{"id":17295,"date":"2026-04-30T13:35:58","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T13:35:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17295"},"modified":"2026-04-30T13:36:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T13:36:03","slug":"the-books-that-changed-how-i-run-my-cleaning-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/the-books-that-changed-how-i-run-my-cleaning-business\/","title":{"rendered":"The Books That Changed How I Run My Cleaning Business"},"content":{"rendered":"    <div class=\"zm-post-first-section mb-24\">\n        <div class=\"first-section-img-wrapper\">\n            <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/images\/first-section-img.png\" alt=\"first-section-img\" width=\"40px\">\n        <\/div>\n        <h3 class=\"zm-post-first-section-title mb-10 w-80 w-md-100\">Brought to you by expert maid service owners<\/h3>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        Tips and advice shared here, have helped us grow our own maid services.\n                    <\/strong>\n                    With eight current and former cleaning business owners in our team, including our CEO and founder Amar, we know the maid service industry inside and out.\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        We partner with amazing leaders in the cleaning industry like Debbie Sardone,\n                    <\/strong>\n                    Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely and Chris Scwap and more, to provide you with the latest industry insights.\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        We\u2019ve built the easiest-to-use scheduling software, built specifically for maid service owners!\n                    <\/strong>\n                    <a class=\"text-primary2 text-decoration-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/zenmaid.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Check out ZenMaid<\/a>\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n    \n\n\n\n<p>Listen on: <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/135-the-books-that-changed-how-i-run-my-cleaning-business\/id1791590022?i=1000764733215\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/69w8Zrsr7WLtsnX0TWNhEC?si=d1f67f3251084d5a\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gApyXSq8T44\">YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: #135: The Books That Changed How I Run My Cleaning Business\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/2Nz0RNAcoXBXYsZhZDy1B6?si=c7eefdab7cde488b&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-1\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host Stephanie from Serene Clean and today&#8217;s episode I am so excited about. It is actually a viewer request. We got a comment on one of our videos. Thank you so much for requesting this, asking what books I recommend and what have had a profound impact on myself in the business. And I thought that this was a fabulous episode idea, especially as I come up on age 30. Hit me, hit me in the face. In two weeks I&#8217;m about to turn 30, guys. And all of these books I read in my 20s as I was growing as the business began and has evolved, books have had such a profound impact on my life and who I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I would love to share with you the ones that have really made a huge impact and affected the way I behave or see things. Some of these are business books, most of them are, some of them are just life books and things that I just wanna share with you. So maybe some of these are gonna be not as interesting to you, but I hope that I can influence you to pick up a few of these, listen to them, read them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Funnily enough, I have barely read books at all physically in the past decade. It&#8217;s all been audiobooks for the most part just because of the business, right? I&#8217;ve been cleaning, I&#8217;ve been driving between jobs, and so audiobooks were just much more practical. So highly recommend. However, this year I&#8217;ve actually started picking up physical books, ordering physical books again, and it feels quite luxurious actually because, you know, as a Taurus, I like my luxury in case you guys didn&#8217;t know that I am a bit bougie and extra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My fellow Tauruses, leave a little bull emoji down below. And you know what, if you&#8217;re not a Taurus, just leave your sign down below. I&#8217;m curious what our listener base is. What&#8217;s your sign, guys? I don&#8217;t care if you don&#8217;t believe in astrology. I don&#8217;t know if I even do. It&#8217;s just fun and really, you know, maybe it&#8217;s a coincidence or a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am incredibly Taurus-coded. Like everything that it says about Taurus, like yeah, that&#8217;s me. That&#8217;s me. You guys could probably clock that from a mile away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So all of that to be said, I am in an introspective mood going into a new decade of my life. I can&#8217;t believe it. Oh my goodness. So here are my 16 books. I&#8217;m gonna try to get through these quickly so that I don&#8217;t make this seven hours long because I can talk, talk, and talk about books for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Man&#8217;s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> The first couple are not business books at all, but I wanted to start with them because of the fact that I&#8217;m not just a robot and I don&#8217;t exist in just a bubble where I work and then I go lay in a pod and sleep or something like that. I am a human being, shockingly enough, and I am deeply affected by my life and my experiences. And so these books, these first few books have had a really big impact on how I view the world or just had some really big aha moments related to this, and they just deeply impacted me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the first one is very heavy. I definitely will say that caveat. This one is very intense, but I think frankly that everybody should read it. It had that big of an impact on me. And it is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl\/dp\/0807014273\">Man&#8217;s Search for Meaning<\/a> by Viktor Frankl. And it does have to do with the Holocaust. I know that that can be incredibly difficult to read about the experiences of people who went through that, but I think that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so important that we do read that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so to give you a little context of the book, Frankl survived going through Auschwitz and he was a psychologist before going into this. And he pretty much just observed prisoners with a reason to live were the most likely to survive. So if they had a person to return to or a mission to complete, they endured far longer than those without one. So survival wasn&#8217;t just about the physical strength of the person, it was about having meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He did develop a form of psychotherapy, logotherapy, the idea that the primary human drive isn&#8217;t pleasure or power, but the pursuit of meaning, and that you can endure almost any how if you have a strong enough why. It&#8217;s the whole concept of like, you know, could you accomplish, you know, could you run a marathon right now if you haven&#8217;t trained? Well, no, probably not. Could you run a marathon if your whole family&#8217;s lives were at stake? Yeah, you could. You would probably go run that marathon, right? So it&#8217;s the whole, like, you can do anything if you have enough meaning and purpose behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really enjoyed his focus on meaning and that it isn&#8217;t found, it is created. It can come from your work, from love, or from how you face unavoidable suffering. And that the last of human freedoms, the one that nobody can take from you, is the freedom to choose your attitude towards any given set of circumstances. Even in suffering, you have a choice. And he noticed that when looking at the guards and how they were taking away literally every sense of freedom and choice, the only thing they couldn&#8217;t take away was what was happening in people&#8217;s minds. That&#8217;s where the choice still was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this was, you know, just, it was a very hard read, as I said. And I remember after I first listened to it, I remember just driving in silence for like an hour after that, just processing what I had just heard and that, you know, just the insurmountable suffering that these people went through and hearing how impactful meaning is on us as humans. And for me, like from a life perspective or business perspective, obviously it just makes everything seem like irrelevant. Any suffering that I&#8217;ve gone through just seems like literal nothing, right? But that&#8217;s not the point of the book. It&#8217;s not to make you feel like I can&#8217;t complain about anything or my life isn&#8217;t hard. Of course, not hard compared to those people, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the point is, you know, that when you&#8217;re in a hard season, it&#8217;s not, how do I stop feeling this? It&#8217;s, what does this suffering mean in the context of what I&#8217;m building right now? Or like, what is my purpose? What is my meaning? And what meaning can I place behind suffering? That if I must endure whatever is happening right now, if I put some meaning behind it and make that choice in my head, it makes it easier to bear and withstand and push through. And again, I really think that this book just had such an impact on my life and I do think about it often. It&#8217;s heavy, I&#8217;ll tell you that, but I really think everybody should listen to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So again, not a business book at all, but it definitely, for me, cemented the necessary application of purpose in life and that I need to find purpose, even like, if I&#8217;m struggling with something, if I can tie it back to what I believe my purpose in life is, then it allows me to push through and do that thing and just start taking it like in tiers of like, I really don&#8217;t wanna do this thing. But if I can like tie it back to why I think I exist, then all of a sudden it makes it a lot easier to do the thing or suffer through the thing. And I don&#8217;t want anybody to suffer, but we all are going to, right? So it&#8217;s like, how can I tie that back to my meaning so I can push through and persevere? So highly recommend that book. And that&#8217;s why I started with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Body Keeps the Score<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Number two, also a heavy book. Let&#8217;s just get these out of the way, guys. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.besselvanderkolk.com\/resources\/the-body-keeps-the-score\">The Body Keeps the Score<\/a>. So if you have not heard of this book, oh my gosh, it is absolutely incredible. Again, I would say trigger warning for sure on this one. Some very heavy concepts, you can Google, of course. Is talking about a lot of trauma. That is the whole concept of the book, is it is a lot of scientific research on trauma and what that does to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I&#8217;ll just go through a couple of points for you. So trauma doesn&#8217;t live in memory alone. It lives in the body. Your nervous system learns responses to survive difficult environments and those responses run automatically long after the environment has changed. We learn how to survive and we learn patterns of behavior, even if the environment changes, we react in very similar ways as if that environment still exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Interestingly enough, there is a lot of data that showcases entrepreneurs have very trauma-wired nervous systems, hypervigilance, inability to delegate, need to control quality obsessively. These are all survival adaptations, not necessarily character flaws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also, you cannot think your way out of a body-level response, so understanding why you react the way you do is the first step to actually changing it, not suppressing it, not pushing through it, but genuinely shifting it. The body&#8217;s stress response \u2014 fight, flight, freeze, or fawn \u2014 was designed for short-term threats. Running a business puts it on for years, and the physical toll of chronic stress is very, very real and documented, literally causing diseases within our bodies when we have chronic stress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So for me, reading this book helped me not only understand myself, but literally understand the impact of trauma, one on our society and how many people are highly traumatized from what they have gone through. And I literally remember a very specific moment where after I read this book, I had a cleaning tech and she was reacting in a very specific way. I would say very, very strong fawn response as well as just trying to appease and just the way she was reacting, I happened to know her background and that she had a very abusive childhood. And so it was literally like exemplified right in front of me of like, this is not just what it appears on surface level. She is having a trauma response right now and that is why she&#8217;s reacting this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s not to excuse or anything like that. It&#8217;s more to understand people and allow us to be more empathetic. This book made me such a more empathetic human being. Absolutely, not only to others, but to myself. I had grew up in an abusive household. I&#8217;m no contact with my parents. Many of you guys don&#8217;t know that, but, you know, so for me to understand why I behave the way I do as well as help me understand where other people may be coming from, this book just made me such a better human, and it also taught me the importance of like moving my body and not just allowing myself to shut down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really recommend this one. A lot of you guys have probably gone through some really tough shit, probably all of you, and you would really, really benefit from reading this book and applying the principles that it suggests. So I really recommend it. Obviously I recommend therapy. Like, you know, if you&#8217;re ready for therapy, it&#8217;s a very good thing to be. I am a huge proponent of it. It has helped me greatly and it helps me a ton in the business. It has helped me so much as a leader in my reactions and how I behave and interpret things, have boundaries, all of the things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so yeah, this book has been incredibly impactful on me, and again, I know this isn&#8217;t a business book. I think it&#8217;s a great human book and I think if more people read it and understood just how many people have like gone through really horrific things, you will understand just one, how fucked up our society is. But two, it will help you navigate, be supportive and also allow yourself to be supported if you are one of the people who have gone through some of these things. So I really, really recommend it. Cannot, cannot just express how impactful that book has been on me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Can&#8217;t Hurt Me by David Goggins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> All right, the third one that&#8217;s not a business book at all, but has been a big mindset one, and I still reference it to this day all the time, is gonna be <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgoggins.com\/book\/\">Can&#8217;t Hurt Me<\/a> by David Goggins. And if you don&#8217;t know who David Goggins is, he is, I guess, a really, like an ultra athlete and just kind of a crazy human being in like the best of ways, maybe sometimes not best, but just on the very extreme side of human performance, I would say. He&#8217;s pushed himself. He grew up in a really, really abusive, traumatic household and just what he has been able to accomplish is, feels superhuman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really recommend this book. If you need a kick in the ass, I&#8217;m not gonna lie. If you need a kick in the ass, read Can&#8217;t Hurt Me, okay? A few of the concepts from the book that I really take to heart. The 40% rule: when your mind tells you you&#8217;re done, you&#8217;re actually only at around 40% of your real capacity. The ceiling you feel is almost always mental, not physical or situational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Callusing the mind: just like skin develops calluses from repeated friction, the mind gets tougher through repeated exposure to hard things voluntarily. You build it by choosing hard, not just enduring it. So this is what&#8217;s really interesting in combination of Can&#8217;t Hurt Me and The Body Keeps the Score, right? We&#8217;re not choosing what happens to us when it comes to The Body Keeps the Score, that kind of trauma. But when we choose to put ourselves through really challenging, difficult things, like we&#8217;re putting ourselves through that by choice, it actually benefits us greatly because then we are proving to ourselves that we can do hard things and our capacity for things just grows and grows. We have to choose, and you have to do things you don&#8217;t want to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And obviously, this can be applied in so many directions. The most obvious ones are gonna be in physical feats, doing athletic endeavors, type of thing, pushing yourself past what you think you can because it really does apply. There&#8217;s a reason they call exercise a cornerstone habit. Another book, this isn&#8217;t a bonus book, The Power of Habit, excellent book. It&#8217;s a bigger one. It&#8217;s like Atomic Habits, but bigger and goes in more depth. Really great book. Forgot about that. Can&#8217;t believe I forgot about that book. But exercise is a cornerstone habit and it positively affects every other area of your life because it starts to kind of domino effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so he uses physical feats, but this can apply in all sorts of things, like doing the thing that you don&#8217;t want to do but you can choose to do it. It really does build your resilience and it&#8217;s a muscle, right? And you callous yourself to that unpleasantness. And so it&#8217;s really interesting that these two books is kind of like understand yourself, but then also pushing yourself, right? So that&#8217;s why I like these in conjunction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really, the other two concepts that I just wanna highlight from this book, one is going to be the accountability mirror. So it is Goggins&#8217; practice of being brutally honest with himself about the gap between who he was and who he claimed to be, with no excuses, just the truth and what he was going to do about it. So taking full accountability for your actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gosh, I&#8217;m just, this is just triggering all of these books that I did not put on the list. I&#8217;m like, how did I forget about that book? I knew this was gonna happen. I knew this was gonna happen when I recorded this episode. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink is a great book when it comes to this concept of like extreme ownership of everything in your life, even though for sure some things are not your fault, but all we can do is control what we react to our life and that if we just take ownership even for things like that of like, what am I going to do about it? Even like when you had a shitty childhood or you&#8217;ve had just terrible things happen to you and people treat you absolutely atrociously, like trust me, I get it. What am I gonna do now today so that that is not what defines me? That&#8217;s not the story that I&#8217;m just going to keep living in and I&#8217;m like, I&#8217;m gonna write my own story and stop giving those people that power, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s been a lot of my work the past few years with dealing with my personal life and things like that of, I&#8217;m not gonna let these bad things define me. I&#8217;m going to just accept that these things happened and how can I turn this into like, I guess my own hero&#8217;s journey. I&#8217;ve heard that phrase being used before of like, I am going to own my life and it&#8217;s gonna be my story that I&#8217;m telling. And so I find that the concept of like the accountability mirror is very useful of like, I&#8217;m taking ownership. Even if it wasn&#8217;t my fault, it&#8217;s now my responsibility, I gotta deal with it, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then finally, you guys may have heard me reference this concept before of the cookie jar, a mental cookie jar, and that is a mental inventory of every hard thing you&#8217;ve already survived that you can reach into when current circumstances feel impossible. You&#8217;ve already done hard things, here&#8217;s the evidence. So that&#8217;s why I definitely recommend any time you guys are going through a struggle, and you made it through it, clearly, because you&#8217;re here today, looking back at that at the next time. Anytime I&#8217;m having a really hard time, I find this practice incredibly useful. Here&#8217;s the proof. Actually, I have 100% success rate of making it through every day, just like you guys do, because you&#8217;re listening to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I find that really, really useful. Come on, Stephanie, you&#8217;ve done that before, you&#8217;ve done that before, you&#8217;ve done that before. You can get through this thing right here. And it just helps me kind of zoom out and make it through. So these books have really shaped my mentality, I would say, and have turned me into the person I am today. Definitely fail so often on actually applying these concepts, but I do try to really pay attention to that and do better. But yeah, definitely, these three are big ones for me, and I really recommend you guys giving them a listen and letting me know what you think about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Relentless by Tim Grover<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Now, going into more business books on the business side of things. These were the books that I really had a lot of points to take away from and apply to the business. So all of these books that I&#8217;m about to mention are going to be something that I read either when I was opening the business or during the life of the business, okay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Number one is going to be <a href=\"https:\/\/timgrover.com\/relentless\/\">Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable<\/a>, and this is by Tim Grover. And he was an elite athletic psychologist, I believe. And he would train like Kobe and people like that at that caliber. And his observations were very interesting on people of that caliber, right? So he categorized people into three groups: coolers, closers, and cleaners, funnily enough, right? And so coolers do their job when things are calm. Closers step up under pressure, you have to put pressure on them. And then cleaners do not wait for pressure, they actually create their own pressure and their own standard and hold it regardless of external conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so the book is just talking about how do we turn ourselves more into cleaners and creating that pressure within ourselves. So cleaners do not get motivated, they don&#8217;t need a pep talk or a good day. They operate from a decision that they made long before the moment arrived. The decision is already made. And I know that for me, this book, like this is such a callout because I still am so affected by external circumstances. I really should read this book again, because it&#8217;s been a long time that I have read it. And I think it would hit me a lot harder now because I had a lot of external conditions previously that do not exist anymore. I had so much more pressure, it felt like, that it kind of almost made it easy to just operate, right? Where now, because I&#8217;m a bit more comfortable, I am not a cleaner, okay? Like I definitely have, I need the pressure in order to actually get things done. So this book, I&#8217;m like, I should read this one again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, you know, relentlessness is not about being aggressive, it&#8217;s about being consistent at a standard that most people cannot maintain. And his observations from training these like elite level athletes are that the truly elite are never satisfied, but not in a miserable way, in a permanently hungry way. The win does not close the loop. It opens the next one. And I will say that I definitely was like this a lot more so earlier in the business. And it was something even, I remember one of my managers commenting on it of like, do you ever just take time to like feel that, when, or do you just move on to the next? Because when things were growing really, really fast, it was like big win and I was just like, okay, cool, great, next, next, next. And it was never, it wasn&#8217;t about the win. It was more about like what that meant of like, I knew how much work went into that. And that was where I got the meaning. And then it was just onto the next thing. Where I think I just kind of stop and like appreciate things a lot more big wins. But I think that this other side of the coin is very useful because it just makes you accomplish so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so the one thing he mentioned too is that the dark side of this is that same drive that makes someone exceptional can make them very difficult. And that in that case of wanting to be truly exceptional, the goal is not to be balanced. It&#8217;s to know what you are and use it deliberately. Of like, I&#8217;m not trying to have life balance. I&#8217;m not trying to be balanced. I&#8217;m trying to be the best, right? And I&#8217;m not gonna sit here and tell you guys to think that way, but people who do think that way get a lot done because they wanna be the best, right? And so if you wanna be the best, you&#8217;re gonna have to sacrifice certain things. And if you&#8217;re not willing to sacrifice those things, then you need to also be able to accept that you&#8217;re not gonna be the best. Maybe you&#8217;re just gonna be great, and that&#8217;s awesome too. I would also love to be great, but maybe I don&#8217;t have what it takes then to be the best, whatever that means, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it was a really good book. Again, another good kick in the ass, I think. If you need one, if you need a kick in the ass this week, maybe listen to a couple of these books, right? I promise that some of them are very sweet and accepting, but I like to expose myself to that type of stuff because it&#8217;s also a form of external motivation for me as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ikigai<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> This book, okay, this is not a business book. I lied earlier. These are not all business books. This one was really great and I just love this book. It&#8217;s a very positive. I would say that this is kind of the sibling to Man&#8217;s Search for Meaning, but the much less like horrific case study, I would say. And this is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ikigai-Japanese-Secret-Long-Happy\/dp\/0143130722\">Ikigai<\/a>, which talks about basically the Japanese, it&#8217;s a Japanese word. And the concept is like meaning and purpose and what that does. And people can live for a very long time when they have meaning and purpose. Another observation is that people who lived in Okinawa, which is one of the world&#8217;s blue zones, they don&#8217;t retire. They just keep working and evolving their purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the concept in the book is there are four circles: what you love, what you&#8217;re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. So Ikigai lives at the intersection of all four, not just two or three. So what thing can exist that lives in there? And for me, that&#8217;s what I mean of, I have that. It&#8217;s really amazing of, I have my purpose because I have something that hits the intersection of all of those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Other points from this book I really appreciated. Small joys matter as much as big achievements. Ikigai is found in everyday rituals and the quality of attention you bring to them, not only in grand accomplishments. So the book reframes kind of like the exit strategy model of business for me of, the goal is not to build something to sell necessarily, it&#8217;s to build something that gives your life meaning while you&#8217;re in it. So for me, even though my business is getting built to be sellable, that doesn&#8217;t mean I want to sell it. I just want it to be really systematic and be valuable, but I like living in my business and I don&#8217;t wanna escape from it anymore. Whereas at times in the business, that absolutely was true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So one of the takeaways is finding your ikigai or purpose that aligns within all four of those circles often requires subtracting and removing what you&#8217;ve accumulated that isn&#8217;t actually yours, what you do out of obligation or inertia, and getting honest about what remains when you do remove those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I really liked that book. I definitely think this is a wonderful one as well that just talks about, again, that impact of purpose and meaning. And I know that that word may sound like, oh my gosh, purpose, how do I find my purpose? And it means this big thing. But as mentioned, small joys matter as much as big achievements. And a lot of these folks that they looked at, they, you know, did something, a very particular skill or something that may not seem like particularly like huge or impactful, but they did it with such intent and focus and mindfulness around it and almost a reverence, and that you can have that reverence in literally everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like if I&#8217;m watering my plants or doing the dishes, like not distracting yourself and just being really in that moment, I think that that is a great mindfulness practice to bring in. Or like while we&#8217;re cleaning, like not always listening to things and just really thinking about, like, what am I doing right now? And I&#8217;m making other people&#8217;s lives better. And like for me, that&#8217;s what, like, I find my purpose is making other people&#8217;s lives better. And the thing is when I&#8217;m that broad, it makes it really easy to then feel purposeful in so many actions I take, of like, is this thing I&#8217;m doing right now making other people&#8217;s lives better? Well, that answer is almost always yes every day because that&#8217;s a very broad definition of purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Obviously I can hone in more further and more further, of like I wanna \u2014 for me, another purpose, I wanna be the best workplace that anybody&#8217;s ever worked at. When they come through, I want them to walk and be like, damn, this is the best place I&#8217;ve ever worked, right? And so that&#8217;s a really specific kind of purpose. But also that&#8217;s broad. Is this action making this a better place to work? And so I can come at it from multiple angles. So I find it useful to be kind of broad. I&#8217;m sure as I get older and have a family and things like that, that&#8217;s going to change things, but I&#8217;m very, very content in my life and happy because I&#8217;m like, well, I get to make people&#8217;s lives better all the time, in a variety of ways. And that&#8217;s why I love owning a business is because we can have such impact and it&#8217;s a really great way to find purpose in my opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Next group of books definitely were very business oriented. These first two that I&#8217;m gonna mention here, I read before I opened the business, literally in the weeks leading up. You guys have heard me talk about them, so I&#8217;m not gonna go into like crazy detail here, but they are incredibly impactful. Super duper recommend, especially if you&#8217;re just opening up, but really at any point in your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the first one is going to be The <a href=\"https:\/\/emythbooks.com\/\">E-Myth Revisited<\/a> by Michael Gerber. And this one helped frame my mindset before I opened the business on exactly what I should be doing and how I should be viewing myself as the owner, even in the times that I was working as the cleaner, right? Because obviously I was the only cleaner when I opened, but I knew that that was not the ultimate goal. And I know some of you, this may be a shift because you&#8217;re like, I just wanted to be the only cleaner. And now you&#8217;re looking at having staff and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And one of the examples that he gives that kind of sets it up, if I remember, it&#8217;s seven years since I read this book, over seven years. And so it&#8217;s a little fuzzy, but if I&#8217;m remembering correctly, he gives the example of a lady who loves baking. Baking is her passion. She is so good at baking, right? Just incredible, impeccable skills. And so all of our friends or family are like, you should open a bakery. You need to share this gift with the world. And she&#8217;s like, bet, let&#8217;s do it. So she opens a bakery and it gets really popular. And all of a sudden she&#8217;s bringing on other people to work for. And it&#8217;s just fabulous. But as time goes on, she is baking less and less because she&#8217;s now managing a business and staff and all of the shit that comes with owning a business. And all of a sudden she is not baking at all, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So she started this business to do what she loved full time and for a living. And now she is having a very expensive, horrific change to the job job instead of owning the business. And she&#8217;s not even doing what she likes, right? Because she is an incredible technician. And that&#8217;s what she wants to be, is a technician. She wants to be doing the work and doing the thing that she loves. She doesn&#8217;t want to be doing the other things in the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So three roles exist in every business, as I just alluded to, one of them being the technician, who is doing the work, the entrepreneur, who is the vision, and the manager, which brings systems in order. In most small businesses, one person plays all three, and the technician always wins, which kills growth, meaning the work has to be done, right? The physical, whatever the thing is, what you&#8217;re selling, it&#8217;s gotta get done. So that&#8217;s always gonna beat out the other parts and that&#8217;s where things can get kind of stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He describes the entrepreneurial seizure, which is most businesses are started by technicians who are good at a skill and assume that skill translates to running a business. As I just described, it doesn&#8217;t. The technician and the entrepreneur require completely different thinking. And many of you guys are experiencing this right now. Right now, am I Australian? What the hell? I&#8217;m not, as all of our Aussie fans are listening and groaning. Right now you may be experiencing this entrepreneurial seizure or you may have experienced it in the past where you are having to switch from technician to entrepreneur and it is really hitting you. And that&#8217;s why you&#8217;re probably listening to this podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The franchise prototype, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let&#8217;s try that again. The franchise prototype mindset is something he describes, which is building your business as if you were going to franchise it, meaning every process should be documented and repeatable by someone else, not dependent on you specifically. Your business should work without you. If it can only function when you&#8217;re present, you don&#8217;t own a business, you own a job. And a very demanding one at that that probably isn&#8217;t paying you as well as it should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The org chart for a business you want to build, not the one you have today, designing the roles first, then figuring out who fills them, even if you&#8217;re filling all of them temporarily. So I read this again before I opened, which is why I was never, even though I was doing the technician work, I saw myself as the entrepreneur. Even when I was doing all three of the roles, I opened Serene Clean, not because I love cleaning. Okay, that is not why I opened it. I opened it because I wanted to own a business, right? I happen to be good at cleaning and I can really see the value, and again, it ties to my purpose of helping people. This just happens to be the vehicle I happened to choose to fulfill my purpose of helping people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if that&#8217;s the case and I have that mindset, I&#8217;m not attached to me doing the technical work. In fact, I know that I cannot be doing the technical work if I want to fulfill my purpose to the fullest extent of its possibility, which is helping as many people as I can with the service that we&#8217;re providing, right? And also helping people from a staffing perspective. Like there&#8217;s so many ways that I get to fulfill my purpose through my business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s really amazing. And so reading this book before I opened the business, just, I think it set me up of like having the vision of like, I \u2014 and let me be clear. I did not have the vision for it to be what it is today. Not, not even a fraction. I truly thought I was going to have like, I don&#8217;t know, like five part-time techs or something. And it was just going to be like this cool thing. But I knew I wasn&#8217;t going to be able to clean. I thought I was going to stay at my family&#8217;s company, you know, for the rest of my life. And I thought that this was just going to be a side hustle. So I certainly did not have the vision that I do today and had to have accomplished the stuff that has happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it set me up to know like, I gotta build this thing from day one as if other people are having to do the work, and they were, because I was still working full time. So I think it just set me up for an understanding of systems and needing to document processes from day one, even if I didn&#8217;t, I wasn&#8217;t good at it or it was clunky still, but it introduced the concepts to me. So I was at least speaking the language from day one, even if I didn&#8217;t have the skill set yet to do it fully, which we&#8217;ll get into further down on these lists. So E-Myth Revisited, guys, give it a listen if you need to understand these concepts, but definitely recommend, it really helped me out in the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Profit First by Mike Michalowicz<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> All right, next one guys, obviously you know this is on the list, <a href=\"https:\/\/profitfirstbook.com\/\">Profit First<\/a> by Mike Michalowicz, who I saw at CleanCon, it was fabulous. And if you don&#8217;t know what Profit First is, it is a cash management method for your business. And basically it just forces you to budget your money and not be spending like a fool with money that you technically do not have for spending like that, right? So it means setting up multiple buckets or multiple accounts, I should say, for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So from day one, I opened like five \u2014 what was it? Okay, we have to this day, we still \u2014 I literally just did our transfers this morning. So what this means is all money flows into our revenue account, right? That is a checking account. We don&#8217;t spend any money out of that. That is just a holding cell for the money. That all, as the money is getting deposited, it goes into revenue, right? And then we have four other accounts in which the money is getting deposited and allocated, divvied up, if you will. If you don&#8217;t know what the word allocated means, it just means we&#8217;re divvying it up by a percentage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I still do it every week. It feels good. So I like to do it every week. He suggests, I think like once a month or once a \u2014 I can&#8217;t remember. I don&#8217;t listen to that because it&#8217;s a dopamine hit to transfer often. And sometimes I need the money in the other accounts, right? So we have four other accounts. Only one is a checking account and that is operating expenses. So everything that is going into operating expenses is to pay all of our day-to-day bills, our payroll, just everything, all of the bills of the business come out of operating expenses. So that&#8217;s going to be the checking account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then we have three savings accounts. One is going to be our tax account. So we are depositing every single week into that. So we&#8217;re saving up to pay our taxes because that is not my money, that&#8217;s the government&#8217;s money, right? We have an owner&#8217;s pay account, which is going to be Stephanie&#8217;s income. And then we have a profit account, right? Or we call it business savings, profit, whatever. And that is going to be rainy day fund. It&#8217;s going to be quarterly allocations for me if I&#8217;m choosing to take those. It&#8217;s going to be just a savings account, you know, something like \u2014 that&#8217;s where I pull for all of our bonuses, like our Christmas bonuses, Christmas and July. I&#8217;m saving up all year long. Every week I&#8217;m putting into that, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it forces good money behavior. Definitely recommend. Great book if you wanna understand like how to set this up, how to talk to your accountant about it, all of this thing, because it&#8217;s a lot of new stuff for some accountants that are not familiar with it. It sounds more complicated than it is. I promise it&#8217;s very simple. I&#8217;ve done this for seven years. This is how we&#8217;ve ran the business finances. This is why we&#8217;ve never had to take out any loans and just been responsible with the business&#8217;s money. Even when things are definitely a lot leaner at times or we&#8217;re not as profitable, I still have the money to pay for the things that I need to pay for. So I really, really love it. So it just forces you to be leaner because you&#8217;re not looking at all of the money the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, this next one I was recommended by my buddies Ryan and Amar from ZenMaid when I first met them in Amsterdam in person two years ago and they both have executive assistants. And I was just describing kind of like my overwhelm and just how much stuff I was doing and they&#8217;re like, oh my God, you need to read this book and then you need to get an executive assistant. And so I read the book and then immediately got an executive assistant and Veronica has changed my life. I love you, Veronica. And the most like platonic boss to assistant, whatever. I I don&#8217;t give a fuck. I&#8217;ll say it. I love you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.buybackyourtime.com\/\">Buy Back Your Time<\/a>, Dan Martell. Oh my gosh, this book changed my freaking life. You know I&#8217;ve talked about this before, but I have to talk about it, talk about it again, okay? Because it&#8217;s a good book. And it teaches you how to delegate your shit, okay? So if you are looking at getting a VA and EA \u2014 which VA and EA, semantics, virtual assistants are typically better at executing systems that are already in place. Executive assistants are very good at taking a dinosaur shit heap and turning it into a system. So I describe in voxer or Voxem, hey Veronica, this is a mess and she will come up with a system and help me systematize things. So that if you&#8217;re looking at what the differences are, right? But virtual assistants can also be very good at that. It kind of just depends on the individual or the agency that you&#8217;re going through when you find them. So just a little clarity there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But basically delegation, delegation, right? So this concept works if you have management team, if you&#8217;re trying to outsource anything, right? And get stuff off of you and so that you are just doing the things that you should be doing specifically. So he has, again, different concepts in the book. One of them that I apply all the time is going to be the 80-10-10 rule. So the person you delegate to owns 80% of the process. You step in for 10% of guidance when needed and you review the final 10%. So full ownership lives with them, not you. And this is the process that me and Veronica use for a ton of stuff, unless it&#8217;s something that only I can own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Only Stephanie can record this podcast, right? So I have to own it, but everything around it could be owned by other people, right? Or just, yeah, like there&#8217;s so many things. Like I&#8217;ve kind of described different processes that we built up. Like for example, the \u2014 when you&#8217;re like, how do you get all these things done, Stephanie? Well, it&#8217;s cause I don&#8217;t. I have somebody who&#8217;s doing the majority of the thing and I&#8217;m just doing the part that I can only do, right? So what is it that I can only do, which is probably not many things. There&#8217;s probably not many things that only you can do, all right? Get over yourself. I mean that in the most loving way possible, right? Like control freaks need to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it doesn&#8217;t mean we can&#8217;t have really high standards, right? But other people can probably execute just as well on all things as you, like I promise, I promise it&#8217;s possible. I really, really do. Okay, there&#8217;s very few things that only I can do that nobody else can do. And it&#8217;s things like this, right? Where it&#8217;s like face of company stuff. And so that is where I am still owning like the video, but there could be a lot of processes around it. Like for example, when I&#8217;m doing my anniversary videos for clients every year on their anniversary of their service starting, I am recording a personalized video and we&#8217;re sending it. I make the video, everything else around it is owned by Veronica, right? And actually she&#8217;s gonna start delegating that to one of our techs who wanted to step into more admin role as well and do some assistant work. So she is now gonna be delegating it. It&#8217;s really cool, but because it&#8217;s documented properly, that is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I&#8217;m not gonna go further. I just think you guys should listen to that book if you wanna know exactly how to do it. Loom is gonna be your best friend. Recording things is gonna be your best friend. Just next time you&#8217;re about to do something that you do all the time, just record the dang thing of how you do the thing. Like for example, April and both of my managers \u2014 well not both, I have multiple managers. Two of my managers are going to be on longer times out later this year. So Veronica is going to be learning how to do one of the manager&#8217;s roles so that it can be \u2014 that&#8217;s the point of an executive assistant or a virtual assistant at times is to pick up the slack in those situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so that means all of the roles have to be documented well enough in order to do that. We know that&#8217;s coming, so we know what work needs to be done, so that it isn&#8217;t perfectly documented yet, right? And so we typically are not typing anything out. Everything is going to be in a Loom video so that they can watch, because it&#8217;s just hard to read instructions sometimes when you can just show them and describe what you&#8217;re doing. So definitely highly recommend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So one of the takeaways is the biggest block isn&#8217;t money, it is your identity. Many business owners tie their worth to how much they do. Letting go feels like losing control even when the math says otherwise. The book names this and pushes you through it. And this is definitely me of like, I had this like \u2014 like it&#8217;s like this martyrdom of like, I work so much. I&#8217;m so busy, so busy. I don&#8217;t want to say that anymore. I want to be working on the things that I need to be working on, which oftentimes is creating something and then delegating it, right? Like that&#8217;s right now what I&#8217;m working on is a lot of data analysis, automation, like building it with Claude and then passing over the full process to somebody else, right? Like that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m working on right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, it was just a great book. And I know I&#8217;m getting rambly. Let me have a sip. Shout out to Moe&#8217;s Southwest Grill. That&#8217;s my Monday lunch date with my boyfriend every Monday. We go to Moe&#8217;s, it&#8217;s delicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, next book, I have talked about this one. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatesalesmachine.com\/book-1a\">The Ultimate Sales Machine<\/a> by Chet Holmes. This one was so impactful, specifically with pursuing commercial accounts. If you guys wanna know how to get commercial work, read this book, it&#8217;s amazing. And of course, it applies for residential, but I found it particularly useful when I wanted to get into commercial because I was like, old school, how do you get them, right? It&#8217;s drop-offs, it&#8217;s, you know, just there&#8217;s processes around it, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Spoiler alert, I may be coming out with a commercial bundle, but first I want to \u2014 we&#8217;re testing and honing in on some things and I want to make sure that it is perfect before I turn it into anything, but that will be coming and you know, maybe there&#8217;s a Maid Summit talk in there somewhere, who knows? You know, I know potentially, but you know, stay tuned to this year&#8217;s Maid Summit guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of my favorite phrases from this book is pigheaded discipline. You may have heard me talk about this, but the businesses that win aren&#8217;t the ones with the best ideas. They&#8217;re the ones who execute consistently on a small number of good strategies. Most give up before the compound effect kicks in. Okay. I have almost 500 five-star Google reviews across our three locations. That does not just happen with a like motivation kick. All right. There&#8217;s a system around to the point now, like I don&#8217;t even like \u2014 I mean, I&#8217;m on it, I&#8217;m on it, I&#8217;m tracking it, I&#8217;m like, how many reviews are we getting every week? We have built it so that it just is happening, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And there&#8217;s so many examples I could give. Our Google My Business, right? Like sometimes I&#8217;m like, why do we have such good SEO? It&#8217;s like, for years we&#8217;ve been doing these things in order to have good SEO. And it&#8217;s really fucking boring to do the good things for years, guys. And I know you&#8217;d be surprised from me saying that, because I get so gung-ho about shit and I have shiny object syndrome. But in actuality, the majority, I would say 95% of the things in the business are happening because they for years have been getting done consistently and well. Maybe not perfect, but we have been doing the right things for literal years. And then it just seems like, oh, overnight success, or you got 500 reviews, yeah. And every week, every week for seven years, we have been focusing on getting reviews, right? To the point now it just feels like it just happened. Like how did we get so many reviews or whatever the thing is, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really love this book because it talks about process, it talks about sales and that they are the lifeblood of the business. It teaches you how to do sales and also who should you be pursuing when it comes to your business. So I really like this book, definitely recommend if you need to learn more about sales and also a little kick in the butt too, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Thou Shall Prosper by Rabbi Daniel Lapin<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So this next one, okay, I guess I did smatter these ones around. They&#8217;re not all business books. What am I saying? This one I know I&#8217;ve talked about before in a YouTube video, but I wanted to mention it because it helped with my mindset around money and I have to be reminded on this one often. And that is <a href=\"https:\/\/rabbidaniellapin.com\/product\/thou-shall-prosper-hardcover-book\/\">Thou Shall Prosper<\/a> by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. And it basically is taking like Jewish concepts of money and how they see money and their mindset around money and teaches us of like, okay, how can we apply these in our lives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I found it so useful because so many of us have really messed up views of money and we&#8217;re actually hurting ourselves because we see it as like this dirty bad thing to be wealthy or to be financially successful. And that will never allow you to win if you&#8217;re in business. Because if you&#8217;re in business and you say, I want to be successful, I want this business to grow and all of these things and I want to be generous, but deep down, you think it&#8217;s a dirty bad thing to make money, you&#8217;re not gonna be successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this book really helps with mindset. Couple of points I wanna make from this book. Money is a measure of value created for others. Profit isn&#8217;t extracted from people. It&#8217;s the evidence that you&#8217;ve genuinely served them. This reframe eliminates guilt around charging well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The moral case for business: every transaction is a voluntary exchange where both parties believe they&#8217;re better off afterward. Business is inherently ethical when done honestly. It&#8217;s not something to apologize for. And he gives a bunch of examples of this, of how business is portrayed, like in movies and pop culture is like the business is always the big bad guy hurting the individual. Where it&#8217;s just like most businesses in America are small businesses. And if we&#8217;re behaving honestly and doing things well, it is good. It&#8217;s a wonderful thing. Business is fantastic. Let me get my little capitalist hat on right here. But it is a great thing and we should be proud. We shouldn&#8217;t be guilty about it. Cause it&#8217;s like, people clearly think there&#8217;s value there. They wouldn&#8217;t be paying us and walking away happy. Like if your business has people walking away, feeling good about the interaction, you are providing value and you should not be feeling bad about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It talks about network and that it&#8217;s your net worth. And even though it is a cliche to say that, they take that as a literal principle. So who you know, who trusts you and who will vouch for you is a real asset that compounds over time. And I can definitely attest to this, both from the staff and the client perspective of that word of mouth. As you guys know, a lot of you get your clientele from word of mouth, but the opportunities and doors that have been opened because of who I know and by getting my name out there and showing who I am with my work and consistency, I can&#8217;t even quantify it because the effects are far reaching, and the opposite, if it&#8217;s negative, are incredibly far reaching as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He argues that a negative or suspicious relationship with money, the idea that wealth is somehow dirty or that wanting it is greedy, is one of the most damaging beliefs a business owner can carry. It caps every single decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, specialization and reputation. The more specifically known you are for something excellent, the more people will seek you out and pay premium prices. Being known for everything means being known for nothing. So, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, that kind of concept. And I&#8217;m even like \u2014 like literally this comes to mind right now is like knowing, being known for something excellent of like, are \u2014 spoiler alert, there will be an episode on this, but we have completely switched to flat rate pricing on first and maintenance cleans. Guys, as of last week, I got so much shit to talk about with you guys from the past two weeks, cause I went to Vegas, then I went to Wisconsin, then I went to Atlanta to see Bruno Mars, which is totally irrelevant to business, but it was like a life dream of mine. I love Bruno Mars and that was one of the best nights of my life. But I have been just, I&#8217;ve been away for weeks and just bouncing all over the place and I just, there&#8217;s been so much going on and I&#8217;m like, I cannot wait to keep recording for you guys because I have so much shit I want to tell you. And one of them being like, holy crap, we did something I never thought we were going to be doing and we&#8217;ve done it really quickly, which is we&#8217;ve switched to flat rate pricing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And we have started transitioning all of our current clients to flat rate. All new clients coming in are flat rate both on first cleans and maintenance cleans. I know, I know guys, it&#8217;s crazy, right? And also we&#8217;re pushing prices even higher because people are saying yes and we&#8217;re gonna have a wait list. So we&#8217;re like, fuck it, we ball. Let&#8217;s see what the limit is. So we&#8217;re now gonna be putting prices out more towards like 65 an hour, which is crazy. Again, at a flat rate model. All of that to be said is because people are just saying yes. We&#8217;re not even having to like, do follow up. It&#8217;s crazy. I&#8217;m gonna run through the whole new sales email and stuff. It&#8217;s just wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Shout out to Molly Moran as well. We met with her before I went to Vegas. We did a one-off consulting call with her, which she made an exception for me. Thank you, Molly. You&#8217;re the best. And that call kind of like helped lay out like how do we do this transition? So yes, even I still am gonna pay for stuff. I wanna know knowledge. I wanna know knowledge, guys, just like you wanna know knowledge. And I want to know from people who have done it before me. And so I paid Molly. It was well worth it. And it really gave us a lot of clarity on how to actually do this. So thank you so much, Molly. A lot of shit is popping off at Serene Clean right now. It&#8217;s just wild. Feels crazy right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And point being when it comes to this thing of specialization and reputation, the fact that we have this huge reputation now for excellence and we&#8217;re seeing the compound effects even at these higher prices, right? And then jumping back to the idea that wealth is somehow dirtier, that wanting it is greedy is one of the most damaging beliefs that a business owner can carry. I can totally attest to this guys. And I just want you guys to practice literally telling yourself and embodying the belief that making money is a good thing and we want to make a lot of money. Okay, we want to make a lot of money because money is simply a tool, all right? And if you are a bad person, you&#8217;re going to do bad things with money. But if you&#8217;re a good person, you&#8217;re gonna do good things with that tool, right? And so I just, I implore you, this is a great book. If you have some issues around this and you may not even realize you do, but you&#8217;re kind of like self-sabotaging or feeling greedy or bad. It&#8217;s like, no, I&#8217;m providing value. I should charge appropriately for it because it just trickles down to them being able to pay well on all of the things. So this is a really good book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Your Next Five Moves by Patrick Bet-David<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, next book is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yournextfivemoves.com\/\">Your Next Five Moves<\/a> by Patrick Bet-David. And so this book was really useful for me to think about business strategy and how to behave and make decisions. So a couple points from here. Chess players don&#8217;t think about their next move. They think about sequences of moves. And business owners who only plan one step ahead are always reactive. The ones who think five moves out are always prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Know thyself first before any business strategy. You have to know what you actually want, not what looks good, not what someone else built, and your strategy has to be built for your life, not a generic playbook, right? So for me, with how I want to operate as an owner, being flexible, that type of stuff, some of the business advice that I hear doesn&#8217;t apply to how I want to run the business and how I want to manage people, that type of thing. So I just don&#8217;t take it, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And as for like thinking ahead, this has been something \u2014 the way we say this in Serene Clean is like, is this gonna work with 50 cleaners? And if it doesn&#8217;t, then we shouldn&#8217;t be doing this now because that hopefully is not gonna be in the next decade, right? It&#8217;s gonna be in the next few years that that&#8217;s going to happen. So we have to build with that in mind, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They talk about studying your competition, which I don&#8217;t talk a lot about competition on this podcast. But his argument is, you know, know their moves, their weaknesses, their next likely step. Most business owners barely know what their direct competitors are doing. When I do consult calls with you guys, I ask about your competitors, who are they? You know, I wanna look them up, you know, before I happen to call with you. And so if you&#8217;ve never looked them up, and I understand the sentiment, like, there&#8217;s plenty of business to go around, abundance mindset. Yeah, but you should still know what they&#8217;re doing. You should still know how you can have a competitive advantage over them, right? Because if somebody asks you, why should I choose you over them, and you don&#8217;t even know what they&#8217;re doing, so you can&#8217;t make an argument, well, maybe there&#8217;s something there you should work on, all right? So, you know, we&#8217;ve secret shopped some of our competitors, and we&#8217;ve noticed \u2014 well, I know some of my competitors listen to this, so maybe I&#8217;m not gonna say what their problems are. They know what their problems are. But let me just tell you, we do it better. We don&#8217;t have weaknesses in those particular areas. Arrogant, but I&#8217;ve studied my competition and I know, right? And so do that, do that, find out what you can be competitively better at in your area, especially when we&#8217;re talking local businesses, right? So it sounds aggressive coming from me. I know I usually don&#8217;t talk like that necessarily. But I definitely recommend, you know, at least giving it some thought, you know, for us tracking, tracking reviews of other of our competitors and things like that is useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Other points from the book I want to highlight, building a team that compensates for your weaknesses. So the five move thinker doesn&#8217;t try to be good at everything. They know exactly what they&#8217;re bad at and hire for it. I&#8217;ve mentioned many times, this is where that comes from, is this book helped me realize like my managers need to have strengths that I do not have and I have strengths that they do not have, right? We balance each other out on these things. We have very different personalities and very different thought processes on things as well. We are all connected by the same values and that&#8217;s why it works. And we all are rowing the boat in the same direction, which is amazing. But I love, like there&#8217;s a reason they work so good is because they balance out Stephanie, all right? If we had five Stephanies, the business would be a clusterfuck, okay? So we don&#8217;t want a bunch of me&#8217;s running around, okay? We need me, but then we need counterbalances, right? And strengths to my weaknesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then finally, moments of clarity versus crisis decision making. Most owners only make big decisions when they&#8217;re forced to by a crisis. The five move framework trains you to make those decisions from a position of strength before the crisis arrives. So I&#8217;ve had so many moments of clarity the past couple of weeks, guys, but none of them are coming from crisis. It&#8217;s from like strategic thinking, and that&#8217;s just really exciting. So I&#8217;d forgotten about this book until I started doing this. So again, thank you to the commenter who suggested this episode because it made me like, I need to go re-listen to these books because they are so, so good. So highly recommend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Should We Do? by Mike Agugliaro<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, this one I talked to in Amanda Stovall&#8217;s episode because I had recommended this book to her. Very good. I read it fairly recently in the past year or so. It&#8217;s called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/What-Should-We-Do-Clients\/dp\/B0CTGPPX1X\">What Should We Do?<\/a> by Mike Agugliaro. Agugliaro, I&#8217;m so sorry, Mike, you&#8217;re not listening to this. Mike from What Should We Do? Very good. This is the most like tactical book I would say on this list. Super directly applicable to what we do here, because it&#8217;s built for home service businesses. This book is written for us, okay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So a couple points here. The home service sales process has specific stages and most business owners skip or rush to the ones that actually build trust, which is why clients shop on price instead of value. So this book teaches you how to get your customers to see the value and how you can explain your value and also help them feel empowered to make decisions. Cause a lot of times people say no because they don&#8217;t feel empowered. And so this helps you teach them how, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s education-based selling. The more you teach prospects before they buy, the more they trust you and the less price becomes the decision factor. Informed clients become loyal clients. And I know, you know, I&#8217;ve even had guests on the podcast are like, I don&#8217;t want to have to teach people stuff. I want them to have had, you know, cleaning companies before that type of thing. I like to teach people things because I want them to understand why we&#8217;re different, why we&#8217;re special. And a lot of times they think they&#8217;re comparing apples to apples when they are not. They&#8217;re comparing apples to rotten smelly oranges and they just don&#8217;t know. They don&#8217;t know that the orange is rotten and smelly. All right, because there&#8217;s perfume all over it, right? So we need to show them like, no, you don&#8217;t want that rotten orange. You want this shiny Honeycrisp apple as I&#8217;ve referenced before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Follow-up is where most home and services businesses leave money. This book really solidified \u2014 I&#8217;m like, I&#8217;m gonna be working on our follow-up. So the book offers a specific cadence, not just follow up more, but when, how, and what to say at each stage. Profit comes from operations, not just sales. He addresses the back end of the business, like scheduling, client communication, service consistency, and how that directly impacts your ability to grow your margin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then finally, talking about referral systems and how that is actually a process, not just a happy accident. So clients who refer aren&#8217;t just satisfied, they&#8217;ve been specifically and intentionally asked in the right way at the right moment. And that&#8217;s another area that I still need to develop is like a more robust and actually systematic referral system in our business. So how many times can I say system, right? Like, ugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Start With Why by Simon Sinek<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, next book that I definitely want to mention and then we&#8217;ll get into my current reading. So I read this one very early on and it was called <a href=\"https:\/\/simonsinek.com\/books\/start-with-why\">Start With Why<\/a> by Simon Sinek. And this just talks about how your why or your belief that drives everything is what most compelling companies have. So the golden circle is something he describes as most companies communicate from the outside in: what they do, then how they do it. So if you start with why, that drives everything and then you work outward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People don&#8217;t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. The what is easily replicated. The why is not. So cleaning businesses are not \u2014 we&#8217;re not this like rare jewel, right? It&#8217;s not like only one person knows how to do this, right? Like it&#8217;s a very low barrier to entry business. You know, standing \u2014 it&#8217;s a whole like standing out in a sea of options. That Maid Summit talk was super duper inspired by this book because I feel like this is one of my strengths because I read this book so early on. I might&#8217;ve even read it before I started the business or while I was doing my practice cleans. I know it was super early on and it just made it so clear to me like I need to be able to explain and articulate my why, why am I doing this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so for me it was like, okay, I don&#8217;t have kids, I can&#8217;t relate to that because a lot of my clients are gonna have kids, parents are gonna be one of our biggest client profiles. So I can&#8217;t relate on that, but what can I relate to? What is very visceral for me of like, why am I even doing this? Because it&#8217;s not just \u2014 I don&#8217;t just say I wanna make money, right? Like obviously we do, we wanna make money. But there&#8217;s gotta be a bigger thing there. And so the purpose, again, helping people. But for me, the why of like, why this specific thing is like, I am deeply affected by my environment and my mental health just goes to the shitter when I am surrounded by chaos. And I am just so overwhelmed. I don&#8217;t even have kids and I get overwhelmed by keeping up with everything and trying to maintain, you know, a semblance of a social life, you know, being fit and all of taking care of myself and going to work, all of the things, like that&#8217;s why I open Serene Clean, right? I needed to make extra money, but it&#8217;s like, no, I can understand you. I can sell to you because I understand you. And I know I can solve this problem for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s just like, it&#8217;s so \u2014 I just love to be able to help take that weight off people&#8217;s shoulders and like provide them with that consistency that they don&#8217;t have to stress, right? It&#8217;s just so easy for like \u2014 I&#8217;m fucking selling it right now, right? It&#8217;s easy because I believe this, right? You need to believe it. So your why has to be genuine. It cannot be manufactured for marketing. If it&#8217;s real, it attracts both clients and team members who share the same belief. If it&#8217;s fake, people feel it, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I love that, you know, they mentioned the team member side of it because it&#8217;s like, I can talk about this mission and really get like \u2014 I&#8217;m the visionary in my business, just as you need to be the visionary of like, I need to be able to sell this to people. And by sell, I mean in the best way of like, you should do this job because you get to help people every day and you know how you feel in your house? Yeah, that really sucks when you&#8217;re really stressed and you can&#8217;t like \u2014 it just feels chaotic and you just can&#8217;t even relax because your house is a mess. We get to help people eradicate that, if but temporarily, and then consistently build that trust over time and have relationships and then we get to donate to local businesses and local nonprofits and all of these things and donate cleanings, and like \u2014 like I could just go on and on and on because it&#8217;s my why. It&#8217;s so clear guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you can&#8217;t do what I&#8217;m doing right now and just go off on a 10 minute tangent of what your business does and why it&#8217;s so important on both the team side and the client side, then I really recommend this book. It will help give you that clarity as to why this is so important and how to explain that. So definitely recommend, it was really impactful for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-15\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Good to Great by Jim Collins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Next book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jimcollins.com\/books.html\">Good to Great<\/a>, Jim Collins. This is a really good book. Like I&#8217;m gonna say, obviously all these books are fucking good. Of course they are because I&#8217;m putting in my book list. So I&#8217;m just gonna be \u2014 just gonna repeat myself a bunch, but this one is very excellent. And he describes in the book how some companies are just good where other ones are literally great and how you take your business from just good to absolute greatness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So he describes something called the hedgehog concept, which is three overlapping questions. What can you be the best in the world at? What drives your economic engine? And what are you deeply passionate about? Greatness lives only where all three overlap. You know, we&#8217;re gonna talk about passion a little bit later in another book. And it&#8217;s not like you need passion to be good, but to be great, you kind of have to be passionate. Like I&#8217;m super passionate about it. I&#8217;m not saying I&#8217;m great. I am saying though I have that ingredient in this matrix, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He talks about level five leadership. The highest performing leaders combined fierce professional will with personal humility. They&#8217;re ambitious for the company, not for themselves. They credit others in success and look inward in failure. You will notice guys that when it comes to Serene Clean, like it&#8217;s kind of hard with this podcast because I have to talk about myself, but in everyday language, when I&#8217;m talking to my team, when I&#8217;m making content to go out to the world, I always use the word we. Always highlighting the team, that I would be nothing without them, that this would not exist without them, without our community, all of the things, right? So like this book just \u2014 I mean, I already had that in me, but this book hones out of even more of just like, highlight your team, highlight your team, just like constantly talk about why they&#8217;re so great and that it&#8217;s because of them that this is getting done, right? So just extreme like humility, but then also like that accountability as well. Like if they fuck up, it&#8217;s kind of on me because I didn&#8217;t provide them with something clearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The next concept of first who, then what, the right people on the bus. Before you decide where the bus is going, strategy matters less than the quality of the team executing it. So you guys know this. When you get an A player, freaking rockstar, you can give them anything, right? When I look at my management team, they are all this. They are the right people on the bus, right? And so it matters much less. I just know that we&#8217;re going to accomplish things when we&#8217;re working together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then finally, he defines the flywheel of behavior in the business. So no single defining moment creates a great company. It&#8217;s consistent, disciplined, pushing in one direction over time, pigheaded discipline, until momentum builds to a point where it almost moves itself. And that&#8217;s what I was referencing when I was talking about The Ultimate Sales Machine when it comes to reviews. We don&#8217;t really have to pay for marketing right now because it&#8217;s just moving itself. The reviews are doing it for us, right? But we had to build that base for years and years and years and continue to build it. It&#8217;s part of our flywheel is we are continuing to do that. Highly recommend that book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-16\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Deep Work by Cal Newport<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Next book is <a href=\"https:\/\/calnewport.com\/deep-work-rules-for-focused-success-in-a-distracted-world\/\">Deep Work<\/a> by Cal Newport. Actually, both of these next books are by Cal Newport. Really great. Deep Work just talks about the negative effects of being distracted. So deep work is cognitively demanding tasks performed in a state of distraction-free concentration. This is where your most valuable output actually comes from, not from being responsive and available. And this one is a hard pill to swallow because we are being so responsive and available as small business owners, right? And so this one really highlighted my need for time blocking. I loved this concept and I really picked it up from this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So Newport&#8217;s rules: schedule your deep work blocks before anything else. What doesn&#8217;t get scheduled doesn&#8217;t get done. Shallow work will always expand to fill available time if you let it. And that the ability to focus deeply is becoming rare at the same time it&#8217;s becoming more valuable. It&#8217;s a skill that compounds and most people are letting it atrophy. Shallow work is urgent feeling but low value: emails, meetings, messages, administrative tasks. Most people spend most of their day here and wonder why they&#8217;re busy but not moving forward. So if you feel like you&#8217;re just like treading water in your business and not like nothing is getting built, you&#8217;re just kind of like existing and surviving in a day to day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My solution for this for years was like getting up really early in the business. And I hate to say that because I know people don&#8217;t want to hear that, especially when you&#8217;re already exhausted. But it was the only time I could be distraction free. It literally \u2014 I had to literally get up at like 4:30 in the morning and go to the office or pull up my laptop or whatever to get a couple hours of work in before everybody. And this is where like a lot of the magic happened was because nobody was bothering me and I could actually like put the things in place like the tracking and stuff, all of that, that started pretty early on. It was because of the concepts from this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And nowadays I use it and when it comes to time blocking, like if I need to record things or like all of my, you know, like I just batch things a lot better in order to do this. And actually we&#8217;re going to be taking this concept hopefully into the management team more because right now they&#8217;re all hopping to the technicians&#8217; messages, which means they&#8217;re being distracted like a million times a day. So we&#8217;re going to kind of rotate who is responsible to be responsive to the staff members. So, you know, I would definitely recommend \u2014 our, my episode with Chris Schwab, our first one. We talk about this a lot when it comes to getting derailed and coming back again. I think that that would be a good one to re-listen to if you&#8217;re interested in this concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-17\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">So Good They Can&#8217;t Ignore You by Cal Newport<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Next book by Cal Newport is going to be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You\/dp\/1455509124\">So Good They Can&#8217;t Ignore You<\/a>. So this is kind of the opposite side of what that other one I just mentioned. The passion hypothesis is wrong. Follow your passion implies passion pre-exists skill. Newport argues the opposite. Passion is the result of mastery, not the prerequisite for it. And I can totally attest that. I am not passionate about cleaning, at all. Cleaning is not my passion. However, it has been built because I&#8217;m so passionate about my business and as I&#8217;ve become \u2014 I guess, not a master, I don&#8217;t wanna say that at all, but I am in the process of mastering it as I will be for years and years and years, it has made me more passionate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you&#8217;re just waiting or \u2014 I think I saw, you guys remember Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs? I saw a really good, I think commencement speech he did at a graduation one time. And it was basically like, don&#8217;t tell your kids to follow their passion. Passion is built as you begin to master something. Like when you get really good at something, it becomes your passion, right? You become passionate about it. Does anybody go into plumbing because they&#8217;re passionate about plumbing? Probably not, but they become passionate about it because they get really good at it, right? Because when you focus your attention on something, that&#8217;s when you start to build that passion when it comes to your career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Career capital: rare and valuable skills are the currency of a remarkable career. The more career capital you accumulate, the more autonomy, impact, and meaning you can trade it in for. Deliberate path practice. Getting better requires pushing past comfort, not just doing the thing repeatedly, but actively working on the hardest parts. Most people stop improving the moment they reach good enough. And I can definitely attest to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So for cleaning business applications, the owners who build remarkable companies aren&#8217;t the ones who were passionate about cleaning from day one. That was not me. They&#8217;re the ones who got exceptionally good and the passion followed, right? I could talk about cleaning now with great passion and what we can do with the cleaning business is because I have been practicing it now for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-18\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What I&#8217;m Currently Reading<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, I&#8217;m actually gonna skip that one because I don&#8217;t feel like that one is super duper impactful. So I just wanted to highlight what I&#8217;m currently reading, in case you&#8217;re curious what Stephanie&#8217;s reading now, because I&#8217;m reading a couple different books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of them is called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oliverburkeman.com\/fourthousandweeks\">4,000 Weeks<\/a> by Oliver Burkeman, and I got this book from Mark Manson, who has the podcast Solved. If you are looking for a fantastic podcast, that is a great one. We&#8217;re talking super long form, like four plus hour episodes, which I know you&#8217;re like, oh my gosh. But the whole concept of Solved is to deep dive into core issues. Let me start over. The concept of Solved is so that if you listen to that episode of the podcast on that particular topic, you can walk away understanding it and not having to listen to anything else about it again. So if you wanna know what I&#8217;m listening to, I&#8217;m listening to every single episode of Solved by Mark Manson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And this book was recommended to him on one of the episodes, or recommended from him on one of the episodes. And basically it&#8217;s the concept of, you know, 4,000 weeks is the average human life. Naming it that precisely makes the finitude real in a way 80 years doesn&#8217;t. It&#8217;s not long. It was never going to be long enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The productivity trap: most time management books promise that if you get efficient enough, you&#8217;ll finally get on top of everything. So his argument is that this is a lie and chasing it keeps you from actually living. And I&#8217;m not even through the whole book, but the profound sense of calm I have gotten so far of like, I&#8217;m not gonna get everything I wanna get done. And I shouldn&#8217;t even aspire to that, right? And just really gives me clarity of like, what should I actually be doing? And help me prioritize if I know I&#8217;m not gonna get all the things done and just stop wishing for that, you know, and just like having that acceptance. It&#8217;s been very, it&#8217;s been a very nice feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you will never finish your to-do list. Accepting this and really accepting it is the beginning of actually choosing what matters instead of pretending you can do it all. Just having that frantic feeling, it&#8217;s gone down a lot in me because of this book. And again, I haven&#8217;t even finished it yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The efficiency paradox: the more efficient you get, the more gets added to your plate. Getting faster doesn&#8217;t create margin. It just raises the baseline expectation as we all know. And choosing is losing. Every yes is a no to everything else. Burkeman argues that until you accept that, you&#8217;re not actually making choices. You&#8217;re just deferring them while feeling busy. So it&#8217;s a great one so far. I definitely rec \u2014 I already recommend it. It&#8217;s been very profound and it&#8217;s already impacting me and making me make a lot of decisions when it comes to my time. And I really appreciate that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then finally, the books I&#8217;m actively reading are going to be $100 Million Offers and $100 Million Leads by Alex Hormozi. I just took my management team to a workshop by the Acquisition.com team put on by Alex Hormozi two weeks ago in Las Vegas. I got to ask Alex Hormozi a question, you guys, and my life is forever changed. I was shaking, shaking in my boots. I don&#8217;t know if I was wearing boots, probably heels. It was incredible. And so we got copies of all the books and my management team and I are gonna be reading through almost like a little book club. We&#8217;re gonna start reading through them together. I just wanna make sure that we apply all the concepts and we have so much focus now that after that conference and lots of clarity. Again, if you want me to make an episode about like my takeaways from that conference, let me know down in the comments. I would be happy to do so. There&#8217;s just so many cool things happening for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-19\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Wrap-Up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So that&#8217;s my list of books. I guess I did 15 instead of 16. But you know what? My birthday is May 15th. So 15 books for my 30th birthday on May 15th. We&#8217;ll do that, all right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope you enjoyed this, guys. I hope you found it interesting. Let me know which one you are going to listen to first. We&#8217;ll be sure to list all of these in the comments below so you don&#8217;t have to worry about forgetting any of them. What book are you reading? What book has had the most profound impact on you or maybe list of books? I would love to just have a list down in the comments for everybody to grab and refer from so that we can all be learning, growing and evolving continually because we are never done in that process, especially in our cleaning businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So hope you&#8217;ve enjoyed this guys. Please hit that like. If you&#8217;re not subscribed, I would love to have you subscribe. If you&#8217;re not subscribed to the ZenMaid newsletter, zenmaid.com slash newsletter will get you subscribed. You don&#8217;t have to be a ZenMaid customer. We are putting out great stuff over there. As if I am \u2014 everybody over there is doing great work. I really recommend, great content over there. Join the ZenMaid Mastermind. If you have not, don&#8217;t, again, have to be a ZenMaid customer. Great mastermind. On Facebook, just type in ZenMaid Mastermind into the search bar and the group will pop up for you to join. Mention that I sent them that way so that they know where you&#8217;re coming from. Would love to see that. And I&#8217;ll see you in the next episode, guys. I&#8217;m Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye bye.<\/p>\n\n\n    <div class=\"zm-quick-tip d-flex flex-column flex-md-row mb-24 mt-24\">\n        <div class=\"zm-quick-tip-content-wrapper\">\n            <h4 class=\"zm-quick-tip-title mb-12 text-dark2\">QUICK TIP FROM THE AUTHOR<\/h4>\n            <div class=\"zm-quick-tip-image d-block d-md-none\">\n                <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"200px\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/cta_images\/zm_trial_cta.png\" alt=\"quick-tip-image\">\n            <\/div>\n            <h5 class=\"zm-quick-tip-sub-title mb-12\">Simplify and enjoy your scheduling with a scheduling software made for maid services<\/h5>\n            <div>\n                <ul>\n                    <li>Have a beautiful calendar that's full but never stressful.<\/li>\n                    <li>Make your cleaners happy and provide all the information they need at their fingertips.<\/li>\n                    <li>Convert more website visitors into leads and get new cleanings in your inbox with high-converting booking forms.<\/li>\n                    <li>Become part of a community of 8000+ cheering maid service owners just like you.<\/li>\n                <\/ul>\n                <p>Start your FREE ZenMaid trial today and discover the freedom and clarity that ZenMaid can bring to your maid service! <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/app.zenmaid.com\/sign-up\">Start your FREE trial today<\/a><\/p>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-quick-tip-image d-none d-md-block\">\n            <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"200px\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/cta_images\/zm_trial_cta.png\" alt=\"quick-tip-image\">\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host Stephanie from Serene Clean and today&#8217;s episode I am so excited about. It is actually a viewer request. We got a comment on one of our videos. Thank you so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17298,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"The Books That Changed How I Run My Cleaning Business","_seopress_titles_desc":"From E-Myth to $100M Offers, Stephanie shares the 15 books that shaped how she built Serene Clean \u2014 and what every cleaning business owner should read.","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[457],"class_list":{"0":"post-17295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-podcast","8":"tag-filthy-rich-cleaners"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17300,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295\/revisions\/17300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}