Lessons from Scaling a Veteran-Owned Cleaning Brand to $55K/Month, with Ibrahin & Jessica Robles

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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 very special episode, I have a lovely couple sitting with me today, who owns a cleaning company together, and they have a very unique angle to their business, and I can’t wait to dive into it. So guys, welcome so much. Introduce yourself. How long have you been married? How did you meet? Tell me everything.

Ibrahin: I love it. Thank you for the awesome introduction. So my name is Ibrahin. I’ve got my lovely wife here, Jessica.

Jessica: Hello.

Ibrahin: We’ve actually only been married since April. April 30 is when we officially went to the courthouse and sealed the deal. It was great. We got married by like a judge. Of course, everyone gets married by a judge, but it was a unique experience. It was really great. It was fun. And our official wedding is in December here in a few months or in a couple months or so. So we’re excited for that. But we have owned Veter Clean here in Gilbert, Arizona since, shoot, how long has it been? Like basically last.

Jessica: I mean, I started it in July of 23 when I first moved here from Wisconsin.

Stephanie: I didn’t know you were a Wisconsinite.

From Wisconsin to Arizona: Jessica’s Origin Story

Jessica: So I am like truly from the Midwest. I am like a hillbilly and I love it. And so kind of a unique story that got me to Arizona. I worked at the post office for like the last 10 years. I’m also an army veteran, hence the name Veter Clean, right? I did six years in the army and yeah, I was at the post office. They just kind of own you. And after I had kids, I was just kind of over it, right? I had spent a decade there and they still treated people like crap. So I was just kind of ready to do something different. My kid’s dad happens to be from like Wisconsin and Arizona. So he had been begging me for years to just, can we go to Arizona? Right? So I was eventually just kind of ready. And we planned it and we got here July of 23 and I was like, F it, I’m going to just start a cleaning business. You know, and my whole goal with that was to kind of target like the retirement communities that are full of veterans, right? Like I kind of, that was like my initial thought was if I can get into some of these big retirement communities, you know, full of Vietnam vets and like they would eat it up, right? And they did. But so I moved here and started that. I mean, I literally just started handing out business cards. I made my own website on Canva. It was awful, but it was something. And I just kind of started like guerrilla marketing, right? I just would tell my story to anybody who would listen. And the other cool thing that I did right off the bat was like I made all my products homemade. So I used very few like store bought stuff. I think like Magic Erasers was like my biggest store bought thing, right? But I used a lot of vinegar, a lot of alcohol. And I kind of made my own stuff. And people really loved that, right? Especially in Arizona. It’s very bougie here in Scottsdale. Yeah. And I was in Scottsdale at that time. So very bougie. People ate it up.

Meeting and Building Together

Ibrahin: So yeah, she basically started the business. We had met. And then we actually met later that December, fell deeply in love and kind of, you know, I was working at the time. I come from a business background. I went to school out here for business in Arizona. And then I think it was like April of 24 is kind of when I was like, hey, like, let’s let me just come full time. Let me just quit my job and we’re going to just jump in. Truly, yeah. I was like a recruiting, I think I was like a director of recruiting for another company that was way big, you know, and recruiting is kind of up and down, very cyclical. And I love it. And I learned an incredible amount. And I have helped scale some like amazing teams like past 100 million and beyond. But quickly, what you find out is like, as the economy shifts, so does the recruiting market and industry. So it’s really common to get mass layoffs in recruiting. And then just to be out of work all of a sudden, when you go from making six figures to nothing, just because, you know, work yourself out of a job, do really good. So, you know, I kind of already had a small business that I was running. I met Jessica and I was like, man, you’re a veteran. You have these products like the valley’s booming. I know the Arizona Valley like the back of my hand, like let’s partner. And she’s like, heck yeah, let’s do it. So fast forward April of last year to now. I don’t know. What is that? Roughly a year and a half in business. We’ve got roughly about 13 cleaners on staff now and an office manager. We’ve got an office space here in Gilbert. And we’re just kicking butt, rocking and rolling, having fun, and trying to build an honest, like, veteran-owned company.

Jessica: And you also asked how we met. We met on Facebook. It was not anything glamorous. And we also have five kids between the two of us.

Ibrahin: Yeah. We’re a blended, busy family. Yeah. Yeah. We both just jumped in. Our kids met each other after like four days. We just, that was it.

Stephanie: Pretty much cheaper by the dozen. I’m pretty sure that’s the plot. Just that intro, you made so many good points. One being like the art of the yapper is truly a wonderful thing. What you said, Jessica, like just talking like everybody, like telling everybody what you’re doing and really having that passion and zeal for it, despite being potentially inexperienced. And so was there something in particular that drew you to cleaning? Like, had you been exposed to that before? Like, why cleaning specifically? What prompted that?

Why Cleaning?

Jessica: I just really like cleaning. But, and it kind of just quells my anxiety. I don’t know. I’ve just always loved it, but I didn’t have any like formal experience. I was just, I didn’t know you were supposed to start in like the master bathroom, right? Like, I didn’t know that was like, I was just like, I’m just going to clean your living room. And, you know, I had very little knowledge of like how to actually, you know, effectively go through a house. I was just kind of winging it. But I was doing a really good job. I’m really thorough. And, you know, and eventually I kind of created my own recurring basis. It was small. And then I met him like six months later. And he was like, no, no, no, no. We’re not going to write appointments down in a book anymore. We are going to get a software. And like I had no idea, right? I would have never understood how to scale without him. Like he definitely brought the business. I brought like the grit and tenacity of just like, I will clean anything.

Ibrahin: And she’s also just like great for the brand, right? I mean, she’s the face of the business. Yeah, she’s a people person. She’s not afraid to sell. And I think that’s a big kind of barrier in this business. A lot of people are like, oh, how do you get leads? How do you get leads? You know, it’s like the leads are out there. You just got to be willing to get in front of people and talk to people and send messages and, and, you know, and stop and say hello and give someone your card. And she’s amazing at that, which is, that’s what built the foundation to Veter Clean, right?

Stephanie: That’s so it’s so true that you have to put yourself out there. And I love that you guys are highlighting basically both of your strengths. And that was something I wanted to ask about of like, looking at each other, like, how would you describe each other’s like biggest strengths from a business, you know, as a partner, of course, but then in the business aspect of it, because most couples that work together kind of like hate each other. So that’s not a good idea. Yeah, still a honeymoon phase. But like, what are those traits? And then we can kind of get into like how you guys balance the couple aspect of it of like, we’re going to butt heads here.

Complementary Strengths and Business Roles

Ibrahin: Yeah. So I think we, you know, me having some sort of a business background, you know, coming from recruiting and, you know, building like organizational charts and all that fancy stuff. I was like, man, it’s going to be really important that Jessica knows what she’s doing. And I know what I’m doing, right? That way we’re not overlaying and we’re not like, you know, trying to make decisions on, you know, the same thing. I mean, you know this, you know, being a business owner yourself. So early on, I was like, you know, why don’t you oversee training? Why don’t you oversee quality? And why don’t you just manage these cleaners? You know, because Jessica has an incredible amount of passion, right? And she’s great with people. She listens. You know, people, you know, feel like they can trust and talk to her. And I feel like those are important traits of a manager, right? And then she’s the one who kind of built the training and the quality that we do, the process that we do out there in our customers’ homes. So it just made a lot of sense for her to oversee that and manage that. And then she is the one kind of doing inspections right now and just kind of overseeing quality and complaints in general, along with our office manager. And then I think where I come in, it’s really just kind of the back end operations, setting up the tech stack, right? What we’re using, any integrations that we’re implementing and really just kind of overseeing strategy. I’m the one always looking at the numbers, right? Oh, yeah. I could care less about that crap. You know, how many new customers are we bringing? How many complaints did we have? What was our payroll to revenue ratio? You know, all that boring stuff that, like she says, she doesn’t care about.

Jessica: But also his superpower, I will say, is truly communication. He can, a pissed off customer can come on the phone and be screaming. And by the end of it, they’re thanking him, right? Like he is so good with his words. And he is also an incredible salesman, right? And he’s just gentle and kind and listens well. And he is so good on the phone with these customers. I love it.

Scaling from Solo to Team

Ibrahin: So, yeah, I mean, we obviously have some complementing skill sets that make it easy for us to be a team duo. But I think what’s really contributed to our growth, which, you know, we like to think is awesome, going from just Jessica doing maybe, you know, $3,000 a month to now I think we’re going to do about $55,000, you know, this month with our team. In that short period of time, it’s really been able to handle that turnover, right, and hire and find the right people and cleaners on the front end, which comes from, like, my 10 years in recruiting, right, just knowing where to post, how to post, what questions to ask, what job description, what budget to use on Indeed. You know, those are all important things that I think a lot of cleaning businesses struggle with.

Stephanie: Oh, absolutely. And you’re reminding me of my operations meeting yesterday with my management team. And we’re talking about 2026 goals kind of projecting already. And we’re like, OK, we’d like to add, you know, this much revenue, which is going to equate to probably only three to four full time techs. And then we kind of stop and pause and we’re like, okay, but that’s actually hiring 10 people because, because of the turnover of like, okay, every couple of months, we’re going to lose somebody. We’re going to lose somebody. So like staying, like, I think, I think one misconception is like you hire one person and like, then, then you build from, and it’s like, no, you’re going to replace that person and then they’re going to finally stay. And then the second person, and then they’re going to get replaced. You know what I mean? So it’s like, I think sometimes we don’t realize before we get into this or before we’re ready to push for growth that like it’s the level of turnover is obscene and there’s so much that we can do to mitigate that but it just it is the nature of this industry and I’m curious coming from your recruiting background like and I don’t know what the industry was that you worked in prior like was that a big shock to you were you like whoa I was not prepared for this necessarily of like this is a lot higher turnover than anything I’ve ever seen.

The Reality of High Turnover

Ibrahin: Yeah, no, definitely was a shocker. And it’s funny, because I actually going into this business, I was like, Oh, I know there’s a high turnover here. I know this is going to be a pain in the butt. And it still was a smack in the face, right? It was still like, holy shit, are we really going to lose a cleaner every two weeks? Like, are we really just going to need to have a flow of job ads open all the time? It’s like, this is not like, this is wild. We need a good process for this, you know. And that’s where I kind of, yeah, had to change because I do come from a corporate recruiting background for the last decade. I’ve actually recruited in probably a dozen different industries from real estate to healthcare to tech to like data engineering, which is really great about my background and how I could kind of understand, you know, bringing like the same strategy in that world to cleaning and tweaking it, right? Because like, you know, you’re not spending as much time interviewing and you kind of have to have a quick screening and hiring process because you can’t afford to spend hours on hiring someone. Otherwise, you’re not going to have any time in your week, right? And just building pipelines and understanding the tools that are out there and leveraging them has been really helpful to us. But I’m not going to lie, still a shocker. Even though I knew the data going in that our average is like a 200% turnover rate, still I’m like, holy shit, this is a lot of turnover.

Stephanie: Yeah, it’s funny. There’s something about you can know a fact intellectually until you’re experiencing it you know it’s the whole like everybody thinks they can fight so they get punched in the face kind of thing so like this is the punch in the face of our industry right that is a great analogy because before I was recruiting I was like a professional MMA fighter so I get you there oh yeah exactly we all think we’re a badass and can talk a lot of smack or think we can run a business yeah and even like you know taking that further of like how many people they are individual cleaners right and they they maybe aspire to something but then the reality sets in once they start trying and it’s it’s really easy to get discouraged and I don’t know Jessica so before he was involved did you hire anybody was there anybody else or it was okay okay I was literally like single mom living in a tiny apartment like what can I do while my kids are in school I could do like one job a day right I can do like one 2,500 square foot house from like nine to two 45.

Jessica: And I hadn’t, I mean, I kind of just thought I was going to do that forever, which is really sad to say all out, but no, I had no intention of hiring anybody. Like I, you know, yeah.

Stephanie: Well, it’s a lot of stress. And also like the beauty of your guys’s situation that a lot of people are not as fortunate to have is like what you, how you guys both described yourself and each other is the multiple hats that the owner has to wear. Right. And luckily, because you guys have your two brains and two skill sets, like they really marry beautifully together. No pun intended. But it for us, like owners who are like, it’s just us. And we’re trying to do this by ourselves. And you’re doing all the cleaning. You know what I mean? So it’s like taking you, Jessica, and like, OK, now start hiring, start start dealing with all of these things and the customer support and stuff. Like, it’s no wonder so many people they try to get some helpers, as they’ll call them. Like, yeah, I got a couple of helpers and they’re really not taking it seriously. And then those people, you know, fuck them over. And then they’re like, oh no, see, this is like, how many times do we see in the Facebook groups? Like, don’t hire, don’t, don’t grow. Like, like you’re, they’re just going to burn you. And it’s like that mindset’s fine. If you’re okay with that income level and you’re okay with that workload, because your body is about to be for 40 years now. Like that’s what you’re going to do, you know? So it’s a mindset thing.

Lessons from Other Business Owners

Ibrahin: Not too long ago, we had met with a cleaning business owner here who lives like 15 minutes from us and he’s been in business probably now about six, seven years. And he was like, man, I tried to hire once. And, and like, now I’m, I’m six years in and like, it was a pain, it was a headache. And I’m not, I don’t, I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I just, I’m not good at it. But he’s been at the same revenue level doing every clean for the last six years. And we’re like, man, like we feel free, right? Like it’s got to get opened. His body is breaking down and, and then we’re like trying to offer help, but, but it’s true. And you make such a good point. It’s like when you go into this thinking that you want to start a business and you can clean and you can do so much of it on your own. But then at some point your schedule gets full. Right. And you’re like, OK, well, now I need a hire. But it’s like it takes you so much time to go make that one hire only for that one hire to leave you a week or two weeks later or try to steal your clients or not show up to work. And then you’re like, man, I don’t want to do this again. And now you’re just in circles. And then that’s why I’m like, I love sharing my knowledge around hiring and recruiting. And I’ve probably met with a couple dozen like new cleaning business owners since we started our business. And I love sharing what I know because I know how impactful it is and how much it can help other people just scale and learn. Because you’re right. We wear so many hats from like having to be the accountant to the manager to the babysitter to the scheduler to the recruiter. You know what I mean? And it’s who’s prepared for that, you know?

Stephanie: I wasn’t. I was not. Why you’re feeling so overwhelmed while you’re in the trenches in that in that startup grind is I mean, because anybody would like if you’re like beating yourself up of like, oh, it seems so easy for this person. Like I was just I’m creating this presentation right now. And it’s like, you know, the history of Serene Clean. And it’s all about like from grind to growth. Right. And I’m looking back and like I have all these beautiful bar charts and like as everything’s going up and it’s all peaceful. And I’m like, oh, I was a psycho, like losing my shit right there and there and there. And like you display it so beautifully in like hindsight and reflection. It’s easy to feel calm about it. But like I think we can all attest to like when you are in that trench zone and dealing with cleaners, it’s like you’re going to feel psychotic because the situation lends itself to it. You know, there’s no getting around the stress right of entrepreneurship, of growing a cleaning business, of the grind that we put ourselves in. It’s stressful. That’s just the easiest way to put it, especially if you’re in your first two, three years of business and you’re just trying to grow. Expect the stress. You kind of have to live with it because it’s inevitable.

Jessica: But we’re really lucky because we get to share the stress. We’re not on an island where it’s like if you’re doing it on your own, you’re by yourself. So we’re lucky that JR has absolutely come out to clean when he has needed to. And like, you know what I mean? Like, it’s so great. I’m so grateful to have a person who will, you know, come out and do whatever has to be done to get whatever, you know.

Ibrahin: And for the listeners, I, my, my first name’s Ibrahin, but, but I’m a junior to my dad. His name’s also Ibrahin. So, so my nickname is kind of JR. A lot of people call me JR Junior. So if you hear Jessica refer to it, she’s still talking about me.

Recruiting Strategy and Systems

Stephanie: Yeah, I mean, I definitely there’s a couple of things I really want to touch on in this conversation. But let’s let’s just get through this conversation about the recruiting aspect of it. I’m like and specifically, like when you’re talking about the way you guys go about it and feeling like you you have a good handle on it. You know, obviously, frankly, we do group interviews. Like for me, group interviews were such a like transformative, like, boom, now we’re ready to scale. But obviously things have changed a lot with AI and technology and all of that. I began the business. So I would love to hear like, what is your strategy look like? What have you been seeing a lot of success with to keep up with this turnover?

Ibrahin: We do really well when it comes to turnover, getting candidate flow, but we’re never short on the amount of candidates that apply. And we’re fortunate to be in, like I said, the Phoenix Valley, where we probably have, I don’t know, a million, a couple million people here in the East Valley alone. Right. So, so, so that’s great. Right. Exactly. Right. When you think about who we have to choose from. But there’s still a fair amount of competition here. There are lots of entry level, you know, jobs that pay more or comparative to ours. So the competition is still relevant here. So, I mean, I don’t know, I guess we can walk through kind of our recruiting process really quick. I mean, preparation is key when it comes to recruiting. Here’s why. We’re recruiting for the same avatar, right? Like when we’re marketing in our cleaning business, we usually have a target avatar of that target customer, right? And that’s how we kind of adjust our ads. That’s how we adjust kind of how we communicate or who we’re trying to talk to in anything that we post or whatever. It’s no different with recruiting, right? You have to kind of think of who’s that ideal avatar that we’re trying to attract into our cleaning business, right? For us, it’s usually experienced cleaning folks who have experience but, you know, aren’t necessarily working on their own. Or it’s those single moms or gorgeous mothers who can work in between the hours for us. And then we do really well with students, too. Yeah, we love students. Those are like our top three avatars that we’re trying to attract outward. So when I post our job ad, we make it clean, we make it kind of sharp, and we really highlight the benefits of working for us in terms of the flexibility, the pay, you know, other things that would attract those ideal people we’re looking for. And then we carefully try to just like post on the right platforms too. We’re really active on Facebook and like those mom groups and the student groups and those areas. And then Indeed, again, it kind of goes back to me knowing how to write the right job description, knowing what to sell on that job description, because job descriptions or job postings are normally like pay-per-click models. That’s how it usually Indeed works, right? You post and it’s a pay-per-click model. That’s how you’re charged based on your budget. So if you understand that, you can obviously curate the content that way. And then we really just have a really simple two-step interview process, right? It’s a phone screen. We try to narrow down the resumes that come in. If we get like 30 resumes, we try to narrow those down to 10, right? And then we might reach out to those 10 for a phone screen. On that phone screen, we’re just spending like 10 minutes with these people, really small amount of time to ask those qualifying questions, right? Do you have reliable transportation? What’s your availability like? Any background concerns we should be aware of, right? Like why did you leave your last job? This is kind of the expectation of our job. Set those proper expectations. This is a tough job, right? This is definitely a grind. You’re working, you’re bending, you’re squatting, you’re doing baseboards type of thing. And then if that goes well, then we’ll move them to the in-person interview where we have them come to our office. And that’s more of like a 30-minute, 20, 30-minute conversation. We kind of reinforce those disqualifying questions. It’s a vibe check. It’s a big vibe check. Yeah, right. And then I have this interview guide that has some situational and behavioral-based questions. These are things like, hey, how would you handle breaking something in a customer’s home, right? Or like, you know, being on time to this job is super important. You know, tell me how you manage your time or how would you communicate if you were running 10 minutes, 15 minutes late to a job? Things like that because you just want to look for like thoughtful answers, right, that people can understand how to respond to. And then after that, we try to get them in quick. We put them into our five-day training super quick. and I love the term hire fast and fire faster because you usually know pretty quick if that person’s not gonna work and it’s usually never gonna help you or your business if you keep them.

Jessica: We’ve kept people way longer than we’ve needed to only because they were a body, right? And it never works out. For sure. And I usually know within two days if it’s gonna be somebody, but then sometimes I’m surprised and they just haven’t cleaned for a while or like, you know. Yeah. But we generally know within that first week if they’re going to work out or not.

Ibrahin: So moving quick is critical, especially when hiring. I mean, you got to think there’s a statistic that Indeed throws around that like the top candidates on average only stay in the market six to seven days. Meaning like the moment they start their job search, they’re going to accept a job within six or seven days, a job offer and start that. Right. Because they got bills to pay. Right. Like any of us. So so you definitely have to be quick, just like you are with reaching out to new customers.

Training Process and Red Flags

Stephanie: I got you. So tell me about during that training process, Jessica, like what kinds of things are giving you green flags versus red flags that would make you make that call? And has it been because for us, we have definitely been better at like realizing the red flags, but it’s still hard sometimes for us to pull the trigger of like, okay, these are the red flags. We know, but then we’re like, but maybe, but maybe that, you know what I mean? Like, you know what I mean? It’s like, I can fix him. Yeah, right. You want to just fix everybody, right? Solve all their problems. So green flags, I really like the people who can follow, like, you know, whenever I start training, we’re in the master bathroom. This is how we do a bathroom, right? High dusting, top to bottom, you know, you’re whatever. And, and then I send them into their own bathroom, right? Obviously I go check that, you know, I feel like it’s really obvious when somebody is like self-motivated right when they’re like oh I have cleaning experience or I don’t but either way we also have like a really awesome laminated sheet that has like everything you do on a maintenance clean everything you do on a deep clean and it’s I made it in can that’s very cute so it’s easy to follow so I’m like refer to your sheet right like you’re gonna do this whole wing and if somebody keeps coming up to me and they’re like I don’t know what to do next what do I do next right that’s like a huge conflict but somebody who I’m like you know I sent them to go to the bathroom and then they did like two other kids rooms and they’re like okay I did this and this and I’m like hell yeah that’s what because again you have the tools and and if you have any type of cleaning experience you know you don’t need you shouldn’t need your hand hold held right um so I feel like the more the less hand holding I have to do within those first few days that’s kind of how I gauge it you know, we want people to be able to walk into a kitchen and kind of know exactly what to do, right? After cleaning two or three kitchens, they should be able to do that. And if they can’t, and they’re still looking to me for every answer, like you got to go, right?

Ibrahin: For sure. We want people who can be independent, self-starters, right? They don’t necessarily, they come in like that and come in asking questions, you know, they come in kind of ready to go. Yeah. Communication is that authentic communication is our second core value. And we really try to look for that and people that we hire. So yeah, if you’re coming on board and you’re really communicative on the front end and through the process, we like that because it’s normally going to translate well, right? Whereas if you have a candidate that’s like taking a day to respond to you or kind of really short answered, it’s usually not a good indication that they’re going to end up being a good employee when they come on because I mean, most people are on their best behavior when they’re looking for a job, right?

Stephanie: Right. Yeah, that’s so true. It’s like, if they can’t even do the first initial wooing period correctly, then they’re not going to be able to sustain really great efforts throughout. So what I’m hearing is taking initiative, using your resources at hand without being a tit baby basically. And then also like having great communication. So that leads into my question of what are your business core values? Run them through me for me.

Core Values and Brand Identity

Ibrahin: Oh, I like that. So our, I mean, integrity is a big one for us. Integrity is our first one yeah we both come from from you know military backgrounds and families and we just know that this industry kind of has a bad reputation with not having high integrity maybe not showing up to cleans and jobs you know kind of ghosting clients stealing stuff so for us like that’s just something that we want to lead forward and we want our people to just known for having be kind and have strong integrity and that’s a lot of what our reviews are too is like man, your cleaners are just so kind. They’re so warm and inviting, right? And that’s who we want. We want people that we would want to have in our own home, right? So integrity is big. We talked about communication. That goes a long way for us. We’re really good communicators with our customers, our clients, and our cleaners, right? So like we want that in return. And other than that, community engagement is one of our other core values. That’s really huge for us.

Jessica: Especially being a veteran brand, right? And it’s just, we want to be in our community. We’re also a part of like some veterans commissions, like locally in our area. We do our farmers markets. And we actually sell like one of our cleaners, our homemade cleaners and like these really cute glass bottles with a nice label. So we’ll go to farmers markets and like sell those, which it’s not about selling the product. It’s more about just getting in front of people, right? but we really try to employ veterans we have two veterans on our staff right now one’s in her 50s and she loves working for us and you know she works her butt off yeah she’s a grinder um so so the so the the community engagement is really important to us and that’s kind of part of the brand we’re building we actually like don’t run any ads we we we’ve just kind of grown really well based off of our brand organically which is which is awesome seeing the growth we’re seeing and we really just kind of want to figure out how to do more of that and then our other two are community well we talked about community engagement the other one’s lasting sustainability right so like really that that comes back to the products that we use in our customers home we we advertise that we use all natural cleaning products we’ve had our stuff tested and it works really well but it’s also all natural it’s safe for our you know the pets for our customers kids and most importantly our cleaners who are using it on a daily basis right so so that’s big for us and that’s kind of how we give back we do a quarterly deep clean for a disabled veteran in our community um which again goes back to kind of that community engagement and that sustainability we really just we want to be a part of it right we live here we our kids go to school here and it’s it’s really important to us that that we uphold those values Stephanie: So what I want the listeners to hear and really pay attention and hone into like why like there’s several reasons. It’s very clear why you guys are growing the way you are. There’s no question about it. Like as somebody like in my position, it’s like, boom, boom, boom. That’s why this is happening. There’s no mystery about it. And one of the main core reasons I fully believe that you guys have been so successful in this very fast growth is laser focused branding of exactly who this company is and what we do. And number one, why are we doing this? You have a vision. You have a mission. You are very, very clear about like, this is what’s important to us. This is what we want to do for our community. And like, I mean, and obviously, like, that’s personally like how I feel about Serene Clean. So I feel incredibly strongly that to be the most successful cleaning company, we need to have community involvement, we need to be plugged into our area. And we need to have a cause, we need to have something that we believe in. And that can be from multiple aspects. But for you guys really honing in on this aspect of like, you’re a veteran, like, this is something very important to you and you’re hitting it from multiple facets. It’s not just we’re veteran owned, okay? You also go out of your way to hire veterans. You do deep cleanings for veterans. You’re doing all of these community related things. So it’s like a multi-faceted approach to the brand. It’s not just like, yeah, you know, for us, like, yeah, we’re really community involved. Like, we have our adopt the highway pickup like thing, right? Like, we do our adopt the highway. That’s one measly little aspect of the entire brand. So it’s not like people just see that. It’s like, yeah. And for six years, we’ve also, you know, donated to local nonprofits every single month that the employees choose and all of these things, right? That it’s like this. Like if people know Serene Clean, it’s we’re involved in the community. And that’s exactly what you guys are doing in a really unique and specific way. And I just love that. And what you said earlier about Jessica being, you know, the face of the company and that that is a really good thing because it’s such a lot. It’s a beautiful face, number one. Number two, it’s such a niche. Like, you are a woman. You are a veteran. You are very proud of what you do. You’re very passionate, as you guys mentioned. And so, like, all of these things in combination really build, like, it’s a no-brainer on how to build this brand. Like you said, you don’t have to advertise because people come across you. And, you know, if you heard the concept of purple cow, you guys are a purple cow. You stand out because you have a perspective that other cleaning companies don’t, because most cleaning companies are incredibly generic. I cannot pick you apart from each other, right? And that’s not to be rude. It’s just, it’s the truth, you know? And so if I, if I came across you guys and I’m looking and I’m like, oh shit, this, this stands out because if I’m going to choose, you know, here’s an apple and here’s another shiny apple, but this shiny apple, you know, has this interesting flavor combination, then I might go for that, you know, because it stands out to me. And also, it lends itself well, obviously, to having high integrity and all of the things that are so important. And I’m really happy that you touched on like the reputation of our industry. And frankly, like, yeah, that’s integrity is our top core value as well. And there’s a reason for that. Because it’s like, we’re doing something that people have to be able to trust us in. And so all of that to be said, like kudos to you guys for having such intentionality about your brand. I know, and it may have come just very naturally to you just from your guys’ brains. And I think that branding sometimes is very confusing to people because they just, they’re feeling like aimless or all over the place where it’s like, it’s just that laser focus, you know, exactly who you are.

The Foundation of Success: Show Up and Do What You Say

Ibrahin: For sure. I love, I mean, you said so many good things there about like our brand and, you know, who we are and, and then our industry, of course, right? And then and you’d be surprised how many customers like will just hire us because we just show up on time and we do what we say we’re going to do, right? It’s like that’s sometimes enough to just get the business long term, right? We can be a little bit, you know, maybe the quality isn’t always good, you know, not every single claim. But the fact that we’re there when we say we’re going to be we pick up the phone, right? And when there is a complaint, we immediately address it. Like just doing that alone, I feel like sets us apart and puts us ahead of the competition because of, like you said, you know, the what what our industry is kind of known for.

Stephanie: The bar is in hell when it comes to being a successful service based business. And I know that the people that are like struggling to get clients or whatever, like fuck off, Stephanie, for saying that. But I truly believe if you show up and do what you say you’re going to do, you can you can be a millionaire. I really like that. It’s people don’t do that. People do not do that. I had a consulting call with somebody who was all gung ho, a slotted consulting call yesterday that was supposed to show up. She no call no showed me. And she also did not email or communicate. And, you know, no shade to her. And she’s very busy. That’s why her cleaning business is going to fail because of what she just did to me. And it’s like, and that’s, again, I’m not being like mean or anything. It’s just like, listen, like these are the traits that we need to have in our entire life in order to be an excellent business. Like it’s just, it’s very, it can’t be bad in one area of your life. And then that not like trickle into the business. It’s just like, it’s like finances, you know?

Building a Strong Brand Through Intentional Marketing

Ibrahin: For sure. I mean, like to your point, I mean, and that’s just not even just in our, it’s not even just to be a cleaning business owner, right? It’s just to be an entrepreneur. You need to be able to communicate like that and get back to people and follow up, right? Like those are, those are all crucial. But, but I guess what I was wanting to say about branding and, you know, we learned something from a local company or I learned something from a company that’s local that I watched really just skyrocket over the last 10 or 15 years are called Green Mango. They have like these wrapped cars. They’re just like black matte with bright green letters. They pop really well. Like they really leverage their pest, it’s just a pest control business, right? They just do nothing, nothing fancy. But they’ve just like created this brand that pops and that people know of and they think of and and they like and it’s not even just the wrap cars it’s like giving stickers to like new customers and kids out there right and like and just being this like friendly helpful face in the community, which is, again, who we want to be. We have this, like, Jessica has this wrapped purple Tesla that’s awesome, and it pops so well, right? But also, like, we want to be out in the community, engaging and talking to people, and that’s why, like, you said it, when people start these cleaning businesses, it’s almost like they take five minutes to think about, like, what their brand is going to be, and who they’re going to be, and what they want to represent, and it’s like, no, no, no, that’s where you should spend the most time when you’re starting your business, is who do you want to be? Who are your core values? What’s that target customer? How can you kind of set yourself apart because that’s how we’ve done it right is because people find us and not only do they see the awesome reviews but they also see that it’s woman veteran owned right and then they also see that like oh they use all natural yeah all natural products and there’s like a lot of reinforcing there in a competitive space that allows us to easily stand out that’s so true that it is it is layers of things and and really what you’re speaking about is just intentionality when we’re when we are moving into like okay this is a business and I totally understand when you’re coming from like an individual cleaner, or maybe it’s just you and like, you know, your sister and your cleaning or whatever. And so but then you start to shift into like, okay, like, I want this to be a business like it is it’s so important to sit down like who is my who is my avatar for both yeah, customers, but then also employees, those are two different things. You know, what is it that I want to stand for? Like, what are these things that I want to be like the core foundations of the business. And so when you take that time to establish those things, it makes it a lot easier because you took that time to invest into like thinking about it at like a global scale, not meaning the business is going to be global, but like overarchingly, like what, what is this thing going to be? And why does it matter? Like, again, like, I really want the book start with why I read that, like, before I opened the business, and that really honed my like skill of like, what is this all about here? Like, why are we doing this? And obviously, to make a bunch of money. But like, also, also, as this is our legacy, and because this is like what, you know, what we are, are meant to be doing. And clearly like you guys have, have such a, um, a knack for it already with that kind of growth and in that short of time. And so, you know, kind of switching gears to, to any particular negatives, um, not just from you guys, like working together as a couple, has it been pretty easy just staying in your lane or like, has there been butting heads on decisions and how have you guys worked through that?

Working Together as a Couple

Jessica: You want to, you want to go first? He’s the boss. I don’t, I don’t want to get myself in trouble here. So you go first.

Jessica: Well, again, I think that it helped that we, again, started this when it was so small, right? And we’ve just kind of done it together. And obviously the stress today looks a lot different than it did like a year ago when we like had maybe two employees, right? So it’s very different, but he’s a great boss. Like he just kind of tells me what I need to do and I do it and it gets done and things move forward and he does what he’s good at and he has made me a much better manager right I was a mailman for 10 years I didn’t like have to deal with people I was like walking up on your porch right so Jessica’s always got great jobs. So yeah he just really taught me how to be a good manager right because I just I had no experience in that other than managing like my kids and he’s also made me a much better parent just he’s just a great communicator so it’s really easy for us I think to stay in our lanes I’m really good at cleaning he’s really good at like everything else so we just kind of you know

Ibrahin: So I mean so yeah to her point I mean I guess honestly we there isn’t a lot of you know arguing or seeing eye to eye between us even in the business fortunately which I know is not totally common because you know we’re in a high stress environment and that puts pressure on things right and it can be hard to to continuously communicate with you know love and respect in every setting when you’re stressed and when cleaners are calling out and customers are canceling and someone’s complaining about something broken and you know i mean you just got all these things to juggle so so no i mean we we definitely have our moments but but i think we’ve just learned early on that you know like communicating the right way is is doing that in the beginning is and setting the example for our team and our kids is how we’re, we’re going to win. Right. And, and just, you know, losing our cool or, or not kind of communicating properly is it’s never going to help us. It’s only going to prolong, right. Like the goal that we’re trying to reach. But, but to your point, like there are times where we might disagree on something, like there’s like a policy we’re creating. Right. And she’s like, no, it should be done this way. And I’m like, what, that doesn’t make sense. Like, you know what I mean? We need to do it this way. And usually it’s like a, it’s like a me, I’m looking at it from like an operating a COO lens right and she’s looking at it from like a founder like no this quality is important to me like I would rather lose money here and have the quality and we kind of kind of bridge that gap and and sometimes it’ll take us a couple days and sometimes I’ll concede I’ll be like you know what you’re right like it’s not worth it like let’s let’s go with it and sometimes she’ll be like okay like I get it right yeah like I get it now I see where you’re coming from and and that’s that’s just it we usually just have deeper conversations. If we don’t see eye to eye at something, we’ll parking lot it and we’ll wait till our, we have these weekly EOS meetings, me, Jessica, and our office manager where, you know, we kind of go over issues from the previous week. We review complaints, numbers, right? So we’re always trying to stay on top of things. And that’s where we’ll kind of like hash out anything we’re not seeing eye to eye on. But for the most part, we agree. And I think it’s also because our goals are aligned, right? If you’re going to have a business partner in any business, you kind of kind of be aligned with your goals and your values. And that’s what makes it so easy for us in both our marriage and our business.

Partnership Advice and Setting Boundaries

Stephanie: And the reason I’m really kind of hammering into this multiple times is because most people have no business going into business with somebody else that they’re thinking about going into business with. And there is no thought. There’s just, yeah, all vibes, frankly, of like, this is my best friend and we’re going to go into business together. And there is absolutely no discussion on roles and responsibilities, who makes the final call in different areas. And I think I think that honestly, in in a business, if you’re going to have a partnership, you almost have to have that. Like, listen, we’re going to have this discussion. But if it is related to this specific topic, I’m going to make that final call. Because I think otherwise it’s like you’re going to you’re going to just hate each other eventually. And I think if you don’t have those very like if you can’t have that conversation from the get go because it’s uncomfortable. You have no business, one, being married, but two, being in business with somebody, you know, because I’ve seen so many friendships and families absolutely destroyed because they opened a cleaning business together. And it’s like you guys, again, it’s just it’s yeah, it’s like going into a marriage without having these conversations because it is it is kind of like that. It’s a partnership and you’re going to have issues if you’re stepping all over each other’s toes of like, OK, Jessica, you are you are the field expert. Like you, you know, the field, this is what you do. And then JR, it’s like, you’re the operation side of it. Like, it’s like, these are your guys’s expertise and realms. And obviously you have input on on on the other. But at the end of the day, like, you know what you’re talking about, but also that that’s where that communication comes in. And it reminds me of my management team of like, I brought up multiple times in the podcast before of like, wildly different personalities and the way we think of things. But I’m so happy that you said, like, we’re going in the same direction. We’re rowing the boat in the same way. We all have the same values and are very aligned and like we’re trying to reach the same end goal. We just have different thoughts on what the best way is to do that sometimes. And that’s much that’s needed, because if everything was ran exactly how Stephanie thinks is best, like the whole company would probably be destroyed. So like it’s really good that you guys have this like bouncing off point, you know?

Ibrahin: No, for sure, because our perspectives are what allow us to consider both sides. Right. And to really build a service or a product that that can serve all of our customers. Right. Because we are in a space that it’s that no one house is the same and we need to be able to be somewhat flexible. And and and and but that’s just growing so quick. Like like we are like there’s new challenges every month. Right. It’s like we’re not set. We’re not a big five million dollar cleaning businesses like like our coaches are that that we listen to. You know, like we we have things to learn and it’s constantly just rebuilding or changing new things or implementing new policies or or pivoting. Right. Or doing less short term rentals because, you know, those are out of hand, you know, or whatever the case may be. So we I think I think totally or I think also a big hack to to kind of business partnership is just not bringing your ego right to the table. And you’re good at that for us. Yeah, there’s there’s no ego involved. You know, even even though our our names are on the business. Right. Like when we’re talking to cleaners or we’re talking to our office manager or we’re talking to customers, we talk to everyone the same. And when we do have issues to deal with or when it’s time to claim the certificate of excellence or the award that we’re getting from the Chamber of Gilbert, we just know who’s doing that. There’s no competition. There’s no, like, oh, I’m making the decision, right? It’s just like, guys, how can we win together, right? And that’s ultimately the culture that we want to live and breathe in our business to allow us to constantly grow and scale. And I think that’s what’s helped us a lot, for sure, that there is no ego involved. It’s just like we’re all a team.

Hiring Veterans and Building Culture

Stephanie: Yeah, we’re all trying to obtain the same thing. And I love that you just touched on culture and pivoting and all of those wonderful things that we need to really be cognizant of. And that’s the beautiful thing about a strong brand, too, is it kind of really lends itself to a strong workplace culture because it gives you clarity as to what it is that you care about. And then you invite people in who also care about those things. I know that you guys have employed veterans before. So what does what does that look like? Like, is it just giving I don’t know the terminology, is it preferential like hiring or like how would you describe like your if you want to increase the amount of veterans on your team? What does that look like? Like, how are you finding them?

Ibrahin: Yeah, you know, we definitely not necessarily preferential hiring. I mean, obviously, as you know, hiring, you know, you have to be really careful with you can’t say. Oh, yeah. Right. Which I’m obviously very familiar with. I’m not. I’m just like, what? You speak Spanish? That’s great. No, I think that our brand obviously attracts, right, which goes back to the why the employment, we talked about brand from like a consumer perspective. But there’s this thing in my in the recruiting industry called employer branding. Right. And it’s kind of like same thing. Like, what do you think of this company when you think about their brand? Whereas like you might think of like Amazon and think that that’s a massive, behemoth, incredible brand, right? Lots of money. But then you think about Amazon and working for Amazon and the reputation of working for Amazon is not the greatest, right? It’s usually like burnt out. It’s like so many hours, you know, like not the best environment. So like that’s why an employer brand and a customer brand can be totally different. So for us, like we try to really just hammer on who we are as an employer. And I think veterans just generally attract to us. I mean, for sure, if we see a pool of like 20, 30 applicants and a couple of them are veterans, like, you know, we’re going to grab a seat. We’re going to make sure we interview them. Yeah, interviewing them and calling them. But the process is the same, you know, in terms of what we’re looking for, in terms of like those disqualifying questions and the vibe check. If it’s a vibe check, no matter what, whether you’re a veteran or not, like we don’t want to hire a veteran just because they’re a veteran. Just because of that. Yeah, exactly. But we definitely will take chances on people that we feel good about who come from that veteran background. And yeah, more often than not, it works out for us because when they come in, they have that affiliation. They have that kind of like, they feel like they belong to something. Exactly. Right. They feel like they’re doing a little bit more. And then they know that we give discounts to veterans. We give 10% off to every veteran that we clean for, whether it’s a deep clean or a reoccurring clean. So I think that helps for sure.

Jessica: And we also have a really great culture, right? We now have probably like five or six employees who’ve been with us for like almost a year, you know, like we’ve completely regutted our staff many times.

Ibrahin: Which is pretty great because we’ve only been in business for a year and a half, you know.

Stephanie: I know what you mean, like that longevity, even when it’s just, you guys are a young company. So that means a lot. So because that the nice thing is that talking amongst themselves. When you bring a newbie in, it’s like, okay, you’ve had these people who have worked with you guys for a year, know that you’re legit and are good people. And then they’ll communicate that, you know, subtly or not to the new folks. So it’s a really good thing when you can have those longer term staff members for a lot of reasons, obviously.

The Mass Exodus Crisis

Ibrahin: Yeah, you’re right. They definitely talk. And we had a situation where we actually got like five cleaners from another cleaning business and we hired one and she brought like five other cleaners yeah and and we thought this was going to be great and glamorous right we were like heck yeah they have experience they know each other like they’re going to work well together we’re just going to grow the hell out of this thing we ended up like losing business that month because they they not only did they come in and kind of like rot the culture as a team they did they were all very clicky they were like clicky they were like gossipy mean girls club kind of thing yeah like they all had a group chat where they would like talk shit about other people and like not everybody was and it was and then we made the mistake of going on vacation like for a week well like it was our family vacation with our kids and and um we still had these team members on board and they ended up quitting right in the middle of our vacation, on like a Sunday night, two days into our vacation. They were like, I quit today. Like and we had a full schedule, right? Like and they were just like, we’re out. And we’re in Utah, right? We can’t even like get their stuff.

Stephanie: Talk me through that, guys, because that is actually a really common occurrence, it seems like where it’s like a mass exodus. I’ve had multiple interviews where that’s happened for people. So, uh, yeah, talk talk me through that entire thing of like, one going up to it, obviously you felt good about them, but were the signs already there before you went on vacation?

Ibrahin: For sure. Yeah, signs, signs were already there. I mean, not even looking back. I mean, yes, to Jessica’s point, looking back like if we would have done it differently and we would have let them go before we went on vacation because it would have been a less of a headache to deal with letting them go before a vacation than to deal with them quitting in the middle of vacation, which is like truly a lesson of like don’t keep crappy people longer than you should especially if they’re rotting your culture and they were we just had this trip planned for a month and we were like let’s let them go when we get home yeah massive mistake and a huge lesson for us right like don’t do that listeners like if you know you need to let someone go let someone go because it’ll almost always bite you in the ass but no we uh i mean it was very stressful and we had our five kids that we were dealing with we were literally trying we were literally at an ice cream shop in like downtown when we got their texts and they both texted us back to back one of them quit, then another one quit. And it was like 6pm on Sunday. And I’m like, yeah, and we had this, we had this full like $12,000 a week scheduled with everyone. So this is how we handle it. First of all, we after we shit our pants, right? And got back to our Airbnb. We’re like, kids, we need an hour. Yeah, kids, we need an hour. Leave us alone. So we literally just looked at what clients that we could we could immediately cancel and not have the worst bounce back, right? Like the clients we have the best relationship with, the clients that we’re going to understand, the clients that we could pick up the phone call and be like, hey, I’m really sorry. Like we’re dealing with kind of a personnel issue. We’re out of town. Like, I think we’re going to have to cancel you clean, but we’ll make it right kind of on your next, right? Give them a discount. So basically we’re just taking a loss. We’re losing revenue, you know, just having these difficult conversations, but immediately jumping on it, right? Because the more time that goes by, the harder it’s going to get to do. You got to kind of just put your big boy pants on and say, all right, I got to deal with this head on. And that’s what we did. Most of the customers were understanding. Yeah, they were really great about it. I think we only lost two reoccurring customers out of like the 12 to 14 we needed to cancel in that week period. And then we got home and we just immediately, you know, got to fixing things and got to hiring and obviously got rid of that team really quick, had meetings with all of our current employees just to be like, hey, guys, like, you know, I’m kind of sorry for even letting this happen because some people were stepping up. They were working extra. You know, they might have been like a 20 hour cleaner and they were like, hey, I’ll go ahead and put in 30, 35 while you guys are away. Right. So it was it was a lot of stress on the whole team. So we definitely had to come back, acknowledge that, apologize and then just check in with everyone and make sure that they were still solid. Right. Because if we were going to lose more people, we wanted to know about it then. And I mean, it took us like a month to rebuild the staff and kind of just get everybody trained and reaffirm the culture and let people know that like hey mistake on us but like you know we we admit we saw kind of the warning signs and and in the future we’re going to be better right about who we bring in especially like five cleaners at a time you know um and we ended up also letting go of another one that was on that team uh that we just kind of knew was part of the gossip and the drama. And now this month, we’re going to do our best month in company history. That was in July that that happened.

Learning from Crisis and Building Resilience

Stephanie: So you had a summer shit show too. So did I with turnover. Yeah, summer, man. Well, one, I just fully can acknowledge the level of accountability and like what that actually did, like turning such a negative situation into actually a really strong culture builder, just like when I had that, you know, that cleaner steel from the church and like And I, you know, set that whole team down, you know, cleaner that been with me for four years and like this incredibly strong level of candor and just being honest and saying like, this is what happened. And and, you know, and for you guys to to actually take that stuff further and apologize, like the level of humility that that takes one to the respect that your team that did stay and stepped up, like you said, because when you do have a shit show going on, the good people are the ones who typically are suffering. because their schedule is getting changed a bunch. They’re stepping up and taking on more to help. And like, so just so important to not take that for granted when you do have rock stars who are helping in that situation. And also the fact that you can rebuild. You know, this type of crazy shit, it’s going to happen to like every business. Like every single one of us, probably many times are going to go through kind of like what I would say, like feels like an apocalypse in the moment. That’s a good way to describe it. and then for you guys that like okay now you’re on your vacation like like looking back do you feel like you were able to actually like enjoy or was it like you just wanted like you were anxious it was stressful they definitely like yeah we definitely didn’t enjoy most of the vacation but again it’s like a learning experience right don’t go on vacation when you know half of your team is like shit but again we’re new cleaning business owners we’re even though we needed to go through Yeah, we need to go through it. Just from that. And that’s why anytime we’ve had stuff like that happen where, you know, you could just see it from such a negative perspective. But it’s like, whoa, look how much we just learned. Like, we learned so much. We grew so much as leaders. We grew so much as a team. So, like, honestly, anytime shit shows happen, I’m like, I’m kind of grateful for it. Because as long as, you know, it’s not a repeat thing because we should like we should be learning from it. But, yeah, so it’s like you guys made it through. and are already like you said are about to have your highest highest month ever so and also out of that out of those like five girls came our office manager she was an office manager for them she was like the last one to come and the only one to stay and she’s like our rock like we love megan so much and she did come from those from that shit show but she’s like the one yeah so if and i always say like if i would do it all again if we like got megan you know what i mean So we did gain a lot out of that experience. And she is an incredible and she’s not going anywhere. She like wants to grow with us for 20 freaking years, you know? So we did get Megan from that.

Ibrahin: Yeah, we did. And like you said, it was an incredible learning experience. You kind of have to go through those things, learn some of them and know that, okay, maybe we don’t bring on five or six people from one company at the same time, because it does kind of put you in a little bit of a vulnerable place, especially when your team is only the size of 12. that’s 50% of our people, right? So you have to consider that. And, and while I was kind of aware of it, I didn’t really, you know, see it well enough in and kind of pay attention to the warning signs. So but yeah, it was it was a learning experience. And we’re happy it happened, because, you know, we got Megan out of it. And we’ve learned a bunch. And I think that the biggest lesson is like, these things are going to come up in your business, right? Like that, that one star review is going to come in, and it’s going to sink your heart. And you’re going to be like, what the hell, I hate this. I don’t want to do this anymore. Right. Like that’s not who I am. And then that person’s going to quit and you’re going to have that 14 hour cleaning day that you got to go out there and do. Right. Or someone’s going to call and tell you that you ruined their oven or something. And like, it’s going to be the most gut wrenching conversation because you’re like, oh my God, do I have to replace this $1,200 oven? Right. It’s like, it’s, it’s tough. It’s just struggle. And all the weight comes back onto us when you’re the cleaning business owner. Right. And you have to make those decisions. But like, I guarantee you, if you guys push through, and you stay focused, and you understand that, like, the bad is only bad for so long, like that having that short kind of mindset when those things happen and, and, and pushing forward is what has led us to kind of where we’re at in this short period of time. And that’s why we think we can, you know, be a $10 million business with three to five locations in the valley eventually, because like, you got to have the grit to get past you know those those those challenging times because they’re only going to keep coming.

Jessica: We have this poster on our wall in our office. Yeah, it’s like huge. It’s just like the whole wall and it says, fuck your feelings, follow the plan.

Stephanie: Yeah, it’s like Leila’s favorite. Yeah, yeah, me too. I know I was like I need merch for that because I just I love her and just like she’s such an inspiration to me for sure. So she is like a you know a woman leader of like you know there’s a lot of I think a lot of people you know specifically highlighting on the female aspect of it of like oh see that as like a negative or like we’re going to be treated differently or whatever it’s like do you know how much benefit I get from being a woman leader like there’s so many positives to it and like you like even just being the brand um the brand the face of the brand And like having that connection and that like, I don’t know, like I see it as a huge superpower. And like the way I lead my team is probably very different than how a man would. And like it’s it’s working out well, you know what I mean? So it’s just like you can skin the cat of a variety of ways. And so, yeah, I just love having like really strong female, you know, people to look up to for sure.

Female Leadership and Power Couples

Ibrahin: I love how there’s been like a transcendence of like females and entrepreneurship and leaders from, you know, Leila to Cody. Like they’re just, they’re, they’re incredible. They bring new perspective and they show that anyone can do it. And truly you can, right. From any background you come from. And Leila is obviously a great example. We, we love Alex and Leila. They’re obviously like the epitome of like the power couple. Right. What we all strive to be. Yeah. I actually went to Alex’s, one of Alex’s workshops a couple of months ago. And that was really cool. But, but yeah, that’s why we love kind of changing the status quo in this industry and doing it together. Right. As a couple. and dominating because yeah, we also share the stress, but we also want to show people that it’s doable. You know, you can do it. And, and like you said, you can be a strong female leader in, in our industry and, um, and crush it.

Stephanie: Absolutely. And I just, I love the vision that you guys have. I mean, you want to have multiple locations. You want this thing to grow. It’s still a baby. Like you’ve done this in such a, in such a short time. And let me tell you, like, once you start getting those systems in place, like, again, looking back at like Serena Clean’s trajectory, I’m like, oh shit we were adding hundreds of thousands of revenue every year and i’m just like this is crazy like how is it like i didn’t remember that happening but like it did and and so like for you guys like you’re putting these building blocks in and it’s about to like fucking pop off like i just fully believe that seen it like that we’ve added like 26 new customers to the schedules in september and it’s like the 18th like whatever you know it’s like we’re we are growing.

Jessica: We’re not running any paid ads. It’s just all organic growth. We, I’m driving on the freeway and I get, we get like a lead and he’s like, Hey, I saw, I’d see you in your purple Tesla. Are you driving right now? And I’m like, yeah.

Systems and Scaling

Stephanie: The branding of it, but like that goes, like what, what this is a testament to is that you guys have systems in place because shit would be falling apart. And I’m not saying it doesn’t, but like, that’s where you start to tweak it stuff like that. But like for everybody who’s listening, who’s like, I want that. Well, you might not be able to handle it because you don’t have systems in place. And I mean that in every aspect. Okay, hiring, the sales aspect of it, completing the clean, what does that look like? Follow-up processes, the bookkeeping and accounting, like all of these areas have to have processes in place because once we start adding 20 to 30 clients in a month, well, like if you feel totally overwhelmed by that, then you don’t have the right things in place because you should be able to do that. You know, and once you’re able to handle that, then it’ll just keep growing and growing. and new problems will show up. Like we’re tweaking our cleaning checklist for the 7,000th time. You know what I mean? We’re still not right. And so it’s not like it’s ever perfect, but just continual improvement, you know?

Ibrahin: That’s definitely the season we’re in is like building systems in our business to support the growth and the scale, right? Because like you said, you need that. And it’s a challenge between cleaning, training, hiring, and having five kids. Don’t forget that. And another business, right? like on top of this, like it is building systems are also one of those things that like, you can’t just log in and do, right? It’s not like just dealing with an upset customer. It’s like, it’s normally, it’s normally like a project that has a start and an end kind of, you know, goal and timeframe and, and all these like requirements and, and, you know, things that sometimes they could be bigger. Sometimes it’s just as easy as going to chat GBT and saying, give me this template. Right. And then, you know, posting that and having it adopted and reiterating over time. But are probably the biggest challenge that every cleaning business is eventually going to face if they want to scale. And just for some context, I think me and Jessica did just about everything in the business until we got to about like 30,000 a month in business. And then that’s when we brought on like a VA virtual assistant to hire kind of some smaller tasks. And then when we got to like that 40 is when we got our office space, we were tired of working out of our garage. I know some people do storage spaces but we were in our garage for a bit and then when we got to about 40 we were like okay we need an office space this is like this needs to happen um and then around 40 yeah around that 40 mark is also when we brought in our office manager megan uh to kind of take on talking to customers booking customers scheduling helping prep bags for new cleaners and doing inventory and like washing laundry at the office um but before that was all him i was like out cleaning all day and he would be doing all of the customer stuff, just all the schedule, everything. And it was so exhausting.

Ibrahin: Oh my gosh. So like, that’s kind of how the progression has looked in our business. Now that we’re at 50, we just brought on a bookkeeper and that bookkeeper, you know, it’s only 175 bucks, 175 bucks a month. And they’re going to do all the accountants, reconciliation, all the bookkeeping, take all that off my playwright. So it’s a lot easier. And, and I think that’s important. You mentioned Stephanie is like, it’s important to start having that help as you grow and have, getting a little bit of that time back in accounting and customer service and VAs are great. I mean, we pay our VA $6 an hour. And if they’re in different countries, exactly. And like, you know, she is the best. Oh my gosh. I would fly her here tomorrow if she could. She’s so great. I love it. I love her so much. Yeah. So, so definitely considering that. And of course, like us using go high level, that CRM has so much automation built into it, right. That you can set up campaigns and responses to customers. And I mean, just leveraging those things in your business will give you guys so much time back in your day.

Stephanie: Oh, absolutely. I really that was that would be one of my biggest regrets, I would say, is earlier on. Like, I wish I would have integrated a true CRM because obviously that makes my scheduling software with light CR capabilities. But a true CRM is a separate entity. And I whereas at this point, we’ve completely built it out custom and click up to what we need, which is great. But it’s like if I had just done that, if I had even known about it, even the way I was tracking leads and stuff so manually, like so that like utilizing software, you know, and I think some people get a little gung ho and try all the softwares and then get overwhelmed. But it’s like thoughtfully utilizing software is truly like, I mean, you can’t have the type of growth without doing that. It’s going to break.

Ibrahin: Yeah, you’re right, though, too. You know, you don’t want to overcomplicate it. There’s like, and there’s a point, like, you also don’t want to bring on too many softwares too early in your business because they could suck out your cash flow, right? And these things do cost money, you know, having Google and an email and an account, right? Like that costs money. Having Slack. We use Slack, too. I know you do. Which is, we love Slack, right? We have a channel, an operations channel, where we can kind of help boost that culture and communicate with our teammates, right? And then we use Go High Level for our CRM, and we use Zedmaid for the scheduling feature. And it’s nice because those kind of talk to each other and do a lot of automation. QuickBooks is for our invoicing, which, again, is automated. So there’s so many things that you can set up to really kind of help your business run, you know, without you having to do every little thing. Manual thing, yeah. Which we were good about setting up early on. And I think because of my background and experience, that helped. But definitely good for other business owners to look into.

Parenting While Building a Business

Stephanie: Yeah, definitely. Huge leg up there just having that technological savvy from the beginning. So for you guys, what does this next year look like? And also, I just want to ask, how old are your kids? Because again, I have no children. And I was able to… So I cannot fathom doing what you guys are doing right now with kids. Or just all of our listeners who are our parents. I’m just like, I don’t feel as successful as maybe other people think because I don’t have kids. Because I’m like, I don’t think I could have done this with children.

Jessica: It’s a lot. I have a six-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. And he has a 10-year-old daughter and 11 and 13-year-old sons.

Ibrahin: Yeah. So five kids, 13, 11, 10, 8, and 6, three boys, two girls. Very, very busy. And we try to be – Luckily, we split custody. So, like, we do get, like, every other weekend with no kids. We’re a blended family. So that helps us. I’m on a week-on, week-off schedule. But week-on with my kids, it’s really just, like, about them, spending time with them, getting them to their jujitsu wrestling football practice and just having dinners together you know and then when we don’t have my kids for that week off it’s like grind right it’s like it works a lot let’s get some big projects done let’s you know schedule these important things and and build build build and our kids like they they know what we do and they know like our goals and they’re they’re a part of it they love it um and yeah it’s just it works it flows and and i think we we really just try to have, you know, good, good home culture too, within, within our kids. And that helps us kind of operate, but don’t get me wrong. There’s no stressful days. You wake up in the morning, you got the two sick kids and two call outs and a complaint from a customer. I’m like, great. I need some coffee.

Stephanie: Oh my gosh. That really is amazing. And just, you know, as for like any words of advice for other fellow parents who, who are still in the field and dealing with that, Like, what do you got to say? Like, how do you guys help manage that?

Advice for Parent Entrepreneurs

Ibrahin: No, I mean, it’s, you know, I mean, obviously just knowing what’s important to you, you know, and like, don’t, I never want to be the business owner or the dad that loses sight of like, you know, which truly important relationship with my kids. And I know that I only have like another 10 years, right, before they’re off and they’re adults of their own. So like my hierarchy is like definitely my relationship with my wife and my kids, right? And knowing that that comes first and that if I’m going to sacrifice, it’s going to be for them. Right. And then any sacrifices for the business is going to come second. Right. So to that. And and that’s tough because that takes up a lot of time. And then the business does. And I’m also just like we’re also just adventurous people. Right. Like we we like to go out and dance. We like to travel. We like to go to the beach. Right. Like we’re big foodies. Like, you know, so so for us, it’s like really just being able to prioritize and knowing that, like some days are just going to be shit. Some days are going to be tough. You’re just going to have like, man, this is going to be a rough day. You’re like, I cannot wait to go to bed and just have this day be over. But the beautiful thing about being the freaking humans we are is you wake up, fresh start. It’s a new day. And I think that if you’re living intentionally and you’re working hard, like things, good things will come your way. And it will kind of get easier. And that’s how we operate, right? We don’t expect anything to be easier given to us. We know it’s going to be hard. We know that being parents and business owners are trying to grow this thing to a behemoth of a business is not easy, right? Like if we want it easy, we’d both be working at the post office, you know, like Jessica was doing. But that’s not what we want. And we want to show our kids that we can be parents and still achieve big shit in our life. So, yeah, I mean, I think that’s the advice I would have is just to keep pushing. And don’t forget your priorities, you know, in the midst of it. And just communicate. Communicate with your kids. Don’t be afraid to let your kids know what’s going on. Don’t be afraid to let your kids know, like, hey, I’ve got to deal with this really upset customer. As soon as I’m done, I’m going to make you mac and cheese, and we’re going to party, right? Just doing that, I think, is truly half the battle. You talked about kind of what our plans are for the rest of the year. I guess we could leave off on that. Rest of the year, obviously, holidays are coming up. So is our wedding. Our wedding is like the beginning of December.

Ibrahin: Yeah. Yeah, we’re actually going to a cleaning business owner mastermind that our coaches put on in New Mexico. Like next week. So we’ve got a bunch of travel coming up, our bachelor and bachelorette party, the wedding. But also us getting to kind of that million-dollar business mark is really what we’re kind of eyeballing here. Yeah, yeah. And we’re closer now than we’ve ever been before. I think that’s like an 83K a month run rate that we’re targeting. Yeah. So I don’t know if we’ll get there by the end of the year because we’ve got so many things going on. But definitely, hopefully by March, we can achieve that. Because once we do that, we want to open a second location in a town that’s only 30 minutes from us that has booming growth. Tons of customers there already. Yeah, and more of our target customers. So those are our plans while just being great parents and trying to help other business owners and people in our community. That’s who we are.

The Challenge of Airbnb Cleanings

Stephanie: That’s amazing. Well, yeah, drop those Airbnbs on because those suck.

Ibrahin: We’ve been really tactical about Airbnbs.

Stephanie: I do want to talk on this for a minute because they are hard to fit into a normal schedule. So you have to be very tactical. That’s a good word for it.

Jessica: Last Airbnb season was rough.

Ibrahin: Yeah, and it seems like there’s a good demand there, especially here. It seems like there’s less quality Airbnb cleaners than there are just residential cleaners in that space. And you’re right. It’s got to be between that 11 to 3, 10 to 2 time frame. It’s such a weird time. If it’s more than like six beds, seven beds in a house, it’s really tough for one cleaner to handle. You normally need multiple. And it’s a different pricing model. It’s a different cleaning process. You’ve got to start with laundry. You’ve got to use a speed wash. right it’s like so it’s a whole different training cycle too so what we’ve decided is if we’re going to take new airbnbs they need to be in our primary target location which is either chandler or gilbert where we live because we need to be able to get to it easily right easily and quickly um and and we need to be able to basically you know send floaters or just a team who who can like substitute that route for the day so if it’s if it’s outside of that surface area we don’t want it even if it’s a great price. And then the price also needs to be, you know, within our parameters, right? Yeah, like we need to make more money on an Airbnb clean than we’re going to make on a residential cleaning if we’re going to take it on. We’re really picky. And then I think the last caveat, yeah, I think the last caveat to that is kind of like the smaller things, like do they have a solid washroom drying system? Do they have multiple linens on, you know, in place? You know, how are the owners are good about restocking stuff like exactly yeah yeah what like calendar do they use type of thing so if all that aligns we will take them on but more often than not we’re saying no to short term rentals last airbnb season we were so overwhelmed we had like fucking 20 airbnbs i was like and then they’d be like five of them on a monday right like they all show up on mondays it was rough we learned a lot for sure it was tough it was really hard um you can make good money on them. But you got to be careful because it is kind of a whole different business model.

Stephanie: It is. I totally agree. And I’m so glad that you guys mentioned that of like being very discerning which ones you take because we same thing. We said yes to all of them. And then we’re just like, oh, this doesn’t work that way. And so also like that. I’m sorry, I live by an airport. So like the planes, man. I think that being incredibly discerning of like, yeah, the location you need to make more money and it just sucks because there is so much money to be made in vacation rentals like the money’s right there but it’s almost like too much work to do around it’s not worth it in most cases dangling in front of you and you’re like oh man i could easily do that right and that is like we really learned our lesson of like the big ones sucked cleaners are literally crying because they’re so frustrated i’ve cried at airbnbs because i’m like this I can’t the laundry the beds the sheets are fitting I’ve been at an Airbnb till fucking midnight like you’re like frantic it’s so stressful and we really yeah we’re really really really picky and we kind of we also found that it’s it’s easier to just have specific Airbnb cleaners so we have a couple part-timers that that’s kind of all they do we don’t really have our actual residential cleaners really go do that unless we need to we kind of have like two or that we can just call and be like, hey, you know, Monday you’re at two. And yeah. Yeah. And then we kind of like created a new onboarding process too. We have like 30 questions like that we’ll go through with the new Airbnb to make sure we get every detail, everything worked out. Right. And then we’ll create a custom checklist for that Airbnb so that the cleaner really nail it. Because last year, we just don’t want to go through last year again. Massive headache. And yeah, I would run a little. Like, yeah, it’s like, it’s the stakes are so high because it’s like, yeah, there’s one hair in the shower fail done. Whereas I got a residential house, like that probably wouldn’t have even been notified them. Right. Cause they don’t care. So yeah, it’s just like, it’s, it’s incredibly high stakes, high stress. You don’t really get a do over at it. And so yeah, you need to be making enough money to make that administrative stress worth it for sure.

Ibrahin: Yeah. So our rule of thumb is like, we don’t want more than, we don’t want Airbnbs to be more than 10% of our business in general. Okay. So if we’re doing 50 now, we definitely don’t want it to be more than like 5K a month of our business. That way we can just kind of always be able to handle it. But this busy season will be tricky. It’ll be interesting. We’ll see what happens. We picked up a few new ones in the last like month. Yep, yep. So we’ll see how they go. But we’re excited and there’s so much opportunity there. And we don’t want to necessarily tell people not to do them. You just need to be prepared. There are always going to be more work than you think they are. Yeah, it sounds easy. until somebody needs pool towels at 10 p.m. and your cleaner forgot to let them out so you now have to go deal with that right it’s yeah or you have to tell like the owners like for us like no we’re not going to haul firewood no we’re not going to do this no we’re not like they’re wanting property management perks without you know paying for a property manager which is a whole other business that is interesting you know property management we’re like maybe eventually we’ll get into that yeah I am a good interview that you should listen to is oh gosh why can’t I think of she’s beautiful blonde what is her name oh that’s gonna drive me nuts I’m so sorry but she is Tennessee Nashville and she works for like a property management company and owns her cleaning business and they like work together and she said that works really really incredibly well so yeah I think it could could be a really interesting business for you guys but I mean I fully, I mean, in a year I’ll talk to you and you guys are going to be at a million.

Looking to the Future

Stephanie: So like, like I’ll see you then. I’m so, I’m so grateful to have met you both. What a, what a beautiful story you guys have. And I mean, it’s just, it’s really exciting to talk to you guys. Cause I just know like what your future is like, it’s, it’s amazing. So I hope you both are as proud as you should be because you’re building something both like incredibly beautiful, but also the legacy for your children is just incredible. So props to you guys.

Ibrahin: Thank you. Thank you so much. That lot. We really appreciate that. We’re hard on ourselves, but we think that’s what contributes to the grind and the success. And you too. I mean, obviously, you built a great business that operates and is doing seven figures. And I’ve started listening to this a couple months ago, and I’ve actually got a lot of good nuggets and takeaways from this podcast. And I’m picky about what I listen to. So I appreciate you for putting this on and being a solid, I guess, resource in our space.

Stephanie: Yeah, you betcha guys. And if you ever feel like coming to Savannah, drinks on me. All right. Keep that in mind. It’s a great city. So yeah, I would love to see you. And if you want to follow along with your guys’s journey, where can they find you? What’s your website, any Facebook or anything like that?

Connect with Veter Clean

Ibrahin: Yeah. So we’re, I mean, our business is Veter Clean, V-E-T-E-R. It’s clean. I’m all one word. You definitely find that online on social media. We’ve got an Instagram, a Facebook. For me, I’m Ibrahin Robles Jr. My first name is a little difficult. It’s I-B-R-A-H-I-N as in Nancy. You can definitely, if you put in Ibrahin, I’ll probably be one of the only ones on there. It’s such a unique name, but you guys can add me on Facebook, Instagram. I am always, seriously, always open to chat, collaborate.

Jessica: He’s always coaching. People reach out to him all the time just for basic recruiting advice, and he will absolutely take 30 minutes to chat with you.

Ibrahin: All day. All day. He’s the best. I’m not busy enough to not be able to do that and to get back to amazing people doing what we’re doing. So I love when people reach out. I always want to connect and learn from each other. So that’s how you can find us. If you’re a LinkedIn person, I’m on there, too. Always. Yeah. So feel free to reach out. Thanks again.

Jessica: Yeah. Thank you, Stephanie. This was so much fun.

Stephanie: Yeah. This was a delight, guys. Thank you so much. And everybody, make sure you leave some love in the comments because they truly were a joy to speak with. and hit that like, hit that subscribe, and we 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
• Go High Level CRM
• Indeed
• QuickBooks
• Slack
• Canva
• Start With Why by Simon Sinek
• Alex Hormozi Workshops
• Leila Hormozi
• EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)

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