Episode 51: Developing the CEO Mindset

Episode 51: Developing the CEO Mindset

Brandon Condrey:
If you're always comparing yourself against someone else, this applies to a lot of aspects in life. Like if you're comparing your kids against someone else's kids, like why aren't my kids like the kid, like it's all negative energy. So with small business stuff, especially like this is September of 2021. This is in the process of post COVID. There's a lot of businesses that are complaining on the news about not being able to get employees and not being able to get this. And it's the government's fault. The ones that are succeeding aren't on the news because they already thought about it to get more people in the door. You're thinking about it from productive standpoint, instead of being in the box.

Brandon Schoen:
Instead of comparing your business to everyone else, maybe they're failing. Maybe they're succeeding, look inward and take responsibility for your own business. Start developing a bigger mindset to take, what is it I can do? What is it I can control to grow my business and not always looking at other people. How do we stir up those positive emotions to bring us to the next level, to grow instead of to stay down at the small business level.

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 to another episode of the Profit Cleaners, the only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world. And today you are joined by not only me, your host Brandon Schoen, but our cohost Brandon Condrey in the house. He is the spreadsheet ninja. He also knows a lot of other tricks that we're going to get into. But first we're going to talk about developing a CEO mindset. Why in the world would you want to do that? And why in the world would you not want to stay small? We talk about small businesses, a lot of us own small businesses, but how do we keep from staying small business and small and our mentality to going big and thinking abundantly and producing way better results and collaborating. Even with people that we think maybe are as our competition. Yeah. So let's jump into that. So what's the current mentality. I feel like a lot of local businesses do this and they compared her and they're like, oh, look what Joe's doing. And it's not like tit for tat kind of stuff.

Brandon Condrey:
And yeah, if you're always comparing yourself against someone else, this applies to a lot of aspects in life. Like if you're comparing your kids against someone else's kids, like why are my kids like that kid? Like, it's all negative energy. You know what I mean? So with small business stuff, especially like this is September of 2021, this is in the process of post COVID. There's a lot of businesses that are complaining on the news about not being able to get employees and not being able to get this. And it's the government's fault and blah, blah, blah, the ones that are succeeding aren't on the news because they already thought about it. They already raised wages to get more people in the door. You're thinking about it from productive standpoint, instead of being in the box, like you said, like I am constrained by all these rules and regulations and I'm upset.

Brandon Schoen:
Man, just you saying that totally made me think of an extreme ownership, that book by Jocko Willink, but he talks about, instead of pointing the finger and me like, well, I didn't do this or this government thing happened and now I'm out of business or instead of comparing your business to everyone else, maybe they're failing. Maybe they're succeeding, look inward and take responsibility for your own business. Start developing a bigger mindset to take on, you know, what is it I can do? What is it I can control to grow my business and not always looking at other people, which is like you said, it's a negative emotion to compare yourself to anything else or compare your kids or anything. Right? So how do we stir up those positive emotions to bring us to the next level, to grow instead of to stay down at the small business level, they're all comparing.

Brandon Condrey:
So the small business levels that we're talking about here, we're trying to ask you to be more like the CEO, right? You can call yourself CEO. I've seen small business. People have CEO on their business card. Traditionally speaking a CEO is the chief executive officer. They are elected by a board of directors of a huge corporation. Amazon SpaceEx GE like things like that. Right? So the point of we're asking to try and think like those guys is that CEOs are making deals happen on private jets and golf courses. And they are maybe not so worried about things, letting the systems, given some trust to the company, to like perform the things that they wanted to do rather than wringing your hands and being like, oh, we're in so much trouble. That's not how you do it. You got to start thinking differently about it.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. So like, when I think of this, if they do think of that, like the guys that own the big businesses, maybe it's a big cleaning franchise, but maybe any of these businesses really they're probably out on the golf course or at a nice restaurant or wherever it is, but they're sharing strategies, they're sharing secrets and here's, what's working for my business. And what about not comparing what you're doing? And they're actually a much different mindset because they're looking at abundance, not scarcity, not like what can we do to like knock Joe off and like make our business better and comparing, it's actually a much different mindset. That's completely positive actually. And you're avoiding that negative. Like yeah, whatever that is.

Brandon Condrey:
Look, I used to be this way, anxiety ridden. I still have anxiety, but there's a way to deal with it. And Brandon helped me a lot with this stuff over the years. Cause he's always hammering away that you need to think differently about it. And so one of the ways that I remember early on when I was upset about whatever he had said this thing to me, which I've mentioned on podcasts before, but I want to come back to it. Cause I always think it's so important. It's like transformative. So the thing that he said was look, you can get the tallest building in town, two different ways. You can smash every other building to the ground. And then yours is the one left and it's the tallest by default. Or you can just work on building yours taller faster than other peoples or building theirs. Right? And so the way to do that is not dwell on things like the competition. So like if you're going to go into the comparison, like you can dwell on what the competition is doing. We've got a competitor in town, who's basically stole our tagline of claiming your weekend. We're better than them anyway. So it doesn't really matter that they have changed tack to try and copy us. Like you're an imitation of the original, but you just focus on like, okay, fine. If the competition is doing that and they're bigger than us, what can we do? That will be better than that. What can we do as a group that would be a different service or an upsell or whatever, to make yourself better than the competition.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And actually it brings me just thought of this story while we're talking about it. But there's different analogies. I've heard of this. There's like pipeline. Have you ever heard of the pipeline story of Brandon where there's a couple of guys building a pipeline to the city, right? Normally you got to bring a bucket of water to get water, but there's two brothers building pipelines. One of them was like, well, I'm just going to do the bucket. Cause I can just go and get the water and get the water right now. Get it right now. I can go walk back and get two buckets. I'm going to get three buckets. Right. And eventually he wears himself out. Cause he's got five buckets, everything he's trying to pull back every day. Meanwhile, the other brother, he's making fun of the other brother and he's saying, Hey, what are you doing over there? Cutting pipes and messing around. And he's like, I'm building a pipeline, right? It doesn't look like I'm doing anything right now, but I'm actually building out my system. People can make fun of me all they want. But as soon as the system's done, this is what he does. He finishes the pipeline maybe a year or two later, he goes and turns on the faucet and water starts flowing and he doesn't have to keep going back and bringing his buckets like his brother and his brother's just looking at them. Like I should've done that.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. You're so far behind because you raised the time thinking about doing it the way that you've thought to do it the whole time. It doesn't mean right.

Brandon Schoen:
And if you were actually collaborating with that brother or that other CEO, that other business owner in your market, maybe they would have been like, Hey, I'm building this system. You should build this too. And we can all, we can build a better system together. We can all help each other out. We can all win. And so that's what we're trying to show you guys is that abundance mindset of, you know, even when you might want to compare yourself to other businesses or even our business or whatever, you're trying to compare yourself, stop comparing and start collaborating and start creating that mindset of abundance, where you are sharing, what's working. And just like we're sharing with you guys. Like we have no qualms about sharing what's working. Cause we want you guys to succeed. We want all of us to rise together and be successful together.

---

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 a spot head over to Profitcleaners.com/coaching.

---

Brandon Condrey:
So there's a couple of different ways to do this. Like with your competition, like we mentioned collaboration, like you don't want to be price fixing, you'll get in trouble for that against the rules, but you can do things like I remember when we first started talking about this, there was a story in one of the other bleeding Facebook groups, it's a magazine. I forget the name of it. Exactly. But one of the people had written an article about talking to the competition and how it helped them, their employees, this person's employees all got together and decided they were going to take over the business. Like they were going to block the driveway and go get all the customers. And it was a harebrained scheme, but the owner got wind of it before it went down. And what she did was that morning that it was supposed to happen. She fired everybody. So it was 14 cleaners fired them all. And then she called up one of the competitors in town that she was friendly with. They actually lent her employees for the day so that she could go service her customers. And then that other business got the benefit of now we know that these 14 employees that we fired her light blacklisted, they shouldn't be hired by any cleaning company cause they're scheming type of thing. And we had a local version of this where a competitor was upset about type of ad. We were running called a competitor ad where they search that name. And if it puts that name up, but then call this different phone number. They're totally legal. It's allowed by Google rules. She was really mad. I talked to her on the phone and then that conversation turned from that. We started talking about how we were handling the pandemic. Were you able to get gloves from this place or that place? And we actually refer her business regularly. And it's for stuff that she does that we don't do. So there you go. They do hoarding cleanup, like hazmat level crime scene type stuff. So when we get those things like, Hey, you can call this person. They're way better at it than we are. And they'll kick us stuff down too. When it's too busy for their schedule to fit in some recurring customers. And you can get some benefit by talking to the competition, which sounds weird to people to do that. Like you're supposed to be bitter enemies or something, but if you're approaching it from the abundance mindset, the CEO mindset, we have this big goal, the big, hairy, audacious goal. We want to have 50 cleaning teams and be a $20 million a year cleaning company for us to do that. If you do the math in reverse, you need like 4,000 people to get bi-weekly cleaning in a city of almost a million. So like you could have 10 companies that are at that level and everyone would still be happy.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely guys, another thing, just talking to your competitors, we've actually found that we learned a lot of mistakes not to make because we talked to our competitors or we see what they're doing. Just don't even have to talk to them, just observe what they're doing and be like, wow, like we've got a lot of customers coming over from the competitors saying they did this, this and this. And we're going to learn from those mistakes. And instead of comparing ourselves and trying to like bring them down, we're just going to elevate ourselves, building bigger and taller. We're not going to smash everyone and talk bad, which is another thing. Unfortunately in small business, everyone likes to just talk trash about each other and be like, oh, screw Joe over there. And like, that's the last thing you want to do in your cleaning estimates or clean talking to your teams. I mean, you never want to bash the competition.

Brandon Condrey:
You want to have information about the competitor. So if a lead says, Hey, I'm getting estimates. You can always ask, who else are you getting estimates from? I'm getting them from Merry maids and Molly maid in this other one, you need to know things about that company, but the way that you're going to present, what you know has got to be okay, that's great. Just to let you know, that company only uses one person and they bring their own cars. So they're going to be there a lot longer than we are. And they may not show up because the employee's car was broken that day. So you want to be able to present that information and kind of an objective way for that person to evaluate it. Instead of being like, if you open with, oh man, those companies are the worst. We're so much better than they are. Right. You're just going to give off a negative vibe to the customer. It's going to put a bad taste in their mouth that you opened with bashing the competition. You want to present all the things that are awesome about them. Call to action at the end. When can I schedule your first cleaning? Oh, I don't know. We're going to get estimates from someone else. Cool. Here's what I know about the competition. Just so you're aware, like I'm just giving you information here. Yeah. And then when they go to those estimates, they can ask those things to those people and have them address.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I would actually argue that by talking about, if you talk poorly about your competition, it's going to automatically open up something in the customer's brain that want to go looking like people want to go find the disaster you just talked about. Well, well let me see if they're really that bad.

Brandon Condrey:
If they were so aggressive about that one company, like right. Maybe they're lying on purpose.

Brandon Schoen:
And this doesn't feel right. Like, so you don't even want them to go down that avenue. So by what Brandon saying, yeah. Let's address it. Let's be honest about this is what they're doing, but we're not going to talk bad or bash them. We're going to say, but here's how we're different. And here's why I think we're better. And I think we're going to provide a better experience because we have this many people show up. So we are a lot more efficient and we get out faster. And like you point out how you're better and you don't go on this tangent rampage of tearing them down and smashing their buildings down. Because again, that's going to create a negative emotion in everyone's mind. It's gonna, I think, keep them thinking. I'm going to go look and see for myself. And they might actually call the other company and end up working with them.

Brandon Condrey:
Right. I have a great example of this. Why we were trying to get windows into my house. The guy walks in, the first thing out of his mouth was what makes you want the most expensive windows ever made and right away, I was like, I don't, if you would put in the marketing that these were the most expensive windows ever made, I would have not scheduled this appointment at all, but he made us go through with it. It was ridiculous. I was mad at this guy the whole time. It's now a waste of his time and my time, because I already know that I'm not going to pay for the most expensive and I was ever made. And all that made me do was digging deeper to the competition to find out the not most expensive windows ever made. There you go, this is a fine line on how you present this stuff, but like you need to come at it. CEO mindset. Our company is the best. Here's why we're awesome. And then you have crafted responses to, if they're going to talk about some other part of the competition that you can bring up specifically in the context of, yeah, I know that they do this, but here's how we do it differently on that particular thing. Like they use a string mop, they drag around from house to house. We use microfiber heads that are clean for every house. Like there's just a way to balance it out.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. All right guys. So I think that pretty much wraps it up. The point is think big, think bigger and more abundantly. Yeah. Think about sharing how you winning and collaborating with others that are in that market. Even your competition, even though that sounds weird. And I think you guys will see big results. There's more than enough for everyone.

Brandon Condrey:
So I want to mention too, is that we've done a few episodes on mindset and that's not because we're running dry on content or anything. It's because this is important. It takes a while for you to hear that. Yeah. Maybe you are the person that's thinking in the little tiny box and you don't even know it. You're upset at employees for quitting or you're upset at customers for quitting. But if we keep telling you like, look, if you actually change the frame, the paradigm and how you're looking at the problem, right. And how we can internally reflect on this and change things. That's the reason we keep giving you these mindset episodes is because it can change everything.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Your competition could be your biggest asset actually. So just change your, the way of thinking. I think that was really well said. Yep. Until next time guys, keep it clean.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean.

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