Episode 28: How Hiring a Handyman Changes Your Cleaning Business

Episode 28: How Hiring a Handyman Changes Your Cleaning Business

Brandon Schoen:
If you're a business owner, you've got to do what you gotta do, especially in the beginning. But as you grow, you can actually outsource those tasks.

Brandon Condrey:
That'll keep you stable I guess, but that's not a revenue generating activities. So if you had spent whatever time you were doing fixing vacuums or running to go buy parts, if you had squeezed in five sales calls instead, then you would have done much better.

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

Brandon Schoen:
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Profit Cleaners we're in the house. We've got Brandon Condrey.

Brandon Condrey:
That's me!

Brandon Schoen:
And Brandon Schoen I'm your host and we're here again, guys. We've got some really exciting content today. Welcome back. You're here to learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners around the world. And we're super excited guys. So let's dive in today. We're actually going to be talking about something specific to inside your business, how and why you need a handyman, almost someone inside your business that you could bring inside to help automate some more processes, maybe fixing stuff to make things more efficient. So your teams aren't breaking down vacuums, aren't breaking down. Equipments kept up to par and everything's moving smoother. We're going to dive into this episode today. Kind of discuss how this came about, why we actually hired a handyman to come into our business and start helping us do those efficiencies and tweak those things and just make everything run smoother and how it's helped us when we're going to share that journey with you guys. So without anything else, I don't know if there's anything else you want to share with them Brandon but I think we can get started.

Brandon Condrey:
I mean, you know, subscribing like, cause always and tell your friends that's all good stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. If you guys are getting value out of this, if this is changing your mindset at all, giving you new inspiration, that's why we do these podcasts. So please tell a friend or tell someone, you know, or give us a review or share it, subscribe. It That'd be awesome.

Brandon Condrey:
We love those reviews.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
So what initially was happening? We were just stretched thin at the very beginning. So we were working our tails off and the issue that we had run into was vacuums breakdown. That's just part of vacuums. They're being used constantly every day. Like if you picture your household vacuum, you use that like once a weekend, maybe like on a busy week. Yep. We have house cleaners. Like I don't use mine at all, but these vacuums are used hours a day. And so the two things that fail most commonly are the belt and the roller. Those are the things that need to be replaced. That's relatively easy, but you're on the other side of town during a sales appointment in the beginning, that's where we were at and then a vacuum breaks and you're like, Oh crap to drive over there and go. And when we were in a pinch, I remember like we specifically had to, we have bought vacuums because that was the easiest answer at the time. So it was faster for someone to go spend $200 to get another vacuum that we didn't really need than it was to try and get one fixed. And so we were just burning through time and money and it was a problem. Right. And I was coming in on the weekend to fix some or at night and it sucked. So it was your idea, like let's find someone to fix these vacuums and you put a job on Upwork, I think.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think it was a, Fiverr, Home advisor, even, I don't know, it was like local service platform.

Brandon Condrey:
So we only had one guy apply I think.

Brandon Schoen:
We had a few, but there was one dude that stood out for sure. Yeah. The guy we hired. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So he owns a company, he's a handyman. So this is the guy who will come fix a door or a leaky toilet or whatever. He's just a Jack of all trades. Right. And that worked out well in the beginning. And then what kind of happened with him was that he was just spending less and less time here. And we knew that because you get a little notification when your alarm gets unlocked every Sunday or whatever. Right. And so it was working out, but the vacuums were breaking down again, and he was only spending 30 minutes here to service like 14 vacuums or something. And so it just wasn't that time wasn't working out. So we sought out someone else and kind of like interviewed him and told him the problem. And he put our minds at ease that he's going to take care of it. Don't worry. Yep. And so we set him up, he was cheaper than the other guy, and we know how long you staying here. He brings his wife with him. They do it together. And so that's been great. So the vacuums are now like back to full operation. So this can help your company because you're not going to have to do it yourself. You have someone else doing it. You also get the benefit of someone who's watching your back there, making sure that you're not going to run out of vacuum parts. They'll let you know when something is running out. And they might be able to notice a trend like, Oh, I've noticed the switches keep getting broken this specific way. And then we're able to tell the company, Hey, don't forget to like, not drop the vacuum, blah, blah, blah. So it's just like someone who's looking out for the trends. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
But the real benefit of the handyman, I think in a different way. So like, yes, he's here every week. He's watching your back with the vacuums. That's awesome. But Facebook in the early days had this saying, which was move fast and break things and that's going to happen when you're cleaning. So if you're growing a company big, you will do some damage from time to time and that's not ideal. And you have training in place to avoid that. And I remember when this was happening, we talked to Corby about it. Like, what do we do? We're breaking this stuff. He's like, no, that's great. That means that they're like hurrying to like, get the bonus. Like this is perfect. It's just going to happen. You just have to deal with it. And so usually that's like a vase, a picture frame, and it's not a big deal, but occasionally it's a big deal. So the two that had come up recently where our handyman saved us was one of the cleaners had moved a wine rack on a butcher block countertop and it just left these deep gouges in it. And so we sent him photos like, Hey man, is this something that you can do? It's like, yeah, it is. So he went out there with whatever tools he took and power tools and spent a couple hours and send it down. And so I think we had to pay him like $600 to do that. But our deductible on our insurance is a grand. So if we had filed an insurance claim for that damage and had someone go replace the countertops, some company, it would have cost more because we would have had to pay the deductible anyway. And you get a against her insurance, which is a good either. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
And then most recently this customer had their kitchen remodeled is brand new. And we had somehow scratched the front of this apron front stainless steel sink. So I think it was their belt buckle or something. Send him a picture. He's like, yeah, I can do that. And so he went out there, wet sand and some stainless steel, like it never happened. And that was like $80. He did that in like 20 minutes. And you do need to like interview a couple of handyman, I think, like ask for a portfolio, ask for references. We got lucky with this guy because he used to do a couple of things. So he used to work in low voltage telephone systems, so super handy and electrical side of stuff. And sometimes the vacuums need that. But he also used to work in auto body repair, which was where this stainless steel repair stuff came in. And then most recently we had scratched a cooktop like the black enameled surface underneath the burners. We had scratched that with something or other, and he was able to take that off and disassemble it and then re enamel it, which I think is, I don't think your average handyman can do that, but they definitely exist. And it can save your bacon in a bunch of different ways. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
And part of the reason we do that is because we offer tremendous customer service. If anyone says we broke something or did something we never argue with and say, no, we didn't, you're wrong. And like read a lot of our competitor reviews. That's what they do. They argue with people, which is the worst thing you could do. We take responsibility, even if we didn't do it, we don't say we like actually admit fault and say, we did it. If we know we didn't do it because a lot of times what happens is we'll break something or they'll say we took something and it turns out they realized later their kid actually did it. Or someone else had it in the house somewhere else. And it just leaves a good taste in their mouth though. Again, if they're having this positive communication with us, we're not saying no, you did it and fighting with them. And so I think that's when we really started doing that a lot more in the beginning to kind of offset that. And then in addition to that, it's just, as we grew, I think it was super nice to just slowly work our way out of the business. You were literally doing vacuum repairs at night. And just think about that from an efficiency standpoint, like in the business, like the teams are cleaning a house and a vacuum goes down like they're just money and time being burned, right. While they can't clean the house, someone has to come get another one while they're waiting for someone. So like you said, that's what we were experiencing in the beginning. That was a huge pain point and a big challenge because we didn't even have a whole lot of money to burn at that point.

Brandon Condrey:
I mean, I want to be clear that like the vacuums still break down that happens. And the procedure that we have now is we've got three people cleaning a house. You will send one of them back with the car, with the dead vacuum to pick up a replacement vacuum. So the other two can keep cleaning. So you're not dispatching the whole team. You're going to pause anything. They're still going to keep going. Right. But when you have someone it's not just that he's fixing the broken ones, he does this preventative maintenance routine on every vacuum every week. So it's disassembled it's. We take an air compressor and blow it all the dust and you vacuum up like whatever hair and stuff like got caught in there. And so just by kind of looking at it constantly, you can kind of see you and like, Hey, this one's getting really crappy. It's probably gonna have to be replaced. And so the other part of the system that we put into places that we tried to replace the vacuums once a year, so we've put them through 52 weeks of hours, a day of cleaning and you just can't repair it once it's past a certain point. And then it just looks super janky. So we usually donate, those are given to the employees if they want those. And then we just buy a whole nother set. And that sounds like a lot of money, but like we literally just did this last week. And we were able to negotiate with the local Orrick store and they beat Amazon's pricing. And we got the entire fleet of vacuums that we needed for a thousand bucks, which Amazon was charging. Well, we got it on a good day on Amazon. It was down to $130, but they were able to give it to us for one 25. And so that's going to happen too. But when you get to the point where like, all right, if you think it's a thousand dollars, I mean, we're doing $6,000 in revenue a day. So it's not that big of a deal. And you just got a whole year's worth of reliable vacuums out of it.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So this is like a great example of that system that we're putting in place for efficiencies, which we've been talking a lot about efficiencies and clockwork in your business and things. So I think this is again, a really good example of how in this scenario, this is something you could have still been doing today, right? You could still be down there on the weekends, coming in on Sundays and fixing the vacuums, which if you're a business owner, you gotta do what you gotta do, especially in the beginning. But as you grow and you become more efficient and you can actually delegate or outsource those tasks or those other things that are, I mean, it's still super important obviously, but it's not money-making money generating. What's probably not the thing as the business owner you should be focusing on is fixing.

Brandon Condrey:
No. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to, that'll keep you stable I guess, but it, that's not a revenue generating activities. So if you had spent whatever time you were doing fixing vacuums or running to go buy parts, if you had squeezed in five sales calls instead, then you would have done much better. So I think the idea there is like we're paying it's about a hundred bucks a week for him to come in and service all the vacuums. So four to $500 a month. Right. But that's totally worth it just because I don't have to do it. And someone else who is that's his only task is to make sure these vacuums work.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It's nice. There's a significant drop in the number of vacuums breaking and things going wrong during the day. Just a normal day. I think it was like, normally in the very beginning, it was like probably even a several times a week, this would happen where a vacuum wouldn't go down. And now with the preventative maintenance type insurance, we've put in place with that system, it's like, I don't even know how often it happens anymore, but it's not very often.

Brandon Condrey:
No, like we're having maybe one team a week who has to come swap out a vacuum compared to when the vacuums get old. If you keep them for like 18 months. Yeah. They're all going to go down during the week and you're going to have to swap them all out. And so now you end up having all right, we've got eight teams. You ended having like 16 vacuums sitting around because you have to have a backup for every single one that's out there, which is also very inefficient. So by him doing the preventative maintenance, it's going to keep the vacuums in that tip top shape when they're brand new for a longer period of time before we swap it.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! So that's saving us money too, making the long-term use of the vacuums more efficient. And again, this is going back to, there's so many things in the business that you can hold on to and you can do, but if you build that structure for it, if you build that system for it, then that system and structure actually supports the business better. So now the vacuums are better supporting the teams and the teams are better able to deliver the product because they're not breaking down in the houses and taking longer and getting upset and things like that. Right. So it's one of those systems. That's a small system, but just an example to show you guys, how does small things matter and all those little systems add up and really make a big difference in your overall day and your overall system, how your teams feel that your happiness, like if you're constantly having to break, you know, go fix stuff and run around town and burn money and gas, like you're not going to be happy and neither of your teams. Right. So I think it's a super important system. And then maybe let's just share with them, how did we actually make this system? So like we outlined it and we recorded some stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we had a checklist from Corby. We kind of modified that a bit for our uses. So there's a physical print out that they can look at. And then we also recorded a video of me doing the repair. And then that just gets when we hired the handyman, like here's what you gotta do. And if you ever need to refer back to it, this was the entire procedure end to end. Right. I think we put it on YouTube. And so watch this video. That's how to do it. Watch this checklist. We also had created a shared Google spreadsheet. So he could document like this vacuum was serviced on this day and we've replaced this, that, or the other thing. And that's just another way to follow trends in the end, that became less of a big deal. If we were keeping these vacuums for years where they were like thousand dollar Dysons, like, you would want to know what was breaking and when it was breaking. Right. But because we're kind of replacing them every year, that maintenance log doesn't necessarily matter. They all get the same maintenance every single week. And that's the whole point is that they all get touched and taken care of. And if he gets lost, he just pulls up his own video. And what's great about him is that sometimes if the job is too big to do in our little warehouse, normally he comes down here on Sundays and services I'm here. If it's too big, he'll take one home and like take it apart in his bigger work and his burger workshop and then bring it back to us, like sometime in the, in the middle of the week, which is great.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And so that's just an example of actually how we build a lot of systems in this business is through, in that example, we just pulled out a smartphone and did a smartphone video. And I was recording you redo like all this stuff with the vacuums, which thankfully you're a lot better at the technical stuff. And the hands-on stuff. Like when we went up to Denver years ago with Corby and he was in his back thing, showing us how to take the vacuums apart. I was like, it's like, totally over my head, but you were like, okay, I got it. And yeah. And in the beginning you helped a lot to fill that role, but then once we needed you in other parts of the business to keep us going, like we were able to that role and delegate that to someone else. And we typically do that through the video process. Right. So we have that in that case, there was a smartphone video, but normally we'll do loom videos if it's an online procedure.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. If it's an office thing we're recording the whole screen with loom, but if it's a physical task like cleaning or something, you have to record that either a phone or a camera.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And the beauty of that is unlike a documented, like standard operating procedure system where it's like typed out or written down and it can be outdated quickly cause something changes or a link changes. And this scenario, like you said, there's no in-person on the spot training even necessarily like the dude just pulls up the video and you don't have to be there to train them. Like you can just watch the video at any point in time, you know, even if he's lost in the future and you're on vacation or something. So that's the really the true point of building these systems. And I know in on podcasts, we were mentioning, I was listening to the other day, but we were saying like, we don't even know how to do scheduling anymore. But the beauty of these systems is if we needed to do scheduling, if for some reason our main person was out that day or that week, we could all, as a company, it's not reliant on one person. We could all go back and find the video of how to run payroll or how to fix the vacuums or whatever that is. And so we'll be outlining these systems more in the future guys, but just wanted to give you like this little sneak peek of this vacuum system with the handyman that we have, it's been super helpful. And just one example of something that could free your time up, create a nice little system and makes everything run more efficiently and smoothly and creates more happiness in your business, hopefully for sure. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So just take that for what it is and twist it to how you need it. Maybe it's not vacuums in your place. Maybe you have commercial mop systems they taken care of and you're just tired of doing it. So there's always a way around it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. There's always a way around it, but be thinking, what can I, what structure, what system can I create and how can I capture that system with a video loom video, if it's online, whatever it is so that it can be duplicatable without you physically having to be there to train someone to do it. That's the kind of mindset we want you guys to be thinking of. That's the kind of business we're building and just to be the most efficient possible, I think that's, that's the best way to do it. So I think that's it for today's podcast guys.

Brandon Condrey:
So little quick one, but we'll have more stuff coming at you soon.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. So subscribe and review. Have a great week guys and we'll catch you soon until next time.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it clean.