Episode 49: Getting Your Business Off to a Good Start with Brandon Condrey

Episode 49: Getting Your Business Off to a Good Start with Brandon Condrey

Brandon Condrey:
Build up the book of recurring service customers. During that time, you wow them with your customer service at your cleaning skills, you get them on board that you're a local company and not a franchise. And then when the time's right, you bump up the pricing to market rate. Some of them will leave and move inevitably. But if you've done a good job on the customer service and the cleaning, they're happy and it's hard to find good help. And so they're not going to leave just because you raised the prices to cover the market. You know what I mean? You can't be lower than the market forever, but that's how you do it to get market share in the beginning, price yourself low, pay people as much as you can build up the book of business and then raise prices to be equal with the market and then keep going. And then once that's done raise prices to be above the markets, your quality will be above the market.

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.

So what is up, sir? I read your description. You put in the thing. So I got a little bit there and then I went cruise your website and your Facebook page.

So I've seen that. So tell me what you want to know. Yeah, so really it's from the ground up, my wife, she'd been doing it on the side, like for a little income, not a business or anything. It was just cure there. She was going around cleaning houses. I've always had the entrepreneurial mindset. When I worked for myself,

I'm tired of working. I was in the Marine Corps for five years. I've done this service, you know, I'm a cop I'm kind of hot right Now. Right, right. Okay. So I'm kind of done with the service and I want to make my own ordeal. I'm only 24. So I'm young and I was 25. I'm too young to start anything I'm driven.

I'm very motivated to get something started. My mom is in Raleigh, which is like two hours away from us. And she has 30 clients that she cleans herself. She doesn't have a business per se. It's just all side income that she does. So I've learned a lot from her. How'd you find us? My wife. Did she found you guys on Spotify because she just looked up a cleaning company on Spotify and you guys came up with the Profit Cleaners.

So you found the podcast? Yes. Okay. So from the ground up, there's a lot to do. You got an edge here, so you've got a website. I can see that you got your Facebook page. That's good too. There's a couple of tweaks on there right away. It looks like you're using two different logos. I would just pick one and go with it.

You know what I mean? It's either the black one with the gold roofs. I personally liked the other one better, which is the A-frame houses facing you. And then there's just a couple of little tweaks here and there, like on your website, your Yelp listing points to Wix because they put that in there by default, if you don't have your own.

So I would update that completely. You know what I mean? Right. And then you need some photos on the website like of you or houses or people are just very visual. You can check out our website for some inspiration, if you want. That's Sandia Green, Clean. That's the company. We have an Albuquerque. Okay. So do that whenever.

But in terms of growing from the ground up, you need a budget. So you need some money to throw at it. And so it's either, so you can hire someone to do the cleaning for you, or you can put it into marketing to get more business. So you guys can clean yourself. So whatever that is, I cashed out a retirement account.

I contacted an old boss and borrowed 60 grand and he just did it on a loan. So if there's money, you can squeeze out of your pension account. I don't know how that works with that type of thing, but that kind of stuff, where you still have savings, that's really the step number one. And then beyond that, it sounds like you're struggling.

You've only got moving. Cleans is what you're dealing with. Right. We have one person that we do, one client every other Monday. We have her on there. Can we do Airbnbs as well? Usually it's every Saturday we're cleaning an Airbnb and that's about it. The rest of it, I mean, it's a military town, so it's constant turnover for housing.

So that's why the move-in and move-out is very precedent here. You were former military, right? Is that Navy or Marines or what, what is happening? Okay. So do they get, is it military housing or are they using military stipends to go get It's both. So you can do the on base housing or you can do out in town housing,

you can buy a house or rent a house. It's up to you really? It's up to your Sure, sure. Can you get in with the on-base housing to clean those? That's what we did today. We have a house on base that we did for a move out. And usually it's pretty easy to get on base, but don't have to have a contract or anything.

You just sponsor us on base. I work on the base so I can sponsor myself. But if my wife is the only one doing it, then she has to get the actual client to be there, to sponsor them on her, on base to get into that. Yeah. So we briefly toyed with that with the local air force space, it became too much of a hassle for us to deal with.

Cause sometimes the gate would be backed up and we're on a tight schedule and you just couldn't get in there. So I wouldn't say you necessarily have to pursue that. We had an officer's wife that wanted us to come every week and we just couldn't pull it off. And so in terms of getting recurring customers, there's a couple of things you need to do kind of off the bat.

You need reviews, you have none. So you've got to get some. So from the people that moved out, if you still got their contact info, just shoot them a text like, Hey, it would really help us out. We're brand new. Can you leave us a review on Google or Facebook or Yelp or whatever one you want to do to make that easy on them.

When you send them the email, put the links like this is our Yelp pages or Facebook pages is our Google my business. Do you have a Google listing? We do. We have three, five stars already on there. Perfect. So I didn't find the Google one, but the more of those you can get the better, but we were brand new and you might find this later when you hire someone,

we did training cleans. So we would go out and train the people to clean. We would do those cleans for free. And usually we would find some worthwhile party to give free cleans to like in our town. We do it for teachers or first responders you're in a military town. So I'm sure, you know, you can have no shortage of military people that you could come do a,

a cleaner, they live there in exchange for a review. By the way, since we're here, here's our pricing for recurring service. And then once you get those reviews built up, then you start throwing money at some ads to try and get people that are looking, especially on Google. When people are on Google, they are actively searching for, I need a house cleaning in Jacksonville,

North Carolina, like today. And so that ad will pop up. And as long as you've got a good ad copy, you'll get someone to fall through. The other thing on your website was under the services page. You have a book now button for all of these, just clicking through right now to see what it does. How do you handle the scheduler that it does on your website?

Yeah. So the website it'll pop up a calendar and you can choose your own day of booking. We haven't had anybody come through it yet. I don't know. I do have the ZenMaid. I have that for like scheduling software type. And then accounting was the QuickBooks that I'm doing. I see with the online scheduling and website is that everything says it's four hours.

And so that may be true. It may be that everything is four hours, but there's gotta be some where it's a thousand square feet. It's not going to take you four hours. But the person who has a thousand square foot house mentally is just like all four hours is too long. I can't be there for four hours. So it may be just simple as changing it to like,

if it's a thousand square feet or less, it'll take us two hours. If it's a thousand to 3000, we'll take this. If it's 3000 or both, there'll be that, whatever that is just to make that more reasonable, more accurate. I suppose, when you get big enough, you're going to not want to have this scheduler on your website because you all have mentally planned out this day.

We're going to drive from point a to point B and point C or whatever. And then someone's going to look in there, like it's off the route on the other side of town, it's going to throw you off. So I think it's fine for now. So ZenMaid does this scheduler that's on your website. So the Wix is the website, like where I ended up making the website and that has like its own scheduling software in there.

But it's like, I put the appointments in there in Wix to hopefully show up on the website. Like, Hey, this day is full this time and days, but it's not showing up. I was confused on that. Research it more, look into it, figure that out. Yeah, I do that. I think put a video on the website of just you explaining,

like, you know, get dressed up with you and your wife and your kids. People love family businesses and tell them like, this is my wife. These are, my kids were very entrepreneurial. We wanted to start this business, like give us a shot. We'll do this other thing. And then hire an editor on Upwork and cut in some video that you shot in someone's house.

Like I saw you made some Facebook posts of walking around like a move-out cleaning out. Good it look. So just put that all in there to someone when they go to the website, that's just the first thing they see. So I'll watch that video really quick. Like, oh, these guys seem legit. It just makes people feel better that they know it's a real website.

You're not going to like give your credit card something else. So there's that your other concern was hiring, right? So I'm assuming you want to hire someone to clean eventually. Oh yes. 100%. Cause I mean, I'll get done with a 12 hour shift and my wife's putting in eight hours in a move out and I go help her out after my 12 hour shift and don't get home till nine and I gotta be up at three 30.

So it's rigorous. That's unsustainable. Right, Right. So yeah, you Need to hire, do you know what the labor market's like locally? It's the, I think the Molly maids and the Merry maids people are hiring on for like $10, $11 an hour is what I saw on indeed. Anyway. Yeah. So our strategy personally has always been to beat the market rate as much as you can afford to do it.

So in our town pre pandemic, anyway, cleaning companies were paying like 10 bucks an hour and you'd find people that had been working at a cleaning company for five years and they were still making 10 bucks an hour. So we started off at 12. There's a bonus structure, depending on how fast they go on a given day, that gets closer to like 15 bucks an hour.

We adjusted all that. After the pandemic, we had to go up because labor got really tight because everyone was trying to hire at the same time. And so we just all went up for everybody. So if you're still at 10, 11 bucks an hour, then you got a good thing going where you can kind of beat that by if you're Africa 12 or 13,

that's enough to just make someone switch and then just be a good employer. Treat people like people, they got to leave because they're sick or go pick up a kid or something like it's going to happen. So you might as well just be mentally prepared for it. We work in a team of three. So the way that we do it, as one person is doing the kitchen and one does bathrooms and one does dusting and they burn through houses really fast.

Each team of three does five hours a day. So it's up to you how you want to work that like, if your mom's cleaning, she's kind of got you the procedure already. So you just need to figure out how to split that up. It's however you want to hire. So like you got to figure out what the first hire is. Is it a team of people?

So your wife's not on there. Is it two people to assist your wife? Is it one person you and your wife are gonna like tandem it and you're going to run the business first. You got to picture like what? That hire's going to be reverse engineer it like, what's the perfect person look like for that? They're a college student. They're there for the summer.

It's a military spouse that is bored. Like whatever it is that you're going to try and find, once you figure out who you think is going to apply for it. Well, then you got to find where that person is. So if they're hanging out in Facebook groups, you've got to advertise to that Facebook group or post in that Facebook group locally,

we don't find indeed does very well for hiring cleaners, but we are on the border with central America and almost all of our employees speak Spanish and they are all immigrants. And so where we get our employees now is basically word of mouth from the employees. But in the beginning we found these Facebook groups where Hispanic people were talking about jobs in town and we would post,

we would have our trainer go in there and make a post in Spanish saying like, Hey, we're hiring. We pay well, there's normal working hours. Not any weekends, whatever it was so that you could get exactly what we needed. And so we've never had a problem doing that. But I think the bigger thing is you just got to pay more than the competition,

even if you take a hit. Okay. Yeah, because I put an ad out on a need and I put it for 11 to 13 and the 40 people that applied for it. I didn't sponsored or anything. I didn't pay 40. Yeah. 40 people. Holy hell. Okay. Where did it go From there? Yeah. And I just screamed through it.

You got, your onesy, twosies are already know off the bat will make a great impact. I put in there like contacting like 20 of them, but there's only really one that I think could be potentially on board. What's holding you back from getting that going from like your higher start tomorrow. The amount of people that were cleaning, we don't have the biweekly clients yet.

We don't have the customers. So that's just a managing expectations thing from your site. So during that job interview, or when you talk to them, you have to say like, look, this is going to be weird in the beginning. It's going to be part time, but we're brand new. It's going to grow quick. And then we'll have you have a full-time as soon as we can,

when we started what we did was we told everybody that it's going to be part-time for like six weeks, eight weeks, or as long as it takes us to do it, I know it's problem, but we're working on it. And then when we had extra budget to work with, we would take them out on the days when we didn't have any cleans and go do door hanger in neighborhoods.

Just let people know that we're here. Like we're here, we can't in the beginning, we didn't have money for digital ads. And so we did a lot of like guerrilla style door hangers, and setting up a cable outside of like a grocery store. Like wherever you can get in front of people to get there and pay them your 12, $13 an hour or whatever it is,

cleaning rate to go advertise. And then at least you're there not sitting idle and looking for another job, like a Tuesday when there's something going on. So that's how it suggests there. But it's a hard leap. It's a hard leap to do that when you need it. But that would be a situation where it look, we can fill the mornings of the days that we don't have booking clients with these free ones in exchange for getting some reviews and also getting our new hire,

like up to speed on cleaning procedures and stuff. And then they'll come in after that. That's what I would do. The way that we do hiring is when we post an ad, we just put a link to our website. We have a constant form on our website. It's just like employment. And you go there. We have screening questions that we want.

We even ask for posting a video. So post a video of yourself on our cleaning form and tell us about it. Why you'd like to work here. We do have a little bit of a benefit because of our size and age that we've got a reputation in the market for treating employees really well. And so people want to work here. And so when they come in,

do you use those videos as like an indicator of how well they're going to be with customers? And so that's kind of a good way to get them in front of people. And then the result of that form being filled out as an email gets shut out to our task manager for software, it's called monday.com and then our trainer would bring in people for interviews and then go through the process.

We have people, no show for interviews all the time. That's just like part of the game. I don't think we have 40 applicants who may make a post. Like that's pretty cool. You got 40 applicants, period. I think if you find the right place to post for a service job like that, you'd get even more. So something like maybe Craigslist is where people are checking in your town.

Maybe it is some Facebook group that you don't know about. I mean, maybe indeed works. It sounds like you've got 40 applicants. That's pretty good. But just try them all is the idea. Yeah. I guess it's the leap of hiring somebody on and explaining everything. Okay. This is just starting. Seat's going to be patient at first and then growing into more a full-time position.

I think the biggest leap is ultimately like I work the 12 hour shift. It's a Panama schedule. So every other weekend I'm working it's Monday, Tuesday off Wednesday, Thursday. So it's kind of like a mixed in there. Ultimately I want to step away from that completely and just do this full force. The thought had come to mind to move in with my family back in Raleigh,

which is like two hours away. And you start everything from Raleigh, a lot more clientele, but you can start anywhere in my mind. Like you can start here. You can start over there over here. Totally fine. Yeah. Yep. Can you part-time it as the police officer? I can. I think, I mean, I know In general that police departments are usually hiring like all the time.

Like there's a shortage of law enforcement, pretty Much everywhere. Part-time police officer To make this leap of faith, like easier on you. So instead of you having to like cut ties completely and lose your salary, can you dumb down the Panama schedule to something a bit more manageable? So you can focus that spare time on business managers Where I'm at now?

No, unfortunately they only do full-time because it's a government position technically full-time or not. I gotcha. That is something to consider. If that's really what's stressing you out is cutting the job out and worried about that stuff. As you might be able to find like a part-time security guard, like, I don't know what's available locally, but with your skillset,

like what can you do on a reasonable schedule to give you more time and peace of mind that you still have an income coming in while you pulled up the other stuff In my head I'll quit tomorrow ordeal. Like not, I'm not worried about it because we have enough in savings that have be a float for six to eight months if need be. So that's not an issue for me quitting wise,

it would be more of how fast can I get profitable? I just have somewhat. So I'm just not living off of savings for eight months in a row. So the savings that you have is like personal runway for six to eight months, right? For expenses, right? What do you have for business funds? If you did that, if you quit tomorrow,

what can you put towards the business for ads and things like that? I would say up to two grand, possibly. Okay. If you conservatively put like 500 bucks a month towards Google ads, which is all I would focus on at the beginning of it's just Google, that gets you four months of recurring ad revenue ad spend. Rather, that's going to get it out there.

That'll just get people. It'll get you in front of people. It's a good idea. The other strategy when you're starting up at the beginning is to price yourself low against the competitors. So call up Molly maids and Merry maids and whatever else is in town and pretend to be someone else or have your mom do it or whatever, and get as much data on the competitions you can't.

So you can figure out what they're charging. And then when someone gets a quote from you for recurring service, make sure that it's less by a lot of 15% less than the competition, 20. If you can swing it and then build up the book of recurring service customers during that time, you wow them with your customer service and your cleaning skills. You get them on board that you're a local company and not a franchise.

And then when the time is right, you bump up the pricing to market rate. And some of them will leave at half with inevitably. But if you've done a good job on the customer service and the cleaning, they're happy and it's hard to find good help. And so they're not going to leave just because you raised the prices to cover the market.

You know what I mean? You can't be lower than the market's forever, but that's how you do it to get market share in the beginning, price yourself, low pay people much as you can build up the book of business and then raise prices to be equal with the market and then keep going. And then once that's done raise prices to be above the mark because your quality will be above the market.

Right? That makes sense. 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 would love. We'd love to help you guys out. So to reserve your spot, head over to Profit Cleaners dot com slash coaching. The other thing Is, if your wife just found us, there is a year's worth of podcast episodes up. We talk specifically about hiring. We talk about marketing. We talk about lots of stuff from those episodes.

So they're not long. They're like 20, 30 minutes a piece you can go backwards and listen to all those. Put you guys in my patrol car. I think I've played 95% of them. So you got that. And then you know that we have the marketing course, right? So that is something that you should look at. That is a deep dive on how to set up Facebook ads,

how to set up Google ads, how to run those campaigns, how to set the billing and bidding and all this stuff that's involved advertising on the back end so that you're not just like throwing money at Google and hoping that it works out. Like it's a targeted, you can pick a zip code, you can pick a town, you can pick all these things where you're going to target those ads,

that specifically where you want customers. So that course right now, I think is 500. We're getting ready to launch a big update to that in about two weeks. If you got into it now you'll get the upgrade one for free. I think it's going to be a thousand in two weeks or something, but we did a lot of effort on updating that for new stuff.

So I'd highly recommend that because I can tell you about the ads and stuff here. And you know, you've got to do the ads. That's actually the nuts and bolts of how you do the ads. You froze again. You still there, there you go. I got you. So there's that. And then tweak the website a little bit. Wix is good.

It's a good jumping off point. We recommend WordPress. And then you pay a little bit of money for a theme. So there's lots of third party providers that do slick looking themes. And oftentimes they'll come up with stock photos already set. So like your issue of not having photos and stuff on here, it'll come with placeholders that look good. You can just go in and swap those out with your own stuff.

Or that video. The one we used in the beginning was called thrive. So thrive themes, and that plugs into WordPress. So that would be a good way to get the website up. And really it's just reviews, training, do it. You need, you've got $2,000 for ad spend. If you put 500 bucks a month towards it, you'd probably be in good shape in terms of traffic to the website,

what you want to have as a good destination on the website that they land on. So that, that makes them want to book. If that scheduling thing isn't worked out yet, solve that before you put ad money towards it. You're just going to be wasting money if they get there and they can't figure out how to use it. So you want to be able to point them somewhere specific contact form,

text me like or whatever, but get it in there. So it's set and then make sure that there's some mechanism on the back end that either you're having to reply to them, or it is the system was ZenMaid that you've fixed. And it was like, actually like book it and let them book and ideally take deposits. ZenMaid to let you do that,

like get 25%, something like that. So they're not when you don't want us people squatting on your schedule and then canceling at the last second. And they held all that time. Yes, that was another question that I constantly have in my head of my wife does deposits through Venmo. She'll get like a $60 deposit for a $250 deep clean or whatever.

And I didn't know if that was a good idea or not just because I do like the fact that you're not going to get it back to be canceled, but do we go the route? Because I saw in quick books that you can do like debit credit card transactions. Do you get their card at the beginning of the month and then charge them for the month?

Or would it be more of, we came in, cleaned your house and then you'll pay us or pay us before we clean your house. Something like, That's how we do it. So we do it as like services renders. So we're going to charge you the data. We clean it, the CRM we use, we use service fusion. You use ZenMaid,

it's two sides of the same coin, but in our system we can store credit card numbers, they're encrypted. And then we have that person's credit card on file all the time. And so when we go to do a clean two weeks from now or four weeks from now, we just run it, just click run at the end of the day and make sure that you got it by and large.

Those never get declined like every now and then you'll get one that's the expiration date passed and you have to call them to get another one over the phone, but that doesn't happen very often. We've never done deposits, but mostly it's because they're recurring customers. And we know that they're going to be there in two weeks for move out some stuff. I think it might be a good idea to do that.

There are ways that you can do that on the website without having to do it. So either when you call the schedule and you're doing it on Venmo, like your wife's doing, but there's also automated stuff, which is what you did to schedule this. Like you paid through the website. So that's set up through Calendly, I think is what took your payment.

Calendly is also a good scheduler. It's seven bucks a month. It's dirt cheap. And they can rent credit cards through it if you want to do it that way also. Okay. Yeah. When you get bigger, I mean, I recommend doing estimates in some form of another, whether you're doing it on a phone like this and a zoom meeting where you can just walk them around the house,

or I heard you guys your episode on that. And so I recently went to that from now on, I think Wednesday was our first one, because I don't know if partnering up with Realty groups is the best option just because we've cleaned two houses for them. And we have not gotten paid yet for those two houses because the actual property owner has not written a check yet You need to work that out with the Realty group.

You need to tell them that like, look, pay us a deposit to get it going. And we can wait. Then they get paid by the other guy. But ideally we partner with a bunch of real estate agents too, but they paid for it themselves and get reimbursed from the client whenever they do it, it kind of puts the onus on them to go chase the money.

If that is that's a problem, that's gonna become an issue when you have to go run payroll. And if you haven't been paid, but it's been two weeks, but like where's the money to like pay the person that you had there in person. So like right now, it's just the two of you. You can like stomach it, but when they get bigger,

that that's problem. So we're always trying to collect the money at the time. Occasionally someone will do that on a real estate thing. It was Tom like, look, next time we need to be a French. We have a couple state companies that were in their bill pay system. And so like after the clean we send them an invoice and then we get a check in the mail.

Like I know four days later, a week later, whatever time their accounts payable does it. And when you get involved with bigger companies like that, that is how they'll do it. And it's just, if you can work it from a cashflow perspective, it's fine. Especially if you're reliable, like real estate agents have a really hard time finding people that will show up what they say to show up.

Right. Yep. What else do you wanna know, Nick? Okay. Yeah. So I kinda got all the research, myself, all the legal information, all of that. We've got the LLC done. We've got liability insurance coverage. We've got the QuickBooks does then may for scheduling. So kind of that era is I'm still learning QuickBooks and how like I'm still learning cashflow as well.

Like trying to get in my mind of interpreting how to define cashflow in my dumb it down for me. And I'm learning it as I go. The next big thing I think would be more moving into company vehicles is we have a paid off a launcher that we have and a little loan on a 4runner. We have the laundry usually for going to the houses,

either estimating or cleaning the house. So I tracked the mileage on it. Like, I'll do it on QuickBooks where I'll do, I'll put it in. The two. Andrews is from our house to the cleaning and the cleaning to the back of the house. I don't know if I'm doing it right by doing that. And do I need to transfer the car into my LLC,

his name to be doing everything. So the way you're doing it now is by tracking the mileage, you're going to reimburse yourself from the business for the work miles driven, which are different than the personal miles driven. So whatever the IRS rate is right now, 60 cents a mile, something like that, you would then cut yourself a check at the end of every month to reimburse yourself.

You can do it that way. It seems unnecessarily tedious. I would rather just transfer the entire car in to the LLCs name. It just doesn't do personal stuff anymore. And you use it for work only. You can still take it to the grocery store and stuff like, no, one's going to flip out, but you gotta make sure that when you do that,

I can transfer that into their name. You have to have a corporate insurance policy on it for the car, not just the general liability and commercial auto policies are different. Some things are acceptable use, like going to the grocery store. And sometimes they're not. So like, you need to make sure they know that. So your agent's got to know,

Hey, it's in the company's name, but I intend to use this to go do personal personalize on the weekends or something. So there's a symbol on auto policies. It's a number one through nine. And I, the higher, the number, the more coverage you have. And so like nine, I think it means any vehicle any time. So that means like if our employee,

if one of our cars is broken down, our employee took a personal car with the team in it to go clean that day. And they got in some horrific car accident is covered under our commercial policy. In some cases, it wouldn't be, it depends on your insurance. So you just got to make sure that your agent's got a dialed in for how you're actually gonna use it.

So there's that. I want to talk to my eyes. So the mileage is going to be a pain to do that, but you can do it that way. You can also not pay yourself back and not try it at all. Just use it for work stuff. You know what I mean? Cause it's just you. And then you mentioned general liability,

but do you have worker's comp set up? I do not know That when you're going to need, when you hire an employee, for sure. I realize that I haven't hired anybody on, so I haven't pulled the trigger on getting that yet. So I didn't know that I'll have that. I definitely recommend going through a broker as opposed to like your state farm agent or your Allstate agent or whatever,

like their rates are always way, way higher. So if you contact a broker, they're going to shop you around to a bunch of different carriers and make sure that we take the right stuff. I can tell you from far away that your workers' comp is going to be high in the beginning because you are unknown. They don't know what you do and how you work after.

Let's see, we just crossed 40 years after the three-year mark. We've had no workers' comp claims. Our rates went way down because you get what's called an experience modification. So that means that over the last three years, you've shown us that you're not an idiot doing. So we're going to lower your rates for worker's comp because you're not injuring your employees every other week.

So you're going to pay more in the beginning, it's calculated based off of payroll. So it's like $4 per $1,000 in payroll or whatever the local set up is going to be. Those are the things that I would like research that now. So you can mentally budget for it when you're going to hire someone. So does it kind of by surprise. And then at the end of every year on your commercial policy,

they do an audit. And so when you get your policy, guess you're going to guess I have this many employees and this many hours, and I'm going to get this much revenue. General liability is a function of revenue. Worker's comp is a function of payroll. So you take a guess and they charge you based off, I guess, at the end of the year,

you do an audit to find out what it actually was. Well, we grew so fast that first year that we ended up bowing, like $16,000 more on insurance because we have high payroll and high revenue that we didn't account for on the insurance. And then it took forever to pay it off. So well, we went to, in the end was we found an insurance carrier that would let us pay as you go for Rutgers comp,

like what was actually reflected. Like you submit a report after payroll, we paid this much cool. You are this much for workers' comp that saved us so much headache to wait for it. Because when you do the audit, it's already the exact amounts at the end. It's totally set. And then you had mentioned like, you're trying to work out what you would say to an employee about it's going to be part-time for a little while and we'll build it up.

This, we can plan those conversations out now so that when you have the employee, you're not trying to wing it. And like the job interview or better yet put in the app, like the position is 11 to $13 an hour for part-time to full-time like, it's going to convert, be honest, like spell it out. If you buy the course.

I think we actually give you the copy from the job ads we posted in the beginning where you're like, Hey, I mean, I'm really upfront. This is a new company. We're brand new. We're going to get big where you've got the drive to do it. But the thing is we don't have any customers straight down and just be totally upfront with them and tell them like,

look, we might be able to use you for some training stuff. And we might be able to use you for some marketing efforts. Like if you're willing to come, like, hang out with us on an off day, go do some door hangers in a neighborhood or whatever, just let them know. And then it's better to do that than it is to hire them on and be like,

Hey, by the way, we've only got 10 hours this week, instead of the expected 40, they'll be upset with that. So just be up front with it. And then the ones that don't want to do it fine. Like you don't want that employee anyway. You want the one that's going to work with the reality of your situation. Okay.

All right. I think my next question would be more towards bookkeeping. I'm not familiar with it other than knowing to keep receipts and to put it in paper somehow. Like that's all, I really know. No, you don't really need to keep receipts these days. Big ones. Yeah. Like you bought a car or you paid yourself $5,000. Like,

do you have to justify those big ones? Like gas, every QuickBooks is going to automatically classify all those things. Cause you're probably going to use a debit card or a credit card to do it. It's connected to QuickBooks. QuickBooks is going to say, yeah, because of the merchant ID on this, I know that it's a gas station. I know that it's a grocery store.

The one that I would recommend working on pretty diligently is if you ever order stuff from Amazon. So like we order a ton of stuff from Amazon and it's a blend. It's like 60% cleaning products and 40% office supply. So you need to be able to differentiate because those are going to be two different kinds of expenses in QuickBooks that are two different setups to your end.

So the more important part is to keep them in the right buckets. This one was all cleaning expense to someone's office expense. This is utilities, whatever, honestly, man, as soon as you can afford to do it, hire a bookkeeper. I hate bookkeeping is a nightmare. I don't like QuickBooks. I don't like it. So we've used a bunch of different services over the years.

Like when we were brand spanking new, we use this company called bench, which I think was like 600 bucks a month and they just did it all. And then they would shoot you an email that was like, Hey, what about these 10 things? You don't know what these are and then you're gonna answer their questions. They have those super slick app.

It's like an instant messenger. And you come back and say, well, this was for that. Here's a picture of the receipt. And you'd refer like scan it in. And anything like even a photo will do or telling me lost the receipt. And it was just like, it was definitely gas or like whatever it was. We met from bench to a different one.

That's defunct. Now, if you've got an accountant lined up, you've been a personal one. They will often offer bookkeeping services. So you can contact them and say like, Hey, we're starting a business. It's really low volume right now. Like what would you charge to set up bookkeeping for it? We're at the game now where we have a CFO that is on contract.

He works 10 hours a week, I think for a bunch of companies, but he does our bookkeeping. So he just built a system into it. And we have a weekly meeting where we go over everything, but I've never physically done QuickBooks myself because I just was. So I just got a bad reaction from Yeah. Cause I did see that. I mean,

whenever, cause we were cut like all the supplies right here in our guest room, it's like, this is an office right now. It's just all stacked up right here on the shelves. And I know I do see it come up like Amazon expense or income for service or whatever it comes in. As I have seen that, We definitely mentioned that on the podcast.

But the other thing is to read profit first, if you read profit first yet. No, that's a book by Mike. And really what it's going to tell you to do is set up a bunch of different bank accounts or whatever your commercial bank is. And you want one bank account that has all the money that comes to me. So all the deposits from credit cards and QuickBooks and checks and cash go to this one account.

And then from there you make these transfers to eat all these other individual accounts that are based on a percentage. So like you want this much for profit that you'll take in cash. You want a payroll account that dedicated payroll account will save you so much headache because if you accidentally overspend on buying cleaning supplies, one month you go to run payroll. Payroll is going to reject it because you don't have any money in the account.

It'll reject the transfer. But if you know that like ours right now is 70%, 70% of revenue goes to payroll that covers the owners in the office and everybody. So 70% of every dollar we get goes to this account and we don't touch it. And then when we go to run payroll, it's all in this account. So we're always covering. Then we do sales tax.

I don't know if you have to do Texas on service in North Carolina are not going to go Mexico. We do. And then insurance, I kept a separate account for it because I was just always paranoid about losing that. You don't have to do that. And then we have one for marketing and then we have the rest goes into this. Like that is the bank account,

like this general thing. And that's a reply, all the operating stuff. So that's where we spend money for computers in the office or cleaning supplies or whatever in the beginning, if you didn't want to do that, cause you got to pay monthly fees. All those bank accounts just get one for payroll. So you have one for money goes into here.

I transfer some to payroll whatever's left over so we can work with, for insurance and operating expenses. Okay? So that'll save you some headache. When you get to the payroll stage, pay for a payroll company. They're dirt cheap these days. I've heard really good things about Gusto, especially when you're small. They are very, very inexpensive. We are pushing 50 employees.

I think ours is 600 bucks a month or with a different company called Paylocity. But if Gusto will meet your need to do it on an app, like we've got a landscaper friend in town, he wants a little company. I think he's got like five employees. He just does it on his phone. Like when it's time to run payroll. So as soon as everyone's plugged in there,

you give me your bank account. You get direct deposit. Just like you're a big boy company. And everyone knows the difference. QuickBooks will do payroll, I think, but it's a lot of data entry to pull it off. I mean, it's going to be data entry in general with plugging in hours and stuff. But if you use Gusto, there's an employee app that your employee installs on their phone and they use that to clock in and out.

And so that's how you track the hours. And so when it comes tighter on payroll, you just review the time card. Yep. That looks good. Oh like this one day you had 20 hours, it looks like you forgot to clock out at the end of the day, go back and fix that. Like those types of things are just so much easier when you're using a payroll company.

Cause they'll flag it. Like they'll automatically say like, yo, this person normally works 10 hours a day. They worked 30. Is that a problem for you? And they'll go correct it. Otherwise if you're asleep at the wheel, cause you've been working 12 hour shifts and you've got little ones at home and you're flipping out, you might pay someone on that 30 hours,

LA thing twice. And then you're just losing money because you're not paying attention. The other good thing about using any payroll company is that as part of payroll is that you have to submit these forms to the feds and state government all the time. That's how they're going to calculate. Workers' comp is how they're going to calculate unemployment insurance, social security. They pay all those taxes.

If you're doing payroll yourself, you have for them cut the check to the federal government for social security and FICA and Medicare Gusto is going to do that just for you. And then at the end of the year, when you go to file your taxes, they give you this report. It's like here, this is how much you paid out. This is how many employees you had take that to your business account.

And they just do all that. It's just so much. What else, Nick? I think we're running at the end of our time here shortly. I can't remember what time we start with. It was more of a confidence booster and dude, you got this, like don't even think twice if you're 24, you've already got the mind to go hire someone to tell you how to do it.

You're good, man. I am pushing 40. I wish I had done it when I was your age. I mean, I tried with a bunch of other side hustles that just didn't get my full attention, but to quit the job and go all in, which is super scary. It's way easier to do it now than when you've got kids in college and two mortgages and stuff like you're a bit more nimble now than you would be leader.

And so it's good to take that risk. And when Brandon and I started this, one of the things we had noticed, like all these people that we knew that we would have defined as successful, the common thread was they all had their own business and if they were varying degrees of successful, but like, you're just never going to get to where you think you want to be by working for someone else.

And a lot of people don't understand that, but the other path of it is that it's hard. It's hard to run a business. And so people look at that, they're like, I'll just go get a job. So the fact that you're already here entertaining doing it and you already have that drive to do it. Just keep going, man, read some books,

pick out whatever you want. Like invest in yourself by getting some more knowledge and reading some stuff and just keep going, listen to podcasts, like whatever you want to do to like keep yourself up. And it'll just happen, man. Like we were in the beginning doing door hangers, like on the weekends and it was a hundred degrees outside and you're making negative money at the end of the year.

Like the business took a loss and you're literally at negative income, but like it's easier, man. Like the Fest you'd go for it the faster, like if you hesitate, it's just going to drag out the process to either get to the success point or get to the part where you fail. But if you go all in you'll know either way, right?

Keep it up, man. Join the Facebook group. Check in with us. Tell us what your progress is. It's fun when people do that, there's a girl in Montana and their name is Jan migraine. Who started just like you did from scratch young kids. She posts her income numbers like once a month. It's fun to watch her grow. It's really cool.

So do it just come and check in, hanging out with us. So we'll be fun. Come on. All right. CMN, we'll be in touch with email with a bunch of stuff with this recording and some other things. All right, Brian, I really appreciate it. All right. See you, man. Good luck. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today.

To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember keep it clean.

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