Episode 96: Hiring New Staff: Practical Tips for Growing Your Cleaning Business

Episode 96: Hiring New Staff: Practical Tips for Growing Your Cleaning Business

Brandon Schoen:
We were really efficient in the beginning, which makes sense. You're smaller, you're more nimble, you can shift things more quickly. And you know, just a small team, a few people even when you're in the very early stages of a business. But then to go from really efficient to like, we grew really fast, maybe got really inefficient at some points, maybe really inefficient on certain payrolls, but then, you know, it's like it's just a matter of time. And I think that speaks volumes when you think about just being patient and like it's a game and it's gonna take time and there's, there's no, no overnight success in this business. It's, it's something you gotta stick through for years sometimes to kind of like see that come back around because it takes time to build systems and, and yeah, figure out the data and figure out what you can do better to improve upon.

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 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 to take it to the next level and win. Guys, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for your time. I'm your host, Brandon Shane, and I'm joined by my amazing, remarkable co-host, Brandon Condrey in the house. Take it away Brandon. That's me. Hey, how's it going? And together guys are listening to the Profit Cleaners. So guys, if you haven't listened to the podcast before,

we Brandon and I started the cleaning business five years ago. We talk about the cleaning business on the show. We talk about what we're learning, what we're doing, what we're experimenting with. And the whole goal of, and the mission of this is so that you guys can win too. You guys can all learn with us and we can all win and grow together.

So that's the point of the show. And today guys, in light of that, we are gonna talk about something really, really important that all of us have been struggling with the last year or two, which is the hiring issues. The labor pool has been crazy and that has definitely played a huge toll in on margins, Profit margins. We're all about profits here at the Profit Cleaners.

So we wanna talk to you guys about what we've done to overcome at least so far, how we've handled the challenge of the hiring issues that all of us are facing in this new market. And we wanna tell you some really big wins and maybe, you know, it'll help you guys. And so we're gonna dive into the podcast today, talk about what we just talked about on our morning meeting with our team this morning.

Brandon, you shared some really exciting numbers and I think everyone would love to hear about it. Yeah, so let's see. I mean, we'll put a couple caveats on this. There wasn't a magic bullet. We didn't stumble upon a thing that we didn't know before and now it's suddenly all better. So I don't have a by this you'll hire people button to push,

but we do have numbers that we're trending in a direction and now we finally hit this big milestone, which I think is kind of cool. So long time listeners of the podcast will know that we've recorded, I don't know, three, five episodes maybe about staffing over the course of the pandemic. And really for us, like the change was Covid, Covid changed so much of the American economy and workforce and what it means to have a job.

There's a lot more people working from home and things like that. So it just shook everything up. And so we're, this is us getting used to it and rolling with the punches, which is one of the things I think we're really good at. And consequently we're trying to make you really good at it. So Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Where Do you want me to start?

I can start with the, the milestone we hit or we can start with what we did to get us to this point and then do the numbers at the end. You tell me how you want me to make this go. Well let's see. I think let's just share with people in case they missed one of the more recent podcasts we highlighted in our,

one of our other recent annual or was our quarterly meeting, I think we were just talking about one of our big rocks, one of our big milestones for the quarter was the hiring issue. So I think we should start there, tell people pretty much everyone was in the same boat and maybe still is and we can just share where we were at, what we did,

kind of like some experiments within and kind of how we ended up getting more people to work with us and how we're at the level we're at now where we saw our profitability go through the roof this morning when you showed those, those numbers. So I guess just start telling Us. Yeah, so from a historical perspective, the issue was we could never get the amount of staff that we needed to be fully staffed.

We need three Cleaners per team and then four to six floaters beyond that that fill in when people take a day off call in sick. And what was working really well for a really short period of time before the pandemic was when someone was approaching 80 hours over this pay period. Like you got to 79 like hey congratulations. You get the last two days of the pay period off,

you got your full-time wages and then these floaters will fill in for those couple days. So being a floater is a full-time job. But the issue we were having pandemic wise is that people were dropping off, they were quitting jobs not working, we'd put out ads, people would schedule an interview on calendarly and then not show up or show up for the interview and not show up for work.

We've talked about all that. So that was the issue we were at. So what did we do to fix it? So much stuff. That's what I wanna really iterate. This was not a magic bullet, This was, I don't know, 18 months of throwing spaghetti at the wall, reacting to the data and then keep going. So I think the big things most recently were Reyna,

our team success person, we told her that like look, when you get an applicant through the system, call them, just pick up the phone and call 'em, just have a conversation, leave a voicemail, whatever. Just increase that touch rate so we're not relying on an email to do it. That seemed to build up some stuff. And then the other side of that was a hiring funnel.

We've talked to you guys before about click funnels. We have a sales funnel that we use use for selling to customers. So what we decided to do was, well why don't we just use the software that we already own and make one that sells the job to prospective employees. So we designed a funnel, I think we're gonna put that in the course.

So if you're one of the people that bought the course or Brandon knows course stuff, I don't know course stuff, it's gonna be an A course, It'll be in the 10 x marketing course, maybe we'll put it in both at some point. But yeah, it'll Be there. You'll have a template of the funnel to work with. And then as part of that funnel we recorded testimonials with our current employees.

We picked four of our employees that have been with us the longest and we're like really enthusiastic and we just had them record like you know, three minutes of why do you like working for us? Like one of 'em was one of our original hires that was the person we hired before we had a website before we bought cars. She was one of the original three,

Why'd you stay with us for so long? So like we asked all those questions and we got a bunch of different answers which was cool. You know, some people said we pay well, some people said we respect you like as a person as opposed to a slave, a cog in a machine. And my favorite was Fernando who said it's not outside.

He liked that it wasn't roofing, he's a Spanish speaking man, a Hispanic man. And normally the jobs that they get unskilled labor-wise are like landscaping and construction. And he was really happy that it wasn't that it was much more laid back. So plug in those videos into the funnel. I just wanted to point out with what you just said, all of the people's testimonials,

all of our employees that spoke, whatever they were liked about working with us, it was really awesome that they were saying the same things that we're aligning with our culture cuz we're trying to build open, honest communication and feedback. Well they're like, well we like how you guys communicate with us. And they were like, we like the claim your weekend,

like get your time back cuz we get our time back and like we get time with our family more than working all the time and working late and working on weekend. So all the things that we were trying to bake into our culture, not all of 'em but a lot of 'em they were saying this kind of reverberating that back to us and just like I thought that was really cool.

And I think that's really a huge part of if you do this in your own company, you can ask your employees this and hopefully if they're not saying those things back to you, you can be like well what do we need to do to get people feeling more like this? Or whatever your culture you're trying to build is so that your team's more on board with it and everyone's happy.

Yep, No totally makes sense. So we, we put that funnel up, we started aggressively marketing to it. We actually ran ads to the hiring funnel and we did that on Facebook just like we do the, the sales ads for cleaning. And that translated to Claudia a couple weeks ago telling us that we're fully staffed. So fully staffed means every cleaning team has three people and we have all the floaters we need.

And then what that translates to when you run a payroll is that we didn't pay overtime. Overtime is expensive time and a half is expensive. You got a job at 12, you're paying 18 if you're working overtime. And we had pay periods, you know, at the height of the pandemic where we were paying payroll, you know like 300 hours of overtime across the company or more.

And that was thousands of dollars that was just walking out the door because we couldn't keep enough people on staff and the existing staff that did stay with us, their quality of life suffered because that overtime translated to you know, coming in at eight, leaving at eight like they were working 12 hour days. Which is not how we wanna run a company. That is not the culture.

We are trying to get you to be able to spend time with your family and work a regular nine to five job. It's just cleaning. So we did all that over and over and over again and we got to the point where we really got to see the payoff. I will say that this pay period that I'm about to give you data on started on the 1st of October and we had a pay increase that also started at the 1st of October.

So that definitely plays a part. So we got more revenue for the same amount of jobs but I think this was like a confluence, it was a perfect storm of revenue going up, prices going up and getting fully staffed all at the same time. Yeah, so that was another recent episode too that you guys probably listened to. But the price increase,

go get the price increase letter if you haven't, it's in the show notes, it's actually there now we have it there. People were asking where it was. But Brandon, we were just talking about that today too. Like, I don't know, 10, 10 or so, like a little more than 10 people of our 3000 plus active customers canceled.

So it's, it was very effective and it was a huge help. You know like everyone understands what's going on in the market and bringing that in together with these other efficiencies I think just totally changed a huge part of the financial picture that we're looking at. So one of the data points that we track is how much does it cost percentage wise as a function of revenue,

What percentage of revenue does it cost us to pay the Cleaners and what percentage of revenue does it cost us to pay the entire company, you know, leadership and office and customer experience. So up until this most recent check date, late October the 90 days before that, our total payroll cost was averaging 68% and our total cleaner cost was averaging 47%, 48.

And this last one it cost us 44% to pay the Cleaners. So we had a 4% drop there and on the total cost it was down to 61.4. So we had a 7.4% drop. So 7.6% drop And there were times like that was up to 80, right? It was like up to 80. Yeah We, if you could you go back and look at the times when we were in peak pandemic we had payrolls that were 84% of revenue went to payroll.

There was one in here that was even worse I found in 88. So in 2020, like as soon as the pandemic kicked off, I'm actually gonna go back and look at this. So the pandemic was like March, right? Leading right up to March 65, 70, 69, 68, 65 and then the pandemic hit 81 and then it was, it's been chaos ever since. So it's been 81%,

80% we were averaging in the eighties. So that means everything that you need to run your business off of, that's not payroll, rent, car payments, insurance buying, cleaning supplies. We had 19% of revenue to work with, 15% of revenue to work with and now we're backed up to like 40% of revenue to run the rest of the company off of that means Profit,

There's actually Profit going into the Profit account instead of it going to pay a past due vendor that we hadn't paid in three months because of pandemic financial gymnastics, which is what we were doing for two years. So now look, I'll give you like another word of caution here. This is one payroll, it's one out of many but like the overall trend has been going from the eighties down to the sixties and now we're,

we're so close, we're flirting with the high fifties. We've never been under 60%. Our lowest revenue or pay payroll share ever was 61.26%. That's the most efficient we've ever been. And that was way back in January of 2018. So four years later we're back to that level. So this to me is a sign of progress of getting out of the pandemic like we are officially coming out of the pandemic related shenanigans in my mind.

Again one payroll, we'll see what the next one looks like. I think that if we can keep the staff, we're in a good spot to keep rolling. Now this also means that over that time we grew part of, there was no trick in here where we cut six employees. We have the highest amount of staff we've ever had right now. So we just crossed 50 employees,

which means we gotta start getting our Affordable Care Act insurance into place, which will be a whole nother host of episodes to tell you guys about cuz if any of you are getting towards 50 employees and you're in the United States and you just start providing healthcare by law, so we're right there. So like it's not that we cut people and that's what saved us the payroll.

We actually hired more than we ever have before and we saved it on the overtime side of things. And you know, typically when we hire more Cleaners it means we have more business. So we do have team 11 that's on the road and that's been going since the middle of September I think. And that's, they're filling up fast. Like that's the whole point.

That's just how it was before the pandemic. You launch a team every six weeks, eight weeks. That's what we're getting back to. Hey guys, I wanted to take a quick break to let you know a little bit more about our course, the 10 x toolkit. We've put together so many amazing resources to help cleaning businesses like yours learn how to get more recurring clients on the schedule.

The systems we teach you in this course are the exact same systems we've used to grow our cleaning business to seven figures in just three years. In fact, in one year we were able to accomplish the growth that our mentor in Denver had in 10 years. So it's definitely a shortcut guys to success model After that success, everything from finding the perfect clients to learning how to keep your schedule filled,

we cover everything you need to 10 x your business and without wasting your time and money. So to learn more about this incredible course, head over to Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses, that's Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses. Yeah and I just too, just as you were saying that, I was thinking like wow we are really efficient in the beginning,

which makes sense. You're smaller, you're more nimble, you can shift things more quickly and just a small team, a few people even when you're in the very early stages of a business. But then to go from really efficient to like we grew really fast, maybe got really inefficient at some points, maybe really inefficient on certain payrolls, but then it's just a matter of time.

And I think that speaks volumes when you think about just being patient. It's a game and it's gonna take time and there's, there's no overnight success in this business. It's, it's something you gotta stick through for years sometimes to kind of like see that come back around because it takes time to build systems and and figure out the data and figure out what you can do better to improve upon.

So I think in general there is no get rich quick, right? So like any business that's not a fly by night drop shipping Amazon game, it's gonna take years of investment. Now I really am super proud of this because we rode out an unprecedented global health emergency during this and still came out better on the other side. So yeah, I mean to those of you that are struggling,

like we had a coaching call with one of the students and told 'em that this was happening for us. We were finally fully staffed and they're not like they're in a different part of the country, it's not working out for them right now, but maybe you didn't get to the point where you had to spend 18 months of solid like this month we do this and look at the data.

You don't wanna change too many things at once because if something works you need to know what it is so you can do more of it. So we know the hiring funnel works, we know that the video testimonials works so we gotta keep refreshing those. Like if we ever change uniforms in the future, we need to rerecord those testimonials so the uniforms look current and that video is current.

So keep on top Of that just the experiment with having Reyna the team success manager follow up more quickly. We did that without doing a lot of other things and other changes like it was small and like these little things that we were testing was like week by week and we would get feedback. It's been weeks and weeks and weeks of being like a lot of times we were banging our head against the wall being like what?

Like what are we gonna do to fix this hiring problem? And so that's why we wanted to record this podcast. We figured a lot of you are doing the same thing, you're probably struggling, we're not out of it either, but we're just saying this has helped us tremendously and we're gonna keep hiring, we're gonna keep running the ads, maybe not as aggressively.

Another thing I will say on the Facebook ads, cuz this could happen to you guys too, is you just like with anything, you start something in the beginning and you kind of think, oh man it's not, this isn't working or the cost per lead was really high on Facebook. We were like paying like 20, $25 per lead in the beginning to acquire someone that was interested in working for us.

We drove, you know, ran an ad, clicked on the ad, they filled out the thing that said yes I'm interested, that's a lead right? So we were getting charged by Facebook, you know, 20 upwards of $20 person that was converting and entering their info after a week or so of running that we were like man, if this keeps going on we're not gonna be able to keep up with it.

It's just too expensive. But that's the time it took Facebook to aggregate all that data and create their smart algorithm where now they, they took that and then next few days of the next week it was like four or $5 a week. So it got really smart and it found more of the, the same like people that were going and converting through our form all the way.

And sometimes it's just what it takes guys, especially when you're running ads on Facebook or even just anywhere out there marketing and advertising anything, it's better to be consistent. So if you try something once, you don't really know if it's gonna stick or if it's gonna work. It's the same for print advertising and other advertising. Normally you have to run several cycles to actually see the effectiveness.

So if you are running ads, if you're trying Facebook ads, if you're trying our funnel, just know that it can take some time to optimize those ads and, and it's again, it's just being patient with all this stuff, growing your business, you just gotta keep at it cuz it doesn't always seem like it's gonna work in the beginning, but when you are patient,

when you stick at it and you're consistent, that's when the results show up. Yep. I do wanna go over another set of numbers here, which was the one from 2018 when we hit that the most efficient we've ever been, it was February of 2018 if memory serves me correctly, we were not paying ourselves back then, so this is kind of cheater that we were that efficient because the owners were getting zero.

This was, we were still in startup mode, we were less than a year into it. And so back then, these are the numbers, we did 74 cleaning jobs over two weeks. Six of them were free. So we had 68 paid and we made 10,500 bucks and we were 61% efficient this time. 529 cleaning jobs, 29 of them were free.

So 500 paid and we grossed 114 K and still 61% efficient this time with the owners getting paid what they should be getting paid for running a company. So in really if you take into account the owners pay on top of that, we're probably more efficient now than they were back then, which you would expect after being in business for five years. So it's really Cool.

Yeah, absolutely. Really cool. And we share this with you guys, not to brag, but it's sometimes good for you guys to see that this is all possible and it's, and it is good to celebrate your wins and your successes cuz that's just part of the game. You gotta celebrate your wins, but you also can't stop and you gotta keep going.

So we're celebrating this with you guys, but we're also like, hey, we gotta keep going, we gotta keep growing, we still have to keep hiring and we still gotta keep overcoming lots of challenges. So this is just one hill that we've overcome in, in the whole game. But it is exciting man and I'm really proud of us too and I think we're,

we're just on a really good trajectory right now, so that's Awesome. Yep. So that's it guys. I mean keep at it. Take those numbers for what it's worth and compare them against your own. And the hiring thing is possible to get out of, you just have to keep packing away. It, you don't have to be the number one place to work for in your area,

you just have to be better than the next job ad. So they will click yours. It is a lot like trying to sell the customer, customer on cleaning. So as long as you present yourself and make yourself a good place to work and treat your people with respect, good things will come. Sometimes they take a while, especially in this weird place that the world is in right now,

but I'm feeling good. I'm feeling really good. Yeah, absolutely. And and guys, just remember like how important this is too, because you can't grow unless you're building your team and you can't build your team unless you're delegating and replicating yourself. So a lot of people that listen to Profit Cleaners, you might be cleaning still, but just know that this is,

if you wanna grow a big business or any type of business beyond yourself, you have to start thinking this way and start thinking of hiring people and just finding ways to get outside of doing all the work yourself and actually building the business, working on it instead of in it. So yeah, we hope this is encouraging for you guys. And if you guys are getting value outta these podcasts,

first of all, if you want to hear something that we're not talking about, reach out on social media, email us hello at Profit Cleaners dot com and if you are getting value, please share the show. Please let us know if you're getting value, leave us a review, subscribe to the show, and just help us keep growing this movement so we can help more people and help you guys grow.

And yeah, we're just excited to keep going guys. So I think that's pretty much it, Brandon. Yeah, keep it clean. 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.