Our Spiciest Takes About the Cleaning Industry

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Introduction

Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And in today’s special Halloween edition of the Filthy Rich Cleaners, I am going to be going through some spicy takes I have about running a cleaning business and just general opinions I have about our industry or how we can behave in our businesses in a certain manner. So if you are just listening on Spotify or Apple or wherever it is that you listen while you clean, or you just clean and watch YouTube and you don’t actually watch, I suggest heading over and watching this one for no particular reason. It’s just, it might be more entertaining. I don’t know. You tell me in the comments. So let’s get into these spicy hot pepper takes, guys. Spicy takes!

Don’t Charge by Square Foot

And my first spicy take is do not charge by the square foot in residential or commercial. I do not think that charging by the square foot is a very good way of doing things for our cleaning businesses. And the reason why is you are very likely to undercharge or not be able to consistently hit particular production rates or predict particular rates of pay because everybody lives so differently. And the same house that is 2,000 square feet in one manner is going to live very differently or have different levels of clutter or belongings than another house. And of course, yes, you can do a walkthrough 100% to kind of mitigate this problem of inconsistency when it comes to charging by a square foot. However, if we’re trying to scale and grow, doing walkthroughs is not an effective way to do that. And most larger cleaning companies are not going to be doing walkthroughs at every single house that reaches out for a quote. It just is not efficient. And as you yourself get out of that role as the owner, you’re going to have to pay somebody to do that. So anything that we have to go do a walkthrough for is probably not an ideal fit for us at our size.

And that’s not to diss that you guys are still doing walkthroughs or anything else, but it is something to keep in mind that the goal ultimately should be either that’s your whole job is estimating because you just love it and you going and seeing people or you do things to make it so it’s not necessary to do that. So the only way to really make square foot or charging by the square foot works is if you have multiple different cents per square foot rates depending on how they report things, right? So you can’t just say on all first-time cleans, we charge 30 cents per square foot and all maintenance cleans, we charge 12 cents. And those are just totally arbitrary numbers that I’m making up. We can’t do that because that just doesn’t work because of the things I described earlier of things not being consistent throughout the houses.

So you may wonder, well, Stephanie, you charge kind of that’s how you do your estimates, right? By the square foot of the home. Yes, and we also take into consideration the condition of the home that’s reported in the booking request when we are giving them a price, right? So if they say it’s a 2,000 square foot home, never been cleaned before, they’ve got four dogs and three cats and seven children, right? We’re going to add more time onto that. So if you’re going to charge by square footage, really the only accurate way to do that is having basically a table of different cents per square foot depending on the condition that’s reported. But even still, I think it’s going to be really, really hard for you guys to nail it because cleanable space is also different as well.

And this really applies in commercial. So a lot of times people are asking what’s your formula for commercial? How much square footage should we be cleaning per hour? And the hard part of that is, is we’re talking cleanable space in a commercial space. And a lot of the commercial locations that you’re going to go clean, you’re not cleaning the whole facility, right? If we’re doing a factory, we’re typically never doing anything on the factory floor. But if you look at the entire facility, it may be 100,000 square feet, but we’re only cleaning 50,000 square feet. But it’s very difficult to discern that without measuring everything out, which none of us are probably going to tell you to do for the most part. Some janitorial companies do that, but we don’t do that either.

So we are going to be doing a walkthrough at every commercial space, and we are going to be noting the spaces and estimating by space how long we’re going to take. Also, depending on the things that you’re doing in the space, that’s another reason that charging by the square foot doesn’t work because depending on the facility, they’re going to want different things. And the different types of finishes that exist in that space will also determine the speed at which you can clean, right? So if we are just vacuuming a space versus we need to dust mop and then damp mop the space, well, that’s twice as long on the same floors, right? But it’s the same size. So we have to take all of these things into consideration. And that is why I do not recommend charging by square footage or paying by square footage. So that is first spicy take, guys.

Don’t Hide Client Information From Cleaners

Second one is I think that a lot of owners are terrified of their cleaners stealing clients, and therefore they try to hide client data from the cleaners, right? So it could be their last names, it could be their phone numbers, that type of stuff. I believe that that is a waste time. And that you really if somebody wants to steal your clients, if somebody wants to start their own cleaning business and attempt to take your clients, they are going to shoot their shot, they’re going to do so right. And so for us, we don’t waste time trying to hide the last names of our clients. We don’t waste time trying to hide the phone numbers from them or anything like that. We just focus on making the company so attractive to work with that a client is going to want to continue to work with our company, Serene Clean, instead of going with an individual cleaner, even if that individual cleaner was great in their house, right?

Because all of the things that we can provide as a company that an individual cleaner cannot, we just really focus on that stuff. We do, for example, in ZenMaid hide our cleaner schedules, I think, so that they can only see out a week forward and a week back. But even I know some owners just simply, they remove all access to any client information. And then they’re handing out the schedules day of, or they are assigning new cleaners to the schedule the day of, and just rotating clients amongst cleaners. So nobody gets loyal. And I just can’t imagine running the business that way. To me, it feels I’m trying to control something that I just would rather let go.

All right. And let me tell you, I have had multiple cleaners open up cleaning businesses that I have trained, right. And then they opened local competition, right? I literally trained and paid for my competition to learn how to do this and to do it that serene clean way, to clean well, clean effectively, efficiently, all of these things. They’re all individual cleaners. They are all individual cleaners. They have their own clients that want to pay those prices and want to deal with the consequences of individual cleaners. And most of those individual cleaners have started a family and or continued having children. And that means that those clients have been without cleaners for a variety of reasons. And of course, no shade. I know some of you, you know exactly who you are, who are cleaning up to you’re in labor about to clean. And so I’m not saying it can’t be possible to do so. Of course it can be. However, the schedule challenges of an individual cleaner compared to working with a company from the client’s perspective, there’s a huge disadvantage there, right? They know that with us, we’re going to have somebody clean as long as they’re open to a new cleaner.

So I just, I think it’s a waste of your guys’ time and energy to be focusing so heavily I’m trying to hide your client’s contact info. They’re going to their house guys. If they want to know their fricking last name, they’re going to find it. They know their address. So if they are tenacious enough to try and go after them for clientele, you know, hopefully the client tells us it definitely has happened before where I have lost clients and they’ve gone to the individual cleaner that used to be an employee of mine. A lot of them come back though, and it’s okay. There’s enough clients to go around. All right. I know that you feel very strongly about that, that that’s your clients. Clients can leave for whatever reason, guys. So all we can do is control what we can and focus on being the best company and making it clear as to why a company is the advantageous situation for the client to go and that we have a lot of things in place to protect them as the homeowner that an individual cleaner may not. And no shade to individual cleaners. You will be not hearing anything spicy about individual cleaners from me because I don’t have any spicy takes. Individual cleaners can be fantastic. It’s just different, right? It’s different.

So how can we just focus on what we can control? And that doesn’t mean trying to hide our client’s identity. It’s an exercise in futility, in my opinion. And I get it. If you’ve been burned, you’re, I got to control this. This can’t ever happen again. It’s going to happen again. You’re going to be fine. They’re going to have 10 clients. They’re going to get full and that’s it. Or maybe they’re the next Serene Clean. Who knows? Either way, they’re going to find a way and you just got to focus on yourself, stay in your lane and stay on being as good as you possibly can be in your business that is spicy take number two.

No Smoking Policy

Number three, this one’s not so spicy but actually I know a lot of you guys have had this situation before and that is we do not clean in any homes that have been smoked in right so it’s not even just active smokers in the home we’re talking is there smoke damage in this house we simply will not clean it at all. And this is something that we put into place probably year two or year three of the business because we just had such negative experiences with homes that have been smoked in and especially if they were still actively smoking in their house. You know for me if somebody’s smoking in their house it may indicate the lack of respect for their space or it just may indicate simply you know they may have issues getting outside the smoke I understand and can empathize but I do not believe that it is fair to put our cleaners into a smoking environment and exposing them to that for hours and hours at a time, they did not sign up for that, right?

And there are so many houses and customers out there who do not smoke in their house, right? I would say 95% of people do not smoke in their house and houses have never been smoked in. So why are we catering to the 5% who, honestly, in my experience, we have had complaints on almost every home that has been smoked in because it’s so hard to clean. It is so hard to clean because if you touch a wall that’s been smoked in and there’s that little patch of white, now you’ve got to scrub all the walls because they’re all yellow and sticky. We have to toss our supplies. Oftentimes our cleaners reek after they clean in these houses. So now you’re inconveniencing them. You’re making them smell bad, which nobody wants. So they’re going to have to change before they go to the next house. And it still may not work because their supplies might stink, right?

So why are we doing this when we’re probably not charging any more for that, right? So if we’re not going to make any more money, it’s wildly inconvenient. And we could easily fill that spot with somebody who doesn’t smoke. And if you say, no, Stephanie, I need to have the smokers houses. There’s nobody else. Well, we need to work on our sales and marketing. Then there’s plenty of customers who don’t smoke in their house. Right. So we have had people throw a fuss over this policy and get offended by it and say that they had plenty of friends that are smokers that were going to hire us. And now they’re going to tell them not to call us. And which is really funny because I would have been, yeah, bitch, we would have told them no to. Please tell all of your friends. We’re good. We’re good.

And that is not arrogant. That is not me looking down on people or anything like that, that choose to smoke in their houses. I am a private business and I can choose who I want to work with. And especially if we’re not discriminating in any flavor, it’s I want a safe work environment for my staff. And that is fair. All right. And they didn’t sign up for that. Right. So we got to think about, again, scalability and all of the ramifications of being a yes man in that situation, because that’s exactly what you’re being. And you may even want to genuinely help these people, right?

We literally put in our estimate email. One of the first things that said is we don’t clean houses that have been smoked in. If you’re looking for somebody, here’s ServPro’s number. And we send them to ServPro’s ways because they have smoke remediation kits and they are there for that. They’re a more specialized service, right, for damage and things. So we do give them, we politely from the beginning, say on our booking request form, our ZenMaid booking request on the website, we say we don’t clean smokers houses. So we say it before they even fill out the booking form. We say it in the estimate email, right? There’s no surprises. And then we say it in the client guidelines that they sign and agree to. So then if we show up and it’s been clearly smoked in, we will charge that cancellation fee, right? And they can’t say that they didn’t know. And if they didn’t know, that’s on them because we have communicated effectively at every stage of the customer relationship.

So that’s on them. And we get to choose that guys, where the owners, we get to say what kind of houses that we are going to work in. And it may make you lose out on business, but I don’t want that business. Anyway, there’s plenty of beautiful homes out there that are not smoked in. So that is next spicy take.

Clients Provide Toilet Brushes

Number four, not super spicy, but it may be something that you guys haven’t considered is we do not provide toilet brushes. And we don’t have toilet brushes in our kits at all. All right. If a client cannot afford to have a $2 toilet brush in every single bathroom of their home, they have no business hiring a cleaning business. And the reason is, and from the client’s perspective, do you really want a used toilet brush that has been in other people’s toilets in your house? They’re kind of hard to disinfect and they typically are going to have the little thing carrying around toilet water, right? So it just would add another layer of prepping the kit on something that’s nasty, something that we are always going to have gloves on when we’re touching on the inside of a toilet. So I just prefer not to even have that contamination anywhere near our kits or having to deal with it. It’s just very unpleasant for our cleaners.

And again, from the client perspective, if you only have one brush in the whole house and we have to carry your dirty little toilet bowl container throughout your house, potentially dripping toilet water over all over no matter how careful you are. Is that what you want in your house? Me thinks not. So have a toilet brush in every bathroom or we just won’t clean that toilet bowl. And that’s what we’ve trained our cleaners to do. And again, we say this in the estimate email. We say this in the client guidelines. So we are being communicative that they need these toilet brushes. And if we come across a house that doesn’t have a toilet brush in every single bathroom, we won’t clean the interior of that toilet. We’ll clean everything else and we’ll send them an email because our cleaner is going to let us know. And then they’re going to mediate that problem because again, it’s a couple dollars.

I really, I don’t think I’m being privileged in saying that they can afford that. They can afford that $2 toilet brush from Dollar General to have, to make it easier on the cleaner and make us more efficient and make the cross-contamination throughout the entire process of home cleaning less of a problem. So 100%, go ahead and expect this from them. The only exception is of course, move-out cleans. We are going to have the disposable toilet wands. And for us, the reason we really want to cut down on disposable toilet wand use is they’re very, very expensive. And our cleaners will just go through them like hotcakes. So I much prefer and have a very firm rule of they’re only to be used in move-out cleans so that we’re not going through that really, really expensive supply. So sue me if you think that we should be supplying the toilet bowl brushes, but we supply everything else.

No Immediate Family Members Policy

Okay, this one I know is spicy. We do not hire immediate family members of any staff member. And I know, I know that many of you would think that there is no way that you can have a fully staffed cleaning company without that being the case. And I also know that many of you have fantastic teams of cleaners who are immediate family members or even managers or anything like that. And this is another one of those we’ve just had enough bad experiences that we just had to make this rule. Right. And so this we’ve had situations with husbands and wives. We’ve had situations with sisters or siblings, and it just never goes well because when one inevitably leaves or one cannot make it to work or one starts having behavioral issues, 100% of the time, or should I say maybe 99% of the time, we are going to be dealing with problems of the other.

And so then we are dealing with losing two staff members at a time or two problem situations occurring or just awkwardness because everybody says they can handle that situation professionally. Until now, we’re coming into family loyalty issues, right, where one is acting up. We’re having to call them out and it’s creating an animosity on the other’s parts. And I’m not saying that’s everybody, but it’s just been our experience. Additionally, a lot of times when they’re husband and wives, they’re sharing vehicles or if one’s out sick, then the other. We had this happen multiple times. We had a husband and wife duo. And every time one was missing work, the other would miss work. So and they insisted on being on the same account so that they would have the same schedule as well. So it was just all of these accommodations that we had to make where we wouldn’t have to make these in other cases.

And so it just costs we’re very adamant about anytime we can reduce the chances of drama, which is an environment that drama is very conducive in, which is hiring family members and having them work together. We just want to, we want to take it away. We want to take that opportunity away. And I get it. I get it that a lot of you guys have a ton of success. And so I’m not necessarily suggesting that you do this. I am saying the spicy take is that Serene Clean does this and we have no problem with standing by it. Right. And I’ve actually had to get called out on this before from my managers being, no, Stephanie, we can’t hire your XYZ. Remember that’s the policy. And I’m, yeah. But then after I think about it, I’m, yeah, you’re right. Every time I’ve worked with anybody whose family or family adjacent, bad things happen.

So anytime, and we all have the best laid plans, right? We all think that it’s going to be okay. And it almost never is. So again, if you have a great experience with this one, more power to you. It has basically managed to eradicate a lot of potential for drama for us by having this policy. And we may be missing out on some killer staff members. We’d rather not risk it just with our odds of it has not been killer. It has not been good in a lot of ways. So don’t hire family members.

Don’t Want Cleaning Experience

Okay, next spicy take, guys. We don’t want cleaning experience. We do not want our staff members to have cleaning experience. And again, I’ve had guests on the podcast who are exactly the opposite, and they only want people with cleaning experience. They don’t want a newborn baby deer walking in, right? The reason Serene Clean does not want people with cleaning experience or that is not an indicator for us whatsoever if they’re going to be successful here is because oftentimes we have to retrain or teach an old dog new tricks and it’s much harder than if they were just fresh right and they had never been exposed to these concepts before because we have butthead so much with people who have had cleaning experience because they’re well that’s not how we did it XYZ that’s not here, blah, blah, blah, or this is good enough quality. Maybe they came from hotels, right?

And we’ve had just experience after experience where we butt heads on what is basically, you know, what I consider our way or the highway when it comes to specialty, especially quality standards, but even just policies in general, it’s they come in with all of these opinions. And I’m super open to hearing different opinions and different experiences and considering them for Serene Clean. But there is a lot of reason behind what we do, what we do and how we do it. And we put a lot of thought into every aspect of the business. So if you come in here and try to just wipe all of that out and be, well, I know better. One, be humble, right? We try to be really, really humble and say I know that there’s often better ideas out there and I will consider them. But if you’re coming into our business and we have this very set expectation and everybody else is following it this way, but because you think you know better you’re going to do it differently or you’re going to go against policy and potentially put the business at risk. That’s not okay. And that’s another reason why we don’t want them doing that.

So we are hiring on qualities like work ethic and attendance and consistency, great communication, low drama, just being a good person, right? That is what we want to hire on. And if they can physically handle the work, we can train them to clean. We can train them to clean. And if they can’t handle the cleaning, we’ll see that during the training. But just because they professionally clean doesn’t mean that they’re going to be able to do it the way you want. Right. And so we have hired people in the past, it has worked out for a time. But looking at my current staff, I don’t believe any of them, maybe one of them have have cleaned at another company before. But across the board, no. So it’s not something that it’s not an indicator of success for us. And it’s also not something that we are even looking for. That has no bearing on us if we are going to hire them or not. We will consider them like everybody else, but it doesn’t put them above for us as an applicant. So does not matter to me at all. I know some of you guys exclusively are going to hire for that. That’s okay. Obviously, they’re independent contractor, of course, they need to have cleaning experience. I’m talking about W2s. So much less important to me than a variety of other things that I’m going to be looking at.

Scheduling Cannot Be Automated

Okay, next spicy take is something I see oftentimes, especially among the bros of our industry who are getting into this to be passive income, you know, already how I feel about that, that this is not a passive job whatsoever as the owner and that you’re always gonna have to be semi-involved at least four years is scheduling is never something that can be fully automated and you should not strive for automated scheduling. It is simply something that does not make sense and cannot exist in the most efficient version of your business. It just can’t, it cannot. And that is because we are having people physically go to houses and routing and rescheduling and people canceling and calling out. All of these things means that you can never just have it set and forget. Scheduling is one of the most time-consuming parts of our business, despite having an incredible scheduling software, ZenMaid. And I’ve had ZenMaid since day one. And I will still always say this is not something that you should ever think that you can automate. All right. That’s no, we’re in the schedule every day because you know what? People be calling out.

Stephanie: People be canceling.

Stephanie: People be needing random stuff or we need to be efficient with where our cleaners are going. Right. So we have a fairly large service area. And even if you don’t, even if you have a pretty tight service area, we need to look at each appointment and how it plays into the puzzle of the of the schedule. It really is a Tetris game. Right. fitting everything in in the best, most efficient way possible. And we don’t want to be stupid because then we’re wasting money from paying the cleaners to drive further potentially. And or we are having opportunity costs because they could have gone to a closer cleaning or gotten more hours out of that day. So it’s not something that will ever be possible to to automate it by some. And so I think a misconception is that this can be a fully automated business or something like that. You just need somebody answering the phones and you need cleaners and a snazzy website, okay? And I just don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. And maybe I’m totally wrong, but just I see when I’m talking to folks, the podcast has been so enlightening when I’m talking to folks in front of me, meaning they have a bigger business than I do. And they talk about having a full-time scheduler or everybody knows how to schedule, right? That indicates to me that that is not something that can be automated, nor is it something that we can strive for. You can strive for more efficient scheduling, of course, and not wasting time. And of course, avoiding administrative errors, which is why the scheduling software is a mandatory, you fucking need it, right? But doesn’t mean that we should ever make it a goal that well, we’re not going to be nose deep into the schedule every day. That’s just not something that’s possible, nor do we expect that. So it’s just not something that’s going to happen.

No Auto Booking From Your Website

On kind of that flavor of hot takes, my other spicy take kind of related to this is do not let any form of auto booking or auto scheduling occur from your website. This is something that I see a lot of perhaps more inexperienced folks I just want people to be able to book themselves into the schedule. And that is never, ever, ever a good idea. And the reason why that’s not a good idea is because 99.9% of the time, whatever they book is not actually going to make sense on your end or on their end, right? Maybe they want a certain time slot and you have the morning available. But because you don’t know all of the parameters of their house and they haven’t maybe filled out the booking form correct or however it’s calculating how much time it needs in the schedule, it’s not going to be accurate. So say they book 8 a.m. and you have an 8 to noon slot, but really because of their house details, they’re going to need 10 labor hours. And now you’re going to have to reschedule them and disappoint them when you could have just eradicated that option altogether. Right. You’re setting yourself up for disappointing the client by allowing them to auto book, because more often than not, you are going to have to scramble to make it happen. And it’s not going to be efficient on your end.

Again, coming back to the auto scheduling side of things. All right. You could have put them on the next day because you had a team of two that was available all day or something like that. And that would have made way more sense. So just there is no scheduling software out there that can allow for auto booking into the schedule. And it’s actually going to work out the most efficient way possible. It simply is not. And and yeah, I just I’m not a fan of this at all.

No Prices on Your Website

And that kind of segues into other spicy take related to this is I will never have my prices on my website. Never. And I wouldn’t recommend you do it either. Because how the hell are we supposed to get their contact information and sell to them if you just have your prices out willy-nilly and then they get sticker shock because they’re just shopping around and you haven’t had the opportunity and chance to sell them the value of working with you. So if they’re just hopping around, and again, it kind of comes back to episodes before the whole Apple analogy of okay, they are exclusively shopping on price right now, right? And so if we give them the opportunity to see our prices, which may not even be accurate because they may not have filled everything out or you haven’t had the opportunity to ask them the questions that you need to to get an accurate price. And they see that price, they’re scared away or the price is too low because they haven’t entered everything in. And now you’re gonna have to correct it after the fact, which is way worse. It’s just kind of a lose-lose situation.

And so we expect our clients to at least fill out the dang booking form. If they are not willing to do that, then they’re not an ideal client. They’re so worried about us soliciting. And I understand you don’t want people soliciting, but if you go to any home service, anything, you’re expected to fill out a form. You can’t necessarily see the pricing online. And some places do that 100% and it works great for them. So I get it. This is definitely an option and it is just a difference in belief here. But yeah, this is not something I will ever consider. I will never do this because we need to be able to sell to them. And I want that email address. I want that phone number because I want to be able to send them marketing later. I want to be able to follow up with them because if they just see that the first clean is going to be $800 and the maintenance cleans are going to be whatever, $200. And they’re, holy shit, that’s way too, I’m not going to pay that.

Well, if they came back in the email, if I asked it, sent them the estimate email, I attached our cleaning checklist. I had my pretty frequently asked questions video linked there and we sell to them in the email and they, then they respond. They’re, sorry, that is way out of budget. Well, what is the budget? Oh, the budget for the first clean is $400. Awesome. What we can do is a limited hour agreement then. And we’re going to work through your priority list, get as much done as possible. And we can just keep chipping away at the house till it’s fully at maintenance level. How about that option? Let’s work on that. So you see what I’m doing is their objection. I can actually hear it instead of them just jumping off my website because the objection is price, right? But I don’t have any opportunity to counter that objection because I’m not talking to them. So we need them to fill out the booking form. We need them to fill out the booking form. We need them to reach out some way because we need their contact info. So that is why I feel so passionate. No prices on the website. No prices at all.

We Don’t Answer the Phones

All right. This one, I almost don’t want to say because I know that there’s going to be commentary on this, but you know what? I’m just going to be truthful, guys. We, for the most part, do not answer the phones at Serene Clean. We don’t. And we haven’t for years. and I legitimately told my managers to stop answering the phones at all. Probably, yeah, three years ago, maybe, maybe even longer. So I’m confessing my sins. That is, I know, a very spicy take and it is not something that I’m going to recommend to most of you guys to do. And there is a reason that we do it this way. Number one, we have a great phone system. We have OpenPhone. I know that ZenMaid has an affiliate code with OpenPhone, I believe, or that you can get the first month free or something. Maybe we can drop that in the comments below. And, you know, I’m not affiliated with OpenPhone other than just being a customer. And we’ve used them for six months. But previous to that, we always still had a phone system where the calls were recorded and everything was online.

So the problem that I was seeing happen time and time again is that people would be calling for things and we would be on the phone for potentially, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour. And in that time, again, coming back to the concept of opportunity cost, my customer relations manager could have gotten 10 clients the answers that they need, right? So this was strictly a sheer volume of calls versus how fast we could actually help the clients. This does not mean we do not talk on the phone with customers. It means on the first call in, we are not going to answer it. We want to see what they need. And then we will call back with the prompt answer and or email it over. In our voice message box, we are telling them if they are looking for a cleaning estimate, go to the website serene-clean.com and go fill out the booking form, right? Because if they are calling for a cleaning estimate, we really want to funnel them to the booking form.

And the reason why is because then instead of trying to sell to them over the phone and verbally describe what we can do for them, I want to show them. I want to show them. I want to show them the cleaning checklist. And again, I, for the first several years of the business, we followed our call scripts. We closed a lot. It was great. But the problem was just the volume of things. And it’s not something that I was willing to pass off to a virtual assistant or something like that, just because we wanted to keep this in house at the time. And honestly, it was kind of just an experiment of let’s just stop answering the phones and let’s call them back so we can be really efficient. So the person that they need the question from. So let’s say they had a billing question or something. This way, April, who’s in charge of that, can find the answer and quickly call them back and give them the answer that quick, right? Instead of her trying to mess around on the computer while they’re on the phone. And or she can send an email very quickly with whatever they’re asking for.

Because most of the calls that we’re getting from current customers are things related to rescheduling or adding a note on the appointment or something like that. So we can just help people a lot faster in that manner. And again, I’m not saying that it’s super slow on the phone, but we just we just have a lot of stuff that we’re dealing with. So administratively, we can actually be better customer service representatives if we don’t answer the phone for them. And so coming back to especially giving estimates out Katie could answer the phone. Katie’s my customer relations manager. Katie could answer the phone and be on that phone call for half an hour and they don’t book. Or we could get out literally 10 estimates in that same amount of time. And they have all of the information that they need. And then we can follow up from that email.

So we want to get them visually in place. And we also saying the numbers also can give them a little bit of shock and put them in this crazy headspace of not knowing what to do, where if we put it in writing, they can mull it over. And a lot of times that shock wears off and they can think about it. So it just it makes the whole process faster for everybody gets them the information that they need. And again, we will always call back once we see what the voicemail is about. So we’re just trying to filter to make sure that we are prepared to be as efficient as possible with whatever is coming down the pipeline, because they could be calling for a variety of reasons. And that way we can vet it and get back to them. And there may be a faster solution. Maybe we just need to shoot them a quick text of hey, your next appointment is on this date, right? Maybe it’s that question. And again, we could answer that on the phone. Yeah, 100%. And sometimes we do. But for the most part, we’re not answering the phone.

So I’m not going to tell you guys to do that, because you probably need customers a lot more than I need customers. That sounds terrible. But we have been backlogged for this year, months and months and months, right? I don’t have any fucking openings. We’ll send them the price and put them on the waitlist. And we will call them back if it’s relevant. And that’s the proper solution. But having 100% answer rate, that is not at all a priority, actually. And I specifically told them to stop answering the phone. So I know hot take. And I know a lot of even my guests would be, what the fuck is wrong with you, Stephanie? It’s what works for us. And I can always change if I want. But this is what works for us right now. And so keep that in mind that everything you hear online is not necessarily something that you should do with your business. And I would not have done this in the beginning, in the first couple years where I was very hungry for clients and all of that. We, you know, struggling with staff is always something that we are going to struggle with, or, you know, that’s something that historically in this past year that we’ve struggled with. And so this way we can be a lot more efficient.

And additionally, finding spots on the schedule on the phone, it’s a total bitch. It’s a total bitch because we are now on the spot. And sometimes we are literally staring at this schedule for 10 minutes, trying to figure out what is the best time for this customer, because they’re in this neighborhood, right. And no matter how organized we are with our scheduling and having the availability and all of that figured out, we still are trying to piece together the most efficient manner. And so if we are sweating on the phone, we are oftentimes going to suggest a worse time. And you can solve this by basically saying, hey, our scheduler is going to call you. But again, I don’t want to schedule while I have a customer on the phone. It’s too stressful. We’re not thinking clearly necessarily because we’re aware of their time and we don’t want them just sitting there silently and wasting their time. So again, we would waste their time. We’d waste our time. This way, everybody is handled in a nice, calm manner. We can offer them multiple dates over email and tell them to get back to us. So yeah, just not a fan. So I know, I know. Skewer me in the comments. That’s fine. I get it. Skewer me like a jalapeno popper, perhaps. I’m going to make terrible jokes in this episode, guys.

You Can Do Both Residential and Commercial

Okay, next hot take. Again, going against even guests on this podcast. Don’t listen when people say you should only do residential or only do commercial, not both. I don’t think you should listen to them necessarily. I think that that is sound advice if you are not willing to sacrifice perhaps your evening or your sanity. But if you want to make a fuck ton of money and you want your business to grow quickly, well, this is the only way Serene Clean was going to do it. We’re too rural to be able to be at the size we are at with strictly residential. Not possible. There’s just it’s not possible. I think I would have struggled to get to a million a year in our area in residential, right? And so when you guys are all, how did you do it, Stephanie? I got commercial bitches. That’s how, okay? And was it very stressful at times? Yes. Has it been stressful at times? 100%. But we have been able to focus on both and do both very effectively over the past six years. And it’s not something I even I when I opened up said I’m only going to do residential, right? because that’s what the course I took told me to do. And then the commercial started calling and I was a yes man. And then I started seeing oh, this isn’t as hard as I thought it was, right?

The schedule could be tough, especially if you’re taking evening stuff and you have to figure that out. And there’s definitely a lot of mistakes made along the way. Would I change doing it the way I’ve done it? No, not at all, because I would never be near the size that we are at today without literally 50%, 50% of Serene Clean’s revenue is from commercial. And it can be done. You can do both effectively. I truly feel that way. I feel that way strongly. And anybody who says, no, you can only do one or the other really well, well, that might be their experience. That may be what they’ve seen because I’ve seen other companies fuck up doing both 100%. Doesn’t mean that you are going to fuck it up. Doesn’t mean I’m going to fuck it up. All right. It’s something to consider. And I would say that you’ve got a family and you’ve got to be home at night and you have to, you’re the main one who’s managing the household and all of these things, then don’t take evening commercial, but there is daytime commercial out there, guys. I’ve got multiple full-time cleaners who do daytime commercial. That’s how many daytime accounts we have or early evenings.

We actually don’t take anything late at night anymore. Because of our life balance and making sure that we can cover that appropriately if somebody calls out, right. So even within the realm of commercial, you can have limitations. You can have absolute no’s in place of we don’t do restaurants. We don’t do X, Y, Z. I don’t want to do daycares. I don’t want to do all these things. Right. You can have these rules in place. Doesn’t mean I’m going to throw the whole baby out with the bath water. Right. Because I would never be where I am today without doing both residential and commercial. So I don’t think that you need to have that rule. I don’t think you need to listen to people. I will say that you’re going to have to be able to manage a lot of stress, 100%. And the stress is more so of when are the cleanings, right? If all of your cleanings are during this daytime hours, regardless if it’s residential or commercial, I don’t think it’s that stressful. I really don’t. The stress comes from when you have teams out at midnight or past midnight, and you also have house cleanings during the day. That’s where the stress comes, okay?

So keep that in mind. What are you willing to bear and sacrifice, okay? And just have a really honest conversation with yourself and that you may be missing out on opportunities. And that’s okay. I’m missing out on opportunities because we won’t do late night stuff. And I am fully okay with that. And I chose that 100%. But it doesn’t mean I would just be, no, no, commercial, because look how much daytime work I wouldn’t have. Look how much work I wouldn’t have for staff. Look how much stable accounts I wouldn’t have. So yeah, don’t necessarily listen. All right, I know there’s a lot of people in our industry who will tell you, no, no, no, only houses or no, no, no, only janitorial. Well, go ahead and listen to them if you want. I’m just telling you, my podcast. So this is what I’m saying. So Serene Clean would not be where we are without commercial whatsoever.

Vacation Rentals Are Difficult

Okay. Next spicy take is don’t make vacation rentals a focus unless you can have enough for full teams of cleaners. So if you are in a town where vacation rentals are all year long, it’s hopping, right? You’re in Nashville, right? Like Brenna Sledge. Like that was a great, that was a great episode that talked about Airbnbs. You’re in Florida, right? You have enough, you have enough vacation rentals that this has just happened kind of all year long. And you can have dedicated teams who only exclusively do vacation rentals, where vacation rentals become a total bitch is when you are trying to fit them into a more traditional cleaning businesses schedule, right? Where we maybe have two cleans a day on every cleaner, or maybe even if you run teams, then you could have them do, you know, three or four cleans a day, but it’s just vacation rentals are so difficult to schedule because though they have more higher frequency, they may have two or three cleans in a week. They’re going to be all not regular, right? Because the same vacation rental, you could have a Sunday clean, you could have a Thursday clean, you could have a Friday clean. And it’s just, it’s so hard. And a lot of it is very last minute nature, meaning the guest book, this week, and you got to fit that bitch in. And it’s very difficult to do sometimes. And so it’s really stressful. It is good money at times.

But I also find it very high stakes, because if we mess it up, there’s no really do over compared to a residential say we miss a hair and a shower in somebody’s house, their residential house, they’re gonna let us know and we’re gonna make sure we get it next time. At Airbnb, they may have to comp that whole cleaning fee, right? Or they may have to give the give the client some type of refund or they may get a terrible review as an Airbnb or vacation rental and it really affects their business. The stakes are so high to do a bomb job and be perfect every time and sometimes guests are just super unreasonable or they’re just looking for a free stay, right? You’re dealing with so many more people that you don’t know what you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with multiple layers of people that you got to keep happy, the guests, the owner, and just the stress that every single vacation rental is different. We have to make a custom checklist for every single one of them. So we have eradicated, we do not take on any more vacation rentals. We have grandfathered in some, but we’ve jacked the prices up to make it all worth it. They’re just very hard to manage.

So I just, if you are in an area that is not a super popular vacation area, I just don’t think that you should make this your strategy is you’re just going to do this because as you grow, it’s just going to get really difficult. I’m just telling you. And if you do choose to go this route and focus heavily, I would say try to learn from people who have done it before you who have done exclusively vacation rentals at high volume. Do I have anybody to tell you who that person is? No, not necessarily. Again, Brenna Sledge, go listen to that episode. Maybe we can link it in the in the comments below what episode but she does a lot of them. And she had a she has a lot of knowledge about that. And I just I just was, nope, not interested anymore. Let’s just focus on residential commercial. So it’s not I’m saying don’t say no to different services. Of course, I’m saying that it’s just specifically in the in the realm of residential commercial, I think you can do both. But vacation rentals are a totally different animal. And that animal is very difficult to fit into the schedule. And there’s gonna be weekend turnovers, there’s going to be laundry, you might be hauling garbage, there’s all sorts of things that you don’t want to deal with, or, you know, as one of our guests shared with me is there may be a lot of adult films being filmed in these vacation rentals and you’re cleaning up stuff that you don’t want to clean. So there’s just a lot of situations that you are not wanting to deal with in a vacation rental that you may not have to deal with in just having regular houses. So keep that in mind. I know it gets exciting because of the volume, but just keep in mind there are a lot of hassle. A lot of times they’re really cheap too, because they don’t, you know, it’s competitive market on their end for charging the cleaning fees. So it’s just really difficult and I don’t want to bother with them anymore. So we don’t.

Share Why Employees Were Fired

Okay, spicy take is we almost always share why somebody was fired at Serene Clean with the rest of the team at that next week’s team meeting. We always share it, almost always. I can think of one scenario where we didn’t tell the team why somebody got fired, but almost all of the time we are going to share with that. And that is never in a gossipy tone. That is never in a fuck that person tone at all. It is a matter of respect and candidness that we want to give our team so that they know we respect them enough that they are going to hear from the horse’s mouth why somebody was let go. Because otherwise, they’re all going to second guess. They’re all going to wonder, especially if that person was particularly popular or they’d been at Serene Clean for a long time. You don’t want to just be, yep, they’re gone, they got fired, and then not tell them, right? Because that creates a level of anxiety potentially in the rest of your team.

Wouldn’t it be better to say, yes, the attendance just went down so far, and we had multiple conversations, we adjusted their availability, and they still just could not do that. And that was hurting the rest of the team, because that meant that the clients were not getting consistency, and the rest of you guys had last minute changes all of the time. And we want this to be a team atmosphere where we’re all working together and we all know that life happens, but there still is a certain expectation on attendance. Or this happened this year, as you guys know, where long-term employee stole a wallet at a client’s facility. It was a church. And so we shared exactly what happened and we were very candid with the rest of the team. And as I said, I could feel the respect growing in the room, guys, because we shared why that person was let go. And it also establishes that is not okay. I may be saying that just broadly, hey, don’t steal guys, that’s against the rules. But when we let somebody go for that, and then we talk about it as a team, it wasn’t in any sort of hateful way of just this is a good person, they made a mistake that you can’t come back from. And we had to let them go, right.

And so I know that many of you maybe not have have experienced bad workplaces before. And that me saying this may feel like it’s really disrespectful to that person’s privacy. I can understand that. But I guess I just find it more disrespectful as if we’re just firing people and nobody knows why. Right. Because it establishes what behavior will and will not be tolerated, especially if the coworkers were all seeing that behavior. Yeah, they mean, the person’s gone. But wouldn’t it be better to be clear and say, yes, this person was oh, because of this, this and this. We had multiple opportunities where we sat them down and we tried to correct the behavior. And this is clearly just not the right fit. And of course, if it was anything in their personal lives, I just can’t imagine them being let go for that. But let’s say they were having substance abuse problems. Right. And that was causing issues at work. We would not share that. Definitely not. That’s not something that I would share. I would just say for personal reasons, they left. That’s where I would leave it at. So it’s not this is 100% hard and fast. We just haven’t had that situation happen, right?

Stephanie: That, yeah, we have not had a situation like that happen.

Stephanie: So it’s not I’m not discerning on this particular thing, but nine times out of 10, I feel it is advantageous and the more respectful option to be honest and blunt and kind again, but just that candid conversations that we’re having with our team. And they’re going to respect you for it. And they’re also going to know, okay, they’re willing, they will fire. They’re going to take care of problems. All right. This person was a problem for the whole team and we’re going to take care of it. And we’re all adults here, right? But this isn’t high school where we have to be, oh, you know, they got let go. Why, why? Right. We don’t want that kind of environment to even be brewing in the team. So I’d much rather just say it. Right. And we can talk about it. And if anybody has any questions, again, always respectful, never coming from a gossipy or bad faith kind of angle of it. It’s more so of just we’re all adults here and we’re all trying to do this thing together. And if you’re not willing to do your part for that and what you were hired to do, we’re going to we’re going to talk about that.

Individual Cleaners vs Teams

Another kind of spicy take I suppose that I have. I didn’t have this on my list. I don’t think is I do not want team cleanings. I try to avoid team cleanings as much as possible. Actually, we have teams when we’re doing first-time cleans. We have teams when we are doing move-out cleans. Anything that’s going to be longer than, of course, like eight labor hours, we’re going to have teams on. Or if the schedule, we need to pair people up to get through a bunch of stuff because we had a bunch of call outs or something. But as a rule, we are aiming for individual cleaners as much as possible. And this eradicates the majority of interpersonal conflict that you’re going to have on your team. I was a waitress for a long time, a long time, like seven years. And there is nothing like getting a bunch of women together in close proximity and making them work together in high pace environments to bring out a level of cattiness that you have never experienced. I mean, men, too. All right. Men can be a bunch of bitches when you put them together. It just comes out in different flavors. Right. So how can we again coming back to how can we make it so that this situation doesn’t even exist? It can’t even happen. No teams. Easy peasy. Right. Because then you’re just accountable to yourself. There’s no one else to blame. All right.

When we get finger pointing is when we have teams together. And even still, that’s just a no go. We do not allow we that’s no tolerance for blaming somebody else for your bad behavior or bad work. Right. However, if we can just avoid this problem as much as possible, it just it takes it out of it. And then there’s no confusion. There’s no bickering over who does what. And again, I know a lot of you guys who you exclusively run teams. You’re, we have this system in place. We do this, this and this. But every time I’ve had to sit down a couple cleaners and hash it out, it’s because they’re on a team clean, right? And something gets said or somebody does something. And now we have to manage that and have this conversation. I’m not saying that that’s not valuable. I’m saying we could just avoid this altogether and not have the situation come about. So, yeah, I don’t want to run teams, man. I will always run individual cleaners.

Additionally, this way for us, we are such a rural area. You know, a lot of our cleaners are going straight from their house to the cleaning. It’s just more efficient. You’re not having to deal with carpooling. So there’s pros and cons. 100%, there are cons and negatives to running individual cleaners. But yeah, I also, another thing I’ve seen when people run teams is they get trained on teams and then maybe you’re trying to branch out or for some reason somebody calls in and it’s, okay, you’re going to only just do this house or you’re going to do two houses. You guys usually do four houses. And then the cleaner is, I can’t make it through a whole house by myself. they get overwhelmed by it where it’s, no, it’s a treat to clean on a team. And you’re getting through the same amount of work potentially, right? It’s just kind of divided differently, depending on how many houses you’re sending them to. So yeah, I just I prefer, I prefer individual cleaners and less hands in the pot, which is kind of nice for the client as well. Again, you may have clients are they want us in and out as fast as possible, which means teams, but you’re going to have different consequences than I am. So that’s just my personal preference is I want to have individual cleaners as much as possible.

Workplace Culture Can Be Casual

Okay, next spice to take is we swear and have quite spicy conversation in our team meetings, meaning maybe not the most what some people would consider professional. How Stephanie talks here is how Stephanie talks in our team meeting, okay? And I know that that is not everybody’s cup of tea. Do I button it up a little bit? Maybe, I guess. But am I pretty unhinged? Am I silly? Am I telling funny stories? Am I talking about, you know, something stupid that I did or something stupid that happened to me? 100%. And I encourage that level of silliness in my team members, because if they see it from me, they know that this is a safe space to to not take yourself so seriously. And you don’t have to worry about that. And of course, of course, of course, we go over professionalism so much in front of clients, right? No swearing, no inappropriate stores, none of that stuff in front of clients. But it’s, we’re all co workers here, right? We’re shooting the shit we’re talking, we’re saying silly stuff. To me, that is the spice of work. And I want to genuinely enjoy work. And of course, we never want to make anybody feel uncomfortable. But we do explain that this is kind of our workplace culture. And everybody really digs it, right? They like it. They like that the management team is silly, and we’re real, and we’re not so buttoned up, and we can have a good time, right?

Our Christmas parties are lit. All right, we’re all taking shots and having a wonderful time and being silly. And so I get it that that may that may be 100% way. That’s not you. That’s not you. And that’s okay. I guess my point being is that it is okay to make the workplace culture that you enjoy. And I want everybody to be having a good time. I want everybody to be feeling good. And I also want them to know that you don’t have to be this buttoned up rigid, fake version of yourself to fit in here at Serene Clean, you can say how you actually are or talk how you would with a friend. And of course there is limits to that. But also the thing is, is we run into some crazy shit in houses and it’s really hilarious to talk about it. I’ve shared some of the things on the podcast. There’s some things I can never tell you guys of shit that we ran into at houses of real dirty, nasty, freaky shit. And I’m not gonna say I’m on the podcast because I feel, not that we monetize this channel, but I feel like it would be good. But point being, as a team, yeah, one of the weekly questions we had on a team meeting a few months ago was, what was the craziest thing you found at a cleaning?

Stephanie: And we say it, right?

Stephanie: Because we see some crazy things in people’s houses and run into some wild, wild scenarios. And so when I, okay, going back to the episode of, you know, my top 10 craziest employee stories or whatever the hell it was, or I think it was top five, top five. And my top one was my male cleaner having alone time by himself in a vacation rental and the clients seeing that through the glass door because he had the bathroom door open. That’s fucking hilarious. Now it wasn’t at the time, but it is hilarious. And I think it’s really funny to say that because it’s saying you don’t know what you’re going to run into in a business. And it’s not me being unprofessional that, that, that happened. That’s not my fault that that happened. That was that person’s choice, right? So why is it wrong for me to say that and get some chuckles? I don’t think it is because everybody can just say, oh, my gosh, that’s crazy. And as the co workers to that, it’s, holy shit, obviously, we don’t say his name, they don’t know who it is. This was a while ago now. So nobody would know who it is now. But and I don’t really talk about that particular thing. If in in the team setting necessarily, I mean, my cleaners can listen to this, that’s fine. And I’m not trying to hide that that happened.

But it’s more so also it showcases to our team what the managers have to deal with on a regular basis. But we have to deal with a lot of BS as as the manager sometimes. And it’s good for our cleaners to hear that because it makes them respect the difficulty of the manager’s job. So I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I think that just making sure that it’s clear to your team what is okay in the privacy of our team setting versus a client’s house, 100%. We pride ourselves on our professionalism inside a client’s home or business, 100%. However, if it’s just us, we can let loose, we can be silly and not take things so seriously. That’s just, that’s one of my favorite quotes is don’t be serious, be sincere. Obviously, that’s literally the ethos of this podcast and probably why you guys are here, right? For example, but I just that’s just who I am. It’s and so I want to build a business to have people who also feel that way and who also are unhinged and say crazy shit, and are just having a good time. It doesn’t mean we can’t do good work. All right, you go into any killer workplace and everybody’s saying stuff like this. So don’t pretend that we’re special or that we’re different, right?

Net 10 for All Commercial Accounts

Okay, next spicy take is not I don’t think this is too spicy, but maybe it is, is no exceptions, net 10 for all commercial accounts, okay? Anybody who is taking on commercial accounts and thinks you have to have net 45 because they say so, absolutely not. You don’t, you don’t. We have what, 60 commercial accounts, and I think almost all of them are on net 10. The only exception is our federal facility that is still shut down, by the way. Thanks, government shutdown. That is the only one that is the exception to the rule, and that is it as a federal account. So if you have, if that’s exclusively what you’re going after, yes, you are not going to be able to get paid any differently when it comes to that. If it’s direct with the federal government. However, if you have your, actually, no, no, think about it. No, we are, we are net 10 with them because we are the sub K to the contractor that got that. So we can set the terms to the sub K, I believe to the, to the contractor. Now I’m just babbling, but I’m almost sure that one might be net 10 too.

Point being is that for all of these years, we’ve always had net 10 because I’m, I can’t afford to float payroll and all of these commercial accounts. So it’s something that I started very early on with my very first commercial account. I was, hey, and maybe the first big one, right? The big manufacturing. I just asked, I was, hey, I’d like to do net 10. Is that possible? Yeah, cool, great. Then that’s how it went, okay? And especially with automated payment or the bank transfers, a lot of times they’re not writing checks. So it just the whole reasoning behind net 30 or net 45, I just find that very archaic. In today’s modern business society, we should not have to do that anymore. And so it really helps with cash flow. It allows for us to not really ever have cash flow issues with big commercial accounts other than that first month. Of course, you’re going to do that first month and you’re not going to bill for it. And then that’s where 10 days after day 30, and then you go from there, right? So the first month is always still going to be difficult. But yeah, that’s just not something that we are going to accept. So net 10 for all commercial.

It’s Okay to Say No

This one is not spicy at all. But some of you may just need to hear this as a take is we should not be accommodating all requests for everything that people are asking, right? You don’t need to be moving furniture. You don’t need to be cleaning chandeliers. You don’t need to keep giving them an inch or maybe it’s a foot and then they take a mile. Cause that’s what clients are going to do. It’s okay to say no. It’s okay to say no to every request that somebody requests of you. Right. I have been on a 15 foot ladder oiling a staircase before in a mansion because I couldn’t say no. And then I had to go do it because the workers comp of course, isn’t going to cover any of my staff members doing that. So yeah, I have done this so many times. And so now that it’s the staff members are exclusively doing the cleanings, we can’t be saying no to all of this random shit or saying yes to all of this random shit. Rather, it’s just it’s not something that is sustainable. It’s not what you hired your cleaners to do. And it’s only going to put you at risk of damaging something or your cleaners getting hurt, right? Or you having to go to job sites and doing the weird stuff.

So you don’t have to do everything that occurs in a house, right? You don’t have to clean out dryers. And some of you, this is what you want for your business. You want to be the Jack or Jill of all trades. You want to be the go-to contact for anything that they need home services. And that’s certainly a strategy. But for most of us, that’s not what we should be doing. So don’t be afraid to say no. You should be saying no a lot, actually, when it comes to any of these other types of requests. So not super spicy.

Clients Don’t Know How Long Jobs Take

But this one, next spicy take, is we do not let a client tell us how long a job is going to take, okay? They don’t know shit about shit typically, all right? They don’t know how long it’s going to take to professionally clean their house, especially on a first-time cleaning, because when is the last time they’ve taken a toothbrush to their kitchen cabinets? When’s the last time they’ve dusted all the ceiling fans? When’s the last time they’ve scrubbed all the baseboards? When’s the last time the base of their toilets have been cleaned? Maybe it was yesterday, but I highly doubt it. I highly doubt it. So they don’t know how long that stuff takes. And everybody that’s gotten into this business, you guys know that first-time cleans take so much longer, right? So if a client comes back and says, no, this should only take four hours, well, we will kindly correct them and be, you can book four hours, but this whole house ain’t getting done, okay? That’s not gonna happen. So don’t allow your clients to convince you of how long a job is going to take. It is a breeding ground for you losing out on money and you being really, really resentful. And you’re only going to have to make this mistake maybe two to five times before you get your shit together and realize the client doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Because what they consider you’re coming in and cleaning your you know, you’re running a Swiffer and vacuuming that’s not what it is or that’s not what it should be. That’s certainly not what Serene Clean does. We’re not a wipe down service. We’re very, very thorough. This is why I’m such a psycho about giving them the cleaning checklist so that they can see the extensiveness of what it is that we’re going to do and that it takes a long time. So we can be polite. We can be kind. We can be professional. But we do not allow our clients to tell us how long a job is going to take. All right. We’re the experts, correct? So I think we’re going to go off of the data of what every other house, their size and condition takes, right? Maybe we should do that.

Cleaning is Skilled Labor

Okay, next spicy take is cleaning professionally is not unskilled labor. okay and not everybody can clean I know that I am preaching to the choir when it comes to the cleaners listening but this could be seen by people who are not in our industry and I know a lot of people think that this is very unskilled labor and technically anybody can pick up a rag and start wiping stuff yes but to systematically and efficiently run through an entire home as fast as possible while being as detailed as possible and using the most effective methods possible and the correct tools to not damage anything and working from top to bottom and left to right and finishing every room and making everything perfect. That is skill. Managing everything and managing the time of it all, that is a skill and being fast enough. That is very, very challenging. And it’s something that not everybody can do. Trust me, we’ve had lots of people who can’t do this work. They’re just not cut out for it, right? And it is very physical labor. And so to be able to do this every single day, in and out, multiple houses a day, do not tell me that that is unskilled, okay?

Do not tell me that going 10 weeks with zero complaints and thousands and thousands of appointments and around 30 staff members, don’t tell me that that is unskilled, all right? That’s a fucking skill and not everybody can do that. So I am very proud of our high quality and our consistency across the entire team. that is not something that you could just throw 30 people together and be well you all can clean you clean your own houses right go do go do this thing right that’s not going to happen and they’re all going to be slow they’re all going to freak out because it’s way harder and they’re not going to have enough time and all of these things right so it is 100% skilled labor it is something that should be respected it’s very physical and it is something that we can do very differently than just some Joe Schmo cleaning their own house right it is very different and you can’t tell me otherwise. Okay, so go ahead in the comments if this is a reel, because I’m sure this will get cut

Stephanie: for a reel and somebody’s going to say something.

Stephanie: That’s fine. I don’t care.

Management Should Be Ready to Clean

Okay, next hot take is management of the cleaning business should be ready and willing to clean. I know that this is just my personal experience in my business and that this is my opinion or the culture that I have created at Serene Clean and that many people want to open a cleaning business and not be able or expected to clean or I will never go out in the field. Can it be done? Absolutely. Absolutely. It can be done. But is that going to have negative consequences? Yes, I think so. I think so. But I think that there’s only been positive that have come from my management team and myself all knowing how to clean and all be all of us being willing. And when we are physically in the state of Wisconsin, able, able to clean, right, I will never be above the work. I also know I’m going to do a damn good job, right? Just like all of my managers are all started as cleaners, and they all are willing and able to go do the job. We may be a little slower than we used to be, right? Right? We may get sore more easily, but we can do the dang job, and we certainly don’t see us as above the work.

And the reason I feel so strongly about this is just because of how much my cleaning staff have commented on that, or even in our Indeed reviews, they’ll say something along the lines of I really like that the managers are willing to do that. They don’t see us see us as beneath them or that they’re superior to us as the cleaning techs or anything like that. So that’s just the feedback that we’ve gotten. Also, it allows for a lot of flexibility. And it allows for us to know how to do an effective quality check. We know what quality is because we all know how to clean. So if you are coming to this business, and you’re, I’m not going to clean, or I’m going to farm this all out to independent contractors. That 100% is a model that can work. But you are going to have to have the ramifications of what this means when you don’t know how to clean, you don’t know what clean looks like potentially, or you are not willing to jump in or not able to jump in. Maybe you’re a remote owner, right? How are you going to deal with when somebody calls out, you need to have these plans in place, right?

And so I think it’s only been a positive in my life experience. And I suggest to most folks that as long you should be willing to jump in, right? And I know that that sucks. And it really sucks to jump back into the field. And this is this has just been my business experience. So I take that with a grain of salt, it can work the other way. But I just this is how I would always do it myself. And it’s what happened in my business. So it’s what I’m gonna suggest to you guys, at least to consider or at least if you are not going to be able to do this, think about how you are going to solve the problems that come from not being willing to jump in the field or not knowing how to clean or maybe not even being local to your business, right? We need to solve all these problems. You can’t just live in the fantasy land that everybody’s going to just show up every day and you’re never going to have quality issues, right? So keep that in mind and also training. Who’s going to train? Who’s going to train? So keep that in mind. All right.

Leave Cleaning Checklists Behind

Next spicy take, which you guys have heard me beat this dead horse. So I am not going to go on long, but leaving checklists behind for residential is a huge competitive advantage and is literally a cornerstone of Serene Clean success. And I would recommend to all of you, especially in the beginning, that if you are not following a cleaning checklist or having your cleaners do so, that is something to implement ASAP. And if you are willing to leave them behind filled out for the client at all residential cleanings, that is going to be a really big competitive advantage because nobody wants to do it, right? Nobody wants to do it. It holds our cleaners accountable to the work that they are supposed to be doing. And clients love seeing exactly what was done. They don’t get that from other cleaning companies. They don’t get that from individual cleaners. Certainly, it also allows for standardization across your entire team, because this is what we do. This is what we’re going to be held accountable to. And it also makes us stand out from the extensiveness of what we are doing, right?

So just there’s so many benefits to filling out a cleaning checklist and leaving it behind. I cannot begin to even, I could do a whole fucking episode just about why, why I love a cleaning checklist. It really is from day one, I was using a cleaning checklist from day one, I was leaving it behind. And from day one, it was it was selling for me. And it was making such a difference in the trajectory and growth of my business as I brought staff on and this is what we do. And this is how we’re following this and blah, blah, blah, right? So big fan. I’ve said it a million times. I’m going to say it a million more because I feel so strongly about it. So cleaning checklist, man, you got to do it. You got to do it. All right.

Pay Yourself From Day One

Next one is going to be owners should pay themselves from day one. And this might be a spicy take, especially if you are used to you might think that you need to invest all the money back and you can’t afford to pay yourself. And I think that this can become a slippery slope for a lot of people and that this will go on for years and years because you just are afraid to pay yourself adequately and that it’s something that you just keep kicking the can down the road. Another thing I see you guys say is that you don’t pay yourself, but you are paying your personal expenses from the business. It’s, well, then you are paying yourself. There’s no difference between you transferring that money over and you paying that out from your personal account or if the business is paying those things. So you are paying yourself. So stop saying that you don’t pay yourself because that’s not true. It just doesn’t say you’re not giving yourself a paycheck per se, but your personal expenses are being covered somehow. Right. So you are paying yourself.

But if you are not paying, taking anything from the business, everything’s going back into the business. I understand that that’s a strategy. Maybe you’re pouring that all into marketing or something like that. I get that. But I just feel you are going to create this bad habit of not paying yourself. And if the business cannot survive without you paying yourself, something is drastically wrong. Right. And that paycheck may be small. Right. It may be 1% of revenue from day one. And it may be abysmally small, but it’s something. Go listen to Profit First. That’s how we operate Serene Clean is the Profit First method of managing our cash. So again, read this before I started the business. And so that meant I opened these different accounts that he suggests from day one. And one of them was owner’s pay. And I’ve always paid myself a percentage of revenue over the life of the business. And of course, as the business has grown, the percentage of that bigger number is going to be a bigger number. But my percentage has actually gone down over the years as we’ve increased overhead. But my actual take home has increased, right? And that’s just a math thing.

But all of that might not make any sense at all. And that’s fine. Point being is I’ve paid myself from day one because I knew that that is what is best practice, at least in the Profit First method. And I trusted that method and it has not steered me wrong. And I’ve always paid myself because when you’re not paying yourself and you’re working yourself like a dog, it’s the worst chain to a job you’ve ever had. Right. Yeah. You may be a business owner, but it’s the worst shittiest thing ever. At least you’re making something. And so it’s more so the mentality and habit of I’m making some money. I’m making some money from this thing.

Stephanie: And it may not be a lot, but I am making sure I pay myself.

Stephanie: Right. So please, guys, pay yourself, pay yourself. You don’t need to reinvest every dollar back into the business. You can have it feed you. You know, it’s okay.

Use Software From Day One

And then my final spicy take, which may not be that spicy, but I have seen a lot of people struggle with this is I have had software from day one in my business. I have had at least three different softwares from the very first moment of my cleaning business. And of course, ZenMaid from day one. You may not know this because this is, this is a podcast brought to you by ZenMaid, our friends at ZenMaid. I have used ZenMaid since day one. I have been a customer of theirs for years before I ever did this whole thing. Right. And that is why I’m such a proponent of theirs because my business has grown from zero cleaners to now a lot more. All right. A lot more, three locations, just, you know, over a million for several years now business. And I could not have done that if I did not have a scheduling software from day one. I truly feel that. And it’s not you can’t if you are, you know, three cleaners in right now or five cleaners in and you’re doing everything with Google Calendar, the earlier the better it is to transition to a scheduling software because that is just your you are wasting so much time administratively and opening yourself up to so much admin error by not having a scheduling software. So I just I highly recommend it. I can’t speak highly enough of it. And that that is a huge proponent of my success.

Bookkeeping software, 100%. I’ve used QuickBooks, QuickBooks online since day one. Right. And that was just, I was familiar with QuickBooks. So that’s what I went with. But I feel that if not, I feel if your books are shit and it’s all a mess and the finances are a mess, the bigger you grow, the bigger of a headache it’s going to get. We got to nip that in the bud guys. And I know a lot of you struggle with the bookkeeping, you struggling with the finances and it’s a mess. Please invest the time in getting that all cleaned up so that we can know where the hell our books are at. We can know where we are financially. We have to be bookkeeping because when it comes to tax time, the IRS don’t give a fuck that you’re disorganized. It’s our responsibility. And if you don’t know how to do this, you can outsource it, but I would recommend you know, at least the basics of bookkeeping so that you don’t get any embezzling. Don’t pass this off to a manager because they could steal from you. And not saying that they’re going to, but I just heard way too many stories of people having embezzling happen. Right. So keeping software. There’s several, again, I’ve just, I’ve had a good experience with QuickBooks online and they do have other things like payroll software built in.

I would recommend a payroll software. Stop paying your cleaners just with Zelle or Venmo or whatever. I get it if you’re under the table, but if you’re, and I’m not suggesting you be under the table, but I am suggesting once you’re ready to be legit, get a payroll software, right? So that you are dealing with the payroll taxes effectively. I’m not even going to get this whole hot spicy take thing. I mean, it goes without saying that Stephanie does not like using independent contractors and never will use independent contractors. That goes without saying. I don’t think that’s a spicy take because that’s literally I’ve said it a million times, but maybe it’s a spicy take is that W2 cleaning styles is superior to independent contractors. Maybe that’s a spicy take. I don’t know. I don’t think it is. And you can effectively run a cleaning business with independent contractors, but you are going to hit some scaling issues potentially, especially around the million mark because of quality control and whatnot, but kind of spicy take within this one. But a payroll software is going to be a great investment. I highly, highly, highly recommend Gusto. I love Gusto. I did not discover Gusto until a couple years in and I’m so glad that we switched because we were paying everybody through QuickBooks Online, but Gusto is so much better for kind of a lot more inclusive things, paying our payroll taxes, doing all the new hire reporting. It’s just easier for the cleaners to use. So I do love that.

The other software I use from day one, I think was MailChimp, which it was the free version, but that I was collecting email addresses from clients from day one. So that now we have several thousand people on our email marketing list. So when I send out our newsletter every month, and we send out opening emails or whatever, every month, then it gets better gets to more of an audience, even if they’ve never booked with us, that frequently happens where they don’t book for us, we show that we have four hours open one day, and they book a limited hour clean and now they’re their client, right? So we can remarket to them. So I’m a big fan of having email marketing and we actually hook up MailChimp to our ZenMaid booking form via Zapier, which is an automation software. So I’ve used that one. I go, so that’s a software technically. Zapier makes softwares talk to each other. So booking form gets filled out on the ZenMaid booking form. And then that triggers that email address to get added to our email marketing list. Big fan of automations from early on as well. So I just you may not be tech savvy. And I understand that I know a lot of you’re, oh, I get so overwhelmed by software, it’s, it’s not as complicated as you think. And especially with things like ChatGPT now, and YouTube, you can really learn anything.

And I truly believe that without these softwares, it’s kind of like the stronghold of my foundation, I always talk about the foundation of the business, right? And software is part of that foundation, It’s a big part of the foundation. And so it allowed me to scale a lot easier and handle the kind of crazy growth that we had is because I had these systems in place to manage every area of the business pretty effectively. And so that allowed us to grow faster. So big fan of software. And I’m not going to be super biased here. Maybe I just can’t not be but it’s I have used ZenMaid since day one. So it’s just hard for me not to mention it because, I couldn’t have grown Serene Clean without it. So all of that to be said, guys, this is a fucking long one. Holy shit. This is a long episode, a solo episode. I can’t believe I just sat here for like an hour 15 doing this. It’s a Sunday, you guys. I hope you appreciate this episode. I hope you have a lovely Halloween. This should be going live before Halloween. Happy Halloween to those who enjoy going out, enjoy dressing up, enjoy being silly. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope I didn’t offend you. And if you got offended by anything, leave it in the comments below, right? Let’s get some comments. Leave a pepper emoji down below, guys. If you listen to all of this, give me a freaking like. All right. I love all of you. I love making this for you. And I will see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, please be sure to leave us a five-star review so we can reach more cleaners like you. Until next time, keep your work clean and your business filthy rich.

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

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• ServPro
• Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
• QuickBooks Online
• Gusto
• MailChimp
• Zapier
• Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
• Watch Brenna Sledge talking about vacation rentals: Filthy Rich Cleaners – E33: She Didn’t Plan to Start a Cleaning Business… And Then It Took Off

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