Episode 35: 10X Live Coaching and Boot Camp: Improve Your Marketing and Grow Your Cleaning Biz

Episode 35: 10X Live Coaching and Boot Camp: Improve Your Marketing and Grow Your Cleaning Biz

Brandon Schoen:
All you have to do to stand out is add five or 10, but I would highly recommend you add a hundred pictures to your local listing take before and after pictures, take pictures of your teams, your office, whatever, as many things you can do to tell the story of your brand. If you're making your customers happy and they're so happy. And so over the moon, they're going to go tell their friends.

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 everyone to the Profit Cleaners, 10X live coaching bootcamp. And we got this month's call for April. So welcome welcome to the call, everyone. And if you're not here, as I mentioned, we're recording this so you guys will get the recording and feel free to always reach out with questions. If you have any hello@Profitcleaners.com. So we do have some people that couldn't make it to the, to the live call today. So we're going to answer those questions here on the live recording, as well as we have Carrie. And we're waiting for some other people to hop on, hopefully, but if not, Hey Carrie, you got a one-on-one coaching session today, so welcome. And we got Brandon Condrey here. Got Brandon Schoen, your host. Thanks for being here guys. And let's get started, I guess we'll start out with this April for us in our cleaning business, we're starting to see a lot of demand, a lot of new growth. And we say that sometimes in our marketing, the cleaning business, isn't really seasonal, but it's kind of seasonal in some aspects. Right? So, yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So I mean, the best way to describe that, I think is that people, you said hibernate the other day when we were on the other calls. So people hibernate in the winter, they're going to not be as interested in booking new service, but your recurring customers that you booked through the year, they don't quit in winter. It's just that new customer uptake goes down for some reason. So we're definitely in the spring cleaning rush. An example of that is that our sales guy, Matt, he's got a target, which is we want 22.5 bi-weekly customers every month. And at that rate that allows us to add another team every 90 days. This is April 15th that we're recording this and, or April 16th and Matt hit 23 bi-weekly yesterday. So he hit his monthly target in less than well, just after two weeks. So it is definitely a time to be aggressive with marketing. If you can pull it off from a budget standpoint and definitely be paying attention to communication coming into your websites.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. We started in 2017. We didn't really know what the market was doing at that because we were brand new to it. But as we've seen every year and you guys might see this in your cleaning businesses as well, there's a big uptake in demand, right? People come out of their caves and hibernation and they're ready for spring. They're ready for the spring cleaning. So it's a great time to be capturing that market share and really getting in front of as many people as possible to get that visibility. I would say we definitely see our competitors starting to advertise more this of year too, but the name of the game guys is, you know, you don't really have to compete if you're dominating your market and other ways. And if you're being kind of unreasonable and going above and beyond, especially in your marketing and doing things that other people are just are not willing to do. So I know in our market, a lot of cleaning business owners, a lot of the traditional franchises and whatnot, they're only doing billboards and maybe tea. I don't see them on TV too much, but like you don't see them doing some of the more guerrilla marketing stuff that we're talking about doing. I think we're still, I don't want to say new to that market. It's been around for a long time, Google and Facebook and nextdoor and all these places, you can find great leads, but I think a lot of the big franchises they're just kind of got comfortable. And so it's a great opportunity. I said this years ago, when I was in the internet marketing space is the whole playing field has been leveled. So there's now opportunities that have never existed for smaller local mom and pop type businesses to really take a market share. And that never used to be possible because there never used to be so many cool tools and resources and ways, you know, channels and avenues to market your business. So it's really an opportunity. You've got to look at it as an opportunity. Sometimes the things that are a little bit harder to understand or figure out, or even if you don't totally understand, like Carrie you're setting up your Facebook ads, but if you guys are struggling setting any of that up, just have someone else, who's an expert do that. That's the beauty of a lot of this marketing stuff is you don't have to know everything. You don't have to figure every little detail out. You just need to get a delegating. Focus on what you're really, really good at, and then find experts and people that are really good at the Facebook ads, the Google ads, whatever else that you need help with in growing your business. Those are obviously the quickest ways to get in front of people is the paid traffic. So right away, you're showing up on Google or Facebook or these places where people are actively looking for your services. That's the low hanging fruit, but we also talk about other low hanging fruit and a lot of our, the marketing course and other areas of that, you know, we preach about the low-hanging fruit on Google maps and SEO, as much as it's a long-term game, it's a longterm play. You can still be capturing a really simple market share like in the Google maps where you can just go through and add more content, fill it out and make it more complete. A lot of the stuff that your competitors are not going to do and immediately stand out and you're making a difference that people are going to see that. And that's also something Google is going to notice. So there's, low-hanging fruit like that. And then just in general, you want to be more aggressive. Like Brandon was saying, you want to be kind of unreasonable, especially in times like this, when people are kind of like waiting on the sidelines or waiting for things to get better or whatever it might be, you want to be unreasonable. You want to be taking more action and doing things that your competition is simply isn't going to do.

Brandon Condrey:
So, yeah. Carrie is the only one. So you want to see if you want to unmute Carrie and you can put you on the hot seat. We've got a one-on-one sort of session.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So Carrie says a change coming out with iOS in a few months, Facebook pixels, as they work without the change. Yes. I just got a message recently too, from our Facebook guy that he's, he's Mitch, that runs a lot of our Facebook ads. There's always updates going on in the online space, whether it's Google or Facebook or whatever platform you're working on, there's always going to be those updates. But yeah, that's interesting, Carrie, so we'll have to look and I don't know exactly what the update is. I just know I got a message recently and there's something we have to update or like re Connect for our pixel as well. So that is a change that's happening. Yeah. Make sure you guys are staying up on that. We'll, we'll look into that as well, Carrie, and we'll pop a new video in here in the course to update people on that. If it's a major change like that. But yeah, typically when you set up your Facebook ads, you're going to want to install. What's called your Facebook pixel, which goes on your website. It's a piece of code. It's a snippet of code that you actually embed in the back of your website. It sounds really technical and complicated. It's really not. It's just, if you go through the trainings, we've got you guys, you'll see exactly how to create that pixel and exactly where to put it on your website. And a lot of this stuff too, is if there's anything that we're not covering, that some of this technical stuff, if you guys are really getting into it and getting into the Google and the Facebook and all that, I mean, a lot of it, you can find just Google search it or YouTube it, if it's a little thing you're trying to figure out that maybe we didn't cover, there's tons of content out there guys. So obviously we're trying to condense it and distill it down and make it super actionable for this market, for the cleaning business market. And it is, but yeah, it's constantly evolving, constantly changing. So, yeah, so we had another question from another student. She had a bunch of questions. Tammy Walker had a bunch of questions about cleaning processes and techniques and other stuff. That's, we're not going to cover as much in this course on this call because that's more geared towards another product, which is the cleaning processes. That's coming out soon, by the way, we're still working through the details on that guys, but please know we're working on getting that out. So that'll help you guys with the techniques and the process and all the other stuff, the systems and operations of the business, we're working on bringing that content out to you guys. So right now we're heavily focused on the marketing and the marketing course, which you guys are in. So that's what we're gonna focus on. Today's call. But the other question Tammy had, that was really good. I thought we could address was asking about the Esri data, right? So she was just asking like, how do you figure out where your best customers are? How do you figure out the neighborhoods they're at the people that have the most money to spend, right? Cause normally in cleaning, unless you're trying to be the cheapest, but you don't really want to be, it's a luxury service. You want to target people that have money that are going to be recurring customers. And normally they're going to have a little bigger house. They're going to have a little more disposable income. So how do you find those customers and how do you know exactly where they are in your city? We did a whole podcast about it.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So I wish I knew what podcast episodes were off the top of my head. But if you go back to the business plan, podcast, episode, think it's episode four and I'm pretty sure in the show notes, we included a copy of the business plan that we use. So you can actually see it as the data that we compiled as re ESR. I, I don't know what it stands for, but the US government has a big program called GIS, which is geographical information services I think. And so it's just mapping and it's a way to map a bunch of data. So anytime they do a census, you get a bunch of data from that. They'll pull data from banks and things. And so it's all plotted on a map. And so what we did was you can heat map within S3. There's a free account that you can set up. And so you set up an account, you want to go look at your metrics. And those are in our business plan, but we had looked at median income for a household and how much disposable income they had. And we were looking in neighborhoods that primarily had single family homes by and large apartments are not people who get biweekly cleaning often. So it's more single family homes that are going to be your target townhomes, maybe. So we looked at those zip codes identified those. And we picked five, I think in the business plan that we had concentrated on. So ESRI, I will tell you that there's a bit of a learning curve to figure it out. It took me a while to do it. I had nothing but time cause we weren't up and running yet. This was too, we were making the business plan to pitch a couple of potential investors on putting some money in which they did. So I had time to do it right. But if we were doing it ourselves, knowing what I know now, I would go straight to Upwork for this. And there are loads of people that can do it. So you can type any ESRI on Upwork. You can also look for business plan writers that might be able to help you do this as well. But if you look for a GIS person, tell them what you're after. I want to know the three most concentrated areas of disposable income or the three neighborhoods that have the highest median income, whatever it is. And that'll kind of give you a, an idea of where to shoot for, but you've got other data in there that they can find too, like people with kids that's one of our target markets are, it's a married couple, both people work and they have young children and that makes cleaning the house very difficult. So even though they may not have like the highest disposable income of anybody in the city, that doesn't mean that they're not going to be a great customer. So you'll have to kind of weigh what you want to go after. If we were in a major city, like I used to live in Denver and we were looking at median income, you're going to find these like country clubs where like Peyton Manning and John Elway live. And that's great. I'd love to have those dudes as customers, but they likely at that level of income probably have a whole staff of people that do that all the time. So there's a sweet spot. You don't want to go way above in terms of disposable income and try and find like the unicorn customer that is going to be very, very demanding. And you're getting a lot of money out of it. It's going to be a huge house, but where we're at is three bedroom, two bath, two young kids, they're all 2000 square feet. That's what the bulk of our customers have. And that's where we make most of our money.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And that brings a good point. I was just thinking, because in the beginning we were thinking, well, gosh, if you could get people with bigger houses, then there'll be way more money. And that seems like a really great place to target. However, like Brandon said, once you get over kind of a certain threshold, there's like this sweet spot, like the bread and butter is in the sweet spot, which you mentioned that the family with the kids with the kind of like bigger home, but it's kind of in the middle. It's not super small. It's not super big because what happens when you, those bigger houses, there's just all these extra variables and issues that come about.

Brandon Condrey:
And yeah, Art sculptures things that cost $50,000, like a Rolex that goes missing, we have specific insurance on our policy for high value items like that, that may go missing. So there is a sweet spot. So you'll have to dial it in, in your neighborhood. But I think just shooting for families with young kids is not a bad idea. Right? And you'll have to figure out where those neighborhoods are. And so the other thing you can do is look at schools, certain kinds of schools and Esri will certainly map that stuff for you as well. So there's federal grading systems of schools can haggle about that with the education department about whether that is working or not. But generally speaking, the schools they get greeted higher are in nicer neighborhoods is usually how it tends to be. So if you can map, you want to map multiple data points. So you want income, disposable income, how many kids they have, whether it's a single family house and how big it is. And then if you compile all that over a list of schools, a layer on the map that has the schools you'll get targets right away to hit. If you're going to do super hyper targeted Facebook ads with a specific audience, that's how you would dial it in it's within X amount of distance of this school or this building, or they like the PTA at that school, whatever it may be. And if you're going to do direct mailing, that one's easy. So as soon as you have that little neighborhood, if you're gonna do it yourself, USPS has a direct mail mapping system that I can't remember the name of what you just pick the routes that you want. Or I want to send out this postcard to all these people at this day and they'll do that automatically. Or if you're going to do door hangers or things like that, that's another way.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. That's actually how we started out was we targeted these neighborhoods and we door hanger the heck out of them. We just walked for miles and miles and miles and thousands of houses later. We got our first customer.

Brandon Condrey:
We got customers two years after we put that door hanger up. Some lady had put that on her fridge. I remember that she, it was a nice little letter with a picture of our families on it. Like, Hey, we're starting a new company and where your neighbors help us out. And so, yeah, it does work, especially if you have the time to do it yourself, if you're just starting and you only have like three or four customers, you're going to have a big gap in your schedule, take the employees out and go flyer a neighborhood during the middle of it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Use some of that time that they would be cleaning the whole schedule to actually do some marketing for you.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I will say that it is illegal to put stuff in email box. So only the postal service can do that. And you are potentially on the hook for like $10,000 per infraction. So going and hitting your neighborhood by putting stuff in the mailbox and someone reports you that could go very badly for you. So that's why we went with door hangers as opposed to just dropping stuff in people's mail.

Brandon Schoen:
Carrie, thank you for that. She says EDDM for postcards. That must be the EDDM.

Brandon Condrey:
I got a sense for it's every day deliveries, something like that, but yes, that's the program and that's you get something bulk printed. You print a little permit on it. Like this is valid for mail by permit one seven, seven, two, or whatever the postal service will give you instructions on how to do that. And then you literally just deliver a giant of it to the postal service that they will take it from there and make sure it gets where it needs to go.

Brandon Schoen:
So alternatively, what we did and I would highly suggest you guys try doing this is find a local vendor in your market. We work with a company called RSVP. I think they're a franchise and other local markets. So you could find the local representative of RSVP in your market and see if they will trade house cleaning with you for doing the quarterly mail-outs to the highest income capita, whatever households in your area.

Brandon Condrey:
Well, that's how RSVP works specifically. So RSVP is nationwide. So look up your RSVP person, depending on what Metro area you're in, the way that they work is they send out postcards once a quarter and they only go out to the homes that are the top 20% of value. And they have some database they use for that based off their real estate sales and comp houses and things like that. So they will mail that out if they're really nice high gloss cards and you put some fancy offer on it, it's like, ValPack on steroid. We get leads like that five a month, I think is the last time we calculated it is what it averages out to.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And that's, if you think about your average customer value is 3000 to $5,000 a year annually. Well, five a month for doing a trade that you're not spending any money on. I mean, it's, it's a big house. We cleaned for them. They have four, 5,000 square foot house. It's a big one and we clean every week. So if you're looking at just our heart, our heart costs on that, I don't know. We probably spend in gas and labor time and all that maybe around, I'm just gonna call it a hundred bucks. So we're spending $400 a month, basically in trade of our hard costs of our labor and materials and stuff to basically get $15,000 of new business every month. Yeah, it's really, really smart.

Brandon Condrey:
So Carrie's got another question here about, would we consider having teams that are all fully vaccinated with the COVID vaccine in the future? I think that's a great idea to do that. There's a couple issues. You'll run into one, the vaccines, not mandatory from government perspective. There are certain institutions that are requiring it. Like I know a lot of colleges are requiring the vaccine to come back to classes in the fall, but it's a personal sort of medical choice. So it's not that every cleaners going to want to do that, depending on how they feel about those things. But also people have allergic reactions to vaccines from time to time. So they just may not want to do it period. So what we've done internally is we have a spreadsheet where we're tracking everybody, that's got their first dose and everybody has got their second dose. So at some point we'll be able to say, Hey, 85% of our team is vaccinated or whatever it may be. I want to get to a hundred. It just depends on who you're working with to get there. The other thing I've seen companies doing, these are bigger companies, but they were paying a bonus if you got the vaccine. So if that's something that you want to push for in your company, you could certainly say like, Hey, we'll pay a hundred dollars on your next paycheck. If you can prove that you got the vaccine, because Carrie is saying that it sounds good to potential customers. If you can tell them that the cleaning crew that's going to come to your house was fully vaccine.

Brandon Schoen:
And we've actually had customers reach out about that. And we didn't know how to respond at first cause a new thing. Right? But like Brandon said, I think it's really coming down to like, you can't force anyone to do that. That's a personal choice. And if certain people have medical reasons or other reasons like you got to support your team, but I think the best thing you can do is tell your customers like we're working on it and we're encouraging them to do whatever they can do. And it is what it is. But I think would be interesting. Maybe even survey your customers. Some people might not really pay that much attention to it because if you're taking the mandatory precautions with the masks and they're with other things that was really our main messaging this whole last year, what to keep people peace of mind and help people feel confident that we were going to be coming in their homes. First of all, because their families were in their homes already. And they were like worried that we're going to come in their homes. And so we really just had to drill in that messaging of where it's going to be okay. We're taking all the precautions. We cleaned the equipment in between houses. We bring brand new everything. We're bringing the, the masks everyone's wearing their masks and their gloves. And one point we'd had the booties. So we were just taking all the precautions we could. I think that's what you tell people is if not all your teams are vaccinated, then we're still taking all the precautions and we're doing everything we can.

Brandon Condrey:
So, I mean, I think by and large, our entire workforce has been really receptive to getting it. They're doing that voluntarily. We're not forcing it on anybody. For sure. We may get to the point where we offer a bonus in the future. But right now I just don't think it's necessary. We're in New Mexico, New Mexico is currently leading the nation in percentage of fully vaccinated people. So the rollout that they've done here has been pretty efficient. So it's happening fast. So on the downside of it happening fast is that we have a bunch of employees that all need days off and they can't really control it. So the way it works is the state kind of sends you a text message and it says, Hey, you're up for your first thing. And you get to pick the time, but not the date. So if they tell them like we can fit you in next Wednesday, well, they got to go. I mean, that may be the only chance that you get for awhile if you decline it. So the scheduling has been kind of a problem that the last few weeks to try and make sure that happens. And then typically when they get their second dose, you want to allow for the next day in case they were one of the people that have really gnarly side effects. So it's just another thing that you got to negotiate.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. But you know, if Carrie, if you're seeing good results, like I think in general, just your messaging and your sales calls and your marketing and your website, shouldn't be to bring that peace of mind to people so that people know that you actually care in the first place you're aware of the situation and you're actually addressing it. The worst thing you could do is just say nothing and then just kind of ignore it and be like, well, I don't know. What's COVID, I don't know. Like some people try to prevent some, there's probably some cleaning company out there that's completely ignoring this still. And, but the more you address it and communicate to your customers, here's what we're doing. We're doing everything we can. And we're really trying to be proactive. That's going to really help. And that's all people really want to know is that you guys are cognizant of this. You're aware and you're taking action to bring that peace of mind and take care of your customers. Right? They just want to know that you're taking those precautions. And I think that's still the case, but I think even more so now people are, that's not as, as it was a year ago, people are realizing we're hopefully coming out of this, Brandon, we keep saying, we're coming into the roaring twenties.

Brandon Condrey:
The baby boom, 2.0 man, this is going to be like, after world war II, everyone's going to be super excited to get out and do stuff because this summer, so, and right now our numbers are showing it. We've had huge spikes in interest, in new customers in March and April. And hopefully you're seeing the same. We've got a couple of new people jumped in. So James Adriana, if you guys have any questions, put them in the chat, we'll be happy to address it. Otherwise we're covering random topics from the people that had emailed questions and couldn't make it to the call.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. We're covering those. So we guys are just to catch you guys up. We're talking about it's the spring, it's April. This is our busiest time of the year. Typically when it picks up and you see a big spike actually turn during the winter months, we have not a slowdown per se. And like people don't drop off, but we just don't have as many new customers come on. And so what we're seeing now is, is the big spring cleaning uptake. Everyone's excited about coming out of their hibernation and they're ready further their clean house. And so we do see a lot of brand new customers. First-time cleaners, brand new recurring customers this time of year. So it's really key to dial in your marketing. If you've had your marketing kind of on pause there on the background or not at all, this is a great time to revamp that, to start getting into the visibility of your audience and your customers out there, because they are actively looking for this stuff more than ever at this time of year. And so the more kind of aggressive and proactive you can be, the more willing you are to take the risks or do the things that your competition is not willing to do to take that extra market share. And then we're talking to Carrie, she's setting up her Facebook ads. That's been a great channel for us. Facebook, Google, Google was our number one channel still is earlier in the day when we started, just because that's that direct search, like people are directly searching for what you have to offer versus Facebook is a little less qualified lead. They're not really looking for cleaning on Facebook, but it's still a great way to capture and get in front of those people. Because what I wanted to say about Facebook, Carrie, and anybody who's running Facebook ads is you can go back and listen to it's one of our other podcasts. I can't remember the number, but it's Facebook ads. It's like one of the first 10 episodes or 15 episodes. It's all about Facebook ads and running those. We talked about specific audience segments that we use and the targeting, and one of them is young families and like parents. And that is a great audience segment that we use on Facebook to generate more leads. And they usually have a really good response. They resonate with our messaging because a lot of our messaging is get your time back, right? And get your time back with your family and your kids. Don't spend your time cleaning on the weekends, go enjoy your family. Right? And so that really resonates with people. And that's why that market specifically on Facebook really, really converts well. So if you guys are doing Facebook ads target that if you're doing Google or other ads, obviously you're targeting not just an audience segment, you're targeting keywords. So you're going to be targeting home cleaning or the zip code of your city, home cleaning, house cleaning, green cleaning, whatever those keywords are. And again, guys, the beauty of all this is you don't have to be an expert at Google ads or Facebook ads, or you don't even have to know how to set them up. I mean, we teach you guys how to do that in the course, we have step-by-step videos to do that. But if you're just like running low on time, or you're just burning the candle at both ends and you're like, I can't, I just don't have the time to figure this out. That's okay. Like you just need to understand enough to be able to delegate it. And really we did a lot of this in the beginning, but we quickly delegated it and you'll notice the faster you start delegating stuff in your business, whether it's the cleaning, you know, if you're still cleaning, bless your soul, but, but you got to hand that off. And just like that, the cleaning, once it gets handed off, then you're more efficient. Then the product gets delivered even better. You're not burned out. You're able to grow the business and work in higher level tasks and things that the strategies that actually grow the business, like the marketing, like the sales, the branding, all the things that are going to bring more customers into your business. And yeah, if you don't know how to set up the Facebook ads or Google ads, watch our videos. And if you really don't want to do it still just go on Upwork or one of these freelance websites go on Fiverr or Upwork Fiverr. Probably not for the professional stuff as much, but Upwork is a great website and I would highly recommend you guys find an ad guru on there that will help you set these up if you're having issues or challenged or whatever. It's okay. Don't worry about it. You focus on growing your business and just getting the right people on the team. And that's the biggest thing. Just keep moving forward. And if you get stuck on something, understand it enough to be able to hand it off and have someone help you fix it and do it all the way. Yep.

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Brandon Schoen:
Hey guys, quick question. Does your cleaning business need more customers? And the answer is of course yes. So if you're like us and you want more customers, we've created a 10X marketing bootcamp course to help you guys 10X your business, get to that seven figures and beyond, and really commit to your success. So if you're ready to commit, let's tell them where to go.

Brandon Condrey:
Head over to Profitcleaners.com/courses. You can get started right away.

Brandon Schoen:
We'll see you guys on the inside, keep it clean!

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean.

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Brandon Condrey:
I've got a question here. We've just launched a new website and a new city want to promote it. How much do you recommend to spend in Google, Brandon, the ad guru here, but generally speaking, I would say as much as you can spare the Google ads or that's where 95 plus percent of our lead generation comes from. If it's a one-time shot, like you're brand new and it's a big campaign for you to try and get that up and running, I think hiring a consultant to kind of help you manage on a project basis. Like just this campaign to get people through the door might be a good idea.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I'll let you guys, because I used to set up Google ads and all this stuff, like years ago for other businesses I had online and it's like Gary said, it's like every other day, it's changing. There's a new thing happening with the pixel code. It's always changing, right? So it's hard to keep up and that's all you do. All you do is Facebook ads. And you're going to know what all the changes are all the time, but that's why we very quickly in the beginning, we set them up. Some of that stuff in the beginning to get going. But we very quickly found an expert who knew all those trends, who knew all the updates happening in the industry, on those platforms. And then you don't have to worry and stress about it. If something goes wrong, all of a sudden your ads aren't working. And you're like, I don't know what's happening. And we're not. We're losing revenue that doesn't have to happen. If you just get the right people on your team, people think it's really expensive.

Brandon Condrey:
No, this was our guy in Seattle, right? How much should we pay that first guy in Seattle who set up our first campaigns when that was kind of on autopilot?

Brandon Schoen:
Like a lot of them are really flexible and they'll charge a fixed rate or an hourly rate to set your campaigns up for you. And I think I want to say it was, I don't know, 500 bucks. I have something listen to,

Brandon Condrey:
yeah, it was like $500 or less. We found a guy who did cleaning company ads. That was his specialty. He was based in Seattle. We told him what we wanted to, what to shoot for. And then he set up the campaign. And then from there it was just how much money do you want it to throw at it via Google?

Brandon Schoen:
And I would suggest what you guys do before you dump a bunch of money into a campaign is you test it first. And again, there's tons of ways to do this, but I would just have your pro guy that you worked at, you hired on Upwork or wherever to just do this for you to say, we want to test a hundred dollars, $200, usually $200, $250 is a really good starting point. You can see if your ads are working, you can get enough data back to know what's working and what's not working. And if it's working, if you're getting any kind of leads or conversions or an ideally a, this expert you're working with is going to help you see what the trends are and what's actually working so you can dial it in and optimize it. And then when you spend more money, you're only spending money on ads that work. You're only targeting the people and the keywords and the audiences that actually convert to lead and eventually customer. So yeah, it's easy to get wrapped up in all the technology and trying to figure out how to do all this stuff. But honestly, you can hire someone for very, very inexpensive. You can even have someone set it up. Like we said, for a few hundred bucks set up your Google campaign, have a budget set aside for ads for the whole month, whatever that would be. I would start with a couple hundred bucks on a good month. We're spending. We're still not even spending that much money on Google because it's just so effective. And you don't need to spend that much money to get a lot of quality leads, but probably 500 to a thousand. If you can spend more than that, if you're really, really growing and you want to really kick it up, you could spend more than that a month. But the point is, these are quality leads, guys. You don't have to spend that much money to get in front of these people and get those quality leads. So other than that, I would just have someone like who's managing your ads. They probably only need to check in like an hour or two a week at the most. And a lot of these guys are 20, 30 bucks an hour, you know? So you're spending a very minimal amount to have someone completely managed all for you. And what's the value of that? You know, like how much is your time worth and how much are those customers worth? Is it worth paying somebody 50 bucks or a hundred bucks a week to manage that campaign for you optimize it, do all the little technical details and optimizations things that are kind of over most of the people's heads and just get it done, right? Just get it done. So you get new customers in the door. That's a system. Once you set that up, it's in place. And it's a beautiful thing because I like to think of it like building a pipeline. Like if you built a whole pipeline from a river down to the where your house is, it takes a long time to build it, right. It takes maybe a few months or a few weeks, but once you get it all connected, all you gotta do is turn on that faucet. And you've got water flowing. Those are your new leads and your new customers flowing into your business. And that's how you got to think about all these systems guys, setting up whatever channel you're marketing on, whether it's Home adviser or next door or Google or Facebook, once you set it up, that's all the hard work is in the setup. It's in figuring it out, setting it up yourself, or hiring someone to do it for you, very inexpensively. And once the system is up, it's just, it's going.

Brandon Condrey:
Sure. So hopefully that helps with the Google thing. James said, we just started at the end of 2020, we went from $0 a month to $10,000 a month, very quickly way to go, James. I done awesome, man. He says, he's got the VA and the sales are all working but he's struggling with the cleaning and delivering a quality product and wants to know if we're going to get a cleaning system course up. The answer is yes, we're in closing final negotiations. We hope getting all that content set up. Most of it's actually been recorded. We're just working on this sort of licensing royalty split to get that out to you. So we're hoping to have that out as soon as possible. So stay tuned. But yes, it's on the way. I know that that's so struggle. If you've got people that were brand new and haven't had cleaning experience in the beginning, when we were training new cleaners, we were operating off of a very Rocky shoddy GoPro video that we kind of shot. And then what was really helping us though, is if you were able to find experience cleaners, you can wing it for the most part. So in the beginning. And so if you're able to get someone James, you specifically said you had people that were new to cleaning, which is it's cool that you got people that are into cleaning that haven't done it before. But if you're able to find someone who has a few years in it, hotel, housekeeping is a good one to target. And by and large, they'll just kind of bring some experience to you. And then whoever you find that's the best one. That's the one that you promote to a trainer. Congratulations, you're training all the new hires because you know what you're doing, but yes, stay tuned for the course. That's we're working our way through that.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Sorry guys. I mean, it's, we, we wanted to have this out in like January, but it's just good things take time. So it's obviously a huge part of, you know, you gotta have the product so you can deliver a great product. That's huge. You got to bring in the customers. So you have the sales and marketing and then we've also been working on and we're going to share a lot more content soon is the getting in the keeping of the money. Once you get the money in the business, how do you keep it in there and how you pay yourselves and keep everyone happy, these different stools, I would guess legs of the business. And you've got to get all of them. Right? So yes. So that, as Brandon said, we are working diligently to get those training videos and processes out for the actual cleaning. So bear with us, it's coming.

Brandon Condrey:
It's coming. Yeah. I'm curious If we've tried Google guaranteed. You mess around with us. These are the local service ads that Google engineered to kind of build a bit more trust into the system. And I know we played around with it, but I don't know that we're running those actively.

Brandon Schoen:
So it's a great question Carrie. So that system is set up by Google for specific markets. So it's not even available. I think it's, for example, maybe plumbers can get it, but maybe not HVAC people are, I don't know what certain services in certain industries. It's not, they're still rolling it out and they're just testing it. So that's at least what it was a year ago when we were testing it more. I think definitely test it. Anything, not anything but like Google maps, good stuff. These days, they've got some great pieces of their platform. And that one specifically is interesting because it's more of a bidding system. So instead of like with Google adwords, you're actually bidding. So a keyword that you're bidding on and it costs $5 a click or whatever the cost is versus the bidding system. The Google guaranteed is more like you set a bid and as long as you're the highest or whatever you set your bid at, if you're the highest bidder, then you're going to get placed. The highest or Google is actually going to show you. So your ad above the other ones. So we did play around with it. We're not doing it still. Like right now, I'll have to get more feedback from our team. We're running all the ads right now. It's definitely something you want to test and see. Cause every market's different. It's just, we have so much more success right now with the targeted normal Google adwords. We just didn't really see a huge need there. But what I also like about the Google guarantee does it shows up in the maps really highly. I think that's where it shows up. And there's also ways to run ads within the Google map. So, but I would say by far on Google, you do nothing else. Focus on your Google maps. And there's some videos on the course too, that show you how to talk. There's some low-hanging fruit basically where if you literally just complete your Google listing, add some pictures like more than two or three, because most of your competitors have one. And all you have to do to stand out is add five or 10, but I would highly recommend you add a hundred pictures to your local listing take before and after pictures, take pictures of your teams, your office, whatever, as many things you can do to tell the story of your brand, put those on your local maps, put your keywords in there. And then some of the things we mentioned in the course guide are like kids, customers to actually take a picture of their clean home, the on location, because the location services on the mobile capture their geographic location. And it tells Google where they are when they're leaving that five star review with content, with an image. So things like that when we started doing stuff, I like that guys at skyrocket our rankings in the maps. If you look right now, if you go, when we go search like housecleaning Albuquerque, we're the number one in the maps. Okay. And that's usually where people look for local businesses right away. They sometimes they'll scroll down and look at the other ads and the S you know, the organic rankings hardly ever. Is anyone going to go to page two when you're looking for a local business, think about that. You search what you're looking for and you that little map box that pops up has all the local businesses. That's what you look for. That's what people look for. So focus on the low-hanging fruit. You can run the ads and you can do the other stuff. When we didn't have that visibility, when we didn't have any rankings, when you didn't have any, nobody knew who we were. We were brand new. We ran ads because paid traffic is the fastest way to get leads, right? If you're running it on, whether it's on any of these other platforms, there's Thumbtack, there's Home adviser. There's next door. You can run ads on next door. Now those are really cool, really targeted. And, but that's the fastest way to generate instant leads, instant traffic, but otherwise the long-term play is doing the SEO. And like, while you're working on your maps and you're waiting for those to rise up in the map search, do some other stuff to generate those leads, but just know, like right now we have so much momentum from the last couple of years, doing all this, that we actually don't have to spend as much money on the paid advertising because we have so much new demand and organic growth. Now our sales guy, Matt, he's crushing it right now. And he's breaking all his records, but he's also letting us know that so many more people are referring. And they're just saying, Hey, I heard my neighbors over here. Or somebody talked about you. It's a lot more referral business that goes back to your marketing and your cars make your cars super wacky and weird looking because then they're eye catching. And then people literally tell us all the time, like I saw your cars driving. I see them every day. And that's what you want. You want people to recognize your brand and you want to stand out and your city. So that's kind of like the old school traditional route is do really, really interesting cars. Or you can go all the way traditional to billboards and radio and all that. But what we're talking about is that more new media, new school stuff that even a lot of the franchises are they're doing, but not to the extent that you can be doing. And there's a lot of more advanced strategies that they're just not taking advantage of. So like the Google guaranteed, a lot of franchises and big companies are not taking advantage of that. A lot of them are running ads on Google, but they're not running Facebook ads, or they're not running next door ads, or they're not doing anything to optimize their maps. So those are, that's the low hanging fruit guys do the stuff that your competition isn't going to do. Or if they're so big, they got lazy. And now they're not going to add pictures to their maps and do all this stuff that you can do being quick and nimble small business owner. Right. That's the advantage that levels the playing field, all this stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So I think that's it for the questions that you guys have put in the chat so far. So you got any other ones we need to cover from email.

Brandon Schoen:
Let's see here. So somebody says index card method for the guy who was asking about quality control and training,

Brandon Condrey:
We have a similar system. And that's what we're going to put in the course for you, obviously. So each one of our three team members rotates through duties, kitchen, bathroom, and Dustin. And they all work as a team on the floors. So the specific bulleted list on their little laminated card, when they're in a house, just kind of a little reminder of like, this is what you need to do. All that stuff in detail we put in the course, we can't release it. It's an intellectual property thing. That's what we're kind of negotiating at the moment. So stay tuned for that. But yeah, certainly if you just kind of tried to DIY at, on those index cards, like, okay, if you hired someone to clean your house, what do you want to be cleaned? You got to make sure that they hit this, this, and this assigned to someone running These cards. You can kind of Homebrew it that way, but hopefully we'll have something for you sooner than later. And it'll be a turnkey sort of solution on the systems for cleaning. So that's in the pipeline.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely guys. So let's see. What else, what else, primarily the focus of these live coaching calls is to help with client acquisition, like getting more customers in the door, keeping those customers. So we don't focus quite as much on these calls as like with the training and the other systems and the cleaning as much.

Brandon Condrey:
But I got around, we can throw in here, let's talk about hiring. We recently had some struggles with trying to get cleaners in and also, Oh, an office hire. And so we had a first interview with an office hire, and then we had a second interview. And in between the first interview, Second interview Biden signed the big stimulus package. The rescue America plan, I think, is what it was called. And that included the $1,400 stimulus payments and the extension to the federal unemployment benefits, which I think was $300 a week. So New Mexico pays 250 a week in unemployment. And with federal unemployment, that brings up to 550, $1,100 every two weeks. That's roughly what our cleaners would be making a net pay if when they hit their bonuses And stuff. So it's hard to get people to give up the unemployment and come work really hard if they don't need to do that. So I believe that unemployment extension goes through September. So we've been kicking around some ideas in the office about how to get people in the door. And so the thing that we're trying right now is we offered a bonus to our current employees. If they could bring us a qualified employee. So we'd give them 50 bucks as soon as we hired them. And then another hundred 90 days later, once they pass their probationary period. So we're going to pay the existing employee $150 to bring us qualified people. They know what it's like to work for us so they can talk their friend or neighbor into coming to work for us too, because we're so awesome. And then if it doesn't give us the results that we need, then we'll Probably add onto it in the form of we'll pay you a bonus to come on board to, to the future employee. So it'd be bonus two ways you get bonus. If you give us the person, but also the new hire gets bonused. So you got to operate within your cashflow constraints and budgets and things like that. But we're at the point now where we're maxed out with eight teams and we actually just sent a message to our car guy this morning that we need to get our ninth car up and running here in the next couple of weeks, because this is the busy season. We got to do it, but it's going to be really hard if we can't get three new people to come clean. So that's just something that you guys might keep in mind. If you're struggling to get cleaners, you got to adjust. Somehow you got to entice them enough to either give up the unemployment that they're on to come do some things for us, be part of a social group again, or entice them enough to leave a job that they're at one thing we've always, we've kind of caused, I joked about doing it, but maybe it would work is going to one of the big franchise competitors and just putting flyers on windshield wipers of cars because they work there. We know that it's not good to work for those people. You know, like we've had applicants that have come in from the big franchises that there have been working there for five years and they got like a 75 cent raise over five years. So just them jumping ship to come work for us could do equate to something like a 25% pay increase before the bonus kicks in.

Brandon Schoen:
So we've actually talked to a lot of other people that you guys in the group and other students, and that had a lot of issues lately, including ourselves. But I feel like we have a little different market here in New Mexico, but on a lot of markets guys, as people are really struggling with the hiring, whether it's cleaners or upper level, other management or other people. So I think it's just a result of the economy right now. And I was just driving around yesterday and I sent, there was like now hiring signs all over the place. Like there's a lot of unemployment still, but still people looking for jobs, but also maybe not as motivated because they're, they're just getting.

Brandon Condrey:
It'd be a bunch of sources, but we're definitely not the only industry in this boat. When we were talking about it in the office, our trainer was saying that she saw ads for McDonald's and burger King and all these fast food places that are all also desperate to get people through the door. And then there was a news article locally about a restaurant group. They have 12 restaurants and they just can't keep them staffed to open the restaurants. They want to open the restaurants, but they don't have the people to do it. So they were paying, I think they were paying $500 if you signed on, they got like a sign-on bonus and it was payable after 90 days. I'd love to be able to do that. I don't think that's necessary for us right now, but we may get to that point. But the idea is other people are also in the same boat. So how do you make yourself stand out against those other companies that are also struggling to hire? Would you rather operate a french fry machine or clean someone's house and not have direct micromanagement? You've got to get creative on job ads and things of that nature.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think what we do, it's not perfect. Obviously we're still having issues with the market, but really do things to stand out. Just like how you attract customers for cleaning. You are differentiated and unique and different. We'll do the same with your job ads. Like we, when we, our most recent office hire in the last few times, and this is the other thing, we've had some issues hiring someone in the office to stick around. I'm not quite another second person as a backup and it's just been kind of hit or miss with the quality of things. And I don't exactly know I'm trying to figure it out still, but I think one of the things we put in the job ad, it just, it's a really well-written job ad and it stands out. It is not the same, like generic kind of ad everyone else read. And so it makes us stand out. And so even just from the simplest thing, like write a really unique, interesting job description and make it sound fun, make it sound compelling. We have examples of those job posts and stuff on the website on Profit Cleaners, on past episodes and hiring and stuff like that. So check those out, but do whatever you can to go above and beyond it, maybe it's paying more. Maybe it's just the culture you guys bring in and how much different it's going to be, how much better it is working from these other companies. And then I don't know what else we can say. I mean, just one of the strategies we use is to make sure we qualify people so that it is a have them show up a second time, that same day that they come in and interview see how they can adjust their schedules. And if they can show up again and actually be consistent and show up and make arrangements and be reliable, that's been a big issue. People are having is getting people to show up and getting people to be reliable. So try to qualify them upfront, try to make your offer more attractive than the other cleaning company on the street. Maybe that's paying more, maybe it's better benefits, some perks. Maybe it's just whatever you can think to make your offer more compelling and then qualify them, make them show up a couple of times at that first interview and see how they handle it. But those are some issues that people are struggling with. We're still working through it, but we'll update you guys more on, on things as we learn them. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we're coming to the last couple of minutes here because we've got about five minutes left. So if anybody else has any closing thoughts, please let us know. Otherwise we do these calls once a month I believe. And please jump in on the next one. You can hit us up in the Facebook group, if you have any questions or on the website or at hello@ProfitCleaners.com.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And if you guys can't make one of these, just send us the questions. Hello@ProfitCleaners.com. And we'll answer them here on the live call.

Brandon Condrey:
And then you can get the recording after it's done. So this one will also be published for the group as soon as we get the recording process, but we're always happy to help in any way possible. James, congratulations on the growth that has come in. So kick ass way to go.

Brandon Schoen:
Definitely. That's really exciting and now's a great time to be starting out and it's a great time of year to be starting out or just getting going even so, but if you're already in business, you're going to see a lot of growth right now. And again, just capitalize on that. Now's the time to be out there, marketing, making a bunch of noise, getting out there and getting that visibility because people want what you have to offer. You just, they just don't know you exist or they haven't seen your, your marketing message enough. And then again, if the cars are eye-catching, you have some added organic marketing there. If you're making your customers happy and they're so happy. And so over the moon, they're going to go tell their friends and their neighbors are going to come over and say, Hey, how do you like that company? And that's really what you want to get guys. And that's kind of what we're starting to get at is that momentum where word of mouth and just the overflow of that organic marketing over the last couple, two, three years of just pushing content out, online, doing the SEO, doing the local maps, it's all starting to catch up. And so if you guys just focus on those areas as well, that's the same thing will happen. You can balance it out with the paid traffic and get more instant traffic that way, but just diversify, just like in any investment you want, you don't want all your eggs in one basket. You don't want all your leads coming from one channel. You want them coming from multiple sources. And that's how you build a really healthy brand, really healthy businesses. You have one or two leads coming from Home visor, five or 10 coming from Google five or 10 coming from your direct mail, five or 10 coming from Facebook ads. And then together you have this big network of new, fresh business.

Brandon Condrey:
And it's not just from one place it's totally efficient in multiple ponds all the time. And then, you know, get creative it's spring. Things are warming up. One thing that I've always wanted to do that we've never gotten around to is putting up a booth at a farmer's market share you go pitch people on cleaning there we in particular are environmentally friendly that tends to jive well with the organic food crowd. So that's one thing I've always tried. So if you feel like you're stuck, you're in a box, think of something weird, go to go set up a booth inside a whole food. See if you can negotiate that with Mr. Bezos and see if you can up a booth there, but even a local farmer's market, just to be able to talk to people and get names and numbers. We've done one Home show, which in the end, wasn't that great of a path, but we did learn some stuff in terms of showmanship at the booth. And one of the cool things that we did was we bought it was on Amazon. It must have been 70 bucks, maybe a little bit less, but it's a Plinko game. So it's like a tabletop version of Plinko like on the prices, right? And at the bottom you get to label what the little columns are. So we had labeled you get 30% off your first clean or 50% off. And then we had one where you, if you landed on it, you were entered in to win three months of free cleaning. And we got a lot of response out of it. It did. It's just that the venue we were at, there was a lot of people that were from out of town and it wasn't going to make sense for them. Cause we obviously don't go to the next door city or whatever it was. That's something that you could take to a farmer's market. Maybe it's a fun game. People come over makes a weird sound. Just something everyone's got that spinny wheel one. We saw that like 10 times of that Home show, but nobody had Plinko.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. And just another thing we were talking to our sales guy did a week. We didn't do this as much in the beginning because we didn't have the time to do it. But if you're getting leads at all guys, follow up with those leads. Like it's so untapped right now. Like you get all these people like coming to your website, that's a number one. Why you want to be capturing those leads on some type of a form or a click funnels or something. So you actually retain that customer that lead and you can follow up with them that way, but also just pick up the phone and call them or email them or text them, whatever you gotta do, because that follow-up is key to getting those new customers or new leads to convert to customers.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. That's really, really huge saying, you know, nine times out of 10, they don't close on the call. They say, I'm going to talk to my spouse or whoever's paying for it or whatever. And then we'll get back to you. But if they don't get back to you, that's on you. You got to call them up two days later, three days later, send him a text message, something, just make sure that you're juggling the leads that came in. That's the top of the funnel. You got to get touch points. So they get to the bottom of the funnel. So make sure you follow up. I think that's a good nugget to close on there.

Brandon Schoen:
A lot of businesses probably close like 10% or something on average or whatever, if they're not even trying, but we really try. And we here at 50, 60% conversion now with their leads to convert into customers. So that's huge guys. I mean, if you can just optimize that percentage right there on your followup and converting those leads to customers, just because people see that you care. I mean, if you really care about your service, that much you're going to follow up and people are going to feel that like, if somebody tries to call me and sell me something and they don't call and follow up, I just basically think like their product must not be that good. Like they didn't even follow up.

Brandon Condrey:
We got one last minute question from Adrianna here. So how are we doing estimates? In-person online or through the website? The answer is there's zoom. There's zoom appointments just like this. So we have a dedicated sales guy. We're fortunate enough to be able to afford that position. And so what he does is you go to the website, there's a form. You enter in the data, that's name, address, phone number, the basics, things for the customer. It points them to a scheduling service called Calendly, which is going to allow them to pick a time. And then our sales guy meets up with them on a computer. You're usually on a phone, they're going to walk them through the house so we can physically see what we're ourselves into. It's a, it's a good chance for us to make sure that we're not putting our employees in a bad situation or that we're not charging enough because it's really bad. So that's how we do that. And then at the end of that call, Matt explains all the good things we do, why we're so amazing. And then you do the pricing at the very end that gets emailed. The CRM we use has the ability for those estimates to get accepted online. So even though they may not say yesterday in the call, they could think about it overnight and then click. Yes. So online is what we did. We were going to shift towards that eventually anyway, but the pandemic kind of forced our hand cause nobody wanted people in their house, you know, just for a sales call. So, but we're not going back. Like we're able to cover quadruple the ground. I think instead of, cause if you're doing an, a person, you have to drive from point a to point B. And if they're across town, it's going to, you're going to suck up time, just driving from a to B plus that's less time that you can be in the office, you know, working on the business, building stuff up. So online is how I would do it. I would really shy away from flat rate pricing where they plug in something on their website and it spits out a number. So what you don't want to do is like I have three bedrooms, two baths, okay. And then the website says that's $150. So they're going to equate that with, you know, the housekeeper that charges 50 bucks. Why is it so expensive? Well, it's because you didn't get a chance to explain how amazing you are because you didn't do it on the call. That's how we do estimates.

Brandon Schoen:
If you guys want to see our process, just go to Sandiagreenclean.com, click on the claim your weekend button. It takes you to our form. And if you do want to schedule something, just cancel it after. So it doesn't fill up our schedule, but that's all we do. We have a form that connects to Calendly that schedules it on zoom with our sales guy. It's just that little circle float right there. And he follows up with them afterwards. And that's huge too, to close those leads.

Brandon Condrey:
But also if you're in here, that means that you bought the course. And so the course has a module on estimates. And I think there's some recorded zoom ones that we did in the very beginning. So you can actually see how we did it, what we explained to them and then how we set it at the end where we emailed them. But online is the answer. All right. Have a good one guys. We'll catch you later.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It's Sandiagreenclean.com. I'll type it in here for you guys. Yeah. Check it out guys. Get out there and get some hyperlocal marketing going and get in the season. It's the time to grow your business. So it's exciting time guys. So hope this call helped all y'all and there'll be a recording of it. If you guys want to go back, it'll be in the course, check it out and we'll see you guys on the flip side.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean.

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