Episode 26: Your Complete Blueprint to Grow Your Cleaning Business into a Million Dollar Company PART 2

Episode 26: Your Complete Blueprint to Grow Your Cleaning Business into a Million Dollar Company PART 2

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.

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 Condrey:
We probably need to talk a little bit more about that I think, but I think it's certainly doable. I have no idea on the funding side, what we would charge for that. I do think you're working with a bit more capital than we started with. So we kind of started everything for, I think it was 60 grand that we had in the beginning and we made a mistake that we'll never repeat, but we paid cash for our first two vehicles. We didn't finance those through a bank. And so we immediately lost like 30% of the funds to cars, which we need to operate, but I would have in retrospect, much preferred a $200 a month payment and then had that money to go do other stuff with, so yes we can teach you. Brandon I'll talk a little bit about that and figure out what that looks like and give you some options.

Brandon Schoen:
But what's your budget Curt, like you said, a hundred grand or what do you think? 24 months.

Curt:
And honestly, on how quickly I think I could get there. What I would want is to my situation now is that I could probably sell a couple of my websites, keep a couple just on autopilot. And if I sold a couple, I probably have like two years of runway and 50 to a hundred grand to start something with or one year of runway and like a hundred to 150 to start something with. And they would have to depend on where the inflection point would be with the investment on when I can start taking some back. So I would want to be able to put, let's say $7,000 a month in my pocket in order to stop drawing on my reserves. So basically it would end up being a projection thing. Can we hit X by this time? If so, then let's put more into it. Can we hit this by this time? Okay. Well maybe we have to put, let's start out with 50 grand or something like that. So yeah, that would be probably about the same, maybe a little bit more than you guys, but like I'd probably be one guy, so I wouldn't need to have two replaceable incomes.

Brandon Condrey:
Right. You'd get there twice as fast in terms of the $7,000 a month. So yeah. Let Brandon, I talked a little bit about that and put together some options for you and we'll see how you want to swing it.

Curt:
Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I didn't mean to put you on the spot with that. I'm just wondering, like, if that was something that you guys had system-wise because I've got so many questions on like once your closing script, how do you get someone on zoom to be like, Oh yeah, come this time and you're going to pay you now. How are you doing interviews? How are you making sure employees are actually not just the worst because I've heard so many horror stories. I'm like, Oh, my employees like peed on the ground and let the house on fire. Like, can you believe it? I just like crazy things like that, that I have no experience with. And it seems like there'd be some stuff there's well, I guess what does your teams, you guys have three people per team, is that right? Is there a supervisor involved? Like why do you do three? Do you pay them hourly versus a job? Can you give a little bit of rundown on that?

Brandon Condrey:
Oh yeah. There's, there's a bunch of impact there. So let's see all the sales and marketing stuff is in that course. So there are video walkthroughs of actual zoom estimates that we've done. So you can see what that interaction looks like between us and a customer. So you'll can see what the back and forth is there. We're going to rerecord some of those with our new guy, because he's a sales guru. He's been doing it for like 17 years. And so I did that too, but it was not for Services. He's been selling software as a service for that long. And so he's been able to transition into it really smoothly. So his script is probably going to look different than mine, but we'll give you that. And then in there, it's not in there yet. Cause I'm not brain has been bugging me about it, but I'm going to get it. There's a rebuttals and responses sort of like spreadsheet. And I'll walk through that on a live video. So you can see like there's a bunch of trust issues. Mostly is like, you're going to, I'm going to give you a key to my house. Like, what happens if you steal all this stuff? Like there's all kinds of answers in there for that. The employees are paid hourly. One of the things that was happening a lot with competitors in our market were super shady things that were illegal, but still happened all the time. Like we'll pay you while you're working, but while you're driving between jobs, we're gonna pay you minimum wage. Like we'll reduce what you get paid or worse. They're only going to pay the driver because they're technically working. And the other two in the car are that's your time to look at your phone or whatever. And so they wouldn't pay you at all. So they would subtract drive time. And it's so common that it's built into all these softwares that we use. It'll actually track drive time versus labor time. So apparently a lot of companies will pay drive rates versus labor rates that are different. We don't do that. We want everyone to be comfortable and what you can bank on in terms of income. Because if we sent you to drive all over the place one week, your check would be significantly lower than it was the week before. If you were just going from neighborhood to neighborhood. So we just pay a flat hourly rate for everybody. Plus that bonus program, all the cleaners are paid exactly the same. There is no supervisor. So we have a loose team lead and they're not paid anymore for that. It's just like one out of the three will naturally rise to the top to be the one that is responding to messages or the one who's interacting with the tablet, like updating jobs, statuses and things like that. But they're not paying any different. You can run that differently if you decide that they're going to deserve that or whatever. But the other caveat with teams, when you get bigger as personality conflicts, it's going to be three people stuck in a car all day long. And one of them's not going to like the other two inevitably. And when you're small, it's like, well, it's just the three of you. We just have the one crew. But when you get bigger, you end up rotating people a bunch until you find groups that work well together. So like your team lead one team may ended up going to a different team that also has a team lead. And so then you're getting this weird conflict of like, well now we have to take away your 50 cents an hour or whatever it is so flat hourly the whole time.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey guys, I wanted to take a quick break to let you know a little bit more about our course, the 10X toolkit we've put together so many amazing resources to help cleaning businesses like yours, learn how to get more recurring clients on the schedule. The systems we teach you in this course are the exact same systems we've used to grow our cleaning business to seven figures in just three years. In fact, in one year we were able to accomplish the growth that our mentor in Denver had in 10 years. So it's definitely a shortcut guys to success. Model after that success, everything from finding the perfect clients to learning how to keep your schedule filled, we cover everything you need to 10 extra business and without wasting your time and money to learn more about this incredible course, head over to Profitcleaners.com/courses that's Profitcleaners.com/courses.

Brandon Schoen:
And also that brings up a potential issue. If you have like an inspector type team, lead person doing it all the time potentially caused conflict because everyone's against the person, who's grading them on all their inspecting them. And they're like, so they kind of get a bad rap.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we do have a trainer and they do inspections. So that's an overarching thing over all the teams. You won't necessarily need one of those until you get quite a bit larger. But in terms of the teams themselves, they're not paid any different amongst the team.

Curt:
Okay. That's great. If someone's like, okay, let's say I start with like one team and you've got three people. What if someone's sick? What if someone quits? Do you have like a part-timer who you can be like, Oh, Hey, I need you today.

Brandon Condrey:
We do now. We have a couple of people that we could pull in. If we needed to, like, we have one lady who's out because her kids all school down here is online right now. And she was the only one who couldn't arrange something. So she's kind of at home, she's helping us out on the weekends. But like, if we really needed her, she would kind of come in. The other thing we do is floaters. So we hired our first floater as soon as we got the second team. I think so, even though we had two teams, we had seven cleaners and the seventh one, we just told her like, look in the beginning while we're growing, like we're talking like 10 hours a week. Maybe when someone calls in sick or takes a day off. But over time now we have four. I want to say we have four floaters. And so they fill in when someone calls in sick or if we send someone home, we're doing temperature checks and blood oxygen for COVID. And if we dispatch someone to go home, then we'll the floater put on that team. If there's excess floaters, we ask for volunteers like do either of you want the day off today? Oh yeah, I do. I'll take it off. And so sometimes they bounce and then if not, we will just tell one of them that they have to go home. And we track that like, we'd last time we sent home this person. So in this time, it's your turn to not work today.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. In the very beginning, when we would have that stuff happened, like I would go in and jump in with the team and clean for the day or whatever. It was hard work, man. I had a whole different respect for the team after that. But yeah, I think getting the floaters in there is the best way to just have that versatility to like throw someone in.

Curt:
Yeah, no, that's I know I gotta be ready for that. And obviously like, I want to be the one who is going to be like the best cleaner in the company. I hope just so I can like, be, make sure I'm the guy, but I, my wife is available as like an early floater, but I just wanted to know. Cause it seems like what if you just like hire someone? So when you hire for a new team, do you already have that business or do you start them as part-time and they get them full time later.

Brandon Condrey:
We've done both in the beginning. We would hire them as part-time and just tell them like we would split the business that we had. So we had one team that got fully maxed out and now we were paying overtime. Then we brought in the second team and we split that business up between the two of them. So they both ended up being part-time and then we would like backfill with both of them. Now what we do because of the economies of scale, we know we have a metric that we're trying to hit. So when we basically hit 95% of capacity, that's when we pulled the trigger on the hiring sequence. So we're going to buy a car and get it painted and all the graphics in order all the equipment. So that it's all here. By the time that they start, they have a start date, that's all in the calendar. So we're all on the same page. And then all the while the sales guy knows that we're maxed out and he'll just tell him like, Hey, we have a new team. That's like training right now. They're going to start taking customers on this date. So you might have to wait 10 days to get in instead of us getting you in tomorrow. But once you get the reviews and the reputation, like people will wait to be able to get in. They're like, okay, that's fine. Like, I'll just keep one more appointment with my crappy cleaning company that I don't like before I switch. And so that's how we're able to like hit the ground running when we hire a new team.

Curt:
Okay. And do you guys use three people just cause it gets some for the house faster? Like how many jobs can you guys get done per day typically?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So that's again like an efficiency and economies of scale type of thing. So our mentor, the guy who taught us how to do this, he had tested two person teams in three person teams and four person teams. And so he just kind of arrived at three person as the most efficient. So they all split up, they rotate duties. So at one person is doing the kitchen. One does bathrooms. One does dusting at the end, they all work as a team on the floors. So it's choreographed and all parts of the house are being cleaned simultaneously with two people. Okay. The kitchen has to get done. It's like the dirtiest part of the house. So one person's gotta be in there. And that leaves the rest of the house, this other person. And then when they finished the kitchen and you got to go over there and like talk to them, like, okay, what have you done and not done. So it just gets confusing on what you're gonna do. So three is kind of an efficiency thing. We do have a fallback protocol. Like if in the beginning, when the floater might've already been assigned to a team, cause someone was out and then another person called in sick. Well, we would just reduce that team to a two person team. And then in the worst case scenario, you would take the last job of the day and say, Hey, we're short staff today. Can we reschedule you for tomorrow or some other day or whatever it is. And it just goes slower.

Brandon Schoen:
And the beginning to like, it was very much, a lot slower. Like we were learning the cleaning, the teams were learning the cleaning, some of the processes, they knew how to clean, but they weren't used to like our certain process or the way we did things. Right. Which was a lot of the systems we got from our mentor Corby but yeah, he kind of describes it as like a well choreographed dance through the house. Like when you really get it optimized and really efficient, it's like, everyone's talking to each other. They're like just flowing through the house and it's just really seamless almost. And they all know what they're doing and they're all rotating those positions and stuff. So it does become a lot more efficient. So in the beginning we probably only cut a clean three houses a day and that literally took the whole day and now we can squeeze five houses and we're doing sticks actually on some they're getting home late right now we're paying, but yeah.

Curt:
And that's for one team doing five houses a day?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Okay. So the rotating duties, I just want to touch on something really quick. That's super important because otherwise one person will inevitably get roped into like bathrooms. And so like you just get one person who's cleaning toilets all day and then they're super pissed off. So they have to rotate between houses. So whoever did the kitchen, last time you're doing dusting. And then whoever did Dustin, you're doing bathrooms and you just go, go, go like that. And then in terms of how many houses per day. So in the beginning we were doing three to four houses a day. And that was because we couldn't really control where the customers were. We tried to limit it to a zip code so we could grow there. But Google took over and we got bookings all over the place, like right away. And so we were like, well shit, what are we gonna do now? So like, we don't wanna turn down the business. Cause we were like not paying ourselves in the beginning. So like, what are we going to do? So we just had them driving all over the place. So like the three houses per day was because it was just like me driving for estimates that you had to have an hour in between houses sometimes. Cause they got to get from point a to point B when we got more people, more customers and more teams, we district them off on a map. So this team is going to handle this neighborhood between fifth street and 30th street and any customer that comes in there, they do that. And then when that came, gets max out in that district, that's a sign that there's enough demand in that particular area that you need to split it into another district and put a second team in there. And so now instead of them driving 10 to 20 minutes between houses, when we did the districting, we try to keep that to like 10 minutes max. So they're driving from within the neighborhood itself without going from Surrey to Langley or to Vancouver or wherever. You just want to keep them in this one little neighborhood. And so that's how we were able to get to five houses a day is kind of the sweet spot. Six houses a day is upsetting for them. That's A lot of work, especially if the square footages are larger. Right now, we're being forced into it because we're growing and all that. But like we're paying overtime right now, which also isn't ideal from a payroll standpoint. So we want to keep everyone at like 79.6 hours. Like that's great. When I go to process payroll that I see that you came in just under 80 hours, like that is a full-time job by the U S definition and no one had to pay any overtime. So go-to.

Curt:
Okay. And the actual cleaning method itself, is that something that like, I know you guys had a mentor who did this before, is that like a downloadable thing where you can get online training or how do you guys learn that? How would I learn that?

Brandon Schoen:
Right. We're working on it. We're actually planning on putting that all into a training where it would be like Netflix style, video training. Like if, for example, we have videos that when we went up to Denver and train, like, I actually just had a little GoPro and we went around with the teams and I cleaned with them and we just like recorded everything. So I have those, but they're just choppy. And like we weren't technically fully gotten all the equipment and battery, like it was just messy, you know? So we're working on creating really cool training. That would be exactly that every single process, every single thing, we clean how to do it. 32nd clip of every single piece of the house basically. And we would also use that for internal training because what happens is we'll get a complaint at a house like, Hey, you guys are messing up on the floors and it's happened. Maybe not just this team, but like lots of teams are experiencing this. And so if we can get everybody up to speed by the sending out a quick little 32nd clip that says, Hey guys, like everybody watch this and reply. And just gets everyone like aware that we had this complaint, but also here's how you do it the right way. And so yeah, that's, we're working on that. That's coming out soon. A good question.

Curt:
It sounds perfect.

Brandon Condrey:
That's probably like early 2021 in the best case scenario. I want to be up front with you. Like, so the mentor in Denver, we paid him as a consultant. And so part of that agreement is that we couldn't disseminate what he gave us. That was like a private peer-to-peer thing. So that's one of the things Brandon I need to talk about with him is like, Hey, we've got this one guy, which would be a really good testimonial for like the whole bigger package of everything. Can we just do it this one time and split, whatever we ended up charging you with him. So we need to talk to him about that to make sure that you get started off the best foot forward with all the techniques stuff too, because otherwise we're going to have to tell you, like, we can't tell you that it's IP or whatever, and you're going to have to wing it with whatever cleaners you get, which is also fine. That's how our mentor did it too. He just started with like a housekeeper and like do whatever you do and then adapted policies as they got it. But the whole reason we had the mentor and paid him as a consultant and why you want us to coach you is that we jumped off from 15 years of mistakes and tinkering to just like hit the ground running. So that's what we're trying to do for you as well. So I'll get back to you on that one as well, but we do have a robust cleaning system.

Curt:
Okay, Cool. And what was the thing I wanted to ask? All right. When you guys started, like, did you collect leads for a while and then be like, Oh, we'll get back to you in two or three weeks. Like, how did you hit the ground with enough clients to justify getting a car and getting into full-time employees and all that kind of stuff?

Brandon Condrey:
Just kind of a faith thing where you're like, man, this is what works. We'll just buy the car and get the employees. What we did was it was that two week gap. So we started off with door hanging. So me and Brandon and Brandon's like brother-in-law and whoever we had a crew of like six people, we still have them downstairs. They're three years old, but we printed like 10,000 door hangers. And we just went to all these neighborhoods that we wanted to be in. And that was how we got our first 10 to 12 customers, which kept them occupied maybe quarter time. And then we tried to just aggressively follow up with whoever came in and tell them like, we can get you scheduled retraining. The first team we'll start on this date. If you could just wait like the 10 days and to make them feel better about us being a new company and proven, like we had cut rate prices in the beginning, we will give you the starter, whatever. And it's 50% off manly redo it 25% off for three months. We had so much stuff in the beginning, but you want them to have a discount so that they're going to take it on faith that you know what you're doing and if not, you'll figure it out and I'm paying less than market rate while you do so. And then once you're up to speed though, like you jump up the pricing and so you lose customers and that happens inevitably, but you want to get paid for what you're worth.

Brandon Schoen:
And think of it this way like you're in the internet space. So, you know, I don't know if you've ever launched a product on Amazon or some other e-commerce or whatever product it is usually with online. It's all about reviews, right? Like, so what we did is actually immediately, we were super aggressive planning in the beginning too. We had friends and family initially, like a bunch of people lined up. I want to say 10 or 20 people, just friends and family, teachers, people, we knew neighbors. And we were like, okay, we're going to start with cleaners as inventory. We're not going to be like, we're going to start it and hope we get to people. And then our cleaners we had cleaners right away. But we also planned it so that we had literally not a full booking of people, but we had like every day we had people for the teams to clean and the deal was we would give them a free clean for testing purposes. Right. We're going to test clean you're out. We might make a mistake. We might cause we're just starting out. So they knew that. And then we would the reciprocity. So they would give us a review and go right away. We started with five or 10 reviews out of the gate when honestly, some of our competitors have been around for five or 10 or 20 years. And they had five reviews because they just don't push.

Curt:
That's exactly what I was going to do. So I really appreciate that. That you guys have yeah. That one.

Brandon Condrey:
But yeah, we did free cleans and we inspected every single house.

Curt:
So it's like training time too. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
It's a neighbor. You came in there. We're going to walk around with a, I remember the employees getting upset because we had a flashlight. At one point we were looking, we were looking behind toilets for like hairs and things and you'd find them every time with a flashlight. It's impossible to get it perfect. But they got upset that we were being too militant to the inspections, but that's what we did. So free cleans, inspect every house and then just point out, I'm not like punitively, like, Hey, there's a streak on this floor. Like try doing it this way instead. Or don't forget, you have to move the toaster rasa counter to wipe behind it. And you wipe the toaster to and put it all back. So free cleans in the beginning in exchange for reviews and then discounted cleans after that for some period of time and then full price for everybody else.

Brandon Schoen:
And what I would always thought Brandon is like, even though, yeah, you're taking a little bit of a hit it's like those reviews are gold, right? When people, any reviews, like if they go to look, they see your door hanger and you're like, I've never heard of these guys. And then they go Google you and you have five reviews already. And a lot of the mom and pops have one or zero. It's still like, they're still gonna like be more interested. And then it's like a double win because you get training time for the teams and you also are getting reviews. It's building the business both ways and it's really an awesome way to do it and filling up their time. So like, if we had spots in the schedule, we like, we wanted the teams to be, have a job and not be able to clean and not be like, gosh, every day it's part-time all the time. We would try to fill them up. We got spot on the schedule, let's fill it up with a friend or family or somebody and get a review, another review. And yeah, it costs a little bit of money. Like you take a little bit to hit on some of the labor, but those reviews come back. Awesome. And you know, if you build that foundation right in the beginning, you have the website really good. You have reviews right off the bat even. That's what people want to see. They want to be able to that's that biggest barrier is that trust. So if you can get those reviews right away, you get a nice looking website, get the marketing down. They're already full when they have on the phone with you. They just want to know that you're who you said you were. And so sales should be a lot easier.

Curt:
Right. Okay. No, that's awesome. And in relation to, I guess, hopping on the phone, how do you guys bid jobs at square feet, hours? Do you like multiply the labor costs? Do you guys have like obviously the system for that, what does that look like?

Brandon Condrey:
Did you notice a trend when you got your 20 quotes on how they quoted you?

Curt:
I put it all into a spreadsheet. I've got average, min-max all that kind of stuff. And it seemed like half of them were doing here's our price total for all Cleaners per hour, half of them were around like almost half of them were like, here's our $35 an hour flat rate for one cleaner. And then some of them were just like, who knows how they got that? I think it was the franchises seem to have the ones that were not quite where I thought they'd be.

Brandon Condrey:
So, okay. I'll tell you how we do it. And then I'll tell you that there's a million different ways that you can do it. I think the franchises, some of them will have a weird model. Did any of them ask you about like your flooring type or bedroom and bathroom count?

Curt:
Bedroom and bathroom count for sure. But never flooring. One of them asked me about like what kind of blinds I had, but that was about as crazy as they went.

Brandon Condrey:
Interesting. So a lot of them do a bedroom, bathroom count system. And so what they're going to do is assume that you have a kitchen, so we don't need to ask you about that and that you have a living room, but, and then if you have four bedrooms and three, they just have some algorithm they're working it through hourly is the one that I would stay away from, for sure. So like we also have an hourly rate. Like we charge $90 for the team of three per hour in the event that we get some weird one where they're like, I just need you to come out and wipe off the cabinets. And you're like, okay, cool. Like the minimum is 115 bucks and then it's $90 an hour. And so most people wouldn't hear the minimum to do that. Like, you're going to charge you $90 to do that. I'm like, I don't want to come out and empty your trash cans. Like we're wanting to do the whole thing. That's what we're good at. But sometimes they're really stubborn. I'm like, fine. We'll take your money for the 20 minute visit to come out and do that. But the way that we do it is if there's a minimum charge that covers a thousand square feet.

Curt:
Do you guys measure houses in square feet?

Brandon Condrey:
Nice way to go, just to make it. Our minimum number in Albuquerque is 115 bucks. You're going to have to tweak it on your end to figure out what that is. So the $115 covers a thousand square feet. And those are the ones that we also tell people like, man, we got one that was a 12,000 square foot house inside of this gorgeous country club on a golf course. And they literally wanted us to come in and clean, they're like 25 year old son's room and bathroom. I'm like, why just make him do it? But like we told him like, yeah, I mean it's a 200 square foot bedroom and a 20 foot bathroom and it's going to be 115 bucks every time we come out and they didn't do it. So whatever. And then what we had done in the beginning, we haven't worked out in 300 square foot increments. So anything beyond the thousand and 300 square feet we up at now by nine bucks. So that's how you get to there. So like it's a linear chart after you get to the minimum. In the beginning, we had five bucks and then what happened was we got for our first, like really big house, our mentor in Denver. He's great, but because it's kind of a, it's a master plan community, all the houses are roughly the same size. And so I remember early on, we had got this customer who had like a 6,000 square foot house. I was like, dude, how much should I charge for this? He's like your algorithm that you gave us is gonna have us pay you. Like we're going to do it in like an hour and a half. Like, I don't think that's going to work. And so he was like, I dunno, man, we don't have houses that big. And so we winged it. And so we charged her 250, I think for the first one. And then we reverse engineer the algorithm beyond that, like, okay, if she's at 6,000 and we just divided by the 300 square feet, that's how we got the $9 figure by jumping it up that much. So what I would do is have your wife call back the competitors that actually responded and then give a different size of house. So make up a fake house that has six bedrooms and an outdoor kitchen and see what they charge and you can try and reverse engineer their algorithms and then try and price yourself in there or a little bit low.

Curt:
Okay, cool. Does that work into like 3 cents a square feet? What afterwards? Like let's see 300 divide or nine divided by 300. I think it's like 3 cents. Now. What about top of the one 15 though? Yeah. All right. And that's 11, 11 and a half cents per. Okay. So the average price per square foot that I got out of them for a 1500 square foot house was 17 cents per square foot. Lowest was like, I should know that I was a one-time clean for the monthly. It was 11 cents or anywhere around where you guys are. How much of a difference do you guys give to like the first time cleaning or are you always giving some discount and only going for recurrent customers now?

Brandon Condrey:
No. So what we do is we always charge a higher on the initial where we get pushback on that is like, no, I've had this other cleaning service and they've been coming every two weeks. So like my house isn't that dirty. And then those cases would be like, cool. We can jump off directly at the bi-weekly cost. So for instance, you gave 1500, right? Is your example down here? Our one-time slash initial cost is two o eight before tax. And so we budget two hours and 19 minutes for that. Clean weekly for that size house is 99, 75. And then biweekly is one 33, and monthly is one 58. The ones that we absolutely hammer on price, our move out cleans because they suck. They're not fun to do for the employees. They take forever. You never know what kind of condition people left those in. So for 1500 square foot on a move out, we charged 273. If it has a garage, we charged two 98 and we push broom out the garage and wipe off whatever shelving is in there.

Curt:
Hmm. Okay. So you guys have an easy thing where you just plugged in the square footage and you get like the idea and you'll always be making money on that. Cause you've reverse engineered. Okay.

Brandon Condrey:
That's it. And then we're in a position where we're going to raise the move-out costs soon too. Cause like we generally don't our office manager likes them cause they feel schedule holes. So if one of our regulars canceled cause out of town or something cool, we'll just drop in this, move out clean this said we could do it anytime this day. So they're nice from that perspective. But like we've gotten competitive quotes on move-outs and we are still under the market. And so we can come up by quite a bit, I think to match what people are charging for move-outs, which to me is insane that people will do this, but like sometimes their lease requires that you have it done by a professional cleaning company and you have to show an invoice. So like you kind of have them in a position where you can charge a lot for those.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. You'd actually be surprised to hear like a lot of times, well, I've heard it from the franchises a lot when I would do more of the estimates, but like the franchises will charge a ton on the first time clean like Brandon was saying like 270 something, but I want to say, I don't know, just any of the big franchises, Molly maids, Merry maids, any of the big ones, at least here they were charging for that same, would it be like $500 for that initial like way, way outside of what we're charging? So generally we went a lot more of those that business because of, we're not like price gouging, but I think what we've figured out is a lot of times the franchises don't have the sustainability that we have because they're just not as efficient. They have different people that come every time there's more inconsistencies and variables in their systems. So when we come out, we're able to charge a lower price, look at the bigger picture because we want to get them on that recurring. Even if it's the first time clean is not maybe half, but it's a lot significantly less than the competition that franchise would might charge. And we're looking at the long-term like we want that customer for a year or five years or 10 years down the road. Whereas I think the franchises have gotten to the point where they just lose so much business. They just price gouge people on the front just to like make up their loss already and on the beginning. And so we stand out on that too, but like Brandon said, yeah, like the brokering, the bread and butter is the recurring. You want to go after the, ultimately we only want to be bi-weekly if we can't, that's what our mentor Denver is. So yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
So the franchises will charge a huge amount on the front because their reviews are terrible and no one wants to stay with them for a long time. And we've heard that over and over and over again, like very mean charge me $600 for this. You're only going to charge me 300. I'm like, yeah, because I'm more interested in keeping you for like years instead of making a bunch of money the first time and making you upset. So we do lean towards getting their recurring, especially when they pushed back on the initial, like my house isn't that dirty. Can you just give me the normal cost? Like sure. As long as you're going to sign up for biweekly service, like yeah, we'll do it. We'll take on the potential loss on the very first one, knowing that we're going to come back two weeks later. And so I can be that big of a deal cause we just cleaned it two weeks ago.

Curt:
Right. And do you guys force them into contracts of any sort or is it just, you can cancel whenever?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, I don't. We talked about that and our mentor, I asked him about that too. That was one of my first questions as well. And he was like, I don't think you should have to sign a legal document to get your house cleaned.

Curt:
I was like, all right. That's kind of what I figured, but I wondered cause it's so important to have that recurring, but I guess you just, you don't want to force them into that because then they feel bad.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. You have to enforce it if they cancel. So that means you're going to tell them like, Hey, old lady on a fixed income. No that you can't solve. I'm sorry. I charge you this $500 to cancel your contract, but just pisses people off. Especially like, if, if they're unhappy with what you did somehow and they know that they have to keep going for six more months, they're just going to be upset and they'll leave bad reviews. Plus the way that kind of like the world has gone. Like, you can cancel Netflix whenever you want and you can cancel your cell phone. So like people just expect it.

Curt:
Right. Do you guys have a minutes per square feet thing? I'm just thinking about the things I'm plugging into my so-called projections and the thing that I wasn't sure about. Cause you said five per day now, but like if I had a 1500 square foot house, how long you told me that didn't change.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So that $90 an hour rate, we just divide that by the gross cost. So like on the 1500, the one-time cost was two Oh eight and then I just divide that by 90 to get to two hours and 19 minutes.

Curt:
Okay. Understood.

Brandon Condrey:
And then you'll have over time, you'll have like a Profit per job that you kind of get and we're floating as something like 65%. So 65% of any given job is profit at the job level. So like the business is not going to be 65% profit but just like that one job. Okay. It took them two hours and 19 minutes to do it. We paid them $12 an hour plus the bonus. So round episode 15, we paid them $45 an hour. So we paid them 90. I don't know like one Oh eight, whenever that is, we paid them a little bit and some change. That's like the gross labor cost. And that's how we got to that figure. Like you can get super nitty gritty with attorney calculate how much cleaner you used, how much raw material do you want to figure in car maintenance for that type of stuff. And it's just so you can get crazy with that, but it's really a drop in the bucket, like compared to the labor. So labor is really the only thing we track in terms of profitability of the job level.

Curt:
Okay. And do you know what is your cleaning supply percentage in terms of cost? Like top line. Through that. Okay. It's not like it's insignificant.

Brandon Condrey:
It is really small. So labor and 60% insurances. I think we do something like 2% of gross revenue for insurance and then otherwise everything else is, it's nothing, man. It's so small. Hey dude.

Curt:
Okay. So I'm just looking through here. I've got how many houses I can do a month. How much revenue that brings in the teams needed the hours those teams were going to do as late man hours, how many cars you'll need and then under expenses, I've got labor, payroll stuff, supplies, gas, insurance, WCB, training, rent, potentially like at first, if I were to start with one car, I'd probably just keep it in my garage at first and only look for a place to rent with two cars, at least because like rent here is insane. What are you guys paying for your 22 car potential?

Brandon Condrey:
Dude, it's going to make you so mad. $1,800 a month for a two story square foot building with warehouse space and a lock. That's sick.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. We used to rent the whole top half out. We used to only, it was like half that. Cause he rented out the whole top half in the beginning. So yeah, it was significantly less.

Curt:
Wow. I could probably get like one bay for like 2000 bucks if I was lucky so that's crazy.

Brandon Condrey:
We have a friend runs a landscaping company and he still doesn't have a brick and mortar place. He runs it out of a storage center. So like those. Oh yeah. So he rents a bunch of those and that's where they store the equipment overnight and he just literally meets them down there in his car, gives them the keys and then they're running a software just like we are. So they get their lists on a tablet and they just get the cars and go. And so like he still doesn't have a place where you can go like visit them. Customers are not going to come see you. So when you go to rent something, you do not need something fancy. Like you can get a piece of junk rested building in an industrial neighborhood. It will be just fine. We wanted the building, we needed places. The biggest thing for us I think was laundry.

Curt:
Oh right. That's another question.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So in the beginning we ran everything in one washer and dryer and it was a total piece of junk that was donated to us and it was 20 years old and we quickly replaced it and I remember having this with Corby like, Hey man, the washer and dryer dire, like we need to replace it. Like we use color-coded rags. I'll reveal that to you. So everything's color coded, but we actually keep the color coding through the laundry system. So there are specific washers and dryers for bathroom, rags, kitchen, rags, and so on and so forth. So when we had gotten to the point where we needed to replace those Corby was just like, I don't, I'd set yourself up for success and just try and get it all right now. So we spent $6,000 to get the equipment for the washers and dryers, but then we had to pay, Ooh man. It was like three to $4,000 on plumbing modifications to actually get all the stuff in there to be installed and electrical modifications. So that was the biggest thing. But I know in the beginning I've got a cousin right now in Wyoming. Who's doing basically what you're doing and we're coaching her through that too for the testimonials. And she's just going to do them at her house and their washer and dryer, which is fine to a point, but it's going to get gross and you're going to want to not be doing it in your personal washer and dryer.

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