Episode 7: How to Create an Easy Rinse-and-Repeat Business Plan for Your Company

Episode 7: How to Create an Easy Rinse-and-Repeat Business Plan for Your Company

Brandon Condrey:
So in retrospect, and what I advise you to do is to call the competition. So the competition for us, and it should basically be the same for you was franchises. So that's the big made companies that have made in their name. You call them, they will usually almost always just give you a flat number over the phone, right? So you can get a little bit of market intelligence there. And really what you need to do is okay, when you call, they might be logging your phone number and things like that with a piece of software. So you call, I'm going to ask what it is for a 2,500 square foot house. And then my business partner is going to call and he's going to ask what it is for a 1500 square foot house. And then my wife is going to call and ask what it is for a 4,000 square foot house. So you can kind of get an idea.

Brandon Schoen:
I mean, if you really wanted to get into it, you could just have him come out and do the estimate and like actually see how they do the estimate and actually do your diligence on your competitors. Like actual presentation.

Brandon Condrey:
That's if you can find someone who's actually going to come out. That was one of the things that set us apart in the beginning is that we did in person estimates. So you call the big franchises, you call the local mom and pops, and then you call a couple house cleaners just to see what the pricing is.

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 welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Profit Cleaners podcast. I am Brandon Schoen, your host.

Brandon Condrey:
I'm Brandon Condrey your cohost.

Brandon Schoen:
And together we have the Profit Cleaners and we're really excited. Again, this is the only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners to put you ahead of the competition while redefining Profit and living the good life. So let's dive in folks, we're going to talk about creating an easy to follow effective business plan for your company. And well, without further ado, let's dive in.

Brandon Condrey:
Let's do it.

Brandon Schoen:
Let's do it. So in this episode, we're going to talk about kind of going back to the very beginning. When we first started, we created a business plan. We also did a lot of other things like in the beginning, just to jump all in and get going. But I think this is a really critical piece of getting that plan going and having that vision and that clear goal to achieve. So I'm really excited. We did it. If there's a few other businesses I had in the past that I just totally didn't do it for. And I can say, I think that's a really big reason why they didn't succeed, right? It didn't have a good plan. So even if you think this is, you know, fluff or nonsense to create a business plan, we're living proof, you should do it.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And also there's a lot of, we revealed holes in our planet by actually going through the process. So we're going to show you how to do that.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. So one quick thing, guys, stay tuned till the end of this episode, because we've got some really cool stuff for you. We're going to be given away. So one of them is going to be in our toolkit. We're actually going to be giving you our business plan in the toolkit. So that's going to save a lot of time. We're going to give you exactly what we had to start out with in the beginning and what we used. And we're also going to be sharing another really cool resource. That's basically a kind of an analytics tool that will help you find out where your ideal customers are. It's like a spatial analytics fuller, right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Spatial analytics. That's my favorite buzzword that I learned today. I never actually knew what they called it, but the other term they use is location intelligence,

Brandon Schoen:
location intelligence Of human behavior and demographics and other cool stuff. So that's really cool. You want to stay tuned to hear about that. And also we're going to tell you the software tool that we use to quickly and easily build out this plan in the beginning. And it's really cool. You just put in your info, answered the questions, it spits it out.

Brandon Condrey:
It's a wizard and it makes a super professional looking document at the end. And that's how we got funding basically. So we'll talk about that too.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So, and just a couple other housecleaning items we want to get out of the way, since we are a house cleaning brand, we want you guys to, again, subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't subscribed already, if you're getting any type of value out of this, if you're learning something from these episodes, we're so excited, but please help us to get the word out and share this with someone. If you know somebody that wants to start a cleaning business, share it to them, give them the link.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And let them know and tell your friends, tell your family, if you know anyone who actually is thinking about starting any business, they might be interested in the podcast in particular, this episode, because there's going to be a lot of stuff in here just for business in general, but it's going to be fun.

Brandon Schoen:
Right? And you know, currently we're not running a ton of ads and 20 minutes of ads in the beginning of these episodes, we were trying to give you guys value. So pay it forward and help us get this out there to reach more people, help more people. So we can all learn more and help each other more and do good stuff. So let's get going.

Brandon Condrey:
Let's do it. So you're getting ready to start a company. You got to start somewhere. So the first thing we're going to tackle is do you just bootstrap it? Do you, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get a broom and a mop and just do it myself and we'll take it from there. Or do you try and start with some funding and, you know, do it a bit more large, a bit more grand scale.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And I think, you know, you could really go a lot of ways about this. You know, we could have definitely bootstrapped and done it. Like our mentors did start it on their own garage and just started doing themselves. When we started this, we were already to the point where we were like, you know what, we're going to go all in. And we're going to have inventory of cleaners to start with so we can just be selling the product right away and getting out there and not have any, any challenges or hold ups. You know? So, yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
And that was part of the business plan process. It was to figure out how much money do you need to do it one way versus the other. If you're bootstrapping it, you need a car with a magnet on the side and a business registration. And you work out of your garage, our mentor in Colorado, they started in a garage and slowly built it up to what it is today. And we have another friend in town that runs a landscaping company and he is still basically bootstrapping it. So he's got employees and he's got crews, but they don't have an office. They run everything out of a storage unit. So at night, all that equipment just gets parked in a storage unit and they just meet there in the morning, unlock the trucks, they go do their thing. And he's basically working in a mobile office out of his car. So he would call the company number. You just get his cell phone and that's how he does it. And he's happy doing that. We just wanted to do it a different way.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! So we want it to be right out of the gate, Just on fire and just all in going full speed ahead. And so we chose to go the route of getting a little money. And if you want to do that, you gotta have a plan. You gotta be able to tell people what you're doing, especially if it's an investor, but you know, usually the banks won't give you money for this kind of thing. Right? Right. We tried to do this.

Brandon Condrey:
So we did talk to a couple loan officers at banks in the beginning. And the hard facts here are that a bank is not going to give you money off of an idea on a piece of paper. So a bank will lend you money via the SBA. If you are trying to buy an existing business, because they can look at that business's history and say, this business has a 20% profit margin over the last five years, and you're going to buy it for this much cool we're in because we are likely to get paid back because the business is already working. If you don't have any experience running a cleaning company like we did. And you're just going to start out of the blue. No, one's going to be like, yeah, here's your a hundred grand congratulations. Right. So the fundraising that we took was we're going to write a really solid business plan, really dig into the numbers, make sure that we got all the T's crossed and I's dotted and then solicit funds from friends and family. And that's what we did. We raised funds from some family members, my mom putting some money. My mother-in-law put in some money. And then a couple former employers of mine put in the bulk of the money. But the reason they did that was because I showed them, we were taking this very seriously. Here's this document. Here's what we need. Not only here's what we need, but here's where we're going to spend it. Not just like a, I dunno, like 150 grand, how to do it. Like, it was a very specific number that we requested and that we got. And so, yeah, that's how we did it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So I can go either way, but again, if you want to go to the banks, they're going to want revenue. And if you're brand new, starting out, you don't have any revenue. And we've learned, you know, in the first few years of business, nobody wants to give you money. Cause they're like, you're not even three years in. And that's when they want to start giving you money. Right. The banks, right. They want to see certain numbers or certain places, I guess like cabbage and places that we found that would fund us.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. We did get a line of credit through cabbage, but I mean, you're talking $5,000 I think is what they gave us. That's not enough to do a bunch with, and you have to pay it back in six months on a weekly payments. So it just hits you in the kneecap from a cashflow perspective to kind of take that money. But we did have it as an emergency fund. And one of the analogies that you told me when we were in the very beginning, you take walks around the block all the time and drink coffee and kind of hash things out. And I remember being very stressed out in the beginning about revenue, this and the other thing. And one of the things that you said to me that call me down was we're building a pipeline. So there's a lot of infrastructure. You got to get the pipes and put them all together. And you know, we're putting it here and there. And then in the end, once the pipeline is ready, you just turn on the velvet, the end. And that's the cashflow. Right. And that proved to be a pretty solid analogy. Like that's how I worked out. We invested more money up front to get a building and vehicles and equipment and the knowledge, and then the cash flow came after that.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And it's sort of this like delayed gratification and you looking around while you're building the pipeline and you're like, man, this is taking forever. And there's nothing flowing down the thing yet. And we're not paying ourselves. Yeah. This is so hard. Or like it was a really anxious anxiety. You know, you were very anxious, you know, because we couldn't even pay rent at her office at some point.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we were working on the penthouse office. We're in now we were renting that out to an electrical distributor. We had talked to a medical marijuana company at one point about renting it out. And so we were just trying to put a tenant up here all the time, just to take the edge off the rent. Yeah. I mean, we've grown past that now.

Brandon Schoen:
But the big picture here is like, you know, it doesn't feel like you're making a lot of progress while you're building that pipeline, but once it's hooked up, it's connected, the valves are all connected and whatever, it's, you just turn that faucet on and boom, the water's flowing and you have customers and money flowing and you're in business instead of just struggling to even get Something built in.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So that's what we're going to tell you today. We're going to tell you how the business plan is going to guide you towards that sort of set up to set you up for success on a bigger scale than if you just did it with a couple of people out of a garage. In the beginning, we had branding, we had marketing, we had professional logos. We had Google ads. We had all that from the get go, and we'll go over all that in detail.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And then just want to mention too, you know, we all about happiness and freedom and having a great lifestyle while you're doing this business. So one of the things that comes with that is making progress. You know, if you can just be making daily progress when you're starting the business, when you're writing these business plans, whatever it is, progress equals happiness. And that's something I learned a long time ago from one of my mentors. I can't remember which one, but thoughts become things. And so like in the beginning, this is just a thought, this is just something in your mind, in your imagination. You know, I really believe in thoughts, become things. Once you have that thought organized into an idea into a plan, then there's a transformation of those plans into reality. And then the beginning, as you see, like it's just in your imagination, but you just need to start taking action and start making progress. And that's what gets you the results? You know,

Brandon Condrey:
That's also one of the things that I really, It helps me personally with anxiety is that if you're anxious about whatever it is, just take some action that you can do to like counteract it. So yeah, we're anxious about not having revenue. Like cool. How do we get more revenue? This is also one of the things that used to say to me all the time, you'd want to do whatever we're going to hire a guy to make. T-shirts I remember you brought that up really early on. And I was like, we can't afford to do that. And you were trying to tell me the change, the mindset, like not, we can't afford to do that, but like, how can we afford to do that? Like actually make the metrics. And this is kind of how I got into this spreadsheet. And ingest side of things was like, okay, to get to this goal of we're going to, whatever we're going to buy another car, we need to add 23 more customers and then we'll have the leftover cashflow to do it. And so all that is taking action and it just works towards

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And it's just reframing that question instead of like, gosh, how are we going to do this? Or like, we'll never be able to have that money to make that happen. It's which is what the question a lot of people tell themselves, they're ask, it's a false belief, but if you free frame it and you say, wait a second, how can we do this and create more money? Or like you said, it's just opening the question so that you'll find the answer and you'll go dig in and find a way to make it happen.

Brandon Condrey:
Yep, totally.

Brandon Schoen:
So, so yeah, and I think it's so important to have this plan because it's going to give you that further, deeper purpose and reason why to execute. It's going to give you that clarity, clarity equals confidence. So when you get really clear on where you're going, you see it just like, if you're going on a road trip and you know, I'm going over here to this place, it's like, you can enjoy the ride a lot more because you know where your destination is. You're not freaking out the whole time and like, Oh my God, what am I going to be there? And you know, it's a lot more clear and it gives you that confidence to take that action and to make that progress.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So in the beginning, I don't think you ever expressed this to me. I learned this while reading the notes for this show, but you thought that doing the business, This plan was kind of a silly thing to do.

Brandon Schoen:
Well, I would say it never really crossed my mind that we should absolutely do it in the beginning just because, you know, doing some of these internet businesses, they were just like, you know, set up a website and boom you're in business. And it was just like for a while, I wasn't creating business plans for some of these projects I had worked on and looking back in hindsight, it's 2020, and you can really see, well, maybe I didn't have a great plan and that's probably a good reason that business never made it. And you know,

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So the other thing that's different between you and I is you went to school for business, you have a business degree and you had to do a lot of business plans as part of that degree. And so yeah, the business plan is kind of like the five paragraph essay of business school. And I majored in biology. What I did do was I attended classes that were put on by a small business development center in Denver. And they drilled in that, like you got to do a business plan, these are the benefits. You're going to learn a lot of stuff about it, like SWOT analysis and things like that. And so that's what I want it to do. I want it to make sure we had it all on paper, not only to solicit funds, but also to make sure that we had covered holes. Like we made sure that we revealed right. We knew what we were thinking about. And so that's what happened.

Brandon Schoen:
So helpful, man. I'm just like, I'm remembering you have it actually right in front of us here. It's this amazing plan that has all these details that you would probably never even think of, unless you're really getting into the details of it, but you're right. It does reveal things that you'd never think of that if you didn't talk about it now, when you're planning out the business, I mean, it could be a major disaster.

Brandon Condrey:
You get to the point where you hit this threshold or milestone. And you're like, what do we do now? But we already had that planned out. It was already in there. Like we had revenue targets, we were going to hit and things like that. And it's funny to look back on it now. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but it's good to review it, to see where we thought we were going to be versus where we are.

Brandon Schoen:
And just coming back to that, taking max to action, like it's hard to take massive action if you don't know where you're going, if you don't have confidence in a plan, you know, a lot of you guys are familiar with Tony Robbins. He's got something that's always stuck with me about achieving results. And one of the things he would always say is, number one, you know, take massive action because whenever you start anything, you have kind of this uncertainty and this disbelief that it's even possible, right? So you got to change that and you got to take massive action right away with a plan, of course. And then once you start taking that action, even if it's just a few little things a day, calling a few people or making a few things that make that progress, that's what builds belief. And that's what builds certainty so that you can take the next steps and the next steps. And it just, it kind of builds this snowball of momentum. And that's kind of the magic sauce. I think in a lot of businesses, once you start getting that momentum, it's easier and easier to achieve more progress and achieve more success because like you almost can't stop it and it just keeps going. And that momentum is what creates those backend results. And that's what we're living proof of now. And again, we started with a plan, we took action. It built that belief in certainty. Now we have results. Now the belief is even more so we can take more action and it just builds and builds. So it's like this positive acceleration into the future.

Brandon Condrey:
So yeah, we've got a nice quote that kind of a goes to that. So all you need is the plan, the roadmap, and the courage to press on to your destination. That's from Earl Nightingale. And that's what we did. And so we're still on that plan where we're not at the destination, we're constantly evolving every day, but that was, this plan was kind of the first sort of,

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think if you look through history, like almost all great leaders, talk about planning and having a plan and it's just a really big part of success. So you can actually have the courage, like where does that courage come from, right. Comes from having a plan and having to execute that plan. You know,

Brandon Condrey:
Well, let's talk about how we actually did the plan. I had dozens of sample business plans that I had found online for various businesses and I kind of read through it. And what stuck out to me most when reading the sample plans were is that they were all the same times, new Roman, Microsoft word document with some black and white bar charts. And it was really frustrating and I'm a perfectionist on formatting and things like that with spreadsheets and documents and stuff. And so I tried to do this first in word and it just drove me crazy trying to get this thing to look the way that I want it to look. And so eventually I got frustrated and I just started Googling around and I found a software solution that ended up being just so easy so that I could actually focus on the content of the business plan instead of like the presentation. And so that software provider is called Live Plan. And I can't recommend it enough. We'll have a link in the show notes that you can go check out and hopefully you find some advantage of a tube. But the thing that was really nice is that it's just a wizard. So you set up an account, it's going to ask you a bunch of questions. What business are you in? Right based on that, we think you need to put these things in here. And so the content of the plan ended up being the opportunity of the plan. So that was, what's the problem that we're trying to solve. And what's our solution market analysis. Who's the competition. What makes us different, how we found our target market, what the advantage is, our execution, our marketing plan operations, the milestones are going to hit who our team was. That's going to actually make this happen. And we put in things like us and accountants and anyone that we thought would be valuable that know that we thought it out. We put it in there. And then we did a bunch of financial forecasts, the forecasts in particular, pretty funny, cause you really don't know what you don't know. So like we're going to take a stab. We want this target invoice. Like we were shooting for $175 per service as an average. I mean, in reality, three years in we're averaging something like 164. So yeah, we missed the bar on that a little bit, but the point is the wizard is what really gets you to it. And so it'll say, okay, cool, we're going to talk about your milestones. Now here's a couple of examples of what you should be doing as milestones. And I'm like, all right, you take a pause, write this out. Brandon your wife was helping us out a lot on the copywriting to make sure that it sounded really well executed. And then you just kind of drop and paste that in and then you can change fonts. And it was just Great.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it was kind of funny earlier today you were showing me, we were looking through our business plan and it's just funny to go back and revisit this plan that we had three years ago. And you were mentioning, man, we totally crushed it the last couple of years, but we were way off on the first year. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
And so we had predicted just full profitability from the beginning. We're just going to hit the ground with 20% and it's going to be great. And that was not what happened. Like our first, you know, six months was hard. It took a long time to get like the first couple dozen customers that were like stable. And we missed the revenue targets in the plan by quite a bit. But we were over three times, the revenue targets three years in. So wow. That curve that actually originated, I think I had us going on something like a 20% growth curve, like super duper stable and boring ended up being more like an exponential thing. So in the beginning it was slow to get going, slow to get going. But once it got going, it just moved.

Brandon Schoen:
Let's tell people like, cause I don't exactly remember those numbers, but it's always like mind boggling. When you talk about like the first year I was like,

Brandon Condrey:
I'm going to actually, it's a percentage is I'm going to flip through our business plan and actually get these numbers for you. For real. Yeah. We're going to give you a copy of this business plan and the toolkit will tell you how to get that at the end of the episode, but we're going to give you all kinds of cool stuff in there, like the link to live plan and a copy of this business plan. So here's what we had. This is kind of in the beginning of the executive summary. So we had financial highlights by year. So the first year we thought we would make $200,000. The next year would be 275 and the third year would be like 320. I'm reading this off a bar chart. So that's why these figures aren't exact numbers. There's a spreadsheet somewhere deeper in that kind of gives you that. So what ended up happening I think was the first year we did more like a hundred thousand over the 12 month period. We started in the middle of a year. So that first six month period was something like 60,000. The next year we doubled, I want to say, but between year two and year three, it was 667% growth. So instead of just coming over $300,000, we pushed a million. So we were at 900 and some change and we're in the middle of year four right now. And we're dealing with the pandemic and stuff, which is going to impact our numbers. So we've kind of, flat-lined a little bit here in the end, but we're expecting a big spike. So this will end up being our best year ever. But yeah, so we had forecast this an overshoot at the beginning compared to reality, but then a very conservative growth curve, which we seriously underestimated the market.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And it was almost crazy. Like we were trying to keep up with the growth and it's definitely like leveled out a little bit and been a little bit more easy to maintain now that we're not like exponentially flying through the roof on the growth. But I mean, that was really exciting, man. We were just hiring teams every 90 days and keeping on track with, and it was just, yeah,

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. When you were on a really good average. So we were hiring three people every 90 days, a new team. And so, you know, you're trying to get the goal and we were growing as fast as we were worse to never waitlist someone. What we wanted to tell people was we've got a team training right now. There'll be ready in two weeks. And so we're trying to sell biweekly cleaning service. That's our primary product. So asking someone to wait two weeks is usually not big of a deal, especially if they're coming from a competitor. So like just get one more clean with the one that you don't like, and we'll pick it up in two weeks. Right. And that's kind of how we accelerated that growth. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
And I think something in the beginning too, that kind of looking back, we didn't do, we were kind of hesitant to do. I don't know why, but I was, we wanted to call the competitors to see what the pricing was in our market. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's call them. And you were like, I dunno, man. I feel kind of weird.

Brandon Condrey:
I shut that down. It felt kind of slimy to me to call Or to give them false hope that we're going to become a customer. And now I have completely flipped. So we probably get hit up. I would say maybe once every six weeks. And I don't think it's a, so much like our true competition. Like we have another cleaning company that does Green cleaning in town that I would call like our real competition. I don't think they're calling us to peg for estimates. But I think what it is is like housekeepers. So like it's an individual housekeeper, it's our car. Yeah. They saw the car, they got, we got one call in particular that I remember where this lady called up and said, how much would you charge for a 3,500 square foot house in Corrales. And we're like, well, we come out and do an estimate so we can tell you what it is. You're like, I don't want this one. I just want the ballpark pricing. And so that happened more and more often. And so we instructed our office manager to when they get those calls, you just saw them. Like, it can be as little as blank. And the number that she quotes is what it is for a weekly Clean on a thousand square feet, which is less than a hundred bucks. And so that just throws them off. Like they're cleaning a 3,500 square foot house for $90. I can't keep up with this and they either bail out or they go and charge 90 bucks to clean a 3,500 square foot house, which is fine by me if they're going to do that. So in retrospect, and what I advise you to do is to call the competition. So the competition for us, and it should basically be the same for you was franchises. So the big made companies that have made in their name. Yeah. You call them, they will usually almost always just give you a flat number over the phone. No one came out when I moved here and was trying to find, we called a couple of them before we had started this business when I just want to die my house clean and they just gave me a flat number over the phone without actually seeing anything. Right. So you can get a little bit of market intelligence there and really what you need to do is okay, when you call, they might be logging your phone number and things like that with a piece of software. So you call, I'm going to ask what it is for a 2,500 square foot house. And then my business partner is going to call and he's going to ask what it is for a 1500 square foot house. And then my wife is going to call and ask what it is for a 4,000 square foot house. So you can kind of get an idea,

Brandon Schoen:
You could even go as far as like, just have them come out. I mean, if you really wanted to get into it, you could just have them come out and do the estimate and like actually see how they do the estimate and actually do your diligence on your competitors. Like actual presentation.

Brandon Condrey:
You can find someone who's actually going to come out. One of the things that set us apart in the beginning is that we did in person estimates. And I don't think any of our competition right Outside of one of the big franchises actually did in-person estimates. And those were funny to me because they would do a handwritten carbon copy estimate. So they're not using software to drive stuff. We're using software. So like you do learn a little bit of things. And once we actually got started, you are shocked at how much potential customers are willing to share to you. I have got copies of invoices or sorry, copies of estimates from basically all the competition. So I've actually seen what their pitch is on paper. Right. But yeah, in retrospect I would have called, so you call the big franchises, you call the local mom and pops and then you call a couple house. Cleaners just to see what the pricing is. And I wouldn't feel bad about it. This is just part of business. People are going to do market research on you all the time. And you know, right now we're converting something like 67% of estimates become customers, which is pretty good. That means 40% of the people that we give those numbers to freely are saying no. So by you getting these estimates and not becoming customer, they're not gonna look you up and, you know, trick you down later, if you started a cleaning company, right. It doesn't matter. So that is the one thing that I think we should have done more because we shot for that one 75 Mark. And we ended up starting way lower than that. In the beginning, our stuff was way lower. We had a price lower. We would have had a better idea. We started raising prices as we got into it because people would tell us and we'd give them numbers like, wow, that's a really good deal. And I don't want to bill our company as an affordable product. It's a luxury product. It's something that is really, really nice to have housekeepers are affordable. So like you get customers, that'll say, I'm not going to pay $200 to do this. My neighbor has someone who does it for 50 bucks. I'm like, yeah, but that's a sales thing that we'll go over later. But yeah, no, you should definitely call the customers, call the competition and get some numbers for sure.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And speaking on that, because we're not trying to position ourselves as just another cheap, affordable, like housekeeping or how like a housekeeper would be where they're dirt cheap and they come in and they don't always show up and they leak oil on your driveway and they miss stuff. And then you have to pay for their hospital bills. Cause you're like, Oh man, they're part of my family now. So like that's the other side is we're providing this actual luxury service, like you mentioned. And so we were actually having to look where are those customers and what zip code those people in and how are we going to get this luxury product in front of the people that actually have the house and the budget. And they don't have the time to Clean. So they're our ideal customers, you know? And so we had to figure out that data, which brings us to our next cool thing.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So this is a thing that we're going to give you in the toolkit as well, but we used company or I used it personally, which I don't recommend, but it's called Esri Esra and their big product is arc GIS. And so GIS is a mapping software. And I remember hearing about GIS when I was in college. Like I had friends that were computer science, people that had mentioned it before. And realistically it's a mapping tool with a bunch of data behind it, but I got the free product and I had to figure out how to do this myself. I watching a bunch of YouTube videos and you'll see it on the business plan. Cause they're gonna distribute that to you. But the graphics that came out of it were kind of fuzzy. And I didn't like the end result. If we were doing this all over again, what I would have done is gone to a freelancing website, like Upwork, something like that. And just hire someone who knows what they're doing, because there'll be able to bust this out in like a few minutes.

Brandon Schoen:
Upwork.com like 30 minutes ago. And we found people that do this Esra as re whatever graphing, like spatial analytics, data compiling or whatever they do.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. And plenty of people that do this, like there are people that have jobs and this

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It's like a full time deal that they do. And we're going to tell you guys a lot about outsourcing and delegating stuff, but this is something we could outsource right away in the beginning. And it would have saved us a lot of time. It's probably not even that much money to, you know, if we would have paid someone a couple of hours to scrape the data. So yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
So here's what we got. So like we pay someone for sure to do it. Absolutely. It's definitely worth the investment. This took me days to figure out how to do it on my own, and someone could have done it very quickly, but here's what we were looking for. We were looking for the places in town that had disposable income, because it's a luxury product. We don't want someone who's making $30,000 a year and then trying to charge them $4,000 a year. That's a significant portion of their income. So we had an idea cause we both live here. Like we know where the nicer neighborhoods are. So we kind of knew that this was it, but you have this map of the whole city, this kind of heat map. And what we were mapping out was the population of a, we had a court in this off. Like you can draw an area by hand on a map. It's not necessarily by zip code, but we were looking for what population was in there and what the median income is, what the median age is, what the mix of white to blue collar workers are, what the unemployment rate is. Then there's actually a metric for median disposable income and how many housing units there are. And so you're able to come up with these numbers that say this, like, this is what we can do. And this is all in the business plan. I'm not going to read you guys a bunch of numbers, but the idea is you identify the places that have the most disposable income. There's this many single family houses in there. If we capture 2% of that area, what does that translate to for revenue? And 2% in our case was like we would retire next week. If we had gotten 2% in the beginning, you need a fraction of a percent to make this business viable, to really do it. And all that stuff is revealed within the numbers. And so, you know, we kind of had the leg up because we live here and we knew what we were looking for. But if you hire someone, let's say you're expanding, like maybe you have a cleaning company and you're listening to this because you want to move to another state. You want to open a new state, you know, anything about that state, you hire someone to do this mapping for you make this little heat map based off of these metrics. It'll show you that these are the zip codes. And then what that did for us was like, yes, we know we're going to try and get customers, but it really helped us with where are we going to concentrate the initial marketing? And we did that with a bunch of door hangers personally,

Brandon Schoen:
which we'll probably never do again.

Brandon Condrey:
Never again, personally, with a bunch of family members, we all loaded up backpacks in the middle of the summer. It was super high. And we bought a bunch of bottled water and we walked and walked and walked and walked. We walked miles over a weekend and we hung something like 3004 hangers. I want to say something like 3000 and that's we got business off of those door hangers. And we knew that those people would respond based on the marketing because we kind of knew their demographic.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And it wasn't like a ton of people off the door. Hangers. Other marketing seems to work much better obviously, but it was an initial push. It was that initial or getting the brand out. People are seeing our stuff. We got a few people, initially, a few people like six months later, you know, cause people would just stick On there.

Brandon Condrey:
It's stuck on their fridge. And then it was time like all my housekeeper retired or moved away. I better call these guys up. So yeah, we got people I think up to a year later.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So I mean, that's the good news is, is like a longterm piece. And if you make it attractive, people stick it on their fridge. And that's how we got started. And looking back now, it's kind of funny because those exact zip codes that we mapped out and Esri are really, when we look at our heat map, that's where the software is. That's where they are and that's where the bulk of our businesses. So it really does translate to that.

Brandon Condrey:
And that's where the businesses Hold in those neighborhoods, then people see your car out front neighbors start calling because they see this car every two weeks. And so they know that if it's good enough for that neighbor, cause I know them and they're really picky, then I must be good enough for me. And then you start getting calls on just the cars. So that's the whole snowball effect. Yeah. But so the business plan helped us get to that point. And then the other part of it before we got going was to kind of create a launch strategy. So we snuck in there that we had done the door hangers, but one of the things we did, which I, we highly recommend that you do is that we had done a ton of free cleans dozens, I think. And the point of the free Cleaners was we're going to call. We focused on teachers, I think in the beginning. So like we had friends that are teachers. They don't make a lot of money. They're probably not going to be able to do this, but we're going to come in, clean your house for free. Let us use you as a Guinea pig. It was kind of a training operation. We did really tough inspections on those first cleans, but the real beauty of it was we did your Clean for free. You actually got to see what it's going to be now, can you leave us a review? And so when we launched, before we even launched and you know, had paying customers, we had multiple five star reviews, which when someone got your door hanger and they're going to go Google you, and they already see that you have these reviews. That was Huge.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! And it's the law of reciprocity. You know, people, you get something for free and there's this subconscious thing. You're like, I need to give something back or I need to help them back somehow. And so yeah, it was really easy for us to be like, Hey, we're starting out, we're brand new. Just let us do this for free. I mean, who's going to say no to that. I'm going to come clean your house for free. And a lot of them, like you said, were friends, family, teachers, anyone, you know, that you know, would be open to this. And you know, that would leave you a review, which would be great. They don't have to do that. Just getting your name out is awesome. But I used to do this all the time on Amazon. We would give away hundreds of products when we launch a new product and those people would leave reviews and just the law of reciprocity, they get something for free. They want to give you something back, a review as a simple way to, you know, there's no monetary amount being like they don't have to pay you back or anything. It's just, Oh, I'll leave you a review. That's easy. So we were pushing people to mainly reviews on Google next door, where else all the different sites, Yelp, Facebook, Facebook. Yeah. I mean just any social channel anywhere you want to focus. Google has been our main source of revenue and leads and things like that.

Brandon Condrey:
We have the most reviews there. We focus on that for sure. I'd say second place is probably Facebook in terms of where we're getting traffic and in a distant third is probably Yelp. Yeah. Just in third is probably Yelp and home advisor and Angie's list like all tied up together.

Brandon Schoen:
If you're just bootstrapping and just getting out there, I mean, door hangers work, and then doing the free Cleaners is a great way to get your foot in the door. And it's a great way to train your teams. It's a great way to fill their time while you're building up, you know, selling more people to fill their time. Yeah. Because give them something to do and simultaneously be getting reviews, which are actually really hard to get, like, you know, you'll see companies that are, have been around for 20 years and they have like 10 reviews still. And it's like, they don't market that they don't really push those reviews. But the reviews nowadays are.

Brandon Condrey:
The worse, the 10 reviews or three stars. Cause they didn't reply to anything and try to recover stuff.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. You want to be constantly pushing those down with fresh new ones that are good.

Brandon Condrey:
And yeah. And we do that. We do review pushes four times a year, basically once a quarter. And we'll, we'll give bonuses for that and make sure that we keep those things fresh. The thing you don't want to see when you go Google a company is that they have a hundred reviews. But the last one that was left was 18 months ago. Like you need new stuff, you need a constant influx to make sure that it's jiving.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So you're just positioning yourself for success. If you do that right out of the gate. And you know, we'll talk more about the car in a later episode and the other branding, other things you can do to market, but just want to get your foot in the door and get out there and start taking action and getting more customers. Yeah. One way or another.

Brandon Condrey:
The other thing we do as part of the launch strategies, we've got the few free cleans up, but once we actually started taking paying customers, we had a bunch of different discount schemes that we were running. So there was like, I didn't want to do big discounts on the first Clean because we don't want to get in a situation where you got to lucky Lou who came out and used you one time and you didn't even, you lost money on the deal because you charged it solo. So what we ended up doing was you got 50% off the second Clean. So the first one is an initial cost. It's a higher cost. So we made our money there. Hopefully we impress the customer and then you get 50% off the next one. And then it goes to the list price. We also tried three months of 20% off, which I think was the one that went out in the door hanger. If I recall correctly, we did lots of things, but like you should have some kind of initial offering for the paid customers that don't know you that not family and friends. Yeah.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And kind of what we're banking on is the fact that a lot of our bread and butter is in the recurring customers. So, you know, if there's this thought of, well, if I discount anything upfront, you know? Yeah. Like you said, we'll lose money. However, you're getting your branding out there. People are seeing them out there, even if they had one experience with you and it was good and they're just wanting a onetime Clean well, now that you're in their mind and if they think of cleaning again or they tell someone or someone asks them, you know, who do you use for cleaning? They're very likely to share that experience, especially if it was a positive one. And so it's actually great. Even in the beginning, even if you don't want to do one time cleans all the time, it's good to start. That's where we started because it drives more business. It was like half of our business in the beginning, right on those one times they're very variable. Sometimes take a lot more time and screw up all the systems and stuff. But again, it helps get your brand out there, right? Some of those people are going to come back to become recurring customers.

Brandon Condrey:
So It happens a lot as you get to move out Clean and then they'll hire you for recurring service at the house they just moved into. So that happens from time to time too. So I mean, my opinion on discounts has changed over time. So like we're at the point now from a cashflow perspective where we are doing big discounts on first cleans now just to show people what we can do, because we've got a little bit more confidence. We know what we're doing in the beginning, we were getting complaints. Cause we were still like trying to work out all the kinks and things like that. And so from a cashflow perspective, I was hesitant to do those initial discounts. But if you are able to, you'll get more people on, like there'll be more impressed if you're offering a big percentage discount on the first Clean, but you don't want it to be so crazy, like a Groupon type customer where it's like 75% off or something crazy like that because you'll get people that are literally just like, yeah, you're my slave for the day. So come here and do all this stuff that I'm never calling you again.

Brandon Schoen:
No, those are the worst customers, the tire kickers, the ones that pay the least and they demand the most and they want to stay in and yeah. Yeah. You want to stay away from those. And that's why we say stay away from big discounts. But like you still want to offer, you have to have a creative, attractive offer. Something that they're going to be like, Whoa, that's compelling. That sounds good. So again, the one we've been running with for a long time, it was 50% off your second Cleaners 60% or something around there. But yeah, that's been really effective for a long time. We didn't think it would be effective because it was like, you know, people are like, no, you've got to do it on the first time. And it worked, you know? So you just got to try stuff, see what's attractive. What would you want? What would be attractive to you? And just try stuff, You know?

Brandon Condrey:
And then you get to a point business level customers and cashflow wise that you can now really experiment and really find what works in the beginning. You're kind of strapped for cash. Even if you did get the investment funds, you've got to use it to actually execute. So we can't be just giving away the farm, but you'll get to a point where you can kind of work it in and we'll have more advice on that. And number of venues,

Brandon Schoen:
The beautiful thing about this is even though you might take a little hit on a loss leader, someone coming in and you lose a little money on the front end, think of the big picture here. These customers are. What's our average customer, like three to $5,000 a year.

Brandon Condrey:
We're averaging like 3,500, I think so that's per year. And like, we're able to forecast that on a yearly basis, but what's hard to calculate as lifetime value for customers because we're still relatively new in our fourth year. When you get to like our mentor in Colorado have been around for 16 years, they have customers that have been with them for 16 years. And so that one customer, the one time that you impressed them and then kept coming back, they are going to stick with you forever because trust is hard to find. So when they know that you're reputable company, you treat your people while you treat your customers. Well, they'll be in it for the long haul. And so that's kind of what the goal of those discounts are in the beginning is to get people in the door, but you have to then deliver, you have to impress right. To get that lifetime value out of it.

Brandon Schoen:
So you want to look at the big picture because you're, you know, taking a little bit of a hit, but look at that big number on the back end. And like you said, man, this could be years and years and we still have customers from year one.

Brandon Condrey:
Absolutely. We have, we have many customers that are from like our inaugural batch, like people that we got in the first three months that are still with us.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So that's the beauty of this is a subscription model business at first. I didn't even realize it kind of like it is that, but it really is. I mean, people, even though they're not like literally on a subscription, you can set it up like that. But like they come, they're scheduled every two weeks or every month. It's ongoing.

Brandon Condrey:
It's the same day Netflix for cleanliness.

Brandon Schoen:
That's what it is Netflix for cleanliness. I love it. So yeah, I mean, we're all about that business model and this is like a perfect localized version of that on steroids. And it's just a beautiful thing because when you can predict revenue and you can predict what your next month is going to look like, that's a real business and that's something that you can be proud of and something you can really have the courage to keep pressing on with your plan and doing all the good stuff you need to do to.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So that's basically it guys. I mean, hopefully you found some value out of there. Yeah. Don't forget to come get the toolkit. So that's it. Profitcleaners.com/toolkit. That's where the business plan copy is going to be. You'll find links to the software. We mentioned, to get that as well.

Brandon Schoen:
I just want to drop this quote in here because you guys got to commit and I got one more quote from Peter Drucker. He's a great business dude, unless commitment is made there. Their only promises and hopes, but no plans. So make that commitment to yourself. We don't care if you don't do it, it's not going to hurt us. We're already doing this. We're committed, but put that commitment on yourself, your family, your purpose, your reason why, and really make this happen. Put a plan together, make a business plan happen. If you don't already have one, make one, or if you're going into another market, if you already have an existing business, plan it out, use these cool resources, this data to find out where these customers are and execute it and create that momentum.

Brandon Condrey:
So we already gave you the tool kit, that's it! Profitcleaners.com/toolkit. We're always, we're not always, but we're still doing our masterclass, which is eight weeks of sort of free coaching. And, uh, you can find that at Profitcleaners.com/masterclass.

Brandon Schoen:
Yup. And also we're on social media, check out the Facebook page and hit us up at Profit Cleaners on the email. If you want to ask us the question hello@profitcleaners.com and I think that's pretty much it, man. We covered a lot in this episode.

Brandon Condrey:
We're gonna go guys, thanks for sticking with us and as always keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean.

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