{"id":17338,"date":"2026-05-14T14:36:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T14:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17338"},"modified":"2026-05-14T14:36:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T14:36:38","slug":"why-i-switched-from-hourly-to-flat-rate-after-7-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/why-i-switched-from-hourly-to-flat-rate-after-7-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Switched From Hourly To Flat Rate After 7 Years"},"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\/139-why-i-switched-from-hourly-to-flat-rate-after-7-years\/id1791590022?i=1000767746647\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/3tgOPNrsRVFIixceJT3hNu?si=cba38cc4439343e4\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/JgSU8JgSvzY?si=AhMeuQu4AESRUKIf\">YouTube<\/a><\/p>\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: #139: Why I Switched From Hourly To Flat Rate After 7 Years\" 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\/3tgOPNrsRVFIixceJT3hNu?si=cba38cc4439343e4&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 in today&#8217;s episode, I am very excited about this particular topic. I&#8217;m going to be describing exactly why and how I transitioned the residential side of my cleaning business, Serene Clean, to flat rate from hourly, because I&#8217;ve charged hourly literally for seven plus years now. You guys have heard me. I&#8217;m the hourly girl, right? I am the hourly girl. You never would have thought that we would be switching to flat rate in Serene Clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve always talked about of why we haven&#8217;t done this is because honestly it felt like a entire cluster F to do this and it&#8217;s something I just kept kicking the soccer ball \u2014 or can down the road, whatever, you know, whatever item you could kick down the road is what I have been doing for seven years because I truly just felt so overwhelmed at the prospect of doing this. And the fact that within a couple weeks we have completely switched to this is truly astounding to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s why I want to talk all about it with you guys so that you understand why I made this change in my business, and how we have made this change in my business, and exactly what has changed and what has not. Because spoiler alert \u2014 we have not changed how we pay our cleaners. So that is very important. We have only changed the pricing to the customer. We&#8217;ve changed nothing about how our cleaners operate. And I feel like this is one of the main reasons that this transition has worked very well for us so far and has been more obtainable from an operation standpoint of actually accomplishing it and not having a total mess on our hands because we&#8217;re changing both sides of the coin, right? We&#8217;re not doing that. We&#8217;re just changing one side of the coin, customer-facing things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I&#8217;m so excited about this. I know that I teased on this topic last week&#8217;s episode so I just had to hop on and get this recorded for you guys. And this is still very much an active investigation, if you will, and we are still transitioning a lot of our clients over. But it is going incredibly well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why We Are Switching From Hourly to Flat Rate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> First I want to talk about why we are doing this. If it&#8217;s broke, don&#8217;t fix it, right? That&#8217;s something you&#8217;ll always hear me say. But hourly, though simple, it does of course affect a few key areas of the business operationally and financially. And the biggest reason that I&#8217;m switching to flat rate from hourly is profit, guys. It is way more profitable. You have more potential to be profitable charging flat rate and paying \u2014 I&#8217;m sorry, ha, if I can speak \u2014 you have way more potential to be profitable charging flat rate and paying hourly specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s right. I&#8217;m not switching to percentage pay at all. And I will talk about that shortly. But I want to highlight I am charging flat rate and I&#8217;m going to continue to pay hourly. So there&#8217;s some stipulations to that. There&#8217;s some reasoning behind that. But the number one reason for that decision is profit on both ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hourly is incredibly simple. It&#8217;s also very protective, right? Because you are charging for the time used. You can never lose, right? Because you&#8217;re always only going to charge for actual time used. So if the job goes over and you communicate that well to the client, you can charge for actual time used. They can buy packages of hours. So there&#8217;s so many benefits to hourly, obviously, and that&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve decided to continue on with that. And the risk felt low because I&#8217;m like, okay, we&#8217;re never gonna lose. And that was my biggest reason for sticking with hourly for so long \u2014 was avoiding risk, right? Of like, okay, but what if this, what if this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the what-abouts started coming full circle and surrounding me every time I started bringing this topic up, either with myself or my management team. We just were filled with what about this? What about this? How are we gonna handle this? And it&#8217;s just like that overwhelm would hit us and it&#8217;d be like, you know what? It&#8217;s not that bad. Like, let&#8217;s just keep on doing hourly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And honestly I don&#8217;t know \u2014 you know, ask me in a year if this is something that I regret not switching to earlier. The jury&#8217;s still out, guys. This is actively happening in real time, and I&#8217;m just documenting it for you of like how am I going to reflect on this change. I don&#8217;t know yet. I&#8217;m not sure how I&#8217;m gonna feel about this, but I think that this was the correct time because we are running into a very high operational expense of just managing this overhead of the business, and we do not have that much availability. We&#8217;re running into a lot of obviously walls with availability as we always do because of staffing. And so again, it&#8217;s just the levers that we can pull, guys. So how can I get more profit out of our current clients? How can I get more profit off of the jobs that we do take?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A profit perspective is the reason that we are switching to charging flat rate after so long. And not only are we charging flat rate on maintenance cleans, we&#8217;re charging flat rate on first times. I know, I know. Shock, horror, awe, whatever emotion you&#8217;re feeling, I felt them too because I never thought I would ever be somebody who would charge flat rate on first times. I&#8217;m like, that&#8217;s too scary. What about the what-abouts? What if we go over? What if the job&#8217;s way worse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because we go to the job site unseen. So I was just so afraid of that and I was like, you know, hourly is the least risky thing, but that also means it has the least room for reward. And so the way we saw it was if we&#8217;re going to switch to flat rate for maintenance cleans, we also are going to do it for first times. And it doesn&#8217;t mean we can&#8217;t switch back, right? So instead of going to the hybrid method of what many of you guys do, which is first times doing hourly and then switching to maintenance cleans at a flat rate recurring price, we&#8217;re just skipping right over that. Full send, full send into flat rate, guys. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re doing here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Client and Operational Reasons<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Profit is going to be the main reason. The second reason is just going to be for the clients. The clients having one straight price, it&#8217;s very simple, it&#8217;s not based on time. We run into a lot of issues where if we send another cleaner in, they may be a little bit faster or slower. And the client is either feeling that or noticing it or asking questions about it, or we&#8217;re eating it anyway. Like so if those variants happened, we were already eating that in the first place and we weren&#8217;t charging the client anything because, you know, that wouldn&#8217;t be fair to the client. If we send in a different cleaner and they are fifteen minutes slower or half an hour slower or whatever and we charge that to the client for the same cleaning and their circumstances in their home hasn&#8217;t changed, that&#8217;s not a great client experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I can completely acknowledge that. You know what I mean? I get cleaning done at my house and they charge flat rate. And I really like that. Like, I don&#8217;t have to pay attention to how long they&#8217;re here. I have no idea how long it takes them to be in my house. I literally don&#8217;t pay attention because it&#8217;s irrelevant. I&#8217;m paying for the job, right? So it&#8217;s just not something that I have to notice. So for the client&#8217;s experience, that&#8217;s reason number two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Reason number three is from an operational perspective, it&#8217;s easier to invoice flat rate. We&#8217;re not having to add up a bunch of hours on the invoice and spell all that out. Which again, that doesn&#8217;t take that long on one invoice. But when you&#8217;re having, you know, a hundred to two hundred appointments a week, all of a sudden, that little stuff really adds up. And it also makes it harder to explain in invoicing. It&#8217;s just so much easier with like, boom, here&#8217;s your job price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The CleanCon Catalyst<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So it&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve been attracted to. And honestly, for me, the catalyst was going to CleanCon. It truly was. And seeing all of these larger companies than my company charging flat rate on at least maintenance cleans. I don&#8217;t know if they offer any hourly on the initial cleans, but it was being exposed to those larger companies and being like, okay, clearly none of these people are doing hourly. There&#8217;s gotta be a good reason, or they would do it the way I&#8217;m doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so I think it&#8217;s really important, guys, to just always be a student of the game. Though many of you see me as like this expert, this holy grail, really I&#8217;m not, I promise. I don&#8217;t know everything. I basically know nothing, it feels like sometimes. But I think that having that mindset of like, you know what, be humble and take a look at what people ahead of you are doing and learn from it. And sometimes you are still gonna make that decision to not do it that way. That&#8217;s totally fine, but I think it&#8217;s very important that we don&#8217;t shut ourselves off to possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think you have noticed over now the hundred plus episodes, I&#8217;ve never poo-pooed flat rate pricing. It&#8217;s never been like I think hourly is better. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s better. I think it&#8217;s simple. And that&#8217;s what I like. I think it&#8217;s simple for us, meaning the cleaning company. But for the clients it&#8217;s not necessarily simpler. And for the cleaners, it doesn&#8217;t really change anything, and I&#8217;ll explain because we&#8217;re not paying differently. So how you pay will also determine how simple it is for the cleaners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s just something that obviously I&#8217;ve always been aware of that it&#8217;s there, but there&#8217;s pros and cons, of course. Scope creep is a huge con potentially if you have to watch that. Whereas hourly, they add more stuff on, they&#8217;re paying for it. They&#8217;re paying for that time. So you have to be more cognizant of scope creep. You also have to be a lot better with your production rates, I feel, and be more on the money because the thing is with the first time clean, if you estimate incorrectly with hourly, you just stop it, right? And it&#8217;s just like, yeah, you&#8217;re paying for the time. Whereas if you estimate incorrectly on an initial clean and charge flat rate, that conversation looks different because it&#8217;s like, well, you said the job would be done for $500 and now you&#8217;re telling me it&#8217;s gonna be $700, as opposed to yes, we are estimating it&#8217;s going to take this long and we charge by the hour. That feels a lot different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I&#8217;ve literally said this explaining why we continue to go hourly, right? Because of that fear of miscalculating on first times. And honestly, for me, look, going to CleanCon and then really taking a good hard look at our first times in the past year \u2014 are we estimating correctly? Do we have our production rates down? It&#8217;s like, yeah, we do. It&#8217;s very rare that we&#8217;re having to ask for more time recently and in the recent cleanings. We have not had to ask for more time on first times very rarely. That does not happen very often, maybe one in ten. And I&#8217;m good with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That also means that we can still have that conversation. We can still use protective language in our estimates and our bids and things like that for residential at least \u2014 that hey, this is going in sight unseen. This is based on the information that you have presented. Doesn&#8217;t mean we can&#8217;t still have the conversation about price at the first time clean and just making sure our cleaners are communicating well with us so that we know what the heck is going on, why they might need more time. We can still have that price adjustment conversation, but we are also going to be willing, if they&#8217;ve booked recurring, to eat it a little bit. You know, say we have to go over by an hour, but they&#8217;ve already signed up for recurring. Okay, do it. Right. It&#8217;s not that big of a deal. We&#8217;re already making \u2014 as long as we&#8217;re still making money at that first one, then I&#8217;m okay with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And just not having to be such a clock watcher for the client&#8217;s perspective or them questioning our speed, that type of thing. So there&#8217;s just a lot less anxiety of like, I guess, proving to the client that the speed is appropriate. You know, it&#8217;s like, no, this is the price, this is what the job is going to get done for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So those are for me the main reasons that I really wanted to do this is just looking ahead at the future of Serene Clean of like, okay, literally no one is doing it the way I&#8217;m doing it who&#8217;s bigger than me. Like I got to a million, a million and a half with half of our business being residential. And it worked. But maybe this is the unlock to get us to three million, right? Or whatever the next milestone will be, which will be like two million really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really never want to be so rigid on my beliefs or thoughts to not change my mind. And I think that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m really excited to have this conversation with you guys. Like I changed my mind. I won&#8217;t even say it was that like I was aware of this, but I now finally put action behind my thoughts of like, yeah, that would work really well. But it&#8217;s just too big for us to make this switch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I&#8217;m telling you right now, it&#8217;s not. If you are my size business or bigger or smaller, wherever your business is, you can still make changes. It&#8217;s just going to have to be very methodical and you&#8217;re going to have to think it out and you might have to do it in phases. And that&#8217;s exactly how we have done it at Serene Clean. This is still not done. We still have not transitioned all of our clients over yet, and we actually broke this into phases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let me know in the comments below any other questions you guys have on the why or the pros and cons of charging hourly versus charging flat rate for either initials or maintenance cleans. Because it really is \u2014 there are pros and cons to each. I&#8217;ve talked about this before. I don&#8217;t want to repeat myself. But those were the thought processes of us. At this size and this experience level in the business now, we know our production rates pretty darn good, especially on the initial cleans, which are going to be the most risky. Like we know where we stand for most clients&#8217; homes going into them of what&#8217;s appropriate. And we also are aware that if something is sick, like we are way faster, we&#8217;re going to be willing to do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Bringing in Molly Moran for the Transition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So how did I actually figure out how to do this transition? Well, I booked a call with somebody who knows more than me, and that is gonna be Molly Moran. I&#8217;ve had her on the podcast. She is fantastic. She owns a very successful large cleaning business out in New Mexico. And she is one of the founders of CleanCon as well. And Molly&#8217;s fantastic. I&#8217;ve had her on the podcast. I&#8217;ve been on hers. And I just really vibed with her. And so I just shot her an email of like, look, Molly, we really \u2014 how do we do this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think it&#8217;s important to look at people who are ahead of you and maybe not like, you know, at 10 million, but she&#8217;s definitely ahead of us and she has figured this out. So I&#8217;m like, well, can you just explain to us \u2014 can we just hire you for consulting and hop on a call with my managers and myself where we just say, this is where we&#8217;re at, this is what we are open to, but these are our concerns? And I just literally listed them all out and we just rapid fire went through all of our concerns about the what-ifs. Like how do we handle this? How do we handle this? Do you think we should adjust prices or how we pay, considering we have a pretty \u2014 like people are pretty happy and used to getting paid hourly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because I know a lot of you guys are charging \u2014 are paying \u2014 pay for performance. You&#8217;re paying flat rate, you&#8217;re paying a percentage of the job, right? And that is not something I am \u2014 it&#8217;s something we talked about, of like, is this something we want to look at? And we decided no, we are not touching that. And that was thought out. I&#8217;m not against it. I think there are pros for that as well. But at least where my business is, rural Wisconsin, people are used to getting paid hourly. They really like it. And frankly, it felt weird for me to tie how much they pay to the percentage that we charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">$65 an Hour in Rural Wisconsin<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Because we&#8217;ve also done price increases, guys. I could talk about that in a separate episode, perhaps maybe next week&#8217;s episode if you&#8217;d like to hear about the price increases that we&#8217;re doing. But we have successfully booked people at $65 an hour for first times. And obviously this is a flat rate price, but we know it to be $65 an hour for the initial and $60 for maintenance. Not many, but it has happened. They did exist. This is crazy. Breaking news, rural Wisconsin, we booked clients at $65 an hour. Holy fuck! There&#8217;s my fuck of the episode. Well, first one. I broke the seal. Fuck fuck fuck. Sorry. I&#8217;ll put a warning ahead of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is crazy that people are saying yes to that. And you know, we were trying out sixty an hour as I had mentioned earlier on this year and people are booking at sixty no problem. We&#8217;re booking people at sixty dollars an hour, no problem. So we know even in this economy that that is now the going rate for us is 60 an hour for the initials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so we don&#8217;t have a lot of availability. It is mid-May and we are booking out into mid-June right now for first times. We do not have the availability because we&#8217;re trying to get some people hired. Story of my life, right? Is this Groundhog&#8217;s Day? So we&#8217;re like, okay, we don&#8217;t have availability. Pull the other lever, price, and just let&#8217;s throw it out there. Let&#8217;s be wild and crazy and throw it out there. And we have gotten feedback that it&#8217;s too high, but also gas prices, economy is in the tank right now. So could be other things, could be that we don&#8217;t have availability too. There&#8217;s several things that are going on right there. But some people have booked. So it&#8217;s like, oh crap, we can&#8217;t fit that many clients in. So we need to make as much money as possible as we can on the clients that we can fit in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this is crazy that, I mean, that&#8217;s a real thing. It&#8217;s not a lot of them, but it has happened. And so that is a conversation I literally had this morning with my managers. Again, I&#8217;m not trying to get into the pricing of it all, but just to mention that this is happening as well. So I just had a conversation with my managers this morning of like, should we \u2014 not many people are saying yes \u2014 choking on air? What is that? What the fuck? Let me have a drinky drink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also for our visual watchers, I know I probably look really sweaty and greasy, but I&#8217;m digging the glow. I will say the humidity down in the south, it just makes you look really moisturized. And I love a good highlighter. You guys know that. So I might just actually be sweaty because I had to close the window too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we had the conversation of should we adjust it down because not many people are saying yes, and we&#8217;re like, well, let&#8217;s just keep that in our back pocket of \u2014 we are willing to clearly take clients at 60 an hour. So if somebody comes back, it&#8217;s too expensive, we can maybe counteroffer with a discount or something along those lines if we want to do that. But right now we just don&#8217;t have the spots, so let&#8217;s not even do that. Let&#8217;s book the ones that we can at the higher price, fit them in, and then if our availability opens up and we can get the first times in like we want to, then we can talk about adjusting back down to 60.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, it&#8217;s really, really interesting. But yes, we did roll out a price increase on all of the recurring clients that we have rolled out the flat rate pricing to who needed a price increase that were at 50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Flat Rate on Initial Cleans \u2014 The Scary Part<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So anywho, I don&#8217;t even know where I am right now, but circling back to our call with Molly. We pestered her with questions. And we also were rolling a price increase into this transition. So it&#8217;s like two things. And so she asked us about our pricing, those types of things. And we said, yeah, we have all these clients at 50 an hour. They&#8217;re grandfathered in. And she&#8217;s like, well then do a price increase on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I literally was like, oh \u2014 like I was waiting till the fall to do a price increase on the ones who are at fifty because it&#8217;s been a year since their last price increase. And I was just hesitant because I was like, I don&#8217;t want them to drop off. I was scared. You know, just like I tell you guys, don&#8217;t be scared. Like clients are gonna drop off when you do price increases. Potentially, that&#8217;s the point. But you know, pot, kettle, right? Like I didn&#8217;t want to do a price increase. But I was like, all right, here we go. Let&#8217;s do the damn thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So she explained to us all of kind of the what about this? What about this? How do you handle this? So let&#8217;s start at the top \u2014 initial cleans. I was like, how would you do flat rate pricing on initial cleans? We know our production rate, but we&#8217;re really afraid of the cleanings that go over, or what if we go way faster, you know, and we charge way too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And she&#8217;s like, you can always make those decisions at that moment. It&#8217;s okay to have the conversation and be like, look, it&#8217;s probably gonna take another five hours. You know, we estimate sight unseen based on typical conditions, and for these reasons, this is what it&#8217;s gonna be. And just like how we treat our hourlies, if they want to leave something off \u2014 like, no, I wanted to stick to the $500. We&#8217;re just using that as the example here. I would say, great, these are the rooms that we have left. What would you like us to prioritize in the time that we have left?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the biggest thing, just like when we charge hourly, is don&#8217;t wait to the end of the approved cleaning or the end of the day to ask for more. So we need to have our cleaners checking in at the beginning, letting us know the condition, and then halfway through the clean or approved time. They need to let us know if they feel like they have enough time, right? Because we have to have time to communicate with the client. What if we also have to send another cleaner, or have to schedule it on another day to finish? So if you leave it till the end of the day, that&#8217;s a very bad experience for the client. They may be trying to come home and now boom, you didn&#8217;t get it done. Like it&#8217;s just all around a bad experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the biggest thing is going to be proactive communication from your cleaners on these initial cleans and these move out cleans so that you know where they&#8217;re at. Do they feel like they have enough time so that we can communicate effectively? You can still ask for more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But she also said, and this is where I mentioned a little bit earlier, that if it&#8217;s an initial clean, they&#8217;ve already booked recurring \u2014 well, it&#8217;s okay if they go over a half hour or an hour or something like that because I personally, and this is a decision for you guys, I personally am okay with eating that and taking a little bit off of that clean. I&#8217;m already making money on this clean and they&#8217;ve already booked. Like to me it&#8217;s like, make that client experience fabulous. They&#8217;ve already booked. The lifetime value of that client is high. So to me, I&#8217;m totally fine with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that gave us some relief because our biggest anxieties were around this initial clean stuff of how do you do this if you&#8217;re pricing for the job and then you can&#8217;t get the job done in what you bid? Like that&#8217;s not a very good experience. And just it&#8217;s the same thing. Communicate, make decisions based on how much time you&#8217;re gonna go over. If you go way way under, you can always give them a discount or discount the next one. If you are just taking money off the bill if you feel icky about it, just making sure you&#8217;re acting with integrity. Of like, okay, we bid 500, we got this sucker done in like four hours or something because it was just stupidly clean and they just said yes, you can make that decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But also they agreed to pay for the job. So I also think that that potentially could just be a mindset adjustment that needs to happen. Of like, they&#8217;re paying for the job, even though we&#8217;re calculating it at like an internal hourly audit process, that doesn&#8217;t make you in the wrong for charging by the job and keeping what they agreed to pay, and they&#8217;re happy because you did a good job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I think that&#8217;s something \u2014 it hasn&#8217;t happened yet, obviously, because this is brand new. If it does happen, I can definitely have a conversation with you guys about how we made that decision of did we bring it down, that type of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Handling Clients Who Say Their House Is Already Clean<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> One thing we are also running into that I still need to figure out is folks who have had recurring cleanings already or they are saying that their house is really clean. That&#8217;s one area that I&#8217;m not so sure about because, you know, this has happened a couple times now where we&#8217;ve sent the flat rate price out. They&#8217;re like, my house is really clean. I&#8217;ve had a regular cleaner. So figuring out, okay, how much do you take off of that initial clean when they say that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And maybe it&#8217;s something saying like acknowledging great \u2014 going off of what you&#8217;re saying, we&#8217;re gonna take this amount of money off. But I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m not sure honestly. Like if you guys have any recommendations for those of you that charge flat rate. Because our production rates for initial cleans of homes that are typical, right, which is gonna be for us for an initial clean of a lived-in home that is occupied, meaning like people live in it, it&#8217;s 150 square foot per labor hour is our production rate on average. And that is how we are calculating this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if they come back and be like, no, like my house is super clean, I keep it clean, it&#8217;s very minimalist, blah, blah, blah \u2014 how do you \u2014 do you just go into maintenance clean price or add a little bit more? That&#8217;s one question I&#8217;m still trying to figure out of how much do you take off in order to make it enticing for them, but also so that \u2014 what if they&#8217;re saying that? You know what I mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think that&#8217;s just again the cleaner communication being really good of like, okay, well we&#8217;re gonna charge a little bit more than the maintenance clean price just to get situated. And then if you show up and it&#8217;s not like that and this is more like typical initial clean that immediately needs the \u2014 like we need to have that conversation immediately. So still trying to figure out \u2014 that&#8217;s kind of the last piece of the puzzle for me for initial cleans when that feedback comes back that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because obviously one of the questions we ask on our intake process is like, when&#8217;s the last time this house has been professionally cleaned? Because a lot of people say, well, I clean my house. And we all know what that means, don&#8217;t we, guys? So I&#8217;m still a little bit unsure about that considering we go sight unseen. We don&#8217;t go do walkthroughs. And even if we did walkthroughs, I feel like sometimes that&#8217;s not very helpful because once you start cleaning something \u2014 I know you guys know what I mean \u2014 it&#8217;s very sometimes it&#8217;s like hidden dirtiness and you don&#8217;t realize until you start cleaning. And like I&#8217;ve done walkthroughs of first times when I got there, like I&#8217;m on the job and I&#8217;m like, oh, this will be a piece of cake. And then we start cleaning and I&#8217;m like, oh my gosh, this is way worse than I thought it was. So even if we did the walkthrough, I don&#8217;t think it would be that helpful sometimes because there&#8217;s so much hidden stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this is just from auditing years and years of first time cleans. We&#8217;re at about 150 square foot per man hour for every typical home. So still gotta, you know \u2014 and I think this is still so new. And so I was kind of hemming and hawing over like, should I even make an episode about this until we&#8217;ve established and I can audit back, but I can always talk about that in like two months. Be like, all right, these were all of our first times, we were on the money, this is what it was for our scope of work, blah blah blah, this is how many that we went over on. Like that&#8217;s the goal, is just to be psychotic about auditing. Why am I blurry all of a sudden? Psychotic about auditing even more so over the next couple months. So that will kind of tell us where we stand. So this may be a non-issue. I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So anyway, all of that to be said, that is the initial clean stuff. So we are officially giving out prices at 65 an hour for the initial. And basically what we do is we base it off of that production rate that we know to be 150 square foot per hour. Where before with hourly we were giving a range of like a two-hour range. So if we said it was gonna be ten hours based on the 150, we&#8217;d do like 10 to 12 just to protect ourselves. So now it&#8217;s just like, nope, it&#8217;s gonna be the 10 hours and then we&#8217;re just gonna audit very judiciously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Uncertainty Problem in Estimates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> And one of the biggest feedback points that Molly gave me that really blew my mind, it was a light bulb moment \u2014 when she looked at our estimate email, how we estimate with the hourly, she was like, this is creating way too much uncertainty. Look at that range of money. It could be this or it could be this. And maintenance cleans, it could be this or it could be this. She&#8217;s like, I think you&#8217;re losing out on people closing because of the uncertainty of these numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I was like, oh my gosh, I never thought about it that way because I was just thinking about it from our perspective of like, we&#8217;re trying to protect ourselves. We don&#8217;t want to overpromise. But what we were doing is probably actually hurting ourselves because of the uncertainty we were creating in the lead. Whereas if they just \u2014 it feels really good just to be like, this is the price and that&#8217;s it. And obviously there is extenuating circumstances. We explain that in the client guidelines of like if XYZ blah blah blah. If it&#8217;s taking significantly longer than the typical home, we&#8217;re gonna have that conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But all of that to be said, the uncertainty was causing us to lose out on jobs. And that was one of her biggest, like, you need to \u2014 even if you don&#8217;t switch from hourly, you need to tighten that amount range because it is probably causing you to lose out on clients. I&#8217;m like, wow, that&#8217;s crazy. I&#8217;ve never thought about that. So that was super useful to hear that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that is kind of the initial clean questions that we had and that we got answered. And so far we have closed, you know, I think over a dozen clients at flat rate for initial cleans or move out cleans. Same concept for move-outs, except we&#8217;re a little bit slower. It&#8217;s a hundred square foot per labor hour for us on move-outs because \u2014 reason being you have to clean all of the insides of all of the appliances, insides of the cabinets, and the insides of the closets. Everything else for the most part is the same, but those things slow you down, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like people think that vacant houses are gonna be faster, but nope, they&#8217;re slower. I mean sometimes occupied homes can be slower, but for the most part, it&#8217;s going to be the vacant home, because of all of the additional deep cleaning tasks that we are doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So so far the initial clean pricing has been going good. Looking at our data here, most of the clients that we have closed at flat rate, we have not done their initials yet because we&#8217;ve been a bit delayed because of just our staffing and availability issues. Memorial Day weekend kills us, guys. Just kills us. So yes, it looks like a bunch of them are confirmed, but we haven&#8217;t completed many flat rate cleans yet. So we&#8217;ll keep you posted. This is breaking hot off the presses. But what we&#8217;re gonna do is just look and see and then we can adjust from there our numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you guys know I&#8217;m a psycho about telling you to do your production rate audits. If you&#8217;re charging flat rate, holy crap, you have to do this. For hourly, of course, so that you schedule enough time and you tell the client the right amounts of time. But for flat rates for you guys, you have to be watching that so you don&#8217;t lose your ass. And for those of you, I know I do not want to be condescending right now, but some of you I have had conversations with and you are charging a certain number of hours regardless of how many cleaners you have, if you&#8217;re charging hourly. So you&#8217;re sending two cleaners in instead of one cleaner in, and you&#8217;re charging as if you only had one cleaner. I&#8217;ve seen that multiple times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this will literally double your profit because you are doing that incorrectly. So that&#8217;s why you&#8217;re hearing me use the phrase labor hours or man hours always, because we just never wanted to be \u2014 wait, how many cleaners on this job? So if you ever have a conversation with me and we start talking about production rates, I will always be like labor hours, labor hours, because I want to make sure we&#8217;re speaking the right language to each other here. So we&#8217;ll keep you posted on how that goes for the initial clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Maintenance Cleans and Scope Changes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Now for the maintenance clean. So what our biggest questions were were kind of around scope creep and things like that. What if \u2014 because right now or as hourly stands, it was very simple because if they wanted to add something, great, they&#8217;re just gonna pay that time. Or if they want to switch something out, great, they&#8217;re gonna add that time or take it away. So it&#8217;s like, oh, I don&#8217;t need you to do this bedroom, do the office instead. That kind of thing. It&#8217;s just like, okay, whatever. Or if they need to remove things, we&#8217;re charging for the actual time used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So obviously, how do you do that with flat rate? And honestly, it&#8217;s kind of the same process from the sounds of it. You just look at how much time did that thing take if they wanted to switch something out, and you&#8217;re still having your cleaners clock in and clock out. You know how much time it took, how much time it usually takes. And if it&#8217;s like a huge significant difference, you need to have that conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But this is one of the things that we had when we sent this announcement out to our current recurring clients. One of the questions that we got back from one of our weekly clients is like, well, you know, sometimes I add on the guest room and sometimes I don&#8217;t need that. I usually don&#8217;t have you do the guest room. So how is this going to work when we need to make a scope adjustment? So she brought that to us. It was such a great question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And we let her know \u2014 again, this is a weekly client \u2014 this new flat rate price is going to encompass those changes. If it&#8217;s things like that that we&#8217;ve done before, you don&#8217;t need to worry about a price change. The price is going to be the price. And so again, making those decisions depending on what the situation is. So I think what we were looking at was like a blanket rule. Because with hourly, that&#8217;s truly what it is. You are getting charged for how much time it took. That&#8217;s it. And that&#8217;s the blanket rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I think that that was what I was so scared about with flat rate is the nuance of it all is \u2014 I can&#8217;t say a blanket rule for every single job like I can with hourly. And so it&#8217;s just going to take situation by situation nuance. And that&#8217;s okay. That&#8217;s okay. It depends on what&#8217;s going on. It depends what they&#8217;re asking for to change or switch out or XYZ. Obviously, you know, if they add an appliance on, well, we need to add a price for that. Correct. So things like that I was a little bit nervous about. But I think we&#8217;re just gonna take each situation as it stands. Like, okay, we know that Maggie sometimes does this \u2014 yeah, first name only Maggie of that client \u2014 and she sometimes switches us out, but we know it only takes an extra fifteen, twenty minutes. We&#8217;ll eat that. Like we&#8217;re happy to include that because most likely the cleaner is going to get more efficient on the other ones because she&#8217;s not trying to find things to do because we are trying to charge the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How Hourly Was Working Against Us<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, this is one of the other reasons, guys, that we are switching. Because \u2014 and Molly said this \u2014 it&#8217;s hurting us always and always benefiting the client. Meaning if we get faster and more efficient at the jobs, we were charging the client less, so we&#8217;re making less money on the same customer. And this has happened again and again. Or we are trying to get our cleaners to find things to do, extra things to do, so we can charge for the full four hours, because they got faster. Now you have to do more work just so we can charge the same. Like it&#8217;s totally backwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is totally backwards and I&#8217;m so excited to not be doing that anymore. And actually our cleaners can get faster and we can add more jobs on a day potentially, especially with some of our fast cleaners. So I&#8217;m really excited about that because it&#8217;s like we&#8217;re not deincentivizing or telling them to find other things to clean because we need to charge that hourly rate. So that&#8217;s gonna be really huge for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yes, that was one of our big questions \u2014 what about when the scope changes? How do we handle that? And it&#8217;s really just going to be a case by case scenario. And then just ensuring the quality. Like just making sure your quality is staying the same. And because we&#8217;re not changing how we&#8217;re paying, we&#8217;re not really making them feel like they have to rush or anything like that or incentivizing that. Because obviously when you pay for performance or pay a flat rate, they&#8217;re incentivized to move very fast, which is good, but then the quality can dip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so you may be wondering, well, Stephanie, why \u2014 aren&#8217;t you worried about your cleaners? And I&#8217;m like, no, I&#8217;m not. Why did I just \u2014 no, I&#8217;m not. Why did I just have that accent? What accent was that? That was weird. I don&#8217;t even know what just came out of my mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What we are going to continue to do is put this job as approved for X amount of labor hours. It is expected that you get through the whole home in this time. Like that&#8217;s gonna be in the ZenMaid notes as usual. Like nothing changes there. So if we bid this flat rate expecting this to be four hours, you better get it done in four hours or less. That&#8217;s what it is. So it&#8217;s not like they&#8217;re gonna milk the clock or anything like that. Like we know what the production rate should be, give or take, if they&#8217;re a little off their game or they&#8217;re newer, whatever \u2014 totally understand there&#8217;s gonna be room for that. And we don&#8217;t have to worry about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if it&#8217;s something where they&#8217;re not \u2014 now all of a sudden we&#8217;re not asking them to basically find things to clean. And obviously that&#8217;s great for value. Like if we want to do a little razzle dazzle for the client, for sure. But as a rule, it&#8217;s like we should be aiming to get more efficient and quicker in the homes. And as you guys all know, all of you who charge flat rate and have charged flat rate for years, I know I&#8217;m just preaching to the choir of like, yeah, you get faster at jobs and that&#8217;s how you make more money per hour by getting faster at said jobs, meaning for the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why We Are Not Changing the Pay Structure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> And this is why we are not switching our pay to any of the other ways. And the reason is, if I pay percentage, I can never get more profitable. Like correct me if I&#8217;m wrong, but I can&#8217;t get more profitable at the job because I&#8217;m paying a certain percentage of the job, and that is fixed or it&#8217;s going up if you&#8217;re doing performance pay. Whereas if I pay them hourly and I am charging the client as if it&#8217;s going to take us four hours \u2014 that&#8217;s what I bid flat rate, four hours \u2014 if I am paying a percentage, that percentage is always going to be the same amount of that, let&#8217;s say $120, and I&#8217;m paying 35% or something. That 35% stays the same. But if I&#8217;m paying hourly and it takes them four hours to begin with and they can whittle that down to three and a half \u2014 that difference, that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re talking about with increasing the profit, guys, on the jobs over time and just little chunks. Little chunks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And honestly, for us it just felt very natural because this is exactly how we do commercial. We bid flat rate and we pay our lead. And it works just fine because we tell them how long the job is supposed to take. If they can get through faster and not hurt quality, great. That&#8217;s awesome. And that&#8217;s the goals. That&#8217;s how you can get better and more profitable at commercial. So I was already seeing that in real time. So I was like, oh, this is just exactly like commercial. We&#8217;re just gonna do this in residential, honestly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that is why we&#8217;re not switching the pay. Also, I just feel like that would create a big upheaval and a lot of confusion and a lot of discontent in our staff. They&#8217;re used to hourly. We like paying hourly. Again, it&#8217;s simple. And as long as we put the buffer of like, no, this is how long this job should take you unless you need to explain yourself otherwise, then I think it just makes a lot of sense to keep it this way. And we also just rolled out last year our raise and wage guidelines that explain exactly how that&#8217;s gonna happen. Of like how they get raises, it&#8217;s blah blah blah, all of these things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so to me, I don&#8217;t want to mess \u2014 I think when you&#8217;re making changes, it&#8217;s good to not throw the entire baby out with the bathwater. We just threw the bathwater out. Let&#8217;s keep the baby the same. So that is the goal. Maybe in a year I change my mind about this, just like I&#8217;m changing my mind about how we&#8217;re charging. But as it stands right now, we&#8217;re not touching that. And I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re going to touch it. I think that this is going to be the most profitable. But, you know, we shall see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would love to hear if you guys have differing opinions on this or your experience with the way that you pay and if you&#8217;ve changed your mind over the years. But I do believe that this is going to be the most profitable because like I said, if you&#8217;re paying hourly, it&#8217;s less hours and you can get more jobs in in the day. So that is kind of my thought process on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How We Rolled This Out in Phases<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> That was a lot, I know. And so now I want to explain exactly how we&#8217;ve rolled this out. And to the shock and awe of everybody, perhaps, we have lost very few clients on this. So we have successfully done a price increase, pricing structure change, and I think we&#8217;ve only lost two clients out of a heck of a lot. We had to do, I think, a price change or a price increase to over, I believe, 150 clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so we broke this into phases to be more manageable. So this did not all happen in one day. It has been getting done over the past few weeks. And April has been killing it. Shout out to my payroll manager, April. She is the one who has been spearheading and handling all of the price increase and price changes and making sure that everything&#8217;s documented correctly, communicating with the clients that this is happening and explaining why. She&#8217;s also tweaked how we have explained this as well in the email because this has been getting done all over email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we had three chunks of people to think about here. New clients, new leads who are coming in. We have current clients who need both a flat rate change and a price increase. So they are at $50 or below and they needed a price increase to bring them up to $55 and lock it in at flat rate. The most difficult people to communicate this because we have the most chance of losing them, because we&#8217;re also increasing the price and having to explain all of these things. And then the third and final group, who do not have all of this done yet, but it&#8217;s happening, are the ones who just need to be switched over to flat rate. They were already at 55. No price change for them. So three different sections, and we started literally in that order I just said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So number one, first place to implement this was on new clients coming in because they do not know any better. And so literally the nuance of this, guys, I wanted to mention that anybody who we had sent hourly pricing out to, but after we made this switch, they came back and said, yes, I would like to book \u2014 we said, great. And also we&#8217;re switching to flat rate. Because those were the little things that would hang me up in my brain of like, well, what about the people we gave hourly pricing to and now we&#8217;re switching to this? Does this make us look dumb? And the answer is, I don&#8217;t know, maybe. But they booked anyway. Like they were \u2014 nobody cared. Literally nobody cared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that was kind of wild to experience. So those were the easiest ones to do this with, and we literally changed our entire estimate email based on Molly&#8217;s feedback and going back and forth tweaking, tweaking, tweaking until I think we have an absolutely killer sales and estimate email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The New Estimate Email and Closing Recurring Up Front<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So for any of you guys who have seen our previous one, which is hourly, we switched a lot of things around. And one of the biggest takeaways when it comes to \u2014 as I mentioned, and the purpose of this episode is to also talk about how we are booking people at recurring services from this initial estimate email before they even have their first time. That was the second big takeaway from my conversation with Molly. She was like, Stephanie, you are treating recurring services as if it&#8217;s just an option and an afterthought if they want to try you out for initial, and then maybe they&#8217;ll book. She&#8217;s like, recurring should be the norm. What should be the outlier is if they&#8217;re only booking a one-off. And you are literally guiding them down the path to be a maybe or a wait and see kind of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even with our offer of book your first cleaning, get your second 50% off \u2014 well, that even applies if they don&#8217;t book recurring. It just has to happen within one month. So even our offer was rewarding the maybe of it all. So we have kept the offer the same, but we never specified a lot of the stipulations around that. It was kind of vague, intentionally so. Now I&#8217;m glad about it. So now it&#8217;s a reward \u2014 as a reward for booking recurring services, you get 50% off. So it&#8217;s the same dang offer, but it is helping incentivize them actually more so than how we were doing it before to book recurring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I know that might sound like, well, what&#8217;s the difference, Stephanie? Before it was anybody would get 50% off that second clean, regardless if they actually are on a recurring service. It&#8217;s almost like the first maintenance clean, but they&#8217;re just trying us out. So they could still say, okay, cool, thanks. Thanks for the two cleanings. See you later. The difference now is the language is leading it to be \u2014 you only get this discount if you have booked recurring service with us and you are on a recurring schedule. So that alone has shifted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it was a whole, like, holy crap, we are incentivizing people to not book recurring and just treating it as yeah, as an option and as a choice. Where it&#8217;s like, no, this is how this works. And literally that is now the language in the estimate is how cleanings with us work. You choose from weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly visits, blah blah blah, and explaining that. And then it goes into here is the initial clean price. Here is a little chart in the email what the weekly visit price, the bi-weekly price, and the monthly price would be, and what the price for each of those visits would be. And then mentioning that sporadic is an option, let us know if that&#8217;s something that you&#8217;re interested in. Because we want to get away and not have them booking sporadic cleanings. And if they do book sporadic cleanings, it&#8217;s not as convenient because we want them to be on at least at minimum a monthly cleaning schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So all of that to be said, the email has been working really well. It&#8217;s crazy to see people literally being like, great, that date works and put me on biweekly. We already had something \u2014 like, crazy enough, we had somebody book weekly cleans off of this. Like it was wild to experience of like, oh my gosh, they booked this big clean and then like before we even did that, they&#8217;re like, yep, and put me on the weekly. Like it was just crazy to experience. And I&#8217;m like, holy crap, it&#8217;s amazing because we don&#8217;t have to sell them again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because that&#8217;s what it felt like is we were chasing them after the initials and trying to get them \u2014 where it&#8217;s like, if they&#8217;re in communication with us, they&#8217;re interested, get them in the schedule already. Lock it in. Lock that thing in. And so yeah, it&#8217;s been really amazing. And you know, I thought about reading out the flat rate email to you, but I know that that&#8217;s probably not super helpful to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So this brand new flat rate email, I did get that uploaded to my website so that you guys can purchase it if you&#8217;re interested. So if you would like to get the flat rate email estimate template from me that we are using and it&#8217;s working very well for us, it is $15. We will link it down below, guys. It&#8217;s on my website. It&#8217;s just a single page, unlike my bundles. I&#8217;ve never done this before where it&#8217;s just like one document. So just go to the link, hit add to cart, there you go, fifteen bucks, guys. Because I just was like, this is pretty valuable, it&#8217;s working really well for us, and we&#8217;ve put a lot of tweaking and thought into that. So I wanted to make sure that we got some value back from it as well. Let me know if you have any questions on that down below too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I did want to make sure I had that available to you guys if you are interested instead of just reading it out or whatever. So those are the biggest things \u2014 all of the language and even the language around how we proposition ourselves and value adds of like what we can offer, we have changed that as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-15\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Selling on What Your Competitors Don&#8217;t Talk About<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Even one of the biggest sentences we added is we are W-2 employees. We&#8217;re not gig workers. We&#8217;re not independent contractors. No offense to those of you running independent contractors. But for me and my competitive advantage, the fact that I run W-2s and always will and we have them go through the training program and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that is a benefit, and I want to sell on that benefit. So please don&#8217;t take offense. But it&#8217;s something I can compete on. And it doesn&#8217;t mean my competitors aren&#8217;t doing that, but they might not be talking about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that is one tip I have for you guys is it is okay to sell on something that even your competitors are doing, but maybe they&#8217;re not selling on it very well. So a lot of the competitors in my area, they are using W-2 employees as well, but they may not be talking about it. So might as well put in there. Because I think, as I&#8217;ve mentioned so many times on this podcast before, part of our job is to educate our potential clients and current clients. Why are you worth \u2014 what is the value that you are providing? And if they are just thinking, oh, a cleaning lady is a cleaning lady, and they can&#8217;t tell the difference because you are not explaining it very well, that&#8217;s not their fault. That&#8217;s your fault. That&#8217;s my fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I&#8217;m like, oh my gosh, we&#8217;ve never talked about this in the initial sales email. The other thing that I changed is we were doing a lot of protective policy language in the initial estimate email. Because we&#8217;re like, oh, we&#8217;re so tired of these situations happening. But I was like, this is not good for selling. We&#8217;re trying to sell them the dream, not giving them all of these stipulations. That&#8217;s the fine print that they will sign off on in the client guidelines and that document. Like that&#8217;s when we get into the nitty-gritty. But we&#8217;re just trying to explain what works, what we can do for them, and what are the options that they can buy from. They don&#8217;t need to know all the fine print in the sales email, guys. It&#8217;s gonna be overwhelming. And I&#8217;m saying that because that&#8217;s exactly what I was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we&#8217;ve adjusted a lot of things, like I said, that&#8217;ll be in the link down below. So that is how we are booking recurring clients before. It&#8217;s just making it that this is the current path. So it&#8217;s like this is how it works. You let us know what frequency that you want, you let us know if this initial clean date works for you, and then you get that discount on your first recurring cleaning as a thank you. And then we&#8217;re just at the end, the call to action \u2014 what frequency works best for you, and does that initial clean date work for you? Boom. So all of the language is subtly aligning with the goal that we&#8217;re trying to hit, which is get them to book recurring before the first time. And it is working, guys. It&#8217;s just little tweaks in the language. It&#8217;s crazy the impact that this has had because people were not doing this before. This was not happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I think that in combination with giving them just a flat rate, they know what the price is, it creates a lot of certainty for them. And done. I don&#8217;t have to think about this. Because again, I think through my process of finding my cleaner, she&#8217;s like, yep, it&#8217;s gonna be 150 bucks every two weeks. That is what I pay for cleaning in my house. Done. Cool. I don&#8217;t have to think about it again. She&#8217;s gonna be here. Like that&#8217;s great, fabulous. And I love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s just \u2014 it was really crazy that years and years in and it just \u2014 that whole student of the game thing, guys, I mentioned earlier \u2014 like it&#8217;s very exciting to try something new like this and to have this positive feedback happening. And honestly, like, obviously I could feel like, gosh, I wish I would have done this earlier. And maybe I will. Like, whatever. I&#8217;m just excited that I&#8217;m trying it now. It&#8217;s really cool to see the effect happening. So it&#8217;s very, very cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I would say if anything, even if you do not want to see my estimate email, I would suggest just tweaking the language to be that the obvious or the path is going to be this is how it works. You pick which frequency works best for your home and your schedule, and does this initial clean date work? And here&#8217;s the price of that, and then here are the prices you can choose from. And obviously, if you guys offer a bunch of different packages, you need to include that as well. We do not \u2014 we follow our standardized checklist, and that&#8217;s going to continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-16\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why I&#8217;m Not Unbundling Services for Upsells<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I had a really good question from one of you guys, listeners, in one of my contacts. She was like, you know, obviously you went viral on the Alex Hormozi thing, and I dug deeper into his stuff. And he definitely talks a lot about upselling and value additions. And so excellent question was, Stephanie, are you going to start taking things off now that you are doing flat rate and offering those as an upsell? Like not everybody wants wet wiping of baseboards or ceiling fans or windowsills, that type of stuff. Like are you going to take that stuff off and let them add on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the answer to that is no. However, it doesn&#8217;t mean I&#8217;m telling you guys not to do that. Alright, strategically, what I want to do with Serene Clean is all about making training and making what we offer as stupid simple as possible so that we do not have variants between each client. And it doesn&#8217;t mean that each client doesn&#8217;t have a different house, of course not. It just means I think I&#8217;m gonna open myself up to a can of worms and room for error if all of a sudden I tell my cleaners, hey, you don&#8217;t do baseboards unless it says it in the ZenMaid notes. You don&#8217;t do this, you don&#8217;t do this at some houses. But some houses you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I just am like \u2014 I don&#8217;t want this. And this could be just \u2014 I could be wrong here, 100%. This is me hanging on to simplicity because I&#8217;m like, this is not broken. And honestly we really sell on our extensive standardized checklist, and that&#8217;s how we stand out and are able to charge the quote unquote luxury prices. So I am going to stick with that for now. Doesn&#8217;t mean I may not change that in the future. It&#8217;s just kind of like we&#8217;ve built the entire company around \u2014 we offer two things and that makes it really easy. You either are getting deep cleaning or you&#8217;re getting the standard cleaning and that&#8217;s it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also think from a scheduling perspective, it could be very difficult \u2014 like, okay, how long is it gonna take for baseboards in a house? Like, I don&#8217;t know what that answer is based on square footage. That&#8217;s gonna change. Because baseboards of a fifteen hundred square foot house if they add that on versus baseboards in a three thousand \u2014 I don&#8217;t know what those numbers are because I&#8217;ve never had to figure it out. Or, you know, ceiling fans or windows or anything like that. I mean we&#8217;ve had to guesstimate on those types of things, but yeah, I&#8217;m not gonna touch it now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Doesn&#8217;t mean in the future it might not be something I look at again, because obviously that allows you to add more value and to upsell the clients as well as offer maybe cheaper options too. So it&#8217;s a great question. I&#8217;m not comfortable with touching it yet. Something I could see maybe in the future. And I&#8217;m not telling you guys not to do that either. I&#8217;m just telling you how we&#8217;ve decided to keep it for the time being. Not trying to change everything because we had just made a huge change obviously with this flat rate, and so the transition is not done yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-17\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Handling Pushback From a Long-Term Client<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> But I think most of our clients \u2014 for most of them, there&#8217;s been no reaction. We&#8217;ve had very minimal pushback on this. I will say one of our longest clients did push back and she came back with a quality complaint at this email and she said, I&#8217;m gonna be shopping around. And obviously I don&#8217;t want to lose her. I do think, transparently, that that was kind of a power dynamic thing that she was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I made it clear in my response \u2014 we came at it in a very solutions-oriented way. So she said she used to have a cleaner who was a very, very, very good cleaner, and she&#8217;s got a very, very good cleaner now. But she shared like, oh, this new cleaner, she&#8217;s getting done faster, and I just don&#8217;t feel like the level of detail is as good as my last cleaner. And I was like, okay, thank you so much for the feedback. And she was just like, I don&#8217;t like that my price is going up. And also it&#8217;s being based off of how long so-and-so took and this other cleaner is getting done faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so my \u2014 obviously we calculated her flat rate price off of what her current cleaner is getting done. Typically she is a smidge faster. But we don&#8217;t want to go too fast so that if we have to send somebody else in there, obviously it&#8217;s typical. So my response was, one, I was able to rebuttal on that. Number two, I was like, listen, I really appreciate the feedback as always. We&#8217;re looking for feedback as soon as something happens that you notice. And she did mention, she was like, I don&#8217;t feel like the quality control is happening clearly because, you know, this is slipping through the cracks at my house. And so the rebuttal there \u2014 every cleaner is getting quality checked, not necessarily every single residential home. But every cleaner is getting quality checked on a regular basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that felt like she just didn&#8217;t feel like enough care was being put into her home. And then the final answer was, we will be sending Hannah at your next cleaning that is scheduled on this date, and she will be combing through and quality checking. Can you give us specifics? And so she gave a lot of like detail things that she was mentioning, basically like scrubbing the shower grout, fronts of cabinets, that type of thing. And so Hannah went, QC&#8217;d, and it was flawless. Like the cleaner did a great job. She was doing a great job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And we just made sure to follow up with the client that they were happy. And she said, you know, I don&#8217;t want to insinuate that she&#8217;s doing a bad job. It&#8217;s just that the previous cleaner was so good. And, you know, she just was like a unicorn basically. So, and I know, I know you&#8217;re listening, you know who you are, and you&#8217;re listening, previous cleaner, because she \u2014 is. She is a fabulous, fabulous cleaner, and she moved away and that&#8217;s why she no longer cleans for us. And she&#8217;s amazing and I love her very much. She&#8217;s a wonderful person and she worked for me four years and she is an incredible cleaner. But unfortunately you have left and the clients are just like holding it to that crazy standard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s just yeah, sometimes they get very hung up. You know, you guys have experienced where they get very hung up on a certain cleaner. But you can&#8217;t do anything. If a cleaner leaves, somebody else has to go. It&#8217;s not like you can chain up in your basement and be like, no, you can&#8217;t leave. You can never quit, right? We can&#8217;t do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-18\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">When to Hold Off on Price Increases<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So all of that to be said, it was a good opportunity to do a touch point to quality check, that type of thing. And so I will say any residential client that has complained recently, we held off on doing the price increase because that is not a good look, guys. Alright. I&#8217;m not saying do a blanket price increase across the board, no exceptions. I&#8217;m not telling you to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We took into account the ones that we recently had complaints for. We want to have at least two good cleanings before we do the price increase on them. And so we&#8217;re just holding off on the flat rate change and just rolling it all into one. But we&#8217;re waiting until we&#8217;ve had some positive in between and just buffering. Because it&#8217;s like, oh, we know that last cleaning was shitty and we messed up, but here&#8217;s a price increase, by the way. We don&#8217;t want to do that. So it&#8217;s okay to have nuance and make decisions based on what is going on in your business. You don&#8217;t have to do a blanket. Just literally have a spreadsheet of all of your clients or however you track it. And if they have had a complaint recently, don&#8217;t do the damn price increase. Wait until you&#8217;ve had at least one good one under your belt before you decide to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So we are making that decision. Anybody we&#8217;ve had complaints on recently \u2014 which it hasn&#8217;t been a lot, we&#8217;re talking like one to two clients that we are just holding off until we can really nail it for a couple and make sure that they are pleased. So yeah, that client I was describing before, she was happy with it. She kind of backed off and was like, they&#8217;re a good cleaner. It&#8217;s just with this one was so good. And so we are just going to monitor, send another QC with Hannah, because we want to keep this client. She is a very long-term client. She&#8217;s actually one of the first clients I got. I think she started with me in June of 2019. So long-term client, she was one of my very first. And a lot of her family we clean for as well. So I want to keep her happy, but I also want to be reasonable and fair to the cleaner. So she said, you know, just so you know, I&#8217;m still shopping around. And it&#8217;s like, okay, we&#8217;ve done all we can do. We&#8217;re quality checking, we&#8217;re making sure the value is there, but it doesn&#8217;t mean that we&#8217;re not going to do a price increase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that was the only one that really we had to go back and forth on. Everybody else was very much like, okay, cool, you know what I mean? We were getting more pushback, I will say, on the price increase until we added just a sentence, I think, about gas prices and the economy. Because before, we didn&#8217;t want to make it feel like excuses, but we did feel like it was necessary because we were getting a little bit back and forth on like, why is this happening? But once we added a few choice reasons, then they really couldn&#8217;t rebuttal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So if you are interested in our new price increase and how we&#8217;re transitioning \u2014 I didn&#8217;t add that to my website. If you guys want that, let me know down in the comments and I can certainly upload that to my website so you guys can purchase that too if you are interested. Because it&#8217;s just, again, tweaking it. So what we did was we did a couple a day. Basically April was doing five to ten a day because it was very tedious. She had to go through and slog and see what was their typical cleaning time and then base it off of that. And if they had multiple cleaners, is this an outlier or whatever? So she had to go through manually, basically do a production rate audit on the maintenance cleans and lock them in at that price or that number of hours, and do the price increase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so it just was quite tedious for her to do those. So the next ones are gonna be a lot faster because she doesn&#8217;t have to do the price increase stuff. But it&#8217;s still quite tedious because it&#8217;s basically a big production rate of like, okay, what should their flat rate be? And a lot of times it&#8217;s just very obvious because like, okay, they take four hours. Like it&#8217;s historically been a four-hour house. And it&#8217;s always that way no matter who we send. Easy. Lock them in at that price. So easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, it&#8217;s just been a tedious little thing and she just worked through them. But the nice thing \u2014 because she was staggering it and doing just chunks each day \u2014 is when we started getting feedback on the first five, we tweaked the email for the next five and then I tweaked it again until we weren&#8217;t getting any negative feedback hardly. So that was useful too, and why I suggest you guys do this in batches so that you can adjust based on the feedback. Of like, okay, clearly we need to add something here so that we have a little bit of reasoning for this and not just XYZ. So let me know if that is something that you would be interested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-19\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Closing Thoughts and a Metaphorical BBL<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So yeah, it&#8217;s been kind of crazy. It&#8217;s just really wild to me that it is seven years in and this is what we&#8217;re doing and it&#8217;s really exciting. And I just want to encourage you guys that it&#8217;s okay to change your mind. It is okay to do things differently. And just again, keep it in mind that this is an experiment. Like we may figure out that first time cleans \u2014 like we&#8217;re suddenly start losing our asses on these flat rate prices. But I also am like, what if we gain our asses? What if we gain our asses? What if this is like a metaphorical BBL for the business, right? And we gain a lot of ass on those first-time cleans because we are making more profit on them. We get done a little faster, half an hour here, an hour here, all of a sudden we&#8217;re more profitable on the initials. Where right now we never lose, but we never gain ass ever on an initial clean because we are always charging exactly how long it takes. What a metaphor, guys. Oh my lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I really just encourage you guys to see pricing as an experiment. And yeah, we&#8217;ll see. Maybe in a few months \u2014 my gosh, I really wish we would have done this earlier. But I think there had to be a lot of things coming together for this to actually happen and for me to have enough of a catalyst to actually make this change of like, alright, I think this is the time to do it. And we are in a good place that we can make this big structural change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So production rate audits are gonna be huge for us. Experimenting, seeing close rates, things like that. And if the close rate goes up again, even at the 65 an hour flat rate, once we have more availability, we&#8217;re gonna just start \u2014 we&#8217;re gonna keep putting that number out there and seeing what sticks. But if we need to adjust back down, I&#8217;m willing to do that, of course, because we&#8217;re happy with 60. That is good margins as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, this was a long one, as they all are, over an hour. Let me know what other questions you guys have about this topic because I know you&#8217;re very intrigued by it. And yeah, just let me know your experience with pricing. I&#8217;m very excited about this. I&#8217;m excited to have you guys alongside me watching this happen. It&#8217;s kind of crazy. And yeah, very exciting times at Serene Clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let me know what you guys think. I am so excited to hear from you. And Friday&#8217;s my birthday, guys. May 15th is my birthday. Give me some birthday balloons. I got the most sickening nails of my life. She literally hand painted 1996 on them and then 30 on them. Like look at that. Alright. Pick up your phone and look at that. That&#8217;s crazy. And like all these gorgeous colors and then the little Taurus bulls because it&#8217;s Taurus season, you guys. So I am so excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nicole, I will see you tomorrow night because I&#8217;m flying up to Boston. I&#8217;m so excited. And I can&#8217;t wait to hear from you guys. So have a great day. Join the ZenMaid mastermind if you have not done so. Hit that like, hit that subscribe, and please please please hype this video. It helps get it out to other people who would like this video. So hit that hype button too, guys. But I will see you in the next episode. Hopefully another year wiser, potentially. Bye guys.<\/p>\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 in today&#8217;s episode, I am very excited about this particular topic. I&#8217;m going to be describing exactly why and how I transitioned the residential side [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17339,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"Why I Switched From Hourly To Flat Rate After 7 Years","_seopress_titles_desc":"Stephanie breaks down how Serene Clean switched residential pricing from hourly to flat rate after seven years \u2014 why now, what changed, and what's the same.","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-podcast"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17338","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=17338"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17340,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17338\/revisions\/17340"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}