The Official 2025 Naughty and Nice List

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Introduction

Stephanie: Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean and this very special episode is our 100th episode of the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am so excited to have hit 100. I cannot believe the whirlwind of a year it has been guys and the amazing guests that I’ve had, the amazing conversations, the crash outs that you guys have had full access to throughout the year. And I am just so grateful to all of you for being along for the ride, for being supportive, for joining me on the podcast, as many of our listeners have, and I just am so incredibly grateful, and I am very excited to see where the next 100 episodes take us.

So in case you’re not watching and you are just listening, I am in the festive spirit. We shall say Santa Stephanie is in full effect, because in this episode, I got my naughty and nice list. It’s actually two pages long. If you ever wondered what my handwriting looks like, you can’t read it. So, yeah, I should have been a doctor, I think, and it’s one of my manager’s favorite little activities, is to go behind my post it notes and see and try to understand the hieroglyphics that are on the page. So terrible handwriting, I think that goes along with intelligence. I’m just going to claim that. No idea if that’s based in reality, but I have a nice and naughty list for all of the shit that’s happened in Serene Clean in 2025 thus far. I know we still have a couple weeks left, but I think we’re far enough into the year to do a little recap. And so I went through painstakingly the entire year and all of the major events that happened at Serene Clean and people and behaviors and things that occurred, and they either went into the nice or they went into the naughty list, and we are going to go through that. I thought it would be really fun. I have my glass of wine because it is 7:04pm and tomorrow I am driving to Wisconsin, so I will hopefully be getting up before the crack of dawn to get on the road with my Lily baby and go to my company Christmas party, which is on Friday evening. So I am so excited. And by the time this goes live, I’ll be driving back, most likely, to Georgia. So I thought a glass of wine was warranted. If that offends you, I don’t care.

So all of that to be said, guys, let’s get into our naughty and nice list. And also, if you guys are big fans of Mean Girls I am, I’m channeling my full talent show Mean Girls persona right now, where they’re dressed in this outfit. So I really enjoyed putting this on because I’m, oh my gosh, I’m just, Katie, drop your favorite Mean Girls line down below you go, Glen Coco. She doesn’t even go here. That’s so fetch. Stop trying to make fetch happen. All right, I just had to say those. Get those out of my system. Doesn’t mean it stopped. There may be more of that coming down the line. So for those of you that have not seen Mean Girls, what I go now, don’t leave this episode, but bookmark it. Go watch Mean Girls. Come back.

Richie Levine Discrimination Lawsuit and Early 2025 Wins

Stephanie: Okay, so first on the naughty list, I’m going to call him out by name. His name is Richie Levine. He’s on Stephanie’s naughty list. The no F bomb starts in January. So sorry about that, guys. Richie Levine is a gentleman who sued Serene Clean for discriminatory practices, and we had a discrimination lawsuit on our hands, and Richie Levine takes a lot of pleasure in going after businesses, specifically in Wisconsin who he has never applied to and never intends to apply to, but claims that we are discriminating by having certain types of phrases in our job listing.

So I have gone over all of these situations for the most part in podcast episodes previously, so I’m not trying to necessarily repeat all of the details, but suffice it to say, Richie goes after these companies because we said something about not allowing felons to work for us and so for us, with our large government contract that we were starting literally two years ago, he found us after the fact and said that we because we said no felons were allowed on the property. They would not pass the government background checks. We were discriminating against felons, which I’ve said before, I’ll say it again. We have felons on staff at Serene Clean. That is not necessarily going to stop us from hiring somebody. It just depends on the situation. But we do not discriminate against felons. But in this situation, we wanted to not waste anybody’s time interviewing them, not wasting our time, because the government facilities background checks are extremely, extremely difficult to pass, and absolutely no felons were ever going to pass it. So we don’t want to waste anybody’s time.

So the mistake that we made was to even list that in the job listing when we thought we were doing a good thing by saying that. But truly, in Wisconsin, you cannot use any type of language related to that. So there’s only a few states that have laws in place that are going to even apply here. So do check your state and make sure that you can’t list that if you have anything when in doubt, which I would just suggest to everybody, just don’t have anything about that you can say something background checks are required, or we perform background checks, that’s totally fine, but we don’t ever want to put in our listing anything to do with something that could be seen as discriminatory. So Richie’s on the naughty list, but we’re on the nice list because the lawsuit got dropped at the very last minute. Because I was, I got a lawyer, and I was we’re going to court. We’re not dropping it, because he emailed us a couple days before the first hearing, and was I’ll drop this for whatever he said, $300 I thought, I believe. And we’re nope, nope, we’re taking you to court. And then he dropped it. So just a big I got, I got names for Richie that I should not say on the podcast, so I’m not going to, but let’s just say not a fan. Naughty List, naughty list. Richie, bad.

Okay, going to the nice list early on in the year, the Serene Clean management team was on the nice list for introducing yearly education for staff, including competency reviews. So we put together in Trainual, which is our software program for training and onboarding that we utilize, we put together a yearly education and review so that all of our staff members, regardless how long they’ve been here, can review and brush up on all of the policies, expectations, safety measures, anything that’s changed over the past year. Additionally, we are also introducing at that time competency reviews, where Hannah, our quality controller and lead trainer, is going out and basically being with each cleaner again, regardless how long they’ve been with us for an extended period of time, watching, correcting, answering questions, if anything’s changed, and just helping everybody brush up and make sure we’re all on the same page of what we should be doing, especially as our scope of work has shifted a bit this year, we have adjusted what we do and do not do in a standard clean for example, we don’t change duvet covers. We don’t scrub walls anymore. All of these things we’ve kind of made decisions on. And some of the cleaners who have been here for a while that felt icky because we were, lowering, technically, our level of detail or the things that we do. We also stopped doing any laundry for clients, except vacation rentals, of course, where we’re washing bedding. That’s an exception to the rule. So I say we are on the nice list for that, because it definitely helped improve both our quality as well as our cleaners. Gave a lot of great feedback on that yearly education, saying that they really appreciated that and they felt more confident in their job. So nice list for us.

The Bookkeeping Error That Caused Months of Panic

Stephanie: Naughty list is Stephanie slash my accountant. Okay, so for literally months of 2025 I was in an absolute spiraling despair. Maybe I didn’t show it to you guys that much of we are not profitable. What is going on? I don’t understand what is going on. And we just we haven’t been profitable for months, and I was just spiraling. And what was occurring was improper bookkeeping specifically related to our 401K contributions, they were basically being counted twice, if you will, or being improperly labeled in QuickBooks as an expense where it did not need to be because it was already getting taken out and accounted for on another transaction, pulling from Gusto. And I still don’t even know if I’m explaining that, right? But basically, we were miscategorizing the 401K contributions that the company made, and it was artificially making us look not profitable when we were profitable for months.

And so I was in a tailspin spiral, I’m a fraud. What am I taught? Why would any of you guys listen to me? I don’t know anything about making money. Don’t listen to me. And that was not the case. We were making money. And that just goes to show that even years into it, you can make these types of mistakes. And so I had a meeting with my accountant, and was listen, I thought that you guys were kind of double checking this stuff, and we just had to clarify a bit on what their services entailed, versus what our responsibility internally was so naughty list for sure on me, because I think I aged myself multiple years at the beginning of this year, because I was so stressed, I felt such a failure. I felt such a fraud, when in actuality, I’m only a little bit of a failure. Kidding. I think I’m not a failure. So naughty list there.

Switching to Slack and Panic Pricing Decisions

Stephanie: Okay, on to the nice list. We switched to Slack. That was such a nice list on us. So a nice action on our part. It’s amazing. You guys know, I’ve talked ad nauseum about Slack and how much that has improved our employee communication, as well as just keeping things less chaotic and more organized and how we were previously doing, which, of course, was Facebook Messenger, right? So big fan of Slack. Slack is on the nice list, just in general. Them as an entity. We love you, Slack. So short and sweet, there on to the naughty list.

Okay, early in the year, in March, we close rate dropped drastically. And I was what is going on, especially from the previous year? And I’m oh my gosh. I kind of had a bit of a panic. And we’re maybe it’s pricing. Maybe we’re too high price now. And so we kind of panic dropped our prices to new clients. And we’re oh my gosh, we need to, we need to do something to make this close rate happen better, and as opposed to maybe experimenting with other things, because it truly wasn’t price that people were not closing for whatever reason. It was not price because a month later, that was not an issue when it came to closing. So I feel that we should be on the naughty list because we acted out of fear when it came to that, and I labeled it as an experiment. And truly, this is minor naughty, okay, this is not major naughty, which we’re going to get into some people who are majorly on the naughty list, other than Richie. This is minor but it is just a reminder that we do not need to panic. We do not need to make drastic decisions. And this truly wasn’t super drastic. Basically, what we did was, instead of offering our new clients at $55 an hour, we dropped it back down to $50 an hour, which a lot of our current clients are at $50 an hour. So it wasn’t this crazy thing, but it kind of feels that was unnecessary. We didn’t need to do that. We could have closed those people at $55 or filled those spots with somebody who is willing to pay at $55 so I’m so minor, naughty, maybe a little nice. Because experimenting is okay, but I feel we did that in haste and out of fear. So I would say making decisions out of fear will put you on Stephanie’s naughty list.

Six Year Anniversary Cleaning Giveaway and the School Account Disaster

Stephanie: As for nice going into April, which we hit our six year anniversary, and so the nice thing that occurred was I did a cleaning giveaway, and cleaning giveaways will always be on my nice list. Okay, because they are so impactful. They’re so useful for drumming up business. They’re grateful for just general marketing and branding. They bring you estimates, and they also do something good, and they reward your clients for following you along on social media, on your email marketing, and rewards them. So we did our biggest cleaning giveaway ever. I give away free six free cleanings, three to current clients and three to any new clients that were in our service area that entered the giveaway. And I just checked and that video ended up getting 74,000 views, which is insane. I did boost it. So, of course, that that was part of it. I ended up spending only $300 on the entire thing in the month of April, and we got 74,000 views. Got a ton of leads from that. And additionally, shares. People were sharing. People were engaging. We got a lot more likes and followers on the page too.

So I have done cleaning giveaways since day one of the business, we’ve done cleaning giveaways, I’m a big fan of this method, and I highly encourage you guys to do these. It’s a great way to drum up business. It’s a great way to do free cleanings as well. For practice, if you are new at this and still a little off on your cleaning, estimating and things. It’s a great low pressure way to get reviews, get practice and get more clients. So big fan of cleaning giveaways, they are fantastic. You can go look at Serene Clean’s Facebook page if you’re curious about this video and want to fact check me on this. I promise that I’m telling the truth on these 74,000 views. And see exactly how I did that video if you’re interested. So you can just go, scroll back. It’s actually it’s pinned to our Facebook page, so it’s right at the top in the pin post, if you just scroll over if you are intrigued by that. So definitely nice list activities there. Okay, something that put us on the naughty list as a team.

Meaning a management team, was we ended up bidding and getting a very large commercial account, large for us, which was $5,000 a month. I mean, that’s large for any of us. What am I saying? A $5,000 a month account is very, very attractive. However we underbid it drastically. So despite that revenue being great and juicy at the top, meaning the gross revenue, the net, or should I say, our time that we were estimating, was drastically off what it was going to take to actually clean the thing. And so there’s a couple reasons this happened. We saw when it was the school was not in session, so that was a big difference. And just honestly, I think that it just we were just off. We were off with our bid. And that’s okay. Sometimes that happens, and we learned a lot of lessons from it, but that naughty action behavior ended up costing us several cleaners that we tried to put on there.

We had massive we had 100% failure rate at this account of we couldn’t keep a cleaner there because they were so stressed and frustrated, despite the client saying, we are happy with you rotating through things. We are happy with you guys not doing the entire school every single night. So we were there four hours. It probably would take six to eight to actually do the thing. So we were way off with our bid. We never bid a school before, so we were just super duper off, and things were way more time consuming than we expected, especially when they were in session. So lot of lessons learned there, I think just the naughty list of we bit off a little bit more than we could chew. And then we did not immediately say, hey, we need to rebid this thing or drop. We just kept allowing our cleaners to be frustrated and kept beating our heads against the wall instead of just making that decision earlier on. I think what the naughty list behavior is, we let it go on too long, right? We should have been noting this immediately, instead of letting it go for a couple months before we ended up dropping the account, which is what we did. So nice list behavior, dropping accounts that don’t make sense for you, but yeah, a little bit of a big learning lesson for sure at the beginning of the year for that.

Record Leads with No Availability and Hannah’s Critical Role

Stephanie: So one of my nice list behaviors was going to be boosting hiring videos on Facebook to push people to apply on Indeed. So I actually turned an employee interview with my cleaner, Ashley V who I did interview on the podcast this year. Great, great employee, great person, just one of the most interesting, amazing people I’ve ever met in my life. And I am not being facetious at all, she is just a very special person, very, very special. She’s worked for me for years, so I have a video where we interview her briefly, asking her what it’s to work at Serene Clean, why she likes working here, and all of that good stuff. And so I actually edited that, turned that into a boosted video on Facebook with the goal of people going to Indeed and applying. And it was very fruitful. We got a lot of clicks from it. And just overall, it’s a great another great branding thing of showcasing our staff really love to work here. So it’s great for getting clients as well, because they see happy, wonderful cleaners talking about how much they love their work. That’s a win, win in so many situations.

So okay, I’m going to say another nice that kind of leads to a naughty. So the nice is going to be kind of just a win from May we had crazy leads in May, we had the highest ever leads in the history of the business in one month, and we had over 80 leads in a month, which is crazy, right? What do you do with all of these leads? And that’s what takes us to the naughty list of nothing. We did nothing with those leads because we didn’t have any availability. So it was the most bitter, sweet experience ever, of all of this money sitting right there waiting for me to reach out and grab it, but we couldn’t grab it because we didn’t have enough availability for even a fraction of it. We couldn’t close anything because we had no availability. So we could wait list stuff, we could say we’ll come back and circle back later. However, a lot of these were move out cleans, right, which are great cash injections, and we to do a lot of move out cleans, especially in the summertime. That’s when they’re most popular. So it was so frustrating, of not being able to touch the money that was right there in front of us. So super nice, super cool, that that was so high leads, especially when we’re not really paying for crazy marketing or anything, that’s amazing. However, we did not have the availability. And the topic of availability, just as in general naughty list material, it was Nam, we don’t talk about it. That was the summer of 2025, when it comes to availability and turnover. It was crazy, and we will get into that a little bit in just a moment. When it comes to turnover and specific people who are on the naughty list for turnover.

Okay, nice list material is early on in the year. We went 11 weeks with no complaints. We also then did that again later in the year, and I’ll get into complaints at the end of the video, of what our complaint rate was for this year, which is totally spoiler nice list stuff. So that’s pretty awesome, and I will attribute that to our intensive training program overhaul and Hannah’s role. So Hannah is 100% on the nice list. She will always be on the nice list. She’s an angel. And introducing her role, coming from cleaning tech to now field development and quality assurance specialist, that is her actual title. I oftentimes will just say, quality control and training. But that’s truly her title is just field development in a variety of ways, training, quality control. All of that stuff. So introducing her role last year has shown all of the fruits of the labor here this year, because we could not have done it without Hannah, with all of the call outs, with all of the turnover, there’s no way we would have survived I would have been up in Wisconsin for months, that without Hannah, there is no if ands or buts. I would have had to do that, or we would have to take such big hits that I honestly don’t feel very willing to take, because it would have just affected us so much more negatively. So Hannah really blunted the effects of the turnover that we were experiencing. So that is incredible.

So coming back to the no complaints, thing that is, I can completely attest that to our new orientation that we put into place last year and our new training program that we put into place last year. So if you’re curious what that looks like, that is actually what my Maid Summit talk was on this year. We can link that down below in the bio. It’s on the ZenMaid YouTube channel. If you want to go and learn more about my training program and training overhaul that we have done, and I do have a training bundle available at Serene-cleanConsulting Services – Serene Clean , if you would to purchase all of our training materials and the actual blueprint of how Serene Clean does training. But this is the proof that that works, because we are now enjoying that, and that has been very nice of overarchingly, the nice thing about this year is not dealing with a bunch of complaints, and I’ll come back to that at the end of the video.

Staff Drama and Losing My Cool

Stephanie: So, okay, specific naughty list folks, cleaners. I got a couple. I’m not going to mention them by name, because I feel that’s inappropriate. I’ll just use cleaner A, cleaner B, that type of thing. Because, yeah, I don’t want to affect anonymity. Yes, I can say that word for anybody who recalls that episode where I couldn’t speak, which is most episodes, however, that particular episode we we were really struggling saying tough words so to to keep my cleaners or previous employees anonymity intact, I will not be naming them, but one of the cleaners was absolutely trying to get fired, and she had inappropriate unprofessional behavior for literally months, and we just didn’t know how to handle it, because we were already dealing with some other turnover that was occurring. We also were being very forgiving of her because we knew that she had some mental health issues that we wanted to be very delicate about. And it really goes to show that it’s yes, people are struggling, but that does not change the fact that this is a job. You need to show up. You need to be able to do the job. You need to not call out last minute, all of these things, lot of lessons learned, and she ended up the straw that broke the camel’s back that had me literally crying in this chair, flinging my phone away. So I stopped angry texting her was she ended up cursing me out over Slack, and I was typing a response because she was being really unprofessional and just having an absolute what seemed a psychotic breakdown.

And so I was, I was typing out, this is unprofessional, you shouldn’t be speaking this way, blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff. And she comes back with a message as I’m typing that says, oh, you’re a coward. You can’t even give me a phone call. And those were the exact words, and Stephanie, in a fit of rage, said back, oh, you want a phone call. And I just start going, not, don’t. Stephanie’s naughty list. Stephanie is 100% on the naughty list for losing her cool. That is the one moment of this entire year that I lost my cool that, and it wasn’t cool at all, guys. So 10 out of 10 don’t recommend to to do that. Don’t curse at people. Do not lose your cool. Don’t let them get to you guys. Alright, cleaners will poke the bear, not all cleaners, of course, but when they’re a bad staff member, they’re going to do anything they can to rile you up, to make you look the bad person, right? 100% she was acting really inappropriately for months and months and months, and she wanted to get fired, right?

So Krystal literally messaged me in my manager chat. She was Stephanie, stop talking, and that’s when I I had to I stood up from my desk because it was right after a Monday meeting that this happened. I went in the other room, I cried, I paced, I calmed down, immediate shame and regret and remorse over losing my temper, which I just, I just felt stupid. I felt stupid. I even still feel stupid now talking about it, of that person, truly means nothing to me. And I’m not saying that to be cruel or anything, it’s she has no effect on my life, and I let her bring out the one moment this year that I’m pissed off, that I reacted in that way, not saying I haven’t reacted poorly in other ways to other things in my life, for sure, but this one in particular really grinds my gears because it was so unnecessary. I didn’t need to do that. I let her get to me. Okay, so don’t let them get to you guys. Alright, so I was on the naughty list. She was on the naughty list. Of course, she immediately got fired, and then immediate turnaround of she was very cheerful about the fact that she got fired, and she did try to get unemployment, and she was denied unemployment because we had all of this evidence showcasing that she broke a million different company policies, right? So naughty list for me and for her.

Open Phone and The Four Year Cleaner Who Stole a Wallet

Stephanie: Okay, nice list is definitely going to be Open Phone. You guys are on my nice list. You’re on my naughty list because of your terrible rebranding. I know I’ve said this several times, and I hope this gets through to them that I know you don’t care what I think Open Phone Quo as you rebranded to, but that was a poor choice. However, if you Google Open Phone, they will show up. It’s also called Quo now, but I’m going to keep calling it Open Phone. Super duper nice list, because it has made our lives so much better. It’s an amazing phone system. All of our calls are recorded which they were before in our other system, but it just sucked. Couldn’t even find recordings when we needed them. It’s just so easy to see everything from the computer, make phone calls through our computer, through your phone, if you want to, and it’s just really affordable. It’s way more affordable than our own fold system. I sound I’m an advertisement for them. They should sponsor the podcast, Open Phone.

Do you want to be a sponsor of our podcast? I’ll start not dissing your your rebrand. If you become a sponsor, I promise. Stay tuned, guys. We’ll drop that sponsorship if we have it. I know we do have a coupon code. I think ZenMaid has a coupon code. Maybe we can put it in here for a discount or whatever. So I’m not affiliated, but I know ZenMaid has some type of relationship with Open Phone, and you guys can get some off. I don’t know if that coupon code is still existing. If it’s not, maybe we cut this part out. I don’t know. Alright, we’ll look into that for you guys. So definitely nice list for Open Phone.

Naughty list is my cleaner who worked for me for four years and then lied repeatedly about stealing a wallet at a church and got caught on camera doing it, and lied to my face four times about it, and I laugh because I want to cry. I’m over it honestly now, it’s it’s just such a learning lesson. It was such a betrayal. It was such an incredible betrayal. I was so upset in the moment about this, because I just couldn’t believe that somebody would do that, who had been part of the team for so long, four years, four years she worked for us. We had our company parties and cookouts at her house. We had pool parties there. This was a friend. I truly considered her a friend. And so it just felt crazy to me that she would throw that all away over $80 or whatever it was in the wallet, and then when clearly we knew, and we were trying to give her an opportunity to come clean. She did not, and she still, to this day, said she lost a wallet in a garbage. I’m sure I made an entire episode about this, but she she is on my naughty list. She will forever be on my naughty list. She definitely apologized after the fact, she thanked me for being such a great place to work and and all that good stuff. So it did end on a relatively peaceful note. But yeah, that was that was honestly, during crazy turnover of the summer that happened in the summertime. And if anything was going to break us as a management team, it was going to be that because we just were please, please Lord, make it stop. What did we do to deserve this crazy turnover and then these insane situations happening, and I’ve got more guys, alright, I got more to drop. So definitely naughty list material there.

Early Quitters and The Fake Doctor’s Notes Scandal

Stephanie: Okay, this one may seem naughty list, but I’m going to put it on nice list. We had two new hires in May that quit super duper fast, meaning within either the first couple weeks or the first day. So one of them quit. She made it through training, and then she quit because she was the physicality is just too much. So love that communication. It also taught us that we needed to emphasize the physicality of the job even more so and ask more questions about their physical capabilities during the interview process, because we realize people underestimate how physical this work is. And so that taught us a lot, a very appreciative that she quit before we put her on paying clients that on her own as an independent cleaner. So that puts you on my nice list, because you didn’t waste my time any more than just that. We mitigated the cost effects and the labor effects and the time effects of that by her quitting that early on.

The other one quit, literally halfway through orientation. She said she went to the bathroom, and then she just left. So that happened, and in the reasoning was really interesting. She had, I guess, a midlife crisis come to Jesus moment. I’m not sure what it was, but the message she sent was basically, our orientation is really well put together. And in that orientation, I have a video about the history of the business. They watch the history of Serene Clean, and then they also watch a video of me talking about our company culture and why this is so important, and giving lots of examples of what that looks like and what they can expect working here. And just everything about Serene Clean, it’s a really good introduction. And obviously that’s just a portion of orientation. Orientation goes on for six hours. It’s very, very intensive. Also that is included in the training bundle is access to our orientation. So that is the hive mind of Serene Clean. So I think it’s very well worth it to invest in that training bundle. Look at me selling. Look at me. I don’t do this usually, so I guess it’s the wine. It makes me want to make money. So does alcohol do that? Do you guys make you good at sales? I wouldn’t say I’m good necessarily, but I am attempting.

So what she said in her message was, orientation was great, and seeing Stephanie’s growth and success has made me really look in the mirror and realize, I’ve cleaned on and off for myself, and it never grew to anything it could have been. And clearly, there’s a lot of opportunity here. And I just, I really need to consider what I’m doing, and I’m gonna move down to Florida or something. And it was totally wild. Of was I too inspirational? Was was that what happened? But the reason those ladies are on my nice list is they didn’t waste more of our time. They didn’t waste more of our resources and energy, because training is super expensive. You do not get that money back for a while of all of that investment that you put in as well as the mental just oh gosh, they didn’t work a month after they’re in the field, right? I would much rather have somebody quit early on, first day. That would be great if everybody who’s not going to work out in the first three months would quit the first day. Do you know how much I would love that? That would be incredible, because it would save so much time and energy and money if they did that. So if any of my future employees are listening to that, to this, Dear God, I hope that’s not the case, I would suggest doing that. Please quit early on. That would be great. You would make it on my nice list.

Okay, naughty list. Cleaner number three here. Okay, this girl, woman, she ended up stealing an Amazon Echo at a client’s house, and we, I can’t prove it definitively, but there’s really no other option. And now that we know, looking back, her history of lying, of course she’s lying about that. Of course she is. There’s no there’s no chance in hell that she did not do that. But we gave her the benefit of the doubt she was so earnest about the fact that she she didn’t, she doesn’t know what happened to the Echo. And so we ended up replacing it for the client. The client still client of ours. And as an act of good faith, we’re look, we are not claiming that our cleaner did this, but we want to keep this relationship strong. We ended up replacing it, right? And so we believed her. I believed her. She was just so believable. She’s a really good liar.

So then what occurred was a series of call outs related to either her or her child’s health, and she was providing doctor’s notes, and supposedly her child got very severe burns from a fireworks accident, because this was in July, 4th of July, right? And, of course, that’s horrific. Of course it is right. However, a lot of things were not lining up. And Krystal my HR manager ended up calling and just being hey, we’re just trying to confirm for our PTO and stuff, and attendance. She’s missing a lot of work, and she’s saying that this happened, can you confirm that this person is a patient? And they’re no, this person has never been a patient at any of the hospitals in this healthcare system because she was using letterhead from Gundersen and Lutheran, which is a local hospital chain at our in our area. And we’re oh, okay. And Krystal was well, can you confirm have these doctors, these doctors that are on the letterhead, do they work in Gundersen? They’re no, there’s no doctors by those names at the hospital.

So all we can guess is that she made it all up, and she was just getting out of work, and it was I just didn’t I can’t imagine lying about that that is truly shocking to me is lying about your own child’s health in such a horrific way. But I can’t really understand it being true and these things being false, that doesn’t make sense, because she would have been able to get doctor’s notes. So it was pretty wild, the level of deceit that was occurring there. And of course, knowing that it’s yeah, of course, she stole that damn Amazon Echo, obviously, so naughty list for her, because that was pretty darn crazy to do that.

Highway Pickup, Six Year Anniversaries, and Christmas in July

Stephanie: So let’s see we were on the nice list. We did our usual Highway Pickup midsummer, which I went up there for, and it was really fun. As usual, we have an Adopt a Highway section. You guys would be on a nice list if you guys got an Adopt a Highway section in your local area, your clients will love it. Your community will love it, your team will love it. It’s a great volunteer opportunity for your team to come together go buy them some pizza after we went to Culver’s. It was great if you haven’t been to Culver’s. Are you even from Wisconsin? Probably not, but Culver’s are all over the nation, I believe so. Recommend cheese curds, pretzel bites and a fish sandwich or a butter burger. Very, very good. Can you tell I’m halfway through a glass of wine and I am absolutely exhausted. This flu has kicked my absolute ass this week. I got I have flu B right now. I tested positive on Monday, and I have been sick for over a week now, and it is a little draining, guys, it’s a little draining. So I’m trying to keep the energy up. I have a lot of medicine in my system right now and now half a glass of wine. So I apologize if I’m extra rambly today, but that’s every episode, and why not, for the 100th episode be incredibly rambly, right? That’s what we’re here for, right? Is the story so that put us on the nice list is doing our Highway Pickup as usual.

I would also say quick nice list is we hit our first six year anniversaries this year, and that’s going to be Krystal, April and Ashley Seekamp all hit six years of working at Serene Clean, which is pretty crazy because in April we hit our six year in existence anniversary of the business. So it’s just really, really amazing that I have three folks that have been with me since literally the very beginning, when it was just a absolute cluster, frankly. So I’m just really appreciative of their loyalty and sticking with it as we’ve continued to evolve. So if you ladies happen to be watching this, which probably not, I love you, you’re amazing. And I’m so grateful to the three of you and to everybody who stuck around, of course, but hitting that is is really quite the accomplishment. So very nice list behavior for all of them you guys are on my nice list, and you will be experiencing that with your Christmas bonuses that you’re about to get in two days in the cold hard cash. I have been feverishly writing Christmas cards for every single one of my staff members, and I’ve been trying really hard speaking of handwriting to write legibly. But it gets worse and worse as the cards progress. So yes, I’ve done this every single year. I highly recommend doing handwritten notes, because my staff always say that the notes really get them. Oftentimes they’ll get choked up over it, which is very sweet. And I try to make it personal for each one as much as I can. If they’re really new it’s a little bit harder, but putting little tidbits in there that are only relevant to them, and trying to really think about each staff member, and then they also have a big old wad of cash in it too. So they probably that too, but they say they the card, and they may just be maybe blowing smoke, but I to think that the effort is worth it, so I would highly recommend nice list behavior, writing Christmas cards for your staff and giving them cold hard cash. Two nice list behaviors, okay, okay.

What else made cleaners on the naughty list is we were having significant issues with communication from cleaners. Of them going over on time, and I us not realizing it until after the appointment was done, because of regular maintenance cleanings that were they were going over 15 minutes, half an hour, and if we aren’t watching it really well, they weren’t letting us know that this was happening. And because we charge hourly, now we have a pickle. Do we charge the client more for that, slower, cleaner that day, or do we eat it? And if you guys charge flat rate, it’s kind of the same pickle. It’s just, you’re probably just eating it. You’re not going to change the price for the client, right? So we had to be very stern about the fact that, this is the approved amount of time, and if you feel that you are going to go over, we need an explanation as to why that’s happening. Because we need to know, do we need to increase the scheduled time and approved time of this reoccurring service going forward and having a conversation with the client? Of hey, I know we booked it for four hours, but it’s really taking four and a half hours over the past several cleanings. Or your cleaner is communicating to us that they are really struggling to hit the quality standard with this time. Can we go to four and a half? And more often than not, they’re yeah, no problem. So it’s okay to recalibrate on reoccurring services, but you’ve got to have your cleaners communicating effectively that that’s necessary, and so we can justify to the client, why is this even something that we are suggesting, right? Or why is my bill higher all of a sudden, if we do decide to charge them more. So there was some definite issues that were coming from it. So naughty list behavior that got corrected. Everybody stopped doing that. So fairly minor, but I wanted to bring it up. So, how long it took me to put all this shit together, guys, I will say this took me a while to go through this year. It was just, it was a wild year.

So nice list behavior. It was Christmas in July. Obviously, I just alluded to Christmas, Christmas bonuses. But we also do Christmas in July bonuses. This is the third year that we have done that that’s very important to me. I think that it’s a wonderful pick me up. And obviously, as you guys might have noticed by the way I behave in the business, having a big fat profit every year is not something that actually matters to me, meaning ending the year with a bunch of money and savings I would rather give that to my staff, one because I’m going to get taxed on it. But truly it’s I want to reward my staff who are allowing me to live the life and have the freedom that I want. Right? So it seems very short sighted to be stingy with pay, stingy with bonuses. And if I can make everybody happy in the middle of the year unexpectedly and have this really delightful experience, I’m going to do that. And it’s now something I look forward to. It’s just part of my budgetary planning every year is, this is going to happen. So Christmas in July, I think is nice list behavior. Personally.

Five Complaints in July and Staff Turnaround Stories

Stephanie: We did have five complaints in July, so we were definitely naughty list behavior. One of them was or several of them were from the cleaner who did the whole lying thing with her son, the doctor’s notes and stuff. So several of the complaints were from her, and so that kind of handled itself. The other complaints were related to a cleaner who still works for me, and I just have her name crash out on the naughty list because she was just really struggling. I was ready to fire her. And I talked about this several times, I think, on the podcast mid year, when this was happening, but things were just going really, really south with her behavior. She got caught smoking at job sites. She got caught leaving jobs early and then having complaints on those said jobs. When I did a quality check on her, when I was up in Wisconsin, she was not in dress code. Every area had issues. It was just a mess. And I was get her out of here. But my management team and I talked about it, and we gave her two warnings, and that took her to the nice list. She has completely turned it around, guys. She’s still with me today. She is so appreciative of having that opportunity to basically be proverbially shaken and she corrected it, she corrected it, and she’s been doing great.

We’ve been getting fabulous reviews, both from clients just emailing us and texting us, as well as online reviews of her work. She we’ve had no quality issues, it’s just, it really is amazing, and that people absolutely can change. Often they don’t, but they can change. And so I’m really happy that we just stood firm and we just said, listen, we want you to be successful here. There can be no other issues this, or you are going to lose your job. And that was how straightforward it was, and she did it, and I’m really, really proud of her. I didn’t necessarily believe that it was going to last. I didn’t know if this, this change, was going to be sustainable, but it has been, and that is something I am so proud of her for. It is really cool to see that. So she is absolutely on the nice list for her come up again moment. So pretty damn amazing.

Okay, naughty less. I don’t even know if I really talked about this on the podcast, because it kind of happened, when I was busy and I didn’t really notice that this happened until after the fact. But we had a cleaner who ended up quitting and, she quit the day after we discovered that she was committing time theft at a police department that we clean, and I honestly totally forgot though this even happened until I was corralling all this information. I’m holy shit. I forgot about that. We had that happen, and so what she was doing was going in, and the police department was the one who told us how embarrassing, right? That we didn’t even catch it. The Police Department caught it because they have to sign in, sign out of a sheet when they go into the PD, and so she was doing that. She was leaving significantly earlier, but she was coming back I don’t know. She’s just driving by and clocking out at the appropriate time, right?

So we didn’t catch it because she was clocking in and clocking out when she was supposed to be doing so we weren’t noticing it. So it would have been difficult for us to really catch this, necessarily, because she was being so smart about it with the GPS, geo fencing and things that is available to all ZenMaid users in the app. So highly recommend tracking your cleaners. But when there’s a will, there’s a way to try to cheat this. And so very rarely have we actually had this successfully happen, and we still clean the PD, obviously, we just apologize profusely. We refunded them the amount that was taken, and yeah, we turned it around, gave them a new cleaner. So that was pretty crazy. She is so on the naughty list that was wild. And we were okay, there’s we didn’t even have to do anything, because she she quit herself. So it kind of solved the problem, right? But yeah, that was that was really insane.

Finally Paying for Indeed and Staff Renegotiations

Stephanie: Okay, nice list behavior was finally paying for Indeed boosted job postings. That was something I had dug my heels in, and something I’m on the naughty list for is I waited so many years when I could have been doing this, and I have suggested to you guys, you don’t need to do this. And really, I’m not on the naughty list until this year for it, because Indeed really changed their practices and cracked down on being able to do what I used to suggest, which is pausing a job listing, making a copy of it and then posting that new job listing as a new job, so that you get pushed to the top of the search results naturally, right? And Indeed is not allowing you guys to do that necessarily, anymore in that manner, they’re making it way harder.

So finally, we’re fuck it. We are. We need to fill we need to get people right. So let’s just try, even if it cost us $400 let’s see if it can do anything. And it was so fruitful. I’m oh my gosh. All year we’ve been struggling with this turnover and staffing and availability, and I could have spent $200 because it that’s how much we needed each time we boosted it pretty much. And I could have gotten several good hires out of this. That was really dumb. Stephanie, that was, that was not, you shouldn’t have been so stubborn on that you can afford $200 to solve the problem that’s stopping you making money, right? It’s just so foolish now that I look back at it of why pride? Man? Pride will get you. There’s a reason. It’s a sin. Because that was really silly of me. I should not have done that. But the nice list behavior is paying for Indeed, it really did work out. It was great. And we can just pause it when we want to. We don’t have to continually pay for it. You can pause you can you can start it again. When it comes to the actual promoted job listings and stuff. So highly recommend. If you are struggling to get enough applicants, give it a go. See what you think. You can always turn it off. If it’s not working, you might have a job listing problem where it’s actually the listing that’s the issue, not paying for it necessarily. So that was very nice to experience that.

Okay, I have two people that are on the nice list. One is still with me, working for me. One is not and the first one, Jamie, she is on the nice list because she came to us to renegotiate her wages, because she was moving out of the area, and she was going to be commuting a lot farther, and she wanted to try to make it work. And I just I put her on the nice list one because she was one of the most perfect staff members I’ve ever had in the history of the business. I mean, when I say she worked for me for what was it? Five years, four or five years, and I think one complaint, and I don’t even know if it was valid, in that time, just incredible. Literally, clients obsessed with her. She’s just an amazing person. And so I really appreciate that she came to us. She tried to make it work, but then once she made the drive, it was an hour one way, she dropped down her hours. We did give her a pay raise. All of these things happen, and it still wasn’t going to work because of the winter driving. It just it. It didn’t make sense for her and her family now that she relocated. So that was one of the turnover situation. So I have all these turnover situations. Some of them, it’s just it just doesn’t, it’s their time, right? It’s their time. And it’s really sad, because I love her so much. She was so amazing, but she will always be on my nice list. I will always remember her fondly. The door is always open for Jamie, for sure. Jamie, if you’re listening, come back, baby, come back because you’re amazing.

Stephanie’s singing now, and I sound terrible with this stuffy nose. Okay? The other nice list is going to be my cleaner, Jenna, who still works for me, because she had a renegotiation, she ended up putting her two weeks in, which really sucked. Because we’re she’s amazing. Also, no complaints, such a great communicator, great trainer, just perfect. She’s perfect. She’s amazing. And she put her two weeks in, and we are is there anything we can do to change your mind? What? What would it take to do that? And she came back with three or four actionable things that we could absolutely do. We didn’t realize she was moving to another area that still in our service area, but it didn’t make sense with our current clients, and she didn’t think that. We had that flexibility, necessarily. So we were able to switch her her entire schedules changed completely. We also gave her a raise, and so I will always have her on the nice list for this behavior, because it’s being able to communicate, being respectful and and being open to suggestions. So very nice list behavior on your part, Jenna.

ChatGPT, Lockboxes, and Client Guidelines

Stephanie: Also, nice list is going to be ChatGPT. You will always be on my nice list. Chatty because that’s what I call it. The amount of work and effort and brain power that ChatGPT saved my entire business is literally just, I can’t even begin to actually quantify it, because I mean literal hours of work that it is saved every single month for us in a variety of ways, whether that be help with communication, writing songs for me, for my employee anniversaries, making cartoons of my staff when I want to do the anniversary posters, creating a drive time calculator so that we can calculate drive time between jobs. And it had to completely code this thing and all of these different use cases. I use ChatGPT every single day, and I will continue to do so. It helps so incredibly much. And yeah, until the AI overlords take over, they will be on my nice list. Alright, I think that AI can be dangerous and should be on the naughty list for a lot of things. It’s people that should be on the naughty list for their use of AI and pushing boundaries and things. However, when it comes to my business right now, it is on the nice list.

Okay, naughty list and niceness combination. Okay, the nice list behavior that we did is we started enforcing lock boxes in commercial meaning, commercial accounts must have a lock box, or have some way for us to keep the key at the location instead of us holding the keys. And that has saved so much strife, because we have had so many situations with keys that have just been a nightmare that was totally unnecessary. So what is the naughty list side of this is us for waiting six years to do this, right? I cannot believe it took us six years to put into place that we won’t hold keys for clients. All right. So we were holding keys for residential, for Airbnbs and for commercial, and it was just an absolute nightmare to manage this, especially when you have three locations in a region where somebody could be coming from several different offices depending on where we’re having to pull and then all of a sudden, somebody’s got the key. They’re out sick. We’re trying to get the key from sick person to give to replacement cleaner, and it was just a nightmare. We have also lost keys. Frankly, it happens, and that’s very embarrassing, very unprofessional. So what can we do eradicate the entire option that that even occurs? Of course, they could still, I guess, lose a key on the site, but that is a lot less likely than us taking it into the office and moving it around so much so we are on the naughty list for waiting that long, but we’re on the nice list for finally doing it. So highly recommend, if you guys are holding keys move away from that. Require your clients to get a lock box or pay for a lockbox if you want to, make this easier for them, but really wish we would have done that sooner, but I’m glad that we did okay.

Naughty list is going to be one of my cleaners quitting, who worked for me for, I think, three years, and I did share this on the podcast. Of he just could not take constructive criticism, and even when it was warranted, and he had a history of pretty shoddy quality, and he kind of just coasted. And so once we really started cracking down on quality with Hannah’s role and him just having really subpar quality checks, he put his two weeks in, he’s fine, I don’t I’m not doing this. And so he’s on the naughty list for not being able to take accountability at all and basically saying, well, I’m not going to do this anymore if I’m going to be held accountable. And I just yeah, super naughty behavior. And he was, he was really nice. He was a, he’s a good guy, I guess, but and real chill. We liked having him. We liked his personality, all of that stuff, but it’s just he was not ready and willing to do the work up to standard. And that just is not acceptable for us anymore, where previously we have allowed that behavior. So naughty list, sorry.

Nice list behavior on us was revamping the client guidelines and the cleaning checklist. We did that this year, and they are so good. We actually just recently, kind of completed these projects in the past month or so, and they look so good. We’ve covered so many new things and and point being is that you guys these things are going to change, right? We’re six and a half years in, and we just revamped these yet again, because new scenarios come into play. We need to talk about all of the things that we have learned, and we need to have a policy for and of course, of course, we have all of our clients sign client guidelines before we step foot in their house. And you guys are on the naughty list. If you don’t do this yet, alright, you are on my naughty list until you start doing sign client guidelines, and kind of until you start using cleaning checklist. You know how strongly I feel about that, so I would recommend to get on Stephanie’s nice list and get those damn client guidelines signed. Guys, you can do it. SignRequest eight bucks a month. Okay? You can do it all digitally. Stop going into houses without sign client guidelines, please, I beg you. Okay, naughty list. Naughty List behavior. But we’re on the nice list because we revamped our so I will say, okay, we okay. Who else? Who else, who else, who else.

Bank Manager Drama and Dropping Problem Clients

Stephanie: Alright, bank manager situation, I made an episode kind of recently about this, so I’m not going to go into crazy detail that bank manager was totally on our naughty list, or whatever he was, whatever his role was at the bank. We ended up losing one of the locations, and then, or no, we ended up losing two of the locations, and then they decided to drop us on the third when we pushed back on his wording, basically saying, if you guys were a customer of the bank, then we would consider your bid or whatever. And just did not that. We pushed back on it. I detail all of that in one of the more recent solo episodes. He didn’t that. And so he’s well, we went back and forth, whatever, and then we did a price increase on them at that time, because we’re screw it full send get rid of them. And we’re not making enough money there anyway. So here’s a price increase while you’re at it, sir. He didn’t that, and so he dropped us, and we no longer clean there. So he’s on our naughty list because he acted really silly and not very managerly at all. So if you’re interested in hearing all of the details, I did make a full solo episode on that, but that guy is on my naughty list for sure.

Okay, nice list is going to be dropping clients outside of our service range. We ended up doing that when we had a little bit of turnover with Haley, one of my long term cleaners that also left. She’s on the nice list too because she was a fabulous cleaner. All of her clients loved her. She was just an absolute doll. She ended up leaving work for family reasons because she needed to care for a family member. And so always, Haley, you will always be on my nice list. You’re also amazing. So I lost a lot of I lost several cleaners who had been with me for years this year. So that was tough, I’m not gonna lie, because they were amazing, amazing women. And we lost several because they were on the naughty list. So it just, it was, it was tough to see some of these veterans go basically, but anywho, when we lost Haley, one of her clients, was pretty far out of our service range, and we just kind of were it’s so out of our way to have this client, we made an exception. We’re not going to keep making this exception. So we ended up dropping them. And so it just made scheduling so much easier. It just made a lot more sense for really all of the business operations. So I encourage you guys to really look at your service range make sure you’re charging appropriate travel fees, or building travel fees into what you charge. But for us, that was really a nice, nice list of behavior for sure to do that. So I am proud that we did that.

Job Coach Discrimination Threat and Government Shutdown Impact

Stephanie: Okay, another guy on my naughty list. A lot of guys on my naughty list this year. Okay, we hired a cleaner through kind of a workplace coaching system for folks who maybe have learning disabilities or have something that is going to cause them maybe to struggle to work normally in a workplace. And so this, this company that we worked with, they helped place people at different jobs. And so they reached out to us. We did the interview with this cleaner. We ended up hiring him, and it did not end up working out, which was really disappointing, because Krystal poured in so much time and energy to completely remake checklists for him. She trained him herself for weeks, and just it was, it was really disappointing. And the person he’s not on the naughty list, it is what it is there. It just wasn’t a good fit. I think, I really think he could have done it, if not for this job coach that they assigned to him, and he is, that’s the guy that’s on my naughty list, because he suggested to our cleaner that we were discriminatory against him and that he should file a discrimination lawsuit against us. And he influenced that cleaner into saying, yeah, I might do this once he was fired.

And we’re well, on what grounds? And he’s I’m getting quality checked so much more than everybody else, and that’s not fair, and that’s discrimination because of my learning disabilities. And we’re no, you’re getting quality checked because you’re having bad quality checks. That’s exactly as everybody does. You start getting bad quality checks or complaints, and we started almost losing clients from this cleaner, you bet your ass every single appointment is going to get quality checked. That is not discrimination. That is us doing that to any of our cleaners. That’s exactly how we’re going to behave with any of our cleaners. And so we explained all of that. We explained that to our contact at this company, and we just kind of skewered the job coach, and we’re he influenced him negatively. And we really hope that this is not true and not to the case, because we completely disagree and do not believe that there is any discrimination in place. But we were in full cooperation and and they were yeah, no, there’s no lawsuit in place. This is crazy, and that is really inappropriate, that that guy said that, blah, blah, blah, whatever they said. But that was super naughty list behavior and not cool. I do not threaten me with a lawsuit for behaving how we behave with every single employee, especially when it comes to discrimination. So kind of two discrimination things that we experienced this year. And I’ve always heard the thing of, for every million dollars you make, you’re going to get sued. But apparently, I don’t know if that really applies to us necessarily, but anecdotally speaking, now we’re catching up with the lawsuits, apparently, or threats of lawsuits, I should say. So that was, that was quite interesting. So that was definitely the job coach is on my naughty list still? Alright? Let’s see here.

Naughty List behavior is the government shutdown. Trump? Is that President Trump? Are you on my naughty list? I don’t know who to blame for this, necessarily, but I’ll just say the government in general, because government shutdown caused a lot of issues for us. Obviously, you guys have heard me bitch about this so much. I’m not going to keep bitching about it. I’ll just go a little blurb. Our largest account is a federal building, and during the shutdown, of course, we weren’t able to clean there. So that was tens of thousands of dollars of revenue these past couple months that we were not able to charge for. So last month was our lowest revenue month in as long as I can remember, and that is really disheartening. But of course, we’ll pop back up in December, because we’re able to charge for that again, because it’s done. Two of our staff members had to get unemployment. And that may not make sense, because you’re well, couldn’t you have used them elsewhere? Not really, because they were hired for that job. They didn’t want to go anywhere else, they didn’t want to clean houses, they didn’t want to do anything, because it’s they’re nah, we’ll just get unemployment. So that was challenging. And so, yeah, the US government is on my naughty list. So this is quite the, quite the prolific naughty list, I would say. So I’m glad that’s over with. I’m very relieved to say that that is done.

The Crying Cleaner and Time Off Statistics

Stephanie: Other naughty list was one of our newer cleaners that she’s no longer with us. She quit, but she ended up during training, she got some constructive feedback on how her toilet was, it was not clean enough. And she ended up going outside during training for 45 minutes and crying over said feedback and saying that she can’t do this, and can’t she just couldn’t. She couldn’t handle feedback, right? And so I want to say light naughty, right? Diet naughty, because it’s that’s, I get it, but I feel that that is obviously an integral part of the job, is being able to take constructive feedback. We make that very clear throughout the hiring process, throughout orientation, how important this trade is. So it’s you’re not going to work out if feedback on a toilet sends you into an absolute meltdown spiral, that you need to go sit outside and be paid to cry for 45 minutes during training. So that whole situation was kind of wild. Naughty list, okay?

Naughty List. Final one, guys, final one. Just in general, we had 3,500 hours, nearly 3,600 hours of time off this year, and 1,500 of those hours were call outs, last minute call out sickness. So I’m not going to say my team’s on the naughty list for this, because it just is how it is, and there’s only so much we can do, especially considering we were already short staffed. We’re not going to fire somebody over attendance issues unless it’s really, really, really bad. Now we’re getting back into our power zone of where we can make those decisions. But we were not in a place to make that call, especially when people were just they were sick. I remember in March, I think specifically, it was the stomach flu hit our entire town, and we just had hundreds of hours that month of call outs. It was crazy, something we’ve never experienced before, and it’s we can’t do anything about this. We just have to weather the storm, basically. And that was this year was weathering the storm, apparently. So yeah, 1,500 hours of lost revenue to call outs, 3,587 hours of time off, total, including approved time off and the call out so pretty wild. I mean, 3,587 hours of potential revenue would have been $200,000 not that we could have charged for all that time. But just putting that into perspective, if you tie a number to it. So I try not to think about it, because if I think about it, this is what I gotta do. But alas, it is what it is. As they say, alright.

Final Nice List – 0.2% Complaint Rate and Looking Forward

Stephanie: The final nice list is going to be our wrap up of complaints. Obviously, got a couple weeks left of December. However, at this point of the year, knock on wood. We had 20 complaints this year, which is a 0.2% of appointments complaint rate, which is go team. This is amazing. I am so proud of my team for that. So despite all of this crazy shit that was going on, that bedrock quality was there. It was there. It was solid. It was stronger than ever. The new hires that we have now are absolutely killing it. We have had a 100% success rate almost with all of our new hires in the past several months. They’re doing so wonderfully. They’re just the training program is just absolutely showcasing itself, they’re coming out of training and they are ready to go. They are so adept. They’re so great at communicating, I’m just so proud of our new hires. They’re just really, really impressing us. So we’ve had a lot of successful hires. It just keeping up with this turnover was just insane. We had to hire double the people just to keep up. And we’re still only at 27 staff members. We briefly hit 29 cleaners, or staff members. I should say not cleaners, 29 total staff members. We briefly hit that in September, and then we immediately dropped back down where I’m just oh my gosh. I’m just trying to claw back up to where we were last year with 30 but now also nice list, we now have availability, we’re finally after this year, crawling out of the hole that we have been in. And this, this year we shrunk guys and all, of course, for the final probably solo episode of the year, I’ll talk a little bit about the numbers and things. Maybe share a bit more about that and how I feel and and goal setting for the next year. If you would be interested in that, let me know what you would to see for the final episode of the year.

But yeah, this was, I will say, on the nice list, is going to be my management team, for sure, for being able to deal with this level of chaos and overwhelm and handle it as beautifully as they have, and just keep pushing. Because we have never dealt with something this. We’ve never dealt with a year this. Obviously, every new year has new challenges, for sure, but we have never in the history of the business dealt with, this kind of insanity, right? These crazy stories, these crazy staff things, it’s crazy turnover. It was just wild. And it was, it was really hard on all of us, especially in the beginning of the year, when I’m we’re also not making any money, we’re not profit. We’re not profitable because of that bookkeeping error. So, it was really a really hard year. I’m not gonna lie again. I can talk about that more further, but I just want to let you guys know that if you have had a hard year, you’re not alone. You’re not alone at all, we definitely did, and we pushed through just you are. And it will get better. I am fully confident it already is on the upswing. Things are moving in the right direction. We are doing the right things. We’re finally taking on new clients, we’re getting a bunch of, first time cleans in which I’m so excited about we have availability for the first time in what feels all year since, February or March. It’s just crazy.

Closing Thoughts

Stephanie: So big breath, big breath in just saying, oh my gosh. What a year. What a year. And yeah, I’ll do a little bit more of a wrap up, guys, but I hope you enjoyed my 100th episode. I’m so grateful to all of you for being here along the way and getting to know me, letting me be weird, letting me say whatever I want to say, because I feel in comparison to episode one, I have just spiraled into delirium. And it feels this is kind of a personal diary of mine that now hundreds of people well, I guess, no, we do have 120,000 downloads, so I guess there’s a few of you watching, but it just feels I’m talking to myself sometimes. So if you made it this far, leave me a Santa emoji down in the comments. Nail check brand new Christmas nails today. Look at that. She absolutely killed it as always, nothing a new set of claws more hair tinsel, because more is more in Stephanie’s world.

So yeah guys, thank you so much for watching. Leave a like, leave a comment below. Let me know that you enjoyed this. Check out the links in the bio of anything that I mentioned in this episode. I know that this was a long one, but I had a lot to go over because we were going through a lot of shit this year. So I hope you enjoyed it. I will see you in next week’s episode, and next week is Christmas if you celebrate so Merry Christmas early, guys. I’ll say it again next year, next year, next week. Good Lord, it’s been a long day. I will say it again next week. And happy holidays for whatever it is that you celebrate. And thank you for humoring me on this kind of ridiculous episode. Okay, guys, bye, bye.

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

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Trainual
• ZenMaid
• Quo formerly Open Phone
• Slack
• QuickBooks
• Gusto
• Serene Clean Facebook Page
• Indeed
• ChatGPT
• SignRequest
• Serene Clean Training Bundle
• ZenMaid YouTube Channel

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