Episode 25: Your Complete Blueprint to Grow Your Cleaning Business into a Million Dollar Company PART 1

Episode 25: Your Complete Blueprint to Grow Your Cleaning Business into a Million Dollar Company - Part 1

Brandon Schoen:
Honestly, when you go to sell any business, including this kind of business, that's what the investors are looking for is can the business run without you? And so the faster we can do that, not only the faster could we potentially sell it, but also the faster we can just get our life back in that time back and watch the business grow.

Brandon Schoen:
What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners in the house keeping it clean. So grateful for you guys being here and so excited for today's show, you guys are going to be delighted to be finding out we're giving you a sneak peek, kind of behind the scenes today. Something a little bit different, but we're going to be sharing with you guys kind of some behind the scenes of our most recent coaching calls. One of them with a guy named Curt up in Canada, he's going to be on the show with us today. And you're just going to kind of hear, just listen in with us. Here are some of his questions. Curt actually just sold two of his website businesses. He's getting out of the internet marketing space and he's going full time in the local cleaning market. So really exciting to just hear his journey where he's at, how he's thinking about all this and kind of the leap he's making to that next step. So really exciting stuff. You're going to get to hear his story, how you know, how he's getting started, what he's doing, what he's thinking about, how he's going to be getting those first customers. We're helping them with that. And just talking about, you know, how much time is this going to take? And he's talking about the four hour work week, is this even possible with a local business? And that's kinda what he's used to. So we're, we're just showing him the ropes and hopefully you guys will learn a thing or two as well, but essentially next steps to building a seven figure service empire. What can we was that even possible? What are we doing to do that and achieve that? So stay tuned guys. Do you want to listen in on this, that really cool call with Curt and without further ado, let's hop in.

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:
Yeah. So I figured we would hop on a call Curt just to see how we can help you and just freestyle. However you want to do it. However we can help you, man. We can just start going through your questions if it's a good fit and you like how it works, we can keep working together and just go from there.

Curt:
Cool. Yeah, no, I have been looking through all this stuff, because as I said before, in my current business, I'm just unfulfilled by sit at the desk and I build websites and I mean, I don't actually do any of the building anymore. It's just click here, click there. VA does this VA does that. And then I wait for Google to give me the thumbs up, thumbs down. And it's just like, so unfulfilling, I've been doing it for like seven or eight years now, slammed around the world. I've done the four hour workweek thing. And now it's just like, I want something more. And I know that like on the outside, I think that going to do a local services business just as like the dumbest thing I could do, right? Like it's offline. I have to deal with employees that have to do all this kind of stuff that I've never done before. But I also love the fact that I've got these online skills that I hope can crush everyone. Competition-wise and it just sounds like so much fun to be in the chaos. Cause that's when I started out doing this kind of stuff was way more scrappy and I loved it. So yeah. Anyway, that's a quick background, just so you guys have an idea of where I'm coming from. And so I came across, you guys I've listened to like the grow my cleaning company and then whatever the sweaty startup and all those kind of guys, and you were like the only ones who were not like, I dunno, it's super internet marketing, bro. Like the Russell Brunson style, the other guy's helpful, but didn't really click with them. And you guys was like, these are the guys. So yeah, basically like I'm doing all the research. I've already called all the companies in my geographic area. I've got clothes from the mall. Like I know mostly how they work. I know that nobody's really doing anything online. And so I just wanted basically to get your ideas on your growth trajectory when and where you guys did things and just some stuff that I can plug in for my own projections, such that I actually have a good idea and I'm not going to like, okay, I'm going to do this and turn out two years from now. I'm like half of where I wanted to be. So yeah, I've got a list of questions if you want to work through those. Yeah. I'm a hundred percent happy to do whatever you guys are comfortable with.

Brandon Condrey:
Let me, I got a couple of questions from your opening there and then we'll get to your questions. So you said you called all the competitors in the area. So how many companies did that end up being?

Curt:
That is, I'm just going to open up here. I have got 30 of which five were just outside the area and like three or four. I didn't actually get a hold of, so yeah, that's when I asked you the first question I had was about geographic constraints and how much you think you can grow within X amount of population. So, yeah, there's about 30. I got about 20 quotes out of those 30.

Brandon Condrey:
Where are you? What is your geographic area?

Curt:
I'm in Langley. BC. It's like 45 minutes East of Vancouver in Canada. So Vancouver is like a city of about a million. And then to the East, there's no space between the cities. I don't know if it's like this in the States, but where I was from in Calgary, it's different. There's like Vancouver. And then there is like Burnaby to quit. Lum, Surrey, white rock, laneway, chill, like all the rest. So I live in a place that's like 120,000 people, but I've got within half an hour, like three or 400,000.

Brandon Condrey:
Okay. So we'd like you're in the Vancouver Metro area. Would you say that 45 minutes away? That's a bit.

Curt:
Yeah. I like, I wouldn't love to service Vancouver right away. If I can help it. I'd love to start like Langley, Surrey, maybe. But that was like, the first question is how big do I need if I want to build a million dollar business.

Brandon Condrey:
Cool. Let's run through the questions. So just fire off at the top and we'll jump in.

Curt:
All right. So yeah. Population size constraints on business growth. What do you guys think? I don't know what the Albuquerque market is or how much you guys serve, but what do you think you need for a million dollar business doing what you guys do and the way you do it?

Brandon Condrey:
We are gonna hit a million dollars this year. For sure. Last year we came so close. It was like $987,000. And we're doing that right now with 402 recurring customers. That's it. So 400 people, you could probably throw a rocket 400 people from your front porch. If you could get all of them to sign up, that's a blend of bi-weekly customers and monthly customers. So bi-weekly customers worth twice as much as a monthly because they're going to get service twice as often. So it's probably a 50 50 split. So I'd say we have 200 and some change that are getting it done once a month and then 200 and some changes that are getting it done twice a month. And then we have very rarely weekly customers. And I would say that's, I don't know. Well, I could count them on my hands. Like we probably have 10 or 12 out of the whole customer base that do that. So in terms of population, you need a fraction of a percent of whatever's around you to pull it off.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Albuquerque is like 560,000 people. I just did Vancouver. It's like 675,000. I think you've got the numbers around you man, to hit that for sure.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, but we also service. So like the Albuquerque Metro area includes Rio Rancho, Bernardo, Placido us, and we service all those cities as well. So across that whole Metro area, we're just over a million. I think we have 1.1, 1.2 million people. So yeah, we reject customers from outlying areas. So if I were you and the Surrey thing was working out and their Langley thing was working out there, not a good need to expand to Vancouver unless you were just like on a tear to try and expand super aggressively.

Curt:
Okay. That's awesome. Speaking of expanding aggressively, what do you think your guys' growth goals are? Where do you feel that you'll level off in your current location and what do you want to do after that? Do you want to franchise, do you want to just keep expanding? Like how does that look for you guys?

Brandon Condrey:
So what you found us on, like the courses that we do on Profit Cleaners is what we're going to do to kind of expand bigger and it's not by taking a cut of people's revenue or anything. It's just, you're going to subscribe to the service and that's how we're going to skirt franchising. Franchising is a pain for me. Like it's a lot of regulation, a lot of paperwork, you can say some things and other things, and I'm sure the Canadian laws are similar, but there's just so much constraint. So we just don't franchising is not something that we want to do. In terms of expansion. Our biggest limiting factor in the building that we're in our physical location is how many cars we can park here because we buy our own cars. So right now we have seven and there's a big shipping container in the back that the landlord has. And we're working with him to get that out of the way, once that's out of the way I figure we can fit like 12 cars in the back. Well, if we do a little parking lot remodel and some paving and stuff, we can probably get up to 22. The overall goal though, is to get to 50 cars. And that requires about 2,600 biweekly customers to pull that off, which again is nothing we've done the math on specific neighborhoods in the neighborhood that Brandon I live in has 5,000 people in it. So we don't want to concentrate in one neighborhood obviously, but it's not a lot of people to actually hit the numbers.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just to give you an idea, our mentor up in Stapleton Denver, I don't know. Stapleton, it's pretty small little suburb of Denver, but he's actually focused it just in Stapleton and like left all his customers in Denver, in the big city, just to focus on a little suburb and he's got 10 teams now. Brandon right. And he's 11. Yeah. So, and that's a small market and he's only wanting to focus in that small market and he's like firing all the other customers. And for him, I think it's just, he's comfortable. It's just, he's a solo owner and he's probably making a quarter million a year, but it's all streamlined and automated. And he doesn't even go into the office hardly. He's got another real estate project now.

Brandon Condrey:
He goes in an hour a day. Yeah. So he works for roughly five hours a week and they, his thing was just brand recognition. So the neighborhood that he's in used to be an airport in Denver, they moved the airport, built a newer one and the old airport became this new housing development. And it was one of the only places in the city where you could get new construction. And so he was just like in, on the ground floor, started it right away. And then everyone just knows him. His cars look funky like ours. And so his is just brand recognition. He actually kept himself on growth. They were growing super fast and he was like, I don't to do it faster than 20%. And so that's what he did. He just grew slowly and that's how you want it to do it. So it was easy to manage and we're doing it the other way. We're trying to go as fast as possible without ruining ourselves or breaking the company. But yeah.

Curt:
Right. And so that's, I think for me, like there's little nitty-gritty details, but the thing that I want most, I guess, is probably what you're offering in your course. Like I'll probably buy that anyway, but recurring client attraction, recurring employee attraction and retention. Those seem like the two big things. If you can get people to work for you and if you can get clients in the door, like sell them all day long, that's fine. But what, I mean, maybe you just tell me to take the course, but what is your funnel to make sure you're getting X amount every month? What are you guys doing for both clients and employees? Because to me, those are like, they must be the two biggest things. Is that right?

Brandon Condrey:
So Brandon can tell you about the funnel for the clients. But the end result is that we're searching for young parents. We want married couples that have two or more kids that are under the age of 10. When they get to a certain age, they become able to do chores. And so a lot of families will stop service because we've passed off all this stuff to her, like our high school kids or whatever, so that they get allowance and yada, yada, yada, but the young ones, especially when they're like brand new infants, you're just swamped and you can't do stuff around the house. And so that's what we've zeroed in on. And then the others just come naturally. So like you get enough Google reviews and people, your SEO is good. And so it just keeps rising up. And then people just find you when they're searching for house cleaning. And then those are the ones that come in as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I was going to say, Curt, you got to like build, you know, this stuff because you've done the SEO and the marketing stuff, but it's actually exactly what you're saying. Like the, it gets a lot easier when you're doing it in a local market versus a, I don't know, Amazon or some huge, massive market where you're competing with thousands of people, because you're literally just competing with the mom and pops that don't have the greatest marketing expertise. They're still doing it, the old school way where they're just not even doing much, like they're not even replying to reviews or pushing that even. So it's actually this, that's why this market's so cool is you can totally disrupt these little mom and pop markets that are just trucking along, but they're right for disruption and for the funnel. Yeah. We're just using a ClickFunnels funnel. It's literally dead simple, like one pager opt in type thing. We've tried different offers, but normally we'd give them some type of a offer up front where it's like, get a discount on your first clean or your second clean or, or the latest one that we've been testing is just like buy one clean get your second clean free. Just stuff to get people excited to when they're on Facebook or wherever they're at, where our main ones are Googling in Facebook that we're driving most of the paid traffic from. And just again, yeah, just a simple funnel, nothing much to, I mean, just like an offer some testimonials on there, a quick description of what we do and then it follows up with them. So we've got it. Some followup sequences that email them, text them a voicemail and yeah, once they're in the funnel, we've got the immediate next step is to schedule that zoom call, which it used to be in person estimate, but now estimate, which is actually streamlined that whole process. We were trying to do that for the longest time. And it just naturally happened with the crazy economy and everything happening. And so now we're doing that. And so it's like, we've got Brandon and all the sales now we've got a guy helping with the sales. And so as soon as they book, we're getting several leads a day and then they'll book and then they'll eat. If they don't book, we'll follow up with them. But otherwise, yeah, Matt will talk to them on the sales call and then go from there. So it's just real simple funnel for the cleaner side. We don't really have finished per se that funnel, but it's, it's what we do is we just post on Craigslist. We just started testing ZipRecruiter and you can test and hope. Some people use indeed as a good one. But like if you use like ZipRecruiter, supposedly like post to all of them, maybe not Craigslist. But we used like in the back of the day we started on Craigslist. We would post and get 50 or a hundred people applying. And it was just a simple post just says, like, here's what we pay you. Here's what we need. It's full-time, it's, part-time tell them some of the details of it and people show up and a lot of people.

Brandon Schoen:
There's a caveat to getting that many people applying on Craigslist though. So we pay well above market rate. So the Canadian thing might throw this off a bit because your wage stuff is much more beneficial than the United States. So are there a minimum wages? Is that how it works?

Curt:
Yeah. In my area, most of the cleaning companies are paying 18 to $22 an hour.

Brandon Condrey:
Yep. That is up there. So the way that we did it is the minimum wage for Bernalillo County, which Albuquerque is in his $9 and 20 cents an hour. There are many cleaning companies that pay $9 and 20 cents an hour. Like we just got an employee last week. Who's been working at a competitor, the maids for four years and she was still making $9 and 20 cents an hour. So our base is $12 an hour, which there's an MIT calculator that you can find online for living wage somewhere. And I think they have Canada in there as well, but you plug in a zip code, it'll tell you like, all right, to be a single person, you need this to do living wage, to be married with kids. You need this for a living wage. And so we kind of built it around those numbers. So $12 is the base. There's an extensive bonus program where we track a bunch of metrics. And based on the feedback from that there's tiers. So based on how many points that you acquire over a pay period, if you get the lower tier, I think it's $40. The one in the middle is 60, and then it goes 75 if you're like, perfect. And so that pushes them closer to the $15, $16 an hour range. But the cost of living in Albuquerque is also very low. So I would expect to wait just to be higher around Vancouver, where the cost of living is much, much higher. So really what you would want to do is you could actually post a job ad saying that you're going to start company, do some interviews and just find out how much people are making. You know, that they're 18 to 22, but the reason we got so many as that we were far and above the competition that may not be possible for you. If the baseline is $22 an hour, which is quite high.

Curt:
Okay. That's awesome. Thank you.

Brandon Schoen:
I would just say real quick on that note, like your price is just going to be a matter of changing your pricing too. So you could probably charge a lot more in your market per square foot versus what we're charging. Like our average house is 165, I think Brandon right. 155 is our average invoice. So yours might be 250 or 220 or something a little to make up for that deficit when the higher pay. But yeah, I would say paying people the best rate you can to attract the best quality people is, that's what we did. And I think it's a great way to go because you want to attract those quality people.

Curt:
Yeah. Like I said, everything I've listened to you guys. It's like, I just want to do like the best. I want to be like the most premium. I want to be the best at cleaning. I want to have the best employees. I want cars. Like I just want all of it to be the best. So I don't mind paying more for them. If I have to charge more. Are you able to share what your percentages are like in terms of labor, profit operating expenses and all that kind of stuff, whereas where you're at right now?

Brandon Condrey:
Sure. We can, we can give you that. So labor, which includes the office staff. We have two people working in the office, so there's an office manager and an assistant. They handle customer service in flux and everything. We allocate 59.5% of incoming revenue to just payroll. So that is going to be your biggest expense by far by far by far. Profit if you include Brandon and I salaries as part of the Profit like for tax reasons, our profits very low, but if you're going to include owner's compensation for it, it's hovering around 20%. There are months where it's like 18%. There might be months where it's 23, but we basically average 20% and we split that and then operating expenses is basically everything else. I think our next biggest line item is insurance. So that's probably different in Canada too, but we have to pay for general liability, which is we burn your house down somehow and we're going to pay to replace the house. We have car insurance in case any of the cars you're involved in any collisions out and about. And then we also have workers' compensation, which might not be a Canadian thing. Yeah. So we have that and the way it works here anyway, the longer you are in business, without a claim on the workers' comp side, the cheaper those rates get. So we just hit our three-year mark and it got much slower after three years.

Curt:
And what is your guys' day to clean look like at this point? And when would you say you went from full-time job with the business to being able to do like this in the middle of the day?

Brandon Condrey:
I mean, that's probably honestly, within like the last six months that's been a 2020 thing. So what really spurred that was the pandemic. So my biggest time beforehand was as twins because we were doing them in person. And so I had to have gaps of time in between the appointments to drive from point A to point B. Sometimes that was as much as 45 minutes from one side of the Metro area to the other. And then what's super frustrating is you get there and people aren't there, they forgot and you call them from your front door and they're like, Oh, I'm sorry. I really forgot about that. So when the pandemic hit, we just switched to doing everything on zoom and they just schedule on Calendly. And then I honestly didn't expect this, but what happened was because we don't have that buffer in between appointments, we were able to quadruple the amount in the same amount of time, because there was no driving. So you hang up with one and jump onto another, like right away. So that was happening. We got a bunch of loan proceeds from the federal government here, given out paycheck, loans and stuff. And so that actually helped us out quite a bit. And so what we were able to do is then hire a sales guy and he's working part-time right now. And that actually took something like 25 hours a week off of my plate about not having to keep up with it or follow up with anybody. He just does that and he's doing way better than I was doing anyway. So I was only able to do estimates three days a week because I had to run the company. I had to process payroll and open mail and pay bills and stuff. So that say the last like six months had been kind of transformative. And my day to day, it's going to look completely different from Brandon's. But I typically come into the office at nine after kids have been dropped off at daycare and all that stuff, and the teams have already come and gone. So I don't want to mix with the teams for COVID exposure reasons. So I want to be here after they've gone. So if I catch it somehow, I don't want to risk exposing it to the entire company. Cause I was in the building when they were here. So I usually come in at nine I'm a big spreadsheet nerd. So I run a bunch of numbers in the morning to kind of see how things are going. And we're working on automating that with Zapier and some dashboards, software stuff. And then from there, it's just kind of dealing with my to-do list. And if I was focused and not on Reddit, I could probably knock that out in like two or three hours, but I kind of just hang out all day. Cause I like it here. We built a kick-ass office. I have a 49 inch widescreen monitor in front of me with five windows open so I can get more done than I can on a laptop. And then I'm leaving at the latest at four 30, most days it's like closer to three because I either have workout stuff scheduled or like I meet my brother for beers every Monday I'm joining a climbing gym. So from inception to getting to that point called two and a half years, I guess, before we were able to do it.

Curt:
Cool. Can I just jump in real quick? I'm sorry. I wondered two things. One is what kind of percentage are you closing on zoom versus local and how much are you paying your sales guy or how are you paying?

Brandon Condrey:
Okay, so the pre COVID, when we were doing in-person estimates, we peaked out at about 67% closure. So 67% of estimates would convert to either a one-time or recurring job. Our software does not have a sophisticated report for that. It just tells us all of it is 67%. It would have been nice to know the breakdown for recurring versus one time stuff. And then post COVID when we went digital, this is going to be a funky number because we also hired a new guy. Who's still getting his feet wet, I suppose, which is concerning from a financial standpoint about us being able to pay him. So we're closing right now. I think it's like 58%. So we had a drop, but there's way more leads coming through the funnel because we turned on that Facebook stuff. And because he's doing it five days a week, he's able to take much more than I was doing before.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey Curt, I just want to jump into your, your on that last question because yeah, I would say my situation's a little different than Brandon's. I know you've got kids, right. And so, and you're talking about the four hour work week kind of idea, which I've always been a huge fan of work, smart, not hard and automate and free up your time as much as possible. We've been going through a couple of books Profit first and clockwork is the next one, which clockwork is all about basically getting your business to run without you and replacing yourself as fast as possible. So to better answer your question, I would say if we would have had that from day one, and if we would've had all the systems that we know now and like we can give you almost, you could do it much quicker. You could replace yourself much quicker than it took us. I would say even I was at one point because we weren't paying ourselves as much in the beginning at all, just to bootstrap and get it. We were pushing hard to get as many people going as many customers as possible. So I had a new son at the time we launched, like right when I had a new baby and then Brandon and I were running around like crazy, at least for the first six months to a year. And then it got to a point where I was like, Hey, I gotta go back and help my wife a little bit. Cause we still had another business on the side, like an internet business that we were running that I was helping her with. So I was able to go a little bit more remote to do that, but I was still working on the business. But you know, it's the kind of thing where once you get the foundations built, you have just like build an internet business. Once you get 80 or 90% of the works upfront. And then once you have those systems in place, that kind of just the biggest things are getting those new customers and making sure the products being deployed and the cleaning services are good. And so we did a lot more in the beginning, but I'm just saying, if you plan it out smart and you immediately start clock working the businesses, what we call it like systematizing it, you could be, I mean, honestly, it's whatever you want. If you put the right people in place, the right systems, it could be as soon as six months or a year that you're a lot more or less involved. It just depends on how much time you want to put in. At this point, you've got my wife and I, we are homeschooling our kids and I don't come into the office every day like Brandon, but I come in like three days a week and that's where we're at now. I didn't always use to be like that, but it's, I think it's kind of up to you, man. And I think if you think about it in a smarter, just however you can strategize that I pick up that book clockwork and go through that too. But that's what we're really big on now, because honestly, when you go to sell any business, including this kind of business, that's what the investors are looking for is can the business run without you and so faster we can do that. Not only the faster could we potentially sell it, but also the faster we can just get our life back in our time back and watch the business grow kind of streamlined it. So, yeah.

Curt:
Okay. So, I mean, I've gotten like a trillion question, so I'm going to go for the big one now, what is the likelihood that you can coach me to do exactly what you did to reach a million dollars and what kind of investment would you want to see someone like me have upfront to get to a million bucks, like as fast as possible, but let's say 24 months, do you have like a framework that it's like, okay, start out with a hundred grand. You do this, this, this, you need this many people buy this. Here's the systems like plug and play is not something that you think could be done? What's the likelihood of something like that.

Brandon Schoen:
All right. And there you have it. We're going to cut it off a little bit early guys. We've got a lot more to that call and what we might share some more snippets of that in a future episode, but just wanted to just go over how awesome that was. And just, if you're getting into that mindset of starting a cleaning business, hopefully that gets amped up and just get your wheels turning. But you know, as Curt left off there, right off of there at the end. Yes. The answer to that question is yes, we do have those systems and those frameworks we're putting those together for you guys. We are basically distilling down the knowledge that we have learned from our mentor, all the knowledge of decades of experience on our own and sales and business and marketing. And we're distilling all that down and making it exactly what Curt was, was asking. Do you guys have systems and frameworks and plug and play stuff that we can plug into and grow our business? And the answer is yes. Head over to Profitcleaners.com/courses. We are rolling out new courses guys left and right, we've got marketing courses, we've got hiring training, cleaning, technique videos coming out. We've got all sorts of great stuff, branding, copywriting, all sorts of stuff, that's going to help your business. So we're really excited about those. We've got many courses and bigger courses, but stuff that I think is just a amazingly valuable content and knowledge that we are sharing with you, sharing everything we know to help you guys win and get to that next level. So check it out guys. We've got, we're going to be rolling those out probably over the next months and maybe even year to come depending on how long they take to develop, but we're, we're here to help you guys win, we're here to, to be there for the whole journey ahead as well as, as we're growing our business. So we get to do it alongside you and just share the wins and share the journey. So head over to Profitcleaners.com/courses, check those out guys, and we'll be doing more of these coaching calls soon. So until then, enjoy and take, take a, you know, a day for yourself and enjoy it and grow your cleaning business, whatever it, whatever it is. But we're so excited to be working with you guys. So have a great rest of your day and take care of y'all. Keep it clean.

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