How to Spot & Fix Bottlenecks in Your Business

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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 in today’s solo episode, I want to give you guys a little analogy that I have been thinking about recently. And it basically revolves around the fact that our problems in our cleaning business can typically be broken down into three categories. And those three categories are going to be supply, demand, and operations.

The Three Categories of Business Problems

Stephanie: All problems that we experience within our business are going to be falling within one of those categories. Supply being staffing for us, that is our good if you will. We’re a service-based business, so we are selling literal physical labor. Demand is going to be on the customer and sales side, and then operations, which is just literally everything else, how the business operates. And that could be in a million different flavors of problems related to that specific topic. But truly, I think we can all break down all of our problems into one of those three buckets.

Playing Problem Whack-A-Mole

Stephanie: And something I’ve been thinking about is how we kind of play problem whack-a-mole in our businesses. And what I mean by that is if you’ve ever played whack-a-mole and they pop out of the holes and you hit it and then another one pops up and then you hit that and then they just keep popping up and you’re like, where are all these moles coming from? And the moles are our problems.

And point being is it is, I think, a fruitless endeavor to aim for a problem-free business. And truly at every level of business that I have experienced, and I know that every new level of business that I experience, there’s going to be new problems to solve. And there’s always going to be certain problems that are the same problem, just in different flavors. That could be staffing, that could be getting enough sales and leads. And then from an operations standpoint, it could be a scheduling thing or what have you. There’s always going to be problems that we are attempting to solve.

And I think that we can save ourselves a lot of frustration and I think a lot of shaming that we probably do on ourselves if we stop trying to have a problem-free business. I think our goal rather should be how can we mitigate the problems, erase the environment that that problem can even exist in, or minimize the impact that the problem is having in your business.

The Thought Experiment: What Would Break?

Stephanie: So something that we always say at Serene Clean, not always, but it’s something that you may have heard. I believe Katie and Katie’s interview with me, who is my customer relations manager, we kind of talked about this, I believe, if I’m recalling correctly. But it’s something that we, a concept that we bring up time and time again as Serene Clean continues to grow. And that is, if we had 50 employees right now, what would break? Meaning if we jumped from where we are now to 50 staff members, what in the business is going to break? And that tells us that that area is not prepared to scale correctly, or there needs to be improvements or adjustments made.

And this thought experiment is incredibly useful because it gives you clarity of the big problem. And you may say, Stephanie, if I scaled to 50, everything would break, nothing is ready. And keep in mind that the number is kind of irrelevant. What I want you to do with this concept is to pick a perhaps challenging number for you, maybe something slightly out of reach. Or you on the flip side, you could say if I added one more staff member, or I added my first staff member, what is going to break? Because we’re all at different levels and places in our business ownership journey. You guys might be listening and not have any staff members. You might be a solo cleaner right now and you are thinking about taking the leap. I know a lot of you guys are because I talked to you.

And so I want you to really ask yourself, what’s going to break if I take that next step? What’s going to break if I attempt to grow in that way? Because I think a lot of us, we get impatient. We want very quick growth because we’re like, oh, that is the goal, to grow our business. But we do not have the systems in place to make that growth actually be something that we can sustain and not everything fall apart.

So all of this being said is those three areas that describe supply, demand, and operations, those are the areas that we can look at that are going to break when we ask ourselves this question of if I added this amount of staff members, what’s going to break? And so I really want you guys to be thinking about that of, okay, this is what’s going to be the problem. This is what’s going to be the problem. And that helps us get a little bit more clarity on the things that we need to focus on.

And so for us in Serene Clean last year, when we were asking ourselves this problem, it was training. Training was what was going to break. That’s an operations thing. That’s not supply, that’s not demand, that is operations. Sorry, I am distracted. I got a new kitty, you guys. Her name is Jenny. I brought her home on Monday. This is my new baby. If you’re listening, you can’t see her. Look at her little bog tail. She’s so cute. Anyway, so she is quite vocal. So if you guys can hear a bunch of meowing in the background, that’s why. Thanks for the distraction, Jenny.

Okay, so for us, it was last year that the big problem was going to be in the operation side of it. And what I want to caution you guys about when it comes to thinking about this is it’s not that that’s your only problem. We probably all have problems in these three categories that certain parts of it would break or fall apart if we added that growth stage. But the point being is what is the big problem? What is the most painful thing? Because I think we just all have to come to terms with the fact that we are going to have problems at all stages of business for the entirety of the business. No matter how big you grow, no matter what, there are problems to be solved.

Avoiding Analysis Paralysis and Taking Action

Stephanie: So I guess I want to encourage you guys to not beat yourself up if you have problems. And I also don’t want you to get into analysis paralysis. And what kind of prompted this topic honestly was a consulting call that I had with one of you on Tuesday. And you are just about to hire a staff member and you’re kind of in that stuck, I want everything to be perfect before I bring on a staff member. And that is one, there’s positives to that, because it means that you are thinking about this concept. You’re thinking, what’s going to break if I bring this new staff member on? So that’s a wonderful thing. But we don’t want to get stuck in there, and we don’t want to make the problem bigger than what it needs to be.

Because that particular lady was very concerned about the legalities of hiring W-2 and making sure she does everything right with the state. And she was getting really overwhelmed with this process of how do I set everything up operationally to correctly bring on somebody? And then just getting overwhelmed and then freezing and not wanting to hire because of that. And I know many of you have experienced that or are currently experiencing that kind of, I don’t know how to do this, so I’m just not going to do it. And I’m going to keep rolling how I am, which is being, not individual, but you’re a business, but you don’t have any staff members.

And so unfortunately, that’s not sustainable if that’s what you don’t want to do. You want to be getting out of the field. So point being, it is good to have this lens. Obviously, this is what I’m suggesting. But then we need to take action towards that thing. And action may simply be going to ChatGPT and saying, I am in this state and I am stuck on how to do this correctly. These are the softwares I currently use. What do I need to do in order to go from where I am now to having a W-2 employee? What do I need to do from a legality standpoint, from the state licensing and all of that kind of stuff? Because it’s really not as complicated as I think we make it out to be. Truly, nothing in business feels as complicated as we make it out to be.

So I want you guys to do this thought experiment, but then I don’t want you to get stuck because you are terrified of making the wrong move. And you have heard me say time and again on this podcast how we want to take action. We need to do something, but we need to also not be so shooting from the hip, which has definitely been one of my weaknesses as strengths as a business owner, as I’ve described before, is that I’m very biased towards action, which I do think is a wonderful trait. We can’t get too paralyzed, but the problem is we do need to think about things thoroughly at the same time. When we have the ability to, we need to think about the problems, but we can’t think too long that it paralyzes us. We need to just try, and the more that we can try and fail and then adjust and just keep going, you’re going to improve faster.

Why do we feel bad about ourselves or that we are a failure because we have problems when every single other owner of a cleaning business is experiencing either the same problems or has experienced the same problems or will experience the same problems? Why are we feeling bad about that? That is not any type of indicator of us being successful, us being intelligent, us being good, any of these things, us being hardworking. It doesn’t mean we’re not any of those things. It just means that this is the reality of owning a cleaning business.

Sorting Problems Into Buckets

Stephanie: And so I really just don’t want you guys to get stuck in, why is this happening to me or this keeps happening to me. We need to completely take any judgment out of it and just say, okay, this problem is a supply problem. Okay, the supply meaning staff members, we are having a staff member supply problem. So what can we do to solve it and going into problem-solving mode? Or this is a sales problem, this is a demand problem. What is it about it? And then getting more nuance. So I really want you guys to think about the current problems that you’re facing, put them in these buckets.

And you literally, I would suggest writing it down. You may have a shit ton of problems. I mean, I certainly do, just in general as a person, but you can put them in these buckets. And then once we have them kind of sorted, then we can break them down further. And it just makes you feel things aren’t all chaotic and in the air and in the ether of, oh my gosh, I have all these problems. It’s, okay, no, actually, the biggest problem is a demand problem. And you may know that because you’re like, I don’t have enough customers. The end result of that particular problem, meaning not enough demand, is you have cleaners with openings in their schedule or you have cleaners quitting because they don’t have enough hours. That is the symptom of the root cause of you don’t have consistent demand or leads. And so now we’re talking sales and marketing and we can kind of start delving into why is this happening and understanding the problem fully.

And that it does help sometimes to have another set of eyes come in and say here, here, here, because, for example, myself, I can tell most people why something is not working. But I find that just getting these problems down on paper and out of our brain really helps. And or if it’s an operations problem, what specifically is not working? And so the first thing I want you guys to do is really think about if I was to add X amount of business, what would fail? What being the problem area. So what would that be? And maybe it’s everything would fail, including your mental health, including your sanity, maybe all of it. But that right there, I mean, I was kind of joking, but not really, because if your sanity is going to fail, that means that’s an operations problem. There is something that needs to go.

Time Management and Delegation

Stephanie: And so a lot of times when it’s that particular thing, it is either a time management or delegation or even questioning the entire process of what you’re doing completely. So you guys know how I feel about doing in-person walkthroughs. And I know a lot of you are experimenting with not doing in-person walkthroughs, which I’m really proud of you for, and because what could be happening if I say, hey, if you add three cleaners, what’s going to break? And you’re going to say me, I’m going to break because I don’t have time for all of this. I don’t have time to bring on them. I don’t have time to train or quality control or all of these things. Well, how are you spending your time? Let’s say you’re out of the field or you’re partially out of the field. You’re not cleaning that much.

Okay, what is going to break? Well, if it’s your time, well, if you’re doing in-person walkthroughs, how many hours a week is that? That maybe we could completely eradicate that. If you’re still sending out appointment reminders manually, meaning you’re texting or emailing those manually, that’s something that could be completely automated with the scheduling software like ZenMaid perhaps. That could be automated. So there’s things that we could take off of you completely from an automation standpoint that starts to open it up, starts to give you that sigh of relief.

Or as I spoke about in last week’s episode, we could start delegating. So a lot of times if it’s you that’s going to break, what specifically are you doing and spending time on? Training. If you have a few cleaners already, is there a cleaner that is really great that they could actually take on most of the training if they would be open to it? For me, I hate training. That’s one of the first things that I did not want to be doing anymore. I’m not a great trainer. I’m not particularly patient. And I just am, I know how to do this, why don’t you know how to do this? And that’s a terrible, terrible mindset. That’s a bad teacher mindset. So, and it’s funny because I can teach you guys things and I’m super patient, but there’s something about physically cleaning that I’m just, it’s so obvious. But it’s not obvious, so terrible mindset. You don’t want me as your trainer.

But point being, if you think that you are going to be the bottleneck, meaning your time, your energy, if you were to add two cleaners, three cleaners, whatever that looks like, well, then how are you spending your time? And could we open up some bandwidth for you? And it doesn’t mean obviously that that’s about to happen, but the point is, it makes you start to think of what is it that needs to change? Because if we couldn’t have three cleaners, something isn’t right here. If we can’t have 10 cleaners or wherever you are, add a couple cleaners to where you are now, what is going to break?

Okay, if that’s the problem, or what’s going to cause the most pain, perhaps maybe not breaking, but it’s, well, our quality is going to be really shitty because we don’t have training and nobody’s, it’s already, we’re already having a decent amount of quality issues at the size that we’re having. So if we add more cleaners, that problem is just going to grow. And that’s kind of as the Serene Clean Management team, those are the discussions we’re going to have or that we have on a regular basis is, okay, if we added five cleaners, what problem are we about to grow? Because that tells us what we’re avoiding, it becomes crystal clear as to exactly the area that we are not focusing on enough, or we need to fix the problem.

So when we fixed our training, when we fixed our quality control, that literally meant adding Hannah as our lead trainer and quality controller. So it may mean another person. And that’s not, again, something that maybe you can afford to do right now. But could you prepare something in the means of having your standard operating procedures or trying to make it so that when you are able to afford to pass this thing off, it is a lot easier to delegate? Just like we talked about last week, a lot of us are not prepared to grow because we do not have the systems in place to actually hand off to a VA, to a manager, to somebody else.

So if that’s the problem, if that again, coming back to operations of that’s going to be the limiting factor for you is actually being able to successfully teach somebody how to do this thing. So point being, I know I’m talking about a couple different concepts, but the whole idea is to remember, we’re all going to have problems, we are all going to have similar problems, honestly, and that’s why it’s so wonderful to have the ZenMaid Mastermind where we can bounce ideas off and things like that.

But if we can name what area the problem is in, and what exactly about the problem that is going to cause issues if you were to grow, that makes it a lot easier and more specific for you to solve that problem. I can’t add two cleaners because I do not consistently get leads or all of my leads are coming from word of mouth and that is incredibly inconsistent and I don’t know when that’s happening. So how could we systematize our lead management or how could, or I should say lead procurement? How can I increase so we have consistent leads? Or it could be sales operations, I should say, and follow up. I get lots of leads. I’ve talked to several of you, you’re getting lots of leads, but none of them are closing. Okay, this is an actual sales process problem.

And so we can kind of delve into exactly where the problem is. So it’s all about asking yourself the right questions, I think. And that allows you to get a lot more clarity around it. And as I always quote Leila Hormozi of, fear is an inch deep and a mile wide. So what that means in this particular scenario is saying, I am so overwhelmed. But once we start labeling it, we realize exactly what the problem is, and that gives you that clarity. That’s why tracking is so important, as I’ve talked about, because it allows you to understand and have clarity about what the actual problem is.

So all of that to say, I just do not want you guys to be getting overwhelmed by all of the problems in your business. The goal is coming back to our whack-a-mole analogy is how can we, the holes, how can we fill some of the holes with sand so they simply can’t come out of those holes? So other example, one of the holes that we fill is we don’t allow for team cleaning as much as possible so that I have less drama to deal with, because once you start putting cleaners together, you introduce potential for more drama. So I just completely eradicate that hole on the game by not having that as much as possible, so mitigating problems before they even arise.

And so for a lot of you, that could be another example, getting client guidelines in place. We are avoiding problems, client guidelines that are signed, we are avoiding problems before they even come up because we expect them. And that’s what this is about, is we are expecting problems to happen and we are trying to, instead of it just being a giant mountain, it’s just a little speed bump in the road because we were expecting this. I knew that this was going to happen.

Same with call-outs. I expect call-outs to happen every single week. Two weeks ago, I think I had, what was it? What did we have? Like 100 hours of unexpected absences or something like that? And actually, it was shocking we didn’t have to cancel on anybody. I don’t know, I got wizards in my office that that was able to happen. So we know that call-outs are going to happen, we know that that’s going to happen. So this problem that is a regular problem that will always happen, that means we can start planning for it. It’s not, oh my gosh, I can’t believe this keeps happening. Well, of course it keeps happening because that’s the nature of the business.

So it is a problem for sure, and I’m never going to eradicate that problem. So then I need to mitigate the effects of the problem. That’s what I’m aiming for is how can we blunt and soften the effects? So it’s not like this, it’s more, this is it, this is just standard, standard day in the life of Serene Clean. So that’s really what we’re aiming for there. So sometimes you can eradicate the problem and then a new problem pops up and then you hit that and then another one pops up and you hit that. And sometimes you can just get rid of the problem altogether, whether that be in a process or a procedure, some type of policy that you need to put in place that either your clients or your employees are signing. So there are ways to solve those problems.

Understanding Bottlenecks in Your Business

Stephanie: I am just constantly reminding myself that this will not be the last time you will have to solve this problem. And I know that might be frustrating because it’s, oh my gosh, didn’t I solve this before? Yes, yes you did. But as we grow, different iterations of those same problems pop up. So now that we are at the size that we are and heading into 2025, I’ve been hyper-focused on bottlenecks. And what a bottleneck is, it’s, imagine a bottle. And there’s a skinny neck and then the fat bottom. And if you have a bunch of supply going, needs to get from one end of the bottle to the other, it’s going to slow down and clog at the neck. That’s a bottleneck.

And so when it comes to business, bottlenecks are basically those areas where literally the flow of business is going to be slowed or stopped and creating a traffic jam of issues or work that needs to be done. And so one of the exercises that I did with my management team to really drill in on what our bottlenecks are, because bottlenecks, by the way, literally they slow your business growth. That’s what they do, because they typically all work together. You’re going to have multiple things that are bottlenecks, and if you solve one, good, you alleviated that, but you still have these other ones that are still going to be slowing your business growth.

And so I did an exercise with my management team where I was, okay, guys, we need to think about this. What are our bottlenecks? What in the business is not going to be able to sustain growth? And we need to solve it. And so having that conversation and writing it out on paper, I ended up with about 11 different areas that would be problems operationally speaking, if we added 20 more staff members, they would be issues. And so that’s been one of my focuses for 2025.

And so this is where I want you to, I want to reinforce this thing of you being able to label, okay, the problem is supply, demand, or operations, and then drilling down on that. So if it’s operations, it’s training. If I’m struggling with supply, it’s recruitment. If I’m on the demand side, maybe I’m not getting enough leads or maybe there’s a problem with my conversion rate. That’s a demand bottleneck where I’m getting leads, but they’re not converting. So we want to be able to label those things so that then we know what areas we need to work on and then we can drill down further.

So for example, with training, okay, that is an operations issue, but then I need to start thinking about, okay, well, what aspects of training are the problem? Is it the fact that I don’t have training materials? Is it I don’t have trainers? Is that what’s going to break? Because we just don’t have the manpower to train. And I think the benefit to not only going through this exercise by yourself but doing it with any management, staff members, whoever your maybe key holders, whatever you want to call them, the people that you’re leaning on that are the ones that are doing the frontline work, and then also thinking about how you guys are going to solve that.

Because what I did in the past was I was having full conversations with myself of thinking, well, we need to do this, we need to change that, and then I would put all of this work into changing something before I would say anything to my staff. And then by the time I talked to my staff about it, I’m already sold on the idea. I’ve already done the work. I’ve already got it all put together. This is how it’s going to look. And then they’re, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? And then I’m, damn it, I didn’t. And I’m, damn it, or these are bad ideas, or what have you. And then it’s frustrating because I feel I wasted my time, and it’s frustrating because I’m, if I would have just come up with this topic from the beginning and talked it through with you, we would have been able to workshop this, get all the kinks out, talk about it, I could have done a better job if I had included you from the beginning.

And that’s something I need to continuously remind myself of, because I tend to be in this mindset of, well, I don’t want to waste my management staff’s time with this because I don’t have all of the information, or this is not finished. I don’t have a full solution figured out for this. And so it can be overwhelming of, well, but if I talk to you about it and I don’t have a plan, that’s going to make me seem weak or I don’t know what I’m doing. And it’s funny that our brain does that to us, and it’s just our ego. It’s our ego telling us that we need to appear that we have it all together, but come on guys, we don’t. We do not have it all together, and we probably never will have it all together, and that’s okay.

But you should let your staff in on the fact that you are thinking about a problem. You don’t need a solution for them to be thinking about a problem with you. In fact, that is probably the smarter thing to do of bringing them into that conversation on the front end so that then you can make decisions together, and then maybe it actually is easier for you because they can take up certain parts of solving the problem as well. And that’s where, as you grow, you guys, that’s how you get things off of your plate, is to have these conversations. Don’t feel this pressure that you’re constantly needing to make sure the staff thinks that you have it all together. You can talk to them about struggles. You can, obviously we don’t want to scare them because you’re melting down or anything, but you can say, look, we are experiencing a problem. We are thinking about how we can move forward and it involved XYZ. What are your guys’s thoughts? And working with your staff and getting their perspective I think is so crucial.

The Heart Analogy and Business Flow

Stephanie: And so kind of, I went on a tangent. To get back to the three categories. So I want you guys to think about supply, demand, and operations, and those are your three categories. And I really want you to utilize this thought experiment or this conversation of if I were to add this many cleaners or this many staff members, what’s going to break? And if we can start identifying those early, or thinking about them early, that’s where we’re putting systems in place, that’s where we are preparing for scale. Because the difference between scaling and just growing is that growth is uncontrolled. That might, I’m sure a lot of you guys have experienced growth in your businesses. It may have not been scaling because you just let go of the steering wheel and you just kind of got on this crazy ride and you didn’t actually mean to grow that fast.

But when we are scaling, that is very intentional and controlled of, we are building out the business operationally to add these new staff, to add these new clients. And so really thinking about that of what are the things that are going to be the problems? And that is a lot easier to do when you’re not in panic mode. So that’s what I’m suggesting you guys to do now. Even though you’re probably in panic mode, but it’s easier to solve this stuff if you’re thinking about it before you are desperately trying to solve the problem while you’re currently in the situation that’s causing the problem. That makes sense.

So I have been recently thinking about how growing a cleaning business is kind of like your heart. And this is a weird analogy, but your heart has four different chambers. And within those four chambers, the blood gets pumped through each one of them and then it goes to the rest of your body. So you guys can look this up if you want, but basically the heart is kind of like your business operations. And if there is a blockage or an issue with one of the chambers, then everything down the line is screwed. It’s all screwed. And so we could think of those four chambers or the three categories being some form of blockage within one of those chambers. And we need to fix that in order for our business to continue growing and to continue operating in a healthy way.

So I like that analogy. My manager, Carolyn, Katie, actually, I think Katie’s the one that brought up the bottleneck. And then I immediately went to the heart and how that flows blood to the rest of your body and how crucial that is that they, one of those valves, if one of those valves is not opening, it has an effect on the body. You guys get it, you get my blood flow analogy. So anyways, that’s kind of been on my mind.

And so I think also in the beginning, your problems can feel much more overwhelming because you have so much less than the larger business, that having a call out, you’re, oh my God, it’s a total emergency. I need to deal with this right now. And it feels incredibly overwhelming. But as you grow, that same problem of a call out, while it’s still stressful, is not necessarily a big deal because you have other staff members to be able to handle it. And it’s not the end of the world.

And I do want to tell you too, that as you get larger, you will have multiple problems potentially happening in a single day. So if we were to look at this past summer, I was receiving emergency level problems pretty regularly. And when I say emergency level, I mean things that absolutely need my immediate attention in order to deal with the problem. Those were happening pretty much weekly through the summer. It was not a fun summer. It was very stressful. It was very challenging. And thankfully we have made it to the other side.

But it is, I think, pretty wild to know that you can survive that and you will survive that if you’re going through it right now or you can know that you will be fine. But that’s kind of par for the course. And I guess, I don’t want to say par for the course, because that makes it seem that is just what it is. And it’s not, we are solving those types of problems so that they never happen again. But it took us going through all of that crap to solve those problems. So there is literally no escaping the struggle when it comes to business ownership.

Accepting Problems as Part of Business Ownership

Stephanie: And something I saw online last night actually was this meme that was basically saying, you won’t have to worry when you have $10 million. I was, bullshit, you’re just going to have $10 million problems. You’re always going to be dealing with different levels of problems because, again, it is not a matter of will this problem occur, but when will this problem occur, how do I respond to the problem and how do I solve the problem? That is what business is. That’s what business ownership is. And I know that when we kind of bought into the cleaning business side of it, we don’t necessarily think about that as much. We’re just, oh, I’m just going to go into other people’s houses and clean, and I’m going to outsource it to staff. I can totally do this. It’ll be easy.

Well, turns out it’s actually kind of tricky. There’s a lot of moving parts. And it all doesn’t have to do with, does so-and-so know how to scrub a toilet correctly? There’s so much more that goes into the backend of running this business, and now you’re dealing with people and processes and systems. So it’s complicated. I feel I say this in every solo episode, but I just want to make sure that message really gets in your guys’s brains of, this is challenging, and the problems that we’re experiencing are all of our problems. Pretty much all of us are experiencing similar problems. And so reach out to me if you’re curious about how the heck did you solve this thing?

That’s one of the things I focus on this podcast is how do we solve those problems? But just remember, there will never be a day you do not have a problem in your business. There’ll never be a day, and you may have a calm day, but it doesn’t mean there’s not a problem brewing on the horizon. And it just is what it is. And I just want you guys to accept that. I don’t want you to be stressed out. That is literally what we have signed up for as being business owners. And I remember in, I believe, Cheryl’s episode a long time ago, she kind of commented. And I’m, that’s our job as the CEOs and the owners, we’re chief problem solvers. That is literally what we signed up for, is to solve the problems. And it may not be you solving the problem. It could be facilitating others solving the problem once you start to grow and add admin. But right now, it probably is going to be you solving the problem.

And so I just want to encourage you. I want you to not be so overwhelmed or not to feel so discouraged and know that no matter what size your business gets to, you’re going to have problems. You’re just going to be solving different types of problems.

Growing Through Different Problem Stages

Stephanie: When, if I do get to 50 employees, that’s going to be a whole different Serene Clean for that happen. Not whole different, I mean, we got the basics down. But you know what I’m saying? It’s going to be a different version of the business. And so I like to think about, well, what are the problems that are going to be occurring then that I haven’t even, it hasn’t even crossed my mind at this size? Because when I was starting out, the problems that we are facing now, I never would have been able to really wrap my mind around how to solve them, or I would have been completely overwhelmed.

So I know sometimes you guys probably listen to these episodes and listen to companies that are maybe at a much larger size than yours, and it probably can be overwhelming of, oh no, that sounds crazy. I can’t imagine having to deal with that. But you’re thinking about that when it’s all on your shoulders. Remember that. And so I say I had 100 hours of call outs or whatever it was a few weeks ago, and you’re, holy shit, I couldn’t deal with that. How are you dealing with all that stress? Well, I’m not because I have extra management to help blunt that. And I really wasn’t stressed at all, honestly.

So let me tell you that the problems that you hear maybe me describe, or other owners describe, where you can’t put where you are now and plop yourself into that and compare, it’s not the same because you’re not going to be the same version of yourself when you get to that size. Stephanie six years ago could not put herself in Stephanie’s shoes today or this summer in particular when it was so stressful and be able to handle that, because she would have thought, oh, I’m going to have all of this to deal with by myself. But that’s not true. I have a great management team. And as you grow, you’re going to add managers. You’re going to add other people to help solve the problem. That’s literally their job as well, to help solve the problems of the business.

Taking Imperfect Action

Stephanie: So all of that being said, I want you to accept it. I don’t want you to get overwhelmed. I want you to start labeling it, and I want you to start doing the thought experiment of what’s going to break next or what’s the biggest breaking point of the business if I were to add this. And so that might be if I add one cleaner, if something’s going to break when you add one cleaner, well, then we need to solve that. We need to work on that. And it might not be solved by the time you add a cleaner, because for you, it might be the thing that’s breaking is you. You need to add a cleaner and other things are going to break too. But you’re going to have to be dealing with multiple things at once, and that’s unfortunately the hard pill to swallow is oftentimes we’re dealing with problems in all of the areas. But we’re trying to get focused because we can only tackle in this moment one thing. We can tackle this thing in front of us. So what is that thing that’s going to be in front of us so that we can either mitigate the problem or eradicate the problem, and then we can work on a new problem.

So just a little mindset experiment for you guys this week. I’m going to keep it short because honestly, it’s been a week for me too, and there’s a lot of problems to be solved as always. But I know that you guys can accomplish anything because look at what you’ve done so far. I know that you guys have crazy work ethics. I’ve seen it. I see how hard you’re working. But I really want you to think about how can I put something in place so that this problem is not going to affect me or affect my business so much in the future. And that’s putting systems in place, that’s putting processes in place, that is perhaps taking things away. Maybe you’re doing things that could be automated. So there’s a lot of things that we can be doing. It just depends on what area of problem we are dealing with.

Just remember, every single problem that you’ve experienced, somebody else has experienced and figured it out. So if they can do it, so can you. We’ve got the internet, guys. We can do anything. I truly feel that. I truly feel that. So just take this as a little motivation going into your work day. If you’re cleaning right now, it’s going to be okay. You are going to solve the problem. Just don’t get paralyzed. Put something on paper, get an action plan in place, and that could just be getting your thoughts out on paper of what you’re feeling overwhelmed and being, I need to tackle this before we can go to the next level. And then just tackle it. And it may not be tackling it to perfection. Good and done is better than perfect and not done. So we just want to get something. You can always iterate. Every single area of Serene Clean has been iterated and changed 10,000 times.

So don’t keep holding yourself to this unattainable expectation of perfection, because that does not exist. We just keep making it better and better and better. There is no such thing as perfect for us. It’s getting it very good, getting it to close. We’re aiming for the moon and we will land in the stars. But right now, you might just need to get above earth. Little motivation for you guys. You guys got this. We all have this. We just have to label our problems and tackle them one by one and then wait for new problems to jump up.

So anyways, guys, I hope you’re having a great week. Let me know in the comments how your week is going. If you listen to this whole thing, put a little star emoji down below or cat, whatever. If you want to do a cat, that’s cool. You know, I’m a cat lady, and I will see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye, guys.

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

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• ChatGPT
• ZenMaid Mastermind
• Serene Clean

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