Stop Overpaying: How to Save $10K+ a Year in Your Cleaning Business

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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 I hope you guys are having a nice, cool day. If you are anywhere in America lately, it has been sweltering heat wave after sweltering heat wave. I know down here in Savannah, we have been having 100 degree plus heat index days. Up in Wisconsin, it has been 95 near 100 and my cleaners are absolutely dying, as is everybody else.

So as a reminder, guys, make sure you have communicated to your clients to have AC available and that you will not clean in unsafe temperatures or conditions, and obviously extreme heat is one of them. Nobody got time for cleaning in the heat. Anything you can do to help make your cleaners feel more comfortable is definitely ideal. We’re looking into those rings that can freeze under tap water to put around their necks to help them be more comfortable. I keep getting advertised that, and I’m totally sold.

So if you guys have any tips or tricks that you use to stay cool during cleaning, definitely put them down in the comments below. If you’ve had anything that really works out, especially for our commercial cleaners, some of those facilities are giant warehouses or fabrication shops, and even the office spaces may be air conditioned, but the shop spaces aren’t and it is just so hot and humid. So anything we can do to make our employees feel more comfortable, we should be doing so. And perhaps you have some ideas that we can share amongst ourselves.

The Big Insurance Wake-Up Call

Today’s episode after that little caveat is going to be about the importance of coming back to things and addressing if it needs to be changed or looked at again. And the reason I said that is I have been overpaying for insurance on a yearly basis for the past several years by $10,000 a year, apparently.

And the reason I am sharing this with you guys right now is because we have had just so many things happening with our insurance broker and company that we’ve been using where I’m thinking this seems unreasonably high. We never get refunds. There’s been no dividend or anything when it comes to workers comp, and I’ll go into all of what these things mean in a moment. And so finally, I felt the pain enough to actually shop around.

My Set-It-and-Forget-It Mentality

And I know that this seems wild coming from me, that I have never shopped around for insurance since year one in the business. I have absolutely set our insurance and just said, “Well, I guess that’s what it is.” And I know insurance is always going to be expensive. It’s going to be an expense, but I just never took the time to actually shop around and I will say I’ve never really done this in my personal life either, which I know sounds crazy.

It’s just not really my style to do that – shop around every year for insurance or anything. I’m definitely an auto pay girlie in my personal life of this is what the price is. It’s getting paid. And I just don’t want to think about it again. And I know that’s a completely privileged way to be. And I am in the place that I can think that, but it causes me to not go after savings where I can, because it’s getting taken care of, it’s handled.

I get very overwhelmed by having to go through administrative tasks that. It’s stupid, I know. It’s just who I am, and I find it easy to turn things as soon as I start it and I see this long list of things that I need to do related to it, and I’m waiting for responses back, and I’m doing all of these things, all of a sudden I’m nope, not dealing with this, because if I can’t immediately do the thing and to its completion, I just completely lose a lot of motivation related to getting it done.

The Moment of Truth

And I just am, “Oh, this is going to be just so much kick the can down the road. It’s fine. It’s getting paid for it. We have coverage. Whatever the juice isn’t going to be worth the squeeze,” which is absolutely not a helpful mindset to have. I’m just sharing how I have been in the past and how I have been recently with the business insurance.

Honestly, we’ve been insured through the same local company, meaning local insurance broker, for years now, I believe, four years, and they have gone through Secure Insurance, which is a larger insurance company that services – and it’s out of Wisconsin, but services Wisconsin. I’m not sure if it’s a national brand or not, actually. But anyway, I just have never questioned, well, could we get better rates? What about this? What about this?

And I wasn’t even familiar with dividends related to – is that what it’s called dividends? Am I saying that right? I don’t know. I’m learning all these terms right now related to workers comp, and that means basically that some insurance companies will offer you percentage back on your policy if you don’t have a certain number of claims. And so that’s something that our company had never offered us.

Getting Professional Help

And it was actually in speaking to my best friend, Maddie. We’ve been best friends for years, and she works for her family’s roofing company, and she’s the office manager there, and she deals with a lot of insurance. And obviously, as a roofing company, their insurance is absolutely astronomical, and they have a lot more claims than us, too, because roofers be silly sometimes and do silly things, and so they have to have a lot of interaction. She’s a real expert on insurance.

And so I was just frankly bitching about our insurance costs, and I’m “I’m losing so much money on insurance this year, and we have next to no claims. We’re very low risk. I don’t understand.” And so she was “let me get you to the guy that we go through and see if he can at least get you some quotes. He’s been really good and very competitive with us.”

So I reached out, provided our current policies, what we’re currently paying for. And he’s “whoa, you are paying way, way, way, way too much, 30% too much on these policies.” And so this has been over the past couple weeks, of just going back and forth, providing the information, and he ended up going through Penn National, which is a larger insurance company, and was able to get me a 30% dividend. If am I saying that right? Just a sec, let me check myself and see that that’s what it’s called. Yes, I’m correct it is called a dividend.

The Shocking Results

And that is going to be offered on our workers comp policy. My total savings, with dividend included, is $10,049 per year. That is a significant amount of money that I will now be immediately saving that is including all of our current coverage. We’re not losing any type of coverage since, obviously being properly insured is so important for all of us.

And so to break that down, we will be saving 37% on our general liability, 36% savings on our auto insurance, and 30% savings on our workers comp because of that dividend. And so it’s just wild that, and I’m honestly just so frustrated with myself for not having done this years ago.

Learning from the Pain

But this is a perfect example of oftentimes, we are not ready to change something in our lives until the pain is great enough. And this is exactly what was happening. I was not feeling the pain and just having it right in front of my face of this is an extreme insurance bill. We are not getting what we need here, and I just wasn’t ready to look at it.

So it wasn’t a great reminder to me that I should be looking at things and understanding that it shouldn’t have to get to that super extreme level of pain to take action on something or to check into something, and now it’s “okay, it’s not that hard every year. Just shop around for insurance. It’s not that hard.” And if the coverage is the same and you can cancel on an insurance company at any time, then there’s no harm. All it can do is either one, confirm that you’re getting good rates or to save you money, those are the two options, and I had not been doing that.

And so I’m just trying to learn from this experience and not kick myself too much over all of this money that the business has been paying that could have been on our bottom line. So it is what it is, and lesson absolutely learned when it came to that.

The Broader Lesson

So I encourage you guys to really look at the things that are hurting you or hurting your business, but maybe are not to the boiling point that it’s going to actually make you take action. And we all have different points to where that is, of how tolerant we are to pain, and it depends on the topic, right? Some of you guys may be checking this every single year, because you’re super sensitive to the pain of this or what have you. And I just was not that person when it came to this specific topic, where other areas I’m incredibly sensitive of if somebody does something, then the pain tolerance is very, very low, and we need to change immediately. We need to look at something immediately.

So I’m trying to have a better grasp as to where that pain tolerance should be on every given area. And you know, I definitely am a very big proponent of, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But am I ignoring signs of brokenness because it’s going to be inconvenient to deal with the problem now, and I’m just going to, as I always do, kick that can down the road to deal with later. I always that meme where it’s yes, here’s the bridge that I had said I was going to cross, or here I am trying to cross the bridge I said I’d cross when I got there. And here we are. So yes, that’s where I am right now with insurance. And I’m just grateful, and I’m just trying to look at the positive that we’re about to save a lot of money, and that is fantastic. And I’m very excited about that.

Another Example: The Quality Issue

And I also thought of another example based on my operations meeting this morning, and that’s with my managers, we talk every single week about different areas of the business that we could increase functionality, efficiency, where something is broken, or if any cleaners are in particular, causing issues that we need to look at, looking at complaints in a really critical sense.

Katie in particular, my customer relations manager, having a really good zoom out moment, because I was standing very close to a problem that we had had with a complaint, and she had the ability to take a zoom out approach and say, “Okay, well, this is what this actually means, and that’s a bigger problem that we need to actually solve,” and I’ll go into exact detail of what it looks like. And I thought it was just “oh yes, I’m standing too close to this. This means other things too.”

The Complaint Details

So this is what happened. We had a complaint come in last week related to detail, basically quality of work. And this is on a newer cleaner, who overall has been a wonderful staff member. Super sweet, very communicative, very open to feedback, just overall, very hard worker as well, great, great woman.

And so we got this complaint, and the client provided photos, and basically just a lot of shoddy detail work where things were not done well, residues left behind, things not dusted well. And so we had shared that with her, and she’s “I touched everything, I cleaned everything, you know, but you know, thank you so much for providing these photos. We’ll definitely work harder at getting those details.” She took accountability.

The Context Clue

And coming in with context. One of my managers had been on a clean with her the previous week, and she had made the comment, meaning the cleaner along the lines of on a ceiling fan, there had been, she had dusted it, and then there had been that lip of dust on the edge of the ceiling fan that the cleaner had not gotten. And she had come to, “yeah, it seems that dry dusting just isn’t, doesn’t get it off, and that means we’ll get your cloth damp,” right?

And damp dusting should be the go to for us, unless we’re talking thick layer of preliminary dust. You wipe that off, and then you damp dust. And I know for some of you guys, you consider dry dusting and damp dusting two different packages for us, and Serene Clean. We do damp dusting everywhere, that’s how we handle it, because that’s just what we’ve chosen to do. And it’s very across the board. You should have your cloth slightly damp just to capture everything. And we don’t use Swiffers or anything. We’re using microfiber. And it finds that it doesn’t just fly all over. It actually clings if it’s slightly damp, better. That’s just what we have found and what we do.

Identifying the Real Problem

And so putting all of these things together, we believe that that cleaner did – looking at the photos. I think she did touch everything. She dusted everything, but I think she did it with a dry cloth where it needed a damp cloth to be done correctly, to remove residue, to remove the dust properly. It needed to be damp in these specific scenarios.

And so basically, we’re “okay, how do we handle this? We need to obviously communicate with her privately and say, ‘Hey, XYZ, we think this might be happening. How are you handling this?’ One, two, we need to talk about this as a team, not naming any names, but as a reminder, because every Monday morning we have our team meeting, and this is something that we go over, is if we’re seeing issues in how people are doing a particular technique, or if we have changed a policy on something and need to go over it again so that everybody has a refresher.”

Wall Washing Policy Change

Then we’ll do that. Side note this week we went over how we’ve made changes to our wall washing policy for move out cleans and deep cleans, because used to be we would wash all of the walls, and now we’ve gone to just spot cleaning with microfiber dust, dry dusting all of the walls with a flat mop and making sure that we get all the cobwebs and dust that clings to the walls. But we are no longer damp washing with those types of mechanisms, we now just spot clean with microfiber and a cloth, and no more magic erasers being used on walls. Where before we would go in with magic erasers and do all of that.

And the reason being is because finishes were sometimes coming off of walls based on the paint, whatever finish that was, sometimes it does it. And so for us, expecting our cleaners to understand that nuance, is we’re just “why don’t we just remove this variable completely?” If somebody truly wants us to wash walls in completion, that is a separate thing that needs to be asked. It is no longer included in the move out. We will spot clean, of course, around light fixtures, fingerprints or coffee splatters or anything. Anything that can be removed with the microfiber and our all purpose cleaner is all that will be done.

We will no longer be using magic erasers because, yeah, you know, I’ll use a magic eraser in my own home on walls, because I know it’s not going to ruin my walls, and again, depending on the paint. But in clients, we’ve just had some situations where once it dries down, you see that change in finish, and so that’s something that we’ve experienced and confusion, as well as how long it takes to estimate depend, if we’re saying we’re going to wash all the walls, and one house needs scrubbing, and it’s really bad walls, and another house doesn’t it just makes it very difficult to estimate properly, and it really throws off our ability to price correctly.

And so we’re “you know what? Let’s just change it to spot cleaning and dry dusting. We know consistently how long that’s going to take us, and it just makes it a lot easier as well, as well as reducing the opportunity to potentially damage in the way that we used to clean.” And so all of our veteran cleaners who have been with us for years, they all are used to cleaning that way. And so now we’re going into these heavy move out season that we’re in, and they ask, right, “can we go over this again? Because what’s the new policy? We want to make sure we get this right.”

The Bigger Picture

So that’s another example of just people need reminders. You can’t expect them to just remember things off the jump, necessarily. So it’s okay to put out frequent reminders. We all forget things, especially if something’s changed, and we’re used to one thing.

And so coming back to the original issue at hand, we’re “we’ll obviously talk about dry dusting versus damp dusting in the team meeting.” And what Katie did so flawlessly today, was “Well, let’s take a step back from the obvious problem here is that not only is she not doing the process correctly, and that 100% could be on training, misunderstandings, things.”

So Hannah, who was there in the meeting, is our lead trainer. We talked about discussing what these different things mean and what the expectations is around dry dusting versus damp dusting, etc, and that it’s not about having a soaking wet cloth. It’s truly just a slightly damp cloth will help things cling better and so and that that should be the default for us is that that is our default, not dry dusting.

The Critical Insight

But then Katie made the point that it’s “what this means is that we are supposed to take a step back and look at the rooms as we complete them. That is the policy rule is check your work. So this either means she’s not checking her own work, or she is and she is not seeing these issues. And so that is a bigger problem at hand of are you able to critically step back with a fresh pair of eyes and look at your work and note what is not up to Serene Clean standard?”

And so that is much more important. And so what I suggested to Hannah, and this is totally from my friend Maria, if you didn’t see her episode, it was absolutely fantastic. I don’t know what the episode number was, but Maria is truly a pro when it comes to quality and staffing and all of that stuff. And so shout out to Maria. If you haven’t seen that episode, definitely give it a listen.

Maria’s Training Technique

And Maria had suggested or said that what she does with her staff is especially during training. They finish the cleaning, and then she instructs them to go find 10 things that were not up to snuff, or could be better, go find 10 things so it helps turn on. Basically they’re eyeballs takes off, the beer goggles, if you will. Of what’s actually wrong here?

And so I thought I used this. And I was “Hey, my friend Maria suggested this, Hannah, maybe tomorrow,” because Hannah is going to be with the cleaner tomorrow on a move out clean, “perhaps when she gets done with a room and you’re coming to quality check.” Because obviously that’s what’s going to be happening after this discussion on dry versus damp dusting, “instead of going in and pointing out yourself, ask her, ‘Okay, can you find five things that could be improved upon in this room?'”

Teaching Them to See

And just what that’s going to do instead of us just jumping and saying, “this, this, this,” before we do that, perhaps, say, “Hey, can you see anything that could be better in this room when it comes to what our standard is, based on our cleaning checklist, based on your training. Take a step back. I’m going to give you a minute. What do you think could be done better, if anything?”

And maybe she’s “No, it’s perfect.” And then that’s where we come in. And as trainers, as owners, say, “Well, did a pretty good job. These are the details that we’re looking for. These are the things that can be improved upon. You know, we all miss things, especially in the beginning, take this as a learning lesson to take forward. Don’t need to get offended or anything.”

And you know, I am not good at providing feedback when it comes to cleaning. So Hannah is much more tactful, as are all of our cleaners who have trained. Are very tactful and sweet when it comes to this. But it really is about how can we help them have the eye for detail.

The Counter Example

And a lot of times I find, you know, it’s all of us. It’s very easy when you’re close to something, you know, for example, say, I’m cleaning a counter, this is something we train is if I’m cleaning kitchen counters and I’m cleaning from up here and just spray, spray free, or whatever, and I’m wiping, it looks perfect, right? I’m standing here, and it looks perfect, but until I take a step back and get down to the countertop level with my eyeballs now, I see all of the crumbs that I missed, right? And so this is a metaphorical taking a step back and seeing the crumbs kind of situation right here.

And I think that this is something that we can definitely go forward and with newbies do is help them get that eye and see what we’re seeing as seasoned cleaners, as seasoned owners, because especially if they’ve never done this professionally, or have only cleaned perhaps their own home and and not coming at it from a professional cleaning service. They simply may not be used to seeing those things or looking for those things. So if we can help train them to have that, they’re going to be more competent going forward.

Teaching vs. Giving

It’s the whole, you know, teach a man to fish, versus giving them the fish, right, instead of us just going back and fixing the things, getting them to actually learn and see what it is. And I’m not saying 100% of time that this is going to work, you know, they may still be making the same mistakes, and then then we have a bigger issue at hand, of this is just not a good fit for them, because they’ve been shown, they’ve been taught how to see these things, and they’re still not doing it. Okay, then it’s not a good fit, right?

But I think that this is a great step forward, especially if you have somebody who’s they’re great, you know, they’re great, they’re good person. Think they’re going to be a good member of the team. But this is where we’re seeing some issues.

Training Updates

And then the final thing is, we do have competency quizzes at the end of our training that go over a ton of stuff that they have seen in their training. And that is something that we are going to add is this damp dusting versus dry dusting. It’s just damp mopping versus dust mopping or sweeping or whatever. Having these words can mean different things to different people. So we are going to add some stuff to our competency training quizzes associated with this topic that will that will help them, hopefully, at least be introduced to it during training.

And overarchingly, our training process has been really beautiful. All of our new staff have been so competent and confident in the quality of work that they have been producing. So I’ve been really happy with it. These are just little tweaks that we can come back to. And that’s the whole point, I guess. Of this episode is encouraging you guys and myself, it’s a reminder that we can always come back and tweak and adjust.

The Constant Evolution

And frankly, we should most likely, every single process that you’ve created, every single thing that you work on or touch in your business, it you don’t just set it and forget it. It’s going to need to be came back to it’s going to need to be tweaked and adjusted as new situations arise. Even me sharing the customer guidelines I did that. Thing has been changed a million times as we run into new scenarios. So don’t let it discourage you. This is just the name of the game. Is that we always need to come back and look at things, whether that be, you know, an expense that we have, and taking a look at it from from fresh eyes or getting new pricing on it. To again reiterate is this, is this the right choice?

For us, we’ve been taking a peek at other office spaces, at our one location in Sparta, and just casually looking around town to see if there’s anything cheaper that would. Makes sense to switch to, because our current one is way too big. It’s a giant, giant building that we use a fraction of. So could we have a smaller space and save ourselves a lot of money? Maybe, maybe not, because we need water hookups. But it’s not a bad thing to at least always be shopping around.

The Job Interview Analogy

It’s kind of going to interviews and having your resume out there, even if you’re fairly satisfied at your job, it’s not a bad idea to go do interviews, and you never know what opportunity may arise. And that really is what this whole conversation is about, is just making sure that when something happens in our business, that we don’t just take it at face value.

I’ve said this many, many times of not just being “well, that sucks,” and then moving on about your day, it’s “okay, this happened. We got this complaint. Okay. She handled the feedback well. But let’s dive a little bit deeper as to, why is it that somebody who just went through our training process is having this issue? Why is it something that from an education process. Is it something about her not being able to take a look at her work? Maybe she’s not looking at her work at all, and maybe she’s just doing a room and not taking that moment to step back and look at it and reviewing her work. Maybe that’s not happening.”

Digging Deeper

So there’s a couple things that could be happening here that we need to explore. And so when something not ideal happens in your business, take that moment say, “Oh, shit, that sucks.” But then let’s actually dive into why is this happening. And maybe it’s not the most obvious thing. Maybe we need to take a moment and really dive into this. And it could be a lot of the times we might need kind of a systematic overhaul. So for us, that was we had to revamp our entire training process or our entire onboarding process.

And that can be really, really overwhelming, just I talked about in the beginning of the episode, is it can be so overwhelming to tackle these giant things, but there is certainly Okay. Could we put into a place one policy that will help chip away at this problem? Could we adjust the training on day three to help address this, or adjust the one comprehension quiz to at least touch on this and see what happens and what is the lowest amount of effort that we could put in that’s going to work.

The Fitness Analogy

It’s just working out, right? If we can get the results that we want going three days a week, then should I start out and go six days a week from the get go? Now, we should start with the lowest that will get us the result we’re looking for. If you’re trying to lose weight, we don’t just immediately drop down to 1000 calories from never ever restricting before. Not that I’m suggesting you should restrict calories, but say that hypothetically, is something that you wanted to do. We would not just immediately jump down to bare bones calories and working out seven days a week and doing an hour of cardio a day, right?

We need to do as little as possible that will get us results, because otherwise, we’re just doing overkill and putting too much energy into something that we are not getting the output for in equal amounts. So that is what I’m saying about all of these examples. And these were just, you know, fresh. They just came up today or over the past couple weeks. So it was just a really nice reminder.

Final Thoughts

And don’t beat yourself up if you find that you have been overspending by $10,000 a year for insurance because you never shopped around. Don’t beat yourself up, guys, and I’ll try not to either. But anyway, that’s what I got for you guys today. I hope you’re staying cool. Let me know anything you would for me to talk about or discuss down below in the comments.

Bye, guys.

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

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Penn National Insurance
• ZenMaid
• Filthy Rich Cleaners Episode Featuring Maria Dorian
• Maid Summit 2025

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