Episode 75: 2022 Update for Our Local Cleaning Business

Episode 75: 2022 Update for Our Local Cleaning Business

Brandon Condrey:
Everything's aligning as a cleaning business owner to be no more pandemic, spring cleaning. It's going to be a good year.

Brandon Schoen:
I think that's really good too, because even with emails and people we've talked to some of the students, Profit Cleaners, like that is still a big struggle. People are having cancellations and extra things. Cause people are just not comfortable with people coming in the houses. So hopefully as people become more confident of everything moving forward, that's going to be less and less of an issue and business can continue. He's stronger than ever.

Brandon Condrey:
And all these things. If you consider it from capitalize on the opportunity standpoint, these could be marketing points for you guys to use. You can use the shifting of public opinion or public policy to market using that stuff. I've always told you that I had this idea for a commercial where the cleaners would take off their mask and introduce themselves for a good video. That was a good one. Like now into the mass survey, like you could see my face maybe for the first time ever.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. What an incredible thing that people can see their faces again, and that brings people back together in the community and brainstorm some ideas to bring that into your marketing,

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.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world, take it to the next level and win.

I'm your host, Brandon Shane. I'm joined by my cohost, Brandon Condrey, Brandon Condrey and we're back in the office just hanging out and we decided today, guys, we're going to give you a little company update. What's been going on at Sandia Green Clean. We've been talking about other markets and other stuff recently, but we're going to give you like a down and dirty look at what's going on here locally on the scene at the office.

And let's give him a little update, Brandon, what's going on in the business? Yeah. So it's late February. What is it? February 24th when we're recording this, let's see, first and foremost, we had three snow days and the last two weeks, which a three and a half. So we had three full cancellations, a two-hour delay. That is our worst snow year ever.

So that was kind of a bummer. It really puts a damper on that. When you look at the numbers, when those snow days come in, it's just like our monthly, daily average is going to be terrible for February. But the nice thing from a growth and sustainability standpoint is that we weren't short on payroll. That's usually a thing that happens.

If you lost two days of revenue of a 10 day cycle, would you be able to make payroll? Historically when we had snow days, the answer was no, we had to overdraft accounts or not make a tax payment or something, but it did work this time. So things are looking we're much more stable on payroll and things like that. So that's great.

Yep. That's and maybe that's more of like an economies of scale, like as you get to a certain volume, those things don't impact economies of scale thing. So like when we were small, the rent on the building is like this giant percentage of your income and the car payments. So this giant percentage of your income, well now all the cars are paid off.

We make rent, I think in the first hour of the first day of the first month, you know what I mean? That's easy to do these days. Economies of scale. Totally. But yeah, other general updates. So we're growing at Sandia Green Clean here in Albuquerque. So Claudia, our director of ops, she's getting her own office downstairs,

which was the former vacuum repair place. So we moved right back to your repair room, to where we used to have the team staging area. So team staging was something that Corby does where you lay out all the equipment. Everyone comes by at the end of the day, drops it all off. And then you as the owner or whoever can go inspect it,

make sure it's all looking good. The reality of our building is that we can't fit any more teams staging in here. We're running out of space. So we had to get creative. So team staging is now in the car, so they just leave their stuff in the car and we inspect it in there. So we've got people in here early in the morning before cleaners get in,

we're able to open up all the cars, make sure no one's using razorblades or anything crazy. So team inspections still happens just a little adjusting, especially earlier on our mentor. Corby would have given us some pushback on cause he was really fanatical about seeing everything and having a visual of the station. And so you could mainly look for damage and if they're messing with the equipment,

so we still can, it's just like a tweak on it, right? So it's still visual. You just got to go one by one. I think his thing in the beginning, it was like, you could just walk by at a glance and see that everything's cool. We can't do that. We've got to go car to car, but they're squeezed in there.

Like sardines back there, you can still do it. So I think that's fine. Yeah. Going out. And this is an example, I think of changing the system, being adaptable. Like even the stuff that you guys learned on the podcast, you can take it and innovate it and change it. However you want to use it for your business.

Just like we're doing with the system we learned from our mentor. And they're always, yeah. So like if, when you, when you walk into the office, the way it used to be is there's like you walked right in, there was a couch and a little table and people could hang out in the morning while we were getting keys ready, like have coffee or whatever.

But that was great. When we had like two teams, well, when we had 10, like we can only fit like three people on the couch. And the reality was now the three people that are sitting there, their legs are kind of in the way of everyone else trying to like get through the hallway to the back of the car. And then on the other side of this half brick wall things.

So you guys can visualize it. There was a row of tables that kept Airbnb linens and team staging stuff. And then a time clock on the bonus report was at the end. So what we've done now is where you walk in and you go to the left, that's now vacuum repair or flower prep station area. So everything is which, by the way we brought the flowers back,

flowers are back. That's a new update. I'll cover that one next. So vacuum repair, flower prep station. It is really messy down there right now. Cause we literally just did this three days ago. And then the tables that used to be the linen team prep area that got, we had them convert that to a bar stool height like table.

So it's a higher height. That's where the couch used to be. We just got seven barstools delivered about an hour ago then. So the Barstool is the intent there. Now with that little area, when you come in is that the teams can sit down. You can see at seven people there, whatever you need to do at that table, write some stuff,

fill it out. But we want to get a computer there for new hires. When they come in, they do their onboarding on this computer. They enter in their stuff instead of us like making photocopies of things like we'll just do it. You just enter it all in there. And then also for current employees, you can go in there and print a check stub.

If you need to do that, which a lot of people want to do that. Ours is all direct deposit. We don't mail out check stubs, so you can just get them printed. Now, previously the office was doing it. Now you just do it yourself and then pick it up with a printer. So that's pretty cool. That's like a whole new system.

Yeah. And then where the table used to be, that little conference table is going into Claudia's office. So she can have sensitive HR type meetings with people in their little powwows of four people or so. And so now the bonus reports on a bigger TV that's out there and there's nothing in front of it so people can actually see it. So we moved the tables.

So you could actually crowd up in there and check it out. And then we're making a document station where there's just this funky counter is where we used to have the coffee table. But like on that wall, we're going to put a bunch of wall mounted, little envelope, holder things. And that's where we're going to keep the flower leave-behinds and the brochures and the,

we can't get into your backyard cause of your pet notes. Like all that stuff that the teams take with them, we'll go in there. And then by virtue of having moved Claudia out of the office, that she was in where it was three workstations in there. Now we've got room for more customer service people to come in, which is also a new update.

Right? We have. So we made all these changes and now there's some room to put people in there. So, all right. We'll switch to the other updates that we kind of glossed over there. So we have brought back the flowers. So we stopped that during the pandemic because of budget concerns, like our numbers dropped and we had just switched florists.

And the goal with them was it was supposed to be cheaper than our other floors. So I'm like, yeah, we can do that. And then when the pandemic hit, they're like just kidding. It's way more expensive than it was before. And so we just scrapped it. We just put it on hold. Cause everything was weird. All right,

well now we brought it back and then let me read it back. Was our facilities, guy's name Scott. He now we set up an account with a wholesale florist. So as if we were making our own flowers and, and Scott goes there every day, that's like every three days. And he picks up a bunch of flowers, a bunch of recycled water tubes.

And he assembles all these things for the teams that I have before. That's what we were paying a florist to do before we're in the fire business. We're in the flower. So now they're just all in the fridge and the teams grab him in the morning. It's back the very first day we tested out the routine to make sure we were working the kinks out of it.

Hey guys. So how can Profit Cleaners help you three ways first off, head over to a podcast or if you're on YouTube, we've got loads of free content. We're republishing the podcast here as well. Check out the podcast. That's a great place to start next. You can grab our 10 X marketing course to help you bring your business up to seven figures,

get a bunch of customers. You can check that out at Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses. And then lastly, if you just head to the website in general, Profit Cleaners dot com, there's lots of free tools on there. All the podcast episodes are on there. And then there's also a free masterclass that we run every week that you can still run.

Yeah, sure. Check out the show notes and all sorts of resources. So hopefully that helps you guys. We'll see you guys soon. Take care, keep clean, keep it clean. One of our oldest customers sent us an email, all capital letters, all my God, thank you for bringing back the flowers. I miss them so much. And she was so happy.

Just all cats. She was super excited, pretty long email. And she was just like, thank you so much for staying positive and little things like this really make, I think this is the customer experience. Part of it where you create this feeling and people resonate with it. And even if you're doing price increases, like this is the kind of stuff that makes them loyal to you.

You walk in after a hard day at work. And the first thing you see on your lunch room, table tables, that little flower. You're like, oh yes, I forgot the house is going to be like super clean today. I'm so excited. More importantly from me, the spreadsheet side of guys, we were doing these first florist. I think we had it down to a dollar 95,

her flower, including the tube and all the prep and stuff. Right? Yeah. The Flores during the pandemic. I think that went up to three bucks and then we scrapped it. I think we got it down to about a dollar 30 right now after all the supply chain shenanigans and stuff. It's a buck 30. I mean, granted, we are paying Scott his hourly wage to put them together,

but I think that's relatively low. And so I think it's good. So we brought the flowers back. That's awesome, man. All right. And then on the other side, we now have the goal was to get Claudia director of operations, not doing customer service at all. So she could be focusing on things like HR and payroll and stuff. So we have two full-time customer service people.

Now they work offset hours. So one of them is starting at like seven o'clock in the morning, taking care of cancellations and getting keys ready, and then she's offered early and then the other one is starting at 10 and she gets off at seven. And so those hours for her are letting us make sure that we're dealing with any straggling teams that are come in any after hours,

customer service, stuff that comes in instead of waiting until tomorrow morning, we can never able to get back to them right then and there, which is pretty cool. And more importantly, she's off on Wednesday, Thursday, and she's working the weekend. So she's able to cover weekend customer service stuff that comes in, which is also another update we started doing weekends.

I think we, I think we told you guys that we were doing weekends, so we're bringing it back strong now the weekends. So she's handling weekend stuff and making sure that that's going smoothly. So she's dealing with the teams are making sure everything's cool and also customer stuff that's happening over the weekend. So we've basically got a lot more coverage in terms of customer service hours now than we used to before.

So that just bodes well for people that aren't working normal hours, we can still communicate with them, which is great. And then I guess if we hadn't told you before, I know that we did, but we did launch a weekend team. And the idea was how do we use the assets that you've already bought cars and mops and brooms and stuff.

They're just sitting there at night on the weekends. How do we use them without drastically altering our system by doing commercial stuff? So the idea was let's hire a team that only works on the weekends. We've successfully done that. Although it is hard to keep people motivated on the that's a whole other episode, but we just had a team lead shakeup on the weekend team,

but the idea is move out, cleans and initials. We pushed only to the weekend and that makes our week schedule flow a lot better. So we're not putting in initials and screwing up the recurring schedule. So it's a lot easier on the week team. The weekend team gets a shift differential. So if you're working a Saturday or Sunday, I think we give an extra dollar 50 an hour to make up for that.

You're only doing initials and move outs, which are kind of harder to do, but those jobs bring in quite a bit more revenue, either way higher margin. And so the idea is once that team is totally booked and then we're now telling people they got wait to get their initial clean, we'll try and get a second weekend team and then a third and a fourth.

And then by hopefully eventually we've got every team that we have during the week. All those cars are also running on the weekend. That would be idea. Awesome. And just maximizing the efficiency of what we're using, like you said, without going into commercial. And then what else? I mean, we've got the mandates got lifted recently and that was three days ago,

four days ago, the mask mandates got lifted in New Mexico. So we no longer have masked mandates from a customer perspective. It's still weird. So we left it at, if you want us to wear them in your house, we'll still wear them. So we're given that luxury customer service experience, not telling them like, no, we're not wearing masks,

but the teams that's their choice. I do see a lot of our team members still wearing masks in the cars, driving around the city through the day. And if they want to do it, that's up to them. So go then that's a personal thing for them. Yeah. But I think there's probably a lot of people as a notice that that's happening in their state too.

I think a lot of states around the country think literally all of them now have either eliminated or have scheduled plans to eliminate the various mass mandates. Some of them are different. Some of them are still doing in schools are still doing the hospitals. Like I think hospitals will be for a long time, but the idea is it's I think this is a good sign.

This is the pandemic feeding out. We're coming into spring cleaning season. Everything's aligning as a cleaning business owner to be like, no more pandemic, spring cleaning, summer rush. It's going to be a good year. I think that's really good too, because even with emails and people we've talked to some of the students, Profit Cleaners, like that is still like a big struggle.

You know, like people are having cancellations and extra things. Cause people are just not comfortable with people coming to the houses. So hopefully as people become more confident in everything moving forward, that's going to be less and less of an issue and business can continue and be stronger than ever. Yeah. And all these things, if you consider it from like capitalize on the opportunity standpoint,

like these could be marketing points for you guys to use that the mask man, they got lifted, like things are like getting back to normal. Like wouldn't you like us to clean your house so you can have your friends over again or something like that. I don't know how many people have locked you out without friends completely over the last two years. But the point is you can use the shifting of public opinion or public policy to market using that stuff.

Cause it's in the news, like it was all over the news here that there is no more masks. So how can we capitalize on and be like, Hey, did you hear there's no more masks. I've always told you that I had this idea for a commercial where the cleaners would like take off their mask and like introduce themselves, like for a good video.

Like that's a good one. Like now that the mass survey, like you could see my face maybe for the first time ever. Yeah. What an incredible thing that people can see their faces again. And it brings people back together in the community and maybe brainstorm some ideas to bring that into your marketing, into the customer experience again, and things are moving and shaking and growing here,

we're excited for the spring here. We're still looking at other markets and we'll have more updates and future episodes about more of how that's going. But it's exciting, man. I'm excited for this year 2022, it's going to be another big year. Just wanted to give you guys an update on what was going on in our end, we have our EOS annual meeting starting tomorrow.

So we'll probably have a lot of updates from that to let you guys know how that went. So that book is traction in case you haven't heard us mentioned that several times, but we're big believers in that system. And so we're, this will be our annual meeting that we've ever done. Cause we started it in the middle of last year. Yeah.

So this is the big one, the two day meeting we're doing up in Santa Fe two day offsite meeting. You go to eight hour days in a row. We have a consultant that we brought in. That's going to help steer us on that. And a lot of big things usually happen as a result of these meetings, a lot of monumental shifts,

but the idea is you've got your leadership committees on there, right? Everyone's got buy-in, you're all pointed and focused in the same direction, same goals. That's what we're doing. Yeah. You're getting everybody rowing in the same direction. Everyone's got their personal goals and responsibilities for the next quarter, the next year or whatever it is. And yeah, it is really cool.

Like the last meeting we did, it was on zoom and you know, everybody is spread out and stuff, but this one we're all going to be together. That is the intent of that. And then it should be really, really amazing the benefit and the result of that. Just bringing people together, getting everyone on the same page. I think that's been really cool to see that growth just so far and even more what's going to happen in the future.

So stay tuned for further updates. We'll have a lot more coming down the pipeline. In the meantime, in the meantime, keep clean guys. Thanks for joining us today to get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember keep it clean.

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