Episode 87: Our Quarterly Cleaning Business Meeting and How You Can Learn/Copy from Us!

Episode 87: Our Quarterly Cleaning Business Meeting and How You Can Learn/Copy from Us!

Brandon Condrey:
We're treating the hiring likely retreating customers. So there's a sales funnel involved with hiring. And so we're trying to sell the applicant on why they would want to work for us instead of some other company that may be paying a dollar an hour more.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, I think the market's changed over there. Say a lot. And I think a lot of people are really struggling with this specific topic of hiring and staffing. But really at this point, guys, you got to really start trying harder than just slapping up a job ad and putting up like a big, old, long form on your website for people to apply. You really need to tell people why they should work for you and tell them the benefits. We're shortening the process. We're putting ourselves in the position of the cleaners and whoever's applying and just making it like a lot more concise, a lot more easy to get through. Like instead of asking for a bunch of information up front, it's just name, email phone. Now we've captured that we can follow up with them. We can educate them.

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.

Welcome back everyone 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 you are joining us today, guys, Brandon Shane, I am Brandon Shane, your host, and I'm joined by my cohost in the house here. Brandon Condrey that's me, Brandon Condrey. And we are in the upstairs office here where we originally got this game going.

And we're broadcasting to you guys a really cool episode today. We're going to be sharing with you some nitty gritty details from our quarterly meeting that we recently did just last week. And these meetings are really cool. It's based on a book called entrepreneur operating system, which we've talked about before, but we're just going to kind of overview all of the details of stuff that you know,

issues where we're working through a new goals that we're setting and probably some cool insights. That'll give you guys just some new ideas as well, some new inspiration for your cleaning business to keep growing and keep going to the next level. So Brandon let's enlighten everybody with what we've been learning. Technically speaking the book is traction Attraction By Gino Wickman. That's right.

And what he teaches you in the book is the entrepreneur's operating system, which is called EOS. So you'll hear us talk about EOS a lot. So this was our EOS quarterly meeting. So the quarterly meeting is you get your leadership team together. It's an all-day thing. You always have it away from the office because the theory there is that you'll get more creative juices flowing if you're not sitting at your office,

because if you're in your office, you'll be like sifting through mail and stuff. That's sitting on your desk like Answering phone calls. Yeah. The piles of stuff that are around me now. So that was interesting. We actually had to bring back a customer service rep who quit and we had to bring her back for one day. And when she did us a favor,

we paid her as an independent contractor, basically because she knew the system and she was free. So she helped us by running the customer side of stuff. Holy crap. Yeah. That was really cool that we had the whole team in the room, the whole leadership team, everyone in the office. And surprisingly, there wasn't any huge hiccups because she kind of like stepped in and helped us.

That was huge. Yeah. So here's how the meeting went. We have a facilitator that we've used in the past for this, and he's great. He's put us into companies like three times, I think. And so we started with just making a list. It was the expectations slash issues list. And then when it came time to talk about it,

we voted on which ones to talk about. So our issues list was we want to outline our new customer experience department. We are continuing to have staffing problems. Just like most of you are probably, we wanted to look at finances for Q3. We were talking about pricing concerns slash an impending recession, potentially, and lots of other stuff. So the two things that we mainly focused on that day were customer experience and staffing.

And then a little bit of pricing. Yeah. I'll just name off a couple of the other ones. Cause they're interesting, but we definitely only Bramble to focus on a few, like you said, Brandon, but it was preserving the quality of employees, how to target hires of people already working, which like, cause we're just having all these staffing issues.

So possibly ideas for getting other skilled people that are already cleaners to come work for us because we're building a better brand, a better place to work. And we talked a little bit about national versus local branding and paid time off and then reviewing of our scorecard, which I think was really interesting too. Is this the scorecard over here or no, that's the wheel.

We're looking at a big wall of giant paper notes that we took during this meeting. So bear with us guys. But yeah, this is all super interesting stuff. So you guys are gonna learn a lot. So let's just jump in. I think the most revealing thing that we got was the hiring funnel. So in the context that I'm using hiring funnel here,

it's not a marketing funnel like we've taught you about before. It's not a click funnel, which is a software that makes marketing funnels. This is a graphic. So it's, I mean, you've seen them before on certain softwares. We'll use it. I think service fusion actually has one built in, but it literally looks like a triangle with the wide part at the top bottom at the narrow part at the bottom.

So that's the funnel and you put the steps of whatever process you're looking at. And the idea is with anything sales, hiring chores around your house for your kids, like there's a bunch of people on the top of the funnel, but not all of them are going to drop out of the bottom. So no one really ever has a hundred percent close rate.

So the idea is it's a contact sport. You got to put more people on the top of the funnel to knowing what your close rate is to get the results that you want out of the end of the funnel. Yeah. So you're trying to reverse engineer it. So, And I think what was interesting is last quarter, our big meeting, like this was what we were trying to also put in place was like,

how can we get a bunch more people on the top of the funnel? And we were doing that. And we were trying indeed and all these other places that we'd never tried to get more people, but we were still not getting the results. So it's still a big issue. Last quarter. His thing was okay, we're having a problem staffing. So what we assumed was let's just put more people in the top of the funnel to get us more hires.

So the quarterly goal, the rock for that one was that we needed three to four qualified applicants per week. So you need 16 people a month to fill out the application. And so then you sit on that plan for a quarter. So we did, we got four applicants in there once every week. However, the issue that we consistently ran into was they wouldn't show up for their interview or they would show up for their interview and nod and smile the whole time,

but then not show up for their first day of work Or worst yet show up for the first day of work and then just never come back again. And So there were, we were having a ghosting issue. So what we did, what our facilitator, Tim did, we, we reverse engineered the funnel. So I mean, that's not true. We drew out the funnel,

which we'd never done before. So here are the steps on the funnel. They're going to go to the jobs, board jobs, board jobs page at our website, that's the first step. Then they're going to get some info or an application. So they're going to fill out, we're going to get their name and address, like whatever it may be.

We're going to get some sort of conversation going with them, like a text invitation to come to an interview. Then we're gonna do an interview in person than it was acceptance training video, field training first day. And then they become employees and they stay, Want to hear all the latest news from Profit Cleaners. First, want to make sure you don't miss out on our next courses and some amazing discounts.

We'll be sure to follow at Profit Cleaners on Instagram and sign up for our emails on Profit Cleaners dot com. Now I'm going to rattle off some numbers for those steps here, and we'll put a photo, we'll get a link for this thing to in the show notes somewhere. So you can understand what I'm saying instead of me trying to describe it. So what we trying to do is get over the period of a month.

We want one employee. We were using real data for this to try and reverse engineers. We want one employee a week. We need to get an employee that actually stays one a week. So 52 a year, that's the situation we find ourselves in because of employees leaving and growth. So to reverse engineer that what we found there was one step that we were really missing.

And so what was happening was our trainer Rina. She wanted to essentially look people in the eye. She wanted to have an in-person interview. That's where she could really explain things to them and kind of get a read on them. She didn't like talking to them on the phone cause she thought that they could just like Willy nilly ignore things. What the whole group ended up coming to the conclusion though,

is that if we're not talking to them on the phone, then the applicant could just be viewing it as a huge waste of time. Like the way the job ad is worded is the starting wage is 1250 in Albuquerque. But it goes as high as 15 bucks depending on experience. But if the 1250 is what was putting them off, then they never even got to the part where they were going to come in.

Like why come in for 1250? So there's this step in here where we had over, like we were looking at last month's date. I think we had 46 people come to the application and fill it Out, fill it Out. We actually submitted. And then we sent text messages to all of them essentially, but not all of them got back. So 37 is the number we came to for that.

But then between 37 text and then the interviews, it dropped eight. So we lost 75% of the funnel in one step. So the corrective action there is that instead of texting, rhino's just going to call him. She was under the impression that she'd be bothering them, that they may be at their job and they don't want to answer the phone. They can't answer the phone.

So we're going to come up with a little script for her to do it, but you can handle it with kids, go of like, Hey, this is Reno from this other company that you talked to this morning, you know, like you can be a little bit vague about it if someone can hear where they're at. But the idea is if we can answer some upfront questions that they may have,

that the job ad did an answer than we would increase the amount of people that came in for interviews. And if we can increase the amount of people that came in for interviews, then we increased the amount of people that drop out the bottom of the funnel. That's the idea. Yeah. And it's really, when you like draw this out like this,

it's really amazing because you can see all the steps and we didn't even see this whole initially, but it was just like rhino. We're putting all these people on top of the funnel, you're following up with them, like what's happening. And once we saw this, it was like really clear that a text message, which these days usually works pretty well,

but even more, follow-up like a phone call, which she was like, well, they're usually working or they're not going to answer well, That's fine. Leave a voicemail. That's Fine. But just stay on it. I want to stay engaged with them. Instead of just hoping that, Hey, we shot you a text. Our hard work has done.

Yeah. With that super high engagement is important because these people are looking for a job just like the customers when they're looking for cleaning, which is another part of this, we're revamping our customer experience, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. But when people are ready to go, when they're ready to sign up for cleaning or sign up for a job to work with your company,

they're engaged, they're ready to go right now. So it's very likely that they're going to go work for someone else. If you don't get back to them right away, or you don't have some type of high engagement. So we're probably still gonna send those texts. And as we revamped this funnel, we're rebuilding it. So it'll be still in sending some automations and things to follow up with people and educate them.

But I think Reyna just calling people simple as that sounds guys just picking up the phone is really going to be key because she's not going to do the whole interview on the phone. Like you said, Brandon, it's just going to be kind of like weeding people out and making sure they know upfront, Hey, there's a huge opportunity here. It could definitely be a lot more pay than you think.

And maybe even just get people that would come in for an interview that would be a total flake anyways. It's just avoid that all together and save a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we could weed out the ones that would have come in and said no. And then we saved them coming down here and save Rina, having to block time to be here to interview because otherwise she could have been doing inspections,

things like that. So it's a win-win for everybody. But like we said, because we had never looked at it from this funnel perspective of what is it like as an applicant to move through the steps and let's actually look at the numbers and how many are we missing? Like how many, where did we drop off? And the biggest drop off by far,

once we got through the call thing, like if you look at the rest of the numbers after interview and acceptance and all that, we're closing 50% of the people that came to interview in person, 50% of those people were becoming long-term employees that stay with us for a long time. So if we can, like, we're looking at this graphic for you,

but we're getting eight people over the last month came in for an interview. So that's like, what two weeks we were getting two a week, but that eight was from 37 that we texted. So that's where the 75% drop off is if we're able to get 50% of the people that Raina calls on the phone that would double the amount of people that came to do an interview.

So 37 we'd be getting was that 19 people, 19 people to come in for interviews. And we close 50% of those that end up being long-term employees. So we'd be hiring 10 people a month instead of four. So that is the ideal outcome of this. That is the hope of doing these phone calls. And so Raina will report into us on this progress,

like during the weekly meetings where we review the data for this. But so part of my job over the next quarter is to get an actual graphic of this funnel for real on a website that we can all look at the arena would fill out a little form every day and tell us like, how many people did you interview? How many people went to the website,

so on and so forth. So we'll actually be able to track over time if this is working or not. But that's the name of the game? Like if you don't look at this stuff, people are sitting around pulling their hair out, being like nobody wants to work anymore. Right? Well, you're not really like sitting back. I mean, we're,

I'm not pulling my hair out. We have been hacking away with knives and pickaxes at the hiring problem for two years. But every time we come up with something that tweaks it a little bit better, it gets a little bit pitter. And so the name of the game is just constant improvement and that's kind of what EOS is really all about is if you're looking at these things and paying attention,

they will improve. Right. That quote that we've said before, What you track and you measure, you can improve, right? Yeah. What gets tracked improves. So like if you're just sitting by like, yep, we put out a job ad done, like we're done, but if you're not tracking it and you're not seeing how bad the job ad is performing.

So really I think the end result is that we're treating the hiring. Like we retreating customers. So there's a sales funnel involved with hiring. And so we're trying to sell the applicant on why they would want to work for us instead of some other company that may be paying a dollar an hour more, but it's at a crappy corporation, blah, blah,

blah. Yeah. And I mean like, honestly, a few years ago we didn't have to do this. I think the market's changed on the say a lot. And I think a lot of people are really struggling with this specific topic of hiring and staffing, but you're right. Like just for example, instead of sending people right to a huge form to apply for the company now we're actually revamping the hiring funnel and it'll be up here as soon guys,

but you can come check it out, but it's essentially a sales page. And we have, we just recorded videos According to employee testimonials, just like customer testimonials. We recorded the employees that have been with us for years telling us what they like about it. Why they have stayed here for a year. Yeah. And they turned out really cool. And it's like really fun to watch because all of the recent things that we identified in our culture and in our core values,

they're saying in the testimonials, they're saying we love working here. We love, they have environment. We love that. We get to spend more time with our families. We love the pay. We love, you know, all these things they're saying in the videos. But really at this point, guys, you got to really start trying harder than just slapping up a job ad and putting up like a big,

old, long form on your website for people to apply. You really need to tell people why they should work for you and tell them the benefits. We always tell you to tell the customer, why tell the customer, why? Tell them why you don't clean knickknacks, tell them why you don't use this chemical or whatever it is. You got to do that.

So this is the same reason we have to tell the potential employee. We have to tell the applicant why this is why you want to work for us. Look at these videos. Everyone's so happy here. You got to give us a shot. Yeah. And we're in the process of refining this funnel. We are going to build it in click funnels,

but really guys, you can build in whatever on your website. It's just, we're shortening the process. We're putting ourselves in the position of the cleaners and whoever's applying and yeah, just making it like a lot more concise, a lot more easy to get through. Like instead of asking for a bunch of information up front, it's just name, email phone.

Now we've captured that we can follow up with them. We can educate them. It'll send some automated texts, but rain is going to call them. And then they're going to fill out the rest of the interview or schedule their interview, things like that. But just making it easier and really again, positioning it as here's why you want to work for us.

And here's why we're different and better, you know, in a lot of ways than the competition. And I think it's going to work a lot better, but just like you said, Brandon, just identifying this one part of the funnel where there's this huge drop off. I mean, that's huge, you know, like measuring that. Now we can see man,

there's this glaring hole in our boat and it's just leaking all this water in and we need to fill that and patch that. And I think it's going to make a huge difference. It was a lot of the meeting was talking about that, but we've got a plan of action going forward. So we'll have that in the future here. Oh, sorry.

I reach out guys. Hello at Profit Cleaners dot com and hope you guys got some value out of this episode. It's kind of a fun episode, but until next time guys keep you the 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.