Episode 97: Is Electrostatic Cleaning a Thing?

Episode 97: Is Electrostatic Cleaning a Thing?

Brandon Schoen:
More of the stuff that I would be looking at as a cleaning business owner is more like what's the future of cleaning? Like what's the technologies and things that are gonna be innovative, that are gonna be integrated into the cleaning. Like like a robot that cleans part of the house for you so you can be more efficient and get through more houses faster. Like things like that I think are gonna be monumentally more impactful. And like that's what you should be focusing looking into for something for your business to grow it. Instead of just just adding whatever shiny object you can find to just get, squeeze any last bit of revenue you can out of whatever you can do. You know? So that's a recipe for disaster.

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. 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. You guys are in the right place. We are joined by the Profit Cleaners Brandon Shane and my co-host,

Brandon Condrey in the house over here. That's me. And yes, you guys are here to be learning from the Profit Cleaners. Apparently we're sharing some knowledge with you about cleaning businesses or something like that. So I'm excited you guys are here. So let's get started with the show today guys, we actually have a little bit different of episode, but we wanted to answer a,

maybe it's a frequently asked question among many people, but it was a question that came in on the email. Hello at Profit Cleaners dot com. If you guys ever have questions by the way, just email us at hello at Profit Cleaners dot com. Maybe we'll do a show about it. But yeah, today's episode guys, we just wanna talk about some of the post pandemic cleaning.

We've, we talked about doing some of the electrostatic cleaning during the pandemic and we were really looking into that. But how do you know what's worth investing in for in your business? What's the trend that will ultimately we could waste your money on? Should you be doing electrostatic cleaning still? Sure. And kinda what's going on there? So let's talk about that Brandon and tell him what we're doing.

Let's just dive in. Yeah, So we're not doing it. We never did do it. During the pandemic, we did buy an electrostatic cleaner and it ended up being, I don't know, it was very mediocre. A, it was stupid expensive because of the pandemic. B, because of the pandemic. We couldn't actually get the sanitizing, the disinfecting agent that goes in it,

like you got like a little sample batch with it but you couldn't buy the stuff to save your life. And then using it was terrible man. It was super heavy. It was gonna make the team's like arms hurt when you let go of the trigger on it, it would just like dribble liquid out of the front. So like you're just making a mess all over people's house.

So like in the end we scrapped it, I still have the machine, it's sitting in the closet. In a pelican case we should probably look at selling it, but no one's gonna want it now cause it's not the pandemic anymore. So it definitely had its moment. Daycares were doing it, schools were doing it, gyms were doing it. Like the company that we actually bought it from focuses on gym cleaning.

And so they had always offered it, it's just that they were a place that had it during the pandemic, which is how we found them. But their whole niche is just cleaning supplies for gyms. And I could see it in the use case for a gym all the time. Gyms are gross, man, people sweat, they sweat all over everything.

You're just shedding bacteria that's on your skin, like with that sweat everywhere. So I totally get why you'd wanna electrostatic, sanitize an entire gym, right? But for like your average house, probably not. And which is why we never offered it. Instead we just focused on, look, the cleaner we're already using is on the e p A list for killing Covid.

So congratulations. Like we're already set up. Like that's the thing. Yeah, absolutely. And like this, actually this question came in like a month ago and it was, forget who it was the name, but some college kids were starting a cleaning business and they were like literally just saying like should we start a business to focus on just this type of cleaning?

And being an internet marketer, I just went to the Google trends insights data and I just sent 'em the link of the trends and if you guys wanna just go to, you can go check it out yourself. Just go to trends.google.com and you can see the trend was crazy. Like the very start of the pandemic, like insane, like 2000% like jumping,

like if you were getting into it then and providing that service then you probably would've gotten quite a bit of business. But over time, over the last year or two, it's really kind of just tanked off to almost back to where it was. And so what I told, you know, my response was like I wouldn't focus on solely doing disinfecting like with an electrostatic type cleaner.

Like you can add that into your service by all means. But even Brandon, like have we ever had a customer ask us to do that? I don't even know. Like if we've never actually had a lot of demand no for that. Kinda cleaning During the pandemic, people asked us things like, are your employees wearing masks? Are they tested for covid?

Are you doing temperature screenings? Like those were the things that people asked us. No one ever asked us about that. Like the only interest we had, I think from the electrostatic side was my kids' daycare asked us if we could come do it and I told 'em no. And then this is funny, this will segue away. Perfect. These kids are asking us if they should start a specific sanitation company.

My answer is no. Here's why The daycare that asked us to do it and we declined, they actually went out and found a company that started during the pandemic. Their logo is actually a covid cell with the little spikes on it. And I just went to their website, they're still in business, their name has sanitation in it, but the service menu is huge now.

So they've already pivoted out of the sanitation and they now do wow water damage restoration, fire damage restoration, smoke damage restoration. They offer carpet cleaning, they still offer the sanitation. Like there's a picture in here that says furniture sanitation. That's a bit of a misnomer cuz what they're using is a steam cleaner on the furniture. The steam's gonna sanitizer for sure,

but it's not like a sanitation service really. It's a carpet cleaning for your furniture. Yeah. The one thing on here that I think is actually viable is they offer a service for if you just bought a new house and you want us to sanitize it while it's empty, we offer that. That one I think is kind of appealing and something that we could add to the menu using our silly electrostatic sprayer if we wanna use it.

Cuz we might actually be able to get the little sanitizing tablets for it right now. So that one might actually have some value in it. But I wouldn't go looking for a sanitation company to do that. I'd be asking my house cleaning company that is already doing it. So Right. It makes sense as an add-on. I don't think it makes sense as a standalone thing.

Not unless you predict a giant covid resurgence or like you're banking on monkey pox so we gotta go out there and like clean all the things for the monkey pox, you know what I mean? Like right. I'm not planning on having another a hundred year pandemic event in my lifetime and hopefully not. So I'm not gonna build my business around that and I don't think you should either.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think as much as it was an opportunity maybe still is like I think people are kind of over it and they're just like, people just wanna be done with the pandemic to be honest. Like they're just for sure it's been very challenging for, we'll just put it that way and I think the less you can focus on that and the more you can just focus on the good stuff.

People want you to come in, make their home feel like home so they can enjoy their time with their family. That's what we've always focused on. We pivoted during the pandemic and we changed some of our marketing messaging obviously during that time. But I think now you know it's safe to start going back to that messaging and honestly not just focusing on one,

not niching yourself so far into like that kind of thing where you're gonna be limited and perfect example where these guys niche themselves down into it and now they're like 20 different markets and I think that happens a lot. Like we tell you guys the riches are in the niches but like we don't ever recommend you guys do that. Like focus on one thing and do it really,

really well. Don't try to do carpet cleaning and window cleaning and house cleaning and landscaping like, like yeah like if you don't focus the right way, sometimes that's what you end up doing. But focus really hard on one thing, like laser focus, like you're gonna cut through a diamond like a laser instead of putting a flashlight on it like a big beam and it's not really cutting through anything.

That's what a lot of people are I think trying to do. And so yeah, my advice would be don't start a company just focusing on electrostatic. Maybe have it as an add-on but even just telling you from our experience, we've really literally never done it. And like we have, we've tons of houses every single day and nobody ever talks about it.

And So no that was the definition of like a spike, a rush and there were companies that found that up again. But like if you go to this company's website, I'm not gonna bash on another local company, I'm not gonna tell you who it is, but at the very top of it, big bold letters now offering professional restoration for residential commercial water damage and smoke damage repair and rebuild.

So like they obviously had built it around sanitizing for covid and then it tanked hard because it went away man. Like all the lockdowns got lifted. If you look at, I used to check covid tracker stuff like every day cuz I was super worried about where this was going and I was trying to like think about it from the business standpoint, like how do we adjust,

it's not on like the front page of anything anymore, but I still have my bookmark saved And if you go look at it now, like like the 14 day trend in the US is down, 21% on cases is down 15% on hospitalizations, down 4% on deaths. Like we had 415 deaths from Covid yesterday at the peak of the pandemic when people were looking for electrostatic sanitizing,

it was like 30,000 people every day, which is why everybody was freaking out. Like that was intense. Now it's like man, like we're over it now. Like this is endemic, it's not pandemic, it's just part of you now you're probably gonna have to get a covid booster shot every year. Like it's like getting the flu shot now. Like it doesn't matter.

We've learned to live with it essentially. So I'm not saying it doesn't matter, like people lost loved ones. That part's intense. I'm saying from a business standpoint it's just here now and we're all moving on with stuff. Wanna hear all the latest news from Profit Cleaners first. Wanna 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. So it is what it is. I think we saw it come and go and there's opportunities but yeah guys, if you're starting a cleaning business or still thinking about adding this into your product mix. Yeah I wouldn't be too quick to jump on it.

I would focus on the higher level pieces, the lower, lower hanging fruit that's just solve the problem man. People need their houses cleaned, they don't really want anything fancy, they just want it done well and if you can confidently tell them how you're doing that and provide a great service for 'em, I mean you're gonna do really well and but yeah,

I mean if it's worth, you know, if, if you ha had a community that where there was a lot of demand, a lot of people asking you for it by all means, you know like put something into place. Yeah. Find way. I'm just telling you we personally haven't Had that. Yeah I've already integrate it but don't build your entire company around it.

Right? Absolutely. So look, I'll give you guys a little teaser here on something that's gonna come up in the future I hope so. I made an interesting network contact with the local company. They make huge autonomous sanitizing robots that were designed for like grocery stores and airports and they also launched during covid. They had a lot of great success. But unlike C O D,

the airports and the grocery stores of the world still want to use them because like I think what Covid did show people is that, I don't know, like people are gross and like you know you're gonna spread illness if you're not careful. And so rather than worry about it, they just run this robot through the store or through the airport like overnight they are making a smaller one and he reached out to me specifically to look for a launch partner to make one for houses.

And so like it's already been designed, it's like the size of a five gallon paint bucket. You set it in the middle of a room and run it for a few minutes and then the whole thing's been sanitized. It's like much more mild than the electrostatic stuff and it doesn't get anything wet. So, got it. We are gonna engage with these guys and see where this takes us.

If we do end up starting to do this, it'll be something that we will offer. We're not gonna pivot to sanitizing with this machine. It's just gonna be right. Hey, as an upsell to everybody, if you want to tack it onto anything like sure 50 extra dollars, a hundred bucks, we'll sanitize your house. Or maybe we'll do that thing that these guys are doing,

which is offer it on moving clean. So like that justifies part of the moving cost cuz we're gonna do this whole sanitizing while it's empty, like inside of all these rooms and closets. So Right. That I think is something that we will get to in the future. And I like it because this, the chemical they use is hydrogen peroxide, which we already use in our cleaner and it is readily available.

So there's not some proprietary thing that we have to go source all the time. You're not at the whim of, of vendor increasing prices. So there's a lot of upside to it. It's not electrostatic, it's totally different and it's not gonna be our business model, it's gonna be an upsell, which means you get more revenue outta the customers that you already have,

which is a win-win for everybody. Right. And again guys, just be careful when you have opportunities like this in business. Like you can get like shiny object syndrome where you're like, you're like, oh my gosh, it's like this shiny squirrel over here and you wanna like go like add it into your business mix. Yeah. But a lot of times that kinda stuff is just a distraction.

And when you, if you think about it, like if you systematize a business, the less variables the better, right? So if you start adding these kind of things in, just remember now you have to train a team on that equipment. There's more things that could possibly happen or go wrong. So it's great if there's the demand for it added in,

but if there's not, don't complicate everything in your business by adding another system. And another thing people have to be trained on another thing that could go wrong. More variables. Just keep it simple. Yeah. Like that's what we're doing. Like we haven't fully added this in at all. Like honestly, if someone called this right now and was like,

Hey can you come sanitize? Like I don't even know if anyone's trained to use that piece of equipment, you know? So the demand for us is just not there. No, we don't own this piece of equipment yet. Like yeah, this would be one in the future. I mean that is a good point that you don't wanna like just pivot to something else that might be cooler just cause so Right,

our focus is residential maid service. So if someone called us up today and asked for home sanitizing, we would just tell 'em like, Hey, did you know the stuff we used was already on the EPA list and it already sanitized your home. It's used on all the high touch surfaces, light switch, door knobs, counters, all those things. Like that's enough to be like,

all right, like I get it, it's really the super like germaphobe ones that want it all the time. But like if we do end up adding on that other one that uses the hydrogen peroxide, it may be used in a situation where like, I don't know, you had a family member with the flu or something. So for the next clean,

please just do the whole thing. So like everyone else in the house doesn't get sick. So yeah, I don't know what it's like to use it yet, so that's why I'm giving you a preview. We haven't really talked to 'em. So if it turns out that training is a beast and there's a lot of risk, risk to people getting hurt by inhaling something,

then we're probably not gonna do it. But it is out there. These things exist. Yeah. And I think more so like just you bringing up that other business, like that's more the stuff that I would be looking at as a cleaning business owner is more like, what's the future of cleaning? Like what's the technologies and things that are gonna be innovative that are gonna be integrated into the cleaning,

like like a robot that cleans part of the house for you so you can be more efficient and get through more houses faster. Like things like that I think are gonna be monumentally more impactful and like that's what you should be focusing looking into for something for your business to grow it instead of just Sure. Just adding whatever shiny object you can find to just get,

squeeze any last bit of revenue you can out of whatever you can do. So that's a recipe for disaster. Sure, man. A hundred percent. So take that with it is the guys who reached out to us. Keep going man. Focus in on what you're gonna focus in on. I don't think having one entirely built around sanitation is the way to go.

Yeah, me neither. So yeah, work it into your mix or just specialize in some other form. If it's just house cleaning or whatever service niche you wanna focus on, just the riches are in the niches. Just focus. Focus on that. So all right guys. Cool. In the meantime, keep it clean. Keep it clean. Thanks for joining us today.

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