Episode 82: The World’s Largest Retailer Cleaning Houses: What Happens to Local Businesses Like Yours?

Episode 82: The World’s Largest Retailer Cleaning Houses: What Happens to Local Businesses Like Yours?

Brandon Schoen:
This is the key man, like that's the opportunity is people want to work with local businesses. They don't want to work with these huge companies because of what you just said right there, because there's all this uncertainty and there's all these things, all these variables and things that could go really wrong and people don't want to deal with that. They want to help the local businesses. And that's where you guys have the edge and the leg up here is like, let them try to come in and let them try to take some market share. And that's a good way to differentiate yourself. You're local. And you're going to stand out way ahead of these guys because people want that. They want that local experience. And so focus on how you can be unique and differentiating. Play that card more.

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 to the Profit Cleaners podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world. And we're joining you here today, guys. Thanks for being here. I'm your host, Brandon Shane. I'm joined by my cohost, Brandon. Condrey amazing. Brandon Condrey and guys, we have a really fun podcast for you today. It's talking all about how the world's largest retailers is coming to clean your house. And I think it sounds wicked scary, Brandon, should we be scared about this?

Yeah, you should be terrible. Walmart is a scary, scary beast. No, you shouldn't be terrified. We're going to explain what's going on and tell you what's up with it. It's silly business ploy on their part, but whatever we'll show you. Why not to worry? Yeah. So this is going to be kind of a cool episode guys talking about competition.

Why you shouldn't worry about competition, why you should focus on your own game and focus on differentiating your own business. We have a kind of a fun story too, and we'll touch on from our earlier days when a similar thing happened in this market and the cleaning market. So yeah, guys, we'll just tell them the cows keeping, I guess, Brandon real quick.

Any housekeeping we might need to do here? Yeah. I mean, always you can subscribe if you haven't done that. If this is your first time hearing us, cause you clicked the world's largest retailers coming to clean your house. Welcome. But otherwise we talk about cleaning company ownership and help you through those things. So if you get value out of us,

subscribe, leave a review, tell a friend, we love to hear it. And you know, right now it's a ad free podcast. It's just me and Brandon real talking about big retailers and billionaires and stuff. Yeah. The cleaning business. And the cool thing is we have a couple of different ways. People can support us too, if you don't want to,

if you're like, I really want to support you guys, but I don't want to buy your course or something like that. We have a Patriot group. You can click on our website on the book club. There's like an extra level that we added where it's like five bucks a month and you guys can help us help keep making these shows happen. Cause it costs money to put these shows out.

We got to pay editing and technology costs. And like Brandon said, we're not running a bunch of ads. So if you guys want to help us out, feel free. There's lots of ways we can work together. But yeah, we're making this content to add value to your business. Hopefully you guys can really take it to the next level. That's the goal.

So yeah, let's tell the story brand. And so we came across this post and we were like, oh my God, this is great. So This was a Facebook Post from a different software user group that we don't use launch 27 is a software platform that focuses on independent contractors. And one of the users in there was saying, oh, we'll get you a link for this.

It's all in the show notes. There's a screenshot down there. But so the guy was saying that he was doing some research in New York to create a proposal. And as part of the research, he's found this ad, he Googled deep housecleaning and there was an ad on there that says Walmart house cleaning services. And he was like, what's up with that?

Like this is going to be some new competition in a town near you. And so I knew what this was, but for the sake of the launch, 27 people, I had to dig into that a little bit and got some information for everyone on why he shouldn't freak out essentially. Yeah, absolutely. And actually the cool thing about this, I always say this,

but people have a hard time grasping this, but anytime you're in any business market, you want to have competition. Like if there's nobody out there competing with you, you probably don't have a good market. Like there's probably not a lot of demand. There's probably not a solution or a hole you're trying to fill there because if it is a good market,

you're going to be seeing stuff like this, which is exactly what we're talking about. When a big old brand like an Amazon or a Walmart or one of these big corporations is coming into their Tesla house, cleaning Service, house cleaning. That's the next one. Exactly. But that means that's proof that there's a market here and you should get excited about that because of those guys.

See, they're like, I want a piece of that pie. You should understand that you actually have a huge leg up a huge advantage. And we're going to talk all about that. So let's get into it, Brandon. Yeah. So in the show notes, you'll find a link to a press release. So the press release, I'm pulling it up now.

So I want to find the date on it for you. So I don't get this wrong. So this actually the press release is October 27th, 2020. And so this is from a company called handy.com. And so the headline of this press release is Walmart ads handy to 2000 stores with $59 for assembly and $79 TV mountain. So handy for those of you that don't know is it's like you buy a piece of furniture at Ikea or something.

And when you're checking out, there's a little box. That's like, Hey, do you want to have a local pro assemble this for you for 50 bucks or whatever? That's exactly what this is. This is the service that links that stuff. So they have a lot of retail partners. And so they started off doing little things like little odd jobs,

mounting a TV, assembling furniture, assembling a bike, whatever it is. And so there's like a little kiosk thing. It looks like a gift card stand it's in Walmart stores and you pick up a little card, it says $79 TV mounting or $59 TV mounting, whatever. And you take that with you to checkout. So you pay Walmart directly for service and then you get a redemption code on your receipt.

And then from there you go to handy.com plug in your redemption code, and then it'll guide you through this scheduling thing. So like you give them some info, then someone's going to reach out. So now here's why I don't think you should be that worried handy. Doesn't have employees. They're not like you, they don't have W2 employees that they care about and are trying to build a culture around all they are,

is Upwork for manual labor. So it's just like a big, It's a referral service. So let's say I am John Q handyman guy, and I have a couple of screwdrivers, but I don't have like a business. I'm not organized. I don't have a website. You can go to one of these websites like handy or care.com or bark.com. There's so many versions of these.

And so you put your stuff in there. There's a couple of requirements. Like you got to have experience in the field that you're applying for authorized to work in that country and you have to have excellent customer service skills. That's it. And then at the bottom on hand is application. It says in big letters, actually the letters are quite small, but it's bolded.

And it says handy is not an employer, but simply connects independent service professionals with customers. So Walmart's out there plugging these ads like Walmart house cleaning services, like you're going to get W2's Walmart employees that are going to come clean your house. In reality, if you bought that service, if you clicked on that ad, if you bought it through their website,

somehow someone on Handy's website would have had to apply and say that I am a housekeeper. Here's my experience. And then they're just going to hook you up with jobs. Why is this not a threat to you? You as an independent contractor can only handle so many businesses. If you're doing recurring business, you're talking like five, 10 people and that's your schedule.

You're maxed out. If you're doing these, one-off go do a deep clean, sure, man, like you're going to rely on that to come in and handy takes a cut. So like the advantage of these people doing it is, I guess you're getting an inbound funnel of people. And when you're in there, you could talk to them and maybe try to get them to commit to something else.

But it's like Groupon. It's like leading service jumps on Groupon, some poor person who started their cleaning company and got a call from a group on sales person and took the bait. And they were like, we'll Get you 2000 customers overnight. And that probably happened. But it's because you're like selling your body for $30 a house. Do you know what I mean?

Like that's what they ended up. That's what you'd net after a Groupon deal. And this is kind of the same thing. It's like hand is going to take a severe cut. I think of whatever that person charged. And so from the standpoint of the provider, it's, one-off not recurring, it's not predictable income from the standoff of the customer. Who's coming into your house,

like handy, vetted them. Like I get that. They said that they've vetted them, but what's to prevent me from, I don't know how stringent this vetting process is. So what's to prevent me from rolling into some town, setting up the profile and just going into houses and yanking some stuff. You know what I mean? Like that's something that would happen in that.

What's the recourse for you as the homeowner, you get a refund from handy and maybe there's a big insurance policy attached to it and you can kind of do some stuff, but typically big corporations are not just going to hand over money. Cause you complained. I just don't think that's how they were. Yeah. Like someone steals something from your house, from that program.

And it's like, who are you going to turn around and complain to? And even if you can, it's like, you're talking to a big old company and then they got to go through this other company. And then I don't mean I'm just imagining it's going to be a nightmare. Yeah. Who do you complain to? Is it Walmart? Is it handy.com?

I'm sure you get some email when you schedule it. Honestly, we should have just tried to book one of these services before we recorded this, but there are other models like this, But I think this is the key man. Like that's the opportunity is people want to work with local businesses. They don't want to work with these huge companies because of what you just said right there,

because there's all this uncertainty and there's all these things, all these variables and things that could go really wrong and people don't want to deal with that. They want to help the local businesses. And that's where you guys have the ed and the leg up here is like, let them try to come in and let them try to take some market share. And that's a good way to differentiate yourself if you're local and you're going to stand out way ahead of these guys,

because people want that. They want that local experience. And so focus on how you can be unique and differentiate and play that card more. Yeah. You set yourself apart as the local person, you're a local job creator. I did not come if you're paying them that money's going to Bentonville Arkansas with Walmart and wherever handy.com is based. And it doesn't,

that's not a warm feeling. I think for most people, I do think that there's a pretty solid wave going right now for supporting local businesses. And this is like the total opposite. Like there's a local person that's getting paid, but they're getting paid a fraction of what you paid to have them clean your house. This kind of brings us full circle to when this happened last time.

And I actually was worried. Yeah. Let's tell them the story of this happened when we very first started the cleaning business. I don't know if it was 20 17, 20 18 Been late 2017. I think so like late 2017, we're in business for a couple of months. Corby in Colorado sends us a link. He's like, look, see they're coming for us.

And it was Amazon home cleaning services. And I was freaked out because like that's a big tech company. Walmart is not a tech company. Walmart is a big retailer. They partnered with handy cause they got foot traffic and eyes on it. And so like, you're trying to get an impulse purchase for helping set up your TV. But Amazon that's like there's programmers behind it and they're gunning for you and whatever and algorithm and yada yada,

yada, I think Walmart's really trying to compete with Amazon. So I think this is interesting how they're kind of like trying to do this after Amazon totally blew it doing this For sure they are. But Amazon tried to do it. In-house and Walmart just contracted with handy. Who's already got their set up and whatever terms they worked out, I'm sure is fine for them.

You know what I mean? So at Walmart's not actually doing it themselves. Amazon did do it. And so it was literally the exact same thing. Amazon home cleaning home services started showing up on Google ads. People booked it and it went badly. Cause it's the same thing. You're burning a person, a single person through that house. It takes forever.

You have like it says, okay, the requirements for handy, this isn't Amazon. But like, let's just use this as the comparison must have paid experience with the services you were applying for. What does that mean? Does that mean that my mom paid me 10 bucks to clean a bathroom one time when I was a kid and now I'm a professional housekeeper.

No, but I don't know how they're vetting them. Do you know what I mean? So like, if you're talking about teenagers that cleaned the house, when they were a kid and they're going to go get some money like over this weekend, you're not going to be happy with that product. And that was the actual end result. Amazon tried it for shoot man,

maybe three to six months. It was not a long time. At least in our market. I saw the ads for three to six months I think. And then they bailed. And now if you go to Amazon does have a page up, which is Amazon home services. Why choose Amazon upfront pricing, easiest scheduling, handpicked pros. That's where all the Juju is.

You know what I mean? Like what is happening in the handpick pro section? How are they vetting those people? There's a happiness guarantee. We'll refund your stuff, whatever. But now the categories that they offer are essentially exactly like candy.com minus the cleaning. So they have home theater setup, furniture, assembly, outdoor equipment, assembly, smart home services.

So you bought no grandma Alexa for Christmas. And she has no idea what to do. Amazon will come set it up. Like that's kind of the business market, but they bailed on house cleaning. They gave up on it. Super interesting. Why do you think they have all those other services? Because they didn't get rid of Amazon services. They just got rid of the house cleaning portion of it.

Right? So I wonder like how did they screw it up so bad? I'm like what happened? I wonder maybe it was, I don't think they've put any info out on that, but I think I can take a stab at it. Hey guys, quick question. Does your cleaning business need more customers? And the answer is of course, yes.

So if you're like us and you want more customers, we've created a 10 X marketing bootcamp course to help you guys 10 X your business, get to that seven figures and beyond, and really commit to your success. So if you're ready to commit, let's tell them where to go. I head over to Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses. You can get started right Away.

We'll see you guys on the inside, keep it clean, Keep it clean. The thing that they are offering are one-off small jobs. So you need to find someone who's willing to transport themselves and their tools to your home, to get 30 bucks to put your grill together or whatever over an hour or something. So like handy.com has pay in there, like make up to $22 an hour as a cleaner or $45 an hour as a handyman up to is a loaded statement.

So that means you could also be making $5 an hour and you're an independent contractor. So there's no requirement to pay minimum wage it's that you agreed on a contract to assemble it for this much. So I suspect what happened was Amazon was trying to take a big cut. People would go in their house. Cleaning is hard. It is hard work. So you go in there,

work your tail off for three hours, four hours. Cause you're probably one person, whatever you got paid, let's go generous with it. You got paid 22 bucks an hour. So you got $80 over that four hours. And now you're exhausted. You're like, great. What am I going to do tomorrow? It's not a full schedule. Like being a W2 employee.

We're paying our people between gaps, between schedule gaps. You get paid from when you clock in. And when you clock out at the end of the day, like if we didn't find a house to fill for you, like that's on us, like we're gonna come back to the office, help us do some marketing stuff, clean the office, help us do some laundry.

We're going to keep you busy during those eight hours. But you get paid all day. It's a full-time job plus overtime sometimes. So I just think it was a huge Pandora's box of problems. Like assembling a piece of furniture, like how bad can you do it? Do you know what I mean? Like they came in and they put it together.

What are you going to complain about? The thing got put together. They came into your house and scratched $10,000 worth of stainless steel appliances with a person that you booked through Amazon. What? Now Amazon is going to fight you tooth and nail to say that those are scratched when we got there. So I suspect several of those types of incidents happened over and over and over again.

And then they bailed. That was the end result. Yeah. And I think just when you're talking about that, like this kind of reminds me of in the beginning, why we chose, like you were mentioning launch 27, which is a software you can contract out these 10 99 employees and you don't, I guess you can have a team. I'm not really sure,

but we know people that successfully do that. It works obviously, but we chose not to go that route just because we have a lot more control over having our own employees. Right. Like we know when they're going to show up, we know who's in the house, we know what they look like. We know what kind of tools they're using, all these things,

right? What kind of products they're using. So you can give that control away. But I feel like that's what they're doing here, like Walmart and what Amazon was doing. And I think it's going to bomb for them as well. I don't know what you think, Brandon, but it seems like it's going to be, If it didn't work for Amazon,

I don't know why it would work for handy. So maybe they've cracked the code somehow. But in the end, like if you look at other types of services, like these let's think of them, bark.com. They'll come out. I think it's barked.com. They'll walk your dog. They'll scoop dog poop. And they'll clean your house. Like they do all kinds of weird stuff.

Cause we got people hit us up from bark.com and do ads on it. In the beginning, We still use Thumbtack. I mean, that's another aggregator, Thumbtacks, a good one. Like that's an independent contractor putting up, like I will do X for this much money. Fiverr is kind of the same. But those are you hiring someone directly. So Upwork you're hiring them directly.

You're looking at their profile. This kind of actually takes a bit of the control out of the consumers, their hands. Because like you set a date and time and they're like, cool, we got Ramon coming over. He's going to do it. And you don't know anything about them. You didn't get to look at his, like his profile. So now that we're talking about it,

I've been testing spruce.com. Spruce does this for housecleaning came and they do this exact same thing. Like every single time someone comes, it's a different set of people. Sometimes it's one lady. Sometimes it's two people. Sometimes it's maybe three. I don't know. But it's always messed up, man. Like they're always missing stuff. They left our door unlocked a few times.

Different people. Like it's just so variable every single time. What happened to you as a consumer? When they left the door open, you complained. So I complained. They said, oh my God, we're so sorry. That happened three different times. Here's 10 bucks. Like they gave me like a $10 worth gas. Yeah. Thanks for exposing my family to whatever was going to walk through the door.

If I wasn't paying attention to It's always like a poor experience and it, it always feels like you don't know what to expect. You don't know what products they use. It's always like this big open-ended question. So I feel like that's, again, the opportunity that people have to deliver a consistent product. Maybe if it's not the same team every time it's,

you know, who's going in the house, they're trained a certain way. They're using your tools, your products. That's why we use that system because it's just a better customer experience. Yeah. So like the word I've been searching for the whole time, this is the gig economy. These are gig workers. You got a gig assembling a grill, you got a gig cleaning a house.

You got a gig job with door dash, delivering food, all door dash drivers are not created equal. Sometimes there are people hustling. They come up with like an insulated bag that kept all your stuff warm. And sometimes you get your pizza box that clearly like was upside down at some point in that person's car. So that's why you leave them ratings.

And at some point, if your ratings drop below a certain point, you get kicked off the platform. But the user, the end user, the person who's getting their house cleaned by handy.com at Walmart. You're the Guinea pig. You're the Guinea pig of them sending out someone who they just vetted, but they've never done a job. They're going to clean your house and you're going to give them one star review because they left your door open or they scratched your appliances or a five star review,

whatever. But there's no guarantee there. I mean, there's, Amazon has a happy home guarantee or whatever, happy promise. And I'm sure handy does too. But like you just witnessed. Yeah, we totally guaranteed it. We gave you 10 bucks because we screwed up real bad. Sorry. When we do something in our business, we don't give people 10 bucks a week.

We just go out and reclaim the whole thing and give it to them for free. Yeah, We'll do a totally over again. If they are super upset, we'll give them a 50% refund. And that's what you get with a local business. So you, as a cleaning business owner, dear listener, you have way more tools in your toolbox to control your reputation amongst your customers.

Whereas Walmart's not going to do any of that. And so they will eventually amass a bunch of low ratings for the people that went for it and actually done it. What's funny is that every time we've seen the ads come up, either in these Facebook groups or found them ourselves, they have zero ratings. So that either means that they're using the internal rating system and not reading them on Google or nobody's using them period.

So that also, I think is viable. Like if you have a company like us, Sandia Green, Clean we've come in, we've cleaned her stuff. We've been good to you. Why would you jump ship to go somewhere else? And then if you're looking at Google reviews, well, Walmart cleaning services and Albuquerque has exactly zero reviews in San Diego and clean has 300 plus like which one are you going to go with?

I think the choice is pretty easy. Yeah, absolutely. Man. So, I mean, I always try to see like the silver lining on these things. And like we said in the beginning, when we were much more unaware of what could happen when Amazon came out with this, like I think it's just proof again like that something similar is going to happen.

You guys don't need to worry about it. We're not worried about it. And again, it's positive because it shows there's a great market. People want a piece of it. And it's a huge opportunity for you guys to create your own uniqueness in the market. That's local, that's nobody else can touch that is that unique experience that really makes you stand out.

And that's how you beat the competition. Guys. It's not looking at what they're doing and worrying about it. It's focusing on your own game, knowing yourself, knowing what you're going to do to become, nobody can be you, nobody can tell your story or have that brand story behind their brand or these big corporations. They're just these big, huge companies.

They P they don't have a face attached to them. So people can't relate to them. Whereas your local brand, you have this local personality, this local story, this thing that you can really play up, that makes you different. That makes you more valuable. It's not just storytelling, you're selling a story. People want that. And that's why they'll work with you over the big brands all day long.

So really, you know, to differentiate yourself, I would say, I think we can do a whole podcast about this, differentiating yourself from the competition. We'll do that soon. But I think just take some takeaways from this is get excited that big companies want a piece of the cleaning market. That's a good thing, and get excited that you have this opportunity as a local business to differentiate yourself to out-compete them,

right? Just to go the extra mile, do whatever they can't do, because they have this big box. They have to fit in. You can go outside that box. You can create a unique customer experience. You can differentiate yourself with your own local story and your brand, and that's, what's going to really help you guys take it to the next level.

And out-compete all these guys. Yeah. I think a tail tail sort of indicator of that, like what you just expressed is the silver lining. We had about five minutes to worry about Amazon and Corby sent that email. We Googled a couple of things, and then we were so busy with keeping up with our growing business that I really didn't think about it ever again.

And I never heard that Amazon was absorbing all the customers in a certain area. And then they bailed. So like big companies have a history of doing this. Like, does anyone remember the fire phone from Amazon? Amazon released the fire phone and everyone was super hyped in that thing, tanked hard. And now Amazon doesn't make phones. So they will experiment with these things.

It's kind of natural as you're this big, giant behemoth of a company. But that doesn't mean that you need to flip out that Amazon's coming to clean my house. Our Walmart is like, they're going to screw that up. Walmart's really good at distribution and selling stuff that does not mean that they're going to be really good at cleaning your house. Yeah,

Absolutely. I think it was a great podcast. I think it's always good to know there's competition, but guys, don't worry about the competition focused on your own game, focus on making your business better. And I think that's what we've been doing with Sandia Green Clean to, And our mindset from the get go. Like I still always think back to this thing you told me.

I said it before in the podcast, it was, you can become the tallest building in town by tearing down everyone else's building. So yours is the last one and the tallest one, or you can just work on building yours taller faster than everybody else. And then eventually you'll be at the top. That's what we focused on the whole time. And now several years later,

we just put out that episode. Our last episode was about becoming the number one reviewed cleaning company in the state of New Mexico. That's because I don't care what the competition's doing. I'm not worried about what they're doing. Someone asks me about them. Sometimes I'm like, Nope, didn't see that don't care. Like we're too busy pushing the train forward, going faster and faster.

And that's what you should be too. And so same thing. This is just static. It's static noise in the background that Walmart's going to clean your house and you can just keep pressing on. And I think the important thing is like in the beginning, you're more hungry maybe because you don't have reviews or as much momentum or as much business. So you have that hunger and that drive.

But as you get bigger, guys, you got to keep that because every inch counts, every little thing counts. And that's what these big companies, they're so big. They're not going to go the extra mile. They're not going to do the extra things that you can do as a local brand to stand out and to be different and to really wow.

Your customers and create that experience for them. So, yeah, it's exciting times. I'm excited that Walmart and handy are taking a stab at it because they're not going to get close to us, not even gonna touch us. So that's exciting. Yeah. Or they'll reach out to us to be the pro. Do you want to be the pro anomic or he like,

we already are the pro we don't need your half discounted business. Maybe that's the opportunity right there just become the authority, the exclusive pro of Walmart in your city. And that way, I don't know, maybe that would work, but it sounds like a fun idea. Yeah. I don't know if any of you have had experience with it. Maybe some of you that are listening actually did go through with signing up to be a pro and do some of those jobs.

What did you get paid? Did you make 22 bucks an hour? Let us know. I mean, hit us up by email. You can find us at hello at Profit Cleaners dot com. There's two Facebook groups. One, if you purchased a course and one it's open, so let us know love to actually hear if someone has a story about doing it.

That'd be very, Yeah, that would be cool. So yeah. Reach out guys. Hello at Profit Cleaners dot com and hope you guys got some value out of this episode, it's kind of fun episode, but until next time, guys, keep it clean. 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.