Like the part-time people might be like kind of halfway already. Cause they're just, I just want to be part-time versus the full-time you're attracting a much more qualified, higher-level person that wants to be there full-time obviously the challenges you have to fill those people, fill the team. So they have something to do. So what we did in the beginning, because we didn't have a full schedule right away either. So what we did is we said, Hey, we're going to let you know this up front. We were completely transparent with them. We said, we're going to hire you full-time however you got to know like the first month it might be, or it might be the first couple of months, like you just gotta be flexible with us. I know that it's probably going to start part-time but it's going to move to full-time as fast as possible. And if you can kind of offset that with some promotions or some marketing or some review pushes or some things that really start beefing up your presence online or do some special door hangers or things like Brandon said, we would actually fill their time with marketing. So if they did two houses that day and that's all they had, they would spend the last two or three hours of the day driving around specific neighborhoods and putting door hangers up on things like that. And you can get creative to fill their time. And just like, you know, another part of the business that's that can, they can help put some diamond do to add some value. And that's an idea too, but I really think that might be the biggest thing, man is just in my perspective, starting with the part-timers right away is a challenge. If there's any way you can, you can attract higher quality people full-time and just tell them the caveat up front is, Hey, the goal is you're going to get full-time as fast as possible with a little bit of flexibility on the front end to get there. Here's some things we're doing to do the marketing and push that. That's what I would say, man. But if you want to keep pushing the part-time route, I just feel like it's a, I don't know, just like if you go all in right away with the full-time people, even though it feels scary, the truth is man, like they're going to be a full-time. But if, as long as you explain them, like some days you're not going to have all your jobs, you know, like you're not going to have an eight hour day, like immediately, they're going to appreciate, you may not friend with them and they're going to hopefully be the type of people that are be willing to grow with you. Especially if you can show them like, here's where we're going and here's where the pay is going or the bone, you know, that's what we did with our people in the beginning. We still have like, literally one of our very first employees, three years later, she's still with us, quite a few of them actually. But one of the very first teams we hired full-time and I remember a lot of days, man, there was like, there was a lot of days they didn't have full-time cleans, you know, it was just kind of flexible in the beginning. So those would be my thoughts initially to help you there. I don't know if that helps.

Shawn Thorton:
Yeah. I definitely think that does on being able to have them maybe do some marketing for us then the downtime. I just think that our biggest concern is just like making sure we have the business and be able to be able to pay them. But like, would you set up getting them started off with part-time for the first maybe month or two and just obviously being upfront with them about that and then being able to grow them into full-time.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, but I would position it as this is full time. We're a startup. So you might start out with like the first month or so part-time but just like, I would position it as full-time, because right away in somebody's mind, like that's going to attract the potentially more long-term employees and the people that are going to show up when you want them to show up and they're going to be all in with you is kind of what I'm thinking. That's my main point I would make there. And then it sounds like you're doing everything else, right? Like posting a lot of the right places. But it's true, man. Hiring is a hard thing because it's hard to find quality people. So there's that saying? You know, hire slow fire fast. So I think just, just keep tweaking your systems and maybe use some of the input questions we have, keep testing it. And just another thing we do is we have those follow-ups on Calendly. So when they, they sign up to our thing here on the website, they sign up for a time on Calendly. And then we set those reminders in Calendly because you can set like reminders for text messages, for emails, things like that. You might even send them a quick and then be very beginning before we even had that, we would just text message them like the day before and the day of like reminders to show up things like that. One other quick test, I thought of that our mentor taught us or mentor Corby when they do their hiring to kind of eliminate those problems. Employees in the beginning is you kind of put them through a test like the very first day. So they fill out an application. Great. You're interested in the job. Cool. Normally they're coming in to do that. Maybe now it's online more, but you tell them that same day to come in like that afternoon, say, Hey, can you come back later today at two o'clock, three o'clock and just see how they react. A lot of times, these people aren't going to have kids and families and things. Right. But if they can make that change on the fly really quickly, you kind of see, well, did they even come back that same day? Number one, if they did that proves to you that they're able to change their life around really quick last minute and make accommodations to show up for the job. Right. And then it also shows you some other things like, do they even have a car? Is somebody else dropping them off? Like how reliable, how accountable are they? Things like that. So you can kind of tell a lot right away from those initial questions. And if they're really good, have them come back that same day to do something else or to fill out something else like their or whatever the other forms might be like a second interview, almost that same day or really soon after. So you can see how they react and how they can manage their time basically. So just another tip there might help you out.

Shawn Thorton:
Yeh. I like that.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. What else, man? I mean, is there anything else, like that's bogging you down or challenging you? I know there's a lot of things going on running the business, but,

Shawn Thorton:
The big thing is, is like you just kind of continuing to get recurring clients, especially on the residential side, to be able to fill some of those gaps in, in, during the daytime specifically, because most of our commercial cleanings are in the evenings. So I know I said looking at your masterclass here, I'm looking at some of those things, but just trying to really figure out Facebook advertisement, some of these Google ads, I just got signed up for next door account this morning. Somebody tried to get in there as well, but just trying to, you know, look at how and to, to get some, those recurring clients, because a lot of the things that we've had so far from our residential sites have been move out cleanings, some moving cleanings, which one thing we are looking to do is to follow up with those individuals that we've done move in cleans with the, see if we can get them to sign up for our service on a recurring basis. But just trying to look at ways just to be able to attract more customers.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. In those recurring customers is the bread and butter like, so like what we've found is the moving the one times they're great. Especially in the beginning or even now it's nice to fill in the schedule if we have gaps in the schedule, but how do you focus on getting those recurring ones? Which I think it's more, more than anything it's just focus on. Who is your ideal customer? Like who's going to want those recurring cleans. Like for us, it's usually the really busy families with kids and pets and they have jobs and they're super busy. They need that frequency because they just don't have time and they want to be with their family and doing other stuff. So hone in on who that customer is. Right. And then once you know, that, put that in your marketing messaging, like in your Facebook ads and your Google ads, like present it as like any offers that you do phrase it as 50% off your first recurring clean, you know, like things like that, that kind of already get people in the mindset of all the, Oh, this is recurring. And then you'll just attract those people because you're putting it out there and your messaging and those people will resonate with that. And they'll see that, you know, the other thing is man, like, even if you're just doing one times, even just to get the brand out there and get the recognition and get some momentum, like you said, following up with those ones too, is really important because, or having some type of like referral program is good. Like we do. If you tell a friend, you get a free clean, so you can start building it organically, things like that. But really if you can get them in there and get them in the door, if you have to do a promotion, maybe you lose a little money on the front end. And if you've seen that in the webinars and stuff, you talk about that. But the idea is just impress them, go the extra mile. And hopefully that's what most people we realize is like, they'll get the service and they might even have told us the only one at one time, they're kind of on the fence, but we just do everything we can to make sure the service is really good. Customer experience is really good. Clean was really good obviously. And it's that kind of thing where people kind of get stuck in this habit. They're like, Oh, I don't want to quit now. It was really nice and really good. So if you can work on like, just creating that experience for them, where it's really, really positive, you know, just like if you have your systems in place, you have your communication in place. Like things that make it feel like a great experience that those people will come back. And then obviously, like I said, if you just try to hone in on who your target market is, speak to those people and put that in your messaging. Like this is a deal for a recurring clean this much percent off or this like those things get people's attention. And if you're brand new, it definitely helps get their foot in the door, things like that so,

Shawn Thorton:
Okay. And then let me, do you guys do anything with the commercial side? Cause it feels like I mainly hear you talk about the residential. So I'm just curious. Do you guys, are you involved at all in the commercial side of the cleaning business?

Brandon Schoen:
We do very little. We do office spaces right now. We clean offices and things like that during the day during business hours, we've thought a lot about doing commercial. We, you still might at some point, but it's just been like, we're just focused really heavily on the residential side right now. And the reason being is because, you know, if you spread your focus too much, you get spread thin. It's a lot more to manage. We only want it to be working during the day, you know, like, cause we got families and kids and stuff at night. So especially in the beginning, we didn't want to be, you know, up at all hours answering phone calls and doing commercial stuff, which is mostly at night, it sounds like, right. So we might do that at some point when we have someone who could full-time with that and manage it for us. But right now we're just focused on residential, little tiny bit of office commercial, but that's our bread and butter. Right. There's the residential. So yeah, not a bad thing to be in man. Like if you can find a way to make it work for you, it's a great way to scale. Especially like right now there's a lot of opportunities for commercial. So I wouldn't say go away from it, but I would just say like really figure out who you want to serve. Do you want to serve businesses and commercial or do you want to serve normal people and customers in their houses? And I would focus more on one maybe than the other if possible. But if you want to kind of, if you have the capability to do both and you're like, no, this is how we want to do it. And it fills up like you're, you're filling up your revenue better. That way. That's fine too. I would just say the way we did it, it was a little bit more focused on just residential.

Brandon Condrey:
So can you meet your thing really quick? I'll jump in there. Yeah. One of the things on the commercial, like we know a couple of commercial cleaners in town and when COVID hit, there was a lot of need for the disinfecting. And I see that prominently on your website with the of text, sprayers and stuff. So given the pandemic nature of it, there's a lot of flexibility in the commercial side right now to have that stuff done during the daytime. Maybe not like the full clean, where we're going to wax the floors and all this stuff. But like one of the guys who has a brush cleaning business in the neighborhood said he got a couple of retail establishments that wanted it to be sanitized three times a day. So they were coming by in the morning, in the middle of the day and that closed the business with those electrostatics sprayer. So just hitting like light switches and doorknobs and bathrooms and I trust services. So on the commercial side, you may be able to kind of focus more in on that, like the things that can be done during the daytime. I also think that would kind of impact your hiring too, because you tend to get a different kind of applicant for overnight work versus we call it banker's hours, but you know, like we're an eight to five sort of operation. So if you can try and do a little bit of brainstorming on what type of business would be able to have it during the day, like school's probably not, but small retail, maybe even grocery stores, the type of high foot traffic places where they want it to be cleaned on a more frequent basis is something I would look at as well.

Shawn Thorton:
I appreciate that. And so that's actually very valuable. I'm definitely gonna take a look at that because yeah, most of our stuff is in the evenings that we've got at schools, we've got a couple of, we have a doctor's office and a couple of other offices that we kind of all clean in the evening. There's only maybe I think two of them that we actually clean in the day.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So like even on like, let's say you got a new commercial customer that wanted to standard sort of overnight thing you can try and even incentivize that customer's tickets during the day. So like, okay, if you want us to do it at night, the rate's going to be this. But if there's a way that we can come in during the day, like we'll lower the rate because we're trying to get more work through the daytime for hiring difficulties and see, you know, what people jump at it. Like I know that we have for awhile clean a dentist's office. And we did that in the middle of the day and they just had, there was one particular day that they had no appointments scheduled. It, it was like admin and catch up for everybody and you would come in there and that's fine when it was just staff. So other places like that may have that option as well. You can just doesn't hurt to ask that's all and try and pivot it to that. Like Brandon said, like the reason that we started residential is that we just do not want to be dealing with, you know, I forgot my vacuum or something like at three o'clock in the morning. So that's kind of why we did it that way.

Brandon Schoen:
So anything else, man, what else can we help you out with? Is there, I mean, that sounds like some pretty big challenges there, but I definitely think those are achievable though. Overcome that, put some new systems in place and you know, things like that for the hiring and anything else challenging right now or that we could help you with?

Shawn Thorton:
Yes. So there's a couple other questions. One of the things that we're really certain to look at here now, and we're trying to figure out how to go about doing this and figured this would be a good question for you guys is vehicles. How do you guys start about going out and getting vehicles? Cause right now we just have everybody driving their own personal car to a customer site. So we definitely want to look at it, you know, investing in vehicles. So we're just trying to see like, how'd you guys go about doing that? What step did you guys take?

Brandon Condrey:
We did in the beginning was we made a huge mistake. We bought a car cash, which really screwed up our cashflow to do it that way. So don't do that though, where we buy our cars right now is from Hertz rental car sales. And so if you find a Hertz enterprise, does it, all those big rental car companies always sell those vehicles off. And right now is actually prime times to I used rental cars because nobody's running Carter's cause nobody's flying. And so they're getting rid of some of that stuff on that sheet. So I set up, I have a guy at the local Hertz if when we need one, I just text him. We buy all the same car. So we buy a Nissan versus their four door hatchbacks that fit our three cleaning people and all the equipment in it, depending on how much stuff you have going on on the equipment side of most commercial tends to leave things there. Like, especially if it's big contracts, like you'll leave a buffing machine like on-site. But if it's just like a cleaning crew showing up with a mop bucket in a vacuum, like any small vehicle will do it. So we chose a Nissan versa. We're looking at cars that are, they have 30,000 miles. They're like two years old and it costs like 10 grand. And so we have a relationship with the Hertz people in that and the finance company that they go through. And so we're able to put zero down on those and then monthly payment on those cars is like between like $200 and $250. So that's what we recommend for cars, for sure.

Shawn Thorton:
That's excellent information. Definitely took a look at that. Cause I didn't think about looking at the rental car companies, but that could be a great avenue and we've got quite a few around here.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And then Hertz in particular does commercial stuff too. So like, I mean commercial rentals. So like if you want like the ones that we've looked at for awhile or the Ford transit connect, they're like these tiny little white bands that you can't quite stand up in the back, but they'll carry a bunch of stuff. And so Hertz is that one of the only ones I know of that does commercial rentals like that. So they're also one of the only ones to the salesman.

Shawn Thorton:
Okay. Because yeah, those are one of the things that we were looking at is like the transit vans for maybe some of our commercial sites that we do need to bring stuff on. Most of our commercials, we just leave the equipment there for the most part where you just have. So that way you don't have to worry about transporting back and forth every day, especially big items. But we were thinking about maybe having one of those transits and then maybe like I said, something similar to the Nissan versa for the rest of our clinics that are residential, that just need a vacuum and a mop bucket. And then the rest of the supplies that could easily fit in there.

Brandon Condrey:
Totally. The other thing you can look at is you all trailers like the, you all will sell those off from time to time too. And you can fill that with all the equipment and look that up to whatever, if it's light, you can get you all trailer attached to a Nissan versa too, and maybe simplify your fleet.

Brandon Schoen:
Another thing is Shawn, I was going to say, I was just looking, I don't think it's out yet, but we have a podcast. I think it's coming out this week or next week, all about that 20 or 30 minutes of us just talking about company cars and how we did it and what we're doing and what worked and what didn't. And, but yeah, you got like a little high level version of that, but yeah, just keep your eye out for the next, I think it's the next podcast or two, we're talking about exactly what you're asking right there so,

Shawn Thorton:
Next question has to do with more like no systems and pricing. So I wanted to kind of get an idea of like, what systems are you guys using for quoting and then like, how are you doing your production. Are you doing it by hour? Are you just doing it by job? I just want to kind of get an idea that because we've gone back and forth between a couple of different systems and trying to figure out who's the best, try it out several different ones. And we're still trying to get some things figured out from that perspective of what can be the best systems out there.

Brandon Condrey:
Sure, Sure. So there's a bunch of different ways to do that, obviously because they're residential, we were able to just kind of hone it in an algorithm where it just does it. It's a flat fee based on square footage. There's a minimum to get us to the door. And that was a lot of trial and error. So what I would do is call some competitors that are local and come up with a hypothetical house. Like I have a two bedroom, 1300 square foot house. What would you charge me to clean it and just try and figure out what the area was. So that would give you some pricing info. On the commercial side, we are not very well versed in that. So like, because we're only taking on small office space, we're just treating it like a house. So we're still using the same pricing while you're with them based on flat fees for square footage and what we're not taking on like warehouses that require those right on buffing machines or like hospitals or anything complicated. So we're literally taking on, it's usually a small kitchen area, a couple of bathrooms and desks. And so that is basically just a house full of offices instead of bedrooms. And so we just keep the price in the same for that.

Shawn Thorton:
Interesting. And that's what does he know that we did do. We did call around our competitors and we are a flat fee base for our residential as well. So we kind of just base it off of kind of the square footage and if it's going to be a standard clean, you know deep clean, move out clean and so we did do some of that pricing, but I forgot. I just wanted to kind of ask you guys and as far as what you're doing, just to kind of get an idea.

Brandon Condrey:
Well, I mean, I mean, it sounds like you've got a handle on the commercial stuff. I just, we're not very well versed in it, but the residential side, like that's really, all we do is just flat fee based on square footage. If someone is really picky about something, like, I only want you to do the kitchen in this hallway and like vacuum myself up, we'll just throw out an hourly rate. And so we just reverse engineer that. So like for instance, we have three people we're shooting for an hourly rate of $90. We have competitors in town that have hourly rates, like on 150. And we just tell them like, yeah, if you want it to be super weird about this, then we'll do an hourly charge of just do whatever it costs, but it's going to be a minimum. It's like, what I don't want to do is send three people out there and it took half an hour and we charged with 45 bucks. I want him to tell him like, we'll do hourly. If you want to put the minimum is 115 for us to just show up.

Shawn Thorton:
Perfect. And then what systems are you guys using to have like people, you know, be able to submit requests and quotes? Cause like on the back end, we're using Java right now and before we're tying in something called response a bit to where people could get pricing right away on a website, but we actually just kind of pulled away from that because we felt like other people were just kind of getting the pricing and then maybe taking that and price shopping versus us being able to actually talk to them and be able to sell them on our services. And what's really included in that.

Brandon Condrey:
So I did sales full-time for a long time and that's what I did when we started the company was I did the sales. And so the way that we did it was we do have a CRM. That's kind of like your job or is called service fusion. And it does have a calling option, but we do instead is we do it all on calendar based. So they book a call, which we do over zoom with us. And we kind of have a pitch that we give to that, like, this is what we do and how we do it. And we give them the pricing at the end. We don't want to give them pricing up front because they're going to compare it and to lead to like my neighbor's got a housekeeper that charges $40 and you guys are 150, but I was just getting them flat pricing using that chat bot it doesn't give him the real feel for like what we're going to do because we do way more than a housekeeper. So I would definitely suggest trying to get it dialed in for talking to them on the phone versus just emailing stuff. USF is easy, but they're not really getting the feel for what you do unless you talk to them on the phone.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just add that to the pricing. Yeah. You got to build the value in that presentation. You're going to have way better results. If you tell them the price at the end, after you tell them all the stuff you do, all the extra and all the value, because you don't want to compete on price, that's a race to the bottom. Everyone loses. You want to build value and say, well, we do this and we do this and we can actually help you out do it and do that. You know? So that's the pricing thing. Call your local competitors, like see what everyone's, let's call the franchise and see what their price ranges are and what they're doing it on. And I would say to start be competitive, but once you build your brand and you're more recognized, you can increase those prices. We're doing price increases like every other year now. The other thing is the software, Brandon did a ton of research on the software we both did, but he did primarily involve the research. And we looked at jobber, we looked at services this and that a ton of different software. There's a lot of good ones out there, but there's a lot of limitations and problems we settled on. I wouldn't even say saddle where you actually picked Service fusion. That's the software we're going with. We started out with service autopilot, which had a lot of limitations. So service fusion, man, check it out. We're going to do a whole podcast about that soon too. But that one has really been a big, big one for us because the scheduling is amazing. The, it has all kinds of cool text reminders and follow up stuff that you can help to remind customers and keep people in line. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff. So I'll set up a demo with those. And then I would just recommend set up demos with you've already done. You got Java, it looks like on your website, but it's just, you know, set up five or 10 demos with different companies to tell them what you're doing and walk through them all, see how you like the look and feel of it just for us service fusion was a winner because it had everything we needed and then some, and they're just, they're constantly developing it. So that was a problem we had with other companies is they were like, yeah, we'll have it out next month on the next update. And it was like three years prior. They said that and they just weren't updating it. And it was a big hassle.

Shawn Thorton:
All right. Perfect. Thank you. That's I think that's a very helpful there as well. And then just another thing that just wanted to ask here earlier, too, when it came to the residential side is have you guys used any of the things like, have you used Yelp and pay for their advertisement? Have you guys using anything like bark Home adviser, Thumbtack, just trying to get an idea. If you guys found that to be helpful, I'm starting stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
You got to just really work it, man. So like, if you're going to use those, you gotta realize it's kind of a hard game because you're competing with a bunch of other people that get the same leads. So you're not in control of the leads necessarily, but if you are really on top of it, if you've got someone like watching the leads coming in, like on Thumbtack was a really good one Thumbtack in the beginning Home advisor was pretty good. But again, that's you gotta like answer those phone calls and those messages, when those leads come in, like in five minutes or otherwise you lose the lead and it's just a hard, so when we were on top of it, I even had our VA or our system, like helping answer those messages. Like immediately, if you're really responsive, you'll get a lot of those jobs and it's a good way to go. However, you're still going to pay a little bit more than if you just take control of it and actually set up your own marketing ads, like your own Facebook ads, you're on Google ads, you're own next door stuff, stuff where you're owning the leads and the traffic, as opposed to farming it out from a big farm that everyone else is farming from the same batch, basically, you know, like HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack. Those they're good, but they're not the best. So that's what I would say.

Shawn Thorton:
And then one other thing here just as just kind of put it as far as equipment, is there, do you guys just kind of use like the same bed and cleaners throughout you buy them from the same companies that were kind of utilizing the same equipment throughout all of your things? Or how does that work for you guys? And like where do you guys usually go for that?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, we do use the same vacuum cleaner across the board. We have two different types. There's a rolling brush, one that we use for carpet. And then there's a handheld canister vacuum that they is on a shoulder strap, whatever vacuum you choose. Like it doesn't really matter, but I would suggest using the same across the board. And the reason is for that, we use oryx those little rotating brush ones or commercials. And we do that because the parts are super cheap. And we have a guy who comes in on Sundays and takes them all apart and cleans them out and fixes all the stuff. And so in the beginning, we obviously all did that ourselves, but you know, you buy everything in bulk, you buy a bunch of vacuum belts, a bunch of rollers, a bunch of bits and parts and switches and whatever. And then you just eat through that. And so it's really easy to get into a maintenance routine. If you had like four different pieces of equipment, it'd be, I mean, it's not impossible. It'd just be more of a pain to design a system around maintaining. So that's what I suggest is stick with one. The ORIC is a good one. People ask us like you guys should be using. Dyson's like, no, they're $500. They're really heavy. And the person hard to come by. Cause they're like manufactured legally. So we just don't do that. And so we just keep it super cheap. They're all probably made in China, the vacuum. So like a hundred bucks a piece, we replaced all of them every year and give them at a year and then they start to look pretty beat up and we swap them out.

Brandon Schoen:
Like, You haven't put that out yet, but that'll either be a podcast or a part of a course or something else you put out soon that will actually have like detailed links of the products. We use those, the equipment that we use, all that good stuff. So there's a lot of details there. So, but hopefully that helps get you a little bit on the right track there.

Shawn Thorton:
All right. Perfect. And then kind of finally that we just wanted to kind of get into some numbers in here and stuff like that. So I wanted to kind of get an idea and if you guys want to share your exact numbers or anything like that, but I wanted to kind of do like what you were looking at as far as like your profit margins in your first year versus your second year, things like that. We're just trying to get an idea of kind of from a successful business kind of where you guys are kind of at. So some can kind of see if we're in the way.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So in the beginning, like the first couple of years, those were hard. Like we weren't paying ourselves like for the first, probably like 10 months, I want to say. And then we paid ourselves with very little, like we were $12,000 a year territory and we were definitely not profitable in the beginning because we were losing money on paying people for during or some stuff. And instead of actually generating revenue right now, we've kind of topped out at like between 20% and 23%, depending on what's going on in the months. COVID kind of give us a little bit of a hit cause we're paying sick pay and things like that. But yeah, I think in general you would shoot for the low to mid twenties as like the target when you've really got it super dialed in and there'll be a slow climb in the beginning to get there, but it will work, especially if you're expanding this quickly already.

Shawn Thorton:
All right guys, that's all the questions I have for right now. I'm sure I'll probably have some more that I can kind of follow up with you guys on that had definitely, this has been very helpful.

Brandon Schoen:
We'll do this again and I will do that, Shawn. So if you want to hop on again, man, I don't be like the group chat. We'll answer them there too, if you want it faster, but yeah, just to know where you got some value today.

Shawn Thorton:
Oh, absolutely here. I'm going to take this back here to, and my brothers here and kind of go over this with them here, but I definitely think this could be helpful for, so definitely appreciate you guys' time.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Sounds good. Thanks a lot Shawn we'll catch you on the next one.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah have a good one!

Shawn Thorton:
Thank you so much. Bye bye.

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