Episode 37: The Importance of Hiring and Why You Should Do It Now

Episode 37: The Importance of Hiring and Why You Should Do It Now

Brandon Condrey:
If you really play out, like how could it all go wrong? You can equally play out how you would real-time adapt to that situation. It's not the end of the world. If it doesn't work out, especially on the first try. When you screw something up, you learn a bunch of stuff, fail up, try it again next time and keep cruising. You'll learn something from every time. It doesn't work out as expected.

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 everyone on to another episode of the Profit Cleaners, where you're in the place to learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners to level up your game, win in this industry and take it to the next level. I'm your host, Brandon Schoen. And I'm joined by my cohost

Brandon Condrey:
Brandon Condrey.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right. And today we're going to be talking about something very important. It's actually a fear. A lot of us have when we're starting any business, but specifically in this business. And that is the fear of hiring people. And so we're going to talk about today, why you need to face that fear. Why now is such an important time to be hiring. If you want to grow your cleaning business, you got to get good at hiring. You got to get good at delegating. And so we're going to talk about facing that fear today and actually wanted to start out reading a really cool story that we got from one of our customers. So we're going to go into that and the details of this guys, but just wanted to reach out to all of you that are probably thinking this in your head, because I was thinking this when we first started, I'm sure you are too right. And it's a scary place to be because you're like, Oh my God, we have to hire people to get this done.

Brandon Condrey:
Right. And that's a scary feeling them and train them and do all the things.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So this is one of our customers reaching out and had a great question. I'm going to share this with you guys. So she says, Hey guys, I recently started listening to your podcast just last week, needless to say, I'm addicted. And I've had my cleaning business for almost five years now. I just started it after realizing I was never home, or I just started after realizing I was never home to see my kids just wanting more freedom. This is again, when we started our business, same thing. We wanted to start a business that created freedom in our life, not just on the job. So I'm sure a lot of you guys relate. I worked from sunup to sundown. I was miserable. I started on the cleaning side and quickly left my eight to seven job and went all in. I have never regretted it. I have however, been having a difficult time hiring point blank. I am scared, scared that I won't be able to pay them scared that I can't train them and continue to keep working in the business to keep money coming in while I'm training. Your podcast has inspired me to push forward and make the tough decision to stop being scared and just take the leap. So I'm really interested in your courses. Awesome. The courses are going to teach you guys how to get more of those customers, how to close those customers. And we've got other stuff coming out as well. The processes, the techniques, all that stuff. But she said, I'm really interested in, I looked up the course curriculum, let everything you guys have, but mainly your question is I'm scared and I'm scared of the hire and I'm scared to delegate. How do I do that? And how do I get over that?

Brandon Condrey:
Right. How to overcome the fear. Right? So let's talk about it. Let's work the fear. All right. So the fear is I am working in the business. I got it solidly dialed in right now. I want to expand. I can't expand without getting more people. You're scared about how to pay him and how to train him. Right? So there's a couple of things you could do. We've got an episode that came out recently about hiring during the 2021 unemployment windfall of everybody or how to get around that. So take that info into account to try and get the good people that you need. And then part of it, I think is that you need to trust the people that you hire. So you need to be comfortable with the ones that you hire. If it's hard hiring market, you can't be that picky. But ideally you're going to be able to get someone who has some kind of cleaning experience. So you're not training from scratch. Yeah. Cleaning, although like, you know, we're trying to make you all set your cleaning companies apart from everyone else, cleaning by and large is cleaning your, take a rag and wipe down the surface and you can interchange uniforms and brand stories and the equipment and chemicals that are gonna be used in there to make it more unique. But the actual nuts and bolts of cleaning is pretty much the same. So if you can get someone that has been cleaning, you're already off to a great.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think just to kind of circle back, like a lot of this, you guys is a mindset shift. So I can go back to like pretty much any business. I started in the past 10 years with doing lots of different businesses. But a lot of the fear even I've had was hiring actually real people like physical local people in my community, some of the other lawn online businesses I've had, it was all virtual. It's a little easier when someone you're hiring somebody on like a virtual Upwork or something and they're across the world or another state, it doesn't feel quite as real. And I don't know. So I had a little easier time with online businesses, hiring help and getting people on my team that way, because it was like fractional, right. Five hours a week, this person would work. And so when you're thinking of a cleaning business, you're like, Oh my God, these are going to be 40 hour a week. Full-time people I'm scared to do that. But it's this mindset shift of you, can't be the chief bottle washer, cleaner and sales person and the marketing person and the customer. Yeah. You can't do it all right.

Brandon Condrey:
But keeping in the bill, paying and all that stuff, a lot of moving parts go into any business. And if you're going to grow, you just get more moving parts. So you got to separate yourself from working in the business, to working on the business.

Brandon Schoen:
And we're going through a really cool book right now called traction, right.

Brandon Condrey:
By Gino Wickman called the entrepreneur's operating system. That's what he teaches you. Yeah. So that's kind of like for businesses that are like in practice, but it's like a way to really dial in and tool everything. So that, everyone's kind of on the same page. We'll give you a report on that when we finish it, we'll give you our book report.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. There's this concept in that book that I think really solidifies this idea in my mind, at least. And he talks about it's like you're hanging from this Roper. It was a vine, a vine. And so most entrepreneurs are hanging on this vine and they've got a huge drop and they've got a huge amount to go above them, but you really got to let go. And it's, it's this letting go and actually letting other people do the work and delegating that work is so important. And that's really a huge struggle. A lot of entrepreneurs struggle with. I struggled with it a lot. I know Brandon has, we all have, because it's just like, you want to like, keep everything in your control. You think that you're the best at doing everything and you're not. And that's where you gotta be honest with yourself and really start to humble yourself and be like, what am I really good at? What am I super passionate and talented at? What's my gift. And how can I focus and double down on that? And then I can let other people and let them empower them to do the best job they can do to fill in the gaps, to fill in the gaps. So that's how you really do it. And that's how you scale.

Brandon Condrey:
You're running the business. So your gift is going to be that I'm passionate about the business and maybe you're really good at spreadsheets, or maybe you're really good at ordering, or maybe you really like talking to the customers, fill in the holes that you don't have. So we hired a CFO recently who's, part-time, he's amazing. He's like a business coach. I think we're going to, it's going to work out really, really well. I'm terrible at cleaning. I never wanted to clean. So we hired cleaners to do that and developed a sort of training system around. So there's definitely ways to do it. But if we go back to this person in particular, who is scared of doing it, so there's a couple of ways that I think you can kind of counteract that. We've always told you in a couple of different episodes and in the course that are really good way to boost your business in general is to do free cleans for people that need it. Teachers, first responders, whatever you're passionate about. Find that community, tell them we're going to clean your house for free, bring in these three people that you hired. And then this is going to be a training opportunity. We're going to use it as a learning opportunity to clean the house. You can correct. Like, Hey, we don't do that. Or we do this differently or whatever. So you're in there with them watching them do that, tack on as many free cleans as you can kind of take. And then for the free Cleaners. Please leave us a review about how we did. And then you get a couple of five star reviews in there that kind of boost the business as a whole. You got some training time in there, the team, and then you're done was that she wanted to still bring in revenue while being able to train them. Right? So don't take out a whole week of free cleaners. Where are we going to train everybody? Like do one a day and then maybe have one person come with you to the paying customer at a time to kind of work them into the system so that your knife guinea, pigging the customer, if you will, the paying customer. And then the other way that I approach it because I'm very numerical. I'm a dude, how much money do you need? Reverse engineer it. You've got three people. Let's call it on the high end, $15 an hour, depending on where you are in the country. So $45 an hour for the team of three, you multiply that over a month, four weeks of 40 hours a week. That's 7,200 before whatever employer taxes you're responsible for. So you need $7,000 to be able to get them a month. You should have them fully trained. I would think after a solid week, this is like really overkill on how much money you would need to feel safe to do the experiment. So how can you come up with seven grand, borrow some from friends and family in our market, $7,000 would be bi-weekly cleaning on 2000 square foot houses, call it. So if you can find someone that will lend you that money in exchange for we'll clean your house for the next two years, that's an option. I closed out of retirement account to start this business, talk to him, angel advisor, depending on your age, I was comfortable doing it because I got time to make it up. And I'm confident that the business is just going to keep going on the rocket ship that we're on. That's also an option. When you start really doing the math, it feels like a lot. It's three people. We're paying them $40,000 a year and I needed so much money to do it. But if you break it down into the wind, can I get them up to speed so that they're cleaning and servicing the existing customers that frees up all time. As soon as you are not cleaning houses, you're not actually doing the cleaning part. The amount of time that you'll have left to then focus on getting new customers in, to pay for those cleaners. You'll be surprised at how fast that will move.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. I would say every time we've hired people, even in the beginning, especially it started with the cleaners. I cleaned myself in the beginning. We learned the process. So we understood everything. But Brandon, I know that we're not the best cleaners we know that's not our skillset. We know that we don't, we're passionate about building businesses and other things to grow the business, working on the business, not in the business.

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Brandon Schoen:
Hey guys just wanted to let you know that we are taking one-on-one coaching clients. And it's awesome. So if you want to be navigating the industry trends, figuring out how to grow your cleaning business to the next level. So you can win. Get more customers, have better systems, have better retention, all that good stuff. Then hop on one of our coaching calls and we'll love it. We'd love to help you guys out.

Brandon Condrey:
So to reserve your spot, head over to Profitcleaners.com/coaching.

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Brandon Schoen:
Once you make that mindset shift, I think we should tell them the story of when we hired Claudia, which is one of our office manager. And I was telling Brandon, we kind of do this man. We got to grow. And we got to delegate this stuff because I know we can call customers. I know you can do customer service, but it's not fun. I get stressed out. I don't know you would get stressed out.

Brandon Condrey:
I was getting really stressed out talking with customers and especially from the head complaints.

Brandon Schoen:
And we were like, you're so stressed out. You shouldn't even talk to these people because we gotta be working on the business. Brandon and I had this same fear that you guys are experiencing. We were like, God, we're fearful that if we hire, we're not gonna have enough money to pay him. And then we're going to just crumble and there's all gonna fall apart. And then it's just like, this fear drives you into this hole. That you're, it's negative. You gotta spin it the other way. And you got to start thinking abundantly and you have to start thinking, well, once we hire this person, it's not only going to free up all my time and energy, but we know that the money is going to come. We know that it's going to offset and it's going to bring in more revenue. If you're making the right hires. If you're scaling the right way in order to do that, you've got to have your systems in place. Of course you gotta be efficient first, but just knowing that as you grow with the more you delegate, the more you empower other people, the faster you are going to grow, because everything just moved forward without you, you can't just rely on you. It's going to break.

Brandon Condrey:
So with Claudia in particular, that was our office manager. When we hired her, that means there was someone in there to answer phones. So we weren't missing calls because I was at a sales estimate. Someone was there to pick up the call. You want an estimate? We can get you scheduled. It was a customer saying they had a billing problem, came and sorted out. The customer service side was what really boosted it right away. And so that just put more people in the funnel. More people came through to get credit cards in there and pay. And so that was it. And the way we paid for initially was we had a deal with our mentor in Denver Corby. We had a consultant thing, worked out with him and we had a monthly payment that we're doing. And we just negotiated with him like, look, can we skip the next six months of payments and double up on them for the latter half of the year to make up for it. And they were game for that. That was just a way to get creative. So like you have some suppliers that are negotiable that you might be able to fund angle, some wiggle room and some cash to kind of work that out. And I, we should have hired Claudia from day one. It would've been such a huge difference. That's my hindsight is 2020 at the time, I was definitely like, we're not even paying ourselves. Like, how are we going to pay this person? That was when we were brand new. And obviously things are working out just fine. So that mindset get someone in there and get the right person on the bus. You don't want to hire a landscape company to service the business. If you don't have customers coming in there, that's a real life example. But you do need someone to answer the phone. So try and figure out if you can make a VA come in right away to be able to help you tweak some stuff that's happening in the office so that you can then work harder on getting the teams trained faster. Those things are, that's all a bunch of knobs and sliders, and you can just adjust it to get the right amount of efficiency that you need for the next month and then tweak it so that, okay, now I'm going to refocus on sales to keep going. There's lots of different ways you can do it. There's lots of different ways to skin a cat. So go do it. I mean, I know you're afraid of it. It is a lot to do it, but if you just jump in with both feet, you just fully commit.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. That's what it's all about guys is jumping in all in all in mentality, meaning you can't give you any excuses to fall back on. And if you have that mindset, you're going to find a way to make it work. If you give yourself an excuse, like, well, if it doesn't work out, I'll just start doing it again. Or you're going to fall back into that trap where you're creating a job for yourself. You'll start thinking, how can you be like, think of it like a baseball team. You might start down on the field. He might be throwing those pitches. At first, you might be cleaning. Everyone's going to start there somewhere, right? Washing the dishes or wherever you are in the business business level down here. But as you grow, you want to get up in the sky box. You want to get up in the arena where you're looking down at your team and you're calling the shots and you can't call the shots. If you're down on the field, you can't work on the business. If you're down on the field, throwing the ball around. So you've got to get from maybe starting out cleaning, but having that confidence, having that mindset shift to know that long-term big picture vision, I have to work my way out of the business so that this business can take on a life of its own. And it becomes, it's almost its own thing. And the people that you're empowering create teams underneath them. And they're empowered to solve problems and do stuff without your approval because they're empowered. They have responsibility. And that makes for a much healthier, happier culture. Anyways, when people are empowered.

Brandon Condrey:
Less micromanaging, they know that, okay, I don't have to call the owner of the company to ask if I can buy office paper or staples or more cleaning company, because you empowered them to make decisions that were less than $500, whatever it is, that empowerment is key.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So a lot of minds have delegation read these books, traction. Clockworks a great book that we've worked through as well. That talks about this idea of delegation. And it's such a hard concept for people in business, ourselves included, but you got to work on that 90% of businesses mindset. So work on that mindset guys, to shift it, to face your fears. Once you face these fears, you'll realize that it wasn't even that scary in the first place.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. One last thing on fear, I definitely suffer from anxiety and this was a big deal when we were in the beginning and I was super stressed out. And so I can't remember where, but the advice was play out the worst case scenario. What is the worst absolute case scenario? I hired these people. They totally screwed up. We lost some customers. I fired them. I went back to cleaning. I learned a bunch of stuff. We'll try it again next time. So if you really play out, like how could it all go wrong? You can equally play out how you would real-time adapt to that situation. It's not the end of the world. If it doesn't work out, especially on the first try failures growth. When you screw something up, you learn a bunch of stuff, fail up, try it again next time. And exactly keep cruising. You'll learn something from every time it doesn't work out as expected. It's like a natural science experiment. Yeah. Thought it was going to do this. If I hired these people, Nope. Didn't work out. What did I learn next time? I got to ask this question on the interview to weed out this specific type of candidate to make sure I don't get that one the next time around.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And this is kind of another concept that just got me thinking of the lean startup method, which is get your minimum viable product out there as fast as possible to the market. Get your cleaning teams out there, your new hires, get them out there and let the mistakes happen. Get that feedback. Let some things happen. Then take that into your feedback loop and improve and improve and improve, and then put it back out in the market and then improve, improve, improve, and put it back out. And by the time your competitors, or maybe they delayed for months and months and years, even to do what you're trying to do, you've taken this feedback and made it so much better. And you're consistently taking action. You're so far ahead of all your competitors and everything else because you're taking that action and you're just doing it. You burn the ships, you went all in and there's no turning back. And that's how you face that fear. And that's how you conquer that. And once you do it, you will see the results. You'll see the momentum and that's how you do it.

Brandon Condrey:
You'll just feel better. Speaking of minimum viable product, we know that you guys keep asking about the cleaning processes course. That is something that we are very, very highly aware of. And we are constantly working on in the background. We are trying to get a beta version of it, put together that we would release to a select few of you to kind of get some feedback on if it's missing anything. If it is what you thought it's going to be, stay tuned for that, we will obviously let everyone know on all the social media channels whenever that's available, but that is definitely still in the pipeline. So keep a look up.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. So if you guys got value out of this podcast, video, wherever you're watching this and consuming this content, please add value back to us, reciprocate, click the like, click the subscribe button, leave us a review, leave us a comment. What are you doing to face your fear and to hire people and what are some stories and experiences you've had? Let us know. We'd love to hear your feedback so we can make the show better for you guys to help you out better. It's absolutely a big circle of everyone helping each other.

Brandon Condrey:
It's a circle of life. All right. So keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean, guys.

Brandon Condrey:
We'll see you on the next one.

Brandon Schoen:
See you in the next one.

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.