The KPIs You Need to Track Your Cleaning Business

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Introduction

From your first dollar to your first million, welcome to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast presented by ZenMaid. Join your host, Stephanie Pipkin, founder of Serene Clean, as she shares proven tips, tricks and hard earned lessons, whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale. Get ready to discover how to build your own cleaning empire. Let’s roll up our sleeves and dive in.

Recent Hiring Success and Business Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and in today’s episode, I will be going over all things tracking related specifically to sales, marketing and your clients. And this is kind of the second installment of our KPI tracking, or key performance indicator tracking series that I have done here. The other one that if you go back a couple episodes for the solo episodes. It was all about financial tracking in your cleaning business. And so I want to delve into all of the different areas that we track at Serene, Clean and more.

So just to give you a lot of ideas, there’s some that I would say are non negotiable. Others are nice to haves and more. I’m a psycho about this stuff, and I just love digging into the data and really understanding what’s going on in my business. And as I’ve said before, for me, tracking is this security blanket. It really makes me feel so much more confident that I know what’s going on in my business. Because there’s a lot of things that we cannot control in our business, and especially this year, it feels like things have been a bit out of control because of our turnover and kind of issues with hiring that we’ve had.

Side note, we’ve really hit a good streak, and we found some great candidates, and have a lot of great people starting. And I did, so I just wanted to keep you guys updated on our hiring situation. So I did end up biting the bullet and paying for Indeed, and we spent, I think, $200 in the past month, and we got three hires out of that that we are very excited about. They’re ideal candidates. So we’re pausing on the paid stuff for now, and we’re just gonna keep doing that and playing with it because, you know, I have always been a proponent of not paying, but Indeed continues to get more and more challenging to make it work without paying.

So I’m like, you know what my business is? You know, well over a million a year. Maybe I can spend a couple 100, since we’re in such a tight spot right now. And so this is a good example of don’t be cheap. And Stephanie has been cheap for the, frankly, ego of it all, to be able to say, I don’t pay for that. But it’s like, that doesn’t make sense right now. Let’s pay for this, considering this is our biggest struggle, and the thing that’s holding us back from functioning the way we want to, as well as potentially growing anytime in the future. So with these three hires will finally have proper coverage of all of our current clients and have availability to take on some newbies, people that we’ve been wait listing for a long time.

The Foundation of Lead Tracking

So obviously financial tracking is the foundation and where we need to start. But this is kind of if that’s the skeleton, these are the organs that we still need to function, right? So the first thing that we need to be tracking, and this is bare bones you gotta be doing, this is how many leads are coming in. Where did those leads come from? And how many of them did you close?

This is if you listen to nothing else in this conversation, which, I mean, that’d be silly, because there’s gonna be so much good, golden nuggets in it. But if you don’t listen to anything else, I say, track your leads. We need to know how many leads you’re getting every week. We need to know where they’re coming from, where possible. And we need to know who closed, right? So that is the foundation of really, everything that we’re about to talk about is, if you’re not doing this, you can’t do all of this other stuff that I’m about to talk about. So this is where we need to start.

Consolidating Your Sales Process

And I know you may be like, oh, this, I get leads from all over, they contact me in all different sorts of ways. This is why it is so important to consolidate and almost force people to come through one point of entry, if you will, of your business. And for us, of course, that’s going to be the ZenMaid booking form. All right, so pretty much. If anybody reaches out in any way, if they send a carrier pigeon to us saying, I would like your cleaning services, I’m going to write a note and attach that to the pigeon and send it back with a QR code of our ZenMaid booking form. Like, I’m literally gonna draw the QR code. That’s how important this is to me, that we have everybody funneled through the same sales path, and that 100% has to do with what I’m talking about here, with tracking and making it easier on you and having a very rhythmic, expected pattern for yourself to manage.

Because that was such a mistake, and I’ve mentioned that before in the podcast, that one of the things I used to do, I’d give pricing out all over the place, right? And then it just made it really hard to track the leads and keep them wrangled, if you will.

Basic Lead Tracking Methods

And so there’s a lot of ways to do this. When I first started with my lead tracking, I literally just had an Excel spreadsheet. I just named it sales and marketing, and I had the first column was just the week, and then it was how many leads came in, was the next, and then where did they come from? And I was just tracking at that and then how many closed, right? And so then I could track my close rate.

So I just did this in a spreadsheet. It did not have to be difficult. Now there are, of course, CRMs, which, you know, Customer Relationship Management softwares that you can use to do this. And a lot of you guys are already using a CRM, whether that be Go High Level, some type of agency, or, you know, for us, we have kind of built ClickUp, which is a task management software into our CRM. We’ve connected it via Zapier to ZenMaid. So basically, every time somebody fills out our booking form on our website, or really anywhere, because you can obviously just link, send them the link to the booking form as well. They’re going to be added to our lead funnel and tracking system in ClickUp.

Now that is a little bit more advanced. I’m not suggesting that you guys do that. I’m just saying that there’s other ways to peel this apple when it comes to tracking the leads. So I would say the first thing that I would suggest, if you don’t have any of these things in place, just a spreadsheet. Is totally fine. But the biggest thing is, if you’re having them contact you, and you’re giving pricing all over the place, and you’re not entering them into anywhere, this is a big issue that we need to consolidate this information every single week.

So the practical thing is, I want you to set aside time every single week. And this is non negotiable. This is when I keep my sales and marketing tracker updated and my lead tracker updated, if you will, and see where everybody’s at. And literally, what I would do is I would leave a comment on the cell in the spreadsheet and just put the names. So I would put, Sally, Tina, and if they close, I would just put a Y next to them. And if they didn’t close, I wouldn’t put anything. And then at the end of the week, or each week, I would look back on the previous week and say, how many Y’s do I have? And if there isn’t a why, we’re gonna follow up, right?

And so this was just my very basic lead tracking in the beginning. Now, again, it’s much more robust with ClickUp and all of our automations and shit like that. But this is a great way to start, and honestly, it works. It’s simple, right? Because at least we can see what’s going on.

Additionally, I would then have columns. So it wasn’t just there was one cell with everybody’s name in it. It was my marketing sources, basically, or lead sources across the top, and then in each column of that, I would have how many came from? Basically, it was Google, Facebook, word of mouth, if I had any partnerships, if they said they saw our car or our office, signage, basically, or some other random thing, and we’d track that we have the weeks down the side, across the top, we have the marketing sources. And then in each of those columns for that week, it would be like, okay, two from Google, three from Facebook, four from word of mouth, one from cars. And then I would leave my comments on each of those cells related to how many of those close and who are, who were their names, right? So this was my very simple, archaic way to do this, but it got it done to the point of I knew how many leads I got each week, because that was then the next column was, how many total leads for the week, and then how many closed immediately, right?

And, of course, people may close after that week. Of course, that’s going to happen. I did go back, you know, for the previous month and check, did any of those leads close? And I would update that number and that percentage. So that’s where it would get a little bit more difficult, because sometimes people don’t obviously close right away, and it might be a couple months down the line that they do. But the point is, I was seeing who it was, where they were coming from, where possible, and then how many of them closed?

Understanding Close Rates and Lead Sources

And so this allows us to then make other types of decisions, because a lot of times when I’m doing consulting calls with you guys, and I ask you this question, or you’re telling me, oh my gosh, I need more leads. I need more leads. I don’t have enough business. And then I’m like, well, how many leads are you getting right now, and you’re like, well, I don’t know 40, 40 a week. And I’m like, this isn’t a lead problem. This is a close rate problem. This is a sales issue, not a marketing issue. This is about let’s look at your sales process.

So when we start tracking these things, it allows us to pinpoint where the problem area is that we need to focus on. Because if you don’t have this data, and all of a sudden you got a week of availability looking at you in the eye, and you’re like, oh, this is a lead problem, or this, I need to spend money here. I need to do this. And you start to panic because you don’t have the information to make intelligent decisions. And that’s what all of this is about. All tracking is about giving us the data to truly understand holistically the situation and make decisions from there, so you’re not going in blind.

Because if we didn’t know that you had that many leads, well, yeah, we need to spend money on marketing, and we need to get more leads where clearly that person would not be handling the leads anyway, because they’re not following up. This could be a follow up thing. This could be in the verbiage of this, the sales process or something like that. Are you sending the correct things on email, or what are you doing? So we’re going to look at that instead of looking at increasing leads, because clearly getting more leads isn’t going to help, because you can’t handle the ones you have now properly.

So that is why this is so important as to what’s going on. It also tells you what is your most viable and important lead funnels, or is that the correct word? Basically where they’re coming from, lead source, that’s what we’ll go with. That lead source. So for us, historically over the entirety of the business, our number one places we get leads are going to be word of mouth, Facebook and Google.

So online sources, and this is where it gets tricky. Of did they first see you on Facebook, and then they went and googled you and filled out the form online, right? And that’s where people, you know, you ask people on your booking form where they heard of you, if you’re talking on the phone or you’re in person, ask where they heard about you originally. You know, is this super integral, it’s more the number is more important. Of how many? But we’re trying to get an idea of where they’re coming in from.

And for us, always, it’s always been online searching is going to be the number one place that people are going to find us, and then word of mouth, and then Facebook, and again, they might have saw us on Facebook and then reported something else. So that’s why it’s a little bit inaccurate. But this way we can see close rate by lead source as well. I can tell you for a fact that if somebody comes from us, comes to us from word of mouth or Googling, they are more likely to close than if they come to us by Facebook, right?

And that is most likely because they were window shopping and they’re just curious, as opposed to, if somebody is actively Googling and searching, then they are in the mindset of, I am ready to hire, right? I’m doing my research, I’m looking at reviews. And this is why, if you don’t have a website, if you don’t have Google reviews, that’s why it can be so detrimental, because those people are a hot lead, they’re ready to buy, right? They’re much more attractive to me than perhaps somebody who’s just looky Lou and on Facebook, right and again, doesn’t mean they’re not going to close, but I just know from the data what is most likely.

And that’s why I go so hard on that. I go so hard on reviews, having a beautiful website, keeping Google My Business updated, because I know for a fact that those people are more likely to close just on all of the data I have in the past six years to tell me that that is the truth. So that’s why all of this is so important to know, because I can sit here confidently and say, this is the truth, because I have the numbers to back it up. And that’s what I want for you guys to eventually, in two years, be able to look back and say, oh, this is exactly how things work in my business and it’s really comforting to know that right, and then you can make those decisions in a really confident and intelligent way.

So all of that to say, this is where we want to start out. This is the baseline quick break if you run a cleaning business. This is for you, the Maid Summit 2025. Is the go to virtual event to elevate your systems, grow your team, and finally, get out of the day today, 20 plus speakers, real results and absolutely zero cost to you. Register today at maidsummit.com Remember, it’s free. Okay, now back to the video.

Tracking First Time Cleans as an Availability Indicator

And so now I’m just going to kind of go through all of the other areas that kind of come off of that that I delve into deeper when it comes to tracking. So a close rate calculation, of course, is going to be something so I can look at each of my close rates over the months and see, you know, do we have it better in different months? And that could tell me a lot of things. It could tell me that people are less likely to close at certain times of the year, which can be very interesting.

But for us, because availability has been so tight lately. This is just one piece of the puzzle. If I just look at close rate, well, then that might say I have something wrong with my sales. No, at the end of the day right now, in Serene, Clean availability is our biggest issues. If people aren’t closing, it might be because we’re way too far out for them and or we are not even offering them a date. So I can tell you, for example, I had 88 leads come through in May, and 21 of them closed, and I still have one person on the wait list from May.

So I can tell you all of these things, because I’m tracking them, and a lot of our lower close rates is having to do with us either not offering them dates at all and literally putting them on a wait list, or not even putting my where they’re so early on we’re just telling them we have no availability right now. Would you like us to contact you when you do so? We are tracking number of leads on our wait list as well. And having a wait list is really useful, of course, when we do have availability, because then we can reach out and fill those spots a lot quicker.

So that is really important to us. Another thing that I track, and so this is getting into more operational tracking or client tracking, but I’m kind of putting all of this together, because that’s where I put it all together. And so I do track first time cleans by month, because if we are having a significant number of first time cleans, that means we have really good availability, because if we can get in first times, that means we got big chunks of time, right? Because first times, as we all know, takes a lot of labor hours or man hours, to fit in, and if I’m not able to get in any well, then that means I have nothing.

August, this month right now, while I am filming this, we have had zero first time cleans, because we have had not no availability at all. In July, we had two. In June, we had five. So June to July, that’s when all of the chaos happened, and everybody was leaving, and we’ve had not even just leaving. We had a fire a lot people, right because of all the silly things that were occurring that did not feel silly at all at the time, it was more like, let me cry in a corner right now, because this is all happening.

But we have two first time scheduled for September. We have one scheduled for October, and once we get these new folks trained, and I’m gonna see those numbers shoot up, because we do have people on the waitlist right now. We have and so many people that aren’t even on the waitlist. We haven’t even given them an estimate, because we’re like, we don’t want them in this process yet. So things have been a little bit messy lately, but at the end of the day, I have this, and I know what’s going on, and that makes it feel a lot better, instead of just being like, so chaotic, right?

Understanding Your Client Demographics

Okay, the next thing that I am going to want to go into is basically things related to our current clients, and knowing our clients, right? And I think it is so important to know as much as possible about our clientele, because that really informs us who we are serving. And when you know who you serve, you know your avatar or your ideal client, whatever you want to call it, it makes it so much easier to sell to them in the future and continue to serve them in the ways that they desire. Right? And really, there cannot be enough said about knowing who your clientele are, right?

So going into this, I want to talk about who our clients are. So first, what I like to track, because we serve a wide area with our three locations. So this may not be relevant to you, but it could be if you serve a big city, and you want to know by zip code, that might be a really interesting thing to track. Is tracking your clients by zip code. So for us all active and sporadic clients by service area is something that I track. So for example, and then I do break it down by commercial and residential as well, so that I can really nuance.

Because remember, Serene, Clean is smack up down the middle, 50% residential, 50% commercial. So I want to see is this different, and that’s why this is so useful. Again, this is all I’m looking at my dashboard in ClickUp. That’s how I’m able to do this information. This took a lot of work to set up again and, you know, again, there’s other CRMs that may be a little bit easier for you. I know people really like Go High Level. However, I have talked to people who are really good at Go High Level, and I showed them what I have going on in ClickUp, and they’re like, don’t move to Go High Level. This you are so far it can’t offer you this.

So don’t even because I consider I was like, oh, people really like, Go High Level. It integrates really nicely with ZenMaid. Should I go this route? But then when I showed my current tracking and dashboards and ClickUp and all of my automations that I have sent up, they’re like, no, this can’t offer you what you already have. It would be a huge downgrade. So what I like about ClickUp is the basically unlimited ability to organize information in different ways. So we tag what type of client it is, what area they’re in, their frequency, even, how long did their first time clean take? So all of a sudden I can put all of this into pie charts and bar graphs and all of this stuff.

And again, this may be really overwhelming to you if you’re not tracking anything, but my point is, is that I still have more things I want to track, right? There’s still more data that I want to dig into, and this has just been really interesting to understand explicitly who our clientele is, so I can look and see commercial clients by service area and residential clients by service area.

Tracking Clients by Service Area

For example, residential clients by service area, 53% of them are in our Black River Falls Office service range. 18% are in our La Crosse office, and then 18% are in our Sparta office. Makes sense, because our Black River office is our oldest one, and then you might be like, well, Stephanie, that doesn’t add up to 100 we actually tag if they could be Black River Falls or Sparta and if they could be Sparta or La Crosse. Because those offices, we sometimes pull cleaners from both of them to service the in betweens, because we serve so many little small towns.

So for us, 5.48% of our clientele could be Black River Falls or Sparta office. And then a 4.11% could be sparred all across. So those are kind of we can pull cleaners from either. But point being I understand where our residential clients are most likely to be, but also I can see how stagnant that black that Black River Falls service residential clientele that hasn’t grown very much where the other areas are. Again, that makes sense, because we don’t have as many new clients coming in in Black River Falls, it’s just such a smaller area, it’s literally 5000 people so. We’ve been there the longest. That’s where I started the business, and that’s why that started to get more stagnant, and that’s why I opened the other locations, so that we would have more access to more people.

Then when I look at commercial, it’s much different. All right, so 38% of our commercial clients are in Black River Falls. 12% are in La Crosse, and then 31% are in Sparta. So Sparta and Black River Falls are closer, and then Sparta or La Crosse office is 9.5 BRF or Sparta is 8% so what that tells me is that Sparta is a really great place. The Sparta Black River Falls area is probably the best for us in commercial.

Again, that that what I know about La Crosse, we have a lot harder time hiring in La Crosse, especially in the evenings, if that’s what clientele and La Crosse are wanting. So we are much less likely for us to say yes to a La Crosse client. It’s not that people aren’t reaching out. It’s we don’t have the availability for the specific times, or it’s just a lot harder for us to staff that there’s just a lot more competition for people in that area.

And side note, the two people that we just hired this week that are going to start in the next couple weeks, they’re both in the La Crosse area. So that’s our focus is, is hiring in that area. So that tells me a lot of things when I know all of this information.

Analyzing Client Frequency Preferences

Okay, next things I’m going to track is going to be residential clients by frequency of clean I find this really fascinating. Is looking at my residential clients. The most common slice of the pie here is every four weeks, 34.55% of our residential clients are on a monthly cleaning schedule. 24% are every two weeks. And actually 35% are on a sporadic one. So they are reaching out kind of sporadically, and as needed, they are not on a very strict thing.

So we have a lot of clients that reach out to us occasionally, or they’re snowbirds, so we’re only cleaning for part of the year, that’s that’s surprising, seeing how much of that and then finally, we only have 3.64% of our residential clients on a weekly cleaning schedule. It’s much more niche for us to get weekly. So that means that our bread and butter is going to be every two weeks and once a month. So that’s not super surprising, but a ton of them are sporadic.

And so it’s, it’s to not say no to things like that, because clearly that is who is reaching out to us. So yeah, it’s just, it’s really interesting to know that. And also it’s like, okay, is there anything we can do to get the every four weeks up to bi weekly? Because obviously, that’s, you know, probably twice the money depending on how long those appointments take, or if you give a little bit of a discount because it’s more frequent, or whatever. But selling people weekly, clearly, is very difficult for us. But the biggest, I think, mover, would be, how can we pull people from every four weeks and get them to buy weekly but if that’s not possible, okay, let’s, let’s go hard on the fact we kill it at monthlies, clearly.

So it just, it tells me things about our current services and what people are looking for. And, you know, what would be really interesting is looking at, you know, by service. Okay, this, I never looked at this before, but my mind’s already going I would be curious to see if different service area. So does the Black River Falls clientele have a preferred frequency versus the La Crosse or Sparta areas? That would be interesting to see if that changes things.

And again, if you did this by zip code or by towns, or however you you have it in your business, it may be really fascinating. Of oh, this zip code, they go for weeklies. And you might know that because they’re all, you know, it’s a wealthy neighborhood. It might be duh, but it could be just confirming, or there might be other areas that you’re like, wow. I’m surprised that they really go for bi weekly versus monthly. It might gain you some clarity on, pinpointing marketing and where you need to focus, because if you can get more bi weekly clients versus monthly clients, that’s more attractive, of course, the higher the frequency, the more revenue we’re talking about.

So that can help us make decisions on things like spending on marketing, or events that we go to that are only specific to certain neighbors or or focusing on certain neighborhood groups, or something like that. So again, you can just drive around be like, there’s a lot of mansions here, but you might be surprised that a lot of times, our bread and butter. Bi weeklies are very modest homes, but they’re just really busy, right? They’re a little bit smaller. So yeah, it can be really interesting.

Marketing Source Analysis by Client Type

Okay? And then finally, I do have pie charts for all of our residential and our commercial clients by marketing source. So where did they come from? And this is important for me to break down, because it’s like, okay, I don’t want to just look at all leads and where they came from by marketing source. I want to look at where is our current clients coming from by marketing source, split by commercial and residential.

So so that you guys know for commercial, 41% of our commercial clients said that they found us on Google or our website. So when you want to know where does commercial come from? They Google too, guys. So it’s very, very important that we do that 11% came from a current client, meaning, one of our current residential or commercial clients told them versus normal, just word of mouth of people talking about so we do, if we can discern that, we try to have oh, you know, my sister uses you, and she told told us about you versus Oh, I’ve just, I’ve heard about you in passing, a friend mentioned that they saw you or something. But again, that’s nuance, but really that’s all kind of the same. Is, you know, current clients versus referral.

Word of mouth is 25% and 11% so combine those two are 36% of our commercial clientele came from somebody telling them about us. And then finally, 14% came from Dream 100 which is going to be things like drop offs and cold calling, cold emailing and doing pursuit like that. And the reason that that’s not higher is because I simply don’t do that anymore. We don’t need to, because we have the Google and things like that that are that’s bringing in clientele for commercial. And we’re just, we’re really not trying to, we don’t have the capacity to grow in these ways where it’s like, eventually, someday, I’m going to be pursuing commercial again, meaning we are going to actively be, reaching out to them doing drop offs, that type of stuff. And right now that’s simply, we don’t need that. So that’s why that’s not happening.

But if I were to look at those particular clients who came to us via dream, 100 those are some of our big boys, as I like to call them, is our big manufacturing facilities all came from me, literally, cold calling, cold emailing or or doing drop offs, dropping donuts off, or have my grandma soon drop off donuts, because she used to do that for me, and it got us some clients.

When I look then at residential it’s going to be 38 point. Let’s see. Let me combine these two, the current clients versus referral word of mouth. So that is going to be 42% 42% of our current clients came from some type of word of mouth. 33% came from Google. And then 14.68 came from Facebook. The smaller ones are going to be 3.67% from signage and cars, unknown is going to be 3% and then little smidges from other little things, Cleaning for a Reason, that type of stuff.

So it just, it’s really cool to be able to, pinpoint it exactly I That’s why I said earlier in the episode. I can tell you where they came from. That’s where I also break down Serene, Clean, active commercial clients by industry. So I can’t I know my clients are. I know who they are.

Commercial Client Breakdown by Industry

And so for us, 36% of our commercial clients are professional services buildings, 12.3% are manufacturing facilities, 7.69 are city hall or municipal buildings, and then six over 6% are in apartment complexes, 6% in trucking terminals, 6% in police and fire departments. 1.5% wedding venues, 3% fairgrounds. 1% historic sites. 4.62 is a libraries, 1% is schools, 3% is churches. And finally, 1.5 point 4% is a dance studio. One One Dance Studio.

And so what that does is it’s breaking it down by industry, but it’s not by revenue. So keep that in mind is we have quantity of clientele versus how much revenue. Those two numbers do not correlate necessarily. We may have 36% of our clients, our commercial clients in that industry. That doesn’t mean that the revenue is the same, though, right? That could be only 12% of our commercial revenue, or something like that. And I have broke that and I have broke that down before. I just don’t have that in front of me.

So I know I’m throwing a lot of numbers at you guys, and point being is maybe I’m just trying to brag, I fucking know my stuff. I know my clients. I know who they are, because I’ve gone through all of this. And so basically, what we’re doing is, when they’re coming into our lead funnel here in ClickUp, we’re tagging all of this information at the get go, when they become a lead, so that all of a sudden, we never have to do that again. It gets handled at that beginning part, so that no matter what, we know all of this stuff from the get go.

Residential Client Pay Rate Analysis

And then finally, on this particular page, I have residential clients by pay rate. So this allows us to see how much of our clientele are at the different hourly rates. Because, and this may not make sense for you, if you charge flat rate, we have always charged hourly rates. So this allows us to see exactly where our residential clients are. So 68.47% of our residential clients are at $50 per man hour. 28.83% are at 55 per man hour, and then the smaller smidges are discounted cleanings that we do for a variety of clients. Whether that be 45 40 or 30, and that’s most likely going to be a family member of a cleaner or staff member.

So that is that. But for us, it’s like, as you can see, most of our clients are at 50, and that’s because we just brought all of the ones who are at 45 we did a price increase in April, and we brought them up to 50 so we’re not jumping all the way to 55 I want everybody to be either 50 or 55 obviously, the higher the better. But I’m happy with this, right? So that is fantastic.

Tracking Recurring Client Gains and Losses

So the next area that I would suggest now that have kind of given you guys all of that about, who your client is. I want to talk about, reoccurring clients, gained and lost and churn rates. So the other day, Amanda, you know who you are, you sent me a voice message, and it made me think about this, about how you said that it felt like you weren’t gaining traction, and you were always trying to sell. And you looked back at the data, and you saw that majority of all of the people that you were cleaning for were one off cleans, they were move out that type of stuff. And so that’s why it felt like you were just paddling and not getting anywhere is you are not getting reoccurring clients.

And so this is where it’s really important to me. Yes, close rate is important. But what’s really, really, really important to me is how many reoccurring clients I have. Because if we are just only cleaning consistently for move out cleans, or one off cleans, post construction, that type stuff, that’s great, but that is much less interesting to me than having a solid foundation of reoccurring clients. And so for Amanda, seeing that, it was just really eye opening of this is why I’m not either I’m not getting these people to rebook or just focusing on too much move outs or whatever. So it’s just it was really fascinating to see that data laid out. And that’s why I track this.

So I track how many reoccurring clients I gain every month and how many I lose. And so this tells me is my, my base, my, my mountain of clients. Is it actually going up, or is it just staying because we are just doing or because we are losing at the same rate our clients, or we’re only doing one off, so it’s just turning and it’s not actually, building our foundation. And this is why, this is why Serene, Clean is where we’re at, is because we have such a solid base of reoccurring business. It’s not just one offs. Of course we do move outs, and that’s really good cash injections, but it doesn’t actually move the needle on, building this big, massive foundation of reoccurring revenue. That’s why we love the cleaning business, right? Guys. This is why it’s so attractive. Just like, you know, getting a haircut, you’re gonna go back. Just like getting oil changes, you’re gonna go back. But the beauty of cleaning is, it’s probably more frequently than both of those things it should be, at least.

And so we want to look and see how many reoccurring clients did we gain? Did they actually convert to reoccurring? So for us, we’re looking at their first time. We’re looking at their second clean, and then their third clean should be, when they’re actually, transitioning to a reoccurring that’s really important to us. So for us, at their third cleaning, that’s where we are giving them a little thank you note. That’s where we’re giving them a candle, because we’ve really figured out the house. We understand them. And now it’s like, okay, welcome to the screen. Clean family. All right, you’re a member here, so I’ll give you some numbers here.

I can see that in July, or, let’s see, yeah, okay, let’s look at July, June. Let’s look at June. In June, I gained four total reoccurring clients, two of them are every four weeks and two of them are sporadic, totaling and four reoccurring in that same month, I lost two clients, and I lost one that was every two weeks and one that was looks like sporadic. So I gained more reoccurring than I lost. I gained two more than I lost. So we are net positive on June, even though we lost them. And you know, we lose clients every single month, through this year, I can see that. I’ll just, I’ll just list off the numbers for you guys. In January, we lost four in February, we lost one in March, we lost six in April, we lost five. In May, we lost six. In June, we lost two. In July, we lost two. August, we have not lost any yet.

So some months are higher, as you can see, and we did do a price increase at the beginning of April, so a lot of it could be attributed to that, and I’ll tell you how I know in just a moment. But then looking at this year, January, we gained eight. February we gained five. March we gained one. April we gained four. May we gained two. June, we gained four. And in July, we’ve gained two. August, we haven’t gained any. And again, all of this has to do with availability. When it comes to these lower I mean, we, obviously, we’re, we’re, we’re staying pretty much stagnant with our core base, because we don’t have any availability to take anybody on. So I’m really looking forward to this fall. I know that this is about to jump reoccurring clients gained.

Understanding Churn Rate Calculations

And so what I’m talking about right now is churn rate. So this is something I really regret not tracking earlier on, I just started tracking that this year to be, which is crazy, is our churn rate of clients. And so churn rate calculation, how you figure that out is you take your number of clients law lost this month, and you divide that by your total active clients on the first of the month. So I can see that in July our our churn rate was point 6% right? So I took the number of clients lost, and as I told you guys, I lost two clients in July, and then by our total active clients on the first of the month, on the first of the month in July, we had 291 reoccurring clients. And so I just took two divided by 291 that got me that point 6% I’m happy with that. If I mean anything less than 1% I am thrilled at that’s that’s a good churn rate. I think so. And I mean not just, I think, that’s good.

So it may be like, oh my gosh, multiple clients, but it’s like, you have to think of our volume of clients. So that’s that those are good churn rates. And it’s about to get even better. I know it is because we’re actually going to have availability to get clients in. So that’s going to be great. So I do, you know, track, obviously, the total number of our active reoccurring clients. And since, let’s see, for the past three months, we’ve been, we’ve been at 291 so residential, 220 active clients, 63 commercial and eight vacation rentals. So yeah, pretty, pretty wild.

And so, you know, I keep saying, oh, we’re half commercial. I mean by revenue. I mean by revenue. So 63 commercial clients are equal to 220 residential clients in revenue. So you guys know why I love commercial, okay, but it’s, it’s both for us, it’s both, we have to have both of these things to be where we’re at now.

Why Clients Leave – The Data Behind Cancellations

So finally, the final thing I want to touch on is tracking why people left. Okay, because we, I just told you how many people left, we actually track the reason why they left, because that informs us exactly what the problem is. What is the fire that is occurring. Or maybe it’s not a fire at all that we can control, right? But if it is, I darn well want to know about it. And if we are losing clients because of something that 100% is on us, this is DEF CON one, we need to solve this problem, right? So that’s why it’s so important, not just to track how many you lost, but why? If you can get that out of a most time, clients will tell us why. They will leave because we asked them.

So I’ll tell you. Okay, so July, we lost two we lost one commercial account, and they said that there’s our services were no longer needed, that they were going to have an internal person do the cleaning. And then the sporadic client. We canceled on them. We do not want to clean for them anymore. In June, we lost a sporadic one. Okay, this was a commercial account. Services no longer needed. They’re having an internal person clean for them. This is a common thing, because people are looking to make extra money, they reach out to their current employer, hey, can I do the cleaning instead? And they cancel on us. We lost a bi weekly client, and they said, because they moved so we can’t control that.

So, okay, we have two months of things that can’t really control. Obviously, us deciding not to work with somebody we can control that, but that’s a good thing. Okay, may this is where it’s very interesting to see why people canceled, because we just did that price increase in April. So we had 1234, how many did we lose? All right, six. And we had 123, of them be because of price. And those were every four weeks. One is unknown. One is other. I’d have to click on that and see. And then the sporadic one that we lost is because of price related. So four out of six clients that we lost was because of that price increase. Okay, we did a price increase, we lost, we lost four people because of that. So, and haven’t lost any sense, that’s that’s not too bad.

In April when we did the price increase. Let’s see if anybody dropped because of that. Okay, so we had one that was every two weeks, and they said services no longer needed. We had three who were every four weeks, and one of them was price related, related services no longer needed. And then one did not respond to us. And then finally, we had a commercial account, and we canceled on them because they would not, they would not, they didn’t. They were just, we’re not good to work with.

So yeah, just to give you the past couple months, I can tell you exactly why we lost clients. And now what that tells me, look at that guys, not a single reason for quality, no issues related to anything that it’s moving. They don’t need the cleanings anymore. And maybe, you know, they’re just not being honest with us. But typically, people are going to be honest with us if it’s quality, because they’re ready to explode. So for the past, you know, several months, nobody’s canceled because of that.

Let’s see. In March, we had somebody cancel because we just didn’t have the availability that they were looking for, the particular day and time we had, let’s see here, every four weeks we had four people cancel. One didn’t respond. Two of them said service is no longer needed. And that could even be somebody passed away. That’s not uncommon when we service elderly homes, and unfortunately, that’s really sad. And then one was price related. In March, the one person that canceled in February was every four weeks, and they did not tell us why they canceled. And then in January, we lost four clients. Three of them were sporadic. One of them was quality related.

So finally, January was the last time we had somebody cancel because of quality, and that cleaner is no longer with us, so one was other and the other one is unknown. They did not tell us. So Oh, and then the every two weeks client that canceled is unknown as well. So we had some people that just would not give us the feedback, but we tag it as well. So as you can see, I just know, why are people canceling? Where are they coming from? When they come from us, how many are active versus sporadic? How frequent do people have us? Where are they? All of this data again, this episode, I know might feel a little bit overwhelming, but what I want you guys to do is pick the first thing, which is leads, how many closed, where they come from. And then you can work on your follow up process. From there, that is the most important thing, guys.

Action Items for Implementation

And then we can start looking at, all of this other data to understand your clients. So if I were to tell you, okay, your action items, what I said at the beginning is, is, you know what I just said? And then the second thing that I want you guys to do is, or really, the other ones I want to focus on is, how many reoccurring clients did you gain? How many did you lose? And if you lost anybody? Why? Why did they cancel? All right, because those areas are going to inform action on your part. They’re going to tell you exactly what you need to do to improve your service so people don’t leave.

And again, if it’s price related, if you’re having a shit say you just did a massive price increase, right? And you jumped too high, and you had 30 people cancel, right? Well, what do we learn? Don’t do that again and not don’t increase prices. Don’t do it all on everybody at once. Unless you are ready to go, we have a wait list a mile long, and those people all are at a higher price, right? So it tells us what we need to do. Okay?

Advanced Tracking Considerations

And I’m sure there’s a lot of areas that you guys could track. This is where I have started, and there, I’m sure there’s other things I’m just not thinking of on other spreadsheets or whatever that I just haven’t touched right now. But this is kind of my central focus, on a weekly basis as I am looking at this stuff, or at least on a monthly basis when it comes to client data, if people are leaving, I’m looking at that every single week. Of course, number of leads, our close rates, how many people are on our wait list. This is stuff that I’m looking at as well as, how many follow ups did we do when they closed? All of the that good stuff.

Tools and Technology for Data Management

So I know that this was, a data heavy one, and it’s through a lot of you guys. If you have any questions on anything I’ve said, leave it in the comments below. Of course, I’m always here to answer them, and I do need to do a Q A video soon, I think, because we have a plenty of them. But if I see a question that I can answer in the comment, I’ll try to get to it for you. Or, of course, you guys can always tag me in the ZenMaid mastermind, if you want to take it there, and we can have the conversation there. Sometimes that’s a lot faster for me to get to it in the the Facebook group, so head on over to the ZenMaid mastermind. If you’re not joined yet, it’s free. You don’t need to be a ZenMaid customer, although if you’re not, what are you doing? And we can chat there. I’d love to, I’d love to meet you over there, and we can have a grand old time in the mastermind.

Making Data-Driven Business Decisions

Other than that, guys, I hope you’re having a wonderful week. If you did not go watch Tuesday’s episode that dropped. It was me, Amar and Maria on site in Barcelona, Spain, doing Would You Rather questions in our cleaning businesses? And it was a hoot. So hilarious. I choked Amar at one point. So if you want to go see that, go watch a YouTube video. If you’re listening to this anywhere else that one is worth, visually watching, because it’s funny. Okay, so I would say, if you don’t watch any of the other ones, go watch that one on YouTube. It’s really, really funny.

Next Steps and Resources

So yeah, I hope you guys have a great rest of your week. If you listen to all the way through, can we give a blue diamond, because I’m wearing a blue shirt right now, put a put a blue diamond. I know that there’s one, or maybe a triangle, a circle, just a blue shape. Okay, give me a blue shape down below to show me that you listen all the way through. Give this a like hit that subscribe and we’ll see you on the next episode of filthy rich cleaners. Bye, guys.

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 Booking Form
• ZenMaid Mastermind Facebook Group
• ClickUp CRM Software
• Go High Level CRM
• The Maid Summit 2025
• Zapier Integration Platform
• Cleaning for a Reason

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