A Full Breakdown of My Company’s Rates, Wages, and Revenue — From Day 1 to $121K Months

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Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and in today’s episode, I am going to be doing a very in-depth timeline of Serene Clean’s history, specifically in these categories: what we were charging clients at that time, what we were paying employees at that time, what the monthly revenue at each of these milestones was for the business, as well as what benefits we were offering.

I just started thinking about the fact that so many owners that I speak to have very unrealistic expectations as to what we can actually offer as benefits to our staff members. I’ve been seeing this question a lot in the comments: am I paying too much? Am I paying too little? And spoiler alert, that has a lot to do with what you are charging as well as what your market demands. Because in rural Wisconsin, where my business is located, it’s a much lower cost of living.

I’ll give you guys some pointers as well on how to know what to be paying your staff members. And again, we’re talking W-2 cleaners, not 1099 – different types of payments here. We’ll go through that as well as some of the things that were going through my mind.

So we’re going to take it all the way back to when I opened Serene Clean in April of 2019, making $0 in revenue, because it was just me starting out, all the way to our peak, which was January of 2022, where we brought in $334,000 in that month. Don’t get too excited – that was a big, giant one-off job that we had added. But as you can see, we’ve had some revenue fluctuation. So I’m going to talk about all of this, and hopefully it’s interesting to you guys.

Starting Out: April 2019

I opened my business in April 2019, and I opened with the charging rate of $30 per man hour. I was absolutely terrified that nobody would go for it. Because in my mind, never having had a cleaner – I was also a broke 22-year-old – I’m thinking, in what world would anybody pay $30 for house cleaning? I did not put that value on it. So in my mind, I couldn’t imagine anybody paying that, considering at the time, I was making $12 an hour at my job. So I’m thinking nobody’s going to pay for this, right?

But luckily, I went in at $30 an hour, and I immediately started hiring. As you guys know, my first employee I hired, or attempted to hire – go check out my First 10 Employees episode if you need to get some details on that, that’s a good one. But I was paying $12 an hour to residential, and because commercial accounts started calling, I made the decision to do $13 an hour to commercial.

The 40% Rule

When it comes to how I decided what to pay, I went off of the concept of paying 40% of what you are charging to clients. And so because I was charging $30 an hour, $12 an hour was 40% of that. And that is kind of a universal general rule that you’ll see in our industry, that for W-2 employees, we want to stick around that 40% mark. If you stick to that, as you increase what you’re charging to clients, you increase the wages as well.

Now looking back, we do not do a pay differential for commercial employees, and the reason I decided to do it in the first place was because, in my mind, commercial cleaners don’t have the opportunity to get tips. And so by that logic, I was thinking they should get a higher pay wage.

Now, hindsight being 2020, we do not do any type of pay difference for residential versus commercial. One, because so many of our cleaners are hybrid cleaners. From a tracking standpoint, it would be quite difficult to handle – at this job, they’re making this much, at this job, they’re making this much. But second of all, commercial cleaning is much more physically easy on the body than residential. So I don’t think that commercial cleaners should, in theory, make more than residential simply because of the work.

Additionally, all of our commercial cleaners want to work the shift that they’re working, whether that be evenings, whether that be early mornings, weekends – that’s the shift that they desire and what they’re coming to us for. So the concept of paying them higher for physically easier work in a shift that they want, I don’t think there should be any pay difference.

Early Benefits

I had only one benefit really, which was flexibility and hiring very part-time. I will say that I did technically offer PTO to begin with, starting after a year. So after somebody hit a year of employment with me, I offered pretty minimal PTO, and it was just for full-timers.

The reason I chose that as my first actual benefit was because, honestly, I couldn’t fathom anybody working for me for a year. A year was so long – I didn’t even know if I was going to be in business, right? So it almost didn’t even feel like a real benefit, frankly. And so I would suggest PTO with a time limit on that as your first real true benefit, if you want to do that right away, because frankly, you most likely are not going to have any employees hit a year. Six months would be amazing, right? So it’s almost like a benefit that you don’t actually have to pay out.

Obviously, now our PTO is wildly different, but this was just starting out. I clearly had no money, right? And couldn’t hardly pay anything either. And so thinking back to that again, I was making – this is 2019 – I was making $12 an hour at my normal job. And so to me, I was thinking, oh, for cleaning, this is pretty good. And so nobody had a problem with it. Nobody had a problem with the wages at that time.

First Price Increase: April 2020

So this whole video has taken me a long time to prep today, because going back and trying to find when I did price increases and wage increases was actually really difficult. It’s not typically something that you’re noting down anywhere. It was more so I was just combing through invoices of first-time cleans over the years and seeing, okay, this client started here. What was that first invoice? And that told me when I did these price increases. So it is mostly accurate – it’s in this ballpark, okay?

It looks like we kept $30 an hour for the entire first year. In April of 2020, a year in, we increased our prices to $33 an hour. So it took me an entire year to do a $3 an hour increase. And in April of 2020, our revenue was $10,000 a month. So one year in, I was bringing in $10k a month.

The Pandemic Boom: December 2020

Our next price increase was December of 2020, so now half a year basically, we increased from $33 to $35. So as you can see, I’m doing these little itty-bitty price increases on new clients. All of my current clients were grandfathered in, and this is something that we’ve done.

What I would suggest over the life of the business is you do price increases on your current clients, but you don’t necessarily bump them to your going rate, because that would probably scare them off, especially when we start getting to the higher rates. We cannot increase prices on a client like that. So we just did small chunk increases.

But at this time, December 2020, we are now $5 more than what we started at, and our revenue was a huge jump. So from April 2020 we’re at $10k, December of 2020 we are up to $45,000 a month. So huge, explosive growth. And if we recall what 2020 was, guys – hmm, what was that? A huge pandemic? Oh, yeah, COVID. So 2020 was a crazy year for us, and we grew drastically, increased a ton of commercial, but residential too. So we’re starting to hop and go here.

Reaching $40 Per Hour: May 2021

On to May of 2021, this is where we did our next price increase, roughly around that, and we bumped it up an entire $5 an hour. We went to $40 an hour. And if any of you have heard any of my content before, you know that I would never suggest anybody start out under, at minimum, $40 an hour. If you are going the business route – individual cleaners are getting $40 an hour. So you best believe that if you’re a business and you are looking to get employees, not under $40 an hour, guys. You can’t afford it. You will not make any money, meaning in your pocket, after paying employees, paying insurance, paying all of the expenses. The going rate is higher than $40 an hour.

So it took me – 2019 – it took me two years to get to $40 an hour. So again, if I had started at $40 back in 2019, everything would have happened much faster. The business would have grown, from a revenue perspective, much faster. But live and learn – this is the timeline, and hopefully it gives you guys some lessons too.

Wage Increases and Growth

So here we are in May of 2021, we’re charging $40 an hour and our pay increase – I increased our starting wage to $13 an hour, and the range is $13 to $15 an hour. And at this time, we are now at $70,000 a month. So from December 2020, to May of 2021, we jumped from $45,000 to $70,000 a month. So we are just growing, growing, growing, scaling.

And one of the biggest indicators too of do I need to do a wage increase – a starting wage increase – is, are people applying? And there could be a lot of reasons people are not applying to your job, whether that be from a visibility standpoint, but for us, it’s like, okay, we’re increasing the rates that we’re charging, so now we’re at $40 an hour, so let’s increase those wages as well. So $13 to $15 an hour, and at $70k a month.

The Big Jump: September 2021

Okay, so this is where we get into the crazy numbers, and I’ll have some caveats here for you guys. So everybody keep your pants on.

So September of 2021 we did another price increase. So as you can see, we’re doing much faster price increases. And I remember at this time, we were having a tougher time hiring and keeping up with demand, despite doing group interviews and everything. It’s just as you can see, we were growing really, really fast.

And so there’s a couple levers that you can pull when it comes to how to handle too much demand and not enough supply – aka staff. Our close rate was incredibly high at $40 an hour. So all of these things are saying, increase your dang prices. If everybody’s saying yes, if you’re having a hard time keeping up, you need to increase your prices, because you only have so many time slots available with the current staff that you have. So we need to make as much money as possible in every single one of those time slots.

Mental Shifts and Market Reality

So it was simply an experiment at every single one of these price increases. I remember feeling so anxious every time we did these price increases and thinking in my head, no way in hell is anybody going to say yes to this? There’s no way. And guess what? There was a way. And they started saying yes, and it just completely shifted my mindset and my grasp on reality, frankly, that people would pay this for house cleaning.

So once people started saying yes at $45 an hour, it’s like, oh my gosh, there’s no way it can go higher. There’s no way it can go higher. I was thinking that at $35 an hour. So I just want you guys to understand the mindset shift that was happening for me of what will the market bear? And that is the only fact that matters – what will the market bear in our area?

And again, this is rural Wisconsin. We are talking 20,000 people in one of our locations, towns where I started, Black River Falls – 5,000 people. Our largest city that we serve, La Crosse – 50,000 people. Okay, so keep that in mind when I’m talking about all these numbers, that if you are in a city, an actual city, think about that. That means that you guys can do even higher because cost of living is so much higher. You got more competition, yes, that just means you have to work harder at standing out and things like that. But all of that to say this was happening in very rural Wisconsin.

The $45 Per Hour Milestone

So we’re at $45 an hour, people are still saying yes, and I remember being so hesitant about the next price increase. I was like, $50, that’s insane, that’s insane. But I was like, we don’t have any openings, so we have to do something to increase our revenue. And if we cannot increase the number of spots, we need to increase the average price per appointment. And the only way to do that is keep increasing prices.

So the beautiful thing about price increases, guys, is you literally can throw the numbers out, and if nobody takes it, you bring it back down to where they are saying yes. And I would say, give it some time, because it could also be a lot of times it’s your sales ability. Can you sell? It’s your marketing, it’s your branding, it’s your follow-up. It’s not the actual price that’s the problem. It’s everything to do with your ability to sell – that’s the actual problem.

So you may not be too expensive, you may just not be able to eloquently describe or explain to the clients or the prospective clients, why are you worth that amount of money? And so I know a lot of you guys are saying there’s so much cheap competition – well, there’s always going to be cheap competition. We need to be able to show why are we the price that we are? And obviously I’ve gone into that many times. That’s a whole other topic.

Revenue Explosion

But as you can see, we are clearly closing, good things are going well. September of 2021, we’re charging that $45 an hour, and our revenue was $155,495. So again, $155,000, and that is because we got that really large government contract that I’ve described a million times. And so as you can see, that changed things. That changed things just a smidge for us that year.

So I did go in and remove that job from our profit and loss and from our reports, so that we can look at what is the normal business doing outside of that big job. So the normal business in September of 2021, we’re at $81,000 a month. So still we are going up. So May 2021, we’re at $70k, by September, we’re at $81k in the normal side of the business.

Hitting $50 Per Hour: January 2022

January of 2022, this is where we did the next price increase. This one I was so scared to do – up to $50 an hour. And then we stayed there for quite a long time. And the revenue for that month, January of 2022, as I mentioned, was $334,000, and that is the big job coming to an end. The last month was February, but January we hit $334,000 and the normal business was at $86,000 a month, still going up slightly from that September, still doing good on that side.

Really for us in the normal side of the business, while this giant job was happening, it was really like, keep the normal business going. Because I was not there. I was not running the normal side of the business. My management team was – I was absentee, and I was at this big job seven days a week, right? So it was like, don’t let the thing break as Stephanie’s over here bringing in all this money, right? That’s the point and goal at that time in the business. And my management team, they did absolutely beautifully. All of the staff did, and were very patient with me as well, because I was losing my mind. But well worth it for the insanity, obviously.

Adding Major Benefits: April 2022

Now we go to April of 2022, and I see that we increased our wages a little higher. So the wage range, I should say – it went from $13 to $15 an hour. Now we’re up to $13 to $19 an hour, and it may have gone up before then, it was hard for me to pinpoint exactly when we made this decision. I’m just going off of the job listings or job postings that we had created that I can find. So it may have been earlier than this, but this is when I can 100% pinpoint this was a real thing.

Health Insurance Milestone

This is also when we added health insurance, dental and vision. Okay, so it took us – 1920, 2122 – yes, I counted on my fingers still. It took us three years to add health insurance, dental and vision. Okay, so stop expecting yourself to be able to afford it in a year or when you’re at $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month. We were at $95,000 a month in revenue, and that is when we were able to feasibly afford health insurance, dental and vision.

And I’m sure we could have done it a little earlier, but I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t that giant influx of revenue, because I knew that that was going to be gone. And it was, as you saw, we’re down to net – we’re back to just normal revenue. We still had a great increase, because January to April, we went from $86k to $95k, so we are still doing really, really well, doing that big jump again, and that was because we started charging the $50 an hour. Still closing very well.

But my point being – it took us years to be able to add health insurance and things like that. And I will tell you now, looking back years, a lot of our employees do not use our health insurance. It is great to offer it – more so they use our dental and vision, because that’s much more affordable. But a lot of our staff members, their spouse, their partner, has it, or they get it through the states, through a state program. So it’s great to offer it. It’s quite expensive to offer it, frankly.

I’m pretty sure I turned 26 and that’s why we got health insurance – because Stephanie needed health insurance because I was kicked off my parents. So then all of a sudden, I actually started looking at it seriously. Yes, I was going to turn 26 in May. So that’s why the business got health insurance, to be frank.

And so don’t put that pressure on yourself. You probably can’t afford it. So what could you offer somebody, if not that? And is that even what your staff wants? Is that what your prospective ideal employee actually wants?

The 401k Addition: March 2023

Going to now we are jumping a whole year nearly, and nothing had really changed. March of 2023, this is when we added our 401k with company match, and we were at $98,000 a month. So from April 2022, to March 2023, we’re pretty stagnant and steady on that revenue – just shy of $100k a month. And we are doing good, and can add this additional benefit.

Most Popular Benefit

And this is one of our most popular benefits that we’ve ever added – was a 401k, because a lot of our staff members who had been with us for a couple years, that was something that was sorely lacking for them. They’re like, I really want to be able to add to retirement and plan for my future and treat this more so like a career. And so it was really important to me that we did this.

And it’s something that we actually talk about every single week in our team meeting. I say how much the employees added to their 401k, how much the company match was, and how much the entire year have we added to retirement collectively as a company. And that is a very important metric to me, because a lot of times our staff members are coming in, they’ve never even had access to a 401k, because they were in service jobs or whatever. And those types of places do not offer retirement, certainly not with a company match.

So this is very important to me, and also helps teach our staff members financial literacy and planning for their future, and that this is actually a career for them, not just something that they’re doing casually. So that was a great benefit add for sure.

Current Pricing: $55 Per Hour (May 2023)

And then jumping to May of 2023, this is where I can definitively see the first time that we charged our current rate, which is $55 an hour, and we have stayed there ever since. We are currently at $55 an hour, and that is all based on our close rates. $55 an hour is what the market will bear that I have seen in rural Wisconsin.

We have experimented with higher rates specifically for vacation rentals, because we don’t like doing them. And we have five, I think five or eight that are grandfathered in, that we still service, and they are all at flat rate, but they all average out to $60 an hour because they’re such a pain – not the clients, but the actual thing itself is a pain. So we want to make more money on it, because there’s so much more administrative labor on vacation rentals for us.

But all other residential initial cleans, move-outs, everybody, maintenance cleans are at $55 an hour. All of our clients have been grandfathered in and price increased to $50 an hour. Yes, so the majority of our clients are now at $50 an hour. Obviously, we have done price increases on the regular clients, or the clients that we had already had, not new folks coming in, slowly over the years, and so they’re not far behind what our new clients are getting in. So it’s not that far of a gap.

Recent Client Adjustments

We adjusted this year – last month. So April of 2025, we brought all of our current clients that were at $45 an hour, we increased them to $50. Had a little bit of a drop and not too many drops. So yeah, I found that a lot of clients dropped from $40 to $45, and the clients that did were the ones who came in at $30 an hour. So for them, it felt like a huge jump from where they started.

And this is another reason we do not want to start so low, because your clients who came in at that low price, when you get them to an appropriate price, or what your current market value is, they feel like, oh my gosh, you’re too big for your britches, Stephanie. Why are you trying to charge us $45 an hour when we were paying $30? Even though they conceptually understand price increases and they’re not even saying, hey, we’re getting $55 an hour, $45 is nothing for you guys comparatively to what new clients are paying. But for them, their perceived value of your service is going to be wildly different because of the context of where they came in.

And so that’s why it’s so important that when you’re starting out, have your price as high as possible. Obviously, get jobs, get whatever you need to do. But it’s much more difficult to do what I’ve done, and very slowly and painfully increase people. If they just started out higher during those years, I would have been getting more revenue from the same clients. So just food for thought there, guys.

Revenue and Wage Growth

So here we are, we are at May of 2023, charging $55 an hour, where we’ve stayed ever since, based on close rates. We are at $113,000 a month growth, and our starting wage, we increased to $16 an hour, and the range going up to $21 an hour.

So if you guys recall previously had been $13 to $19 in April 2022 – a year later, May of 2023, we increased our starting wage to $16 because we were having a huge shortage in folks applying. And that was kind of how we gauge that starting wage needs to go up. We also have increased to $55. Our overhead was massive now because of the management team, these benefits, insurance, all of that stuff. Of course, we felt that it was appropriate to increase that starting wage, and it worked.

And that is where our starting wage is to this day, $16 an hour, and we have our raise schedule very well laid out now. I’ll get into that a little bit later, but the highest wage possible for cleaning techs was raised to $21 an hour. So our longest employees were getting up closer to that amount.

Peak Revenue: August 2024

August of 2024, let’s hop forward another year, we are at $121,000 a month in our regular business, no big jobs, and that is our highest revenue month that we have had thus far. We are now chasing after that high of August last year, and that’s for a variety of reasons – staffing or call-outs or whatever. We’ve been a little bit stuck, and so that has been our goal this year is, how can we get to where we were back in August of 2024, because we had great margins at that time and whatnot.

And obviously, I’ve made content about the different struggles that we’ve had this year, from whether that be staffing, call-outs, etc., but I know that we’re going to hit it again. So I’m feeling good, but that’s where we were in August of 2024.

The Year of Benefits: 2024

And 2024 was the year of added benefits. That’s when I truly feel like last year, we came into our own as we are a company that really can offer a really attractive, robust workplace. From a cultural perspective, obviously, I have a fantastic workplace culture for my company, and that’s why the people who started at $12 an hour, several of them, are still with me today, which is insane when I had nothing, and it was just insane back then. But they have come along the way, and that’s really, really amazing.

New Benefits Added in 2024

And so now we added – 2024 we added holiday pay on a tiered system. We added PTO for part-timers as well as lowered the timeline for when people can get PTO, which is now six months, they can get PTO as full-timers. We added a car care benefit, which basically reimburses them when they are spending money on vehicle-related expenses, and they can submit those expenses to us, and we will reimburse them on a tiered system as well.

And we also introduced the Employee Assistance Program, which is 100% free therapy services to our staff and their immediate families. And that was actually a really well-received and wonderful benefit that we added last year. So it was the year of benefits – we might have gone a little hog wild, honestly. Now I’m like, oh shit, overhead’s really high because of that. So I’m still learning, guys. It’s still kind of a guess of can we afford this thing? And what is the actual effect of this going to be for sure.

Current State: 2025

Come 2025, we now have better Spin the Wheel bonuses, because we have this cool wheel that, if you qualify every quarter, you can spin for different bonuses. So we have made those bonuses better and more enticing as well as easier to get, so that it was more fair across both residential and commercial clients. We also added bereavement leave this year, so we are done adding benefits for this year.

And honestly, I don’t even know the next time we will add a benefit, because we just increased our wage potential as well. We completely revamped our performance review and wage guidelines in January of this year, and I’m not going to get into that all this episode, because this is going to be a long episode already. So if you guys are interested in hearing me outline exactly how we went about what our wage guidelines are, what the schedule is for raises and how people qualify for those raises, just let me know in the comments below on YouTube.

By the way, if you’re listening on Spotify, you can watch me talk and wave my hands around. Why are you watching on Spotify? Go watch on YouTube, guys. Give it a like on YouTube too. I get it if you’re cleaning, Spotify is probably easier, or whatever podcast listener you like, but if you enjoy visually seeing what I’m talking about and gesticulating, go onto YouTube. I’m a YouTube girly. You guys know that.

Current Wage Structure

So we are now at $16 starting wages, still, but now the potential has increased to $25 an hour. So it takes a long time for anybody to get there – we’re talking nine or 10 years, to get there, based on our guidelines now, but now it’s spelled out exactly how people get raises. What’s going to take away from their raises, literally broken down by percentage. It’s amazing. It’s crazy. It took us a lot of conversation and back and forth between the management team of, how do we handle this?

So now people have the opportunity to make up to $25 an hour, and have all of these fantastic benefits, as well as obviously, since day one, tips have been a thing. On average, I believe we make – each year, I think last year it was over $30,000 in tips on paychecks, because we don’t know about cash tips, obviously. IRS, our cleaners report all of their tips. Okay, don’t come after me. Wink.

But yeah, so they’re getting a lot of tips, as well as significant bonuses. We do very large Christmas bonuses. I do Christmas in July bonuses, if the numbers are looking good. So people are getting a lot of bonuses. Every month we choose an employee that gets a $100 bill in the mail as well with a handwritten thank you letter. So there’s a bunch of tertiary perks that we do as well on top of the great culture.

But yeah, as you can see, it’s been kind of a wild ride to get from $30 an hour all the way up to our $55 now, and I feel good there. And if close rates are really, really low, we will bump down to $50 if we feel like we need to to close the deal, because we’re still making fine margins there.

Again, I would say our average cleaning tech is probably making around $20 an hour, maybe a little less, just because typically, most people don’t last past two or three years, right? Two years, the two-year mark seems to be where we turn over quite a bit if they can even make it to that. If they can make it past two years and they stay, they’re probably in it for the long haul, just looking at our current staff. So that’s very interesting to note, and trying to get to the bottom of why do people leave at that time? Or why are people leaving in the first year? So, always room to improve, guys. And always, how can we get this place, this workplace, to be something that people do not want to leave? Or, why are they leaving? Really, really delving into that.

Key Lessons and Pricing Strategy

So yeah, it’s been quite the journey, as you can see, both from a what we charge perspective, from a revenue perspective. If you guys want me to deep dive into any part of this timeline, I would be happy to go into. I know I’ve kind of just glossed over what – six years of time. But if there’s anything that really piqued your interest, of okay, tell us about this time, I would be happy to do that and kind of describe what’s going on, how many clients we had, etc., because I have all of that data, guys.

And that is the beautiful thing about utilizing software from the beginning. Because you bet your ass, I wouldn’t be able to tell you all of this if I was not utilizing software properly since day one. QuickBooks Online since day one for our bookkeeping, and that’s where we did our invoicing. Obviously, if you use Square, Stripe or whatever, you can do that too. Works fabulously. But this is why I really am a big fan of having all of your invoicing in one place and all of your reporting in one place, because I can just boom, go back to that month and see exactly what was happening. ZenMaid, since day one. I can pull my appointments and my clients from that time and say, oh, yeah, this is what was happening, blah, blah, blah. This is how many cleanings I had.

All of these things are so important for this – now for me to even discuss this or think about what was happening during that time. If I didn’t have this data, it would be next to impossible. And even just reflecting – honestly, I’ve never laid this information out in this manner. I’ve looked at the revenue, of course, but I never thought about what were we charging and what were we paying?

So if any specific time period pops out for you, then just let me know, and I’d be happy to talk about it, because there’s reasons behind every single thing, whether that be – hey, I was getting a divorce in what year was that? 2023? So we didn’t want revenue to go up, right? We did not want revenue – or 2022, I can’t even remember, it’s a dark time. It was a dark time, okay? So we didn’t want revenue to go up, because that would just increase the value of the business, and we wanted the value of the business to tank, because every dollar that it made was potentially 50 cents taken away from me. My business – still a little salty about it.

Everybody, please just get a prenup. Okay, that’s all I’m going to say. But yeah, so there were things happening, obviously at every time period. And so there is context. It’s not just this perfect chart that goes like this. It was all over the place. We still have ups and downs. We’re coming off of a bit of a down quarter for sure.

Quality Focus and Current Achievement

So yeah, it’s been a wild ride, and I hope that this has been interesting to you. Let me know any questions you have, guys. But yeah, all of this to say, as I said 35 minutes ago, increase your prices, charge as much as you possibly can, as early as you can, because that gives you the power to be a higher paying employer. It gives you the power to add benefits. It gives you the power to be so generous in your community – all of the things that make our life and my life rich, filthy rich cleaners.

It has to do with higher charging and the only way you can do that is high quality work. And another spoiler, I’ll probably do an episode about this as well. We are going on over eight weeks of zero complaints, and that is over 1,400 appointments that my team has accomplished and completed without a single complaint. And that’s probably – I’m going to put that on my tombstone, because it’s probably the most proud thing I can possibly think of. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. 1,400 appointments, zero complaints.

And so, as you can see, that has been the guiding light since day one is quality, and all of these numbers that I’m saying, these crazy revenue numbers and whatnot, it’s because of the basis of a quality service.

Historical Perspective

And actually, I just went back because I’m making an appreciation video for my staff based on what I just told you, and I’m going to put that on our Facebook for marketing and just appreciation. And I actually stumbled upon a video that I had recorded and put on our Facebook in December of 2020, and that was when I was charging $35 an hour at $45k a month. And we had had our busiest week at that point ever. We had had 90 appointments, and we had zero complaints. So that was our busiest week at that time, was 90 appointments and we had zero complaints. And I was so proud.

And if I could go back and tell myself, hey, in five years, you’re going to have 1,400 appointments with zero complaints, eight plus weeks, two months, I would have cried. I would have cried. I would have cried. I feel like crying now thinking about it, because I’m just so freaking proud.

The Foundation of Success

So point being – prices as high as possible, quality as high as possible. Get some freaking checklists, guys. Use the checklist feature in ZenMaid. You need to have consistency. Get a training program in place. That’s why we hit this quality.

Spoiler alert, this higher wage guidelines, so they are much more incentivized to do high quality work and spelling out exactly what’s going to take away from those wages, quality being one of the biggest ones, as well as the training program that we have overhauled and implemented since last year. Our training is top notch now, so all of the newbies who would normally get the complaints are not because they know exactly what they’re doing.

And finally, we have a psychotically beautiful quality control system in place that is just skyrocketing our quality. So those three things have been put into place over the last year, we are experiencing the fruits of those labors, and I’d love to go into those more fully in a video. If you guys are interested, let me know.

But anyway, as I continue to ramble, this is the longest outro ever. I am a Midwesterner, so if any of you are familiar with a Midwest goodbye, this is exactly what it is – you’re experiencing it right now. So let me stop waving and yelling from the car to you and saying goodbye and just cut it, guys.

So I will see you in the next episode. I hope you’re having a great day, guys. And yeah, hit that like, hit that subscribe, see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• QuickBooks Online
• Filthy Rich Cleaners – E36: The Hilarious (and Horrifying) Truth Behind My First 10 Cleaner Hires

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