Stop Letting Fear Run Your Cleaning Business

Brought to you by expert maid service owners

Tips and advice shared here, have helped us grow our own maid services. With eight current and former cleaning business owners in our team, including our CEO and founder Amar, we know the maid service industry inside and out.

We partner with amazing leaders in the cleaning industry like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely and Chris Scwap and more, to provide you with the latest industry insights.

We’ve built the easiest-to-use scheduling software, built specifically for maid service owners! Check out ZenMaid

Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube

Introduction

Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And today’s solo episode is inspired by several consulting calls that I had with you guys last week. Many of our listeners book calls with me, and I so appreciate those calls because they really help me understand where you, our community is at in your businesses, in your struggles. And I was seeing patterns and kind of through lines throughout all of these calls. And that’s what I wanted to go over today of what these women are struggling with and the ideas that I gave to them that I want to share with you guys when it comes to your own businesses.

And overarchingly, what the common denominator amongst these calls was, was fear of growth and what that growth was going to mean for them and their lives. Looking at the calls, there were several things that stood out from each of them. One of the owners, she is physically breaking down from cleaning. She has some physical health struggles that she has gone through, and she literally is in so much pain cleaning, yet she’s terrified to hire and to grow. Another was capped at seven to eight texts with zero systems in place, basically, and completely overwhelmed because of that, is afraid to grow because of that. Another stuck just under $10,000 a month for what seems like an eternity because of lack of systems in place. And then finally, the fourth call, she was burned out and grieving the loss of a family member while spending $2,000 a month for pay-per-click ads that were not working. And so just absolutely frustrated with, I’m spending all this money, this isn’t working, we’re not growing.

And just overarchingly, just afraid, afraid of what if they’re making the right decisions, not trusting themselves. Just all of that was really screaming out to me of being petrified that if we keep growing, things are going to fall apart. And it’s true. If they kept growing in the manner that they are at now, things will fall apart. And what that tells to me is that growth, it’s not that growth shouldn’t happen. It’s that we need to put things in place. We need to take things off of their plates that we can in order to facilitate that growth in a healthy manner, right?

Why Your Current Growth Feels Overwhelming

Because right now, wherever you are at, because this is exactly what I experienced, is if you had told me at every stage of the business up until maybe, I don’t know, two years ago, whenever I went remote, I’ve been remote for three years, right? And so that’s really where a lot of things change for me mindset wise of the business growth is not going to hurt my life, right? It’s actually going to support the life that I want. And if I look back at Stephanie before that and said, hey, you’re going to grow to this, you’re going to be at this much every month, you’re going to have this many customers, you’re going to have this many cleaners specifically, I would have been like, ain’t no way that that’s going to happen without my life drastically suffering. Because I know what it was like for me during that first year, during that first two years, and how absolutely overwhelming it was, and how much sacrifice I had to make in areas of my life that, you know, looking back, I’m like, gosh, I don’t know if I would do that again. I don’t know if I would put my personal relationships on the back burner again like that. I don’t know if I would put my health and wellness on the back burner like I did during that time. But I was willing to sacrifice it then.

And what I want to remind you guys of is when you are comparing your business growth to other stories that you see, it just isn’t particularly healthy or helpful. And I know it’s the whole cliche of you’re just trying to beat your former self. But that’s truly the case is you should be comparing yourself to where you were last month, where you were a year ago, and really reflecting on that as opposed to looking outside and seeing what other people are doing or how fast they’re growing, because we’re not the same. We don’t have the same circumstances. And, you know, especially I bring it up a lot guys, but so many of you are parents. I was not a parent. I’m still not a parent. So if I had had a child when I was opening Serene Clean, we may not even be here right now, frankly, maybe it would have grown just as fast, but I highly doubt that because I would not have been willing or possibly able to give the business everything I had to give because my energy would have been elsewhere and my focus would have been elsewhere. So I was able to be pretty single-minded and just locked in despite working full-time. Obviously, I still had my full-time job for the first year and I had responsibilities, but it wasn’t like so many of you.

So when you’re trying to compare yourself to other people’s growth or, oh, they grow so fast, what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with my business and how I’m running things? It’s like, I don’t know how helpful that is. I really think we should be focusing on your own path, your own journey, your own numbers, and just what can I do to make this better for me? Because it’s going to grow the way it’s supposed to grow, right? I think that Serene Clean was supposed to grow like it did. And, you know, it could have grown even faster if I had known the things that I’m going to talk about today, or at least if I had known them more intrinsically.

So all of that to be said, coming back to the topic of, if you had told me at those points, you’re going to have this many staff members, I would have been like, no, it’s going to break because I couldn’t envision a world in which my business could be at the size it is today without my life absolutely being just destroyed and me just running around like a crazy person. But that’s because as you grow, you know, you bring more people in to help with the operations. You put systems in place because the reason some of these people are stuck where they’re at is because the systems that are in place cannot live and survive in that manner at the next stage of business. It’s simply not possible. And so that’s what we need to fix. So that new growth level is unlocked because that’s how I kind of see systems and scaling is it’s like a lock going into a key of the next level as if we’re playing a video game or something. And that’s the thing that you need to find to unlock that new part of the map or the new level or whatever. I’m not a big video game girl, but if you like video games, hopefully you can understand what I’m trying to say here.

So all of that to be said, I have kind of five different ideas or concepts that came to me from these recent calls.

Idea #1: Growth Is a Dial, Not a Switch

And the first one is going to be that growth is a dial, not an on and off switch that’s on is 100, off is zero, right? It doesn’t have to be like that. It can be a gradual dial, like a thermometer that we turn up a degree, turn up a degree, turn up a degree, take back a degree, right? It doesn’t have to be this runaway freight train that I think a lot of you are afraid of because as soon as you do turn that dial up, it feels overwhelming because we don’t have the systems in place.

One of the calls, her fear was if I hire, I’ll end up working more than 40 hours a week and I’ll be working all of the nights and the weekends. And she, you know, she has children, she’s got a husband, she’s got this life and responsibilities that she has to take care of. And she’s the one who is cleaning all herself, right? She’s doing all of the cleanings herself. So she is terrified and cannot envision a world in which she adds people and it doesn’t add work for her because it’s so overwhelming feeling, right?

And the point being here is, you know, we need to reframe what growth means and that it doesn’t have to be this wild, untamed animal that we’re chasing after, right? It’s not like that. It can be something very controlled because we’re the ones who get to decide what that looks like. And I want to remind you that you can say no to literally anything in your business. And I think that this kind of, we’ll talk about this later in the final point about boundaries and things like this. But it’s the fact that we at any point can say no to an opportunity, we can say, nope, we’re gonna stay right here for a moment until I feel good, until the systems that got us here are reworked so that we can unlock that next level. Because once we start adding, you know, new cleaning techs, and you start adding them rapidly, that’s when things can really feel out of control.

Because what you’re doing is you are trying to keep up with all of the leads that are coming in. And you’re trying to just grow very rapidly. And if you do that, you need to be prepared for rapid re-systematizing, basically. And, you know, if you listen to Tuesday’s episode with Chelsea Withers, excellent episode, highly recommend. Chelsea is amazing. She talked a lot about this, of how, once she, you know, she hired the first time, it was a mirror that showed her what systems needed to be put into place that did not exist, or the ones that did exist, what needed to be changed, right? Because systems are a living, breathing entity, as I always say. Something that we’re going to tweak and adjust as each new level is unlocked. So definitely recommend listening to Chelsea’s episode if you have not.

So some of these decisions that we can make that, you know, of things that we’re not willing to sacrifice, right? So you can say something along the lines of, you know, my target income is X amount of dollars while doing zero hours of cleaning. And what would need to happen in order to facilitate that goal, that decision? What things do we need to put into place to make that happen? Because they can absolutely happen, right?

We can also make decisions around hiring and that you don’t, because I think when we go, you know, balls to the walls, frankly, and try to hire a bunch of full-timers and then that creates this huge sense of urgency and absolute terror because we don’t have the hours. So all of a sudden, it’s the giant pendulum swinging back and forth of, oh my gosh, I’ve got all these clients and no cleaners and now I’ve got too many cleaners and not enough clients. And what happens is we ping pong back and forth to panic here versus panic here. Whereas if we do a more moderate approach on both sides, we can kind of bring it to the middle where we can control that. And what I mean, practically speaking in that realm is only hiring a couple part-timers, right? So for example, I will only hire two to three part-time W2s at 15 to 30 hours per week instead of being like, oh my gosh, I need to hire full-time, but then I need full-time hours. And then what happened? And then I know where your mind spiraled because I hear it in calls. And I know because that’s how my mind used to spiral of like, oh my gosh, if I hire this one person and then I give them all these hours, but then what happens when they get full? Then I need to hire another one. And now I’m panicking to fill their hours.

And the solution to this really is part-timers, guys, that are flexible on, they’re happy with 20 to 30 hours, they’re happy with 15 to 20 hours, whatever that looks like for that particular individual. That’s how we do that. So it’s not so zero to 100 with the dial, right? Or that on-off switch, no, the dial is going to be part-timers that we just can fill up over time. And to make that hiring decision of when do I hire next? Well, it’s when that person is getting 75% full in their availability, because it’s not like we hire somebody today and they can go in the field tomorrow. That’s not how it works. We all know that, that the hiring process and training takes time. So we can’t wait until we’re absolutely full. There’s no availability to now start thinking about hiring. It’s too late, right? So, you know, there’s decisions about this that can help make this feel controllable.

So, you know, lesson here in this first idea is we are allowed to control how big this gets. It doesn’t have to turn into a monster. You know, growth, growth is not a runaway train and it doesn’t need to be that way. It doesn’t need to feel that way. So I think what happens is once we start to feel that, oh my gosh, this is out of control, we are, shut it all down, shut it all down, where it’s like, no, there are things that could be done at this size, including the biggest one, saying no or putting a pause that will allow us to feel in control. Because frankly, at every new level of the business, you are going to be absolutely a fish out of water. All right, you’ve never experienced this before. I certainly didn’t. I’d never ran a million-dollar company before, all right? So you have to grow, you have to adjust, you have to evolve at every new level. And that is going to feel uncomfortable. I promise you that that discomfort is not going to kill you. It doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. That is the natural consequence of growth. And it is uncomfortable, but we have to learn to sit in that discomfort. We have to learn to look at what is happening in the business at this level. What are the things that I can improve that’s going to allow me to get to that next level with the least amount of discomfort, right?

Because otherwise we’re just going to get stuck at the lowest level of, even three years ago, before I went remote, right? My life was so well balanced. I could kind of do what I wanted because I had pushed through those discomfort levels and I did allow myself to bring people on to help me. And I know that many of you guys, you can’t afford that yet. And you’re in the valley of despair. You’re in the trenches, whatever you want to call it of, frankly, the shit part of the business, which is you can’t really afford admin work or admin help and you are still cleaning, right? So you’re doing it all. What that means the most is that we need to systematize as much as possible and make things as easy as possible during that time so that despite the fact you can’t afford help, you’re making it easier on yourself. You’re lightening your load even when it’s just you, the one-man band or the one-man leadership band rather.

And that kind of goes or that really does go into my second idea, the second common denominator of these phone calls that I had last week. They were Zoom calls, phone calls, who talks on the phone anymore?

Idea #2: Systematize Before You Scale

And that was idea number two being systematize before we scale. So some of the things that I noticed during the call and that I talked to them about during these calls last week was manual chaos in literally every area of the business. So some examples, one owner was using their personal cell number for everything. So their personal life and the business were absolutely just enmeshed because of the cell phone. Okay, and so there’s things that we can put into place to make that not happen. Scheduling in spreadsheets or QuickBooks workforce, in-home estimates only because the booking form that they were using didn’t ask the right questions. And then finally, there was no client guidelines, no employee docs, no e-signing. Every step of the way was as hard as possible.

And that’s what I want to tell you guys is you are making things way harder on yourself than you need to. So a lot of times we get stuck into whatever our first idea of how to do something is the idea we run with and we stick with it. And you’ve heard me say a million times that good done is better than perfect and not done. I fully agree and I feel that very strongly that that is true. However, that does not mean that we keep doing that thing that way forever. Most likely in literally every area that you can possibly think of the business, every single decision, or I would say method of the way that you’re doing anything, there’s a better way. There’s a better way.

And that’s the point of the growth at each level and the analyzing and looking at the systems and building systems before we scale rapidly or even not rapidly, just putting things into place at each level. That’s the point because then we can really, you know, fix the things that are costing you guys so much time and energy before we get to the next level. Because if you keep doing things the way that you’re doing them now and we add another $5,000 of revenue on top of you, which is probably two cleaners, right? If we do that, you’re going to lose your fucking mind, right? So we can’t add those until we fix all of the things or maybe not fix them. We make them better. We improve. I guess that’s really what I mean by all of this is continual improvement in each area so that once we do get to that next level, say we do add 5K in revenue, nothing breaks. Nothing breaks too bad, right? And what is revealed to us again, coming back to Chelsea’s concept of the mirror, the mirror that’s held up to us at that extra 5K, well, those are the next areas to work and to fix, right?

So a couple areas that I would suggest you guys work on in this particular idea is going to be things like money and admin, the basics, right? Making sure we have a separate business bank account. Because once you scale, once you add that extra 5K or 10K or 30K, if you do not have your finances in order, and by that I mean bookkeeping, right? You have QuickBooks or Wave or some kind of bookkeeping software connected to those bank accounts, those separate bank accounts, and you have bookkeeping in place, things are absolutely going to hit the fan. Shit. One might say shit may hit the fan if we do not add a bookkeeping process early on. So if you guys are at 10K and you are not using a bookkeeping software, I promise you it’s going to fall apart. Frankly, it probably already has fallen apart, but you are just holding it all together, just a messy glue or something like that. So we need to have things separate. If you haven’t done that, that should be number one goal is let’s get that going and let’s get a bookkeeping software in place. It’s a non-negotiable, guys. As a business, your bookkeeping has to be on point. And if you don’t know how to do that, there are bookkeepers available. There are accountants available.

But I highly recommend take two hours on a weekend while your kid’s playing or whatever they’re doing. Watch some YouTube tutorials on what is bookkeeping and basic bookkeeping with QuickBooks, basic bookkeeping with Wave. What does this even mean, right? Taking it back in the day, it’s balancing your checkbook and tracking expenses in each category. That’s what bookkeeping is because then when we go to do our taxes, we can say, here, accountant lady, accountant man, here is everything you need in order to get as much back as possible or to owe as little as possible. And we need to categorize our expenses. And that way, three years from now, you can say, has this area gone up appropriately? We’re spending this much on tools and supplies and a year ago, we were spending this much, but oh, we’re bigger now, so this makes sense. You can have these conversations and you can start to analyze.

I’m so proud of little Stephanie at 22, literally day one QuickBooks. We had bookkeeping in place from day one. And that is absolutely because I worked at my family’s company previously, and I was responsible for the bookkeeping. So I knew how to do that. And so I’m really appreciative towards that. And just because you guys didn’t have that, it doesn’t mean you can’t put it into place now. And things might be an absolute freaking mess. So it’s okay to hire an accountant or a bookkeeper one-off to bring everything up to speed. And then you take it from there, right? That could absolutely be something I think it’s worth the investment if things feel really overwhelming. And I have had some calls where you guys have had some stuff going on in your QuickBooks that are a total mess or things not aligning correctly. And my suggestion has been, I think you should hire a bookkeeper one-off to do a complete audit and get this whole mess fixed. And then you take it from there. I think it is worth that investment because it’s just slowing down your ability to analyze anything, right? So that’s going to be money and admin.

Scheduling and operations. If you guys are doing anything manually when it comes to scheduling, meaning sending out appointment reminders, notifications, GPS tracking, all of the job notes, if you’re doing that stuff manually or in a spreadsheet or, you know, Google Calendar or however you guys are doing that, get a scheduling software in place. Obviously, our lovely, I guess, host, I am the host, sponsor of this podcast is ZenMaid. If you guys didn’t know that, I have been a ZenMaid customer since day one of Serene Clean. We didn’t start working together until last year, but I’ve been a customer of ZenMaid for six years and it has clearly grown very beautifully alongside my business and I could not have grown Serene Clean without ZenMaid in place. So obviously, I can’t be unbiased here because I have used it for six and a half years now. I guess it’s been six and a half years. So highly recommend a scheduling software. And the earlier, the better. You may think, I don’t need this right now, or I don’t want to pay for this right now. But let me tell you, the headaches that you are going to experience by not having a scheduling software in place, you are going to be kicking yourself in the foot. What’s the saying? You’re going to regret. What I’m trying to say is you’re going to regret not putting a scheduling software in place sooner because you are spending so much time doing manual stuff and all of the things.

I was literally at job sites cleaning myself and checking to see if my cleaners were clocked in with the GPS tracking at the jobs that they were supposed to be at. The amount of relief that I felt because I was so anxious, rightfully so, because my cleaners were fucking me over in the beginning. So that was just my security blanket of, okay, at least they’re there. Who knows what kind of work they’re doing, but they are there, right? I can go check on the work later. So I just can’t tell you guys how important this aspect is for all of that, as well as, you know, invoicing and things like that. I’m a big fan of getting away from the Zelle, the Cash App, the Venmo, the cash, the checks, all of the ways that you guys are accepting payment. Bring that together one way, one way. We’re invoicing through one system. For us, that’s still QuickBooks Online. It could be Square. It could be Stripe. Those both integrate beautifully with ZenMaid. Highly recommend. Both of those, they’re popular, they’re loved for a reason, right? They’re the easiest ones to do. So highly recommend getting that stuff in place before we start to try to grow rapidly, right?

Third area, communication under idea number two, texting from your personal phone to customers and to cleaners is a recipe for disaster. How’s that going to work when the business triples? Okay, how’s that going to work when we got $10,000 or $20,000 a month? It is so much easier to make these changes when we’re smaller, guys, because it’s just so many less people to transition to perhaps a new phone number or a new system or a new process, right? Because then it’s not just you, right? If you keep kicking this can down the road and say, I’ll change this when we’re at this, well, it’s just going to be harder then. And especially, you know, not sponsored here, but big fan of Open Phone. They just rebranded to Quo, which is a terrible name. Open Phone, if you’re listening to this, who authorized that rebrand? What the fuck? That’s terrible. But doesn’t change the fact that Open Phone is amazing. Amazing. It’s so affordable.

You literally within minutes can have a new business line or a business phone number is what I mean by that. You can text from your computer. You can call from your computer. All of the calls are recorded. They give you AI summaries. Oh my gosh, I could just go on and on about the importance of having a separate business line guys from your personal number. You need to have that separation because it’s just, it’s not going to grow well. It’s very affordable. You can also, if you have a business line right now, or you want to use your cell phone number and just get a new cell phone or something like that, or cell phone number, you can also port an existing number over. So I cannot begin to tell you how much I love that. We really like it because literally another little feature that I like, it’s kind of hard to describe, but what happens is all of the texts and phone calls that you get to the business line, they’ll show up on your computer. And of course, you can do it from your phone. You don’t need a separate phone. It’s just an app that you download and can make phone calls from your own current cell phone. But on the computer, what I really like is because that’s how we do our work in our phone calls is we don’t even have a separate phone. We just call through the microphone in our computer and have a headset on or whatever.

What I like is that it’s kind of like a task managing of to-do’s because you can literally have everything in your inbox, all of the calls and texts that you need to get back to. And you can check them off and be done with them. And it’s kind of, it allows you to feel less overwhelmed. So I really like any type of basic task management built into our current softwares. Love that. Big fan, big fan.

And then communication, again, talked about Slack in Chelsea’s episode. Go back to that if you haven’t heard that one. But Slack for internal communication has been absolutely amazing. So if you guys are texting individually your cleaners to their personal phone numbers, and you are either making group chats through text to all of your cleaners, well, what happens when you have to add somebody new to that group or you have to remove a cleaner? All of a sudden, you’re making a new text group every other week or every week as something changes. And it’s just a nightmare to get communication across the board to everybody in the efficient way possible, right? So big fan of Slack or something similar. I know that some of y’all use WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram. And those can all work really well as well. I just think Slack is very affordable and incredibly scalable system to use for team communication. It really is fantastic. Our cleaners love it. We love that we can schedule out messages. So if I think of something at 10 o’clock at night that I need to tell somebody for the business, which I don’t know for all of my former servers where you were laying in bed and you’re like, fuck, I forgot to take ranch to table A10. That would happen all the time when I was waitressing.

So when that ranch thought comes into your head at 10 o’clock at night or whatever cleaning equivalent comes into head, you can open up Slack, you can type it out, and you can schedule it to send at 8 a.m. the next morning or whenever the other person is going to be available, right? So it really is fantastic in so many ways. And that’s one little example that I can give you of things that I love about it, but it has really been a game changer to us. And so those two things, Open Phone and Slack, we’ve implemented that in year six. So don’t feel bad if you don’t have these things. It took us over five years to get to that. I wish, oh my gosh, I can’t even begin to describe how much my life would have been easier if I had those two things from the get-go. I can’t even imagine it would have been lovely. So that’s what I’m telling you guys, do this now, okay?

And then finally, this other area under systematizing would be protections and boundaries. So things like client guidelines signed via Sign Request. Many of you guys know that you should have client guidelines, but you’re not getting them signed. Okay, you are hearing me talk about this all the time. And all of these situations that you hear me and my guests talk about that could all have been solved by having signed guidelines. And you’re still waiting until the shit hits the fan to actually do it. And I understand that. I understand just my conversation with Amar last week, where we talk about the pain not being high enough to make a change? Well, I’m telling you right now, something painful is coming down the line for you. It is. And you could prevent it from being so painful if you had signed client guidelines right now. So if we can set a little goal for the new year is that every freaking customer that walks through your door, even if you don’t have a door for them to walk through, every customer that you interact with before you step foot in their door, sign client guidelines, guys. Let’s get it into place. Let’s do this. You can do it. Sign Request is $8 a month. That’s literally e-signing. It’s like DocuSign except way, way cheaper. And then you don’t have to deal with any paperwork. Everything is digital. You have it signed and then you can hold clients accountable. You can do all of the things and all of the policies that you want to hold to them and protect yourself with. You can do that.

Same with employee documents. What I just said about clients burns, employees can burn you way, way, way, way, way harder, I would say. And so we need to be getting some employee documents in place and signed because nothing matters if they don’t sign it, right? So policies across the board, literally every area conceivable Serene Clean has an employee document or policy in place. serene-clean.com/consulting. If you guys are interested in any of my documents, I do have an employee documents bundle available as well as a lot of other fabulous bundles if you’re interested. Or just go to ChatGPT. I don’t care, guys. Go do that too. It’s great. But if you want the specific ones that Serene Clean has, I got you. Link in bio. But I would love to see everybody listening, client guidelines, employee documents signed, 2026 goal. If you don’t have this or you need to beef it up, let’s freaking do this, okay? We need to get these things in place before we can get to that next level. Because all you’re going to be doing is introducing a whole bunch of pain that we could completely eradicate and remove from ever happening if we got these two areas in place. Okay, so I would love for you guys, if you don’t listen to anything else, listen to this part. Okay, go do that part. All right.

So most of us do not have a growth problem. We have a systems problem. And you’re trying to stack revenue on a very unstable mountain. So if we can create a stable base that we can stack on top of and start growing on top of, it’s not going to fall apart like a deck of cards or what are those card pyramids that you would make? Yeah. Well, it’s not going to be shaky or Jenga. I’m in a games mood. I want to play a game apparently because I’m really, really good at giant Jenga specifically. If you guys have ever played that at a bar, side note, if anybody ever comes to Savannah, hit me up. We’ll go play some giant Jenga because I love that shit. All right.

Idea #3: Match Your Marketing to Your Mental Capacity

The third idea that I was seeing throughout all of these calls was related to marketing. And that was really the concept of, I want you guys to match your marketing to the mental capacity that you have right now. So for example, one of the, one of the ladies, as I mentioned, she was spending $2,000 a month on Google pay-per-click ads, and that wasn’t working. And she was already feeling fried. And this was just the cherry on top of the shit heap. What a visual, right? And you know, another call, she was relying on Thumbtack at $49 to $80 a lead with about a 30% close rate. That’s not great because that’s so expensive for those leads. Thumbtack is very, very expensive. I know many of you guys have used it and it can be a great way to start, but we want to transition away from that ideally because of the cost of that lead.

So what I moved that particular client to, or I guess consulting client of mine was the three-legged stool or, you know, choosing the three areas to focus on. And for Serene Clean, and what I suggested for her as well, is going to be Google in the form of the Google My Business profile and LSA or local service ads, Facebook, and then word of mouth and networking. Put that same amount of effort and money into those areas, and those are going to be a lot more fruitful for you and actually get you momentum as well. Because if we build our Google reviews, if we build our Google My Business, if we build our Facebook audience and profile, if we build our network, it creates a really big base that kind of starts to tumble and build on itself, right? As opposed to something like Thumbtack, it doesn’t do anything else for you other than get that immediate client. But all of these other marketing areas, we can actually get that client and it can help us get future clients too, right? Not just that one. So that’s why I’m a big fan of those areas.

And then, you know, the other area that I suggested to all of them was, you know, video testimonials. You guys know, I have beat this dead horse a million times and I’m going to beat it a million times again because they are the most powerful marketing tool that you can ever have in your tool belt. They are so freaking impactful, right? Because they just showcase from your real customers what it’s like working with you and you can utilize that for years and years to come. Because if you search Serene Clean Black River Falls, all right, you know what’s going to show up in the Google search results is video testimonials from years ago. You know, what’s going to show up in our photos and videos on our Google My Business is the video testimonials that I uploaded six years ago are still popping up at the top for people to, they’re still working for me, guys. I did do that once with that video. And look at what it’s doing for me still years and years later, it’s still getting me business, is still providing social proof. And you can utilize that video across so many places, your Google My Business, your website, your Facebook boosting posts. If you want to boost, that would be a great thing to boost. You can send it along with your estimates and proposals is the video reviews. They’re just so useful and impactful. I can’t even begin to tell you how important those have been for Serene Clean’s growth. I cannot recommend them enough.

So we really want to focus on, I guess I would call it gentle but powerful marketing, I suppose. And the reason I call it that is because it’s not, it doesn’t feel as salesy to me. So, you know, Google My Business in the form of reviews, photos, little weekly posts, you know, video testimonials, chamber and BNI involvement, as well as having cleaning nomination programs, all of these things feel really not icky or super salesy to me. It just feels like we’re building this powerhouse brand and this foundation to grow and scale off of from marketing because it’s really just going to give a great overall first impression and a lasting impression over time to your audience. So I’m a big fan of those.

So we probably don’t need more leads if things are feeling absolutely chaotic. We probably haven’t worked the current leads that we have enough, right? We need to fix something in that area, whether that be marketing, we’re spending too much, and we’re, I need more leads, I need more leads. I hear that a lot from you guys. Yet your close rate is abysmal. And it’s like, well, why is that happening? Or your follow-up is terrible. We’re not doing any follow-up. There is no process or system in place. And another shout-out, Katie, my customer relations manager, she is taking on consulting clients for ClickUp specifically, showcasing how Serene Clean uses ClickUp as a CRM, our lead management system and how it integrates and connects via Zapier with our ZenMaid. So if you’re not a ZenMaid user, you can still use ClickUp, of course, separately, but we specifically use it with ZenMaid, of course. So if you’re interested in that, definitely, you know, shoot me an email, Stephanie@serene-clean.com, and I can get you more information on that. It usually takes a couple hours in order to do that. But truly, I mean, again, things I wish I had in place years ago, one would be our ClickUp lead management, because that would have made things so much easier and just skyrocketed our ability to effectively manage the leads that we are already getting instead of having to focus so heavily on, we need more and more and more. It’s like, let’s focus on the ones that we already have, right?

Idea #4: Hire with Buffers, Not in a Panic

Number four is hiring with buffers and not in a panic. Okay. So something I mentioned a little bit earlier and that I recommended to one of these owners was hire when current staff is at 75% capacity. So you always have room for training, people quitting, big surprise jobs, right? We want to not wait until the final moment to keep that hiring process in place. Something that I recommend everybody do is group interviews. You guys know how I feel about group interviews. You know how powerful they are. I’ve definitely, I know I’ve talked about them a lot in different episodes. What I recommend to all of you guys when it comes to hiring is I’d love to see you start doing continuous weekly interviews. Regardless if you feel that you need to hire anytime soon or not, you don’t know that. You don’t know if you’re going to have to hire because somebody could quit tomorrow. I want all of you to think about who have hired before, how you thought, think back to an instance where you’re like, yep, we’re good. We definitely don’t need to hire. And then the next week you are literally saying, oh shit, I need to hire yesterday because something unexpected happens. We need to be expecting the unexpected. And the unexpected in this case is people quitting unexpectedly, people ghosting, people putting their two weeks in, you having to fire somebody very unexpectedly because they are doing some nonsense in your business and you have to make that decision right now.

I remember I had a call a couple of weeks ago with a husband-wife duo. They were on a Zoom call with me describing this nightmare employee. And I was like, literally the second you get off this Zoom, you go fire her. All right. She’s poisoning your business. And in order to be able to do that, we have to have the power of a pipeline of candidates that we are interested in. And if we only hire or only start the hiring process, only put job listings up, only interview when we desperately need to hire, you’re already behind, guys. That is why Serene Clean grew so fast. A year in, we started group interviewing and there is no freaking way we could have grown the way we did without this process in place when it comes to hiring. So don’t feel bad. Don’t feel that you are being deceptive. How we say it is if we are not hiring this moment, we’re, we’re most likely hiring in the next month. All right. So we’re looking at all candidates. And so most people are going to have to put a two weeks in anywhere they should be at their current job. So it’s okay. It’s okay. All right. So most likely in two weeks to a month, you’re going to need somebody if you’re actually trying to grow, right? And even if you’re not trying to grow, remember, turnover happens even when we’re not trying to grow. So to not shrink your business, we also need to be doing this just to keep up with the turnover that’s going to occur.

So, you know, panic hiring is when your calendar is already overfull. That is when we make poor hiring decisions. And hi, my name is Stephanie. I have made poor hiring decisions 7,000 times at Serene Clean, and I’m recovering from that still. So what does controlled growth hiring look like? It’s when you’re still comfortable and you hire, so you stay comfortable. That’s the goal. We want to stay comfortable. And that means that we’re going to have to be hiring probably more frequently than you think we are. And again, that’s where it comes back to hiring part-timers so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming to you and having kind of that overage. It’s not a bad thing to have a client waitlist, guys. It makes you guys seem really in demand, but we don’t want that to get out of hand where we, you know, we are, we’re booked out months and months and months, right? Because that’s where Serene Clean has been literally all year. We’ve been booked out for months and months. And this is the first time of the year that, of this year, I think that we’re actually comfortably like have a bunch of availability. And we’re like, what do we do with this? We haven’t, we haven’t had this in a long time. So it is, it’s hard to balance availability and your cleaners having the hours that they want. Absolutely. But it’s okay to have a waitlist. It’s also okay to leave some buffer in the schedule so that we have some wiggle room when we need to reschedule things or somebody calls out, right? So goal is that we do not panic hire because those decisions that we make during that panic time are going to just kill us later, right?

Idea #5: Boundaries and Self-Care Are Not Negotiable

So the final idea to wrap up this episode is something that I saw every single woman that I spoke to last week, they needed to work on. And that was going to be the boundaries and the self-care. So several of them were struggling with people-pleasing and the fear of saying no. And I can so relate to this a million times over when it comes to both of these areas, the people-pleasing and fear of saying no. So people-pleasing in the form of customers, in the form of employees, and not saying no to both of those people as well, and just trying to keep everybody happy. But I got to give it to you straight, guys.

You are not going to have everybody be happy. At any given time, somebody’s going to be unhappy with you in your business. That is just the name of the game. And it is a fruitless endeavor to try and keep everybody happy. Or, you know, I think it’s okay to try, but that doesn’t mean that you need to allow what your needs are to be walked all over, right? I know I’ve shared a million times all of the crazy ways that I have had zero boundaries in place and allowed employees to absolutely act a fool right in my face and, you know, disrespect me. But I was allowing it. You know what I mean? Because I wasn’t being a good leader. I wasn’t respecting myself enough to hold a firm boundary. And if we respect ourselves, that means that we’re going to say no to other people sometimes. And they are going to grow to respect you if you do that. They’re not, they may get pissed in the moment. They might quit, right? But at the end of the day, you walk away from that situation with your self-respect. And anytime we’re feeling resentful, that should be an alarm bell that something needs to change, because most likely you are not upholding your boundaries. Most likely you are people-pleasing, and that’s going to lead to resentment. And we don’t want that in our business. We want everything to be feeling as good as possible so that even if we’re losing our minds and working like dogs and all of these things, at least we have our self-respect, right? And know that, yep, they quit because I held that boundary and I’m okay with the consequence, right? I’m okay with the fallout that has occurred because if I kept allowing that to happen just so I had that body in place to complete those cleanings, well, guess what? You’re literally not able to look in the mirror and be proud of yourself. And that’s what I want you guys to be able to do is look in the mirror and say, I’m proud of myself. I’m proud I stood my ground on that situation. And yes, it may mean some current sacrifice. Maybe I have to step in the field. Maybe we aren’t able to hit the revenue goals I had envisioned because we’re down a staff member or we had to cut this client because they were acting this way. But the point being is you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I’m proud of you and I respect you. And that’s what I really want for everybody.

Because when we can say that, we really start to elevate. We really start to prepare ourselves for that next level. Because if we do not act in ways that would give ourselves self-respect, we’re not going to be for that next level because that next level is going to push even harder on those boundaries. I promise you that.

So, you know, one of the things that I did is I waited to put something in place until after I got burned. And that’s why I share with you guys so many of these stories. That’s also why I typically ask guests about any horror stories that they’re willing to share or something that comes to mind, because I am trying to implore you guys to learn from our mistakes before you make them. I don’t want you guys to get burned in the ways that I have. But I do know that most of you are going to have to because you’re not going to listen to me. And that’s okay, because I wasn’t listening to anybody else either. But point being is I’m telling you guys all these stories to hopefully make you feel the urge of, oh, I’m seeing the problems that can occur. It’s kind of like the crystal ball for you. It hasn’t maybe happened yet. But if you only wait until you get burned to put a policy into place, well, it’s going to be a lot more painful than it needs to be, right?

So for us, I know that there has been a lot of things that I did put in place that eradicated pain ahead of time, right? So even things like, okay, I had ZenMaid from day one, a lot of pain points, I just completely eradicated because of that. I had client guidelines actually from day one, I did and I had them sign them from day one, which is crazy. So I am proud, again, looking back, I had some really good things and shout-out to Melissa Maker, her Decision Makers course, which is no longer available. I’m sorry, guys, but it was the course that I took. And it told me these things that put these things in place for me before I even opened. So I had a really great foundation of avoiding problems, because I paid and learned from somebody else who knows what they’re doing. And that’s the point of this podcast is listening to people who are either going through it now or who have gone through it in the past, so that you guys can learn from that.

So I know that so many of you, you listen to the podcast, and you’re like, oh, my gosh, I have this 7,000 long to-do list based on the things that we talk about, I want you to start eating away at that. What is the smallest, littlest task on that that you can knock out, right? So that we can start chipping away. Because that’s truly how we start to take this load off of our shoulders, this weight off of our backs and prepare for that next level, prepare for that next level of growth so that we don’t have to be afraid of what’s coming down the line because we have taken some of the manual labor off of our backs, whether that be the cleaning labor or the administrative labor, because that’s what we’re really talking about is operationally the thing feels like a chaotic mess and we’re not able to grow because we’re so afraid of that next level of growth bringing more mess, right?

So how can we clean up the mess that’s occurring right now, at least to a viable point so that we can push to the next level and then clean up that mess and then get to, there’s just more messes ahead, guys. But I promise it will get easier because you’re going to keep chipping away until every area of the business is running more smoothly, right? Until it kind of runs like a well-oiled machine. I promise you it can get to that point. It truly can. But you can’t really skip over that building process. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of concerted effort in order to, at every single level, clean it up, clean it up, clean it up. And that’s what we’re going to do at every level that we unlock.

Wrapping Up: Policies as Future You’s Love Language

So I really want you to remember that policies are like future you’s love language, right? You are loving yourself by putting policies in place. You’re loving your employees. You’re loving your clients by putting things in place because then we’re being clear. And I know we’ve discussed on the podcast before, clarity is kindness. Being clear is being very kind. It’s being very loving. Then when we have that policy, we can point to that as the bad guy and we don’t have to feel bad, right? Well, you know, I know you’d love to have a pay advance, but it’s against company policy. We don’t do pay advances because of that. It’s the policy’s fault, right? It’s not me, even though I wrote the damn policy, right? I’m sorry. You know, we cannot service you until you have paid all of your outstanding invoices. It is part of the client guidelines that you signed. Let me know if you need a copy of that again. Policy’s fault, policy’s fault, right? Then it’s not you trying to enforce anything, not coming up with something, not arguing anything. They agreed to it, they signed to it. It’s on them and it’s on the policy. So it kind of creates this third entity. Me, you, policy, blame policy, all right? So that’s why we want to have these things in place. And that was an area I would really love for you guys to get into place in this new year if you do not have to, because that is going to save you guys so much heartache.

So those were kind of the five areas that I was really seeing in these calls and all to do with the fear of growth and how we can eradicate that fear by taking action steps in all five of these areas. So I hope that this was helpful, guys. I hope that this has given you some food for thought as we go into the new year in your businesses. And remember, growth does not have to be scary. Remember, fear and excitement are kind of the same response. It just depends if we have a positive and negative thing in it. So anytime I’m feeling afraid, it’s like, okay, how could I spin this as excitement? And how can I see this in a different light? And truly labeling the fear of, what am I afraid of? Okay, I’m afraid that if we grow, if we continue to grow, I’m going to have to keep working more and more, and that is not true guys. I promise you it’s not true.

It is in the beginning true. You’re going to have to work hard. You are going to have to work hard, but there are things in place that we can put into place in the business to make it that we can grow and nothing breaks or things don’t break that badly and we can get to that new revenue point so we can afford to put more things into place, right? Because all of these softwares, administrative help, whether that be a virtual assistant, an executive assistant, an in-person office staff who’s also a hybrid cleaner, all of these things that cost money but take things off of your back so you can breathe, that’s what we need to do. And that’s investing back into the business. And so every new level is going to unlock the opportunity and possibilities of doing those things that takes weight off your back.

So remember, if you’re at $5,000 a month and you can’t envision what $20,000 a month looks like, because you’re like, I’m going to have to quadruple my effort. No, no, no, you don’t. I promise you don’t, you don’t. But before we get to $20,000 a month, we got to get to $10,000 a month. And in order to get to $10,000 a month, we need to put XYZ in place to level up to that and grow without breaking. And then we do it again. And then we do it again. And literally every level that we got to, where I was like, oh my gosh, $40,000 a month, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $90,000, $100,000, $120,000. We were even at $330,000 a month, a couple of months. Go back to the history and episode number one, if you want to hear about that. But truly, I promise you it doesn’t have to be zero to 100. Going back to the idea number one of the dial, right? We can dial it up. It doesn’t need to be this overwhelming thing. And you are going to feel overwhelmed, but it doesn’t have to be out of control. You are in control of what’s going to happen. You’re in control of a lot more than you think. Okay, this is your business.

And I definitely recommend, I mentioned in Tuesday’s episode about the book Extreme Ownership. That would be a great book for you guys to listen to while you’re cleaning, while you’re driving. I think it’s a really great mindset book and it helped me realize truly how much control I had over my own life, over my own business and, you know, my actions and what I was doing every single day to showcase the leader that I wanted to be and to my employees, what we should all be aspiring to.

Closing Thoughts

So all of that being said, guys, you are in more control than you think. All that being said, guys, give this a like. Hit that subscribe if you have not done so. Join the ZenMaid Mastermind if you have not done so, which is on Facebook. It’s a Facebook group where you can post lots of questions and interact with other owners and fellow listeners. I’m in there, and I would love to see you guys in there as well. We’ll definitely link that in the bio. Give me a green heart. I’m wearing green velvet. Also, if you are just listeners, I got my Christmas lights up, so head on over to YouTube if you want to see my pretty Christmas lights. I love decorating for Christmas. It’s so exciting. And the next week is going to be the 100th episode. So be sure to tune into a special episode. I can’t believe it, guys, 100 episodes. That’s so freaking crazy. And at Christmas time, too, it’s lovely. So I look forward to seeing you guys next week at that. Yeah. See you in the next episode, guys. Bye.

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
• QuickBooks
• Wave
• ClickUp
• Zapier
• Square
• Stripe
• Open Phone / Quo
• Slack
• SignRequest
• Serene Clean Consulting
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
• ZenMaid Mastermind Facebook Group
• Watch the episode with Chelsey Withers: Filthy Rich Cleaners — E97: Why Your Systems Determine Your Success (Not Your Experience)
• Watch the episode with Amar Ghose: Filthy Rich Cleaners — E95: You Need to Think Like a CEO, Not a Cleaner
• Melissa Maker’s Decision Makers Course (no longer available)

QUICK TIP FROM THE AUTHOR

Simplify and enjoy your scheduling with a scheduling software made for maid services

• Have a beautiful calendar that's full but never stressful.
• Make your cleaners happy and provide all the information they need at their fingertips.
• Convert more website visitors into leads and get new cleanings in your inbox with high-converting booking forms.
• Become part of a community of 8000+ cheering maid service owners just like you.

Start your FREE ZenMaid trial today and discover the freedom and clarity that ZenMaid can bring to your maid service! Start your FREE trial today