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Introduction
Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And guys, today I wanna talk about something that you are inevitably going to go through as a cleaning business owner, as somebody who potentially staffs other people. Y’all are gonna break shit, okay? Because I’ve broken things, my staff has broken so many things, and we are currently in the process of processing a very expensive thing that we broke. And I wanna talk about that.
I’m gonna talk about just different examples of things that we have broken, have had to replace — perhaps it wasn’t even us, but we’ve replaced it anyway. And I wanna give you guys those scenarios. One, so that you know it’s going to happen. Number two, that this is why we need to charge good rates for ourselves, because we need to have money to cover this type of thing. And of course, we need to have insurance in place to cover the very expensive things.
And a spoiler alert, we have only done, I believe, one — this might be the second insurance claim that we are going to place, depending on the cost of it. It just depends, we don’t know how much it’s gonna cost yet. But we have not done many insurance claims in the history of the business. In seven years, this would be the second insurance claim on actually replacing something that we broke or damaged in a home. Other than that, we have paid for all of these things out of pocket.
The Employer Pays — No Wiggle Room
So, one thing I wanna get clear on is a lot of people hesitate to get staff because they are afraid of many things, one of them being what happens if my staff breaks items in homes. And I want to be very clear with you, that is going to happen, and you are going to have to pay for it, okay?
I have seen posts in some of the Facebook groups talking about how, oh, do I make my cleaner pay for this thing that they broke, how does this work? And I will tell you 100%, there is absolutely no wiggle room on this. If they are your employee, you, the company, need to be paying for that, all right? If they are an independent contractor, that is a completely different story, that is why they should be carrying insurance. But as your employee, and you as the employer, that’s part of the dealio here, is that if they break something, we’re the ones to pay for it, we are the ones to fix it.
And yes, I know that that may feel not right or not fair. I would argue you are benefiting greatly from them working for you when you are making money off of their labor. So one of the trade-offs is if they break shit, you’re going to pay for it. And it sucks, and the faster that you can get over that fact and just live with the reality of it, the better you’re going to feel, okay? Because being upset about it, being frustrated, it doesn’t help in this scenario, okay?
And I will say, we are all human. I have probably broke more things than any of my staff members. And it is jokingly said that like, “Don’t let me on the job, I’m going to break something.” I’m pretty clumsy, and as careful as I try to be, especially as soon as I start to rush, that’s when things happen.
A Quick Word on the New Camera
Side note, I’m so distracted by this new camera. Oh my gosh, shout out to Kylan and Nicole at ZenMaid. They sent me this new camera. Stop, pause, look at the crispness. I swear you can see every pore on my face right now. It’s incredible. So I’m really digging this new camera. Leave me a camera emoji down below, guys. I would love to see it for engagement. It really helps when you comment. Hit that hype while you’re at it.
And if you’re not subscribed, what are you even doing here? Please subscribe, hit the like, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever it is that you are listening. It really helps our message and our lessons get to more cleaners in our industry. And I would really appreciate it. And I love that you are listening while you’re cleaning, while you’re driving. And I really, really appreciate every single one of you. You guys the best, okay?
A Little Weekend Detour
Back to breaking shit. I just had to pause and be like, look at that crispness. Also, side note, you guys cannot see — I am like horrifically sunburned. It actually doesn’t show as bad as I thought. My back is so sunburned. I had such an incredible weekend.
Side note, I’m just gonna go into personal stuff now because why not? It’s my podcast. So I went to Charleston. I’ve never been to Charleston before. If I have any Charleston listeners, would love to see you down below in the comments. It was very cool. I went to see Chris Stapleton Friday night in concert, one of my very favorite artists. And it was absolutely incredible. Oh my gosh, it was such a wonderful concert.
This has been the best year ever in a lot of ways, I think. Turning 30, just going all over the place, enjoying. I got to see Bruno Mars in Atlanta last month, was it? Which my other favorite artist. So to be able to see two of my top favorite musicians in the world within a couple months, it’s already been so spectacular. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be able to do that. So yeah, that was wonderful.
Went out on a charter fishing boat on Saturday, out on the ocean, the coast. And caught me a fish. I have not been fishing in a long time. And this fish was a sheephead fish. And they have human teeth. I’m not kidding. Google it, guys. Google it. It’s very bizarre looking. I’ve never seen such a thing. But that was really fun. Didn’t get burned that day.
And then yesterday I had a pool day. And that is when I got burned. It was a UV of 11 in Savannah yesterday. And your girl is crispy, okay? So please put your sunscreen on, guys. Please, I beg of you.
Anyway, so I am just riding high off of such a good weekend. It’s a Monday when I’m filming this. A fantabulous summer. And I hope you guys are able to have some fun this summer as well.
The Faucet and the Blind: My Own Disasters
Okay, now really, back to breaking stuff. Okay, let’s talk about it. All right, so from the beginning, we have absolutely broken things, damaged things. Very, very, very early on, obviously me being the first one to do that. I can’t remember what the first thing I broke was, but early on, one of my most memorable ones — I’ll take us back.
It was the weekend or the week of July 4th. So pretty much same time of year. It was a Friday. It was a Friday before the 4th of July. And much like this week, actually. And I had a cleaner. She ghosted. She was a new cleaner. She ghosted us. We had a move-in clean of a vacation home of a new client. And so she ghosted. We, I think, had somebody else call out. So myself and my manager, April, were both at this job site. Ashley Seacamp was at this job site. I think we had at least one other cleaner at the job site.
And so we’re cleaning. We’re getting the damn thing done. And I go to — I’m in the kitchen working, and I go to wipe down the faucet, ’cause it’s kind of like one of those large arched faucets. And I go to wipe it. And I swear, I’m not like superhuman strength. I mean, I look pretty strong, I know, guys, but I don’t just break things when I touch them, I swear. And the whole faucet literally snaps in half when I touch it. And it’s like rusted through. And I’m like, you gotta be shitting me, right? Like, it’s already a day. I’m already pissy ’cause this girl ghosted and didn’t show up and we’re short-staffed and all this shit. And then I do that. And I’m like, oh, God.
So the client was there. So I go tell him. His name is Tom. And I’m like, Tom, I broke this. We’ll be sure to replace it, et cetera, et cetera. And then I go on to clean the dining room. And this was back in the day when I didn’t realize that when you have large windows with full blinds, the wide slatted ones, they’re heavy, right? They’re heavy, and you need to support the bottom of it as you pull the string, ’cause otherwise it’s too heavy for the string, which in my opinion is a design flaw. Why would you make something that retracts that’s going to break when you pull the string, like the thing that is supposed to raise it up? I digress, whatever. I’ll take it up with a blind manufacturer, right?
So anyway, I’m yanking on this string and the whole blind snaps and breaks. So like a really wide window, expensive blind, too, like probably a couple hundred bucks. I’m like, come on. Like, what is this day? So I broke two things in that house. That was ridiculous. And he still used us for recurring services. So it was all good. And he owns some rental properties and we did the cleanings for that, too. Just told him, moved on, paid for it, right?
Never Hide That You Broke Something
And so you’d think, yes, that’s great, ’cause you broke those things, Stephanie, but what about when staff breaks things? And boy, have my staff broken things, and I love them dearly. And it’s just gonna happen, guys. As careful as we are, as we train our staff to be, when you are touching literally thousands of items in a week, it’s going to happen. It is inevitable. Every single one of my staff members, if they’ve been here for like three to six months, they have broken something. Like, it just, it’s gonna happen.
And a lot of times, there is nothing that comes from it other than us alerting the client. And this is one of my most important lessons that I want you to take away, is never, ever, ever hide that your company broke something. Do not hide it. That is the worst possible thing that you could do, and it will bite you in the ass in so many ways. It just, no good can come from it. I promise you that no good will come from it. It will only hurt you, and it could have some very, very long-lasting effects.
I’ll give you an example. So I had — and not that I had done this, but a story that I heard. So we had a client that came to us, and we were doing the move-in cleaning on their very, very expensive home. This client, they had three washer and dryers, like one set on every floor. Just crazy house, right? New build, just gorgeous home. And they had hired another company because we did not have the availability to get them in when they wanted to, so they hired another company. And that company ended up using a shop vac or whatever vacuum on one of the laundry stainless steel sinks, and scratched the shit out of it. And it was a brand new sink, right? Like, and the contractors hadn’t done it. It was the cleaning company.
And so the client called the cleaning company up, and was like, “Hey, can we resolve this?” And they’re like, “We didn’t do that. That wasn’t us.” And it was them, it was absolutely them. And just how disgusted the client was with them not taking ownership of the problem, of it clearly not being the contractor. It was the cleaning company. And the client even said, he was like, “I don’t even know if I would have had them necessarily pay for it. I was gonna hire them to do other cleanings for us, but the fact that they wouldn’t take responsibility, like that, they lost us as a customer. I was disgusted with it. I would never recommend them because of it.”
So it’s like, you don’t know the far-reaching effects of negative word of mouth. You don’t know how many people are not hiring you because of something wrong that you did, and tried to hide it, or whatever. You don’t know the effects of it, ’cause you’ll simply not know. And most people aren’t gonna be like, “Yeah, I was gonna hire.” Like, they’re not gonna call you up and be like, “I was gonna hire you, but then my friend told me that you hid that you broke a vase in her house,” or whatever. That’s not going to happen. You don’t know how bad it could be. So just, it’s not gonna benefit you.
I know, I know it can be very painful to tell what has happened when an accident happens, when something gets broken. It sucks, it’s never fun. There’s one I’m gonna tell you about that was incredibly painful, incredibly painful. But you just gotta do it. You just gotta do it.
And when I say the majority of the things that we break in a home, nothing comes of it, is we simply let them know that it’s broken. They’re like, “Meh, that was already kinda loose,” or, “No big deal, thanks for letting me know. I appreciate the honesty.” And we don’t have to pay for it, there’s nothing. Sometimes we do pay for it, sometimes we don’t. Well, I’d say usually we don’t, honestly. It’s because we’re honest.
Our Broken Item Email Template
And I’m actually going to read off to you. We have a template for broken items. We literally have that in email, so I’m gonna read that.
Quick little break here. If you have ever been listening to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast and thought, “Oh my gosh, Stephanie would die at this story,” well, guess what, guys? I wanna hear that story, okay? We are looking for guest applications for the show. And I know many of you have never been on a podcast before, but those are my favorite episodes, to be frank — is the owners who are just here to share their stories.
So if you are an owner who wants to share their story, or perhaps you would like to have a free consulting call with me and ask me your questions live for everybody else to learn from, that is also an option. And then finally, if you know somebody in our industry, you have a friend or somebody that you look up to and have learned from who you think would be a great guest option for us, please go to the link down in the bio, and we would love to see you apply or nominate them, and we will take it from there. And I would love to have a conversation with you and get to know you more closely. Back to the show.
Here’s the template:
“Hi, customer. The cleaning technician that was at your home yesterday let us know that the toilet brush handle broke while she was cleaning the downstairs bathroom. She also had a small circle of glass that fell from the bedroom ceiling fan light while she was dusting. As stated in our client guidelines, we believe in shining a spotlight on an issue rather than sweeping it under the rug. While our technicians are careful and considerate of each space they attend, every now and then something can happen. She had left notes about each on your checklist, but we wanted to follow up and would like to further discuss a fair and quick resolution of the situation.”
So as you can see, our cleaners, we instruct our techs to leave a note. If the client is not there, they must leave a note, they must take photos of what happened and immediately let us know. If the client is home, the cleaner is to go find the client, explain what happened, and let them know that we will be reaching out to resolve the issue, right, and come to a fair solution.
So it’s a multifold — or multifold, what am I saying? Paper towels on my mind, apparently. A multi-step training here. We need to train our staff members and then your office managers or office staff, or you if that’s the person who does this, you need to have a process in place for how you’re going to handle this. We also have this mentioned in our client guidelines, as we said here, that we’re not gonna hide things, that we will, if something happens, we’re gonna deal with it responsibly.
And so our cleaners just go find the client, they apologize profusely, say, “Hey, the office will be reaching out and we’ll take it from there.” So we don’t wanna put it on the cleaner to come up with a solution. Obviously the cleaner knows that the company is going to pay for it and we obviously just tell them to be as careful as possible, but shit happens, right? And so that is how we handle it. And so many times it’s like, with this it’d be like, “No problem, I’ll just get a new toilet brush.” But if they wanted us to pay for it, of course we would. So with little things like this, of course it’s just, we’re gonna pay for that. That’s, it’s no big deal.
When You Get the Short End of the Stick
Now, there have been situations where it’s been frustrating because it feels like we just got the bad end of the stick, the bad side of the wishbone. I don’t know what saying applies here. Short end of the stick, that’s the saying, that’s what I’m trying to say, guys.
So one situation we had was this client, no longer a client, she was a bit difficult. She had a microwave and it stopped working after we had cleaned. And the cleaner swears up and down that they didn’t spray up into any of the electrical things. So make sure your cleaners are not spraying into any of the holes in the microwave or anything like that. But it just stopped working. And I don’t think it was anything that we did when we were cleaning. It worked when we were there, didn’t work after she left.
And so in that situation, again, what are you to do? What are you to do? So we paid for the microwave and it wasn’t a cheap Walmart microwave. This woman did like baking out of her kitchen. So very well could have been like, she wanted a microwave and we were the ones to get it for her. But I do think it, unfortunately, it was a situation where it wasn’t beyond a reasonable adult — I can’t speak today. Oh my Lord. Beyond a reasonable adult, that’s a really funny thing to say. Oh my gosh. I need that on a shirt. Okay. Beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t us, right? We couldn’t say it wasn’t us because we were the last people to touch the microwave. Microwave doesn’t work anymore. Well, there you go, right? So we had to replace that microwave. That sucked.
Removing the Risk: Duvet Covers, Taxidermy, and Bleach
Another situation that we had to actually replace was — and one of the reasons we don’t do any bedding anymore, meaning washing bedding, and this happened last year — was a cleaner threw the bedding in the duvet cover through the washer. And I think they put like high heat. I don’t even know exactly how this happened, honestly, but it got like tangled and ripped. The duvet cover was destroyed. Somehow we fucking destroyed this duvet cover. And so now we don’t do duvet covers. We won’t do that. That’s now a policy of Serene Clean is we’re not messing with duvet covers.
And I know that that may seem like an extreme response, but a lot of our staff members have no idea what a duvet cover is. They’ve never came across one, especially our younger folks. I’d never seen a duvet cover before I started cleaning. I didn’t know what that was. I’m not bougie like that. Just kidding. They are very nice. I like it, especially in a pet home. But they can be a bitch to wrestle onto things. And so now we just don’t do that. We don’t wrestle them on. We will make a bed if fresh sheets are provided. We just will not put a duvet cover on. We will not do laundry. We don’t wash any laundry other than our vacation rentals that we have grandfathered in that of course you’re gonna do laundry, right?
It’s just something, you know, I thought that this was gonna get some more pushback from clients, but there were so few that we actually did any type of laundry at their house. And so it’s just been really nice to not even like it. We’ve simplified by removing that as even an option. And I get it. Like if you wanna sell as a luxury cleaning service, like shouldn’t you offer that? Well, it hasn’t really hurt us guys at all, honestly. And we very rarely get asked of this ’cause we’re not advertising. And it just removes the risk of damaging it, right?
And I think that’s another lesson I want you guys to take away is how can we remove the risk altogether? And there’s a couple ways you can apply that. That can be to your tools and supplies. That can also be to what you will and won’t do, the scope of things.
I’ll give you another example. This is gonna be a heavy-example episode ’cause that’s the whole episode, right? Taxidermy — I think we’ve talked about taxidermy before when I did my client guidelines episode. But that is something that we decided in the past six months, we’re no longer going to dust or touch taxidermy. And that is all about mitigating risk. We wanna remove the risk altogether because the cost of it going wrong is so high because it’s priceless, it’s irreplaceable. If one of those taxidermy animals fell down and broke while we were cleaning it, that’s like a once in a lifetime thing for people. Like it’s that animal.
I know this is kind of fucked up. If you’re like a city person and you’re like, “What are you talking about?” Like almost, I swear, almost every house we clean has taxidermy animals in it because we are in rural Wisconsin where hunting is huge. Like that’s a big part of our culture as is fishing, right? Like there’s taxidermy creatures and critters all over the place, right? It’s kind of morbid and creepy when you think about it, but whatever, it just is what it is, right?
So it’s a thing that we have in our client guidelines that we do not touch taxidermy animals. And it’s like the risk just so far outweighs the benefit. And again, nobody since we’ve implemented that has had any issue with it. They understand because they also don’t want something to happen. And if something is improperly mounted, heaven forbid, a giant buffalo falls on top of one of my cleaners, I don’t want that. You don’t want that either. So I would suggest maybe don’t touch them. Just don’t touch them, right? And so that’s what I mean. Remove the option of the risk altogether.
Another thing that we do to remove risk when it comes to damaging things is by not having certain products in our kit, namely bleach, right? There are several reasons we don’t have bleach in our kits. We don’t have any of our products that contain bleach because if it were to spill on anything in a home or a business, it’s going to damage it most likely, especially if we’re talking fabric, most materials, if it sits in pools, we just don’t want to deal with it.
So oftentimes, you know, we have our spray bottles, of course, in our kits or on the loops of our aprons that we use for cleaning. And those bottles will just spontaneously erupt sometimes and break. I’ve had it all the time where I smack it and like the thing was kind of loose and it spills all over. But because the only thing that’s going to be in that spray bottle is like one of two things. It’s either going to be water, Dawn dish soap, and some essential oil, like very diluted Dawn for our all purpose cleaning, or it’s going to be half vinegar, half water for the glass cleaning product that we use. Like that’s literally what we use to clean glass. So neither of those things are likely to damage something, just make it a little sudsy if we have to wash out the carpet.
And I’ve literally had that happen to myself where I’ve been cleaning and it opens and spills all over carpet. And guess what? If there is a bleach or even just a lot of other cleaning products too that are more harsh chemicals, that would be us replacing floor. Or like if it was hardwood floors, replacing hardwood floors. Like there’s just so much that we avoid because we don’t have bleach in our kits. And so that’s going to be one of my biggest tips is just remove a lot of the stuff from the kits that could cause damage.
And of course somebody could damage a house with anything, right? Like if we really tried, we could damage pretty much — yeah, I think I could. Maybe a squeegee. Could I damage something with a squeegee? I’d have to think on that. I’d probably have to try pretty hard for that. But another example of the really abrasive like green scrubby sponge pads, like almost like Brillo-esque sponge pads that we used to use in ovens, we just took them out of the kits ’cause like the cleaners, sometimes they’d try to use them in the sinks. And of course that’s like a training problem. Like don’t use those there. But we’re like, honestly, we can get the ovens clean without those with other mechanisms. Let’s just remove those all together so that they’re not just quickly grabbing a sponge and scrubbing down a stainless steel sink. And now we’re replacing the sink, right?
This Week’s Sink and the Case for Repeating Yourself
And this week we are replacing the sink. I don’t know how the cleaners even scratched it. They used Bar Keeper’s Friend on a sink. And this is kind of what prompted actually this whole episode was we’re replacing a sink. It wasn’t stainless steel, but it’s like a stainless — it looks like stainless steel, but it’s not. I can’t even remember the material name. Well, because I was never told the material name because the cleaners don’t know what it is either. The client said it to somebody and nobody can remember what it is. But all of that being said, it scratched up the surface and now we are going to have to replace that sink.
So it’s just, this is where it can get frustrating, right? And sometimes it can be tough not to just want to shake the staff, right? But you do your best. You train them. When in doubt, in inconspicuous areas, if you’re not familiar with the material, always come and ask the office managers rather, or your trainer. And we can look it up. We can research it if it’s something we’ve never come across before. Like for example, how many of us cleaned a copper sink before we encountered one in a house? Probably not many, right? And weren’t aware how to deal with that, how to deal with the patina. And some clients don’t want that scrubbed off, right? It just totally depends on the client. So there’s just so many scenarios and materials.
And even today in our team meeting, Hannah reminded everybody, natural stone, don’t be using Bar Keeper’s on that. Like they’re just kind of going over and reiterating, like what do we use this for? And so I want you to get comfortable with repeating yourself. This is something that you’re going to just have to constantly be reiterating, is how to properly use the tools and materials in your cleaning kit with your staff. And I know that that may feel tedious or unnecessary. People need reminders, okay? They need reminders, even if they’ve been there a long time.
And there’s certain things and ways of cleaning that we used to do that we don’t do anymore because we’ve learned, we’ve evaluated. We’re like, nope, that’s risky. It’s introducing the opportunity to break things too much. We can do this in a safer, more gentle way. So we’re going to do that as much as possible. You’re going to be repeating yourself a lot about tools, products, all of that stuff, and just get used to it, you know, and make sure that your kit is as simple as it possibly can be. Get them the tools and supplies that they need to get the job done, but don’t go over the top. Don’t use harsh chemicals as much as you can avoid it.
The New Product: Quick and Bright
Even the shower products that we just got, it’s like a kind of all purpose for lots of things, and it works excellent as a degreaser, shockingly. So we’re able to get our oven cleaner out of the kits, which is insane because it works really well on ovens, which we have been testing out.
I want to find the actual product name for you guys, ’cause I know you’re going to be asking what the heck the product is. It is called Quick and Bright, and we are able to use that in a variety of places, and it can be diluted down or upped up, up the strength up, which is really nice if you need it to be a bit heavier duty, but it works in a lot of different scenarios. So we have been very pleased with that product thus far, and we definitely needed a new product for like soap scum and things like that in showers, because Bar Keeper’s Friend, though we love it, we use the cream product, not the powder. The cream was hard to like spread around, and then it would dry down really, really quickly. And the thing about a shower, of course, is you want to soak it. So we really, really like it. I’m pretty sure it uses coconut in order to clean. So don’t quote me, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. Of course, I should look at the product information before I talk about it.
But Hannah really took the lead on this. Hannah and April in my office, they took the lead to do the research and development, test it out. They tested out several different products for this use, and then to discover that it also works really well for degreasing kitchen cabinets, all of that good stuff. So very excited about this product. No affiliation, of course, I’m just letting you guys know, this is the newest product that we have added to the kit, but it takes a lot for us to add or change something in the kit, because of course at our size, it is a big change to make an adjustment like that. So when you do have staff, just please reduce the amount of products as much as possible for costs, for simplicity sake, as many multi-purpose things as possible is the goal.
The Bird Statue and the Glass Top Stove
Okay, other examples of things that we have broken. Okay, the one that we are working with now that is probably, I’m assuming, going to be an insurance claim is it is a custom bird statue that was made by an artist down, I think, in Florida, and the artist is able to repair it. So the cleaner, I think, bumped it, and a part of it broke off. The shipping alone has already run well over $300, and that’s just the shipping to get this thing down there to get fixed. And so no idea how much it’s going to cost to get this repaired. So that is probably going to be an insurance claim, and that is why it’s so important with incredibly valuable, delicate things.
We are telling our cleaners, when in doubt, do not touch it. We would rather you not clean something really dainty and breakable, and we can explain that to the client, especially if there’s so many irreplaceable things, that type of stuff. And I’m not saying don’t dust around it. Do be very gentle and dust around it, but don’t touch the thing as much as possible. Just avoid it. That’s really, when in doubt, just don’t clean it, and then just make a note of it, right? I’m not comfortable. Just like we don’t clean the crystal chandeliers. We just don’t even touch them. If we see a cobweb in between, you know what I’m saying? We will absolutely hit that, but we’re not gonna dust all the little crystals. I know some of you guys have been asked to detail that. More power to you. It ain’t gonna be me. It ain’t gonna be me. I’m not gonna do that.
So who knows how much that is going to cost. That sucks. Sucks for the client too, ’cause they gotta deal with all of this, right? And so we’re doing the right thing, and it’s just an expensive, expensive lesson to be as careful as possible. And again, cost of doing business, this is part of the cost of doing business is paying for things that your cleaners are going to break.
And again, I know that it may be frustrating for some of you. It may scare some of you off, like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna have to pay for all of that stuff. It’s like, listen, the majority — you know, of the hundreds and hundreds of appointments that happen every single month, I guess thousands — like this, you’re gonna have stuff that happens. Like if less than half a percent of the appointments, something breaks, probably even less than that. It probably, yeah, it has to be even less than that. So in the grand scheme of things, I’m telling you all of these examples, like bam, bam, bam, but over years and years and years, we’ve broken lots of things. Most of them have been very, very inexpensive, like a picture frame or something like that, right? So for the most part, it hasn’t been bad. It’s just the bad ones stick out, of course.
The first insurance claim that we ever did, that was a couple of years ago, probably three to four years ago. And it was a glass top stove of a very fancy kitchen. This was a very high-end home. And they had a big decorative, like stone, leaned up behind it and the cleaner was cleaning around it. It like tipped and it fell face forward, shattered that glass top stove. And so we had to replace that ’cause that was several thousand dollars. And yeah, that was not fun, but the client had us come back. They loved the cleaner. They understood accidents happen. They’d been with us for a long time and they stayed for a long time after that as well.
The Worst One: A Priceless, Irreplaceable Loss
So I just wanted to give some examples. I would love — oh yeah, I saved the best for last. The worst for last, I should say. This is awful. This one was priceless and could not be replaced and this one sucked.
So I always joke, like, it could be worse. You could break like an urn, you know, full of grandma’s ashes and then accidentally vacuum them up, right? We didn’t do that, but it was pretty bad. So, and you know, my staff member who did this, I think she was ready to fling herself off a bridge after this happened because it was so rough. So it was a little glass statue that the client had that she got from her father when she gave him her kidney and then he had recently passed away and we broke it. We broke it. And it was awful.
Like there’s nothing you can say or do other than to profusely apologize, to reiterate to clients, like if there is anything like priceless or irreplaceable, like let us know so that we can just avoid cleaning it. And not saying that we’re just going to break everything and be clumsy, but of all the things to break, right? So that was awful. It had no cost associated with it because it was priceless, irreplaceable.
So I wanted to end on that note that guys, we’ve been through it too. If you have broken something like really, really memorable for a client, it’s awful. It sucks. All we can do is apologize, try to make it right. And sometimes there’s just nothing that you can do, right?
When to Stand Your Ground
I will say sometimes things break or sometimes things seem not right. Like maybe they’re trying to blame you. They have to come back quickly, okay? It can’t be two months down the road from the last cleaning that they say, “Hey, I think you guys broke this,” right? That’s not going to fly. It’s okay to stand your ground. You don’t just have to pay for things just because people say that you broke it or people say it must’ve been you.
Each situation we take individually. We’ve absolutely refused to pay for things because we’re like, “No, there’s been many people in the house after us. There was a big party or something like that.” We’ve had that situation with things going missing too. We’re like, “We’ll fully cooperate,” but there was lots of people in the house. That means that it could have been a lot of people, right? So just different situations.
So I’m not saying blanket across the board, 100% of the time that it’s going to be just you writing a blank check, right? It’s not always like that, but for the majority of the time, it is just a cost of doing business. And I wanted to just provide this little potentially reality check, give you guys some examples, honestly, just to let you know, like we’ve been there, done that, got the fucking T-shirt, I swear to God, on some of these ones. And it sucks and you’re gonna go through it at some point. And I just wanna know — I’ve been there, I’ve been there.
So please, I would love to hear down in the comments below, what have you guys broken? What’s been the worst? What’s been maybe something that you were super like, “Oh my gosh, this is gonna be awful.” And then the client surprised you and you were like, “No, that was already broken,” or whatever the case may be. I would love to hear any examples that you guys have down in the comments below. And it would make me feel better just to — misery loves company — and just hear other people’s experiences, right? So let me know your guys’ examples and I will see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners, bye guys.
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