How Dave Camenga Built a Thriving Janitorial Business with 30+ Cleaners

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Introduction

Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and today’s fabulous guest is Mr. Dave Camenga, and he is the owner of Dave’s Cleaning Consultants in Baltimore, Maryland. And guys, this young whippersnapper is impressive, okay? He has just been an entrepreneur since apparently the womb, and I cannot wait for you guys to hear his story. Dave, thank you, thank you for joining me.

Dave: Stephanie, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for reaching out. I’m so glad you reached out. You know, I love to be able to share my story and tell people how it got started. It’s my favorite part when somebody asks me — I’m like, “Well, it’s kind of a long story,” but I love to dive in and tell people about it, because I love hearing other people’s stories. So thanks again, Stephanie!

Cleaning Houses in Fifth Grade

Stephanie: Oh, absolutely, and me too. I just love a good origin story, and I think especially in our industry there is such a diversity of backgrounds. When I’m interviewing people, I’m like — just such wild backgrounds. So for you, cleaning was a hobby as a young lad? Do tell.

Dave: It’s so funny. So I actually started out cleaning — it was more so for me. Any time I felt disgusted, the first thing I wanted to do was just clean. I wanted to just get everything clean. I wanted fresh linens, I wanted the trash taken out, and I wanted a clean bathroom. And I grew up with my family — we were a big family. I guess you could say big family, but I had three older sisters, and the house was always dirty. There was a lot of stuff going on. So I would always clean the house. When I got home from school, I would clean the house. On the weekends, I would clean the house. And my mom loved me for that, because she never had to clean the house. But I will tell you, my whole family — they’re all very hard workers. My mom was the one that really taught me how to clean. And little did she know I would have a thriving cleaning business 11 years later, right?

But yeah, so I started cleaning houses for, like I said, my family, and then it was just friends after that. My mom had some friends, my sister had some friends, and she started just telling them, like, “Oh, my brother has a hobby — he likes to clean.” Keep in mind, I started this hobby of mine in literally fifth grade. So in fifth grade, I was cleaning people’s houses. I did not drive, I did not have insurance, I didn’t have anything, right? I was cleaning people’s houses, and they were just like, “Oh, Dave, that’s so nice. We would love someone to clean our house.” And I was really good at it.

So then, by sixth grade, one of the houses I was cleaning, which was a friend of a friend, they said, “We have a local gym. Do you clean gyms?” And of course Dave’s not gonna say no to cleaning a gym. I said, “Absolutely, we clean gyms.” Keep in mind, I had no idea how to clean a gym. I didn’t have insurance. I didn’t know anything. I was just kind of going along with it. But yeah, just by word of mouth, it was one thing after another. I just took every opportunity.

And then by seventh and eighth grade — I told you guys earlier, I have three older sisters, and they all did the thing. They went to college. That’s what their thing was, right? For me, I hated school. I never really liked school. I had always been doing something with business. I was doing landscaping, I was doing house cleaning, I was doing a little bit of everything, right? So I always looked forward to that when I came home from school. I never did my homework or anything — I would go right to doing my business. I would be reaching out to people, calling. And like I said, I think some people just are meant to do business, and for me, I just did it. I did the thing, and then, yeah, it kind of went from there.

Stephanie: I’m just literally stunned right now. This is shocking — like, stupendous. And tell me about that. There must have been tension, right, between the schoolwork and your responsibilities when it comes to being a teenager, things like that. What was your parents’ response to this? And okay, say your grades were struggling — did they give a shit, really? Or were they like, “No, we know you’re going to do this,” and were they supportive?

Dave: Yeah, it’s really funny. So in the beginning, I had my dad’s support. He would drive me around, and he actually would come clean with me sometimes, because a lot of the times I would clean after school. Either my mom or my dad would drop me off at the house, or I had a really good friend in the neighborhood that would drop me off at the house. Or on the weekends, my dad actually would come along with me. And then when I got that gym that I was cleaning, he would come at nighttime and clean that with me.

But yeah, I think what really made me push so much is the fact that I did not want to go to college, right? I knew my sisters all went to college. That’s the typical thing — you go to school, and everyone at school is playing video games, they’re outside playing, and then there’s me. I’m building this business. And it’s so lonely, even at that young age. I felt how lonely it was, right? Obviously it’s not the scale that I have today, but there were some days I’m like, “Dave, why am I not just going outside and playing? Why am I cleaning houses? Why am I doing landscaping?” So I definitely thought a couple times, like, why am I doing this?

But I think, to answer your original question, my parents were very supportive of it. To be honest with you, they didn’t really care so much. My dad cared a lot, and he’s like, “You should go to college, and you should do this, and you should do that,” whatever. But my mom was always worried about me too. They were all worried about me. But I got it done. I think my grades weren’t the best, but I got it done, you know?

Stephanie: Did you have examples of entrepreneurship in your life? Because typically when I hear people who start like this — I mean, really so young, or who just have that urge — they have had this example somehow. So when it comes to business, what drew you to it specifically?

Dave: To be honest with you, nothing in particular drew it to me. It was just a hobby of mine, like I said earlier. It was just something that I didn’t even realize there was really a need or even a want for. I just kind of started cleaning houses, and then it was a hobby. No one really drew it to me, but I was surrounded by a lot of hard workers. My family are very hard workers. My mom was always hardworking — she was working at the hospital, she was a nurse, and she always put in the hours. My whole family, we were all hard workers. So I guess I got my work ethic definitely from my family, for sure. But no, no business background.

Stephanie: So you turn 18 — go ahead.

Dave: Actually, you know what? Sorry, not to cut you off — I will say my parents did used to flip houses. They used to renovate the houses and sell them. I guess you could consider that, but I personally didn’t really know about that until I got a little bit older, because they did that when I was younger.

Stephanie: Wow, that really is — clearly, it’s like, yeah, you had to get this out of you and do this thing. That’s incredible.

Choosing Business Over College

Dave: Sorry to add to that — I think for me, it was kind of like I had this vision in my head. I was like, “This is what I want. I don’t want to go to college.” After I did more research on the cleaning business, I’m like, I could make this something, right? I could really make this my full-time thing. And I always dreamed of one day just cleaning offices at night and making a living, right? I did have a vision in my head, but at first I thought I wanted house cleaning. At first, I wanted this massive house cleaning company, but then it completely shifted, because as I was getting older, I was realizing I’ve got to figure it out. Everyone around me was picking what college they’re going to, and I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to do this.”

And I will say, my favorite class during school was business class. I was the best. I loved my teacher. That was the one class I had my eyes on the whole time. All the other classes, nothing — I did not care about any of the other classes. But I was in the business class. I remember we had a project, and the project was to create your own business plan. And what did I do it on? The cleaning business. I had the whole presentation done in a day. Everybody else was working on it for two weeks. I had it all — what kind of competitors, direct and indirect. I mean, I had everything done. And my teacher was like, “Wow, you had it all.” I was like, “Yeah, I have my own company.” He’s like, “Oh my god, really?” Anyways, it’s crazy.

Stephanie: I so can relate to that pressure, that external pressure to go to college, and being almost looked down upon if you don’t. I remember I was in high school, and you’d sit down with the guidance counselor and talk through your plans or whatever. And I was like, “I’m going to go to a tech college and get an associate’s degree,” right? Because I was adamant — I was like, “I am not having school debt. I’m not gonna have any debt.” And I just remember — her name is Mrs. C, very good meaning — but she just kept saying, “Stephanie, you are too smart to just go to a tech school.” But looking at my life now, and where I am financially in the business and things like that, I’m like, thank God I didn’t do what that pressure was, right? The whole world telling you you should go to college.

Dave: And I really think — I wish that would change, because there’s so many things, not even including the cleaning industry. I mean, plumbers, HVAC — there are so many important things out there that do not require a college degree. And I think that our school systems really need to work on telling the students more about that, because no one my age would have thought, “Oh, you should go start in the trades or a cleaning company.” You know what I mean?

What’s really nice is when people that have successful businesses can go in and share their stories. I still remember, when I was in that business class, we did have some local companies come in and talk, and I thought that was so inspiring, seeing them. I really liked it. I think we need more of that. But if you’re not in business class, if you don’t have that, you don’t even hear about it. So probably half the school didn’t even hear about that. So I think it’s very important to explore different options. I think one of my favorite things now is seeing there are people my age, or maybe a little bit younger than I am, that message me all the time. They’re like, “How do I get started?” They text me, and I get to tell them about it. I give them my advice and what I think.

Stephanie: It is amazing, and that’s the beautiful thing about the internet — it can expose people to new ideas and information. For me, I would love to make a scholarship for my old high school or something that really pushes people towards the technical side of things. And like you said, all of the skilled trades — you can make such a good living with that. And when I eventually have children, I’ll be like, “Take a gap year, I don’t care.” You don’t know what you’re gonna do, and why would you spend $30K a year to change your mind? No offense to anybody who took that path — I’m not saying you guys didn’t get value out of it. I’m just really grateful that I didn’t do it.

Dave: We need more people like you, Stephanie. We really do. People don’t think that there’s anything else than college. Go to college, get the degree, and then find a nine-to-five. They don’t think outside the box, and they don’t know what else is out there. And you can’t blame them — they want that security.

Stephanie: Exactly. And I’m really excited, especially when I’m getting so many young owners on who are probably listening right now — I’ve had many on the podcast already. It’s just really inspiring to see people come out of high school and immediately go down this path, and just thinking of what they’re going to be able to accomplish — it’s so exciting. Because I started my cleaning business at 23, and now hearing you — you’re 23, and look what you’ve done. It’s just so amazing. It’s really exciting.

Dave: If anybody asked me 11 years ago, when I officially started DCC Commercial Janitorial of Baltimore, Maryland — if anybody told me that we would be where we are today, which I can’t wait to dive into in a little while, I wouldn’t say I would be where I am. I always thought so small. And to be so young and so successful and have a thriving janitorial service in our area — it’s huge to me. For me, it’s not just the cleaning; it’s so much more. It shows my hard work and dedication over all these years that I was dreaming of when I first started, right? So yeah, it’s amazing.

30 Cleaners and 225 Cleans a Month

Stephanie: It is, and I can so relate to that — not dreaming big. In my mind, when I started, I was like, maybe I’ll have three to five part-timers — that’s it. This is just always going to be a side hustle alongside my full-time job. And now it’s like — it’s such a cliche to be like, “Dream big, guys,” but when it comes to this industry, the sky is the limit. Truly — the limiting factor is us. And so that’s what I want to dig into now. Okay, you graduate high school — obviously, you have staff now. So let’s just give a little tasty taste here. What size are you at now? And then we’ll work through your journey here. But how many staff do you have right now? How many clients on average do you guys have?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. So right now we have 30 cleaners. To give you a little background, all of my work is typically nightly janitorial — doctors’ offices, lawyers’ offices, common corridors. You name it, we clean it. We’re servicing right now between 190 to 225 cleans a month. Right now our focus is mainly nighttime janitorial, so we go in Monday through Friday to a lot of our offices.

How we actually work is we have two sides to our business. One side is our nightly janitorial, and our other side is our once-a-week, our quarterly, and monthly contracts. How I work is I do teams of four to six, and all my nighttime janitorial, they typically clean eight offices a night. They work in groups of five to six. One lady does bathrooms; one does vacuuming, mopping, dusting. They finish out with the floors every single time. They’re in and out of most of my offices within an hour. And we do buildings as big as 50 to 100,000 square feet, but we divide the work up very evenly to get the job done. I can have a 100,000-square-foot building, but we’re only doing bathrooms, trash, vacuuming, right? Every one of my job sites is completely different. And on average, I will say most of my ladies are in and out of my offices within an hour. Obviously, some of our bigger locations, we have set ladies that will go to our set locations, and they’re there for multiple hours. But I’m talking about our smaller to medium-size offices.

Another thing I want to mention — so many of us are so confused when they’re getting into the janitorial side of things. They’re like, “I have this office. It’s only 1,500 square feet, or even 3,000 square feet. How do I even staff something like that? Do I only send one staff?” So what we do, like I said, is a group of ladies, and they still get their eight hours, because they’re doing enough offices a night to get the eight hours. But I can dive into that a little bit later — how we actually operate.

Stephanie: Yeah, I definitely want to dive into the nitty-gritty of the how, because that’s my favorite thing to do on this podcast — how do we do these things? And I’m very intrigued by doing it in teams like that. We are very individual at Serene Clean. We are super duper rural and have a lot of drive time in between, because our locations are so rural. However, I’m very intrigued to hear it, because we’re at about 75 commercial accounts — we do residential, of course, too. So I always love to hear how businesses at that scale do things. I’m very excited, because then I can learn and be like, “Ooh, let me apply that at Serene Clean.”

Dave: Absolutely. I’m literally learning something every day. And this is another thing I can’t stand about people — some people think they know everything. I don’t operate that way. I will never operate that way. I still learn things every single day, 11 years into this business. I love learning new things, even from people that are just getting started — they might tell you something that you might think is so interesting. Because for me, we do a lot of things very old school in our office. We do a lot of things by paper. And I know that doesn’t work for some people, but it works for us. So many people are like, “You do paper time cards? You do a paper schedule?” We do old-school things, but it works for us. And I always said, if it works for your company, don’t change it.

But to answer your question, yes, that’s how many clients we’re currently servicing on a recurring basis. And then I have our specialty side — so carpet cleaning, strip and wax, window cleaning. I have a handful of contracts that we do on our specialty side. So technically, we have three sides to our business: our daily janitorial; our once-a-week, twice-a-week, three-times-a-week; and then we have our specialty side.

Hiring: Start Small and Always Be Interviewing

Stephanie: Okay, we will be digging into all of these. So take me back to starting out hiring. What did that look like? What challenges did you face, whether that be because of your age or inexperience? I’d love to hear about that.

Dave: So let’s fast forward from high school. I finish high school, and I have this cleaning business. I decided this is exactly what I want to do. I had a handful of clients to feel comfortable financially. I was still living at home — I didn’t need too much, but I had enough clients where I was able to feel comfortable saying, “I don’t want to go to college. I have this much income coming in every month, and I’m happy with that.” So basically, after that, I just started going crazy with going door to door to offices. I was cold calling like crazy. There was a time period I was just going seven days a week, just pushing our business, getting our name out there. And that’s what I did.

And then it got to the point where I couldn’t handle it myself. My dad was helping in the evenings, my mom ended up coming to help us, even my sisters. I had the whole family in the company helping.

Stephanie: That’s amazing!

Dave: Yeah. So fast forward to today — my mom actually quit her nursing career, and she’s our full-time director of operations. She does all of our schedules, our invoicing, all that stuff. So to answer your question, I started with family. I started with the support of my family.

But there’s probably many people listening here that don’t have the support of their family with the business, which is completely understandable. So my first and foremost thing I would recommend with hiring: just start off small. Think small. When I am looking for someone, I always go to Facebook. I go into my local Facebook groups and just say, “Hey, I’m Dave. I own a local cleaning company. I’m looking to hire some people to come work for me. I have a couple offices part-time — that’s a couple hours a night — and we’re looking for some help.” So start with Facebook. Of course, there’s always Indeed and this and that, but I have found using Facebook has been a real game changer.

But fast forward to today, most of our people are word of mouth from the current employees. And I will tell you something else: people talk. I have a large Spanish-speaking following in my company, and I will say everybody talks in the community. It doesn’t matter what race or ethnicity — everyone talks. And I’m going to tell you, you’ve got to treat your people well.

At first, when I was getting into it, I had no experience with hiring, so luckily I did have my mom to lean on for advice, because my mom has run companies in the past for people. She was helping me with this process as well. But I would say you have to be confident in what you’re hiring for. Be exactly clear what you’re hiring for. Do not give more than you can. If you don’t have the hours for the people, don’t tell them you have full-time when you don’t actually have full-time, because I actually ran into that problem, where we thought we had full-time — which I guess my meaning of full-time was a lot different than what they thought, right? I think it’s about 40 hours a week, and I think ours was nowhere near that. So we would hire people, they would expect a full schedule, and then, oh, they don’t have a full schedule. So be very firm and clear on what to expect working for you, and kind of just give them the rundown.

But fast forward to today, our hiring process is pretty straightforward. People apply online, and we use several platforms, because we are always hiring. My motto is always hire slow, fire fast. Once a week, we have in-person interviews at our office, and Carol, my office manager, has a designated day to do interviews. We do open interviews, and we also schedule them. We go through — I mean, every month — hundreds of applications, and we are always looking for new people. Because at the end of the day, we’re always getting new contracts, number one. And number two, you never know when someone’s going to quit, and you don’t want to rely on people. So many people rely on one or two people in their company. They’re like, “Oh, if this person quits, they’ll take the hours or whatever.” But the whole point is you don’t want your good people to really burn out. You want to be able to constantly bring new people in and hire.

So to answer your question — I know I made that very long, and I apologize — just hire slow, fire fast. That’s what I’ve always heard, and it does work. Try Facebook, try Indeed, try ZipRecruiter — just try anything until it works for you, right? I talk to a lot of different cleaning businesses all over the world, and I’m going to tell you, every one of them does it differently. So what works for me might not work for you. And I’m gonna get into a little bit later how we advertise, and a lot of you aren’t going to agree with that either. So, like I always say, it works for us — that’s great. It might not work for you. But I like to share. I’m not a gatekeeper. I think that’s really important too.

Letting Go of a Five-Year Employee

Stephanie: I really appreciate that mindset, because it’s exactly how I feel. I have lots of owners on this podcast, and we’ve changed a lot of things in Serene Clean — how we do it — because, one, I think it’s always being a student of the game, never being so arrogant to think that you know it all, and just constantly being humble and saying, “Hey, let me learn from this.” But also knowing there are a lot of ways to skin the cat — or peel the apple, if you don’t want to skin any cats, because we both love cats. So as we like to say, there are a lot of ways to peel the apple. And I really try not to be dogmatic about anything. Like you said, it’s like, this works for us, and I’m just going to share it. For example, we do group interviewing as our first filter, right? A lot of people do not like group interviews — they think lots of things about them. But it’s worked so well for us, and it has not hurt us; it has only helped us.

And we always have job listings going regardless, because like you just said, you have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring, good or bad, right? Something crazy could happen in a positive, or something crazy could happen in a negative — like you’ve got to fire somebody yesterday, and now you’re being held hostage by a crazy employee, right? Which I’m sure you’ve had your share of. I’d love to know — do you have a particular favorite, or a couple favorites in mind, that you are willing to divulge of juicy employee experiences?

Dave: Gosh, this one’s a heavy one. So we have had — if you could imagine, over the last 11 years — you know, it started off with just me, my dad, my mom, my sisters. It started off as just us. But then when you start dealing with the public, and you start dealing with other people’s lives, it starts to get very sticky, right? You don’t know what other people have going on in their lives. So when you’re hiring someone, you’re kind of getting into their zone of things. And when you don’t have anything in place — like when I first started, I had nothing in place. We were just hiring. We did run a background check, but when you’re just getting started, you don’t know anything. You wouldn’t have known then what you know now, you know what I’m saying?

So to fast forward to today — yes, over the years, I can’t even tell you how many people we’ve had. I will say, in the cleaning industry in general, at the end of the day, no matter how good you treat a person, no matter how much you pay somebody, they will find something better, right? And as much as you want to keep people long-term — that’s our whole goal, keeping someone long-term — at the end of the day, people come, people go. People get new jobs, people get new relationships, they move. Everything happens, right? At the end of the day, you can’t control that. The only thing you can control is always having that interview going.

But to get into your question — yes, we have had many, many interesting things happen. I’m gonna tell you the most recent one. This is one of the hardest things we have to do: when we have to get rid of someone. I hate doing it. It’s never personal. At the end of the day, it always has to do with the client not getting what they need, and it’s looking bad on the company. And at the end of the day, when you get multiple warnings and it’s still happening, then you have to go.

I will say, when I first started, when we were just getting into it, we were so strict on so many little things — you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I’ll just give an example: I remember I cared about people’s hair color at first. I’m like, “Oh, they’re gonna look so weird if they go in with pink hair.” And if you ask me today, I don’t care. As long as you come in with our DCC top, long pants, and closed-toe shoes, which is our uniform policy, we don’t care. You come in with a positive attitude every day — we don’t care if you come in with purple or green hair. We could care less, as long as you can come in, do the job right, and get it done. But I know I keep switching topics.

Stephanie: You’re good, hon. By the way, do you have ADHD? Okay, because I can tell — because I do, and I’m like, we’re the same person, man.

Dave: Yes. I’ll be doing one thing, and I’ll go over here, I’ll get a phone call, forget what — every time.

So to get into the most recent one — this is actually a couple weeks ago. I had this one lady. She’s worked for me for five years — it was coming up on six years. And it’s just been one of those relationships between us that was very good for our company, because as we started getting Spanish-speaking people, she became our bilingual manager, and she took on more responsibility over the years, which was great. But when that happened, I think she felt that I was never going to get rid of her, due to the fact that now we have all these Spanish speakers, and we don’t have another Spanish speaker in the office. So we kind of need her, you know? We need her to be able to communicate.

So anyways, fast forward to like last year — we hired some of her family. Which, I’m gonna say to everyone out there: stay away from hiring family.

Stephanie: We have a policy — we won’t do immediate family. We got burned just like you.

Dave: Yeah, it unfortunately has burned us multiple, multiple times, and we are so tired of it that we don’t do it anymore. So anyways, she had brought in her mom, her sister, and her brother. It wasn’t all at once — it was over time. We had gotten new contracts, and it was, “I need someone on this team, I need someone on that,” because we do groups. So when we lose one person, that’s one section that’s getting missed. So it’s kind of urgent — that’s why we’re always hiring. We’re always looking.

So anyways, we had brought them in, and the two family members kind of just phased out over time. And this was like a year ago, right? She’d been with us for five years; they came like a year ago. Within like a month, they were all working for me, and they did really good work. They always came in with great attitudes. I don’t personally speak fluent Spanish, but I do know enough Spanish to know what you’re talking about. And I will say, I know when people are negative, and I know when people are positive, right? So when I have constant complaints from other technicians that this person’s being negative — I don’t do negativity in our company. We are zero drama, zero negativity. If you don’t come in with a positive attitude, don’t expect to be working here, because we don’t do it. We are too busy of a company. We’ve got too much going on. We’ve got too many team members to be worrying about this person. You come in with a positive attitude, or don’t come in at all. Because I don’t care what kind of day you’re having — I have some bad days, and I still go into the office, and I have a very good attitude. And I have some ladies that have some terrible lives, right? They tell me about it. And guess what? They still show up. They show up every single day, they do their job, and they go home. It’s just your mindset. You’ve got to have a good mindset.

But anyways, to finish the story with this lady — she worked for me for five years. She ended up becoming my bilingual manager, and she was great. I really liked her. I even had some parties at my house, and I would invite her over. She was a really nice person, and I think we became friends, right? And I think sometimes that’s not the best thing to do. You need to remember: yes, you need to be friendly with everyone, but maybe you can’t take it that far to be friends with these people, right? And obviously, everyone learns over the years, but when you have an employee that’s been with you five years, it’s very hard to get rid of them.

But anyways, fast forward to what happened most recently: we were getting complaints at some of the buildings that she was in charge of managing. And the ultimate job of one of our managers is to do quality control — turn alarms on, lock the doors, do final inspections. And if anything needs to be redone, that’s getting checked during quality control and getting discussed with our office manager, so we can all have that discussion with the team member that’s not doing their job correctly. And it was just over time where it was a constant thing every week. It was something: cobwebs missed up in the corner, door handles have sludge on them, or the light switches, or trash bags aren’t being tied neatly, or consumables aren’t being refilled. There were just little things that were adding up over time. And I had it — the plug had to be pulled, unfortunately. Unfortunately, it’s just not working out anymore. We appreciate all the work you’ve done for us over the years. I don’t have anything against you — it’s just a business decision. And we unfortunately had to let them go.

But of course, Dave always has a plan. And Dave actually had hired another bilingual manager a little while back. So I actually had two, because we were growing, and we had a lot going on, so we needed another. So I already had another bilingual manager, so I already knew that wasn’t really the problem. At the end of the day, if our quality was not there, our clients — we were going to lose the contract. So it was more so a very big business decision, especially since some of the clients that she was in charge of were some of our larger accounts, where we needed a manager there at all times, checking in on things and making sure things were actually getting done.

So yeah, I think one of the hardest things is getting rid of someone, and I don’t do it very often. And I think the best thing to do is: if it’s not working out from the beginning — or even the first week, or two weeks, or even the first month you notice something wrong — don’t think it’s going to change, especially if you spoke with them. It’s going to constantly keep happening. Because that’s it, in my mind — this woman that I had, she had the best attitude. She came into work. She never missed a shift, and if she ever did need to miss a shift, it would be with really good notice. But at the end of the day, you can’t change how somebody cleans and how people manage. You can coach them, you can show them, and if they still choose not to do it, that’s up to them. And unfortunately, you can’t change that. So at the end of the day, you just have to part ways. But it’s one of the hardest things that we do. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in — cleaning business, HVAC, plumbing, doesn’t matter — that’s one of the hardest things to do, getting rid of someone.

But I just recently had an issue with a new employee, literally last month. And basically what happened with them is they came in with an excellent attitude, ready to work. And then I was getting reports from not just one but multiple crew members about how nasty this individual was, and how they were telling them that they have 30 years of cleaning experience and “I don’t need you to train me.” But one of the things when you get hired at our company is you need to be a coachable person. Just because you know how to do it does not mean you’re doing it to our company standard. We have a process that we follow with every new technician. I don’t care if you know how to do something — I need you to be willing to hear the trainer, hear the other team members’ feedback, right? You need to be able to be coachable. And unfortunately, I heard so many bad things. And my new bilingual manager came and spoke with me. She was like, “Hey, Dave, can I speak with you? I spoke to Carol, and Carol really likes her, but she wants you to make this decision.” And after speaking with everybody, I think it was best to let this team member go. Sometimes it’s better just to let go. And I’m going to tell you — it’s been, what, a couple weeks now, and we haven’t had any drama on that team. So sometimes it’s just best to let go, and find something new. It’s business, right? You let go, and hopefully something better comes along, and that’s just what you do.

Protecting Your Team Culture

Stephanie: And I think really being very protective of your current team, and really trusting — obviously, everybody has bias; everybody sometimes just doesn’t like somebody for no good reason. But if my current team, who I trust and trust their judgment, are coming to me and saying, “Hey, this person has a bad attitude, or this and this and this, and it seems like problems just follow this person” — well, that’s the variable that changes when this new person comes into our culture. And I’m very protective over that, because my team members’ respect for me is the thing I hold the highest, right? I need them to respect me, because if they don’t, then what are we doing here? But you need to earn that respect. You don’t say, “Respect me” — you behave in a way that’s respectable. And if you hear things coming to you and you don’t do anything about it, I think it’s the number one worst thing we can do for our culture — seeing or hearing problems and then, frankly, being a little bitch and not dealing with it, because we’re afraid to deal with it, right?

Dave: And Stephanie, I want to add to that — you’re so right. Because this particular employee was very nice to my face, of course, and very, very nice to our management team. But then, when they were with — they didn’t even know it was our manager that they were speaking to — they were very, very nasty. And it wasn’t even that. It was also complaints coming in even within the first couple weeks. And obviously, when you have a new hire, you’ve got to constantly train them. We do a three-week training program with all of our new cleaners, so she was still in that training period, right? But if it’s not working out and you’re hearing all those things, it’s best just to let go.

Stephanie: Yeah, especially in the beginning — it’s like, this is your best behavior. You’re trying to impress us, and this is what your best behavior is.

Dave: Right? I know. Some people, I will say, put on acts. Over the years, we’ve had so many different characters. But at the end of the day, I don’t care. I always say, I don’t care who you are, what you look like — come in, give us what you got. Come in with a positive attitude, and we’ll see if it works.

And I really like what you said earlier about respecting the boss and the owner. You actually asked me this earlier — I don’t even think I answered it, because I was going on and on — about being respected at a young age. It was definitely harder when I was younger, just coming out of high school, right? Over the years, you just kind of — I guess you just mature more, right? And people respect me because the one thing I do is I will never ask someone to do something that I personally wouldn’t do, right? If somebody calls our office and asks something crazy, I would say, “Oh God, we don’t do that.” I would never ask one of my employees to do something crazy. And I think my employees do respect that, and they respect my hard work, right? My employees know where we came from. They know where we started. They know our clients. And our clients talk to each other — most of my clients, they might not directly know each other, but they will call and ask, “Do you use Dave’s Cleaning? Who do you use?” And they’ll tell them, “Oh yeah, we really like them.” That’s the difference, though. You want your staff, you want your employees, to talk good about you. You don’t want to be that boss that’s condescending and short with your employees. I’m luckily not like that.

Firing a Disrespectful Client

Stephanie: I think that it’s so true that a lot of times we want to command respect, we want to command influence, all of these things — but those are the things that you can’t. Even reputation — you can’t control that in any other way other than with your actions. That’s the only thing we can control, right? So I’d love to hear — you just talked about firing staff members, which is so challenging. Do you have an example of firing a client that was perhaps a long time coming? You’re like, this was the best thing ever — lesson learned here. I love hearing those lessons.

Dave: Absolutely. I do have a lot of these, but I can tell you a couple of the most recent ones. And I want to also mention before I get into this: I am the same way with the way I treat my employees as the way I treat my accounts. Basically, if you treat me nasty, or you treat anyone else nasty, you will be gone. I don’t tolerate disrespect.

So anyways, most recently we had this local school that we were cleaning. And if anybody knows anything about schools, daycares, childcare centers — they are one of the hardest customers to please. Right now, I have probably like 10 different daycares that we clean, and they’re one of the hardest customers that we have to service. I will say I’m lucky — with most of the daycares I have, they pay us decently, because they’ve gone through so many terrible companies. They’re willing to pay more.

But to get to my story with this one: I had a childcare center right up the road from here. And keep in mind, I’ve never spoken to this woman before. We’ve always dealt with the office manager, or like her personal assistant, whatever it was. She’s the one that hired us. She’s the one that gave us the keys, all that good stuff. She’s the one that would call us and tell us any issues or complaints. So keep in mind, we start with this customer, we were working for a couple months, and then all of a sudden, I guess that woman went on maternity leave, or she got fired, or something. I’ve never heard from her again, so I don’t know what ended up happening.

But the owner calls in this, like, rage to our office manager, and she starts going on — I still have the recording, so I replayed it and listened. She starts going on, saying, “You had six cleaners in here last night, and the place doesn’t even look like it was touched.” She just starts going off on the phone, saying this isn’t done and that’s not done. Carol, my office manager, called me. She’s like, “Hey, Dave, I just got done speaking with this really nasty woman. I think it’s the school up the road.” She didn’t tell her who she was — she just said she wants the owner to call her immediately.

And with me, I take a minute. I step back, and I say, I’m going to give her some time to cool off. So I called her the next day. Because I don’t like when people are like that — you need to give them time. And unfortunately, I know they want you to call them right away, right now, but cleaning’s important — it’s very important — but there’s no emergency for someone to act like that. And I’m not calling someone back when they’re in that kind of mood.

So I call her back the next day, and somehow she’s still in that mood, especially with me. She goes on and on. She goes, “I’ve been trying to get in contact with you for days, and the cleaners you have in here are terrible” — just blasting my staff, blasting my office manager. “Your office manager, she’s incompetent. She took a message, and she didn’t transfer the call like I asked. I asked to speak with you.” And I was like, “You know, ma’am, I will say you’re being very disrespectful right now. First of all, you’ve disrespected my office manager. Number two, you’ve disrespected me, and you’ve disrespected my team members. I don’t tolerate this type of behavior.” And here she goes again, going on and on.

And if it’s a legitimate concern, I would like to go ahead and hear about it — obviously, it’s the only way you can improve. I’m gonna say this: I used to think we could be 100% perfect, but as you start to grow, there’s always gonna be complaints, and you’ve got to learn how to deal with it. People complain about the stupidest things. Like, I actually just got a message this morning about a customer saying they don’t like the type of trash bags being used in one of their cans. So you’ll get any type of complaint when you start to grow and you start to have enough clients. You’re dealing with the public. You’re dealing with a lot of different people in these offices, or even the houses you’re cleaning — that’s probably even worse.

But yeah, so she ends up just going off, and I said, “You know, listen — I think it’s best. I’m gonna let you out of this contract today.” And I didn’t argue with her. I don’t argue with customers anymore. I told her, “Listen, I appreciate you trying us out for all these months. I wish you the best of luck.” Most people would say, “Dave, you’re crazy. Why would you get rid of her? That’s lost money. That’s lost sales.” And for me, a problem customer is just not something I want to deal with. If they’re not happy, you’re not going to make them happy. Maybe you could make them happy for a little bit longer, but they’re probably very unhappy if they’re calling your office manager, screaming at them — especially when you’ve worked for them for months, and you haven’t heard any complaints from anyone, and then all of a sudden everything’s terrible. So my advice to anyone is just get rid of those clients that are not good.

The Flooded Endoscopy Center

Dave: Another one of these examples, I’ll tell you: I had an endoscopy center we were doing Monday through Friday. Come in, disinfect all the chairs, the gurneys, their lobby areas, the surgical areas, the walls — everything. I mean, they came out with probably 10 carts of trash a night, because if you know medical settings, they have so much trash. Anyway, it was a great contract — really liked the contract. They’d been using a national company for 10 years until they switched to us. They really liked us. I had a great relationship with them. They loved our office staff. They loved our cleaners we had over there.

And unfortunately, one night, one of our cleaners walked into a huge flood. Basically, we called the customer per our protocol, letting them know, “You have a flood in your facility. Just wanted to let you know — the cleaners will stay there until somebody else can come help out with this.” And my first thought is, I have a good friend that owns a disaster restoration company — Kate Bostwick with ServiceMaster here in Baltimore. So my first thought would be calling them and getting the customer help. But the customer didn’t want that, which is completely understandable — they have their own people. Okay, cool. So they ended up getting their own people, and we went on about our day.

So it was two days later when she called our office — the manager we were dealing with. And keep in mind, our office closes at six o’clock. We’re open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. — that’s our office hours. She calls at 5:59, and Carol does answer — I don’t know if it was Carol, or it might have been Trish, but one of them answered. And this woman just starts going off on the phone. She’s like, “The cleaners just pulled up here, and the people are here working on the place.” As you know, it was flooded. And they were like, “Understandably — yeah, your place was flooded. We called you.” And she wanted them to come later in the evening. But our routes are already set. Our routes are set in stone. We understand things happen, but we have other clients to service, not just you. So we let her know, unfortunately, we could just skip the cleaning tonight — it was getting done every Monday through Friday. We understand you have 10 carts of trash every single night, but your place flooded. Half the place is torn up with dehumidifiers. It really won’t make a difference.

So anyways, she said, “No, they need to come.” Basically, she wanted to reschedule — she said they need to be coming after 10 o’clock, after they come pick the dehumidifiers up.

Stephanie: That same day? Oh my gosh.

Dave: One minute before our office closes, yeah. So our office manager let her know, unfortunately, we can’t do that. And then again she goes, “I need to speak with someone higher up. I don’t want to speak with you.” So she speaks with Trish, and Trish is like, “Listen, unfortunately, our routes are already set for the night. The best thing I can do for you is we’ll just tell the ladies to leave, and we won’t even charge you a cancellation fee.” This woman went crazy. She’s like, “We have 10 things of trash waiting to go out.” And then she said, “Well, do you want them to do that?” “I want the whole place clean.”

Stephanie: Wouldn’t take any type of solution at all.

Dave: Yeah, she wouldn’t take any solution, right. So then Trish said, “Let me call the owner, and I’ll call you back,” because this woman was just very unreasonable. And sometimes when they’re very, very unreasonable, I want to deal with the situation, because I’m a very good problem solver. I like to come up with a solution for customers as best as I can. But after me hearing that my office manager and our director of operations have spoken to her and it’s still not getting resolved — then what do we do? So basically, I just let her know — would she like them to stay and pull the trash? She’s going off on me. And like I said, I don’t deal with disrespect well. Her name was Kim. I said, “Kim, I really value our relationship, but I won’t be tolerating the disrespect.” And she’s like, “If you don’t come after 10 o’clock tonight, you guys will not have this contract” — she just starts blowing up on me. I said, “Kim, I’m gonna respectfully ask you to come grab your keys tomorrow from our main office, and we will no longer be servicing you.” She went crazy.

Stephanie: So she can threaten it, but you can’t? Okay.

Dave: I decided it was best for our company to go ahead and end the contract, and that’s what we did. And as a business owner — talking money aside — you gotta make the best decision for your business. But something that I have learned over the years: you cannot get rid of every terrible customer you have, right? You won’t have a business. As you grow, you’re not gonna be able to please everyone. I used to think I could please every single customer, and that’s just not true. It’s just not realistic. So if that’s your mindset, then I would recommend staying small, right? If you want to please every little customer and keep them happy. But if you’re looking to scale, and you’re looking to grow — in reality, it’s a cleaning business. You’re not going to make everyone happy, because we deal with human beings that work for you, and we’re all human. At the end of the day, we all mess up one day or another. So yeah, those are my two stories, but I have a million others that I could get into another day. I could make a whole video on them.

Stephanie: Yeah, it’s great — I love sharing those things, because I think it really bolsters the confidence of especially newer owners who are people pleasers, as many of us are when we start out. It’s very hard for us to stand up to people, even if we are being horrifically disrespected. And like you said, making those decisions — any time we’ve broken up with a client, the adult hissy fit that is thrown is sometimes insane when we’re the one ending the relationship. Because they want to be in control. They want to be able to wield that power. But when you do it — oh my gosh. The biggest hissy fits I’ve seen from adult men — well, that’s not true, I’ve seen a lot of hissy fits from adult men, because they’re a bunch of little boys — but it’s typically when you break up with them as a customer, and they’re like, “Wait a minute, you don’t want my money?” And yeah, it’s always something else.

Dave: It’s awful. It really is. And people think that they need every one of the customers, and sometimes it’s just best to move on, you know?

Stephanie: Absolutely. There’s always another customer.

Dave: Yeah. But I will say one other thing to mention before we move on from the subject. I think it’s very difficult for some of us to understand, because, for example, that one contract for me — the endoscopy center I’m talking about — that contract was like $7K a month, right? So for me to just overnight be like, “Okay, we just lost this contract” — but at the end of the day, it’s sometimes best to move on, right? And guess what? A week after that, I think we got a contract that was paying like $8,500. We have this bell in the office, and we were all ringing it, and we’re like, “We got one even higher!” So just know that there are so many opportunities out there. Just because you end an opportunity today does not mean you might not get a call today, tomorrow, the next day — but it will come. Just be patient, do consistent service, be that positive company that people can reach out to, and you’ll get the contract.

Old-School Direct Mailers That Land Big Contracts

Stephanie: Absolutely. And just doing that consistent outreach like you are. So just quickly — what is your go-to now for getting clients? Is it still outreach? Is it drop-offs? Is it mostly coming to you from Google now? What does that look like?

Dave: Yeah, so that’s a really good question, and I actually made a completely separate video on this, because I went into such detail. But I will tell you how we currently do it. So many people are like, “Do you do SEO? Do you do Google paid ads? Do you do Google LSA?” All that stuff. So to be completely honest with you, we do old school. We currently do a mailer — not your regular postcard mailer that you get, not one of them. What we do — which I don’t even have it in front of me right now — we just go ahead and we send a letter. It’s typed up, and it says, “Hi, my name is Dave. I own a local janitorial service here in the greater Baltimore area.” No pressure at all. We just want to send you our information for future consideration, because most every single business is using a janitorial service, right? So our hope is that they think of us when their company retires, or when their company is no longer performing.

And I will tell you, these letters work like a gem. We have a set amount of letters that we send out every month. We keep track in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s old school, I know. We use Excel, right? I know there are all these other crazy companies out there that might be great — we don’t use them. We track every mailer we send. We do three sets of mailers — the first, second, and third — across three months, and we will also follow up with cold emails as well as cold calling. It’s what we do, and we get all of our business from that.

Aside from that, we do get business organically on Google — you know, when you have good reviews. Well, we have some bad ones, like that woman I talked to you guys about earlier. She went on and blasted us on Facebook, Instagram, everywhere you could think of — the mom groups, everywhere you can imagine, she was on there. But like I said, it’s these mailers.

And basically, people ask, “Dave, how do you do these mailers? How do you find the people to send them to?” Basically, it’s pretty simple, but it does take a lot of initial work to get it going, right? You’re gonna type the letter, you’re gonna print it, you’re gonna stamp it, you’re gonna put your company logo on it, right? That’s the hard part. Then you’re gonna go find what you want. So I literally drive around my area, and I say, you know what? Today I just want to target dentist offices. So I drive around, and I see which dentist office I want to clean. I take pictures, I go back to the office, I’ll look the address up, and I’ll just go ahead and enter it in our spreadsheet. And then our office manager — this is another thing she does once a week — she goes ahead and she writes them out. It’s not even just her; we do it. That’s one of the once-a-week things she has on her to-do list. But between me, Trish, Morgan, Lucy, and Carol, our office manager, we write these out, and we have a certain amount we hit every month. So some months it might be 2,500 mailers. Sometimes it’s 3,000. Sometimes it’s only 500. It really just depends on what we set for the month, right? If we’re doing really good on our sales goal for the month, then we don’t need to go as hard, right?

But I will say another thing: getting good Google reviews is huge. Obviously, most of our customers are recurring, everyday janitorial service, and we’re not going to ask for a review after the first service, right? We want you to see how we perform months after. I would rather have a review from a customer that’s been with us for five years. Like, I just recently got a review from one of my second customers. My second customer, 10 years ago, is this dance studio we clean. I was just cleaning gyms — my first-ever contract was Orangetheory Fitness up here in Hunt Valley. But my second-ever client, this dance studio, gets done seven days a week, Monday through Sunday. I have two dedicated ladies that are there every single night, and they have been with us for 10 years. And they finally just wrote us a review, literally like last year, and it was so good. They’re like, “We’ve been working with Dave’s Cleaning for over nine years” — because it was nine years last year, 10 years now. And I love to see reviews like that. I’ve been waiting, you know? So even the one-year, two-year, three-year reviews — I wait. I don’t do it right away. But obviously, for my specialty work or my one-time work, like office deep cleans, we will ask for them. That also helps us hugely.

So to answer your question: yes, we’re old school. We do direct mailers. I know a lot of people say, “Dave, that takes too much time, too much tracking.”

Stephanie: When you think of the amount of money that you get out of these accounts — the lifetime value of each of these customers — it is worth the extra work.

Dave: I got three of these wedding venues — this was a couple years ago. I got one mailer I sent to one of their locations down in Baltimore. The manager had held on to our mailer for a year. Their cleaning contract was with Coverall Cleaning Systems, it was called, something like that — Coverall, Jan-Pro, all the big names. One of them — they were stuck in like a five-year contract with them. So their contract was finally up, and she was getting bids, and we randomly get a call one day. And she’s like, “Yeah, we got your mailer a year ago. We’ve been holding on to it. We’re very interested in working with you, because we actually have three locations that get done.” And these contracts ended up being $50K a month — three of them. So that’s $150K off of one contract, okay? One contract under one umbrella.

So when I tell people this story — and that’s just one contract, right? We get calls all the time. We’re constantly pushing out. But we do have some slower months, right? We have some slower months where the mailers don’t work as good, and I’m transparent with everyone about that. Some people will message me and be like, “I’ve sent 20; I haven’t gotten anything.” Okay, it’s about volume — you’ve got to send more. But I won’t recommend this for the people that are in an urgent rush for customers, right? I don’t recommend this for people that are like, “I want a hundred customers tomorrow.” You know, like, go maybe use Google Ads, SEO, and stuff like that. I can’t personally speak on behalf of that, because we’ve only used it very little. And I will say, personally, I think the money is better spent on — I’d rather give the extra hours to my ladies in the office to help us write the mailers out. I’d rather put my money into that. And stamps aren’t cheap nowadays! So it works for us. It might not work for you — I always like to tell people that. So yeah, thanks for asking.

Stephanie: Oh, absolutely — thank you for going into detail. And you know, that’s not something we have done — we’ve never done direct mail for commercial like that before. We’ve done cold calling, cold emailing, drop-offs. I actually paid my grandma for a long time to drop off donuts, because who’s gonna turn down a sweet little old lady with donuts? And that got us accounts. So the thing about getting commercial — it’s old school. That is how you get commercial. It’s totally different than residential. And like you said — one of my favorite books is called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, and the way he phrases it is “pigheaded discipline.”

Dave: I think I’ve heard of that.

Stephanie: Yeah. And that’s what you’re describing — having pigheaded discipline, where every single month you are doing this, whether the results show up right away or not, because most likely they’re not. And just being able to delay that gratification — it may not be this month, it may not be next month, but when they hold on to your mailer —

Dave: It will come.

Stephanie: It will come. It’s just a longer sales period. So that is really incredible, and I really hope that others are inspired to do the same.

Competing With National Companies

Dave: Yeah, and I really like what you said. It definitely is a longer sales period. You’re 100% right, because like I said, so many people message me — “I sent this many.” Well, you know, it is going to be delayed. I’m going after people — and I know this because I’m doing it — I’m going after people that already have vendors. I am not trying to take their contract, right? I’m just trying to offer our services, and I’m trying to be a future reference. A lot of companies — I will say, even in the last two years, the amount of people that have called me because their cleaning companies are retiring — I’m like, really? I saw an uptick in people telling me that, because we always track why they are getting rid of them. My first question always to these customers is: what is your problem with the current company? Why are you out calling another cleaning company? Because we’re going to solve that for you. That’s my first thing. And I can talk to someone for two minutes and understand that this person is either crazy, or their company truly is terrible. I’ve heard enough — I’ve talked to hundreds of people over the years, and I know: either they’re crazy, or it truly isn’t getting done. Because the second they tell me they’re using a national company, you don’t gotta tell me anything more. That’s what I tell them.

Stephanie: Yep. Especially franchises, because when I look at — I’ve talked to lots of franchises before, and no hate, but that franchise fee comes at a cost, and the cost is typically the staff member’s salary, right? That money’s got to come from somewhere. That means they’re paying really low, they’re gonna have worse turnover, and that means the results are, of course, going to be worse for the client. So any time that we can win clients from franchises, we’re probably gonna be better, frankly.

Dave: So it was really funny — in our office, we have a collection from these commercial offices. A lot of the national companies do logbooks, which we do too. Basically, we sign in each visit — it’s just a book. And we just date it, and then we put in any notes that aren’t very urgent, like, “Oh, hey, we noticed that this is broken,” or whatever. And so we do logbooks. Anyways, we have a collection of all the national companies’ logbooks, and to see the way they operate and the way they respond in the logbooks — it tells a lot about these companies. And I always tell my customers, because the second I say that we’re going to put a logbook in their location, they’re like — because every national company has done that. So I make sure to tell them this is nothing for urgent matters. If something’s urgent, it’s not to go in this book — you would call the office. But this is for little notes that our staff can communicate to you in the evenings. And then so many people say to me, “Well, Dave, if you have all Spanish-speaking individuals, how are they writing in the book in English?” Well, we always do have one bilingual person in the crew to make sure they’re able to communicate, if there is an emergency that occasionally happens that needs to be communicated to our crew manager. Just wanted to add that, because I’m sure people will be like, “Wait, but they all speak Spanish — how do they know?”

Where to Find Dave

Stephanie: Gotcha. Oh my gosh — well, first off, Dave, I have about 30 million other questions, so I know we’re running out of time. I’ve got another podcast I gotta get to in 15 minutes. So I would love to propose another episode with you, if you would be interested, because I just have so many questions. I mean, that hour just flew by — I cannot believe it. So if you’re open to another conversation, I would love to have you.

Dave: Absolutely. Yeah, there’s just so much that we could dive into. You know, this company truly was life-changing for me. It really has been able to open up so many things for me — number one, financially. I was able to buy my first house last year at only 23.

Stephanie: That’s amazing. Congratulations — that’s incredible.

Dave: Thank you so much. Thank you. So I would love to get into more — I can share so much more. I love this industry. I love helping people out. And yeah, thank you so much, Stephanie. I really do appreciate it.

Stephanie: I appreciate you too, Dave. Do you mind if, after the episode, you can send us that link to the video where you talk more in depth? I’d love to link that down below for the listeners. Is it a YouTube video that you made?

Dave: It is. I don’t know if anybody knows, but do you know Carolyn Arellano?

Stephanie: Of course! I’ve had her on the pod. She’s fantastic.

Dave: Oh, okay. Yes — she and I made that video, and people love that video. So yeah, definitely check that out.

Stephanie: Okay, we’ll find that. And if people want to follow you, Dave, where can we send them to follow you? I know that you also do consulting, so please share your wares, sir.

Dave: So I have an Instagram, which is Dave’s Cleaning Consultants. And I do one-on-one coaching. I try to set aside one day a week to just kind of get to know our community. I made the mistake of doing free calls a while back, and people were wasting my time — it wasn’t people that really wanted it; they just wanted to know information and be gone. For the people that are serious about growing their business and taking it to the next level and really growing it, I love to talk to those types of people. And they can just go to our website — we have a business consulting page on there. But I always say, if you guys just have a couple questions that I can just answer on email, I do it all the time. People message me all the time. I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on email — feel free to send me a message.

I feel like the cleaning community has done so much for me that I love to give back. Because I will end the podcast by saying, when I was first starting, I did look at YouTube, and I feel like there weren’t as many YouTube videos available like there are today. You know, 10 years ago, there was probably a little bit less information out there. And I was actually calling some of the other local cleaning companies around my area, and I will tell you, a lot of them would not really help out or answer small questions. So when I finally got to where I wanted to be in the company, and grew it to where — I call it content; I’m content with my business — the last couple of years, I’ve been really helping out with mentoring. So thanks again, Stephanie. I really do appreciate it.

Stephanie: Oh, this has been amazing, Dave! Everyone, please leave him some love in the comments. And what questions do you have for a follow-up episode? Because I know I have a lot. I want to get into more operational things, but this was just — I mean, the stories are too good; I had to hear them all. So I apologize — you guys know I just can’t leave things alone. I have to dig into it. So please leave me the comments and questions that you have below for a part two with Mr. Dave. Go follow him, give him some love, hit that subscribe, hit that like, and we’ll see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Thanks, guys!