Consult-Style Session on Scaling Fast While Staffing Smart, with Jennifer Dorn

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Introduction

Stephanie: Hello everyone, and welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I’m your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And in today’s special episode, as you guys can see, we have Ms. Jennifer Dorn here with us from Augusta House Cleaning from Augusta, Georgia. And she made the trip up down, down to me, down to me today in order to have an in-person conversation and a consult style interview. Because we’ve been emailing back and forth and you said, hey, if I’m ever in Savannah, can we meet up? And here we are. So this is my living room, guys. You haven’t ever seen it. So I thought we’d do a little change of pace here. So Jennifer, I’m so excited you’re here.

Jennifer: I’m excited too. It’s finally happened.

Stephanie: Yeah, so I’m Jennifer with Augusta Housekeeping. And we opened business July 1st of 2024. So it’s been a little over a year and a half. And I’m still trying to figure it all out.

Jennifer: Yeah, no, brand new business basically.

Stephanie: Yeah, it feels brand new.

Jennifer: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you have had some really good growth so far.

Stephanie: Yes. We’ll talk about it. We’ll talk about it. Okay, let’s get to it. I’m proud of where we are for what I’ve put in. I’m very proud of where we are. I thought by this time frame, I would be more advanced than I am.

Stephanie: Okay. Well, we will get into all of that. And that’s kind of what this conversation is going to be about, guys, is hearing Jennifer’s story and then just answering your questions and me giving a little input here to help her propel her growth and work through some sticking points. So first and foremost, tell us about yourself.

Jennifer’s Background and Journey

Jennifer: Okay. So I cleaned houses through high school and college. So I kind of dabbled in the industry back then, majored in Spanish. That didn’t pan out. I thought, do what you love and didn’t have a dual degree in nursing or education or anything like that. So, learned quickly that just wasn’t the right trajectory for me.

Stephanie: You are still fluent though, I assume.

Jennifer: I’m taking Spanish lessons right now and it’s going terribly. I love the language. I love culture. I love travel. I think if I immerse myself, I’d get a lot back, but sadly, like any vocabulary, you lose it if you don’t use it. So yeah, I’m not where I wish I was.

Stephanie: That’s okay. That’s okay. I could communicate probably I wanted to, but I wouldn’t understand almost anything.

Jennifer: Gotcha. Especially the fast speaking.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. That’s where I get with my Spanish tutor. She thinks I’m catching on and then she’ll start speaking faster. And I’m like, oh. I know. Hold on. I missed that. But what an interesting choice for a degree.

Jennifer: Yeah. It was fun. I studied abroad in Spain, so that was totally worth it.

Stephanie: Where in Spain did you go?

Jennifer: Sevilla.

Stephanie: Sevilla. Very cool. I mean, I traveled all around Spain and the Mediterranean. But yeah.

Jennifer: That’s awesome. Lived in Seville. I’m jealous. It was wonderful. It was really wonderful. So yeah, majored in Spanish, got married. The plan was always for him to be the primary breadwinner. So all career development and resources went towards that. And my husband has been on his own journey. It’s taken quite the time to get anywhere with that. He just got his big boy job this month.

Stephanie: Hell yeah. What does he do?

Jennifer: Yeah. So he’s a land surveyor.

Stephanie: Oh my gosh. That is a, people need that.

Jennifer: They do. And it’s actually a dying field. Most of the advanced surveyors are older and they’re all retiring. So there’s a wonderful opportunity, which is why he has stayed in it, but he’s not licensed. So, you know, he did a bunch of odd jobs initially, got into surveying, hoped that this company would help him, you know, get advanced. And it didn’t. Then this company and anyway so we’ve kind of been all over the place and the reason I, I just got that fence put in back in the backyard and I had to get it surveyed and oh my gosh there’s no surveyors and when I finally got one yes it was a very eccentric old man and he was like yeah there’s no surveyors. You can charge whatever you want yeah so it’s a great business to get into yeah we thought about starting our own company and surveying yeah but he just got a job with Georgia Power which is amazing yeah probably great benefits and stuff amazing benefits so he might say they’ll pay for him to get certified oh heck yeah when licensed yeah there you go okay that’s going well then yes but it wasn’t for a long time so but the plan was always for him to be the primary breadwinner so I just dabbled in a bunch of odd jobs and worked for a lawn care company for a while, we both did. He was in the field, I was in the office, we loved it in that we loved who we worked for. But both knew this wasn’t a long-term plan. But I’m so thankful for that opportunity because one, I got to learn all of the ins and outs of a service industry business from the administrative side. And then the owner of the company, his name is Kyle Flanagan. He owns Lawn Ace in Augusta. If anyone needs lawn care, he’s incredible and is an amazing mentor. So he established a wonderful culture. He poured into his employees, paid everybody, you know, a living wage, wanted to see you grow and develop to be the best version of yourself and help you get there along the way.

Stephanie: Sounds like an amazing guy.

Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn’t be, we wouldn’t be who we are and we wouldn’t be where we are if it wasn’t for him. So I’m so thankful. And he really encouraged me to start the cleaning business and has kind of held my hand a little bit through that. So, big shout out to him. And then as my husband was still trying to figure out what he was doing, I dabbled in some different things after that, different entrepreneurial endeavors. So I did network marketing for juice plus, it’s kind of like a supplement. Think Mary Kay. I ran a successful eBay business for about a year or two, reselling stuff. The model that I bought into was going to be conducive for my long-term plan was not really the most lucrative or best value for your time input and the better model was not going to work for me because I wanted to stay home with kids and you really should be outsourcing more than at home listing and I was doing the reverse.

Stephanie: Got it.

Jennifer: So put that down. I started the lead generation endeavor, where you build a website for a local service industry, rank it on Google and then sell the leads that come into that to a local business. So I built the website. I did a cleaning business website because I cleaned in college and knew a little bit about the industry. I was like, well, then I know what to put in there and built the website and as soon as it started ranking I miscarried.

Stephanie: Oh no. I’m sorry.

Jennifer: That’s right. So that was devastating, totally knocked the wind out of my sails to do anything at all. Yeah. And got to a very dark little place. So all endeavors for Jennifer paused. I kind of just sheltered in place, needed time while Garrett continued to try and figure out what he was doing. In all those endeavors, although they weren’t my long-term path, I’m very, very thankful for them because I love education and research. So in all of them, I spent a lot of time educating myself, learning from the best in those businesses. And that really did a lot of vision casting for me of what success looks like, how to get there, modeled people persevering and, you know, just seeing the long-term trajectory.

Stephanie: Yeah. And also skill, everything that we do, there’s skills to be taken from it. And because you’ve had all these varied things as well as a lot of all surrounding business, right? And entrepreneurship. And so you’re pulling from every single one of these I’d imagine as you go and, hey, don’t do that. Don’t do that. And at the end of the day, business skills are business skills, regardless what we’re doing.

Jennifer: Right. Yeah. So it’s been really interesting, you know, now in this business, so often I’m pulling from some of that information and I’m really thankful that it’s there. So anyway, I had my kiddos, and that turned out to be much more difficult for me than I was expecting. I mean, I’d nannied for years. I thought, I know how to take care of kids logistically. But I’m an HSP. I don’t know if you know what that is. Highly sensitive person.

Stephanie: Oh, yes.

Jennifer: Yeah. So I didn’t know that about myself. Very easily overstimulated. And kids are next level energy. It’s nonstop.

Stephanie: It never stops. It never stops, yeah.

Jennifer: So I really struggled adjusting, postpartum anxiety, depression. Yeah, I just had a hard time. And then we were on the one income, at this point, government assistance, and just had a lot of overwhelm in every facet. Well, now it’s post-COVID, which in itself was a tumultuous time.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. And having newborns through that.

Jennifer: Terrifying. Oh it was awful. And then inflation hit so now things are even more tight, more overwhelming, what are we going to do, how is anyone surviving in this economy on average salaried income and it dawned on me oh most people have dual income and I’m just gonna have to figure this out. I didn’t need to go get a job or start a business and I knew this entrepreneurial side of me was there, but also it’s easier to just go clock in and out, work in the evening somewhere. But I really want to stay home with the kids. I homeschool. I wanted to continue that lifestyle. That was our vision and purpose and plan.

Stephanie: Was there any jobs that you were considering instead of entrepreneurship? You’re like, oh, maybe I did go do this instead. Or were you pretty like, I’m going to start business?

Jennifer: Well, the thing is, any of the fields that I would want to go into would be more of a full-time job, which meant I would have to put the kids either in daycare and school.

Stephanie: Which would cancel out most of the income when it comes to daycare.

Jennifer: Right, exactly, because we didn’t want to do the public school system. We would want to do private school or private tutoring, and I couldn’t afford that. Or else, yeah, the entire income would go towards that. So it’s a wash. What’s the point?

Stephanie: Yep.

Jennifer: So then I thought, well, just clean houses in the evenings. A friend of mine had suggested it, so we were kind of talking through that idea. I knew I had the cleaning business website that I built years ago that I turned off, but was fully prepared to turn on and be hopefully ranking well enough for leads. So I started researching about cleaning, because that’s what I do. I research. And what’s the best products? What’s the best methodology? Should I start a business? I’d really rather start a business, but it’s easier to just go do it. And I came across your infamous ZenMaid Summit video.

Stephanie: Yeah, the 0 to 800K.

Jennifer: Yes, I was sold. I got this. Look at this chick. She’s amazing. Young, energetic, and an average person.

Stephanie: You didn’t come from any background.

Jennifer: Right, that one would think you needed to accomplish what you have. And so it cast the vision. It demonstrated. It modeled what I could do was possible. And then you were also so generous and have been. I’m trying not to get emotional. I know. I’m about to start crying. Thank you. To hear that video, I was, what, 20? I don’t know, probably 25 when I recorded that, 24 maybe. And so to hear, and now you’re sitting here in Georgia with me.

Stephanie: And it changed my life.

Jennifer: Literally.

Stephanie: That’s amazing. Wow.

Jennifer: Yes, and your videos continue to because you’re so generous in the information that you give. You’ve said recently, you have to be careful or consider because you’re giving out information that could, you know, affect your competitors. But yet you continue to pour into this community. And I’m so thankful because everything that I am doing well is because of the information you’ve shared.

Stephanie: Oh, thank you. I’m so happy to hear that. It makes it all, and it just, yeah, even, you know, obviously, yeah, I thought about that before doing all of this. But at the end of the day, it’s you just focus on most people, even given the roadmap, still can’t do it. You know what I mean? Because even if you have exactly what you need to do in front of you, it’s still difficult. It’s still very challenging. So it’s nothing I say is particularly revolutionary, right? It’s just organizing it.

Jennifer: It is. Yes. Yes. When I knew, I think from all the different endeavors that I’d had, the most successful people said, find a proven system and follow it. And if you just stay consistent, you’re going to find the growth and continue self-development and education and growth.

Stephanie: Yeah. It reminds me kind of dieting where people are like, this is the way to lose weight. This is the way to lose weight. Where it’s a lot of ways to skin the cat, being a calorie deficit, whatever you can sustain kind of thing, right? Instead of it has to be this way. So anytime I hear somebody be really dogmatic about, oh, charging hourly is stupid, you know, or charging this way is stupid or whatever. It’s like, well, it can work. You know, there’s lots of ways to do this thing, right? Or we don’t, a lot of companies don’t even do one-offs. They’re like, no one-offs, no move-outs. We only do reoccurring, right? It’s like, well, that works too. You know what I mean? So I can give a thousand examples here, but at the end of the day, it’s just go, go hard on whatever path you choose. It can work, you know?

Jennifer: Yes. Yes.

Opening the Business and Early Challenges

Stephanie: So you opened the business.

Jennifer: Yes. So, saw your video, game changer. I got this, let’s go. So I spent about four months researching and systematizing to prepare to launch. And at the time I thought this friend that I kind of referenced was gonna be not a business partner because I wanted to be in control, but would function similarly in that she would be the manager. We would do this together, you know, collaborate. But it came time to launch, so July 1st I got my LLC, we made an announcement in August that we’re opening. And by then I had some SOPs in place and I had an employee handbook and things like that, basics. And we did one training and so it was me and her and then one other girl and I was doing the training because I spent all the time researching so I was also teaching her. And in that few weeks before found out she was pregnant and did the one training session and it was, oh no, I can’t do this. Yeah, yeah. So it was a huge blow because I just made the announcement, yeah. And I’ve spent all this time and you’re so vulnerable in that moment in those early stages of it’s devastating because you’re well now what and I’m supposed to stay home with the kids. I’m not supposed to be out cleaning. So I did have one other person at the time who was going to also work with her as her teammate. So I was like, are you interested? Do we still want to move forward? What are we going to do? And she thought she wanted to. Hired another gal that I found, reconnected through Facebook. She decided she really liked the management idea and I think she was well equipped for it. So we did another big training session. The first or the other teammate quit after that training session. She was like, no, this is too much. Maybe I’m too extra. I don’t know. But fortunately, the girl that was going to be my manager at this point stayed with me for about four months. So we hit the ground running and I thought it was going to work well. Obviously, it’s very part-time because we have no clients at this point. She had a full-time job serving at a restaurant, but she thought the way we communicated, I don’t know if we miscommunicated or she didn’t fully understand compliance with her company. We thought on the hours that she’s off, she could do the cleaning and we’ll just kind of work around it and slowly she can fade out of the restaurant. Well, it just wasn’t working that way. So as we got a little busier, we got clients in September, she brought in some of her friends to help staff and you know, things were moving well as far as the business goes but now she’s not as available as we thought she was so now we’re trying to throw some of these other people who aren’t trained because she was the one who’s trained, oh no, so then it’s starting to tumble a little bit. And then the hurricane hit and I was really hoping that would end up being good for the business because everyone’s going to have post-construction cleans or whatever, but now I’m having staffing issues.

Stephanie: Yeah. Was Augusta hit bad? I can’t remember.

Jennifer: Yeah. Awful.

Stephanie: So that was, yeah, one year ago. Gosh, right. Again, brand new baby business and just getting walloped.

Jennifer: Yes. Yes. So in January, a year ago, I found myself with no staff, clients at this point, not a lot because we were still working on it. Yeah, struggling with staffing, I couldn’t really push, grow. Yeah. I didn’t want to, so I wasn’t going to be able to show up. So, but I had maybe three clients I think that were recurring. So now I’m having to find sitters that I can’t pay for, for me to go out in the field to continue to fulfill those commitments while trying to hire. And as you know, if you don’t do group interviews, hiring is a nightmare.

Stephanie: Yes, very much so.

Jennifer: Yeah. You’re spending all this time chasing and they don’t show up.

Stephanie: Yes. Hours and hours. I had over a hundred applicants and I’m so detail oriented. I’m reading every single resume, their time chunks in each job, are they committed to their jobs? Then I’m looking at all their socials, then I’m calling them.

Jennifer: Oh my goodness. Not showing up, you know, we get through the whole interview process. Sounds great. And then they ghost.

Stephanie: Yep. Yeah. Just so much effort. And I think what you’re describing is what makes this our industry. And I mean, I would imagine a lot of kind of more blue collar, whatever we want, whatever we want to call our work, right? Service. Yes, service in comparison to a white collar admin role or something like that where, yeah, the resume matters and stuff like that. It’s in ours, can they show up? Can they show up? Can they show up is the biggest barrier to entry. I couldn’t tell you anything about most of my staff’s resumes because I don’t care about them. You know what I mean? Obviously that consistency does matter. And if somebody was at a place for 15 years, yeah, I’m very interested in them or long chunks of time. But especially considering most of our staff are going to be moms, you know, that plays into what does their past career look like if they were staying at home and things like that. So yeah, I think it just, it’s a totally different ballgame with hiring for us of what actually matters, you know?

Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah. So I realized I’m doing something wrong. I can’t keep anybody. I can’t find anybody. And yet I’ve got hundreds of applicants. Applicants, yeah. What does Stephanie do? So I spent a bunch of time digging into your videos and Serene Clean videos. And I knew you had mentioned group interviews. I was like, what is a group interview? What does this look like? Yep. Came up with a system, implemented it immediately. Have solid staff and haven’t struggled with that since.

Stephanie: Yep. Solves the problem.

Jennifer: Yes. So I’m sure as we grow, you know, there’ll still be some learning.

Stephanie: Yes. You’ll still hit it, but it’s blunted a lot more. Because at least you’re not starting the race when it should have started two weeks ago, right? And you just didn’t know. Really, it’s the race never stops. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen ever. Tomorrow, all of our staff could quit. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, but it could happen. Well, in your situation, you had all that turnover all in one short amount of time. We still couldn’t keep up with it. But we kind of did. It’s when I look back at last year, it’s okay, we hired 10 people within a couple months, well, most of them turned over and then other staff turned over. So it’s how do you keep up? But at least with group interviews, it could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse. And so, and now it’s, yeah, we’re fully staffed. We got a kind of wait list of people that we’re interested in because we’re not dealing with that. And that’s a powerful place to be of, okay, we’ve got some choice here, you know? So that’s awesome. So that kind of started getting the ball rolling. So what was that looking like for you then with training? Were you the one still doing the training for these people or how did that work?

Training and Finding a Manager

Jennifer: Yeah. So I was doing the training. So I still having to get care for the kids and be in the field. But my plan was as soon as I can find a manager, I’m going to hone in on them and then they can run with it. And I knew I’ve known since the beginning, I need a systematized training process. But it’s just been, you know, getting it. Yeah. No, let’s just get open and do something. And then there was all these fires. So training is one of my 2026 goals. But in that hiring season post group interviews, I found my manager that I had all for the rest of the year. She was wonderful in that she is hardworking and she takes constructive criticism. She wants to learn, you know, all of these things. But over time we saw her executive functioning skills were not well suited for the job.

Stephanie: Yeah, they weren’t there.

Jennifer: So didn’t see that on the front end. I thought a lot of the time as she was struggling, that was just me needing to better educate her or put better systems in place. So we’d kind of get to a good season and then it felt like the ball was getting dropped and, you know, but it was hard to track.

Stephanie: Sure. Yeah. Where is the issue here.

Jennifer: Yeah. Right. It must be me. So I kept working on me, which is good.

Stephanie: Yeah, of course. It helped me develop some great things. Yeah. And always, you know, taking that accountability of is there something. But at the end of the day, sometimes it’s just wrong person in the wrong seat kind of thing.

Jennifer: Yes. So, we’ll pause her story for a second. In May of last year. So, you know, I get hiring figured out. In May of last year, I have enough recurring clients to be profitable and that all of our overhead costs are covered because I had insurance, software, bookkeeping, you know, all right out of the gate. So we were kind of bleeding for a little bit. But by May, we had enough recurring clients to be profitable. So that was a very, you know, huge milestone. And then got my manager kind of onboarded well enough to feel like, okay, I think we can grow. We joined BNI in October.

Stephanie: How was that effect? Love BNI. Good for you? Everybody joined BNI.

Jennifer: Yeah. No, and that’s, I’ve suggested that before, and I know a lot of people have a lot of success. Have you gotten both residential and commercial from that?

Stephanie: Yeah.

Jennifer: That’s awesome.

Stephanie: Yep. It’s not been a huge influx all at once. It was enough to poke holes in our systems to see where we need more development, which is why I went and bought all of your stuff. I’ve been looking at all of your documents since I opened, but it was trying to save money on the front end. And now I wish I just hit the bullet and done it. I was like, I can build my own. So much easier when you just have a framework, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know sometimes. And that’s even just all of the, not to plug my shit here, but it’s all been built with pain and blood because it’s, oh, that terrible thing happened. We need a policy in place. And there’s some things that even talking about training, you don’t know to train somebody on how to deal with something if you yourself haven’t come across it yet, or you’ve only came across it once, right? So it’s to build that into training is impossible, because you don’t know yet. And it hasn’t happened yet, right? For us, we never told people, don’t touch breaker boxes, because we’ve never had a situation where that was a problem. You know what I mean? Yeah, we’ll flip a breaker, it’s not a problem. And then all of a sudden, we have somebody accused, I’m not even kidding, we, my cleaner mistakenly instead of turning all the lights off in the house she just went to the breaker box or something, it’s been a couple years since this happened. So she, she was young, she’s 20 years old and she was, oh okay let me turn the, I don’t know. So anyway she turned the breaker off on the whole house and so this turned into the customers convinced that we were scoping out the house to steal their jet skis specifically. They kept referencing the jet skis that we, that cleaner was, the goal, we need the jet skis. I’m like, this girl does not have a truck to steal jet skis. So we’re, okay, don’t touch the breakers. That’s the rule. We won’t even flip a breaker for somebody. But and that’s such a silly example. But all of those little things come together to when you look at somebody’s, how do I, how are they so, you know, proficient at everything? He’s like, well, it’s trial by fire. You know what I mean? And so for those listening, don’t feel bad if you don’t know something because you just haven’t experienced the thing yet to teach you that lesson, you know? And yeah, you can buy stuff, which is awesome. And you can kind of skirt that. And that’s the goal is learn from other people’s mistakes. But as I always say, sometimes you have to touch the hot pan and get burned.

Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah.

BNI and Growing the Business

Stephanie: So let’s see. I joined BNI. Love it. So even though my growth there has not been immediately worth it, and networking is such a slow burn too sometimes. You don’t know who.

Jennifer: Well, and I’m loving it because they’re all like-minded individuals. They’re all goal-oriented.

Stephanie: Good people, yeah.

Jennifer: Good people. And BNI specifically is a culture intentionally cultivated to help each other. You know, the best referrals are the ones where you’ve built these relationships. So they sew that into the framework. And these people genuinely care about you and your business. And so I’ve learned a ton just from sitting under some of this community. So I think it’s invaluable just for the education piece of it. And then obviously, the more time we spend together, the more.

Stephanie: Yeah, you trust those people then.

Jennifer: And also it shows that they can show up consistently, which gives you some evidence of, all right, this is a consistent person. I think I can recommend them to other people.

Stephanie: Right. Which adds value to our business too, because then we’re experts, not just in cleaning, but now we know the best.

Jennifer: Yep. Exactly. I can recommend, oh, you need this person. You need this person. I know people already. And that makes you valuable to your customers.

Stephanie: Exactly.

Jennifer: Yep. So that was a great next step. And then that was in October. And then in November, we started bleeding money. It took me a long time to figure out why. I think it was fine. I think there were just some expenses that kind of compounded. But it was enough to stress me out to where I had just gotten to a point where I thought I want to start investing in growth, whether that’s ads or marketing. You know, hiring somebody to do digital marketing or whatever. That was kind of the direction I was going. And then we started bleeding money. So I had to pause and then it was the holidays. And all the while my manager was, things were compounding for her.

Stephanie: How so? Like, what do you mean by that? Like it was becoming more evident that things were not right there?

Jennifer: No, more on behind the scenes for her, I see. Yeah, for her emotionally, independently.

Stephanie: Got it. So I think things are being handled, but she’s feeling more overwhelmed. She has six children.

Jennifer: Oh my goodness. Her existence overwhelms me.

Stephanie: Yes. Yes. And they’re all in school, but you know, some kid is always needing something. Somebody’s sick. Yeah. Schools. Yeah. I can’t imagine. Yeah. And then home is difficult when you have that many children. Yes. And then because of her, you know, difference in skillset, I think she’d be really great going to a job where you clock in, you have these expectations and you do it. But because we’re part-time and it’s work from home and it’s kind of work at your own pace just to get the stuff done. And on my fault, I gave too much free reign. I didn’t set clear expectations. I didn’t have checklists. That was another big prompting to go ahead and just buy your stuff instead of trying to build it out. Cause I was, she needs to be equipped now to know what needs to get done. So she’s not feeling bad that she’s forgotten this or that. You know, we don’t have the card on file and now we’re at the job and things like this. So, and then it’s Christmas and all of her kids are home and, you know, without getting to her whole story, it was very evident that the ball was getting dropped. So we had to start having hard conversations. You know, do I need to hire someone to help you? Which part of this is the most difficult for you? She was also primarily the one answering the phones and the phones aren’t getting answered, and that’s, you know, number one point of contact that phones have to get answered. So we were trying to problem solve, I built out more operations systems for her and it still wasn’t happening. So we had a hard conversation the first week of the month maybe, this Christmas, January, just a few weeks ago. And by the end of the conversation she said, I think this isn’t for me. This isn’t for me.

Stephanie: Yeah. Which I saw coming, but also didn’t because the whole time she has wanted to be in it long term and has been my buddy. We’ve become super close friends through this whole thing. And she takes full ownership of the business and of the areas that she’s not been doing well. She owns up to it. She’s not defensive.

Jennifer: Very accountable.

Stephanie: Yeah. Very accountable. But it still just wasn’t happening. So I kept hoping, let’s make this work. And we just couldn’t. So the end of that was very emotional for both of us to say goodbye. I compared it to a relationship when you break up. Yeah. We both know this is for the best, but we love each other. And we don’t want to say goodbye. I really just that. Yeah. No, for sure. And that, you know, this is a good person standing in front of you, but it doesn’t mean they’re your person.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Stephanie: And that’s a painful realization. And I think a lot of people will, you know, if this is a relationship or a business or whatever you want to call it, friendships too, it’s you keep trying and trying when it’s the answer is right there, but you’re not willing to accept it basically. So basically for her then, I mean, was there any opportunity to think of her being in the field or was that not what she was interested in?

Restructuring and Moving Forward

Jennifer: You know, it’ll be interesting to see. In that conversation, I think she needed to take all responsibility off of her to help regain herself and just restructure herself independently. I will not be surprised if we do sew her back in to just some field hours or just the phone or something really clear-cut.

Stephanie: Yeah. It’s a lot less mental bandwidth needed kind of thing. And also kind of what you mentioned too is just there’s so much malleability and you kind of have to be able to adjust quickly and have a lot of things thrown at you. And you don’t know what every day brings. Whereas, you know, a cleaning tech, though each house may be different and their schedule might change at the end of the day, you were doing a very specific, go clean this space, right? Where the office staff, it’s we literally, we don’t know what’s coming through that door. When the calls are coming, if they’re going to be an angry customer, a lead, you know, schedule change. You just don’t know. It’s a lot. It takes a certain kind of personality. And like you said, that executive functioning, it becomes evident. And, you know, I put people in management roles who should not have been there, but because they were a great cleaner or a great employee in general at that time. And then I put them in a role that is not suited to them and it’s really tough. It’s tough to be, ooh, oh, this is not it. And then yeah, you’re friends with them. And, you know, that it’s very tough in a small business. And I know people say, that’s a lesson I’m, you know, as we discussed, continuing to learn of where’s the line when you’re managing, you’re so close to that. You’re just going to get, you’re going to get close because you’re spending so much time going back and forth just in communication that the line starts to blur because of the quality time.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie: So I understand when people say don’t be friends with your staff. You know, I totally get that. But also at the same time, I haven’t listened to that at all. And yes, I’ve gotten burned on it sometimes, but at the end of the day, it still feels worth it to me because I’m, you’re building, you know, my vision. You’re, we’re all working together to build a vision and there’s going to be a level of companionship there. And then you start hanging outside of work or whatever. And you know, their family, you know, their kids, yes, there’s going to be emotional ties there. So there is a risk there, but it’s also a risk that I personally am willing to take. And it sounds like you as well. So, so now what does that look like for you managing the work? It’s all on you now, right? Or how have you handled it?

Jennifer: Yeah. So panicked. I didn’t panic. Yeah. I had a dark day. Yes. Bad day. Bad day. Sat in front of the heater for 30 minutes just zoning into space. Yeah. Yep. This is my disassociation couch actually. I come here and I’ll eat snacks and just stare at the ceiling when I’m having a bad day. Yes. Well, and for me, it’s all with children.

Stephanie: Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah, at least I don’t have that. I just have a cat on my chest.

Jennifer: Yeah, just soothing me. I wish. I wish. Yeah, so I had a bad day. A lot of grieving. And then the next day, I stayed in my pajamas the whole day. I didn’t make the bed.

Stephanie: Yep. It was bad.

Jennifer: Yep. And the next day, I was, I’m going to put my big girl pants on, made the bed, put my tennis shoes on. And that sounds like a little thing, but I actually really need that to be, I’m in work mode.

Stephanie: Yep, house. I’m going to be on the job. I’m going to figure this out. So looked at my options. I could either promote one of two people that worked for me to that role and give them the full responsibility. I could divide the role between those two. Both of them were interested in more hours and responsible. They want more pay, more responsibility. And they’ve proven that they’re capable of that, or I could hire a VA to do a lot of the administrative side and then maybe just one of them to help with field, you know, do walkthroughs or what have you, or I could open a job listing, you know, and hire external.

Jennifer: Yep, exactly.

Stephanie: So I decided to divide the role between the two. I’m not calling either of them a general manager. I think that’s wise. And I told them I’m reserving the right to hire a general manager if I, in the future, yeah. So we have a field manager and an office manager. They’re both supposed to be trained in each other’s roles. I’ve given clear, written expectations of them. And I’m going to, I had one year checklist that you do for the manager’s daily checklist. I did have that all built out, but now I have to divide it. So that’s next step one. So they each have a daily checklist and a weekly checklist.

Jennifer: Love it.

Stephanie: And the thing is they probably love it too because they have clear expectations.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I think I really set my other manager up not to fail, make it harder. Yeah, exactly. Because she just didn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing when and didn’t have any clear expectations here. And that’s why, you know, whether it’s a cleaning checklist or just a general management checklist, I think a lot of people make the mistake of, well, I need a manager. And, well, they’ll figure it out. They’re the manager. It’s, no, we have to give them things. And I know what you mean. When I first brought somebody into the office, Crystal, my HR director now, and she came in and she’s, wait, what? This is how you’re doing everything. And I’m, yeah, just take this chunk of stuff and figure it out. Right. And it was just so chaotic. I was drowning and just like, yeah, again, if I ever had to redo it all over again, wildly different when it comes to the admin side of things of I had cleaning checklists, but there was no rhyme or reason in the office.

Stephanie: Exactly. Yeah. We had a cleaning checklist from day one, but yeah. Yeah. Which I mean, that is half the battle. These quality is going to be there, you know, or the cleaning is going to be less problematic, hopefully because of a cleaning checklist. But yeah, you know, you have to set everybody up for success. And it sounds like that’s a lesson you’ve learned now. And these two folks are going to hopefully be more, be more successful. That’s awesome. And I don’t, you know, and what you’re doing is a creative solution because you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket, which is nice because then if both, if one of them says, you know what, I don’t like this part, well, then you can just clean.

Jennifer: Yes, exactly. It’s not so chaotic.

Stephanie: Yep. And we’ve given them both 30 days to evaluate, step into it, see how you do. And I’ve explicitly said, this is my expectation, both as leadership, vision, passion, our mission statement. We went over it. I want this character and then here are the logistical expectations. If you can’t fulfill this, I don’t want you in the role. I love you. I think you’re doing a great job. I believe you can do it, but I don’t want you in the role.

Jennifer: Good for you.

Stephanie: Yeah. I was very blunt.

Jennifer: Very boss lady.

Stephanie: Good for you. Because I’ve not been that way with these other people and I’ve learned. So we’ll see. I’m feeling really good. We did our first big training this week and onboarding, and that went well. We have a bunch more to do.

Jennifer: That’s awesome. How exciting. I mean, a lot of changes and a lot of things, as they say, not on your bingo card, but this is business. And this is life, especially when it’s brand new. But things can shake up at any point that you don’t expect. And your ability to roll with the punches really, I think, dictates how successful you’re going to be. Because the punches are going to keep coming. They’re going to keep coming. It’s not the punches ever stopped. Literally, as I was telling you before we hopped on, the punches have been coming this week. And it’s things that I was, oh my gosh, I never would have thought I’d be having to deal with this. And it’s, okay, you need to just put your head down and get through it, you know? And I think allowing yourself the time to process, but also say, okay, I can cry later about this. Right. Literally, I joke of, I’m going to schedule in the crying time because I’m, now is not the time to cry, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Yeah, we got to pull this together. Exactly, exactly. Especially in front of others. Yes. Something that really helped me on your first episode with Cheryl, you mentioned that if you just put on your firefighter hat and know this is part of the job description, it won’t be, it won’t feel so tumultuous.

Jennifer: Yes, exactly. And that totally changed my perspective. Yeah. When I was, I don’t know if I was going through staffing then or whatever issue. It’s always an issue.

Stephanie: Yeah. No, for sure. And I think too, as you continue to grow and you run into all of these problems, your belief in yourself grows because it’s, well, I figured that out. I figured that out. And I think that’s the hardest part when you’re starting out is you don’t have any proof for yourself in this endeavor yet that you can make it through. So every single challenge feels like the biggest deal because you’ve never came up against it. And so then when you do make it through, all of a sudden it’s okay. And David Goggins, if you guys know who that is, he’s a very inspirational figure, but basically won’t go into him, but former Navy SEAL, blah, blah, blah. He’s written several books about a lot of cool stuff. Read Can’t Hurt Me. But anyway, it’ll put a fire under your ass, but he calls it having a cookie jar basically that you can pull cookies from and the cookies being your former accomplishments or former challenges that you have made it through so that when you’re in your next tough time that you’ve never came up against, okay, I’m going to go to my cookie jar and pull from it and be, okay, I did that. I did that. And that’s, I’ve kind of alluded to that concept before on the podcast of you’ve made it through everything else. I mean, look at what you’ve done in your personal life, you know, and anybody having children and attempting to do this, my hat’s off to you because I can’t imagine, you know, and every, it’s funny because I literally, Lily, you know, my border collie, she got into the cat food the other day. And so she had me up three or four times the other night to go to the bathroom and I was absolutely destroyed the next day. And I said to my managers, I’m, this is making me rethink kids cause I’m, holy crap, how am I going to do this? I just was not able to function the next day. And that’s so embarrassing to say, because it was just a couple of times in comparison to breastfeeding a child, you know? And so I’m just, yeah, exactly. So I’m just, I want children, but I’m, how am I going to do that? I know I will be able to figure it out. I know, I know. And it’s get the cookies out.

Jennifer: Yeah, get the cookies out.

Stephanie: But it’s just I’m, okay, I function really, really high level when I have sleep. But when you go through sleep deprivation, then all of a sudden it starts to fall. So it’s how do you function when you aren’t getting all the things your body needs, which is most of our listeners, honestly, is their bodies are in a rough spot because of their obligations and things. So, yeah, just all of that beside the point, it’s just going back to your successes in the past, even if it has nothing to do with what you’re doing right now. It’s, well, I ran a half marathon or whatever the thing is. You know, it’s always good to bolster your confidence, I think. And so, yeah, I don’t even remember what we were talking about. Well, I think because with her leaving and being able to rise to the occasion and solve the problem, I definitely, you know, at the beginning of this endeavor, when these things were happening, it was, I need to quit. I don’t know if I can do this. And it came very close a few times. But this time, it was, this is really hard, but I’ve already overcome so much. So just keep going.

Jennifer: Yeah. That’s what I keep telling myself. If I don’t quit, I will be successful.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. It’s really about you don’t need to quit. You need to rest. You need to go to sleep. You need to wake up and try again kind of thing. It’s just, yeah, never quit kind of thing is the lesson there. And I think if this had happened at an earlier stage, maybe that would have pushed you over the edge kind of thing. So I love to hear that. That muscle has now, that tenacity muscle has grown significantly since you started, which is fantastic.

Pricing and Profitability

Stephanie: So that brings us to today. Yeah. Yeah. The only other thing I left out of all this was another big struggle has been pricing. So I’m still not really profitable. You know, I told you last May we were covering our expenses, but we still, most of the money that’s coming in is going back out. So at some point, maybe we can talk about that. You’ve talked about it a lot. I think I’ve figured it all out. But anytime I think I’ve figured it out, I’m still.

Jennifer: Yeah, no, and it does take some nuance to dig into what is actually happening there because there’s many reasons that pricing might be off and many things to cover. So yeah, I’d love to, we can dig into that. I think I would love to talk and try to give you some solutions there. So yes, what a story. So it is. Let’s get into your questions. Yeah, I have them in an order of importance. Okay, what do you attribute most to your speech and vocabulary? Every time I watch you I am just dumbfounded because you are so fluent and I find myself struggling a lot to say fluent. So is it something you’ve, have you been a reader since you were young? Have you done something specific to develop this muscle?

Stephanie: Yeah, well, that made me chuckle when I saw that question. I actually, I messaged my best friend because she has always commented I should be a romance author. She’s, Stephanie, you need to write romance novels because you’re so flowery with your language. So yes, there’s many, and I thought about this. I’m, why am I like this? And there’s several things that I attributed. Yes, I was a voracious reader growing up. And so that introduced me to a lot of vocabulary as well as just English in general. And then from the opposite side, I always loved to write essays. And English in general was always my strong suit growing up for speech class or not speech as much. But I would say I was in advanced literature by my sophomore year kind of thing. I just love reading and analyzing and analyzing things like that. So that would be number one. But I will say I did not speak like this, obviously, at that age, not in the slightest. So I would say, honestly, consuming an insane amount of commentary channel content on YouTube. I just listen to a lot of people speaking, I would say. And anytime I hear a word that tickles me, it just, it gets added to the vocabulary. Because there’s just something so delightful about using the correct word, I would say. And then honestly, the podcast has made me speak so much better. I would say just practice, practice. And specifically when it comes to, I still lose my train of thought a lot. That would be one of the things I still struggle with. So just really trying to hammer in on what is the point I’m trying to get across, you know, and when is a tangent entertaining and useful versus now you’re getting, now we’re just in a rabbit hole. Now we’re getting, exactly, exactly. And honestly, just realizing I have ADHD has helped a lot because it’s, oh, this is why I am the way I am. But, and then just from a delivery perspective, I think I have a lot of vocal modulation that keeps things very interesting. So if I’m analyzing why am I good to listen to, it’s because I do a lot of this. It’s not monotone and it’s unexpected. So I try to analyze myself as much as possible. And, okay, where is this not good? You know what I mean? And where is this useful, especially when it comes to the podcast? I want to be educational but also entertaining because I think this can be really dull otherwise. So how can I inject funny stories or even the way I say something into that? Yeah, your vocal intonation. Yes, exactly. So good question. Thank you. That was such a nice compliment when I read that. It made me smile last night because I was, oh, thank you. Well, I put it first because every time I listen, that’s the first thing that comes to mind. I’m, she’s excellent. I want to be that.

Jennifer: Yeah, and then diction as well. Because I’m a northerner and in Wisconsin, we pronounce our words very, I would say, crisply. You know, we have our accent, but compared to here in the South where sometimes there are no consonants. Oh my gosh, sometimes I talk to people and I’m, you got marbles in your mouth, man. I have lost so much of my diction.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. But it’s a beautiful, I love a Southern drawl. Don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to, yeah, the crispiness of the way we speak, I have not, I haven’t lost that at all. I would argue that I lean into it more because everybody loves a Northern accent.

Jennifer: Yes. It’s funny. Yeah. Well, since I’m in BNI, I’m hoping to develop more networking skills. And at every meeting at the BNI, you have to give a presentation. Yes. Yep. So I’m memorizing mine to the T because if I get off, who knows where I’ll end up. And I think, you know, just always being on the verge of laughter is always a good, that’s what I’m, is there something funny? And actually, it’s funny because one of my co-workers at ZenMaid, who’s a developer, Rich, he has ADHD. And I find myself always constantly interrupting meetings for ZenMaid. If something funny comes in my mind, it’s very hard for me not to blurt out. And he was, you’re dopamine mining, because this is boring. So you want to make it funny. And so for me, I think that also is a thing of, how can I make this funny?

Stephanie: So I think, yeah, where’s the joke? Where’s the joke? I’m the least funny person ever. I’m so, you just got to be silly girl. Good question though. Excellent question. Yeah. Okay. If you could start over, what would you do differently? And you’ve talked about your pricing structure is hourly and y’all are so set in it. You can’t really change or it’d be a huge undertaking. Yes. So with that, if you could start over, you can address pricing in there too.

Starting Over and Lessons Learned

Jennifer: Yes, absolutely. So as I alluded to earlier, I think that one of the big areas would be on the administrative side is having a bit more structure before I brought anybody in. That would be one thing. I think that I did not have nearly enough of the employee documentation in place to protect myself. And I had zero backbone when it came to employees because I was, well, pretty much by the, I hired my first person, I was 23 and I was just so deep in people pleasing and I wanted them to like me. Respecting me had zero. I mean, yes, I guess I suppose I wanted that, but in practice I was not behaving in a way that demanded respect whatsoever. I wanted them to like me. So going back, I think I would, you can only be as confident and forceful as, as you, as my experience now has caused me to be that 23 year old Stephanie could not do that. So if I were to start over today, whole other ballgame when it comes to my leadership style, I would say the boundaries that I would have with clients and employees alike. And, you know, just saying no, things like that. I’m, nope, we’re not going to do that. Or we’re not going to bend over backwards for this unreasonable person on either side. I also think that I never would have taken on vacation rentals at all. And I probably would have said no to some of the commercial accounts that I did, though they taught me things looking back, it wasn’t financially worth it. The lesson for sure, daycares, fuck daycares is my thought process now, not because fuck them kids, but because it’s they don’t have any money. Daycares don’t have any money.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. So daycares are wonderful needed places and they need to get clean, but it’s not going to be by us because they don’t have any money. So I would have honed in on certain industries that we simply will not do, as well as even things like far out clients went from a travel logistics side of things. I would have had a more nuanced and higher travel rate. Of course, I would have started at a higher price altogether. And yes, as you mentioned, I would have introduced flat rate pricing, at least on maintenance cleans, I think I would have gone that route. Maybe still doing first time cleans at an hourly or move outs, that type of thing. I think I would have continued to do that, but I would have introduced some flavor of flat rate pricing, perhaps still allowing people to book us for limited hours because that’s my biggest draw to hourly, right, is because we have so many clients on some type of limited hour basis that that’s a little bit more difficult to enable with a flat rate model, meaning if somebody wants to rotate rooms, right. Or somebody wants you only to do certain areas of a house. Well, all that makes it a little muddy for flat rate, right. Where it’s, okay, you have us for three hours. Here you go. You know? And you could certainly do that with flat rate and just be, it’s 120 bucks. And then if we go over this many hours, we’re starting to charge you hourly on top of that. So there’s a lot of nuance that we could have introduced. So, yes, if I went back, I would do that because it is more profitable because you can get faster. Right. And, but then I think making one thing I would have done a lot sooner too on that note is making sure that the cleaning techs know exactly what is approved and not for time of the job. I don’t know if I did that in the beginning of this is approved for this many hours, do not go over, you need to get approval if you go over on this kind of thing. So can you elaborate what you mean on the timing of stuff? Like, do you have each space timed out or meaning the each appointment, our first time clean says in our notes, this is approved for 10 man hours. You are not to go over that. So the cleaners know, that’s how much we’re charging for. So they can’t go over on it. So we would just, maybe it’s just the notes for my texts. I hadn’t compared to now our notes were not good. So I would say really leaning into making sure the cleaners have what they need to be successful from a notes perspective. Also, you mentioned earlier, having the credit card on file, having the client guidelines signed, if you don’t have some type of task management system in place to double check yourself, you’re going to be relying on your memory. And so yeah, we’d be at a clean be, shit, they didn’t sign the client guidelines, or we don’t have, I didn’t even have a, I didn’t even do down payments. I didn’t even do credit cards on file until I think year two or three, maybe year three. Cause I was, oh my gosh, nobody’s going to want a credit card on file. And then here I am playing the bounty hunter, literally.

Jennifer: Exactly. I can, I still remember that lady’s face. Oh, what a bitch.

Stephanie: Yeah. So I think I would have, all of that structural stuff would have been in place. And I wish I would have had, for example, from day one, because that’s just, it’s changed my life when it comes to just managing all of the administrative labor that needs to happen, because it’s not just book a client, right? There’s seven things that need to happen in order for that client to let us to be able to go to that house and have what we need. And all of that stuff just was not thought out, I would say. So those are the things that really stand out. And then just holding cleaners accountable. You know what I mean? Actually having policies in place that we’d never hold them to, you know? And so it’s, what’s the point of having a policy if you’re not actually going to enforce it? And when we kind of revamped a lot of our things, our raise and wage guidelines and the cadence, okay, we really had to have a conversation of, well, attendance though important, we don’t actually ding them for it that hard. So this should reflect in the way, okay, it’s going to be the smallest part of your potential raise, you know, or eating away. And again, because most of our staff are moms and, you know, it’s some of my best staff, they’re going to call in once a month, you know, because their kids sick or whatever. And so I don’t really want to ding them as much as if they’re having quality issues, that kind of thing. So, yeah, those are the things that would come to mind. I would say, and we can certainly dig into any of those.

Jennifer: Yeah. You touched on so many. Yeah, I know. Should I just go systematically?

Stephanie: Yeah, we can just keep going and elaborate more. And they’ll come back. Yeah. Okay.

Commercial Properties Strategy

Jennifer: Commercial properties. So right now we have residential and commercial. All of our commercial are very small little offices. And I like it that way because it’s a very easy crossover between the two. And, yeah, it’s manageable. The hours aren’t, it’s not such a big property that we’re cleaning it all night or something like that. And if any of them move on, it’s not a huge blow to our payroll. So I wanted to, but I know something I’m really interested in once we can get our structures in place with this new administration is scaling. That’s something we’re going to talk about. And I really want a plan on because I want to make money. I’m still not making any money. So I know large commercial properties are just larger than what we’re doing. It will be an easier way to immediately jump. I’m still not sure if I want to do that route, but I’d like to hear from you. Yeah. So how do you price commercial properties? How do you staff them in relation to if it’s full-time and then how are you going to keep the full-time staff if they change contracts? Yeah. And then the sizing.

Stephanie: Yeah. So when it comes to pricing, obviously all commercial is going to be flat rate. But when it comes to actually, how do I figure out what that price is going to be for that account? It literally is us doing a walkthrough. We have our walkthrough packet of basically the entire space. And we are taking notes on and literally tallying up, okay, two lobbies, there’s three stairwells, there is 30 offices, there’s 20 cubicles, there is 17 bathrooms, with three stalls each. Yeah, exactly. We’re literally taking note of everything as we’re doing the walkthrough. And that sounds complicated. It kind of is, but at the same time, it’s just tally. And with us, we have a blank walkthrough packet, basically, where we are just labeling, okay, lobby one. And then we are, as we’re going along, we’re making very quick notes for ourselves of how long based on the tasks that they are saying that they want in this space, gut instinct, how long do we think this space is going to take? And that sounds like a lot of guessing. It’s educated guessing based on what we know. And this is why it’s so important. At the end of every single commercial walkthrough, we do a video of everything we just saw. So what that looks like in practice is we get done with the walkthrough. We answer their questions. We ask about supplies and tools, all of that good stuff. You’re providing this. I’m providing that. What about expendable items? All of the things that you need to know for commercial. And we say, great, now we just need to do a quick video walkthrough of the space that we just saw. This is just for internal purposes only so that we ensure we don’t miss any spaces. You don’t need to do this with me, customer. I can just retrace my steps kind of thing. And this is so that when you’re not in panic, heart racing, I’m in this walkthrough mode, you can go back to the office, sit down, calmly go through all the spaces and make sure that you have everything accounted for that needs to be cleaned. And then, yeah, it’s just, it’s literally working through each space. And there’s certainly guidelines that you can look at, right? Because the, you know, for example, fixtures in general for commercial spaces, it’s going to be three minutes per fixture. So if there’s a sink, a urinal, and a toilet in a space, well, that’s going to, you know, nine minutes for that.

Jennifer: So is that based on your production rates or the ISSA?

Stephanie: That’s ISSA, yep, ISSA production rates. But I will corroborate that and say, I agree with those assessments for production rates for bathrooms. And so I may up it a little bit and be, that’s 15 minutes for the bathroom because, you know, floors and things like that, right. Depending on the space, and so if I’m, yeah, I think that bathroom is going to take 15 minutes. I’ll put 15 minutes down there. And we just, you start literally doing that for every single space. And then you tally it all up, add a little bit of a buffer and then take that and multiply that by whatever it is. Yeah. Whatever you want to make. And so we’re always coming at it from on it, you know, taking it back to hourly even for flat rate, I want at commercial us to be making $50 per labor hour. So if I estimate that this job is going to take three labor hours every visit, I’m going to do $150 per week. Let’s say they want us three times a week, right? So it’s $150 per week, because there is going to be, or wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. Let’s say, don’t listen to my math, guys. All right, one visit per week at three hours per visit, right? So at $50 an hour, that’s going to be $150 per week. All right. Then I’m going to multiply that by the number of weeks per year, which is 52. And then I divide that by 12. And the reason you do that instead of doing 150 times four is because some months have five weeks, some months have four weeks. So we have to take it to the yearly level and then divide it by the months because customers are going to want a monthly price. So I do 150 times 52 divided by 12. Here is your bid price, right?

Jennifer: So is that industry standard in large commercial properties is a monthly rate?

Stephanie: Yes, they all want monthly. Yep. I’ve never come across, all of our clients are monthly and we may bill them twice a month. You know, if the bigger the account, we are going to push for billing them twice a month. And almost all of our large commercial accounts allow us to do that other than our big government contract. They’re set in stone or whatever, but don’t be afraid guys to ask for the terms that you want because it’s, you know, if they say yes, it’s great because then your cashflow is so much better. Obviously you still have to make it through that first month of payroll. But then for example, you know, we, our terms are net 10, right? So after that first 30 days, we still have to cover the first 30 days of payroll, but then it’s only another 10 instead of some people think that it still needs to be 30 days. It doesn’t, you know, all of our commercial accounts agree to our terms and conditions in that way. And at this point we have 64 commercial accounts. So only one is not okay with that. And that’s the government contract. And we knew it was going to be that way. And that’s fine. We knew we could cover that first month of payroll when we bid it. So outside of government contracts, you really can push for this, you know, and if they really push back and be, no, it’s net 45. It’s, well, that may not work for you. And that’s okay. You know, there’s no reason for that. Right. So that’s how we handle that side of things. And for us, all of our commercial accounts from an auditing perspective, I know that I think on the lowest end, maybe we have one at 40 an hour when we do the math of what is actually taking us 40 to 45. But I think most of them are still 50 or above, you know, and some of them were way higher because it’s flat rate. And that’s why flat rate is so attractive. But yeah, so what’s your residential rate?

Jennifer: Residential, we just upped our first times and one-offs to 60, and all of our maintenance is at 55.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought. Yeah, 55. So we do have a lot of clients who are grandfathered in at 50 because they started years ago and they’ve been raised. So our range currently is 50 to 60 an hour for all of our residential. And honestly, our commercial, we’re able to get that as well. I know not every city is like that, but so that’s just been our experience. So I know some places it’s more competitive on price. But honestly, when I’ve had folks on that do a lot of commercial, they’re able to get pretty competitive, I would say, as well for commercial. And, of course, you could pay your commercial cleaners a percentage or flat rate to make them hustle faster. Again, we’re paying hourly, so we have to stay on top of that aspect of it. Because when you’re charging a flat rate price and you’re paying hourly, that can be very dangerous. This is the problem. Yeah, it can be very dangerous because then you’re in all intents and purposes, you are incentivizing your cleaners to move slower or you’re de-incentivizing them to move faster because they’re getting paid hourly. But that eats away at your profit because you’re charging flat rate, right? It doesn’t go up with how long they take. So that’s why it’s being very, this is approved for three hours. Do not go over this, hustle faster kind of thing. So that is something to consider. So when it comes to how we price it literally is every single account gets a walkthrough, every single account, we’re just taking notes as we go. And this is why I do not suggest doing it by the square footage because cleanable square footage is very different than the actual facility itself. You can certainly look at Google Earth and get kind of an idea, but you still got to do that walkthrough and every space is different with the finishes and what they’re expecting. You know, as I always give the example of even offices, they may just want you to take the garbage out or they may want you to fully dust all the desks. That triples the time in each of those. So we have to, a lot of times during walkthroughs, they’re in a hurry, right? And they aren’t even thinking about this stuff. And they may act even annoyed about all these questions you’re asking, right? But it’s, what do you want done in offices, right? And make sure in the bid you very, that’s what’s going to be your held to is the task list in the bid. So if it says dust all open spaces on the desk, that’s what you’re going to be held to. So if they don’t want that done, I would even say no dusting will be completed as per the walkthrough. So it’s very set in stone what the expectation is. Because a lot of times when they’re moving between vendors or they’ve had a janitor in the past that’s on staff, that janitor is doing things that maybe they’re not asking you to do or vice versa. You’re going to be doing more, right, which is good because then you’re going to be getting positive feedback. But all of a sudden, the office people, they’re not getting done what they used to get done. And they start bitching. And let me pour Celsius all over myself. They, my hands, you know, they start complaining. And then all of a sudden, it looks bad on you guys, but we’re doing what we bid. So that’s why it’s super important. Be very explicit in what the expectation is during the bidding process. And if they start adding stuff, we just have actually one of our longest commercial accounts. They want to add things and they want to take some things away. And so we are being very explicit of this is, you know, this is now what’s included in the bid. And anytime scope changes, when we’re talking about flat rate, commercial or residential, you need to have that pricing conversation. Or you can decide, no, we’re profitable enough. This will not affect your pricing. And sometimes that is the conversation. But you just have to look at everything. And don’t ever let a staff member at one of these facilities go directly to your cleaner and ask them to do X, Y, Z, right? Because that’s a recipe for disaster for a variety of reasons. One, it’s not in scope. Number two, when you have to send a different cleaner in and they don’t know, they don’t know. And so, and this literally just, you know, one of our, that commercial account, they came complaining and that particular, she’s not listening and she’s very difficult and I’m not going to say your name, but she’s a very difficult person to deal with. And, that would be hilarious. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t watch us, but she’s very difficult. Well, and she said, Lori did it better than so-and-so. And we’re, better how? And while she was doing these things, well, those things weren’t on the checklist. Lori shouldn’t have been doing those things. And so just literally being that specific of, if you want those things, I’m sorry that she was completing those. I understand why she was doing that. She was trying to do a great job. But if you want those things done on a consistent basis, they’re not on the checklist. So we need to talk about this.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie: So be pretty firm about that stuff. And also know when to concede. If you’re, I don’t want to lose this account. And I do not want to lose that account. But I’m also not going to start giving away 15-minute chunks of time five days a week. Because that starts to add up, right? So really taking into account all of those things. So I know that was a lot. What else? I can’t remember what the other aspects.

Jennifer: So I was pricing. Well, you said a lot. Yep. And I want to process. So do you not have a standardized checklist then for commercial?

Stephanie: We do. Yep, we do have a standardized checklist that can be adjusted, right? So we basically, this is what is typically completed and what we will do in commercial accounts. But each space has, so there’s certain things that we just simply will not do, right? When it comes, we’re not doing ladder work or anything. So yeah, this is the basics of what most accounts have us do. We give them that. But then if they’re, I want, it’s typically, let me clarify, what typically is going to change is the nuance of that particular account spaces. What I mean by that is some accounts, it’s a church, right? And they may have sanctuaries and all of these things. So at the end of the day, dusting pews is still dusting, but it’s just a different object that we’re doing that we may specify in the checklist. So even though the task itself is not different than dusting in general, we may specify in the checklist, dust all the pews, you know, or something like that.

Jennifer: So do you custom build checklists to each commercial?

Stephanie: Every account has a custom checklist. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is we have a template that we’re just copying over and over again and just adding. So it’s, okay, this is a church. We’re going to add a line item or just add to the dust all horizontal spaces or dust all horizontal objects, whatever you want to call it, including pews. So we’re just going to tweak it in order to reflect that. Most of the tweaking is based on the actual, some places have just kitchenettes, some have full break room, you know, like, so that’s where a lot of the customization is based on the actual spaces and layout. We are also wanting to make the checklist be in the order that is most sensical. So our cleaners are working through the space, the checklist, as if they’re walking through the space. And that takes time. We don’t know necessarily always before we start cleaning it, what the most logical order is for the cleaner to work through, right? You can kind of guess based on, okay, I think they’re going to start here. But especially if we’re cleaning while people are working, you don’t know necessarily when their breaks are or when each space is going to be difficult to clean. And so what we’ll do with commercial is we’ll do our checklist and we’ll put it in the order that seems most logical based on our preliminary walkthrough and thoughts. And we are experimenting with even doing, you know, free cleaning or whatever, or sending Hannah, my field manager to that first cleaning whenever possible. And then asking Hannah and the tech, does this make sense in this order? Or do we need to readjust? So about a month into every single new commercial account, we’re touching base often with any of the techs, of course. But we’re really asking, is the checklist in the order that makes sense? Because we’re always thinking in, our mindset is always, could we put a tech trained normally sight unseen into the space and can they be successful? And if no, why not? Because something’s broken. So that’s always the mindset of, I want this check. If I hand you this checklist and you’ve been trained at Serene Clean and you’ve never seen this facility between the checklist and the video walkthrough, you’re going to be able to do this. It may not be exactly perfect and you’re going to be probably slower, especially if it’s a larger facility, but can you get it done? And can we make it as easy as possible on you? So that’s always the thought process is somebody else is going to be in this account at some point, right? The cleaners are going to, cleaners are going to leave, they’re either going to die or quit or get fired. Those are the options to leave Serene clean. And so if that’s the case, then you need to not be so hung up on each individual cleaner, they can do it, but nobody else can go there. Then it doesn’t work. If nobody else can go there, this does not work. So we need to fix it.

Jennifer: Yeah. Okay. In the packet that I purchased, because I haven’t gone through everything, is the walkthrough and this checklist in there?

Stephanie: Yes. Let me double check on the commercial, because we’ve introduced this kind of standard. Yeah. I know your standard cleaning, your residential. Yeah. The commercial checklist is in there for, yep.

Jennifer: Okay. Because we have a standardized one and we’ve just been offering it. It’s we do all the top to bottom touch every surface kind of thing. But we’ve had a few nuanced questions of, well, can you just do this or not do that?

Stephanie: Yep. So that’s interesting. Yeah. And in commercial, we’re much more apt to remove tasks versus rooms. In commercial, absolutely, we will remove tasks. We treat that very differently, because it’s, yeah, they don’t want us to wipe down anything. And they just want us to do the floors in this area. Okay, cool. I’m not gonna push that, because it’s what makes sense for that commercial space. So we do treat that differently than residential for sure. And what I’ll do is once we’re after our conversation, I’m going to show you how we organize all the checklist stuff in our Google drive. So you can kind of see the structure behind the scenes.

Jennifer: So that’d be great. Yes. We’ll go through, we’ll go on the computer and show you some stuff. Yeah.

Staffing Commercial Accounts

Jennifer: I guess large versus small. So you already have small. So for any listener, I would always suggest starting out small first and getting your feet wet in the commercial. Obviously that is not the way I went about it, but mine is not probably recommended. But what I did do actually is I’m really glad that everything happened the way it did, because I, I know I got a large commercial account right away. I only got a fraction of the facility, right? They, I only started doing their front offices where as time went on in the years past, we ended up doing a huge amount of their facility, but that grew over time. And that just, that’s just how the cookie crumbled in that situation. And so I really only did, you know, 45 minutes of commercial work a night at that facility. But that was enough to get us, you know, in an office and be very profitable, even though it was 100,000 square foot facility. We were just doing a little itty bit of that facility. And so that was good. Thank God they didn’t take my bid. I would have figured it out. I know I couldn’t, but thank God. I mean, I just overbid it because I gave them a price of I remember I gave them a price of $11,000 a month. And they laughed at me because they’re, no lady, what are you talking about? I’m, well, you’re telling me you have two full-time janitors. I’m pricing it out if I had to supply two full-time. And literally the longest we ever spent in that place was I think four or five hours, five hours. That’s how inefficient their janitors were. We weren’t doing everything in place of their janitors. But yeah, you know, it’s apples to oranges. You can’t ask a facility, how long does it take your janitors to do this? And use that as actual, that’s what I should bid, because they’re janitors. Again, what are they incentivized to do? They’ve got, they’re janitors. They’re supposed to, this is their job. They’re going to take as long as it, as they want, basically, you know, they’ve got some hustle, but it’s just not the same. So that was definitely a learning experience. But what I would say for you now, now that you’ve got, what are the commercial spaces you have now? We do a mosquito control, very small little service office. We’ve got a law office. Who else do we have? I don’t know. You’re putting me on the spot.

Stephanie: Yeah. So it’s a professional spaces kind of thing.

Jennifer: Yep. I got you. Yep. I understand. We have, that’s a huge part of our church, but it’s a small church, but it is a full sanctuary.

Stephanie: Yep. Churches can get very large in a hurry kind of thing. And they almost always take longer than you think they’re going to take. That’s just there’s a lot. Okay, so the thing about commercial is that actually, once you start, the bigger it is, it doesn’t get harder. It’s just bigger. And so what I mean by that is you already know exactly how to do every commercial space already. You already know how to do that. It’s just I think the hang up is the staffing. Yeah. And that’s, that’s really what it comes down to in time of day. So what I would suggest to you is just do not take on any account that goes into late night, meaning, oh, you guys can’t come in. If they say in no uncertain terms, you cannot start this place until 6 PM and this is going to take seven labor hours. Don’t take that account on, you’re, that’s not going to make sense for you. And it’s not because of what needs to get done. It’s when it needs to get done. I hire people who are available, you know, maybe two to eight o’clock at night or right. They’re, that’s a fine shift and I’m part time. So I don’t care when you make those hours happen. So maybe they start with houses and then they go and do a commercial account. Right. Say cleaner two who does commercial in the evening quits. Right. What we’re going to do is we’re going to pull the houses from cleaner one, give that to a residential cleaner. All of a sudden your schedule shifted, you know, and then maybe then at least to cover those accounts until we hire somebody to basically replace the other cleaner. So we give ourselves a lot of flexibility and staffing by basically hiring people who are okay with that type of thing. So it’s not we only operate during these times if you’re going to dabble into commercial, right? So it’s somebody who is open to that. A lot of our students, they want that type of thing. They want afternoon and evenings. And if they only have afternoon, that’s great. They don’t care because they want 20 to 30 hours. So having people who are very flexible is going to be the number one thing is they’re okay with that. And as long as, you know, and so, yeah, I can think of honestly, darn near half my staff almost run in those hours because they’re, they’re good with that. Right. So that is ideal for us. And they do both residential and commercial. So that would be number one is making, and I know a lot of, I’ve had guests on the show where they’re, no, no, no, commercial and residential, those are separate entities. Do not have your cleaners do both because cleaners are not going to be able to clean fast, right? Because they have the residential hat on and they’re thinking like that. Yeah. All the production rates for commercial is so much. It’s so high. Yes, exactly. And I don’t know how to do that. Yeah. And so you can definitely move a lot faster, right? But we’ve never touched 3,000 square foot an hour or anything like that based on our standards. And so I would say we probably clean better than, we’re just more detailed. I hold ourselves to a very high standard of detail in commercial as well. I want those bathrooms cleaned as if it’s a house, you know? And so that’s just, I know that I am eating profit because of that. It’s something I’m willing to do because I know there is never going to be an account. Okay. I’m not going to say never. There has been accounts that have dropped because of quality. It’s not going to happen again, right. Because of, I don’t ever want a commercial account to be able to say we’re leaving you because your quality is not high enough. That doesn’t happen. And so I just, I want to take that off the table. And that means something’s got to give, we’re going to be more higher priced. Is that even how you say that? We’re going to be higher priced. We are going to be a little bit slower, but we’re still faster than a house. It’s still faster than a house. It’s just not speed Queens for commercial run it. I just know that that is not something I’m willing to really back down on. Maybe as we continue to scale, we start to get into a rating system of, this account needs to be a seven out of 10 and they’re okay with that because they want a cheaper price. I don’t know how to tell my cleaners that because how do you quantify? You can leave this dust here at this account, but not at this account. And that’s my biggest problem with it is, I’m not, that’s just not how I want to run things. And, keep it simple, stupid. Standard is here. And you hit it at every account at this level. So it’s just not something I’ve figured out how to do without sacrificing something that’s important to me, which is high quality across the board and simplicity for the cleaner’s sake. So that would be number one. So when it comes to, yeah, so that is the staffing part of it. But then if somebody quits, that’s how we handle it. And then if something drops, if a large account drops, it is devastating, right? Potentially. And so, but that’s also, you can’t, the mindset of, but what happens if we lose this account? You can’t go into, at that point, we could extrapolate that across the whole business. So many different. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can’t think, we can’t think like that. It’s more so what that means is you need to stay hungry and always be doing behavior to continue to get more commercial accounts, right? So that if somebody drops, it is blunted. But then at the end of the day, you’re going to have to keep hiring. And for, I’ll give you an example. Based on, you know, I did an episode on those three bank locations that dropped, right? So that cleaner, Matt, he was doing the three bank locations. And so when those dropped, and this was his part-time job, he has a full-time job. And this was his evening work, right? So then we just went to him and we said, this is happening. And what we did was we pulled from one of our hybrid cleaners, Brittany, she was doing another account three nights a week. But Brittany is, we moved her to something else, basically gave her more houses or whatever, which is easier for us to fill in. Matt got her other accounts and he did go down in hours. And so he is open if we get another small commercial account to supplement. So that’s logistically speaking that we just restart to rearrange. But if it was a huge, so our, we have a large account that’s four hours a day, five days a week, right? But even that, because it’s in the daytime, if that dropped, get more houses, put that girl on houses. Yeah, that one would not be as difficult as I think. It’s the evening ones. And so this is why I’m emphasizing try to get daytime as much as possible and or just go about your business in a hybrid manner, meaning people could do houses or businesses. And the evening people are all part-time. They’re all part-time. This is their second job or they’re very flexible, doesn’t really matter if it needs to be directly 40 hours kind of thing. The only one, Joe, my cleaner Joe, he is full time and he does all commercial, but he, I mean, he has up to four or five accounts a night, depending on the night. So if, so he doesn’t do any large accounts, it’s just a bunch of stuff pieced together. And so if one dropped for Joe, it’s a little bit easier for us to pull, but you know, or rearrange to get him those hours. So you’re kind of just pulling and rearranging constantly to give people what they want. And also in such a large service area, well, you know, Joe’s, we’re not going to send Joe all the way to another town for an hour account, even though he technically has that time spot. It doesn’t make sense. So it’s, it dictates where we are going to be putting effort into procuring more accounts of, okay, if I’m going after commercial, I’m doing some, you know, drop-offs or I’m doing cold calling or all of the things we can do to get commercial. Maybe I don’t do it in this area. You have, you know, commercial cleaner, they’re looking for more hours. Okay, go around all of their current commercial accounts and hammer those and really pursue, be very specific in your efforts. Don’t just, you know, shoot with a shotgun, shoot with a rifle.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Stephanie: So yeah, so that’s how I would behave. If one of Joe’s accounts left, I would be going after accounts in Tomah or Sparta because that’s where Joe works. And so that’s what I would do to behave. And you should be doing that at all times, right? And so you’re just always going after more commercial. But if those things happen, that’s how we behave in it. And we’re also just very honest with our cleaners of, hey, if you shift your availability, we could give you this account. But if it has to be that, you know, okay, we temporarily, we lost this account, right? Then we could get you houses. Do you want that? If no, then you’re, you know, and we kind of have that conversation. So yeah, long-winded, but a lot of different things to consider.

Jennifer: That’s really helpful. Do you do contracts for these for all commercial or just large accounts?

Stephanie: All commercial, but with the caveat that anybody can cancel with it. We have a cancellation period. So we don’t hold anybody to, you have a year and you cannot get out of this. Yeah. I know a lot of accounts or a lot of companies do that, especially larger janitorial companies, but I want it to be, if they want to get out or I want to get out, there’s an ability to do so. And we actually we say that as a selling tool as well. Hey, we don’t lock you into long-term contracts. We want this to be a mutually beneficial relationship that we’re both feeling good about. So I do put that in our sales pitch of, if you’re not happy, you can get out of this, you know? Cause a lot of times when we are going after commercial, they’re, yeah, we’ll call you in six months when we’re out of this contract, you know, cause they’re doing a shitty job, but we can’t get out of it or whatever. So yeah.

Jennifer: Okay. And then back to the pricing with commercial. So you do $50 an hour. Are your margins then different? Do you pay differently for those accounts or everybody still gets their same hourly wages?

Stephanie: Everybody, we pay exactly the same across commercial and residential. When I first opened, I was doing a dollar an hour differential for commercial cleaners because they didn’t have the opportunity to get tips. But and so I’m, well, we need to make up for that. But then I quickly realized that their job is easier than residential. So they’re physically, it is easier, you know, I don’t think we can really argue that. And so therefore, I just it makes it a lot easier. Because once we started getting into these hybrid cleaners, it became a bit of a mess of, okay, you’re on a commercial job, you’re getting paid this, you’re on a residential job, you’re getting paid this, it’s just easier from a payroll perspective, just it’s across the board and hiring as well. And then also if a cleaner is getting paid higher at one or the other, they’re going to get sassy if you put them on the other, right? Because they’re going to make more. And so it makes it easy for us to be flexible of, all right, today you’re going to these, tomorrow you’re going to this, or if we have to change. So yeah, there’s a couple different reasons for that.

Jennifer: Okay. All right.

Scaling Fast and Masters Opportunity

Jennifer: So moving on subjects, I want to scale fast. Okay. What should I do? These are all the nuances to that. I want step one, two, three kind of thing. I’m open to financing. I do still have some debt from the initial startup startup piece. That, you know, I don’t know if I should work on that first since we’re still, we’re not really, there’s not a lot of money coming in right now, but also there’s not a lot money coming because we don’t have many jobs.

Stephanie: Yes. We’re averaging five to seven a week revenue a month.

Jennifer: Oh, okay. I got you. We’re still very tiny.

Stephanie: Got it. Okay. So, you know, if we scale, everybody will be making more money, and that would help pay off some of these debts, you know, so balancing, you know, but financing might help me. Maybe, it just depends what you’re going to, really truly what you’re talking about. You need more leads, you need more leads and you need to book people as high as possible. So all of the efforts should be on getting more leads flowing in and then making sure that your sales process is where it needs to be to actually close the leads. Right. But we need an influx in that. So I would be focusing, number one, when it comes to the free stuff, let’s talk about the things that you can be doing for free. Google reviews should be something you sell your soul for, because that is where people are going to be coming from. Is that making sure your Google My Business is on point and is standing out in the way that it needs to be. So whatever you need to do to get honest and true reviews, do that. Incentivize your cleaners to get them. Give them $10 per review that mentions their name or 20, whatever is going to light a fire under their ass to help you work towards this goal. Because the more we have that, the less money we have to spend on because they’re just going to come organically and they’re going to be more likely to book with you because you have the social proof. Number one. Number two, I would get 10 video testimonials from your best customers, longest customers. Make sure in that video testimonial they mention how long they’ve been working with you if it has been any sort of length of time because that also showcases, oh you can perform over time. This wasn’t just a one-off. Not saying don’t get them from first times or anything like that, but the more valuable ones are going to be your long-term clients. So even if that means give them a free cleaning as a thank you or whatever you need to do but most of it, I’ve never had to do that on, I’ve never had to give a free cleaning in exchange for a video testimonial. The ones who are happy to do it are happy to do it. So rip that bandaid off and start asking, because if you got a handful of those, you put them on your Google My Business, you put them on your website, you boost them on Facebook. Those are your advertisements right there. And so when you start spending money, going back to the conversation I just had with Drew Larrison, if you listen to that episode with Five Door Media. Yeah. So that one’s a great one to listen to because he talks about the point being it’s not just how much you spend, sometimes it is, it’s what is the content of these advertisements? Right. And so that’s going to be, I would go extremely heavy on basically testimonial style marketing. And if you put those on your Google business, you put them on your website, you put them everywhere. That social proof is highly impactful. So I think if I were to invest it, if I were to go back and be, I want to invest in advertising, I would probably use somebody like Drew and be, all right, you got a thousand bucks a month, do your thing. And then you need to make sure your sales and managing the leads themselves and your follow-up and all of that is on point. And literally, you do not stop talking to these people until they tell you, I’m going to get a restraining order. Please stop contacting me. So we’re going to know.

Jennifer: That’s what we’ve said.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Until they say no, we don’t know that they don’t want to hear from us. So those would be the first levers that I pull. And then when it comes to you want big jumps, yeah, commercial is going to be the way, right? Because if I can get five houses, or one commercial account, well, it’s going to make you, the it is harder, meaning the getting the account started and stuff is harder, but you are then only managing one account versus five houses, right? And we can cover that one account with some half a shift for somebody instead of multiple, you know, cleaners going to multiple locations, the most efficient way to make money is one larger commercial account, right? That’s the best. And so I would say for you, go to, if I wanted to do what I’ve done, I would go to the industrial parks in every single town. I would go to the trucking terminals in every single town. But really for, and this advice is based on where my business is. And we can, you know, looking at Augusta of who are the biggest employers? And I have just had such great success with the fab shops, the manufacturing facilities, the kind of dirtier job places. Those have just been the biggest jumps in revenue for us in comparison, not saying that, you know, professional offices aren’t that for us or they can’t be good. You just need more of them. Right. So, and you get what you get kind of with, if you get a, if you get some three small ones, that’s great. Right. So I’m not saying don’t turn those down, but when it comes to if you’re, I want this, start doing drop-offs once a month or once a week, give them donuts every single week, go to the industrial park, you know, and just go to all of the businesses in the area and start getting those walkthroughs. And, and so it may be because you start doing this now, six months from now they call, it is a longer game, right? And so if we want to ramp up as we’re working on the commercial, ramp up the residential, that is where I would start doing boosted giveaways on Facebook. I would start boost lots of testimonials. I would be spending money on marketing there. And again, I never really considered using a marketing agency, but my conversation with Drew, I’m, you know what, this could be really useful to somebody in your place of, okay, I don’t want to do this all on my own. Here’s an expert at this thing. Here you go. As for Google, you know, being LSA certified, are you, you are okay, great. So that’s, that’s turned them off because I wasn’t tracking it. And it was just money, it was money going out.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. I need to wait till I can babysit.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. So making sure that you’re watching that and not just money going out like that. That would be one thing. You know, and just being really judicious about things, especially when you’re in a small town, you’re gonna have people coming and asking you to sponsor shit all the time. Be careful about that. Because the ROI on that is, I mean, sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it’s not. So I would also crank up your networking to 11 if you’re not. Are you a member of the Chamber of Commerce too?

Jennifer: No, it’s on my list.

Stephanie: Okay, so yeah, I would, I would, just thinking of, okay, what is the cheapest things that we could do here? You know, being known in a small town is very good. And not that Augusta is small, but it’s, you know, it’s not Atlanta, right? So yeah. And, and, being buddy, buddy with people and joining the, you know, all of the kind of basics of joining the local parenting groups. You’re a mom, right? Use that, you know, not in an icky way, but use that. I would say also on your website, I would revamp your website. I would, I did take a peek at it. I would, yeah, yeah, I would, that would be on the list.

Jennifer: Yes.

Stephanie: So that will make a huge impact. Having some type of offer that is enticing to people to get them to reach out, you know, book your first, get your second half off. That’s ours that will forever be a thing, right? For commercial, our no-brainer offer is book with us and you get one week of service free. That, yeah. So that entices them to at least look at us, you know, maybe less so than a house, but at least it’s something of, we want you, right? And even what we’re about to start doing with the free cleanings of commercial, if you really want to make an impact, can I come clean your break room for free? Let me show you what we got. You know what I mean? And especially if you’re going after the big boys, that may be something really impressive to them. Yeah. Especially a lot of times at those big accounts, the front desk people, that’s a woman, right? Get to her, bring her things and ask her what’s pissing her off. You know, we can get in there. It’s always, they’re the gatekeeper, right? So if we can, you know, just be really gregarious with them and let them bitch, right? We all just want to bitch about how dirty the bathrooms are at work, right? So get in there and they will help you get the foot in the door. Additionally, does your husband have any friends in town who work at places, you know, look at your network. Everybody works somewhere, right? And everybody knows somebody. So just be bold, I would say, with your current network and just make it very clear at your next BNI, we are specifically looking for commercial accounts. And even say the industries that we are interested in are this, this, and this.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: So the more specific you can be there, the better. But I’ve just vacillated on what that means, what the specific is for us. Yeah. And it could be, and so I think that there’s some general no-nos, I would say, you know, restaurants, daycares, that type of thing.

Jennifer: Yeah, we did say no.

Stephanie: Yes. Yes. Good, good. And you know, we actually, we just did a bid at a cafe where it’s, we’re not doing the kitchen, but we’ll do the common spaces or whatever. So within reason, we’ll talk about it, but in general, it’s going to be all professional services buildings. It’s a lot of, I would say state or city run government buildings. So things like public libraries, city halls, we have multiple city halls, we have multiple libraries, we have multiple police stations. Those are somewhat, yeah, the police stations, at least one of them is one of our bigger accounts, you know, cause it’s five Monday, no, it’s three days a week. So three days a week is awesome. That’s a really good frequency. Any, I mean, it’s not we’re going to say no to twice a month, we’ll do anything, right? We’re going to go after anything, as long as it’s in the right location, and we’re not having to travel a bunch. Banks can be okay. They can be sometimes they’re cheap. Sometimes, again, when I think of difficulty, all right, we’ve got 30 tellers, all ladies who are kind of bored, they’re going to nitpick, you know, that’s just been my experience of, if I am in a fab shop full of men and I’m answering to a man, they don’t give a shit. You know what I mean? They do. They want a clean space. I’m not saying that they don’t care and men don’t care about that. So don’t, nobody take it that way. But just, it has truly been my experience that it’s when we are answering to all women and it’s a dentist’s office. That’s why dentist’s office had been our fucking nightmare. And we just don’t even bid them anymore because we’ve had such a bad experience. We’ve failed at every dentist’s office. We can’t do enough for them. And they oftentimes are cheap for some reason. So it’s, that’s just been, you know, and once you start to see these patterns and that type of thing, it’s okay to use your own experience and say, you know what? I don’t really want. Or if we’re going to do a dentist’s office, we’re going to jack the rate up because I know we need to add an hour a week to make sure that it’s perfect for them, right? And be very specific and kind of coddle them. So what I would do if I were you is start doing some market research on Augusta. And, and I’m sure, you know, there’s hundreds of businesses, right. And start, you know, that’s what ChatGPT is for is start separating things into that. There also is a, I’ve mentioned it before. There’s a really great AI tool for procuring or basically cold emailing commercial. And I, the name is eluding me, but we’ll link it in the show notes for that one, but it can do a lot of cold outreach for you to get walkthroughs for commercial that I have some colleagues who have had really good luck with that, but we’re still doing at the old fashioned way of donuts, drop offs, cold calling, cold emailing for commercial. We haven’t done any this year, or even last year, all commercials came to us because of Google. So it’s a win win, just making it clear on your Google My Business that you do commercial, make sure on your website, this is where you’re kind of fighting against your name, housekeeping. And so I’m not saying change your name, because that would be a shitty thing to do. I mean, you can because you’re only a year and a half in. And honestly, housekeeping, that word lends to, oh, you do dishes and you do your maid service, right? And so, bed turnover.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Stephanie: And there’s nothing, there’s a reason we don’t use the word maid at Serene Clean other than ZenMaid, obviously. But the word maid in my mind and most people’s mind, makes us think that you are going to be doing dishes and laundry and just housekeeping tasks, right? And that’s not something that we do. We do cleaning and light, you know, okay, something’s a little untidy, well, tidy things, right, for sure. But there’s a line there. So I may consider a rebrand, if you if commercial is something that you want to do, and this is the vision, right? Then I, you know, I may consider it. And I’m not, it’s not easy, especially because I’m assuming you’re already registered with the state and everything, because then you have to, you have to redo with your, you have to get a new EIN, typically federal identification number, and things like that potentially. Are you an LLC or, okay, you’re an LLC. Okay. So you could do a DBA.

Jennifer: Yes.

Stephanie: You could do a DBA. So that just so that you can operate at that, that would, might be easier. I would just go to an accountant and ask what they would suggest in this form. For us, it made sense to do a full shebang. Yeah. And I went, that’s another regret. Wish I was named Serene clean, start out with, but you live and you learn, Blackbird Falls cleaning services. But for I would still stick with Augusta because that from an SEO perspective makes a lot of sense, even if the Augusta cleaning services or whatever, that’s not a sexy name.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Stephanie: And even in Augusta, even if you live in Evans, Martinez, Brooktown, most people will search Augusta for their own person. So I think you should still keep that in your name for sure. But I may consider a rebrand, frankly, just, because the word housekeeping is so limiting to a specific niche that if I was a commercial account, yeah, you’re not typing in housekeeping. Yeah, you’re not typing in housekeeping, but even if you showed up at the top of the map as a result, it may make me hesitate to be, oh, they don’t do commercial. You don’t, so I would almost.

Jennifer: I need to put the word for sure.

Stephanie: Yeah. Up front. Yeah, and you don’t even just, if just having the word clean, I think is important. You know what I mean? Because in your name, in some flavor, but I think that just on your Google My Business, make sure it’s go over the top commercial because you’re fighting your name right now for commercial. If that, you know, because if, if I’m looking for a residential, of course, your name dictates. So push on commercial and your business website, your Facebook, that type of stuff. So, and I did not look at your Facebook, but make sure that you’re active there. So all digital marketing has not been happening, one because I just haven’t wanted to do it, which is not a good excuse, and I was expecting some, anyway, it hasn’t been getting done. So it’s on the job responsibilities for one of the new people and they both have a job responsibility to canvas.

Jennifer: Okay.

Stephanie: So great. That’s a good, that’s awesome. That’s a good direction.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: And the I think it’s the office manager is also supposed to start scheduling all these, the client video.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: Testimonial. Just getting that, you’re going to be doing all of the things that I would do for sure. That’s what I would do. And so I get all those things in place first before you start spending money on anything because all of that stuff is free. Basically, it’s just some labor. So I would go heavy on that. Or if you are going to boost something on Facebook, make sure it may count, right? Video, a cleaning giveaway, that type of thing, right? And you can be very creative with that of, hey, give me a walkthrough at your workplace and you get a free house cleaning. I don’t know. You know what I mean? Think outside the box, right? That would, I would, if I was some type of office worker at a business, hell yeah, give me a house cleaning. So yeah, there’s plenty of things that we could do with that. So yeah, that’s what I would do.

Jennifer: I put this under scaling, but we live in Augusta, the Masters is coming up.

Stephanie: Yep.

Jennifer: Last year we only did one because we were still having staffing issues. How many are there? What? I mean, it’s golf, right?

Stephanie: Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So the Masters is a huge golf tournament. Those of you that didn’t know. I didn’t know about the Masters until I moved to Augusta. Everybody rents their house out during Masters.

Jennifer: Oh, interesting. They just leave?

Stephanie: They just leave.

Jennifer: They leave. This is their vacation week.

Stephanie: Wow. It’s custom culture. And you either get a rental company to facilitate the whole thing.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: And they outsource the cleaning companies to do those turnovers. Or you post on Airbnb. And that’s your responsibility to figure out how the house gets cleaned or turned over.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: But everybody does it.

Jennifer: Wow. Any middle class.

Stephanie: That is so highly niche. Yeah. Yes. So it’s a great opportunity for cleaning services. Yeah, absolutely. But, one, I’m scared of turnovers, Airbnbs.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: Just from all the things you’ve said, our little experience with it. And then last year we only did one client. So for sure we’ll do any deep clean. So the standard procedure with Masters is you get your house deep cleaned.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: And then the same company does your turnovers for however many guests are. And some of them they want to turn over every day just sheets, trash, and bathrooms wiped down. Some are turnovers because the client actually left and you get a new one in. How long does Masters? Is it a week?

Jennifer: It’s weekend to weekend.

Stephanie: Oh, okay. Friday to Sunday.

Jennifer: Sure. Of the next.

Stephanie: Yep. Okay. Got it. Cause there’s practice for, so there might be multiple people, yes, turnovers basically in one house depending.

Jennifer: Okay. Okay. Got it. Now the big companies will book a home for a whole week and bring their executives in or whoever. So there’s that. But, and then there’s a post cleaning typically, of course, because people are coming in to live in their house again. Yeah. Yeah. So we only did one of those last year, because I didn’t want to market and then not be able to sustain. So I think we can do it this year, but one, I’m a little afraid we’re still babies. Should I do it anyway? And two, how do I market for that? Just social media blasting.

Stephanie: Yeah. It’s, should I pay for ads for something like this where everybody’s looking right now? This is the time. They’re all doing all the things. They’re painting their houses. They’re getting the electrical fix on the outlet that’s still exposed. You know, they’re doing all this stuff.

Jennifer: Okay. So what I would do first is figure out what your availability is. When is this? When does the Masters happen? That’s a great question.

Stephanie: Okay. In March.

Jennifer: Okay. So they’re literally about thinking. The deep clean should be happening right now. Well, yeah. Yeah. In beginning of March.

Stephanie: Okay. Got it. So to prepare. So what I would do right now is look at what is your availability currently for those weeks, right? And so let’s say you have 20 hours available. So that’s a couple, you know, a deep clean maybe or two. So really, we’re not talking about probably a ton of availability, most likely for the deep cleans based on your current stuff. It just depends. Or like, so I would see what your availability statically is for that week first, or for the weeks going up to it, considering we’re talking the deep cleans is one thing, and the turnovers are another thing, right, during the actual week. So right now, I would not book anybody else during those times, right? Because you want to hold right now. So that’s from the scheduling side of things. So I don’t think it’s, I think, so what this is reminding me of is we do some county fairs, which are totally outside of normal for us, right? We do these county fairs, they happen every year and basically we put it out to our staff, one they get paid more during this time because it’s totally different, also fair bathrooms are disgusting and so and we just charge extra basically for that and they’re also done early in the mornings and evenings. So the first thing I would do is ask your staff how much are you willing to work during this time and maybe do a pay differential to make it worth it for them because that’s what we have to do for the fairs because these are longer days for everybody, but they want to do it because they’re making more money, right? Or they’re getting the bonuses or however you want to figure that out is so how can we incentivize our staff to open up their availability in order to accommodate these one-off large projects basically. And if nobody wants to do it, well then there’s your answer. You don’t have a lot of availability because it’s not you want to hire temporary work because then we’re talking that’s more independent contractors.

Jennifer: Yeah, I wondered if that was the way to go.

Stephanie: Yeah, I would, you know, in that instance, if you’re going to, if you do have a lot of coming and that’s where you get into the IC territory. However, when we’re talking about turnovers, the stakes are high, right? We need to impress, make sure that this is done well. So it almost be I would go out and inspect or something to make sure that they’re, you’re nailing it. If you did bring in an IC temporarily to accommodate this extra one-off period of work, basically. It’s not a bad idea. And that’s totally legal. If we’re, if you are hiring for kind of project-based work, ICs are totally fine, even though you do have W-2s doing the same type of work, this is an instance where I see the IRS isn’t going to freak out. Not that I expect you to get audited, but just from a general advice perspective. So that would be one consideration as an independent contractor or see if anybody you know wants temporary work during this time kind of thing. So that wouldn’t be a problem either. So see how much availability you can get out of your staff first so that you know how much you can book, right? And then as for an advertising thing, yeah, I would be very specific. And I would start, yeah, blasting everywhere, especially, yeah, the parenting groups, because those people own houses, right? Your BNI, your Chamber of Commerce, just in general, reach out to your local radio. Because when I’m thinking of homeowners, older people, right? Who owns houses in your area? What do they listen to? Where do they go? Right? Where do they hang out? Where do they gravitate towards? And then we need to go to those places or those things and say, hey, we’ve got availability. It’s booking up fast though. Get out, don’t leave this to the last minute. Right. And so that way you can start getting things planned out. So you may only be able to do three deep cleans, you know, leading up to this. You don’t know, it just depends on what your availability is. And then just be satisfied with that. Know that every single year we’re going to add on to this. You’re still very small. And it’s just, if I can, because okay, you only did one last year. Can we do three deep cleans and can we do five turnovers or something like that and just be okay with that. It doesn’t have to be permission.

Jennifer: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It doesn’t have to be, oh, I need to take on every house that is getting rented out or I’m a failure here because, and it’s tough because it’s, you know, the opportunities there is to make a lot of money. And it’s very frustrating when you’re not able to grab that money, but you’re not gonna be able to grab it all. Any money is more than you made last year. And that should be truly the goal is, how can you learn from what happened last year and do the thing. Number two, for these turnovers, you need to be very, very like specific of what is it that the expectation is here, make sure that the laundry, laundry is going to be a big deal. And then garbage is going to be a big deal as well as documentation to show, cover your ass basically that this turnover was completed to a satisfactory level. So after every single one, have your cleaner take a video of it, video walkthrough of the whole space. We don’t do that with all of our vacation rentals. I know some companies that that’s all they do. Every single turnover does that. We do video and picture proof after some of our, because we still have, I think five, five or eight Airbnbs that we do or vacation rentals that we do. And several of them have us take pictures after every single cleaning so that they, because otherwise what happens is if a guest is unhappy, they’re going to say, hey, Airbnb, this is not good. Airbnb is going to go to the owner and say, do you have proof that this was clean? If they don’t have proof from us, the cleaning company, they’re shit out of luck and they have to comp, right? And so how do we help the owners protect themselves from claims, which also protects us? Because they’re going to come after us. And if we don’t have proof that we cleaned it, well, it’s just this whole rigmarole and that’s the risk, right? So how do mitigate that risk is you take evidence. You take video proof of that. And then just the semantics of it all of, okay, locking up and all just kind of having the I’s dotted and T’s crossed of, how does this happen? Because really all that’s different outside of the normal cleaning is the laundry, the restocking, and the garbage potentially, making sure that they have somewhere to put that. And then also the timing of it. When are the next guests coming in? Because that’s why vacation rentals are so hard as same day turnovers. So it could be that you require, you know, because if it’s a big house, and you’ve got four hours, now you have to have multiple cleaners on it, right? And that just makes it a shit show for scheduling, right? And all of a sudden, it’s eating into things. So or you’re gonna have to bounce in, you know, I would I would consider yourself available for these turnovers, just because they are time sensitive, they must happen, right? Whereas a house cleaning client has a lot more malleability and flexibility, typically, depending on the situation, but they’re more apt to switch, right? As opposed to vacation rental, this needs to happen. And those are the ones where our managers are stepping in and cleaning because it’s there is no choice. This has to happen. Those are the ones that are I’m still here. Yes, I’m still here. They are the ones that are going to our management team have to step in because we have no choice. Right. And so being very, what I would do is I would request that they block the day instead of allowing same-day turnovers. They may say no to that, but you could just ask. Maybe if the guests are leaving on a Tuesday, the next ones don’t come until Wednesday. Is that possible? Because that would give you a lot more flexibility than a same-day turnover. But if they’re, no, we want to milk every single dollar, okay, how big is this house, how many cleaners, right, are we going to require and if it’s going to require more than two cleaners, what are you going to do, right, and also do they have extra, the biggest thing is how fast can we get this laundry done, right, if they’ve got a whole house of towels and they have all of the beds have been used, do they have extra sheets for everything basically, and if they’ve been doing this for a while they best have extra sets of extra linens.

Stephanie: Even Costco stocks.

Jennifer: Oh, that’s awesome. Are you serious?

Stephanie: According to the master. That’s amazing. Yeah. Gosh, what a cool thing in your community that this happens. And so that being the case, just specify, okay, if the laundry isn’t done, what should we do with it? Do you want us to leave it in the dryer? Because the guests need to get in. What should we do? Because if they, and I would also make sure that ideally they are having the guests that are leaving, start a load of something, start a load of towels or some of the heavier things. That’s what we ask our owners to do is ask their guests, if possible, to start. And most guests will. They’ll start. Yeah, it’s not a problem for them to do that. So that would be the biggest thing. And then just, yeah, the documentation of it all. But it’s not, I mean, it’s just, if they’ve been doing this for a while, they know the kind of the role of it all. But it’s for you from a scheduling perspective, making sure things are blocked off. And, and remember that it’s, okay, if it’s a midday turnaround, what about your other openings, right? What can you do with that? And that’s where things get challenging. And so what I would suggest is once people start coming to you for this, it is first come first serve, lock it in. And if they’re, well, we’re having a turnover same day and you don’t have an opening on that, be, well, the day before or the day after is available? Can you block off, you know, if they haven’t had all of their bookings come in or whatever. So it’s really looking at it from a case by case basis of, what do I still have available to book basically. So I would say for you at this point, I would not bring in extra help. I think that this is, this is something you almost start to prepare for months in advance or think about it in that manner, or see how much your current staff will take on more availability and just do an upcharge basically on these clients. And they’re probably going to be looking for flat rate. We do flat rate for vacation rentals. So what’s the budget? Is that feasible for you? They may have a budget in mind. And whatever they charge for cleaning fees, you can look, obviously, and see what the cleaning fee is if this is on vacation rentals. That doesn’t mean you have to be within their cleaning fee. That’s their problem. They set those prices, right? So your price is your price. You know, if they say, well, we budgeted 200 bucks for turnovers. Can you do that? Is that reasonable for you? Great. Then go ahead and say yes to it. But don’t back down. I was, ooh, we really were hoping for $50. Well, fuck you. You know, that’s not my problem.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie: So yeah, so those are my initial thoughts. But the deep cleans, I would immediately start advertising. Hey, we have limited availability. Do a sense of urgency. The faster you book, the more likely you are to have an opening. And yeah, see in the more recent that you can do it, if you have availability now, push them to do that. And then even suggest a touch-up clean, kind of how realtors would do touch-up cleans on homes that are for sale. So see if you can start doing deep cleans now, you know, and then do a quick one right before the guests actually come. If they’re, no, we really want it that week. Well, could we do it this way instead? And then you’d be able to get more people. That’s what helps with the availability.

Jennifer: Yeah. That’s a good idea.

Stephanie: Yeah. So those are kind of my thoughts. But yeah, what a unique situation.

Jennifer: It is. Very.

Stephanie: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that’s cool.

Jennifer: It is.

Crew Size and Cleaning Operations

Stephanie: Crew size is the next header. We run teams. Mm-hmm. You’ve already talked at length about this in multiple episodes. So I don’t know if we should just. Well, just, yeah. I mean, go ahead and we can touch on it. I just don’t understand. I would like to run individuals for all the reasons that you’ve already explained, but I don’t understand how to keep everybody safe, keep everyone accountable and cover shifts. Well, when there’s call outs, if I was big, I would have one person who’s designated yet afloat, not there yet. So, although I’m still thinking about everyone’s part-time. So I’m, I could just have another part-time floater who knows they might not even get scheduled for weeks, a mom who, whatever. But anyway, it’s nice now when one of them call out, we already have two people and their schedules are pretty flexible, so they can run a little longer.

Jennifer: Yeah. I mean, that’s good. I think, so you touched on the weaknesses of individual cleaners, specifically with the safety side of it, right? An individual cleaner by herself is going to be potentially in a less safe scenario than having a co-worker, right? As long as the co-worker isn’t the assailant. But typically, we’re not talking about that with residential because it’s all women, frankly. Again, no offense, men, but look at the statistics. So this is why, statistically speaking, a commercial janitorial cleaner is most likely to be assaulted by her co-worker or her manager. Fun fact for you guys, that’s not so fun. But with houses, if we’re talking about two female cleaners together, they’re more safe. And so that is a huge benefit. And I’m not going to discount that because that’s the big knock to us. And why individuals are so attractive is because of our large service area, we have large distances to travel. I am not paying two people in a car to be traveling, right? Because I have to pay for travel time. So there’s some benefit there. So if you have a closer service range, teams can absolutely work. Accountability, that’s not a problem for us because of the checklist. And I find accountability is greater when there’s nobody else to blame or no shifting, oh, well, she did this area. We don’t have to look at that at all. I find an individual cleaner is the most accountable person compared to a team.

Stephanie: I haven’t thought of it that way. Because if something goes missing, you know exactly who’s there.

Jennifer: No question. If there’s a bad quality problem. You know, exactly. I haven’t thought of it that way. I think I was thinking they check after each other. You know, if they get sticky fingers or somebody else who’s, catch them. And that’s beneficial unless you got two sticky fingers and they’re working together.

Stephanie: Exactly. Yeah. Right. Worst case scenario is you got a couple of bad eggs that are working together or one is dragging the other down and just, there’s no resentment because there’s nobody else. There’s no one to be resentful to, you know what I mean? There’s no one to be, she’s not pulling her weight. She’s not blah, blah, blah. And of course we do run teams on large cleans, first time cleans. Right. But they’re not, they don’t work at as a team. They’re individual. I mean, they do, but it’s, it’s cross country versus football, right? It’s, we are running the race and we are getting points as a team here, but I’m running my race. You’re running yours. I’m going to be held accountable to my spaces. And so for us, when they are running a team, they’re writing on the checklist who did what spaces. Yeah. I did this bathroom, I did this. And so because for us on a first time or a move out clean, they must take in a picture of the checklist and attach it to the notes and ZenMaid. That way if we get a complaint on the living room, we can see quickly, Sally did the living room. There’s no, there’s no question there and we don’t have to go to them. And if that didn’t happen, we still go to the team and ask what happened because like you said, if they are in a team setting, they’re supposed to be checking each other’s work, right? If they’re not in a team setting, they’re expected, their work is supposed to be satisfactory, they check over their own work, right? And we just handle that as an individual complaint. So I can see where you have a newer team member, it’s very beneficial to have them with a more seasoned, right? They got out of training, you know, still kind of questionable. Yeah, we would have them, you know, tag along potentially. But even then, it’s, okay, you’ve been through training, you should know what to do, you might be slower, but we’re also doing more quality checks on those individuals and stuff. So I have found that the most efficient cleaner, meaning the one who’s going to get through it the fastest is going to be individual. As soon as we have multiple, for sure.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Stephanie: It’s just the enigma of mystery of as soon as you add two cleaners, a job that should take four labor hours now takes six. Yeah. It’s, why is this happening? Right. But if you add three, we’ve tracked the numbers, exactly. It just, it is what it is. And so that’s why I like individual. When it comes to somebody calls out, every day somebody calls out, right? And so because we run, take Hannah out of it. Take our floater system out of it, right? Before that, because we didn’t have her until a year ago. She was just a full-time cleaner at that time. We always leave wiggle room, it’s not always fully booked, right? Very rarely is the week actually truly fully booked. And we will leave it until the last, because people are okay with flexible hours. Okay, if Jane is available, and she’s okay with not being booked the full day, but day of, Sally calls in, well, Jane, you’re getting this other cleaning because your static availability dictates this. And so that is how we work with the static availability is that you are expected to be available during that time. And if you want off, you need to put a time off request. So yeah, that’s how we do it with that. But the managers were having to jump in and clean more, or we would just have to cancel on clients more. So at least with a team, they can get through some of it. You know what I mean? Or, hey, Mrs. Smith, you know, one person called out today, we can still get through half the house. What’s the priority list. That’s the benefit to the team. So I’m not knocking teams at all. And for, for me, it’s we run both technically. Cause you know, teams, or if we need to get through houses faster, if we do have somebody call out, well, shoot, this person’s available, put them on and get through all of the houses faster. So we will utilize them in that manner. We’re just not married to it. It’s whatever needs to get the job done, we will do that way. So on any given day, there are cleaners working together. It’s not just team one, team two, team three, a lot of companies do, where it’s just team A gets through four houses a day, team B does this. We just don’t run it that way because logistically speaking, it just would be a nightmare. So I would say do both, you know, and just expect your clean. The cleaners need to know that it is expected. They can get through a house by themselves. It’s just going to take twice as long as when they have a team. But who cares? At the end of the day, they’re working six hours a day. They’re working six hours a day. Two jobs or one job. It doesn’t matter. And they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t. Because I know and I’ve talked to people before and done consulting calls where they, when people come in, it’s, yeah, we clean on teams. And then all of a sudden, if you try to put them on a house by themselves, they throw a fuss and they’re, I can’t possibly make it through a house by myself. And they get really overwhelmed. And it’s, what are you talking about? It’s no, what’s the difference? And I, and not to, not to, you know, discount their overwhelm, but we’ve trained them to think that they can’t. It’s, no, every single person can get through a house by themselves. It’s just going to take longer. And if you’re working, working eight hours, yeah, like you said, going through multiple houses or one, depending on how many people you’re working with, it’s not more work. It’s the same amount of work and you’re not, for me, I would much prefer to be in one house than two.

Jennifer: Yeah. It’s the switching, any, and honestly, I remember one time early on, I had somebody call out. And so me and one of my cleaners, we made it through three or four houses in a day that were smaller. That day sucked. I hated it because every time we went into a new house was so stressful to me. I’m, yeah, no, that’s, getting into this. Yeah. The switching between, that’s what makes it stressful for me. So I actually prefer it the opposite way. Cause it’s, cool. I just got one house today. Or I just got two houses today instead of as a team, we’re going through four houses. And so it’s just, I see it as I, I personally find it a lot less stressful. So it could just be in, in having that conversation with the cleaners of, look, actually this is much more peaceful, you know, you just have these two or whatever. So I would say utilize whatever makes sense for the schedule that day and just be creative with it, you know? But anytime I, yeah, I just, I try to avoid multiple cleaners as three or four cleaners in a house. There is way too many cooks in the kitchen. And our cleaners are instructed to, you are in separate rooms, right? Instead of, I know some people, they do teams, you do all the dry dusting, you do the bathrooms, you do blah, blah, blah. And that it can work. And, but then we’re starting to muddy where it’s you are responsible for this room. All right, Tina, you get this bathroom done. Sally gets this bathroom done. We are all separate. And you know, and because for us, they jump into the kitchens and the bathrooms first, get that done, and then work through the rest of the house. But we do not want cleaners in the same room at all unless it’s the final room, because shit starts to go south and they start talking. And, again, they can talk at work. That’s not what I’m saying. But it’s very distracting to clean in the same space. And you’re all over each other. And get missed because it’s just a mess. So yeah, just keep everybody separate as much as possible in the house until the very end. And then just everybody’s checking each other’s work.

Stephanie: So how do you do floors for that? Are they doing?

Jennifer: They finish a room completely to the floors.

Stephanie: Yep. So floors are not left to last. Of course, if we’re talking about an open, so say my dining room was open, you know, that’s an open concept, right? I could see doing the floors in the dining room and the living room if this was all one open concept. But even still, if I was doing this work, I would do the living room and then I’d move and let this dry because of the floors. So I don’t have all of these wet floors all at once. Complete this, move on, move on, move on. And I know that is not how everybody does it. I totally understand. I just find it from a mental capacity. Living room is done. Check. On to the next, especially because we charge hourly. If we need to leave something, it’s going to be an entire space. It’s going to be one room is left instead of, well, I got everything except all of the floors done. That feels like shit to the client of, we want it to be, the only spaces that were not done was this. And that it makes it a lot easier to justify and being, instead of choppy all over the house.

Jennifer: Yeah. And you don’t know what, what did they do?

Stephanie: Exactly. That looks clean, but that doesn’t. Exactly. Because we’ve run into that. It feels really icky to the client if we do run out of time and it’s full tasks left off. It doesn’t, just, just complete the room. You know what I mean? So that at least whole spaces are done instead of everything half complete, you know? So, yeah. So how do you balance the vacuum and the mops? Everybody has their own. We don’t share vacuums. Every cleaner has their own vacuum, yeah. I mean, it can work depending, but, yeah, we know.

Jennifer: Because you’re fighting over the vacuum. Everybody’s getting to the floors at the same time.

Stephanie: Yeah, it’s just a nightmare. Everybody has their own vacuum, yep, and own mop. Well, and I guess if they’re already outfitted with their own. Because, again, they could be individual. They could be team. So they must have all of their own stuff. Everybody has a full kit by themselves, yep. So more money on the front end. However, it just gives you ultimate flexibility for scheduling.

Jennifer: Okay. And you feel like your production rates don’t suffer doing a whole room at a time?

Stephanie: I mean, maybe. But I think I would rather have a slightly slower production rate than spots getting missed. They forget things. They start to forget things. That’s what we’ve run into. They start to get messy. If you start being, all right, I left all of the, you’re going into rooms over and over again when you start doing whole tasks throughout an entire space. You know, I could, but so yeah, it’s I would do the high dusting in this room and complete this room. I’m, I don’t touch anything else. I get it. It probably is a little bit faster to go through the entire house and do all the high dusting. And I could argue that, but then the cleaners are going through the house again and again and then again, we’re just, just do this damn room, get it done, move on to the next room and boom, boom, boom. And so this is where my argument for this is based on simplicity and the mental capacity of the cleaner. And I’m not saying my cleaners are stupid. How do we make it as, it’s just easier to systematize.

Jennifer: Exactly.

Stephanie: The compartmentalization of all of a sudden this room is completely done. Not, I need to run through this house seven times and do all of the layers of the tasks to get from top to bottom in the entire house, that’s very overwhelming and exhausting. And you’re very likely to miss something where it’s just, nope, this room’s done. It is completely done. It is off my mind. Don’t have to worry about it until I do the final walkthrough and double check everything kind of thing. So yeah, I just, I think mentally, it’s just easier, probably faster to do it, you know, and so I wouldn’t be opposed. But then you’re doing all those laps. So it’d be interesting. Yeah. And again, if it really depends on the layout of the house too, because if you have a completely open concept house, where everything is open. Yeah, I would do all of the high dusting because I can see the entire space. If it’s all the living room, the kitchen, it’s all one big space. I could see doing some things like that, but it’s, and then doing all of the low dusting, maybe not in the kitchen, but I would, I would go, yes, that is how I behave in an open concept house is I, it is still one space. Yeah. Whereas my house is much more broken up, boom boom boom boom, we’re doing each space all the way to completion yep and going back to accountability then you know exactly yep top to bottom who covers yeah yeah so otherwise yeah once you start, well she does the vacuuming, she does this, you know this, but it’s, well who do I blame here, who do I not even blame but who do I hold accountable, you know for this not getting done, it makes it just, all right you did that room, this on you, that’s what we’re going with. So yeah, I just I find it simpler, you know? And I definitely I feel like I probably, my philosophy is I would eat away a little bit at profitability for simplicity’s sake, you know, and even just with the whole concept of packages and stuff. Yeah, I lose out on money because I want it simple and scalable. And so that, I’m sure there’s a world, of course, where you can have both simple and more profitable, I would think. But, you know, we’re still working on that.

Jennifer: Right. Yeah, I’m more in your train of thought. I want to try and figure out how many systems we can put in place now so that at any size.

Stephanie: Yep. This works. This works. Yeah. Exactly. And that’s what we’ve run into. It’s a later question, but we can talk about it now since we are. We have not done whole, if you want an hourly rate. So we do flat rate-ish. We’ve just converted to hybrid.

Jennifer: Yep. I’m working on it.

Stephanie: But if you want an hourly, you tell us your priority tasks and then we work from there. Yeah. But we’ve run into all these issues. Yeah. So I think as a homeowner, I have a hard time with that. It’s, well, I’m really just struggling with the fans and the baseboards. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I would make, I mean, you can certainly make exceptions of, this is, and really be the authority figure of, this is the typical thing that we do, but you can always make exceptions for a client. You know what I mean? Our cleaners aren’t stupid. If we put in the notes, don’t do this. You know, so I’m not opposed to that concept. But as a rule, it’s, no, you can remove this room, right? Because we do have some clients. I can think of one client right now. They have a huge giant house. We come in for four hours every two weeks. We do the bathrooms and then the floors throughout the entire rest of the house. We do that for them, you know, because that’s pretty easy. It is. It’s very cut and dry where the nuance gets into it of, okay, you do the ceiling fan in this room. But in this other room, we do all of this or whatever. I could see, especially if we’re only talking floors, that is easy for the cleaners to understand and not mess up. It’s once we start, once they take our checklist and start X-ing things off, that’s the problem. That’s when things just don’t work where it’s, oh, you don’t need to wipe down the toothbrush holder in this bathroom. But do it in that one. That’s just a mess. There’s stuff in this room.

Jennifer: Exactly. Yeah.

Stephanie: That’s where, so it depends on what they’re asking for. We will make exceptions to the rule if it’s very, very easy, cut and dry floors only, right? But once they start piece parting together our checklist, that’s where I have a problem with it. So I would suggest to you just be very specific and also of what you will and won’t allow for, how nuanced are we getting on what they’re looking for. Where a lot of times, and a lot of times with the clients, what they’re asking for and what they actually want at the end of the day are probably two different things. And what I mean by that is they say that they’re okay with us not doing certain things, but they’re not going to be satisfied with that. They think that they’re saving a bunch of money, but all they’re doing is having us half clean a house. And then it doesn’t feel like valuable to them because it’s really, it’s not professionally cleaned. It’s cleaned as if they did it. And we’re not trying to clean it as if they did it. We’re trying to clean it as if we’re a professional company. So that’s where I’m a bit more forceful of, look, I know that this is what you’re asking for, but I know what’s best for you and you want, you want that detailed clean. I promise you that you’re going to sense it, you know? And it’s going to get faster when, you know, we move to the maintenance cleans or whatever the thing is. So, yeah, you can allow a certain variation there. But I just, I think that clients think one thing, think they know what they want, but a lot of times, we have to be the authority figure in that of, listen, it’s going to feel really good if we just get this whole thing done and maintain it. If you don’t want us to maintain it, it’s just going to get bad again. You know what I mean? And if my cleaners are going in and saying baseboards are shitty and they’re not doing it because the client said that they don’t want to pay for it. I don’t want to put my name on that work personally. Cause at the end of the day, their friends are going to come over to their house and be, oh, dusty baseboards. And they get it professionally cleaned by Serene clean. I thought you had Serene clean coming in. It looks like, you know, and again, that’s paranoid Stephanie, but that’s my reputation, that’s my name on that work. And if the work is shitty, cause that’s what the client wanted. I still don’t want my name on it. You know what I mean? Even if that’s what they asked for, I just don’t want that, you know? So, and that’s just, yeah, personal kind of standard, I suppose. So yeah, those are my thoughts on that.

Jennifer: Excellent. It’s exciting. Cause I’ve, I’ve wanted to do individual cleaners, but I felt like there were these hurdles and you’ve clarified that.

Stephanie: Yay. Good, good, good.

Final Thoughts on Pricing and Profitability

Jennifer: I know you mentioned that, you know, pricing is kind of a struggle of, are we actually profitable? And what I would want to take a look at for sure is just, well, how much are you paying? Are you paying a range or are you paying flat rate? Are you paying hourly?

Stephanie: Yeah. So we were paying hourly, but from the beginning I knew I didn’t want to be paying hourly, but I needed to while I was training everybody. It just made sense.

Jennifer: Yeah. Of course.

Stephanie: Yeah, of course. So we did finally roll out, I don’t know the industry term for it, but we do estimated hours. So if the job should take three hours, sure, they get paid for that, yep, they go under or over, and that has helped a lot. Yeah, I would say that’s you pay flat rate, you know, per job, because this job is approved for this, you’re getting paid for this job. And we try to keep at a 40% payroll cost. I think the two biggest issues was, well, and we were estimating the job price per square foot based on how many hours we thought we could clean per square foot. So initially I was using national averages because we didn’t have any. We’re not anywhere close to national averages. Then I was using your, I wanted to use our averages, and they were so slow, I felt like I couldn’t charge the customer that much. It was too high.

Jennifer: Yep.

Stephanie: So I was, we’ll go by Stephanie’s averages because people are doing it, so I know I can hold them. It’s possible, yep. Yeah, I’m going to hold them to this standard. So we did that, and now I’ve formed a whole tracking system to really nuance our production rate, yep. Production rate. I wasn’t tracking it well. So we’ll probably do another price evaluation in the next two months.

Jennifer: Okay.

Stephanie: But so part of that was not knowing production rates well enough to price accurately. And then I’m going to take responsibility that I didn’t train well management and staff to report if the job’s going to take longer. I have said that. It was still not happening. Yeah. So I’ve made it abundantly clear at this point. Well, and preparing the customer on the front end, you know, because if we’re if we’re underestimating an office but we’ve charged a flat rate, yeah, what are you gonna do, shit out of luck, yeah, exactly. And and I think moving to this paying per job or paying for approved hours kind of thing and if they don’t take that long they’re still getting paid for that no matter what, you are incentivizing speed now number one. So you’re, you’re incentivizing the behavior that you want. The biggest thing is I would also do some type of quality bonus because what you’re now de-incentivizing is quality, right? So that’s the flip side of the coin. And so make sure that your quality standards or there’s some, you know, there’s a bumper, as I call it, there’s some type of bumper to stop the bowling ball from going into the gutter, which is quality, because we’re now taking away the incentive to be slow and methodical, right? So this is the way for sure. I think this is fantastic that you’re moving this direction because it’s going to increase your profit margins. And if you do, so that would be one thing I would consider is if you, you got to think about your cleaner situation, if you misprice it, right, and it actually should have been five hours and they go over the approved three and they only get paid for five, but that’s legitimate. What do you do in that scenario? Because it is on the office then that we didn’t bid this right. So that is something I would consider. But as you hone in on your production rates, that should really happen less. Or you need to, they need to be able to do a walkthrough at the beginning and make sure that this, before they touch anything, all right, this is approved for three, you’re getting paid for three. Does this feel like it’s enough time? And making sure that then you take that to the customer ahead of time. Because anybody who charges flat rate, that’s exactly what, on first times, that’s what they do is they make sure that their cleaners are competent at evaluating.

Jennifer: Exactly. And we now have the check, the before and after checklist, you know, that you have, and have amped it or developed it for our company. And that’s on there. You must do a walkthrough initially and evaluate your time. And then you must halfway through evaluate your time again.

Stephanie: Yep. I love it. And I think that that will, and once they, once they run into it once where they only get paid for one and it’s not. And you say, well, did you do a walkthrough at the beginning? No. Okay. Well, this is why. And they’ll learn that lesson very quickly once it starts hurting their paycheck. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And honestly, do you think you were not profitable at the job level or from the business itself? Are you saying you haven’t been profitable as the business or you haven’t been profitable on each job? And the reason I’m asking is that comes into play of your overhead of running the business, right? Because at that point, there might be a variety of reasons, but one of them being you need more volume, right, for the expenses that you have.

Jennifer: Okay, so I’d like you to look at my P&L at some point. Yeah. But pretty much all my percentages are good. Payroll was way too high.

Stephanie: Yep. So we were at 65 to 75.

Jennifer: Oh, yeah, that was a problem.

Stephanie: So that was the problem. As of yesterday, my P&L shows we are under 50% for cost of goods sold and we’re at 42% for payroll.

Jennifer: That’s fantastic. This is huge.

Stephanie: Yeah. Huge win.

Jennifer: Yep. That’s fantastic. So, and then the volume. I think our overhead, those percentages have been going down as our revenue has increased.

Stephanie: Yep, exactly.

Jennifer: So I think. And they’re pretty healthy right now.

Stephanie: That’s fantastic. And I think, yeah, then it’s just amp up the volume as every job is staying where it needs to say it, then it’s just a volume problem, you know, because you may just have had more overhead costs than what is typical for startup, because a lot of people start up and they don’t put these infrastructures in place. So it feels like they’re super profitable, but it’s because they don’t have any software or any cost, right?

Jennifer: Exactly. Or even a manager role, that’s overhead.

Stephanie: Right, I out of the gate had a manager.

Jennifer: Exactly. So I think you’re just going to see improvements going forward. So that’s all good to hear. So I think you’re on the right track. And then just double check on, I don’t know what your service ranges, but travel fees really get people, especially when we’re talking teams. Are you paying that? So how are you paying them for the travel side of things?

Stephanie: They are not paid for travel on the way to the job or the way from the job, but in between, they were staying on the clock and I still to talk about paying hourly. But now we’re just budgeting that into their estimated hours.

Jennifer: I see. Okay. Got it. That makes sense. So yeah, the rule is from a legal perspective is for their hours worked for any and including drive time for work purposes it must equal to at least minimum wage in the state. That is legally what you must do. Obviously we want to do a lot more than minimum wage of course. Well depending on your state some of these states minimum wages are, you know $18 an hour. So it just depends but in Georgia I think it’s still pretty, yeah exactly, abysmal. It’s same with, it’s Wisconsin it’s 725. So we don’t want to even get near that. But as long as what they’re making is, you know, appropriate, if you did all of that math out, it’s fine. And it just depends on what your cleaners are asking. And if they’re used to being paid hourly, there may be a snafu there. And also, if they’re using their own vehicles, I’m assuming there, then I would possibly look at just a flat rate kind of gas or mileage stipend, how we do it, you know, with the tiered model of the further you drive, the more gas money you get basically. So that may be a kind of good middle ground instead of hourly in drive time. It’s, well, here you got, you drove. So here’s 10 bucks because you drove this far or whatever. So you could look at that too. But yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. And the reason I brought it up is, are you charging the client more when they’re further away?

Stephanie: Yes.

Jennifer: Okay, good, good. Then, then you’re golden there. Cause a lot of people do not account for that when they’re doing their prices. So I think you’re good. I think you’re on the, one thing I wasn’t accounting for in pricing was payroll taxes and merchant services.

Stephanie: Yeah, the credit card fees. Credit card fees.

Jennifer: Yep, exactly. About 3% to 3.5% for sure, which is just a cost of business. And I will say, what do you use for processing? Square, Stripe, QuickBooks?

Stephanie: It’s in my CRM.

Jennifer: Oh, okay, cool. Awesome. So yeah, that’s pretty typical. And you don’t want to try to price shop for that too much because then the quality of customer support and things go downhill. So that’s just, you just, you eat it. It’s cost of doing business. So, and yeah, I think we did $20,000 in credit card fees last year or something, but it just scales. You know what I mean?

Stephanie: Well, we just added it and a couple of different service businesses in my BNI group told me they charge their customers for it. Yeah. So we haven’t actually, we’d just rolled it out.

Jennifer: Yeah. Be careful with that. So we’ll see. It just says administrative fee?

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. So if you do it that way, I think it’s legal. But just check the nuance. Every state is different with how you can pass on credit card fees or doing cash discounts instead to your customer. Because in some states, it is illegal to charge them the processing fee. So just double check. I don’t remember what it is in Georgia or what the laws are. So everybody listening, check your local laws for can you even charge a credit card fee at all? And it might be at this point universal as well. So just double check on even just how you call it. Yeah, right, right. Or even just say, hey, there’s a cash discount if you pay with a check or cash or bank transfer or whatever and kind of reverse engineer it in the verbiage, right? But yeah, okay. And if you don’t, just budget that into your pricing because I wasn’t.

Jennifer: Yeah, yeah. I had a coach, I guess, a business coach in my BNI look at the financials because that’s his thing. And I didn’t realize it’s silly, but how many little pricing differences add up. So we had customers who were underpriced and I thought, well, they’re just only a little bit. But it adds up to where we were $800 short every month of what I thought we could be making based on our volume from all these little things. They really do add up.

Stephanie: And that’s where, it’s combing through, doing the audits. It’s so important because it’s, again, coming back full circle, you don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s literally sometimes crunching the numbers, it can be a really sobering experience. But once you rip that Band-Aid off, I think a lot of people avoid looking at it because they know it’s bad. Just rip the Band-Aid off and then you can actually take action. And that fear can be dissipated because you’re so afraid and anxious because you don’t have the data staring you in the face. And when you finally have that data staring at you in the face, you’re, okay, now I can take action. Now I know what needs to be done instead of just this generalized anxiety about, I know the numbers aren’t good. So that’s awesome.

Jennifer: Which is where I was for a while.

Stephanie: Yeah. And it’s great that you had that resource to kind of comb through and just, yeah, don’t be afraid to ask for somebody to take a look or whatever. I think we get really embarrassed. It was very awkward.

Jennifer: Yeah. Really embarrassing. I felt naked.

Stephanie: Yeah, I know. It is. It feels very right. And even for me, I started, in my monthly newsletters for my consulting subscribers, I share all of our P&L. And I showcase all of that, all of the numbers and stuff. And when we’re having a bad month, I’m so embarrassed. I don’t want people to see but I’m, no, this is good. Truth will set you free. That’s right. So it’s good, because then you’re looking at it too. It’s forcing you to take accountability of, okay, I’m not, you know, I’m not doing what I need to do kind of thing. So it’s always good to have a fresh set of eyes, especially somebody who knows what they’re doing. And they’re not judging. They’re happy to help most likely.

Jennifer: Yes. Yeah. Awesome. Well, we’ll wrap it there, I think, because this was a really good conversation. We will continue on lunch. We’re going to go out to lunch at one of Savannah’s fabulous restaurants. I don’t know yet. We’ll see. We’ll discuss what we want to do. But this has been amazing. I am so happy that you took the time out of your day to drive this. And hopefully you guys have enjoyed this. Make sure you give Jennifer some love in the comments or just in general vibes. Jennifer, do you have any social media that people can follow along for you?

Stephanie: Nothing major but Augusta housekeeping is on Facebook. I’m Jennifer Wholesome Dorn is my name on Facebook if you want to find me. I’d be happy to come pursue with you about anything. Yeah. And augustahousekeeping.com is the website.

Jennifer: Yeah awesome. Well we’ll wrap it there and let us know what you guys think in the comments below. Hit the like, hit the subscribe and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye guys.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins
• Five Door Media
• Lawn Ace