What Running a Maid Service Taught ZenMaid’s CEO About Leadership

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Introduction

Stephanie: Hello everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I’m your host, Steph Pipkin from Serene Clean, and today’s guest is our friend, Amar, the CEO of ZenMaid, and my personal friend. Some have claimed, Amar, that you are the fraternal twin of Stephanie Pipkin. What would you respond to those claims?

Amar: I don’t know that I would have believed that until we spent time together in the Netherlands. When I met you in the Netherlands, I was like, “Oh, we’re like peas of a pod.” We think about problems exactly the same way, like people problems, the same way. It was quite interesting. It’s just applied in slightly different ways.

Amar’s Entrepreneurial Origins

Stephanie: I am looking forward to this conversation, because we have really gotten to know each other over the past year, working closely together as you’ve peeked behind the curtain of ZenMaid. I would love for our listeners to hear more about your origin story, your villain arc, if you will. Because many don’t know that you were a cleaning business owner. So I would love to hear what your background was before that, and what led you there.

Amar: I grew up in Palo Alto in California, right next to Stanford University, very close to LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Apple – all of those are within 25 minutes driving of where I grew up. I never thought that had much of an impact on me, but I do think in many ways, it made me a little bit more entrepreneurial.

The first entrepreneurial thing that I can remember is I found a really good discount on candy. It was essentially an error charge where what should have been maybe 30 cents a candy bar was like eight cents. I literally just bought as many as the store would let me, and then went to school and undercut the vending machines. This was when I was maybe 11 years old or something like that.

I read “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss when I was late in high school, maybe between high school and college. That really planted the seed of owning a business and getting freedom out of owning a business. After reading that book, I was essentially trying various things for a couple of years during college and post-college. I played a little bit of poker, tried selling T-shirts and doing the e-commerce thing.

As an education, I did philosophy and economics in college, and then I ended up in sales, primarily in tech sales after college.

Starting a Cleaning Business

Amar: In 2012, I started a maid service with a friend focused very much on digital marketing first. We worked with contractors who we could scale up or down based on how many people we could find, and we weren’t doing many of the cleanings ourselves. That was the idea.

We started and ran a maid service that had eight cleaners at one point, and we scaled that up pretty quickly. We shut it down after 14 months due to a couple things that we can talk about, but in 14 months, we went from zero to eight cleaners. I think when we shut it down, we had six at the time as we had let go of two.

That was a very interesting experience. I was very young, which I know is a similar story to yours, where I didn’t really get taken too seriously by anyone that found my online profile. But I was doing most of it remotely. I only met one set of cleaners actually in person to hire them before realizing that wasn’t necessary and using Skype or Zoom or just phone calls.

I only went over to one client’s house because it was a sorority, and I was like, “I’m definitely touring a sorority house.” That’s the only client whose house I actually saw. Everything else, we just quoted things blind and learned from our mistakes. We spent 14 months learning a lot of hard lessons. In hindsight, we didn’t learn even probably a tenth of the lessons that there are to learn, that I’ve learned from you and from so many others in this industry. But we got in over a year at the school of hard knocks before we ended up shutting down and then moving our attention to ZenMaid.

Lessons from Running a Cleaning Service

Stephanie: Looking back now that you’ve had time to reflect on that experience, obviously a very short but fast kind of uptick in growth, what would you say were some of the biggest things you did well and mistakes that you made during that time?

Amar: The things that we did well were on the marketing side. We set up a good Google AdWords campaign that brought us very consistent traffic that we were able to build around. We weren’t spending very much at the beginning, but it was enough to get the ball rolling.

I think we got very lucky in that we did actually find some good contractors. I wish that I could take credit for that, but honestly, we were willing to take anyone that was willing to work for us at the price that we were willing to pay. We just got quite lucky in having a couple of people that customers really liked.

I do think I was good with communication. One of the teams, for example, didn’t exactly look like your typical cleaners – kind of came across as ex-cons. I don’t even know if that was true, which is not a great testament to how we were running the company. This is just being completely transparent – we just didn’t know what we didn’t know.

They looked that way, but they were very nice and very genuine. You could tell that they were good people. I think I had the social awareness to let clients know: “I’m gonna send in a team. They don’t look like your typical cleaners. If you’re not comfortable with them being there, that is perfectly fine. I’m not going to blame you for judging a book by its cover. But I’m also telling you that they are a very good cleaning team, and there is a reason that they work for us.” Just letting people know that solves most of the problems, because then the person doesn’t feel like they’re complaining – you’re giving them permission.

The Power of Honest Communication

Stephanie: You probably made people comfortable because you’re calling out biases like, “Hey, I know we’re all biased in this way.” I’ve seen that done very well, because oftentimes in the groups, I’ll see questions about male cleaners, and there’s a lot of back and forth with people getting pretty heated about that.

The biggest thing when it comes to that is communicating from the front end so that the client feels like they have choice and something wasn’t thrust upon them that maybe they’re not comfortable with. If a client is uncomfortable with a man alone in their house, that’s fair. But if you take that lead and just say, “Hey, I’m calling this out,” I think that type of vulnerability and honest communication probably went very far.

Amar: Exactly. I think that’s always been kind of a personal strength of mine. I found that’s the easiest way to build trust with people is to just be more honest than they’re expecting. I think that was one of the things that we did well.

But the mistakes, there were just so many to name, because we very much had our heads in the sand. We had found a couple of blog posts that kind of outlined how to run the business, but we didn’t really look any further than that. We didn’t know about Debbie Sardone. We weren’t looking for the resources that ZenMaid currently offers.

It didn’t occur to us that we should be doing background checks and stuff like that – a lot of just very obvious stuff. But it was my first real business. I was just out of college, and not to make excuses, but they were youthful mistakes. We’ve learned from them, and you get better. I think this is how most people learn.

From Cleaning Business to Software Company

Amar: At the same time, and this is transitioning into ZenMaid, it was also an “ignorance is bliss” sort of thing. We did some things differently. Because the person that we were following was talking about managing the entire calendar on just a website back end or maybe using Google Calendar, it never occurred to us to actually look up if there were any software out there made for maid services.

When we started ZenMaid, there was only after we had decided that we were going to do this and we were going to build this product, that at some point we were like, “Maybe we should see what other people are using.” Then we realized that these other software’s existed, like Made Easy Software that was kind of the big name in the industry at the time.

It was very much just an “ignorance is bliss” sort of thing. As dumb as I feel looking back on some of those times, I also wouldn’t be in the situation that I am right now without them. The truth is, we wouldn’t have created these resources or done any of the things that ZenMaid has done if I hadn’t been that blissfully ignorant at the beginning.

The Benefits of Naivety in Business

Stephanie: You’re so right. I’ve said that many times before – I’m so happy I was so naive in the beginning, because if I had been aware, I never would have done the sheer amount of work that was about to hit me. If I had known, I would have said, “No, thank you.”

That’s the thing – you’re kind of forced, once you’re into it, to just do the work, because quitting just wasn’t an option. And I’m sure that’s how it felt for you. Hearing your story of having this cleaning company and then pivoting, what made you feel like you couldn’t do both? Why didn’t you try to do both? I’m sure it was the right choice, obviously. But I’m sure a lot of people would have been like, “Oh, maybe I should do both.”

Amar: Honestly, there was zero consideration of it. It was because I changed day jobs and was no longer in the area of the maid service that we were running. I was running it with a business partner who was ex-military and very sort of by-the-book. This was before anyone ran maid services remotely, and he just was not comfortable with that. Even though I hadn’t been on location for a client or for a cleaner in months, I think he just thought that if I left, everything would fall on him, even though it didn’t technically change anything.

There wasn’t really any consideration there. I had very distinctly shut down the maid service. Another friend had approached me previously about potentially doing it, but we didn’t really seriously consider the idea until we were already post-maid service.

Independent Contractors vs. Employees

Stephanie: What’s interesting to me is thinking back to my conversation with Chris Schwab, who also ran ICs from the beginning as well. You guys have a lot of similarities. I am so opposed to running ICs, not because I think it’s wrong, but because of the type of business that personally suits me, which is a very touchy-feely, Kumbaya kind of sensation and vibe in the culture.

I feel like your culture is much more independent, which is exactly what Chris was attracted to. Would you say, if you were to start all over – one, do you agree with that? Two, would you do it the same?

Amar: That is how I ran the maid service. But you see how it is at ZenMaid, right? The culture at ZenMaid is much closer to what you have at your maid service. The interesting thing is that if I was running a maid service again, I don’t think that I would have that much interest in creating that culture. I would be okay with it if I had an office manager that was doing it and leading it.

I think really what it is is that you hear a lot about Product-Market Fit in terms of finding something that’s actually going to work in your market, whether it’s a cleaning service or a tech company. But there’s also such thing as Product-Market-Founder Fit – picking the right business for you.

For me, I didn’t enjoy my day-to-day running a maid service. I didn’t find it challenging in the ways that I wanted to find it challenging. I would much rather operate it more strictly as a machine with independent contractors and think about it in parts.

With ZenMaid, I have created a team that I enjoy showing up and working with every day. That’s part of the benefit of having ZenMaid. I think it would just be a different kind of business for me. In a maid service, I would really be thinking like an owner, whereas in ZenMaid, I really enjoy being the CEO and the operator, even though I’m also the owner. I just don’t have any interest in stepping back, because I love the problems that we work on every day.

Finding Your Business Fit

Stephanie: That’s so interesting. It makes me think of something I saw by Alex Hormozi the other day that talked about if you’re going to open a business, which direction to take it. One of the key things is if you are the user or the person that is having the problem, that makes you the ideal person to then solve that problem and sell that solution.

That’s why I talk so much about having your very authentic brand messaging being about how you can relate to your customers. I can relate to – I don’t have children, but I get very upset if somebody comes to my house unexpectedly. This happened the other day where Derek was like, “Oh, so-and-so is stopping by in 10 minutes.” I was actually in the shower, and I’m like, “No, they’re not coming inside? Oh, thank God,” because the house wasn’t even bad. But it has to be perfect – that’s just how I am.

So I can relate, as a woman, to that pressure of being judged because of my house. It’s so easy – selling is natural. I’m not selling, I’m like, “I understand you.” Depending on who your market is, of course, that’s different for commercial clients.

I feel like you were an owner of a cleaning company and you saw the pain of scheduling. So it’s very easy for you to then say, “I understand your pain. Let me fix it for you.”

The Birth of ZenMaid

Amar: Exactly. For us, what it was is we built a very basic system that became ZenMaid, that was essentially simple scheduling with built-in communications. At its core, everything that ZenMaid does is built around that base of just simple scheduling plus automated communications that are ultra-specialized to maid services.

When we started ZenMaid, I was picking up the phone and cold calling owners and asking them how they were doing their scheduling. The main question was, “I’m sure that your customers are expecting reminders – how often are you sending out reminders? How consistent are you with that?”

As soon as I was able to say, “If you just use us for scheduling instead of Google Calendar, we’ll send a reminder with 100% consistency for all of your appointments. How does that sound?” That makes it sound really nice and obvious.

It was very tough. I spoke with 1,000 maid service owners over the phone to get us to 40 clients. You’d think that’d be shooting fish in a barrel, even back then, right? But it really wasn’t. It was tough at the beginning.

Early Adoption of Scheduling Software

Stephanie: It’s so funny because you say that – I’ve been a ZenMaid user since before my business started. I bought it and had it all set up before I even launched. This is the way I was going to go. I will attest to you, because it was pretty – I have a vibe I like, and ZenMaid happen to have that vibe of pretty, nice-looking, simple. So good job on that.

But the fact that it was simple – it’s interesting, because I’ll see in cleaning groups people sharing templates for their reminder texts that they are manually sending out. It’s really like that whole hindsight of, “Oh my gosh, if for the past six years I was manually texting people before their cleaning – I can’t fathom it.”

I guess you just don’t know what you don’t know. I’m sure a lot of owners who are still doing that – you get used to what you get used to. You don’t know how bad you have it until the pain is taken away, like manually texting everybody, dealing with scheduling errors. There’s so much pain that could be felt.

It’s interesting to me that people take so long to fix the pain. Why do you think it takes so long for people to come to a scheduling software or something that’s going to fix their problem so easily?

Why People Delay Adopting Solutions

Amar: Honestly, it’s mostly because they’re just not feeling the pain yet. We have a competitor right now that’s been critically down for eight days now, and their users are feeling the pain. Quite a few of them are going to be coming over to ZenMaid because of that.

Oftentimes the pain isn’t as acutely felt. There’s a lot of people probably listening to this podcast that know they should have signed up for a trial for ZenMaid already and are maybe sending those manual reminders. The truth is, most people listening – it still works for them.

Maybe for some people, it just takes one mistake where you forget one thing, you show up, and it’s like, “Okay, I can’t have that happen again.”

For anyone listening, if you haven’t made that jump yet, what Stephanie was just touching on, of imagining the past six years of sending reminders for all of those appointments – it’s not even about the time that ZenMaid is saving you. It’s about taking one task off of your mental load so that you can take that mental energy and focus on your next marketing campaign, or focus on a better hiring process so that you can provide a better service.

There’s some things that ZenMaid can automate for you so that you just don’t have to think about them again. It really is more about the headspace than the actual time saved, but we will save you a ton of time as well. The more systems and the more things that happen in your business without you, the owner, personally doing them, the better a business that you have, whether you want to sell or whether you want to take vacations like Stephanie does.

The Importance of Early Systems

Stephanie: I think back to some of the hardest times in my business, when I was working like a dog, in tears, cleaning, doing all of these things. To put any other thing on top of it that could fall apart and totally relied on me – it’s just so stressful when so much is already on you. We are everything in our business.

I guess when I think about why it’s gone decently well for me and Serene Clean is that I made easy decisions very early on, even as simple as having my client guidelines electronically signed, instead of having printed copies and trying to get clients. Little tiny things that seem like they wouldn’t make a difference, right? But compound that over hundreds and hundreds of clients, that’s something. Every time we can move one degree in a better direction, it compounds and makes a huge difference.

Amar: Exactly. There’s a really great book called “The Slight Edge,” and there’s a similar one that’s called “The Compound Effect.” It’s about essentially getting 1% better every day. If you take that to your business and you just try to remove friction as much as possible – not getting people to physically sign, which might require chasing and more time, and allowing them to just do it electronically – that’s the kind of thing that seems very small, and the same task ends up getting done, but it can really add up to massive change.

That little thing doesn’t make a big difference, but imagine that you find 10, 20, 100 of those things over the next couple of years. That’s the difference between the maid services that seem to be working just as hard as everyone else, and one ends up with five cleaners, the other ends up with 15 or 20 cleaners. It’s those little things that add up, that seem invisible on a day-to-day basis, but you zoom out a year, you zoom out five years, and all of a sudden it makes all the difference in the world.

Patterns in Successful Cleaning Businesses

Stephanie: Zooming out, since you have been exposed to so many cleaning company owners over the years – thousands and thousands – I’m sure you start to see patterns. Could you name some of the patterns that you see? Or perhaps there’s some warning signs, like “That’s burning and going down”? Is there anything that really stands out where maybe, while we’re in it, we don’t know what those red flags are?

Amar: That’s kind of a tough one, because I’ve never really acted as a coach, so I’m not really talking to people before companies are crashing and burning or anything like that.

But I do think that everything comes down to systems. Anyone that is starting from scratch every time they hire a new cleaner is not going to build a very big business until they get that solved. You should have an ad that works for you and probably be running that constantly if you’re trying to build a bigger business.

I think the other one that causes a spiral is when maid services are lacking quality control systems. That’s when you can see a tendency of, “Oh, you hired Maria, and then multiple of her cousins and friends.” And then all of a sudden you start having quality control issues, and you can very quickly have a company tank.

But I would say all those problems are solvable. If you’re listening to this and you’re going through that right now, you probably just have to cut the weight. You may have to contract and give up some customers, and it’s not going to be fun, but you can totally turn it around and rebuild your brand.

The Value of Consistency in Growth

Stephanie: And so the opposite, I’m sure, is the truth: the more systematized you see a company get, the more likely they are to scale quickly.

Amar: Exactly, or just consistently. As an entrepreneur, I care very much about consistency. I would take consistent growth – for me it’s easier to manage mentally. I would rather have very consistent growth than sporadic growth that adds up to more over time, just because I would struggle to manage that.

Systems are what make you consistent. Honestly, the other thing is that my goal with entrepreneurship is very much freedom. The more that you have systematized, the more free that you will be. It’s a weird one – personally, I’ve learned that I don’t like following systems, but in order for me to be unsystematized, I have to have enough systems in place to keep everything going.

I follow a very strict schedule Monday to Wednesday, and then my calendar Thursday to Sunday is very open for me to do what I want to. Sometimes it’s very productive, sometimes it’s something else.

Stephanie: I do the same thing. My Monday through Wednesday is meetings, meetings, meetings. I mean, I have P-breaks built in, and that’s it. Then Thursdays and Fridays, nothing is booked as much as possible, just for me to actually have work time.

I think a lot of our listeners are still very much either in the field or the only manager. I just find if I had not built in those chunks of workspace, like uninterrupted focus time – and how do I do that? I woke up really early, and nobody wants to hear that, but that’s the only way I could do it.

What were those early days of ZenMaid like? It was very much bootstrapped – what was your life like at that time and the things that you were going through?

Starting Small with Systems

Amar: Just quickly, before I forget – if you’re maybe not a solo cleaner, maybe even a solo cleaner, but if you’re running a maid service and you have a couple of maids right now, but you’re still very much working in the business, the best thing that you can do is to start giving yourself maybe Friday mornings or Friday afternoons off, where you just go, “I no longer clean these afternoons. My cleaners are available, but I am not. This is when I work on the business, not in the business.”

If you can do that, and you can expand out further and further, it might be where your schedule is more like me and Stephanie’s, where you have three days that you’re doing the cleanings, then you have two days that you’re working on the business. That’s a great way to start stair-stepping your way out of the day-to-day of the business, out of the day-to-day cleaning so you can focus on the operations and turn it into a real business.

The Early Days of ZenMaid

Amar: To answer your question, the early days of ZenMaid were essentially myself and Arun. We were the co-founders – he started building the product. We knew from the get-go that we were looking for very simple scheduling with simple SMS and email reminders and follow-ups, and that was pretty much the basis of the initial version. I think we were also building a basic booking form.

While Arun was doing that, I was spending my time going through Yelp and cold emailing, then cold calling maid services that I found on Yelp, and essentially asking them how they were doing their scheduling, how they were liking that, if they were having any challenges with it. It was very much a customer development type call.

To go into how my life actually was at that point, I would wake up – I was in California at the time – at 5am. I would have my list organized so that all of my East Coast leads were at the top of my list for the day. As soon as I woke up, I would start calling all of the maid services on the east coast, where it was already 8am. At six, I would then go on to the next time zone and start calling them.

From there, at seven, I would be out the door, 7:15 on a train up to San Francisco for about a 9am start time at the office. But while I was on the train and on my commute, that was when I was listening to my entrepreneurship books, when I was listening to stuff on marketing and figuring out the next steps.

Then I would work a full day. I would make it home about 7pm and do some more work on the train. Then 7pm is when I would usually go and see my co-founder. He worked a very different schedule, where he would start working for ZenMaid around 10pm and work until like 3 in the morning coding.

Working Around a Full-Time Job

Stephanie: What I’m hearing is that you had your full-time job and you worked around it, which is exactly what I did. I had my full-time job, probably nine months to a year. I was working, still at my other job, to financially be able to survive, because the business wasn’t maintaining it.

I’m so happy that you mentioned you were just non-stop exposing yourself to material, to learning. That’s what our listeners, the ones that are cleaning right now, are doing right now. Good job, guys.

I would say one of the biggest testaments to my continual growth and success is I never am in silence, ever. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but I can’t stand it. I always want to be listening to something. I just always have some video on, just marinating on it. It sounds like you very much have always been that way as well. Maybe it’s the ADHD, but would you say that you’ve just always kind of been of that learning mentality?

Amar: I definitely have that. I’ve always had that sort of personal development bug or itch, that just the idea of being able to change who I was in different ways has always been very appealing to me.

What’s interesting is, you know, I’ve had some health scares recently, and so that sort of had me reframing a couple of things. I’m working on being a lot more present at the moment and being less plugged in. I think that’s entering kind of a new chapter of life where that’s in part because I’m realizing that I’ve heard so much stuff now that at this point, most things that I’m listening to don’t really move the needle for me, personal development wise.

So now I’m trying to – if I’m going to listen to something, am I going to be present in listening to it, or am I just turning something on to just have it in the background? There’s still times where I choose to do that – if I’m cleaning up the house, I’d rather have something on in the background. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s too productive or not.

I’ve started walking the dog unplugged a lot more, where typically I’d be listening to something there. I think it’s just kind of entering a new chapter in life. I’m a couple years older than you, so maybe you’ll slow down on the listening to stuff at some point as well. We’ll see.

Overcoming Health Challenges

Stephanie: On that note, I just have to say that for those of you that don’t know, Amar just went through some pretty crazy stuff. I don’t know if you want to get into that, but I will just say I was so absolutely blown away and inspired by how you handled yourself publicly as the CEO to your company. I don’t know if you were spiraling internally, and that was at home, behind closed doors, but holy – the way you kept it together. I just applaud you. That level of outer strength obviously reflects a certain inner strength, so how were you feeling, or how did you navigate that? It was crazy to watch.

Amar: Just to give the audience context to the conversation – seven or eight weeks ago, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor that’s about one millimeter from my optic nerves, so very close to causing side effects. I got very lucky in finding it.

During that time, I had a three-week period or so where it was very clear that something was wrong inside my head, but we had absolutely no idea how severe it was. We had about three weeks or so where there was just a ton of uncertainty.

I have a very stoic philosophy towards that sort of stuff. I think I’m very good at – as part of the stoic philosophy – just being very quick when new situations present themselves to do a worst-case scenario sort of planning in my head. That’s a muscle that has just developed over time. It’s not expecting the worst – it’s preparing for the worst, but expecting the best.

In that case, it was as simple as, if this is terminal, then honestly, this is all very simple. I might have a couple weeks to live, I might have a couple of months to live. If that’s the case, then I know that the instant that I find out that information, I fly in my family and closest friends. I like where I am, walk the dog – I have a Golden Retriever puppy who is amazing. I would be perfectly happy here.

There are obviously ramifications for the wife and all of that, and there were things that I would have to get in order, like a will and stuff like that. But it was very much just a “if that happens, that is a very well-defined thing. I know exactly where my focus and attention would go. And if it’s not that, then I will take it from there.”

My wife and I were joking about Schrödinger’s tumor – if you don’t know that it’s there and you get the MRI, right? Because I wasn’t having any side effects. So it was kind of like, “Well, maybe there’s a tumor there, but nothing’s happening to me. So does it matter?”

Finding Strength in Adversity

Amar: What I outlined was the worst-case scenario, and that immediately made me more comfortable and just able to operate from a good place. But what was interesting was, from talking to Fran (my wife) about it, what we actually realized was the worst-case scenario was going in, getting the operation, them fiddling with my brain, and it changing my personality or who I was.

The other thing that really helped me was that in the beginning, when it could be worst-case scenario and terminal, everyone feels like they have to be there for me, but really it’s more like I have to be there for quite a few of my friends. Quite a few of my friends told me that they cried after hearing this.

It was more like a very immediate thing of, “I need to be strong for Fran here.” If I start freaking out and acting like this is the end of the world, that’s not going to make anything better. I’m very externally motivated, for better or worse. So keeping it together – and not even putting on that front, because that is genuinely how I felt – of just, “This is going to be fine. This too shall pass, or it won’t. And it’s Fran’s problem. Either I’m tapping out right now, or I’m going to be around to annoy her for a long, long time.”

I’ve also thought about this – one of us is going to pass first. At some point this was coming. The past couple of years with her having long COVID, me having a broken ankle, has been a nice little glimpse into what old age is going to be like.

A lot of people have said that they were kind of inspired by how I dealt with it. Honestly, if it was worst-case scenario or terminal, that’s how I would want to be remembered. I want my funeral to be a party for all of my best friends, not some somber thing about me no longer being there. That’s just how I want to live life. I was like that before the tumor; I’m even more like that after the tumor.

The Choice to Be Strong

Stephanie: What you said about not being forced, but when you have two options – either be strong or not be strong and fall apart – I’m the same way. That external motivation, especially when it comes to obligation to other people – and obligation not in a negative sense, but we are obligated to the people that we care about and the people that we lead to act in a certain way.

For myself, when I put it in the frame of “I need to be strong for these people I care about, for my team especially” – and I’ve mentioned that before in the podcast – every time you lose it in front of your team, you’re eroding their sense of security in their job, in their team, in you as a person.

So the whole “this is gonna pass when the dust settles” – it’s gonna pass one way or another. I love that you just said looking back, you want to be remembered for keeping it cool, having that realism. And like, “Hey, me freaking out right now does not solve anything. It only is going to make it worse for everybody I love and care about. So how about we just don’t do that?” Which is easier said than done.

Amar: Exactly. I think it’s also that with these choices – this is a reframe that’s really helped me recently – you’re always gonna go through pain. There’s pain with every decision that you make. Fitness-wise, it’s like there’s the pain of being out of shape or there’s the pain of working out, but either way, you’re gonna be in pain.

With that, it’s the same thing – this is gonna suck either way. I have a tumor, right? This is gonna suck, but there’s also ways that it could suck a lot less.

By the way, Stephanie, I feel like we should also tell the audience that I’m gonna be okay. Modern medicine is an absolute miracle. Went in, saw neurosurgeon, they’ve put me on medication that I’ll likely be on for the rest of my life. They were like, “You have a tumor. It’s one millimeter from your optic nerve. This is just another Tuesday for us.” They acted like it was just the most not-a-big-deal ever. They looked at me like I didn’t have a tumor. So I’m essentially just on medication, and my life is completely normal. I’m back to running ZenMaid, and life is good. Still a Golden Retriever puppy.

Stephanie: I have my Lily, my Border Collie, and they’re cute, until I came into the house yesterday, and she has been a counter surfer lately. I had a plate with barbecue sauce on it for my lunch, and there’s just a shattered plate all over the kitchen floor when I come in. The tortilla shell bag is just destroyed and empty. I’m like, “I love you, and you’re 10 years old, so please just go outside right now.” But they’re fun, they keep us young. I’m sure this is how people feel about their children. But neither of us have children, we’ll just talk about dogs.

I think that honestly, just thinking about the whole “you’re gonna go through pain either way” – at different stages of ZenMaid, I’m sure that it’s been incredibly painful, but then looking back, you’re like, “Oh, well, this is just a different stage.” The whole “more money, more problems” – it’s just more money, different problems. That’s what I’ve experienced with Serene Clean.

Honestly, it’s like, which problems do you want? I had problems when we were bringing in 10K a month. Now we’re bringing in a few dollars more than that, and now I have different problems, and I prefer these problems, because at least I have time freedom. What kind of problems did you face in the beginning that maybe have morphed? What are the stages of problems that you have hit during the lifespan of ZenMaid?

The Evolution of Business Problems

Amar: That’s a great question. I did a YouTube short on this that you guys can find on the ZenMaid social media channels, which is that we’re paid as entrepreneurs to solve problems. The nice thing is that the longer that you stay in business, the more that you’re paid.

I do solve harder problems now than I did before, but I’m also compensated way better because I took that risk 10 years ago. Now it’s easy to solve problems because there’s a very direct revenue at the end of the solution.

Stephanie: When you’re not making anything, and it feels like you’re solving a million problems, and it’s terrible and awful. So now it’s so much better. So everybody listening that’s there – it gets better. Just keep going.

Amar: Exactly. I think I’ll try to answer this one pretty quickly, and then if you want, we can double-click into anything that you think is interesting.

With ZenMaid, there’s essentially three chapters that every company kind of goes through. At the beginning, it’s building the product and building the marketing. I personally spent a lot more time working on everything that was non-product. My co-founder, Arun, built the actual product, and we made decisions together strategically, but he made a lot of decisions.

Now I have a lot more control over the product than I did back then. That’s a good thing, though. I think that had I had control of it, we would have made just as many mistakes, but in different ways. Because we made mistakes in ways that he had made the decisions for, he fixed them all. Whereas if I had pushed them, then maybe it wouldn’t have worked that way.

At the beginning, it was building the product and then building the marketing. After that, it was building the actual company. When you have the building of the product and the marketing kind of going, it’s building more the company and the actual organization. And then now I’m in the stage of building the team that builds the company. That’s a different level as the CEO.

Early Business Challenges

Amar: Going back to the beginning, a lot of it was just developing a good enough product. It wasn’t the best product – it was a good enough product to actually add value. A lot of the problems that we were solving were, first of all, just how to do that. And then also, we had to develop the strong skill of saying no to things.

Because we were so new, we could literally change what we were doing on a daily basis. Whereas now, somebody suggests an idea and it takes time to implement that idea, even if I want to move on it right now. That’s a blessing and a curse. It means that I have to be more thoughtful about what we do now. But it also means that we move slower than we did in the past.

An early mistake, for example, was we thought that the new booking forms that we were building would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. My initial co-founder was a much better developer than he was a designer. I didn’t have any eye for design either. So the forms that we put out were just not good. I was not a good marketer at the time – I had only done sales, so it was poorly written copy, poorly designed, and just nobody wanted them. We put them out, and they completely fell flat.

But surprisingly, people absolutely loved the calendar and the reminders, and so that’s sort of was the initial problem that we solved on the product side. From there it was, we began to get some momentum and to go from there.

On the marketing front, it was the same thing – it was honestly just hustle. We did cold email, cold calling. And then we got very lucky with an early partnership with Sharon Tinberg back in the day. She was our first official partner for ZenMaid, and that took us up to maybe 150 clients. So I probably spoke with maybe 2,500 maid service owners to get us to that point.

Around that point is when our content marketing began to kick in. I had just shared a couple of pieces of content about things that had worked for me in our maid service that we were running prior to that. At around 150 clients, all of a sudden, people began coming to us because we were sharing the “47 keywords that every maid service owner must use” and stuff like that. From there, we began building the marketing kind of machine.

Perseverance in the Early Years

Stephanie: I want to pause on that real quick – actual timeline, years. What year are we at in business at 150 clients, customers?

Amar: I would say probably about two and a half, three years in.

Stephanie: The reason I want to highlight this is because you’re two and a half, three years in, and you have been for years now cold calling and cold emailing. That was a consistent action that you were taking that was paying off, but it sounds like it was very painful. I think so many people are afraid to do the hard, icky thing, which is just being really tenacious.

What you said about the consistency of not only results, but of action, even when that result coming out is really slow – I think that we all say we would do anything for our business until we’re asked to do something that we don’t care to do. And then we’re like, “Ooh, not that though. I’m not going to do that.”

I think a lot of people feel that way about selling, about cold calling, about cold emailing, doing drop-offs, doing quality control – all of these different things. It’s like, “Well, I just want to make the money from it. Why do I have to do this part of it?” And it’s like, that’s not how this works. I just wanted to highlight that you were very tenacious and persistent for literally years, not just like a quick drop of a pan.

Amar: The one thing that I will say there, though, is that if you’re an introvert listening to this, and you’re like, “Oh, well, I’m never gonna succeed because I’m an introvert” – your hustle doesn’t have to look like my hustle, but the hustle has to be there.

You need to find a way to get in front of people. Maybe you can succeed by sending 10 times more cold emails and not doing any cold calls. But the point is, I did what it took to get ZenMaid off the ground.

I was only doing cold calling for about eight months. If I remember correctly, it was because after eight months, our cold email campaigns had scaled up, and we were sending enough and getting enough of a response rate that I no longer had to cold call. I could just wait for people to respond and then call the people that asked for a call back, and no longer had to chase.

There’s a great essay by Paul Graham on “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” If you’re a solo cleaner right now and you’re trying to hire your first cleaner, you don’t need to worry about scalable systems. I did talk earlier about how systems and processes are kind of the difference between folks that scale and folks that don’t. But there is a time where it really is just hustle.

If you’re a solo cleaner, spending your time formalizing a hiring process to hire one person is just not the best way to spend your time. It’s far better to hire that one person and then document the things that worked while hiring that person and starting from there, refining it as you go.

The Intensity of Entrepreneurship

Amar: You’ve seen this with ZenMaid – sometimes I feel the need to remind the team – now I feel like I’m relatively chill. I make a decent amount of money, I don’t have to work as many days, I’ve got a lot more freedom of schedule, but I can up that intensity when I want to, and that was needed at the beginning of the company.

The company would not have made it without that initial intensity from both me and Arun. Some of the stuff that he did, code-wise, is stuff that a lot of coders wouldn’t be willing to endure without a guaranteed payout on the other side.

Some people make it look easy. Very few people actually have it easy.

Stephanie: So true. You see the quote-unquote finish line or the chapter either of us are at – “Oh, traveling and time freedom, blah, blah, blah.” But I love that you said you know where that intensity is because you’ve experienced it, and you can immediately turn it on. I’m the same way.

I’m managing Serene Clean – it could be five hours of my week or less if I wanted it to be, but I can crank it up to 11 if necessary, and I’ll do that periodically, depending on what is going on in the business. Just knowing that you have that ability, it’s something that’s nice to tap into when necessary. And also to remind your team that you can bring it still. You’re not just this person who’s off enjoying life or whatever.

Amar: Exactly. I think it’s also that leadership does come from the top. I’ve seen that when I up my intensity at the top of the company, you can see it trickle down to the close to 30 team members that we have. It’s crazy now that I feel like I can up my intensity for one hour for one meeting at the start of the week, and it’s literally noticeable with the rest of the team throughout the week. It just sets the tone.

I do have the flexibility now where I don’t even have to be on that meeting if I don’t want to, and I can bring my hours down to literally zero if I wanted to, for probably a couple of weeks or even a couple of months at this point. The company would continue to improve, service would continue to get better, the product would get better, the marketing would get better.

But I love the problems that we get to work on every day. I have a call coming up in an hour that’s just on product and how we can solve more of these problems for maid service owners, just remove clicks or add more value. I’m going to be here until that changes. It’s been 11 years, and I love it.

Finding Your Passion in Business

Stephanie: That’s how you know – it’s the whole “you don’t find your passion, you create it,” and you’ve created this passion. I feel the same way.

Even just being involved in ZenMaid now and seeing the internal mechanisms – you guys are so focused on what is going to make this better for the end users, whether that is the owner or the cleaners or our customers. It’s really interesting to see how you guys attack all of those angles.

It’ll be fun to talk about the next couple phases of you saying you move slower, and I’ve seen this where there’s so many things that you guys want to do, but in order to actually get things done to completion, you have to say, “No, not right now,” and that takes so much discipline. I struggle with that – that’s my biggest struggle. I want to do it all, and I’m sure that that’s probably a challenge for you.

Amar: Exactly. I heard something – you mentioned Alex Hormozi earlier. I think he was referencing Steve Jobs – people think that focus is about concentrating on something really hard, but what focus actually is, is saying no to everything else other than the thing that you’re trying to focus on. It’s just removing that as an option.

It can be quite difficult. I certainly understand opportunity cost a ton more now than when I started the company. When we started the company, it felt more like we had a rowboat – it was weak and pathetic, but you could change directions quickly.

Now it does feel more like a battleship for this analogy. When I decide things that we need to do on the product side, some of these decisions are a 6, 12, 18-month decision. There will be tons of micro-decisions within that. But when we choose to focus on one feature or another, it’s a long-term commitment. It’s a long-term commitment of not just one person – now it might be four devs that are turning their attention.

The question now is, what else could they be doing with that time? How else can they be adding value to maid services and to the industry? It’s fun, it’s different problems, but I certainly enjoy having more resources to solve the problems. The problems are harder, but I certainly prefer them now than when we were smaller.

The Growth of Educational Content

Stephanie: You’re a couple years in now, things are probably like you said, you’re able to back off on some of the more extreme efforts like cold calling. You’re building this kind of email newsletter and information. In this baby era of ZenMaid, you are already putting the building blocks and foundation of media out there and education.

Was there a reason? Was there a defining moment where you’re like, “This is a good idea. We should be putting educational content out”? Because obviously, now that’s like the ether – this is why I’m here, right? To put out educational content. This is a beautiful thing now, but you started this long ago. Was that just “let’s do this,” or was there a thought-out plan?

Amar: It was one of those things that we lucked into. I’d mentioned earlier that we posted a couple of things that had just worked for me, a couple of messages that had worked nicely. Some of the marketing research that I had done that there was no reason that other people should have to do separately.

So we just put together a couple of things like that. Around 150 customers, we began to just see more people finding us through that. I think we might have posted a couple of other things, but nothing too crazy, but we were beginning to actually just see traffic there.

To be completely honest, though, it was also that in tech startups at the time, that was when HubSpot was coming up, and they had created the “inbound marketing” term, and that was the hot new thing that everyone was doing – content. I just saw a lot of people that were doing that.

I wasn’t seeing too much of that in our industry, and the only folks that I saw doing that weren’t specific to our industry. The way that they were promoting the content – it wasn’t really findable. Nobody knew that it existed. I realized that there was both a content gap and a marketing gap, and people just weren’t finding the content that was out there. Because a lot of the content did exist, you just had to search stupidly hard for it.

At that point, we began to double down on it a little bit. In the industry, I would say that I was really the first marketing-first sort of founder that really just came in and thought about the marketing on a very deep level. I feel like a lot of the current competitors that you look at have actually copied what ZenMaid has done. Not to say that they wouldn’t have arrived at those ideas on their own, because I do think they’re quite obvious ideas. But we did lead the way with a lot of this stuff.

Building a Content Strategy

Amar: With the content, I started out by sharing things that were essentially documenting things that had already worked for me. Once we saw the traffic coming in, then we began to double down on it. We would also send newsletters every time we did the content, which, at the time, a lot of our competitors didn’t have newsletters.

One thing that’s interesting is that a foundational piece of ZenMaid content is that we always write content that is valuable to both a non-ZenMaid user and to someone that already uses ZenMaid. You’d think this is a well-thought-out strategic thing, because it’s the best way to write content, and it is the best way to write content.

But the funny thing is, the reason that we do it is because back when we started our newsletter and our email list, I was so unsophisticated that I couldn’t figure out how to send an email to just ZenMaid users, to all of the users on our email list, or to just the non-ZenMaid users. So every time I wrote an email or wrote any piece of content, in my head, I knew that I was writing this to every maid service owner out there.

That was actually a really nice challenge, because it forced us to really think through – if we’re writing this piece of content, and it’s not just to trick somebody into signing up for a trial, but it has to be valuable to an actual ZenMaid user, that raised our standard for content and really laid the way.

From there came the community, the ZenMaid Mastermind on Facebook. A couple of years later, we did the Made Summit, which is the industry’s first virtual summit, and a bunch of other things. Now content is a massive part of the company.

You and I have talked about this before, that at some point, I shifted my thinking and reframed this for the team – essentially, you can think of the company in two elements. One element is that we’re a media company that provides content, provides the best free content out there (this podcast, for example) for maid service owners to run more successful businesses. We happen to monetize that audience by selling them amazing software that helps them to manage their maid services in less time, make more money.

But thinking about it as a media company – if something happened to the ZenMaid software and it completely ended overnight, we still have a very valuable asset here, because there’s so many other ways that we can help maid services to be successful, which is ultimately our company mission. Our slogan is “making maid service owners successful.” It happens to be through software, but there’s lots of other ways that we can help.

The Importance of Brand Consistency

Stephanie: I love that. That’s your brand, and I think that is one of the biggest weaknesses I see among all small business owners, not just our industry – oftentimes in our industry, there is no strong brand at all.

I think I just intrinsically understood branding and that it needed to be consistent and laser-focused – who is Serene Clean? Now, six years of building what I said it was, I have the proof. This is who we are. We’re about our cleaning techs, we’re about our community. I have amazing people, and I want to highlight them, and we do great work, and we give to our community – that’s just who we are.

I have all these different vessels of doing that. Now I don’t need to tell you that – you go to any of our marketing pieces, or run into any of our cleaners, they’ll tell you, because that’s just who we are. It seems like having a strong brand is also what you have had for a long time. Would you say that was obvious? Did you know that that was what you were doing, and how has the brand evolved over time?

Amar: Honestly, no. We got very, very lucky. Initially, we were actually named Made Desk. Then there was a third co-founder who bought all of those original assets and decided that he didn’t want to build it with me and Arun, who started ZenMaid. So ZenMaid was actually our second choice – we were forced into it.

ZenMaid is obviously a much better brand name, but honestly, it was one of those things that we just got lucky with. We thought it had a nice sound to it. It was at a high time when all the tech startups in Silicon Valley were combining two words. Some of you might have heard of Zendesk, and so that’s where we got Made Desk, and then ZenMaid – because we thought that Zendesk was a great name.

Because we named it that, that dictated the brand, so the brand was a lot less thought out – calm, chill, serene, peaceful, all these different things that really just ended up coming out organically out of the name. That developed over time.

In terms of building the brand, to me, I’ve just always felt very strongly that if we do right by customers, that will come around. I think that most of our brand is just doing good work, making good decisions, and contributing to the industry. But the biggest thing is just showing up consistently.

I mentioned a competitor earlier – we have a competitor that’s been critically down for eight days. Yes, that’s a problem. But the bigger problem is that the CEO, who everyone knows, stopped showing up years ago, and so nobody actually believes that that person is still in charge. When everything is going wrong, their reputation is hurting them, not helping them.

ZenMaid has critically gone down, and ZenMaid will critically go down in the future, but the way that we are going to respond to it, and the speed with which we’re going to bring it back up and deal with that problem when it happens is, I think, what separates us.

When we’ve been doing this for 11 years, the folks that have been with us for a long time have seen how we behave. We’ve increased prices recently, which people haven’t been the happiest about. But honestly, most people are staying because even though they’re not happy about paying more money, they know deep down that we will do right by them in a way that a lot of our competition has demonstrated over the years that you can’t take for granted.

If you’re thinking about signing up for ZenMaid or any other competitor, that’s something that I would be filtering for. It’s not like ZenMaid’s the only one – there are plenty of our competitors that care, but there’s plenty that obviously don’t. If you find someone that obviously doesn’t, don’t fall for their software looking good, because that’s only going to help you until you need help, and then they’re not going to be there.

I think our brand and reputation has just come from showing up and doing the work consistently for 11 years. I think that anyone that does that is going to build a pretty good brand. You’re also gonna make your fair share of enemies as well. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine. I can be quite abrasive, and I personally do not match the ZenMaid brand very well. I’m not gonna apologize for that.

Managing Different Personalities

Stephanie: I’m the same way, and that’s where having my management team is that buffer between me sometimes. It’s hard when it’s your business, and it’s hard not to do things personally, when people attack something that they don’t understand.

Especially when decisions are made that may be on an external basis – they don’t know all the factors and time that went into that decision. When you have a customer reacting a certain way, or if we put out a new policy and have people coming back at us, it is nice to have that buffer of my managers. Don’t let Stephanie get at it, because I’m going to be upset. I’m like, “No, you’re wrong. You don’t understand how wrong you are. Let me tell you how wrong you are.”

Amar: One thing to note for everyone listening here – it would obviously be better if me and Stephanie conducted ourselves better as business owners in those situations. But what I really want to emphasize here is that we have solved the problem a different way, by giving it to other team members.

I’m working on being less abrasive, because I know that I get defensive. It’s my baby. I don’t like it when people tell me that ZenMaid sucks. I’m like, “You’re wrong. And here’s 28 reasons why.” I should not do that. I should just thank them for expressing their opinion and just move them on. There’s no reason to engage there.

But every time that I tag somebody else in so that that user doesn’t have a poor experience with me providing support – that’s me solving the problem. It would be better if I could just control my tongue or my temper, but ultimately, it’s about making sure that the user has the best experience.

That’s something that I’ve really embraced – it’s okay, I feel defensive about this. That’s fine. I can let Jorge handle this, because he’s gonna make the user feel amazing, and then everybody wins. I keep a happy paying customer. Over time, you can overcome these things, and hopefully I’ll get there, but I’ve solved the problem another way in the meantime, and ultimately, that’s what we get paid for as business owners.

Acknowledging and Solving Problems

Stephanie: I’m so glad you said that – we are people, and we have our flaws, so this is really more just acknowledging and solving the immediate problem that that flaw causes.

My customer relations manager Katie can stay cool as a cucumber, no matter how ridiculous that other person is. And Jorge – he’s a gold bar and an angel. He’s just so calm. Not saying that you and I are bad people, but it’s like, “Okay, we have this potential weakness.”

Same with training. I hate training. I hate training. And that means that my new staff member is not having the best experience, despite the fact that I know how to clean really well, but I have no patience for that. Instead of trying to force myself to be somebody who I’m not, which is a patient cleaning trainer, now I don’t train. That was the first thing I delegated. I got that off my back. Once I had a good cleaner – “You’re training. Oh, you like training? Great. That’s fantastic, because I hate this.”

I could have beat myself up and tried to make myself do that, but that effort to me wasn’t worth it when the ultimate goal is for me not to even be doing this. Why push that? Just like you’re not going to be on the phone every day with customers – you’re the CEO. Just like I can’t be out cleaning – I’m the owner. That’s not the goal.

Amar: Exactly. But I think another important thing is that even though Stephanie wasn’t a great trainer, she did that for long enough until she could hire the help. If you stick with it for long enough, you may have to do things that you don’t want to do and that you don’t love doing, but the idea is that you do them for long enough that you get it working, and then you can bring someone else in to actually do that and to systematize it.

We’re not saying that you can just pay other people to solve all of your problems, because you can’t when you’re really small. You have to solve them yourself. But you also can get to the point where you can provide better service than maybe you personally can provide.

Understanding Before Delegating

Stephanie: I understand what makes a good trainer. You understand what makes a good CSR. I don’t get bamboozled, I don’t get taken advantage of.

Bookkeeping is my prime example – just because you don’t like bookkeeping doesn’t mean you can just say, “Well, I’m not going to do that because I don’t like it.” No, you need to do it, and you need to get damn good at it before you give that to somebody else, because that’s how you get embezzling.

Amar: Exactly.

Stephanie: You’ve grown a lot throughout the years. Is there anything specifically, traits that you say you really feel you are great at now that maybe were not the case before, that your different stages of business has forced you to become better at?

Amar: So many things. I think just as a leader, I’m completely different. I look at myself now compared to six months ago, I feel like a completely different person.

I would say that one thing that I’ve invested a lot of time into since my early 20s is working on communication in various ways. I think that’s been really helpful. At the beginning, communicating through the written word – copywriting specifically – was the core skill that I needed to develop early on, to begin writing persuasively and getting people to sign up and to take action.

I feel like that journey has continued over time, where for some time it was public speaking and presentations during the ZenMaid journey, working on that. Now most of the stuff that I’m working on tends to be more internal. You saw my presentation at ZenCon last year for the team. The year before that, it was the Day 74 project where I was presenting to the team on the importance of making sure that every ZenMaid user has an outstanding experience.

We usually focus on the first 14 days and making that experience outstanding. I was trying to reshift that – it’s like, no, until they hit day 74, most users aren’t fully on board. They may know they’re going to move forward, but that’s how long it takes. My communication has really developed, and communication is leadership to me. Those are two sides of the same coin. That is probably the biggest thing.

I would say also that I just have a ton of mental models now that I’m able to much more quickly apply to many situations. The speed with which I’m able to simplify things down to “what’s the core issue” or “what’s the core question here” – that’s something that I’m noticing more and more. It’s clearly a muscle that I’ve been exercising for a couple of years.

Those are probably the biggest ones that come to mind, or certainly the ones that I treasure the most. Those two things are things that I will take with me to whatever I do in the future, whether that’s another business or just life in general. I’m really happy that ZenMaid has been a vehicle for those things, at least.

Business as a Vehicle for Growth

Stephanie: That’s such a good point. I feel I’ve experienced that same thing – Serene Clean has been the vehicle of my personal growth as a person, because every single year, I have changed so much. Even since I’ve known you, even in the past three months doing this podcast – it has changed me.

It’s amazing if you just let things teach you and are open to receiving things, even speaking better, speaking more clearly. Looking back to different episodes where I’m like, “Oh my gosh, Stephanie, stop going ‘mm-hmm’ every time somebody says something,” and actually learning and applying.

Or overarching, big things – you just saying that mental model of being able to get to the core of the problem. For me, starting out my operations meetings every Wednesday morning with, “What is the problem that we are trying to solve today?” Actually just saying that question, because we went through several weeks of being an hour and a half into a meeting, and it’s just like, “What are we even doing here? What are we trying to solve?” Just that clarity.

Is there anything that happened yesterday that you would say you felt like you nailed how you handled it?

Leading with Charisma

Amar: We had the ZenMaid exec call yesterday. One of the things that I’ve been working on recently is charisma. If you’ve ever read the book “The Charisma Myth,” it’s about how you show up and make people feel – being energetic and all of that stuff.

Yesterday, that was a book that I’ve been reading, and I applied that on the exec call of just showing up being higher energy, throwing in a couple of jokes, poking a little bit of fun, just lightening the mood, but at the same time, bringing that intensity and reminding the team that we can have a lot of fun, but we also need to get a lot done.

I’ve been pushing the team to work harder and more intensely since early December, when I returned from Japan and Thailand. I put out a message and a video to the team on increasing our sense of urgency and our intensity. But I also was very clear in “I’m not telling you guys to work longer hours. I don’t want us actually working longer, but I do think that we can work harder and we can work smarter, and that we can just be more intentional about what we’re doing.”

Yesterday on the exec call, that was definitely a leading from the front and setting the tone. I know that that’s going to cascade to the other teams, because all of the team members will now have to have calls with their teams – the marketing team, the dev team, the ops team – and bring that energy. Setting the standard on Monday morning for most of our US people.

Stephanie: I love that. I’ve definitely seen that even in when it comes to intensity and getting more out of the same amount of time, just being more efficient. You guys are always having “Moscow-ing it,” which is the must-have – you all are doing that now just naturally, it seems. It’s really become a habit of the company I’ve observed. For our listeners, could you explain that?

The Moscow Framework

Amar: The Moscow framework stands for Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have. So it’s essentially Moscow – just remove the vowels, and you get this nice little acronym.

It’s essentially for almost any big decision that you’re making in life. It might help you to make the decision by writing out a Moscow framework, which is defining for this decision, whether it’s finding a life partner or getting married or for ZenMaid defining how our new invoicing is going to look.

It’s defining what are the must-haves, what are the should-haves (which should be there, but it’s not an absolute deal breaker if it’s not), what are the could-haves, and then what will this strictly not have? What are the won’t-haves here? That’s a really helpful framework that you guys can use.

We have incorporated that into ZenMaid, and it has been very helpful with getting features designed. What’s been interesting about that, and we haven’t done it all the time, is we have to differentiate between when we’re trying to actually be efficient and when we’re trying to brainstorm.

Because when you’re brainstorming, you might come up with the best headline for an ad. Theoretically, coming up with that headline might have taken 10 seconds, but if you spent two hours thinking about it, writing down other things, and then going for a walk and having it percolating in the back of your mind, it takes up a lot more time than that.

For example, we have the design call that’s in an hour that’s like an hour and a half. There’s no reason that that call needs to be an hour and a half, and yet, because it’s an hour and a half, we get to go deep onto random things that we would never justify at other times.

So it’s been finding that balance of when are we trying to actually be efficient, and when is trying to be efficient actually holding back the company. That’s been an interesting balance to strike over the past maybe year or so.

Stephanie: That’s a really good point to make – there’s a time for that and a time for not. Some of the best insights and really great ideas come at the very end of talking about something from different angles and different perspectives. Even looking at the Moscow framework – I think the most interesting conversations come from people debating whether this should be or should not be, and hearing why. That’s changed my mind multiple times – “Oh, your perspective makes perfect sense.”

Coming back to the charisma thing – I’m really happy you talked about that, because I literally before my team meetings every Monday, I think to myself, “It’s showtime.” I don’t care what happened five minutes before, it is my job right now to entertain, inspire, educate. Every single person I talk to, every single person in my team that shows up there – I’m connecting with them because for me, them having a strong sense of loyalty is very important.

I find that those connection points, especially because I’m in Savannah and they’re in Wisconsin – that is my whole goal of that meeting, do they each feel connected to me and that they could come to me or come to the leadership team? So charisma is really important. Being charismatic is so important.

Amar: It really is. Those are the kinds of things that I don’t think most people talk about, but it goes a really long way. If you’re a maid service owner and you’re still meeting clients in person, you can go work on sales, or you can go read about charisma, and you’ll probably sell a lot more. It’s a very interesting one.

Closing Thoughts

Stephanie: I feel like we could talk for hours, and we’ll have to have another episode, but we can wrap it up, because I’m sure everybody’s tired of us babbling.

I guess takeaways is just, you’re pretty awesome, Amar, and I think that it’s really amazing what you’ve done and the community that you have built. The ZenMaid community is quite something. I don’t know how many people are in the mastermind that are not even ZenMaid customers – that would be interesting to me to know, but it’s just a really beautiful, welcoming place for education.

Obviously that’s where I have come from, even from my first Maid Summit talk to where I am today – that’s changed my life in so many ways. So thank you for creating this platform for us to connect. As I’ve said so many times, this is a lonely path, not only entrepreneurship, but specifically the cleaning business, because we are alone cleaning in houses, and we’re not around people. So thank you for that.

Amar: For sure, I appreciate that. It’s nice to be recognized, because obviously, it’s been a long time that we’ve been investing into this. It is very nice.

I thought it might be cool though, if the audience gets a quick preview of how some of our offline conversations go, or the ones that aren’t recorded. Because I have an idea for a feature that I think that we can do. I don’t want to promise this, but I did just want to float it to you, and we’ll record it, and we can probably leave it in the recording. Maybe we’ll cut it out if it’s not good. We can see what Alex says.

A Preview of Coming Features

Amar: Bundy took the exports from one of the ZenMaid accounts and just uploaded that data directly into ChatGPT with zero formatting changes, and then was able to just ask ChatGPT questions and essentially just generate reports based on that.

I messaged Alex, and I think that it’s going to be possible for us to do that. I don’t know exactly what it would look like, but it might be a reporting area, or a reporting chat, or something like that. It would essentially just put your information into ChatGPT, and then you could say, “What is my average customer from the past three months paying me?” and ChatGPT would just go through and give you an answer. You could actually chat back and forth for information about your data. I feel like that sounds pretty cool, right?

Stephanie: Oh, my brain just went like 1,000 different directions of all of the manual reporting that I’m doing, and the amount of dissection that needs to happen, especially considering how the majority of owners don’t feel like they’ve got time for that when it comes to reporting.

But this stuff is really important, because you could literally say, “What’s the churn rate? How many people are going from recurring or a regular customer to former customer?” All of these different things that you could do with that would be really amazing.

The pricing stuff especially, like what you just said – “What is the average appointment price?” And I don’t know how nuanced it could get, like, “It’s their second appointment.” Because first-time appointments are going to be more expensive. So let’s cut those out. “What’s the average of the second appointment?” So my brain, of course, is like, “Yeah!”

Amar: That’s kind of the power of ChatGPT. I’ve been thinking that we would have to think of all of those scenarios that your mind is jumping to. But the power of using AI is that we don’t have to think of all those things. I’m pretty sure it’d be able to take the question you just asked and answer it with the information provided.

Okay, cool. Well, that’s a nice little teaser for you guys. A little preview of this – whenever I have ideas, I usually ask Stephanie if she wants to jump on a Zoom call. And then this is how I gauge the excitement of our audience – how does Stephanie react to this?

Stephanie: Usually if I listen. So we just have to get Father Alex, who is a mastermind developer, to say yes, because he’s the one who actually has to do all the work.

Amar: Exactly. We’ll let him listen in on this conversation, and he can decide which way we’re gonna go.

Stephanie, thanks for having me. Of course, it’s the ZenMaid podcast. So if you guys are listening to this and you’re not on ZenMaid, sign up for a trial. Let us know what we’re missing, that we can add that would earn your business. We probably already have it on the list – it’s probably just a matter of priorities. But more feedback can never hurt. So give it a shot. Let us know what you think, and we hope to see you inside the program.

Stephanie: Yes, and at that, guys, hit that like, hit that subscribe. Put a comment down below, give Amar some love for all of the work he’s put in for all of us over the years, and we will 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
• ZenMaid Mastermind
• “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss
• Paul Graham’s “Do Things That Don’t Scale” essay
• “The Slight Edge” by Jeff Olson
• “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy
• “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane