Episode 6: Pandemic Pivots: Today’s Cleaning Essentials with PPE, Electrostatic, Sanitizing & Disinfecting

Episode 6: Pandemic Pivots: Today’s Cleaning Essentials with PPE, Electrostatic, Sanitizing & Disinfecting

Brandon Schoen:
It's really really easy right now to enter the conversation in people's minds, which is what is the pain someone's having and how can we enter into that mindset and help solve that problem for them. So it's really a good time to provide that clarity. People want to know it's okay, guys, this is an opportunity to have a voice and to be a voice and be a leader in your community and do something different. And again, focus on the solution, not about us. It's not about what you're doing, what your business is doing, which is great. I mean, it's good to communicate that stuff, but more importantly, it's about them, right? And we're not closing our business because we're providing this solution and it's really, really helping people.

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:
Hey everybody. Brandon Schoen, Brandon Condrey in the house back with another episode of the Profit Cleaners.

Brandon Condrey:
That's right here we are.

Brandon Schoen:
And we are super excited today, guys, because we have some really cool new stuff to share with you. We're talking about actually kind of a pandemic special talking about pivots and your business. Talking about tweaks. You can be doing to kind of shift direction, shift gears during this crazy time of pandemic going on and talking about electrostatic foggers PPE, even some of our pivots into virtual estimates. So a lot of good stuff in this episode, guys. So again, right now we believe is the best time in history to start growing your cleaning business or start one or grow whatever area you're in, of growing your business right now, people are no longer buying cleaning guys. They're actually buying peace of mind. They're buying confidence, they're buying clarity, certainty. They want to know what we're doing to take precautions, to help keep them safe. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yep. That's right.

Brandon Schoen:
So actually it's a really cool time to be in the cleaning business with all that added uncertainty. There's an opportunity there always as an opportunity, the pivot, we're going to be talking about a new service, a new solution, whatever it might be for you. Our electrostatic sprayer just came in yesterday, Brandon.

Brandon Condrey:
Yesterday. Yeah. Did a test run around the office. We'll give you all the nitty gritty details, but it wasn't what I hoped it would be is the short answer.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So stay tuned for that guys. We're going to talking about, should you get one of these cool sprayers, whatever they are. ULV electrostatic. We're going to talk about the differences there. We're going to talk about a one little known secret that we figured out yesterday that totally blew my mind.

Brandon Condrey:
I think that I think most people that are shooting for the electrostatics aren't aware of, and that I wasn't aware of until we made a couple phone calls. But yeah, we'll give you the knowledge on that one.

Brandon Schoen:
Literally. It's crazy because these things don't work. If you're not doing this one thing, right? So we want to make sure we're doing that and helping people at the highest level. We're going to talk about the difference between sanitize and disinfect and the different verbiage there. In words, people are talking about out there. So anyways, all this in the episode, just some quick housekeeping as well. If you guys have not subscribed to the show yet, please hit subscribe. It helps us out a ton. Leave a review. Also helps us out a ton. If you guys are getting any value out of this, a new idea, a new inspiration, whatever it might be. Tell someone about the show or share it out there. Give us a, like, give us a review, whatever it might be. We're not running a bunch of crazy ads just because we want to keep the content and the quality super high for you guys. So there's that. So before anything else we should cover man,

Brandon Condrey:
Don't forget. We've got a Facebook group. You can find some social media stuff on there as well. So you can join in the conversation with other cleaning business owners, other listeners to the Profit Cleaners podcast and yeah. Trade ideas back and forth. And we'll jump in and add input as needed.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. Guys, some find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. We're going to start getting more active on there too. Just putting out content everywhere to help you guys out. All right. So talking about pivots, talking about problems or solving guys, what is the problem we're solving in our communities right now? I think that's the underlying question is with everything going on, we can talk about more services and more cool gadgets and things we're doing, but people don't care about that. They care about what are we doing to solve their problems.

Brandon Condrey:
That's right.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And that's the classic business entrepreneur thing. Anyways, is if you can solve a problem for someone, you have a business you're in business. So we're just talking about another level, I guess, of solving these problems to talk about what we're doing.

Brandon Condrey:
Yes. The pivot in general, like I guess from a sales perspective, you're not supposed to be selling the service. You want to sell the solution. Yeah. And so you're talking about adding on different solutions perhaps.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it's real easy to be like, guys, check out this cool fogger electrostatic thing we have and people are like, cool. All right. But what does that mean for me?

Brandon Condrey:
And if any of you saw the Wolf of wall street, there's a scene in there where he's trying to get him to sell him a pen and they're in a diner. So sell me this pen. And one guy's a scrubs. It is black and shiny and really cool. And the next guy does the same thing. And finally, one of them says, sign your name on this piece of paper. And he says, I don't have a pin. And then that was the joke is that they created the demand by telling them why they needed the pin. So another sales sort of thing that I had heard back in the day was that if you're selling drill bits, you're not telling them where the drill bit is awesome. You're selling them the hole, right? That's what you want. You want to tell them what the solution is.

Brandon Schoen:
I liked that. So we're talking about leadership here, guys. This is part of me and a leader in your business and your community with everything going on, you have to talk about the solution, right. And talk about instead of, you know, just posing things differently. So instead of talking about, Hey, can we do this and this at your house with our cool thing, it's more like, do you have a house that needs disinfecting? And like, is there a problem that you need solving? And that's what people are thinking about. And it's actually really easy right now to enter the conversation in people's minds, which is as marketers. We're thinking about that all the time, like what is the pain someone's having and how can we enter into that mindset and help solve that problem for them. So it's really a good time to be acting as a leader to provide that clarity board movement, action, confidence. People want to know it's okay. Plenty of people are saying, we're just going to give up. We're not going to do anything. A lot of cleaning competitors that we have doing the same thing. But guys, this is an opportunity to have a voice and to be a voice and be a leader in your community and do something different. And again, focus on the solution, not about us. It's not about what you're doing, what your business is doing, which is great. And it's good to communicate that stuff, but more importantly, it's about them, right? And we're not closing our business because we're providing this solution and it's really helping people instead of just talking about cool gadgets and things that we're doing. So let's talk about the pivot. So what does that even mean? And why would we pivot during the time like this?

Brandon Condrey:
It is like a Silicon Valley term in my mind, like there's a startup, it's not working, we're going to switch to something else. And so there's apps that have done that in the past. Right? But in this case, what we're talking about doing is alright, your cleaning service that you're offering before pre pandemic was great during the pandemic, it went down for whatever reason. So people were scared of strangers in their house, whatever it may be. So we did a couple of kind of small pivots. So like you want to tell them the three kinds of pivots before we kind of went into this,

Brandon Schoen:
We kind of narrowed it down there. There's probably more than this, but the three categories, essential ways. Yeah. Some basic ways that you're going to be able to pivot during this time is number one, you're going to be able to change your marketing or your communication, your messaging, how you're talking to people. Right? So maybe like, for example, us, we're no longer talking about claiming your weekend and get your time back. We're talking about disinfecting your house and preventing the spread and talking about keeping people safe and things like that. So number one, changing your marketing messaging, number two, changing the solution you offer. So maybe there's a slight variance in what you're doing now, which is good. What we're talking about here. And then the other one would be the person that you're serving. So maybe you're also branching out into commercial, or maybe you're also doing something additional to what you've been doing. That's just another pivot you could be doing. Right.

Brandon Condrey:
Right. So we did all three, basically. So like you said, with the marketing and messaging, we're not saving you time anymore. We're saving your health. It's all about disinfecting the house. The CDC recommends frequent sanitizing and disinfecting things of that nature. Right? The solution we changed was a couple fold. So we added all the PPE personal protective equipment. So we had videos out right away when things went crazy that we're wearing gloves. We had a bunch of masks made by a local tailor. Cause you couldn't get the disposable variety at the time and shoe covers. So we told them, this is what we're doing. We're trying to cover up our people as much as possible to keep you safe, to keep us safe. So that was the solution. Right? And then the person we changed it to, we're still marketing to homes obviously. So that one didn't change, but we did add small commercial space. So yeah, if someone approaches us, we have a bunch of businesses that are in the same sort of warehouse area of town that we're in, that kind of took us up. And it's mostly just that we're going to come in and wipe everything down for you on a schedule. And then the stuff that we use as an EPA registered virus side. So you know, that you're good. Right? So that was kind of the stuff that we changed in the interim, but the one that we tried to do right away and apparently so did everybody else was the electrostatic sprayer. And so we had ordered it in March. It was late March and I bought it from a gym cleaning supply place because they were the only website I could find that would let me pay for it now and back order it for later, it took five months to get it delivered, but we got it delivered crazy, man. And so now we, it, and we've been waiting on this thing forever. It comes in a super fancy case. It's looks really nice. The hardware looks nice. It just kind of disappoint on the deliver of the solution thing. So now we're kind of scrambling.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And we don't want to like bash any brands here. We just want to give you guys some honest feedback on like, here's what we found. And maybe we're going to keep looking because maybe there's some other better options out there, but you've been learning some cool stuff about these.

Brandon Condrey:
So let's just, we'll just launch into we'll just With the feedback on the sprayer. So the one that we bought, this one is rebranded as protects us, which is just, it's a victory sprayer. It looks exactly the same. So the hardware is the same. It is electrostatic. It's handheld battery operated. The hardware quality seems decent. You can tell that they put a lot of effort into it. There's a couple areas where it really disappointed one, the sanitizer that they supply it with these little tabs that get dissolved into it. Yeah. We can't get those for 12 weeks. So it came with a hundred tabs. I used five to get the parts per million dilution. They wanted for disinfecting and sprayed a couple door knobs and light switches around the office as a test. And I went through half of it in like five minutes. So if we put this out into the market right now to try and test pricing, we're going to be able to hit like five houses and then we'll be out of the solution. And so we're not going to be able to get anymore for 12 weeks. Cause it's all on back order because everything is made in China. Right? So that became apparent right away. So what we did was we started doing some research, which to be fair, we probably should have done back in March before we bought it, but we just jumped on whatever was available cause it was crazy.

Brandon Schoen:
Back then we were just take an action.

Brandon Condrey:
So the research we did was all right, let's get to the bottom of the sprayers. Like you may have heard the term ULV versus electrostatic ULV stands for ultra low volume. All that means is that it's making a mist. It's not going to use a lot. It's like a garden hose versus a spray bottle. So the spray bottle would be the ULV in that comparison. So hand pump sprayers that like a exterminator would use our ULV sprayers. You can get motorized ULV sprayers. So what we have is technically a motorized ULV sprayer with this electrostatic add on basically got it. So ours has a little switch. You push the switch to turn on the electrostatic function. You pull the trigger to run the pump and that pushes everything through a nozzle, which gives you the ULV part, right? The nozzle itself has an electrical current going through it. That's what makes it electrostatic, right? Where we fell short on this one is that you keep it six to eight inches away from whatever you're spraying. The whole point of electrostatic is that you're not wasting material. And that because of the electric charge that the machine induced it's going to stick to vertical surfaces or oddly shaped things, right? The reason that Jim's instead of you having to go through and like wipe down all the dumbbells at the end of the day, you just spray it with this stuff and it'll stick to it. No problem. But our observations were that that doesn't happen. So like I was wearing shorts and I was testing it, Holding it six to eight inches away and my legs are getting covered with the stuff that's just blowing down from gravity. So either the droplet size is too big, but I suspect it's at the electrostatic doesn't work. So, okay. First we did. We determined ULV versus electrostatic. So they're, ULV, they're basically the same. It's just that the electrostatic has the charge and the ULV doesn't alright, let's go hunt for an electrostatic. When that actually works, we did a bunch of digging around online and we came up with the version that plugs in and this proves to be the difference, the battery powered electrostatic sprayers with any electrostatic solution grounding, the electrical current is crucial. And so the victory one that we have, they call it a grounding strap, but it's a metal bar that is facing your Palm on the trigger. And so you're supposed to grip that and that creates the ground. This creates a bunch of problems though. Yeah. Our people are wearing gloves while cleaning. So gloves are not conductive. They're rubber. So that's not gonna work. Right. They're wearing shoes, which is also usually gonna prevent you from fully grounding out. And if you were cleaning something that had a rubberized floor, like a gym, perhaps a kids daycare play area, right. This also all prevents grounding. So this is why our electrostatic function didn't work. It'd be fun to do another test where we actually connect like a little metal wire to the grounding strap and then to a grounded piece of metal in the building. Right. And see if it works any better.

Brandon Schoen:
So you're telling me, cause I've been watching like videos of people, cleaning companies everywhere to doing this. And it's exciting. We got this new gun. We have even like our competitors in the newspaper because they beat us to it. But they're not even actually grounded, maybe even doing what they think it's doing. It's a major problem. And it's not even electrostatic in the walls or whatever you're saying, right.

Brandon Condrey:
It is doing, You're getting an ultra low volume spray of the disinfectant or the sanitizer. Right. But it's just operating off of gravity. So we had sprayed it on a couple of walls in the office and it'll run. Like if you had sprayed it too much in one spot, it'll go down. The idea is you do a quick pass with the electrostatic and it's supposed to hold it there because all the sanitizers and disinfectants on the market to kill things, have a contact kill time. So it can be certified to kill C diff, which is a nasty bacteria in hospitals. But it has to stay put on the surface for 10 minutes to be able to do it. The electrostatic is supposed to be what makes that happen. But if the grounding doesn't work and it's not doing that, it's not going to stay for 10 minutes. Right. It's not going to do it. Wow. So that was a huge hole.

Brandon Schoen:
Huge flaw. And like, I'm just wondering like how many people are so uneducated that don't even know this and even companies that are taking advantage. I haven't seen so many posts on online. Even people asking about these and people are very confused. They don't know the difference between ULV and electrostatic. And then on top of that, they're not even grounded. And we didn't know that until No, until we found this out.

Brandon Condrey:
So yeah, the thing that's happening right now too, is that these Chinese companies have popped up out of the woodwork because the demand for these is skyrocketing. And so there a number of brands, which we'll just collectively call like the red backpack. So there are different sizes and shapes, but they all have the same battery thing that goes in the bottom. There's one switch to turn on the motor. There's another switch to turn electrostatic. It's a backpack at the end, you have your nozzle thing, the nicer ones that's actually like, it kind of looks like a pressure washer and it has a little wand at the end and it's adjustable. Those are the nicer ones. The worst one we've seen. It looks like a leaf blower that they repurposed for this by running some liquid through it. And then the test video that we saw online, it's like pouring the fluid out of it. So if this is your sanitizer, we're wasting a ton of it has the potential to discolor carpets and clothing and damaged surfaces. But the most egregious part of it was when the operator tilted the blower back, all this water came running out the back through the electric motor. So there's a huge chance of electric shock. I think not to mention it also suffers from the grounding issue as well. Right. So I would be aware of any of those ones that pop up. If you Google electrostatic sprayer, there's one, that's got great SEO that pops up right away. But then you go look at the product. It's the same thing. It's the same backpack. It's a no name brand. It has electrostatic spray painted on it, but that doesn't really guarantee you anything. Right?

Brandon Schoen:
Right. So there's all these products just popping out because there's such high demand for these, but you really gotta do your research. And you also gotta think about like, we pick that thing, this one we got yesterday and it's a handheld one, but it's so heavy and even so heavy. Even the backpack when we looked at what's like 60 pounds, right?

Brandon Condrey:
I'll take the backpack one over the handheld one because your body can at least do all the weight. The handheld one in your you've got it away from you at like a 90 degree angle to your body to try and get close to the ball and you're moving back and forth. Right. It ways, Man, I don't know, five to eight Pounds, something along those lines. Right. So that as you're moving back and forth, your arm gets fatigued. So you're going to have to switch between arms a lot or take breaks. And it's not the solution we were hoping for. Right.

Brandon Schoen:
So we're going to keep looking at guys. We're going to keep you updated on what we find as we test more of these units. I think a lot of people are, I don't know, they're more cognizant and more aware of obviously viruses and disinfecting. And so I think it's definitely a good pivot. I think it's something people are going to want. It's just, can we deliver the product in an efficient way that actually works and

Brandon Condrey:
Like a moral Lie to you? Like I told you that it was electrostatic and it's going to get behind all the things that we can't reach because of the electric charge. But then we come out there and it didn't do it. So in the worst case scenario, someone's going to come back to you very upset because they can trace a COVID exposure to your lack of electrostatic. I think that's really, really low probability, but in the end we're not delivering what we are promising. And so people are making these super slick ads about our cleaning company, has these electrostatic sprayers, they're marketing to daycares and stuff, but it's not actually standardizing anything, which is super upsetting. The one we did zero in on. And the one that we're gonna hopefully be able to get a hold of soon is actually produced by Clorox. And so it's called a total three 60. I think we're not sponsored by anybody. There's no affiliate marketing, but this is the one that we're going to try next. It's pricey. Like I'll tell you that upfront. So like the victory, one that we bought was $800. It took five months to get here. We could have bought it right away and got price gouged on eBay for five grand for these little handheld ones. Imagine paying $5,000 for that, getting it, and then being so upset. You can look at reviews for the victory online. The Clorox one is anywhere between $3,500 - $7,000 is what I found online. So we've have a local distributor that we're going to try and contact to get a hold of it. This thing is a floor model. Like it's a handle it's on casters. You roll it around, but it plugs in. So the grounding is key. So the grounding is grounded to the electrical outlet. That's the whole building is, and that's where you get the grounding. Got it. And then the other thing that we learned from talking to the Clorox people, it was that if you don't own the chemistry, the chemical that's going through the system, then you also run into a problem. So Clorox knows exactly what they're putting in there. And the chemical is designed to have an electrical charge applied to it. Some chemicals, depending on what you're putting in there, like the victory just says, put in desired liquid, that's all it says, but you run into problems like by applying electrical charge, you may actually change the molecular nature of the sanitizer and make it completely inoperable. So like now it just does nothing. Yeah. In the worst case scenario, you might change it to be toxic where now people can't go into the room because you altered it and it has to be vented for an hour or something like that. Like a hydrogen peroxide sort of fogger. Wow. So Clorox guarantees that their stuff So safe with the electrical charge. So it does seem to be like the complete package. We're just trying to get a hold of it, to check it out.

Brandon Schoen:
And is that still Green? Cause I think at Clorox bleach and we're a Green company, can we do that.

Brandon Condrey:
From a Green standpoint it's probably not ideal, but one of the only things that's like approved too, that has FDA approval to kill COVID is what's called the end list. The EPA has a document called the end list. And basically the only things on it are Clorox and Lysol. Those are the ones that have been approved to do it. And they're nasty. But like if the goal is to, if you got a customer who was sick and now that they're getting over, it they're a recovered case we're going to come in and like really disinfect the house. I'm assuming they want the stuff that we know is going to work. So I don't think the Clorox stuff would technically apply as environmentally friendly, but because of the electrostatic nature of it, we're not applying buckets of it. It's just a tiny amount of plight to services. Right. So we'll learn more about the chemistry once we're able to actually get a demo unit in.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I think the other one we were looking at with Jeremy, it was interesting because you said you can actually produce the chemicals. So this one is a major. If you run out of it, like you said, now we can't serve as houses. So right.

Brandon Condrey:
So this one is actually hypochlorous acid. And what's interesting about this is that you take salt water, you put it in this machine, it does electrolysis on it, which means it applies electrical current. And it's going to generate it from water and salt. It's basically a precursor to bleach. So this is more environmentally friendly than your Clorox style stuff. But this is one of those situations where we don't own the chemistry that's going under the gun. Like it's not necessarily been approved for electrostatic use. So it's good from a environmental impact standpoint and you can make it yourself out of common household ingredients, which is great. And even better, you don't have to pay to have it shipped to you in an already made form. You're generating it from a machine, which is awesome. But if we can't find an electrostatic sprayer, that'll play nice with it. Then it kind of defeats the purpose, right? So more testing is required is basically what rafter, but we just wanted to let everybody know that the electrostatic sprayers that you tend to find all over the place are not ideal for what most people are trying to pitch them as.

Brandon Schoen:
And do you remember the name of the, The name of that red, the red backpack, one of the Jeremy,

Brandon Condrey:
It doesn't have a name, but it's one of those Chinese companies. The problem, like it is the red backpack. It's basically unbranded and they set up a factory just for this. They're cranking them out at 300 a week or whatever it is. So the nice thing is the supply is there, which is fantastic. But if it's not doing what I want it to do, then it kind of defeats the purpose completely.

Brandon Schoen:
the other thing I kind of didn't like, apparently this is what you have to like wipe down the areas and do your normal sanitizing disinfecting what your normal cleaning so that when you do spray it, it can activate or something like that. Right. I've read this.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So this is kind of the difference between cleaning, sanitizing and disinfecting. So cleaning is the removal of debris. So someone physically came in there and wiped away, dirt hair, food particles, whatever. So, right. Services now Clean in the sense that it's, we've removed pieces of dirt and stuff. Sanitizing is basically reducing the amount of bacteria that the chemical claims to reduce. Right? So the chemical that we use is virus side, but it's also a sanitizer. And so the claim that it has, it says that it will kill 99.9% of bacteria and viruses, right? That's like almost all of it, but there's a further sort of level, which is disinfectant. And that destroys everything, right. Disinfectants tend to be a bit

Brandon Schoen:
Smart for the virus side of things..

Brandon Condrey:
But the chemicals are like a bit more hardcore. Like you'll find someone, hospitals they're called quaternary disinfectants. They use ammonia and it is nasty, nasty stuff. These are the things that you need, like OSHA classes for, to be able to properly use without hurting yourself, like by inhaling it. Right. So those are kind of the graded levels there. Right.

Brandon Schoen:
And, and I just noticed, Even if you do that though, like we were spraying and all sorts of surfaces testing it out and it does leave. I mean, I know we were a little close on some parts, but like it does leave a weird residue, right.

Brandon Condrey:
Residue. Yeah. So we had sprayed it on a mirror just to see like, is it going to completely evaporate? Because like, if you're pitching this towards a daycare or even a gym, we're going to spray it on the weights every day. If you do that every day, eventually that residue is going to build up. And depending on the type of chemical, like, okay, I grabbed this dumbbell, I did a couple of presses and then I rubbed my eye. Yeah. And that residue burns that's going to happen. And if you're in a kid set up where you're trying to disinfect toys or blocks or something, and that's going to happen more and more. So I don't know that the electrostatic setup for that as necessarily ideal, we look forward to testing this other one, which will hopefully have smaller droplet sizes and actually stick. So we're not having to spray it to the degree that generates the residue. I think that's Compromise.

Brandon Schoen:
Right guys, we're going to keep testing these. There's a lot of variables, a lot of things to think about. It's kind of crazy because these are expensive, these units and stuff like that, but just wanted to share a quick story. I don't even have this to talk about, but in our Facebook group, just the other day, a woman posted I'm actually would love to have her on the podcast here in soon. And just talk about more her story, but just to show you guys the power of this, she basically, her pivot was very close to using this like an electrostatic product. I think she said her revenues were down to like $6,000 a month, right? When the pandemic hit all the chaos, just like us, we were down quite a bit in our revenues. And then after introducing the electrostatic, creating a new service for that as an upsell, she's back up to like almost $30,000 a month in our revenues. And it's just from a pivot guys, just pivoting and just again, leading in your market and telling people what you're doing. And so I think just, that's a great example. We'll try to get her on the podcast here soon, but guys, that's what we're doing. And that's what you should be doing. Just thinking about these pivots and what you can do to keep leading on your market and keep providing solutions for people. So again, I guess we'll just kind of close out a couple more things. I just thought people were asking a lot of questions about pricing and how much to charge for this kind of thing. And guys, that's all over the place. I know in our market, even one of the guys we work with pretty closely, he's been doing this for awhile, with ULV sprayers and he's charging somewhere in the 40 cents per square foot range. He's doing a lot more commercial. But when we were looking around, like there's all sorts of examples. So some people are charging hourly rates, 50 to a hundred dollars an hour, plus the cost of supplies and markup. Some people are charging 40, 50 cents a square foot, or even more like if it's a post infected clean or whatever and emergency Clean, some people are charging a dollar or $2. I wouldn't recommend like price gouging, but I'm just saying guys, every market's going to be different. Have another person we saw up in Colorado, 75 cents, a square foot, the bigger the square foot, the lower the rate, obviously.

Brandon Condrey:
So we'll put it in the show notes basically. So we've got a couple of examples from people that we talk to, but there's hourly. There's low ends where you're trying to lowball each other off of the competition. It's just all over the place. So we'll give you a kind of a couple examples that we had seen from around the country. And then you can kind of make up your own mind there. In our mind, when we were talking about electrostatics, I wanted it to be an easy upsell to the existing customer base. Not that we would go out and promote super heavily that we're going to come spray daycares, like elementary schools and stuff, but more of that, like, Hey, your normal house cleaning scheduled next Tuesday. Do you want to do this whole Home disinfecting as a $150 add on like that in my mind is what we're shooting for. But again, until we figure out how much we're spending on those machines, 99 bucks makes sense if we're spending 500 bucks on the machines, but if it doesn't work, then we need to buy the one that's five grand and then see where we to price it there. So this will change the metrics on it, but we'll figure it out.

Brandon Schoen:
Right? So yeah, you guys will post 'em all that in the show notes here. And then also a lot of people, even ourselves wondering like, what do we do for COVID cleaning? This is totally new. And there really isn't a whole lot of stuff out there, but we did find through the traditional ISS a site, I don't even know what that stands for. I also don't know what it stands for, but they run like the biggest trade show related to cleaning. And it's a big global one. And I think it's a lot of janitorial companies for the most part, but it is the industry. It is the industry trade show for cleaning and they have an online certification that you can do to kind of teaches you what you need to do

Brandon Schoen:
For COVID cleaning specifically. So we'll link that in the show notes guys, check that out as well. And I think that's pretty much it guys. We just wanted to give you an update on pivots and things we're doing differently also just real quick, Brandon touch on the virtual estimates. So how we're kind of pivoting.

Brandon Condrey:
It was one of my business coaches had asked, she gave the example of Walmart and target are not going to do Thanksgiving day sales anymore. They're using the pandemic as the excuse, but she suspects that they would have done that a long time ago. And she asked us in the group, what can you use the pandemic as an excuse as to pivot to, or to change in the business. And we had kind of already done it, but we were doing in-person estimates for the longest time. We would actually, you set an appointment, I will come to your house, walk through it with UC complainant, anything specific and go through it. I was driving a hundred miles a day when we were fully booked out on those. And so the pandemic kind of forced our hand. We were looking to get away from those in person ones, and the pandemic was like, do it now. And so we did. So we set up virtual estimates, we changed our website, such that when they're booking the appointments through Calendly, they can choose to have a zoom video conference. And then what we do there is I'm in the office, I'm at my computer, the customers on the other side, they're on their phone and then they can walk me around their house, Just like I would have done when I was there. And I can still observe The things that I would have done. Like man, that bathroom's really dirty. We're going to up the price or what I find, which is really beneficial just because customers like it a lot is that you had some military regalia stuff on the wall. And so now that I know that you're in the service, we will offer you the veterans discount. I just do it. I say, Hey, while I was in here, while you're walking around, I saw that you are in the national guard. So we're going to give you this 10% discount. And people are just super psyched that we were paying attention, right. It also has crazy knock-on benefits where we're doing like triple the amount of estimates, because I don't have to drive 30 minutes in between appointments because they're on different corners of town. We have five minutes in between to take notes in our CRM. And then we moved to the next one. So we're just cranking them out. Bang, bang, bang.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Even just the last couple of weeks, man. I don't know how many it's been, but it's like almost 30 new customers we've brought on. And it's been all through the digital estimates. I feel like it's just been the perfect storm. We've been able to scale a lot faster doing that. It's pretty.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. It's a good, it's been working. Great. So take that sort Of question. Like what can you use the pandemic as an excuse to change the, maybe you were holding up on and I don't know, it's a thought exercise, change some stuff, make it easier on yourself.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. So guys, we're going to wrap it up, make this a little shorter than always. We aren't, we sometimes go a little longer, but just remember guys, get out there and hustle, do the work. If you want to get better results. If you're looking around and you're like, Hey, why am I not where I want to be? Just look at the last thousand days and ask yourself if you've been putting in every ounce of effort, if you've been doing the extra work, if you've been pushing yourself, cause now's the time guys, you can't be relying on your local community to pull you through this. You really got to step up and you got to put in more effort than you've ever put in. So think about what is your pivot? What are you going to change in your messaging? What service are you going to change? And how are you going to start serving your customers even more when everyone else is panicking? So just some food for thought guys. I think that's pretty much it. So guys check out Profitcleaners.com. Check out the group again, leave us a review. Hit that subscribe button, share it out there. Remember guys, we're still doing the weekly master class. So Profitcleaners.com/masterclass. We're sharing insider secrets to grow your cleaning business, get way more recurring customers, even during a pandemic. So we'll be talking more about that and I think that's pretty much it.

Brandon Condrey:
So keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it Clean guys.

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