{"id":17414,"date":"2026-06-09T14:44:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T14:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17414"},"modified":"2026-06-09T14:44:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T14:44:41","slug":"how-matt-ricketts-built-a-6m-cleaning-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/how-matt-ricketts-built-a-6m-cleaning-company\/","title":{"rendered":"How Matt Ricketts Built a $6M Cleaning Company"},"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 class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Listen on: <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/146-how-matt-ricketts-built-a-%246m-cleaning-company\/id1791590022?i=1000771852855\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/4jh8zQtZrLjy0mwOqKeDTy?si=6c75e89b1dc54271\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VTSHNRIiwMU\">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: #146: How Matt Ricketts Built a $6M Cleaning Company\" 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\/4jh8zQtZrLjy0mwOqKeDTy?si=6c75e89b1dc54271&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 class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><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 guest is truly a legend in the cleaning industry. And I cannot wait for you guys to hear his story. Matt Ricketts, thank you so much for joining me today. I&#8217;m really excited for this conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Hey, thank you for having me. This is gonna be fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, absolutely. Matt, for those who do not know of you, obviously you started in not the cleaning industry, a pilot, I do believe. So where did you come from? Where are you at now? And then we&#8217;ll get into the meat of how that all happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">From Pilot to Cleaning Company Owner<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Sure, I think most of us start these businesses accidentally, right? Like it wasn&#8217;t what we planned. But in 2008, the last financial crisis \u2014 well, there&#8217;s been a few since then, I guess, but the big one that we experienced in my lifetime \u2014 I was a pilot. I&#8217;d been hired at Hawaiian Airlines, and my class just kept getting pushed back and pushed back. But, you know, we had intentions that that was gonna happen. And it was going to be a big pay cut. So my wife was like, I&#8217;ll start a cleaning company. I&#8217;m pretty good at web stuff. I&#8217;m pretty good at marketing. And I was like, I&#8217;ll build you a website. I really know how to do operations manuals and stuff from the airline stuff. I&#8217;ll write your policies, procedures. And so she worked on developing the cleaning systems. I documented it all. And by the end of that summer \u2014 we started July 5th, born on the fifth of July for the company \u2014 we were already up to about 30,000 a month within three months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Wow. All residential or how?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> All residential. About a half million dollars by that winter, by December. And by December they&#8217;d canceled the classes. They canceled all their orders and all their planes. And we had this little business doing about a half million dollars a year. And we&#8217;re like, wow, this is interesting. Well, there&#8217;s no reason to get rid of this yet. Let&#8217;s see what happens. A couple more years go by and we&#8217;ve got it to about a million dollars a year. And kind of a tough decision \u2014 it&#8217;s like, I&#8217;m in this career that I like, I&#8217;m pretty good at it, it&#8217;s professional, it has a lot of upside. But this business, we could just see that it could be something really, really special. Also really hard. There were times where we questioned our sanity on all of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But in 2001, or 2011 \u2014 yeah, late 2010 \u2014 I took my last trip before my son was born in January 2011. So when he was born, I took FMLA. In the process of taking FMLA, they were gonna do a reduction in force. I was pretty senior in the company, but I took a voluntary furlough and that gave me just a little bit more room where I&#8217;m like, well, if this doesn&#8217;t all work out, right. So about a year and a half later, they call me back and I didn&#8217;t go. I was like, this is working, right? So that was the beauty of it. We had that path. It was there. And there have been times where I&#8217;ve been called by people that need a pilot or something like that, and it&#8217;s been appealing. Somebody like a really, really famous kind of financial influencer. I was offered a flying job maybe 10 years ago. And that one was interesting. I was like, well, I would learn so much, but what would I be? No, no, no. I&#8217;m not saying any names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. Was his name Dave? Or I&#8217;m just guessing, no? Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> But it was a very, very interesting opportunity that would have changed the trajectory of my life. But I think the impetus of this was, once we had it going, we had something really good. We built it on the systems that I developed and the culture that my wife really wanted to create. And so, you know, people go back and forth on how does this all work? Because it&#8217;s never easy. I think the combination of us together is why this worked. One of us on our own probably would not have been as successful, but the combination of our personality, skills, and just work ethic combined made it work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> When you were still working as a pilot, does that mean that operationally she was pretty much running it? Because when I think of all of the things that come in the day to day as it builds, even to that million point \u2014 I guess my question is, what size was the business at by the time you stopped your other job?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> About a million, but I was still very active. So as a pilot \u2014 this is, I was giving up all the days off that I had. I had a really great schedule. Well, I don&#8217;t know if it was great, but I had a lot of control over my schedule. Some months I would do these overnight trips where I would just leave at five. I would get a hotel \u2014 they were called stand-up overnights because there weren&#8217;t technically enough rest to be like an overnight. You&#8217;d get in like at 11, you&#8217;d take the same flight back out at five in the morning. I&#8217;d be back in St. Louis at six. I&#8217;d take a nap, and you would do this like every other day. So I would be pretty available. Or I would do a three-day weekend trip starting on a Friday. So there was a lot of availability to kind of be there, support the business, run the back office and operations. I mean, I cleaned a few houses early on. I was not good at it. I probably scratched some stainless steel, if I&#8217;m perfectly honest. But we learned a lot in those first few months, and I went out there and cleaned too and wanted to be a part of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Acquiring Other Cleaning Companies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> And this business is in St. Louis. I know you procured another business. Is that also in St. Louis or am I wrong here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> We have bought two other businesses in St. Louis over the years. Both good operations, but the owners were going in different directions. One was starting a new business. He had about a $600,000, $700,000 business. The downside of that one was that culturally almost none of the employees worked out. They were teams, and there was just a lot that just did not work culturally when we brought them in. But we were overstaffed at the time, we were ready for it. Second time we did it, really, really great company, great culture, great people. Two years later, I think there was 10 of them that came on. I want to say eight of them are still here. So it was also a testament \u2014 they had a really good company. And she didn&#8217;t give up on it. Her husband had an opportunity, they were moving on. And it was opportunistic for both of us. I was able to buy it from her. She was able to move on. That one, I&#8217;ll speak really highly \u2014 Regal Cleaning, really great brand, really great people that were there. One of my CSRs \u2014 we call them CERs, customer experience representatives \u2014 Reagan was one of the best parts of that deal. She&#8217;s just so talented, just with technology, with youth. I mean, she&#8217;s like 24 years old now. I think she was 22 when she started here. Just young, ambitious, smart, like all the things that you would want. And she was probably running that company. And so to come here, her responsibility shrank into basically the CER role, which is dispatching support, and then also special projects. At first it was like just such a sigh of relief, probably, but also now she gets to do fun projects. A perfect example, she reorganized our maps. Our software allows you to create zones, and we&#8217;re really tight on the way we schedule. She really reduced that friction for the employees of drive time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We have this pod system, which we can talk about more if you like, but it&#8217;s basically companies within the company, geographically. We cover a pretty big area. We have 61 techs today, maybe 62. Any given day, that number changes one or two, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I know what you mean. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> And it may be more than that if I count field managers. The point being that geographically we&#8217;re covering a big area. So we have techs start close to where they live, finish close to where they live, and create these really tight zones. We can&#8217;t do that for everybody if they live 30 miles away from where work is. But she really helped improve that system along with Savannah, who&#8217;s our HR manager. The two of them really took that project on. She also implemented Connecteam. I&#8217;m sure people in the industry are using that pretty commonly. We switched over from Slack. There&#8217;s things we liked about Slack better, but Connecteam kind of became the platform of choice for us and she implemented all of that. So on tech projects, like rolling out, she&#8217;s been great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, especially considering switching software at that size has got to be a colossal undertaking, of also making the right decision too. So yeah, that&#8217;s very impressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. There&#8217;s different levels of software. A critical system like your CRM, your production management software, the scheduling software \u2014 that&#8217;s rip out and replace, that&#8217;s open heart surgery. This was more like some stitches or something like that. But right now we&#8217;re working with one of our partners. We&#8217;re alpha testing some software. And I&#8217;m like, wow, we took on a lot, but it&#8217;s exciting to be on the front edge and learning a lot of what&#8217;s going on. And she&#8217;s really probably taking point on that as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> It really showcases just the right people. It really doesn&#8217;t matter, frankly, what role sometimes you put them in because they&#8217;re going to excel. And it sounds like you&#8217;ve got some rock stars that you got with that business. So for that many techs, I&#8217;d love to hear about the pod system. I&#8217;ve heard that term used before, so I&#8217;d love to hear that as well as just in general how your management structure has evolved over time. I&#8217;d love to just kind of rapid fire so we get a state of the union of how you operate. You alluded to the one company doing teams. I&#8217;m assuming you do individual cleaning cleaners mostly. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Moving From Teams to Solo Cleaners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> We&#8217;re solos. We started as teams, and God love Debbie Sardone \u2014 I should have listened to her a lot earlier on that, because she was preaching it for years and the math just mathed eventually during COVID. COVID was the line where we switched from teams. We had probably 15 cars at the time, teams of two. So we were probably 30 techs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> But you can just generate so much more revenue per head, much more efficiency in terms of scheduling. Productivity goes up because there&#8217;s not somebody waiting around for somebody else to finish. There&#8217;s so many advantages of it. And there&#8217;s reasons for teams too. Teams make sense if you&#8217;re in a high urban area like we are. An urban area can make a lot of sense to do teams where you can get to a lot of houses with a lot of density and schedule tightly. So all the ways can make sense, but we&#8217;ve moved to solo, and that may well be the lid on our growth right now. If we were to do a hybrid model with some teams, we could probably grow a little faster. We&#8217;ve talked about labor being the lid in the industry. Sometimes you could find good people, but they might not have a car. So we could probably put them into a deep clean team or something. There&#8217;s things that people are doing that we haven&#8217;t adopted yet that could probably hybridize this a little bit, but that&#8217;s one thing we&#8217;re looking at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, I run individuals as well. And you&#8217;re so right of the drive time, that type of thing. Flexibility with scheduling is a lot easier. But I agree. When I talk to folks who run teams, a lot of it is, this person has a car and a license, these people don&#8217;t. So it makes sense. So you do open up a little bit on the labor market. I&#8217;d love to hear \u2014 we don&#8217;t have to riff on this too long \u2014 but one of the big reasons that people run teams is safety, right? And that&#8217;s the feedback I get. For us, first times are always gonna have multiple cleaners, most likely, on a first time. But individuals are running 90% of the appointments. Is there anything you guys have put in place, or how do you handle that aspect of it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Safety Systems for Solo Cleaners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, that&#8217;s a great question. So a couple things. We&#8217;re watching our dispatch board as people arrive and get to places. We have a code word that if our techs say, immediately management will dispatch a manager to that house and call the police. But the main thing is, right when you&#8217;re scheduling a job, there&#8217;s red flags all over them. One of the key things I would tell anyone is that the customer needs to have a matching address on that credit card. If they&#8217;re giving you a credit card, always take the address, and the address should match. Now if there&#8217;s a good reason \u2014 they&#8217;re moving, things like that \u2014 you might dig a little deeper, but just on a first glance, that&#8217;s a pretty good safety check that the address matches the person. Your card is not generally issued just out of nowhere to an address. And so if you have your card verification set to address match, that helps. It&#8217;s a small step. You could go further. When we have concerns about somebody based on things they might have said during a call, we can do quick background checks in Missouri with CaseNet, which is a free service in Missouri. Not every state probably has something like that. But that is something that we have done from time to time. And it&#8217;s not uncommon for us to send a couple people at a deep clean to start, especially a bigger job. So it&#8217;s oftentimes not a solo job for a deep clean. Two solos might arrive, driving separate cars, coming from their own homes. So there&#8217;s a few ways to address that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, no, I&#8217;m happy I brought it up because that credit card thing, that&#8217;s great. I&#8217;ve never even thought of that. That&#8217;s a really good tip there. I like to highlight, especially in big companies like yours, it&#8217;s really fascinating to hear what things you&#8217;ve put into place. You did say, from the sounds of it, you used to do teams and so you transitioned. Did you have any pushback from your staff? Because anytime I talk to people who are like, my cleaners don&#8217;t wanna \u2014 yeah, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. It&#8217;s different people. Of that cleaning staff, I&#8217;ve probably got the people that were there before \u2014 there&#8217;s probably three or four techs of these 60 that were here with us back before COVID. Let me think. So Katie, Melody, Brianna, Savannah. Four. Out of 60. So it&#8217;s a big change over the years, right? So you&#8217;re looking at different kinds of employees. They have different needs, different wants. Fundamentally, they&#8217;re just different people. The conversion process was painful. We did it during COVID and we basically ripped the Band-Aid off. We&#8217;re like, hey, we&#8217;re not going out in teams anymore. This was probably February before things really got bad, before the shutdowns in March. So we pulled the Band-Aid off. We&#8217;re like, we&#8217;re running as solos for safety. It&#8217;ll alleviate some risk, some cross contamination, being in the car all day. Some people did not like it. Some people quit right away. So I would tell people you&#8217;re probably gonna have to roll that out slowly if you have 10 employees. A few of them are probably gonna be good with it. The rest are probably not gonna be there long term, right? So take your time. It&#8217;s not an overnight transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Turnover, Retention, and the First 90 Days<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> You&#8217;re speaking about turnover, so I&#8217;m just curious, from a KPI perspective, do you know what your typical tenure is now for staff members? Like what can you get out of somebody?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> I mean, I know about turnover. I don&#8217;t know about tenure. Our year over year turnover is like 52% last year. So I know I have a lot of data on this from being a partner in a software company. What I do know is the average tenure five years ago was closer to 300% turnover. This is real for the industry, for people on software that I&#8217;m familiar with. And last year \u2014 this is based on Maid Central, they do their own study \u2014 the top quartile of companies were around 120% turnover. So I want people to put that in perspective, that 100% turnover, even though it sounds really bad, it&#8217;s not as bad as you think, because a lot of that&#8217;s in that first week. We track every hire. Literally, we hired five people last month, and it just was a bad month. One stuck. So I looked \u2014 we sent out an email at the beginning of the next month to welcome all the new hires from last month. There was only one picture on that email. And I know we hired a lot more people. Last month was not a great month for us in terms of hires that stuck. So those all count against our turnover. So a better metric than turnover would be retention, and I just don&#8217;t have that software. It&#8217;s not baked into the software, so I&#8217;d have to dig up the number. But I would say that retention, year over year, is probably about 60, 70%. It&#8217;s just the turnover is the bottom \u2014 those new hires, right at the bottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. Like for me, that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m trying to get into, when it comes to tracking how many people can I get to the 60 day, to the six month, to the one year mark. Because if they can hit a year, they&#8217;re probably sticking around. But getting them to that. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> You get them to 90 days, actually \u2014 if you get them to 90 days, you have a very high likelihood of getting them to a year. So that&#8217;s where a lot of the turnover risk is, in the first 30, 60, 90 days. Tracking, probably putting your focus into that, and building \u2014 what is the book? Never Lose a Customer Again. He also wrote a book, Never Lose an Employee Again. It&#8217;s the same book, basically. He just did like find and replace and just replaced customer with employee. It&#8217;s a great book either way. The first time I read it, I was like, wait a minute, I just did that in my mind. I was like, this is a book about employee activation. So customer activation is great, let&#8217;s do all this stuff for our customers, but how do we activate our employees? How do we turn them into raving fans of our company? It&#8217;s kind of like net promoter score. Some of your employees are just gonna love it. And then what you want to do is you probably do want to move out the ones that don&#8217;t like it. On a cultural side, it&#8217;s just not good. Just because they can do the work, it&#8217;s probably better to move on. So some turnover is healthy when people just aren&#8217;t happy anymore. So I think around 50% is a healthy mark. It&#8217;s still a lid on growth for our industry. If we got the hiring right every time and it was only 20%, so it was just the natural turnover and we got those hires right every time, our industry would be so much healthier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Oh my gosh, yeah. I look back at even my last month and I&#8217;m like, gosh, if we could have just got even two more people to stick, this is what next month would look like instead of what it&#8217;s going to look like. So I think it&#8217;s encouraging as well as sobering, probably, for our listeners. Because, just so you know, a lot of our listeners are newer owners, smaller companies under a million most likely is the person that&#8217;s listening right now. And so I think it kind of can be the cold, frozen water that we&#8217;re splashing on them. Like, this doesn&#8217;t end. This problem doesn&#8217;t go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Professionalizing Management and the COVID Rebuild<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, so this business is hard. It gets easier though with people, but that cuts into profits, right? So it&#8217;s a pretty tough balancing act. So what I would suggest people figure out is \u2014 this is kind of where things did start to get easier. When we got to about two million, things started to get a little easier. We put a lot of professional management in place. We could have done some of that sooner, but we built our leadership team, which \u2014 Katie on sales, she&#8217;s still with us, she&#8217;s a 2011 hire. What is that? Shoot, I don&#8217;t know. Yeah, 15 years this year. Connie, 2012 or 13 hire, she&#8217;s my operations manager. And then Savannah&#8217;s my HR manager. She was a COVID hire. And so is Koju, they were hired about the same time. Koju&#8217;s my marketing manager. That&#8217;s the leadership team. That&#8217;s who kind of runs the company. There&#8217;s a couple other CERs, there&#8217;s a little bit of other indirect labor, but that&#8217;s the core team, and professionalizing that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Everyone&#8217;s big on EOS. We like that. We like Scaling Up. We use a combination of both. Scaling Up focuses more on profitability, building a model that is financially solvent. It&#8217;s very easy to sell a lot of stuff in this business and then actually still go broke. It&#8217;s kind of easy to do. So I like Scaling Up a little bit more than EOS because it focuses more on profitability, more on financial systems, more on professional management. But they both work. And so that was a big turning point. We got to two million pretty quickly and we kind of had a little detour. I don&#8217;t even know \u2014 my son is, so like nine years back, what is that, 2016? My son was diagnosed with this rare eye disease called choroideremia. We were right at two million dollars and we just kind of were like, all right, you guys run the company. We got an RV and we just started traveling, and took like what all of us think we want to do with our companies. But it won&#8217;t grow. We did that for like five years. We would go on a 16-week vacation and be gone. We&#8217;d have our laptops with us and be doing stuff, but it really sounds great, and I also look back, I&#8217;m like, God, if we could have just put that focus in, we&#8217;d already be at 10, 15, 20 million dollars, because of that little five to seven year vacation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">COVID was a big wake-up call. We&#8217;re like, two million dollars is not a very secure company. A lot can happen. It sounds great, but we were rebuilding St. Louis, we were all shut down, we had zero revenue. We figured out a lot of stuff from that point and kind of rebuilt. So I look at our company almost having been rebuilt from the ground up. Like here we are at zero. Now we did have all those old customers, so we could turn it back on, but we were at zero. We did 1.3 million COVID year, 1.8 the next year. Last year we did five. This year we&#8217;ll do six. It&#8217;s accelerated because we&#8217;ve adopted the principles of management, of like, you talked about KPIs \u2014 these are the numbers. And here&#8217;s a number I think everyone should be tracking: what&#8217;s your net recurring revenue every week? People, don&#8217;t worry about your customers. We&#8217;ve only added 60 customers this year. We&#8217;ve added $10,000 a week in recurring revenue. 60 customers, $10,000 in recurring revenue. That&#8217;s a half million dollars in recurring revenue so far this year with 60 customers. It&#8217;s because the ones we replaced \u2014 we&#8217;ve sold a lot more than 60 customers. We&#8217;ve only netted 60. But the ones we&#8217;re selling are at higher prices. We&#8217;re about to do a 5% price increase. If we lose 200 customers, not that I don&#8217;t care, it&#8217;s just the better \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. I just experienced this. We just did a price increase. We just actually switched over to flat rate, which is crazy. And so that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m looking at, is the recurring revenue. That&#8217;s the only thing that matters. And I&#8217;m like, it still went up. We lost these customers, still went up. So the math is mathing. It&#8217;s crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why Customer Count Doesn&#8217;t Matter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> It&#8217;s scary. It&#8217;s super scary because you base it on this idea of the number of customers. Doesn&#8217;t matter. It&#8217;s a superficial number, right? And I&#8217;ll say, ours, we have like 1,400 plus. Doesn&#8217;t matter to me. It&#8217;s the recurring revenue per week. And I would love it to be a lot less. I have a friend that does almost the same revenue as us that has like 800 customers because they have more high frequency customers than us, right? And for a long time he didn&#8217;t take any monthlies in his business. So how much easier it is to deal with 800 customers versus 1,400, right? So many less personalities to have to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. Well, strategically, I&#8217;m wondering \u2014 I do have, half of mine is commercial, half is residential. Because we&#8217;re so rural, it feels necessary. And when I think about our top commercial accounts, it&#8217;s like that&#8217;s 40 houses of revenue. And I&#8217;m dealing with one point of contact. I&#8217;m dealing with one facility, that type of thing. So there&#8217;s definitely negatives to commercial. Is there a reason that you guys haven&#8217;t gone that way? Is it the splitting of focus? Like you&#8217;re like, we&#8217;re really good at this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why They Stay Residential-Only<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. So I think we&#8217;d be fundamentally bad at commercial. We would charge too much. We would spend too much time there. We would lose money because we would be way too detail oriented. It&#8217;s a different business. I might as well start a plumbing company. I think they&#8217;re very different businesses. They do the same action, but in very different ways. The marketing is different, right? I don&#8217;t want to do this. When we used to think, let&#8217;s go after commercial, that&#8217;s like door to door sales. I mean, it&#8217;s not quite like that, but it&#8217;s shaking hands, it&#8217;s dropping gifts off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> For real. We go drop off donuts. Like that&#8217;s how we get our commercial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> I would drop off wine. I will tell you, there was a time we had a very specific type of commercial customer, and this works in St. Louis, it doesn&#8217;t work in a rural place. Mid-rise apartment complexes with interior hallways that need to be cleaned, and common spaces that are nice. So these are high-end mid-rise apartments. We had a bunch of these at one point. And one of those contracts might be worth $30,000 a month. I mean, it&#8217;s a big deal. During COVID though, when I was short on staff and customers were coming back, I made the decision that we were making more per hour on residential. And if labor is the lid and I can only do so much work, and I can charge now closer to $75 an hour for residential, and I&#8217;m at like 40 \u2014 well, let&#8217;s go back to those days, probably 26 to 30, and then 45 to 50 for commercial \u2014 I was like, we&#8217;re gonna go do residential work and that pays more. So that was the decision. It was just sort of, if labor is the lid, then I&#8217;m gonna focus on where the higher return is. And it created a lot of clarity because we can focus all of our marketing on this one thing. All of our marketing is super specific. It&#8217;s about lifestyle. It&#8217;s about creating a better life. That&#8217;s the whole brand message, right? It became so much easier to market and sell what we did and really understand what we do when we got really clear on who we are, what we do really well. And that&#8217;s the difference between scaling and growing, in my mind. Adding commercial would be growth, it would, but it would require different managers, different sales actions. And we wouldn&#8217;t be leveraging all of the technology. We&#8217;d need probably a new technology platform. So that&#8217;s growth to me, but that&#8217;s not scale. Scale would be leveraging all these things that we already do well and just doing more of it, right? So that&#8217;s kind of my take on it. That&#8217;s the difference between growth and scale in my mind. Does that make sense?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> No, that makes perfect sense, because it&#8217;s coming down to math. And like you said, the only lever we can pull when we are struggling with the staffing side of it is how much money per hour can we get out of every tech, right? And luckily for us, our commercial accounts, we&#8217;re making damn near as much as we are residential because of where I am. So when people come to me and they&#8217;re like, I want to get into commercial, but nobody&#8217;s taking my bid, I&#8217;m too high, I&#8217;m like, well, you&#8217;re in a \u2014 it&#8217;s lucky. It&#8217;s very specific, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> That&#8217;s great. I see that in unique markets. PH Clean, they do these sororities up in \u2014 they&#8217;re in a college town. This is an amazing company. You should get Sarah on. She runs a great company. She&#8217;s in a college town in a little rural area, and she&#8217;s grown. Her company may be bigger than mine. It&#8217;s probably about the same size, four to six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I&#8217;d love to. I think they were at CleanCon, actually, now that I think about it. So I kind of met her. Yeah, they&#8217;re in Iowa, I believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Daniel&#8217;s her manager. He&#8217;s really smart. Sarah runs a really great company. And they&#8217;re in Iowa. But she focuses on this really specific type of commercial. I don&#8217;t think she does all kinds of commercial, but she does these sororities and fraternities and they do that really well. So there&#8217;s ways to focus on commercial and kind of pick your spots. So I liked places where people lived. I like mid-rise apartments, things like that, because it&#8217;s daytime hours, I didn&#8217;t have to get into a different thing. So I&#8217;m not saying don&#8217;t do commercial. I think there&#8217;s ways to do it, and that fits into the model, especially if they&#8217;re willing to pay for higher quality service. I don&#8217;t think a manufacturing facility that wants you to come in at midnight to four AM and clean is ever gonna care about that stuff as much. But a mid-rise apartment where they&#8217;re charging $3,000 a month for a studio apartment in St. Louis \u2014 which is insane to me, but there&#8217;s a lot of these places \u2014 those places will pay crazy money to make sure the place is perfect and the manager just doesn&#8217;t want to get the calls, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> No, that makes a ton of sense. I want to go back because you mentioned pods, you mentioned management. I guess what I really want to know is, today versus maybe how this has evolved, is like the training of a person. A person comes in, who is their point of contact? What does that look like? What is your ideal? They start today. When can they do houses by themselves? What does that life cycle look like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Hiring Funnel: 500 Applications to One Hire<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Sure. So first day \u2014 let&#8217;s go back even further. Indeed&#8217;s our primary funnel. We do some Facebook, but let&#8217;s just use Indeed. 500 applications in Indeed kind of starts what we get per week, right? That&#8217;s kind of the goal. We get down \u2014 of those 500, about 100 fill out our application. We&#8217;re using WizeHire, applicant tracking system, whatever you use. WizeHire has another next step, which is assessments. So they have a couple of job fit and flight risk assessments. We&#8217;ve dialed those into a score range that will auto-kick people out. You score too good, you&#8217;re probably just good at saying what people want to hear. Too low, you&#8217;re probably \u2014 you quit jobs, it&#8217;s your job to quit jobs, right? And so from there, about 70 applicants make it through assessments. So most of them actually kind of get through the assessment phase. Offer those folks a one-way video, about 50 do it, about 30 do it correctly. So then we get down to about 30 that have done it correctly, they&#8217;ve uploaded it. So it&#8217;s an arbitrary filter, just because we want to put a couple of hurdles into the process. Then we go through those and offer job interviews to about 10 a week. And we&#8217;re really looking to make one solid job offer, maybe two. We like to hire one a week, but oftentimes we batch it where it&#8217;s like two every other week. Our turnover&#8217;s low enough that that works. Right now we could probably use to up it to two a week just to get ahead of getting into the fall. Just make sure we&#8217;re ready for our busy season starts in October, but we need to start being prepared now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Is there a reason for that? Do people leave in the summer? Like why, or is it college?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. So summer is high vacation season. Our peak revenue of all time is actually the week before July fourth. That historically is our highest revenue week of the year, especially if July fourth doesn&#8217;t fall in that week \u2014 like in the weird middle of a week. But last year, July fourth fell on a Monday, so the week before. This year it&#8217;s gonna fall on a Sunday, I don&#8217;t remember exactly. I think it&#8217;s a weekend this year. So the week before will probably be a banner week. But in general, through June, July, there&#8217;s a lot less \u2014 people are home, the kids are home, stuff&#8217;s more chaotic, a lot more skips. Our skip rate climbs. So customers don&#8217;t leave necessarily, but it&#8217;s just sort of a \u2014 our highest growth month of the year is typically October. We&#8217;ll probably net close to 50 customers in that single month. So we might grow $10,000 a month in recurring revenue in October if we have the people to do it. I think that&#8217;s a fairly common pattern, if people have enough data to sort through and look and see the patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Onboarding and Training a New Hire<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> But the \u2014 what was the question though? So we&#8217;ve hired these two folks. They come in for orientation. I&#8217;ve got a bunch of little bags over here behind me. They get a swag bag with some company swag, they get some gifts, they do an orientation. The first day, everyone from the team comes and visits them, they get a tour of the office. I generally \u2014 I have not been able to make the last few. We&#8217;ve got some family stuff going on on Mondays that&#8217;s kind of been blocking that. But I generally like to go to those, have lunch with them, meet every single one if I&#8217;m able. And then they&#8217;re assigned to a field supervisor and assigned a pod. Their field supervisor for the next four days will work with them one-on-one. And then they&#8217;ll rotate to another field supervisor for an additional five days of one-on-one training in homes. That&#8217;s generally enough for most people to go out and be solo. After that, though, for the first week, they&#8217;ll generally only be assigned two houses, and a field supervisor or field manager will drop into one of their two houses. Just a quick stop-by for the next week. And if all goes well, then they&#8217;re cleared just to be on their own. But they&#8217;re collecting what we call job share, or fee split, or commission, whatever people want to call it. I don&#8217;t like commission because it&#8217;s not really commission. They didn&#8217;t sell anything. We call it job share. They collect their job share at that point. So they&#8217;re on their percentage pay at that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Wages and Benefits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Mm-hmm. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> So our guarantee is currently 19. July 1st, it&#8217;s gonna go up to 20. Our average hourly is closer to about 25 and a half, 26 with tips. I think that might be with tips. So the wages is a big reason that we&#8217;re able to attract people. And then you talked a little bit before, when we were kind of off air, about benefits. We have a really great benefits package. This is overly complex, I don&#8217;t want to get into it, but we&#8217;re technically self-insured. We have a benefits manager. We pay a certain amount of money per month up front. If it goes above that, we have reinsurance kick in, all this complicated financial stuff. Just to say, we&#8217;re not doing a traditional PPO. We&#8217;re taking a little bit more risk. But we also have pretty large cash reserves that I feel really comfortable with what we&#8217;re doing. And then we&#8217;re offering them on the front end of that a concierge medical practice that they have 24\/7 access to a doctor. They can get in. And that actually helps us keep costs down because they&#8217;ll help direct them to more cost efficient care versus like, I have a splinter, I should go to the ER. No, come to the concierge doc, we&#8217;ll take that out. It really helps with wasted care. Even where to get an X-ray, where to get an MRI, go through the program and it&#8217;ll be zero out of pocket versus your deductible. So really well run program. I&#8217;d say like $400 a head is what something like that costs. And then we pay 65 and they pay 35. So the $400 a head, we&#8217;re not paying all of that. They&#8217;re paying a little over a third of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> It&#8217;s not bad for what you&#8217;re getting. That&#8217;s quite impressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, it&#8217;s a young workforce. You&#8217;d be surprised. So that&#8217;s vision, dental also are offered, short-term disability, and we give everybody a AAA membership. This is something all of you guys can do as a benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Ooh, that&#8217;s a great one. I love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Not a very expensive one. So you can do it at 30, 60, 90 days, wherever you want to put it. We do it at 30 days. We make it 30 days, we&#8217;ll buy your AAA membership for the year. It&#8217;s a nice little thing. And honestly, it takes some stress down on the office. Like when people are like, something&#8217;s out in the field, something happened \u2014 well, in the past, we&#8217;d go out, the manager with a jump pack, we&#8217;ve got some tow trucks on call. We don&#8217;t do any of that stuff anymore. Call AAA, let them take care of it. So it&#8217;s a selfish benefit too, but it&#8217;s a simple one. You amortize that out and I want to say it&#8217;s like $40 a year when you buy it in bulk like this. And so it&#8217;s like a $3 a month benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Wow, I love that. When it comes to benefits, obviously everybody is like, which ones do I add, which ones do I not? We don&#8217;t have that robust health insurance, and we offer health insurance, but it&#8217;s not that amazing. EAP, bereavement, holiday pay, that type of thing. So all of those fantastic things. So when you&#8217;re looking at adding, how do you make the decision of what, and is it feasible? Like, is this what people actually want? Are you doing surveys of your staff to make that decision?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How to Decide Which Benefits to Offer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> I think you have to have \u2014 well, I would tell you, your young staff would probably tell you they don&#8217;t really want the health insurance. They&#8217;d rather have higher pay. But that&#8217;s asking the wrong question, because the people you want to attract do care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. 401k was huge for my older ones. They&#8217;re like, I want a retirement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, 401k, that&#8217;s another great one. We have a 5% match. Be generous, as generous as you can. I mean, you gotta be able to do the math. Here&#8217;s the problem with most of us. We make decisions and it&#8217;s not based on a good financial model. I will tell you this. My company has an incredibly strong financial model. We have a fractional CFO. We know our numbers to the point where \u2014 I had a meeting with him today that I was like, I have no questions for you today. I&#8217;ve already looked at all your notes. Can we just push to next week? Because we do weekly. And he was like, yeah, that&#8217;s fine, I got nothing either. But it gets repetitive and boring, but you just gotta do that stuff. Although as I called it off this week myself, I&#8217;d already looked, there was nothing on the agenda that really needed to be addressed this week. Books aren&#8217;t even closed yet for the month. What is it, the third? Didn&#8217;t make a lot of sense to have the meeting. But if you have the excess profits built in to do it, then that&#8217;s the kind of stuff that you need to look at. And then if you don&#8217;t, then you need to raise your prices and figure out how to bake that in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we did it \u2014 what&#8217;s just brute force. We added a health and safety fee. Basically our customers pay for it, right? We added \u2014 it started off as a $5 fee. Now it&#8217;s a $10 fee because it&#8217;s gone up so much. But we&#8217;re like, look, if we&#8217;re gonna add health insurance, it would cost us double this fee to raise your rate, because we&#8217;d split it with the employees and then we&#8217;d take what&#8217;s left. But we pitched it to our customers years back. We&#8217;re just like, we&#8217;re gonna add this health and safety fee. 100% of this is gonna go towards paying health insurance. It&#8217;s baked into our model. And that&#8217;s how we did it. We added a service fee. That&#8217;s not going to be for everybody, but that $10 fee is like raising our prices $20, because 100% of that is collected and goes towards that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I imagine that attracts the right kind of customers who are happy to pay that type of thing, because they want to support companies who have good staff, less turnover because of it. So it&#8217;s probably beneficial in that way as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Higher Prices Attract Better Customers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, and I think even across political lines and across ideologies, people want good people in their homes. And people will invest. If you are doing the right things to attract people, you will get a lot of benefit of the doubt from your customers. You make a mistake, you didn&#8217;t come on the right day, whatever happens \u2014 you clean the wrong house. No, I&#8217;m kidding. We&#8217;ve not done that one in a long time, but a friend of mine actually did and made it into a great promotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> We&#8217;ve got a customer from that before. We cleaned the wrong house and he asked about pricing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, it&#8217;s great, right? She turned it into this amazing marketing program. Trisha Lake should be a guest on your thing. She&#8217;s an amazing marketer. So anyway, you&#8217;ll get a lot of benefit of the doubt and you will attract the right customers. And higher prices weeds out bad customers. You have less problems. We all have the most problems when we start off in these businesses because we say yes to stuff we should have said no to. Will you clean this white powder off here? I don&#8217;t know what this is. I don&#8217;t know what it is either. Sure, I&#8217;ll clean that off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> We were painting apartments. I&#8217;m not allowed to talk to customers because I&#8217;m such a freaking yes woman that it&#8217;s like, don&#8217;t give me away from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> I have a friend that had a cleaning company, but now he has a lawn mowing company because he would say yes to mowing people&#8217;s lawns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yes, I know. And the problem is, it&#8217;s like, I know I could do this, but it&#8217;s like, doesn&#8217;t mean you should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. So now he has a lawn mowing company. So it&#8217;s kind of funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> That is super funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> But yeah, you&#8217;ll learn to say no. That&#8217;s \u2014 for those of you out there, let those people clean those awful jobs themselves. That stuff is not for you. And that stuff is not for your employees. That stuff just destroys morale, creates a lot of resentment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-15\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The End-of-Day Employee Survey<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> We have a survey at the end of every day. At first there was some pushback from employees, like, I don&#8217;t want to do a survey every day. It&#8217;s just three questions. Like, how was your day today? Zero to poop, basically, right? Or 10 to \u2014 I don&#8217;t know exactly what it says, I haven&#8217;t looked at it in a while. But it&#8217;s basically, if it&#8217;s below a certain level, like I had a crappy day, Savannah will check in on them. Because guess what? We&#8217;ve noticed that the amount of people that just don&#8217;t show up the next day stopped. That I had a bad day and then I don&#8217;t want to come to work the next day, and then I&#8217;m never gonna come back to work again. That&#8217;s a phenomenon of you overwork your best people and give them these really terrible jobs because of course they can do it. So we survey every day. How was your day? Anything you need from us, every single day at the end of the workday. They can&#8217;t clock out till they do the survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I like that. It allows you to probably reduce the insidiousness of discontent that&#8217;s just kind of brewing, right? And you&#8217;re just not aware of it because they don&#8217;t feel like it&#8217;s the right time or place to say it. So it&#8217;s like, no, this is the right time and place every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> We have one employee that always is having a bad day, but we still check in on her. It&#8217;s just she&#8217;s just having a hard time in life. I think she wants somebody to just check in on her, she just needs a call and a pat on the back, some human interaction. So it&#8217;s just meeting people where they&#8217;re at, what their needs are. And I laugh about that one because I&#8217;m like, she probably could use a therapist. And we have free therapy too. We have \u2014 well, that is a benefit. Maybe we need to make sure she gets in on that. Everybody could use somebody to talk to when they&#8217;re having a tough time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-16\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Pod Leaders Do<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So you&#8217;re mentioning Savannah, that she&#8217;s the one calling. So what are the pod leaders responsible for versus where does Savannah step in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, so day to day, pod leaders \u2014 the main responsibility is to host a supply drop for their pod two days a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I wanted to know about your inventory and how you handled that, so \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, so we have Mercedes vans. We should have got bigger vans, but next time, live and learn. If you implement our pod system, don&#8217;t do the Mercedes vans, get a bigger van. Don&#8217;t listen to your employees telling you these vans are too big, they can&#8217;t drive them. Buy the biggest van you can so you can have more inventory in the vans. That&#8217;s our mistake, that we bought these Mercedes vans that are too small. They&#8217;re great, but I wish they were bigger. So they host their pod meeting. Each pod leader has two pod meetings that they run a week. They&#8217;re geographically spread out all over St. Louis. So six to eight people come to that pod meeting, are resupplied. They do the company news, company information, some cultural highlights. It&#8217;s kind of like a Level 10 meeting for the techs where they have to share something great. They have to read off their scorecard. We&#8217;ve automated a scorecard to the employees on their key metrics, like their quality score, their response rate from their customers, their productivity, their efficiency, their revenue, and then their attendance from the week prior. They don&#8217;t have to read all that. All they have to do is read off their quality and their response rate. But they have to share that with the group and then ask for help if they need any help with anything this week. So make them all engage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then they have to train new hires. So field supervisors are in charge of rotating through training new hires. We have six field supervisors, so we probably need one or two more. And then the last responsibility they have is just checking in on trainees after their first two weeks, just to drop in, see how the quality of the work is. We have one field manager for that. We&#8217;re thinking about adding a second, that all they do is quality checks, customer visits, customer service. Just be a face of the company out and around, and have a van full of supplies too. And another great way to get supplies to people is Uber. We&#8217;ve been doing that for a long time. So if somebody forgets something \u2014 all right, because how expensive is it for a manager to get in their car, drive, and be gone for an hour, right? That&#8217;s $35. Well, if it&#8217;s an Uber and it&#8217;s $35, just do the Uber, right? Just losing that opportunity of somebody in your office that can&#8217;t take calls \u2014 it&#8217;s more than $35. It&#8217;s that lost opportunity cost too. So that&#8217;s how we mostly resupply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So you have one central office, from the sounds of it, and then you guys just \u2014 do the cleaning techs ever come to the office other than the orientation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> I mean, if they want to, but generally there&#8217;s not. Some that live by might come by here, but generally not. That&#8217;s the greatest thing \u2014 so we have a quarterly meeting. We might not see everyone in person except four times a year. We have a quarterly meeting. The last few years we&#8217;ve done an all-day, all-company meeting, where we just do it as a training day. I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re gonna do it this year. We just don&#8217;t have the bandwidth, and we don&#8217;t have anyone lined up to facilitate it. But the quarterlies are a great opportunity to get all together, share some culture, have breakfast, do something. And that generally is a good reset, that everyday \u2014 that 90 day cycle of kind of resetting. And they&#8217;re still getting a weekly meeting with their field supervisor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-17\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Inventory and Laundry on the Back End<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I just love to ask the hows. So when it comes to things like cloths, rags, whatever, they&#8217;re just taking a shit ton every twice a week and bringing back all the dirties and then you guys handle it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, we do everything on the back end for them just to make the job really straightforward. So no laundry for them. If I were to do it again or go into new markets, I might go all paper, because I could make the argument that paper&#8217;s just as green as microfiber. And we don&#8217;t have to get into all this, but microfiber being shipped over from China is not as green as we&#8217;d like it to be. If it was manufactured here \u2014 yada yada. Paper might be just as eco-friendly. And the word green is overly used. But we have three large commercial washers in the bottom floor of this building. We have two large commercial dryers and then another dryer. The dryers just blow my mind because they&#8217;re kind of scary, because a couple human beings could get into these things. Like just bad decisions could be made. I always worry about that. There&#8217;s these giant laundry, and then I&#8217;ve got a couple of folks that just all they do is clean tools. So for every home, there&#8217;s a clean set of tools. There is 20 or 30 cleaning cloths per home they&#8217;re given. So we&#8217;re giving out a lot of supplies. We have \u2014 I don&#8217;t know if we&#8217;ve inventoried, it&#8217;s really like \u2014 it&#8217;s not really worth inventorying because all the money is really made on the labor side of things. People get in the weeds about losing cleaning cloths and things like that, but it&#8217;s still less than 1% of our cost. It might be, in a bad month when we had to buy a few extra vacuums, it might get up to 2%. But it&#8217;s not worth auditing how many we have. But it&#8217;s probably in like the 50 to 100,000 range of cleaning cloths out there. Don&#8217;t have an exact number, but it&#8217;s a big number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, I know that&#8217;s how I feel. I&#8217;m like, there&#8217;s thousands and thousands and thousands out in the wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> There&#8217;s a lot of these things floating around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. And I know I&#8217;m getting into the weeds. I love knowing how do you do this, how do you do that kind of thing. So obviously we&#8217;re not really talking big picture right now, which I&#8217;d love to just get your overall general takes on \u2014 why do you think that you guys have been able to do this? Obviously you mentioned your wife, you mentioned your leadership team. Is there something in particular that you feel you&#8217;ve done so excellently that this is allowed to continue year over year like this, outside of the COVID?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-18\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Relentless Pursuit of Excellence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. So I think we are in a relentless pursuit of excellence. There is no part of our business that is ever like, good enough. So once you&#8217;ve got something good, that&#8217;s fine, that piece is stable, move on, fix something else. It&#8217;s like the OS system of having these \u2014 you identify your issues, and then the issues become rocks, and the rocks become projects, and the projects get done. And every quarter, if every leader had two or three rocks, and you move three things per leader, so five of us, 15 projects a quarter, you&#8217;re just continuously improving, right? I think brand \u2014 it&#8217;s an often used word. Brand in terms of our color scheme, our logo, all that&#8217;s good. But our brand promise is really at the heart of this. Our promise is to be consistently delightful. Our promise is something that we meet in everything we do. Our culture is really well defined and we are able to attract and keep people that buy into it. And there&#8217;s \u2014 we have raving fans, internal staff that love working here. And if you would have told me that 15 years ago, I&#8217;d have been like, nobody&#8217;s gonna want to work at a cleaning company. Who&#8217;s gonna want to do this? I would have been right there with some skeptics. But you do this well enough over and over again. So it&#8217;s never any one thing. It&#8217;s just this relentless pursuit of being better, pursuing better. And every week identifying what&#8217;s going on and what the issues are that are driving you forward, identifying the key metrics of what allows you to grow. And honestly, understanding your financial model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-19\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Customer Acquisition Math<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Key one is just how much can you affordably \u2014 people in our industry, I think, are scared. I want to say cheap, but are scared to spend money to acquire customers. And if you really look at it, if you have your business dialed in and your churn is three, four percent \u2014 somewhere in that range, let&#8217;s say 5%. 5% is kind of like good industry average. Ours is lower, but let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re at five. Five&#8217;s good, because that gives you 20 months of a customer on your service. You know, our company, we only do about 1.5 visits a month, 1.55 to be exact, but let&#8217;s say 1.5, it&#8217;s easier math. Our average customer with those two spends 442 to 450. It&#8217;s going up because we&#8217;re raising prices. Let&#8217;s say 450 a month. That&#8217;s $9,000 that that customer is worth. If my gross profits are 50%, then I could make the argument that I could spend $4,500 to acquire that customer and still break even over time. Now that&#8217;s not a great business decision, but if you&#8217;re looking at it as marginal costs above and beyond the customers you already have, you could make that justification. That&#8217;s how big tech spends all this money to acquire customers. I&#8217;m not saying you do that, but I am saying if you&#8217;re stuck on spending $100, $200, $300, might not be enough. Right now our model is that we&#8217;re at like 360 to acquire a customer, and we&#8217;re really good with that. I think that&#8217;s a very safe zone. I think we could be safe all the way up to 600 and still have plenty of room to grow. And that&#8217;s even blending one-times with recurrings for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> That&#8217;s what I wanted to ask. Is your churn including the one-times?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. So our lifetime value, including one-times, is about 22 weeks, because our churn is so low, our customer attrition. So this is where you really just have to know your numbers. If you&#8217;re only getting 10 visits on average, because you do a lot of one-times, or your turnover of customers is really high, then that math won&#8217;t work. So then you need to fix operations before you start spending money on marketing, right? So to be perfectly fair, to spend the kind of money on marketing that we spend \u2014 to spend 30, 40,000 dollars a month on marketing \u2014 you have to have really dialed in operations, because it&#8217;s just too painful to see them leave on the back end because you did not deliver the promises that they expected, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. It&#8217;s lighting the money on fire, and it&#8217;s at worse because now you have somebody who is disappointed, so they may tell other people. You don&#8217;t know the effect of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yep. So we&#8217;re probably more like 26,000 a month, but I have a full-time marketing manager. All in, it&#8217;s over 35,000 a month with people and all the things that it takes to do what we&#8217;re doing. So it&#8217;s your operations. It just starts with that. Being really good at what you do \u2014 that&#8217;s not sufficient to grow, but that&#8217;s the foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-20\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Recruiting Spend and Indeed Strategy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> When it comes to procurement of staff, how much do you think you spend on Indeed a month, or percentage of revenue perhaps?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> It&#8217;s not as much as you&#8217;d think. Like 1% of revenue, maybe? Not even.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay. I was kind of curious, because we just ramped up ours and I was curious where you guys fall for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> We&#8217;ve really been reworking our ads. We&#8217;ve been working with our rep at Indeed, because we&#8217;re like, hey, we&#8217;re not getting the results we used to get. And we&#8217;ve been really hammering our rep because we&#8217;re spending a good amount, that we end up getting a rep. But I think you could call and get on the phone with somebody there and be like, what do I need to do? Or just look at our ads. We&#8217;re making a ton of changes. It&#8217;s not public, but it&#8217;s out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, everybody&#8217;s is out there. So just that continual honing of literally everything, like you said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. But some things we were doing \u2014 we were running like eight or 10 different ads. Now we&#8217;re narrowing it down to three ads, putting more budget behind those three ads. Those three ads are getting more visibility. We&#8217;re changing our strategies because Indeed&#8217;s changing. The platforms are changing. So it&#8217;s gotten harder. I would say 1% of revenue is not a bad target. It&#8217;s probably a little lower than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, that&#8217;s really good to know. I know we&#8217;re running on time here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> I can go a little longer. I just know my daughter has music at 4:30. So I gotta get home, probably gotta leave here probably at 50. So we got a few more minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, got it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-21\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Creating Delight: The Three Pillars<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I want to hear \u2014 you mentioned delight, and I love the concept of delight. It&#8217;s something we talk about at ZenMaid all the time. And how I personally define delight is a lot to do with the unexpected of it all, that unexpected delight. So I&#8217;d love to hear, on both internal and external customers, your staff and your clients, can you give me some examples of how you infuse that delight?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Well, first off, there&#8217;s a really good book from a former Chick-fil-A \u2014 I think it&#8217;s just about delight. So I&#8217;ll think of it in a minute. So first off, I think of it as three pillars when we talk about creating delight in my company. First pillar is operational excellence. We&#8217;re really good at what we do. That starts with hiring really good people. That&#8217;s the first thing. We make no sacrifices on who we hire, who will be in their homes. So operational excellence starts with that 500-to-one funnel that we talked about. It also starts with the fact that we only do one thing and we do it really well. So we don&#8217;t paint houses, we don&#8217;t mow lawns, we don&#8217;t even do commercial cleaning. We just do high quality residential cleaning. That&#8217;s what we do. That&#8217;s it. And we&#8217;re really focused on that. That&#8217;s what I mean by operational excellence. We have really great technology, really great service delivery, really great systems. Hone in on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second part is the idea of creating a really custom experience to your customers. So I mentioned we had 1,400 customers. If I ever hear one of my employees say that to a customer, they might not be an employee here. It&#8217;d be like \u2014 ma&#8217;am, you&#8217;re only one of 1,400 customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Meaning a derogatory of like, you think you&#8217;re the only person?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Not if a customer asks how many customers there are, that&#8217;s not the issue. It&#8217;s like, if a customer was complaining about something, and then it&#8217;s like, ma&#8217;am, we have 1,400 other customers to service. I&#8217;ve had customer service reps be like, look, we have millions of customers. I&#8217;m like, I don&#8217;t care. I&#8217;m the person on the phone right now. So no, it&#8217;s all about them. You customize the experience to them, right? You only make it about that person. So we have really detailed scopes of work. We know everyone&#8217;s name, the house name, the pet&#8217;s name, where they have their trash, all the stuff, right? Trash bags, where to park, all the details, really detailed site-specific scope of work. And that grows and shrinks over time. Like if Fluffy died, you want to remove Fluffy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then the final part is, to your point, this idea of memorable moments, which is our third pillar. Memorable moments is how you create delight, above and beyond. Some of that&#8217;s just as simple as leaving really good notes every time. I noticed this, that&#8217;s beautiful, that&#8217;s great \u2014 good adjectives, right? In your notes. We train our techs on good adjectives, fun adjectives. Throw the word delight in there. I was delighted to help you today. Because that&#8217;s gonna be in your scorecards that go out. The first line is delighted, delightful, great work. That&#8217;s the one they want to hone in on. So use elevated language in your memorable moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Build relationships. A lot of companies don&#8217;t want their techs to have relationships with their staff. No, no. Build depth of relationships with your people. We allow them now \u2014 spend five minutes when you get there talking, getting to know what they need. Don&#8217;t just jump right into work. If they offer you a drink, drink it. That&#8217;s a sign of hospitality. Then you&#8217;re in a relationship with them. Just simple stuff that we train on, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-22\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Surprise Gifts and the SightStones Nonprofit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> And then we do surprise gifts throughout the year. We just finished giving out SightStones to all of our customers. So we delivered 1,400 SightStones to all of our customers over a four-week period. SightStones is our nonprofit. It&#8217;s a small clay memorable device. It&#8217;s kind of like a worry stone. It&#8217;s got a hole in the center. And they came out of our journey with our son&#8217;s rare disease. The device is a couple things. It&#8217;s a worry stone. It&#8217;s for anyone that&#8217;s going through something to hold on to, have something tangible. So it&#8217;s a really nice gift. To be honest, I love gifts that are best in class. And if you can&#8217;t give them a best in class gift, don&#8217;t give them a gift. So a $5 little SightStone \u2014 that&#8217;s the wholesale price that the company paid for these back to the nonprofit. And we actually just had another company in Ohio, she&#8217;s launching this \u2014 she has a smaller company, 300 customers \u2014 but great little gift to give your customers to remember that, hey, you&#8217;re going through something, how important your vision is in the world, how important it is for you to keep going, do what you need to do. So these little memorable moments are really key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So in the past we&#8217;ve done Swedish dishcloths. That&#8217;s best in class, they&#8217;re the very best dishcloth you can give. So here&#8217;s the thing. I like watches. If somebody gave me a $10 watch, I would say thank you, but it would probably be given to one of my children, right? It would not make it onto my hands. So our customers are affluent people. We can&#8217;t give them the kind of gifts that they can buy themselves. So the SightStones, like a charitable thing \u2014 Seeds of Happiness is another good one. They&#8217;re a little smiley face that you give to people when they&#8217;ve experienced a loss or something in their life. But they&#8217;re also just a happy thing to have on your desk. These are little three-dollar things, little $5 things. They make incredible gifts for your customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-23\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Flowers, Cards, and Automating Thoughtfulness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> And then finally \u2014 there&#8217;s a lot to creating delight with us. We have this whole channel on our Connecteam, or Slack previously, where we have about 1% of the company&#8217;s budget, about three to four thousand dollars a month, just to give out flowers, cards, sympathy. One of our customers \u2014 the husband, they&#8217;ve been customers for years, they actually came over from Regal, that company that I talked about \u2014 the employees that had been serving that house for years asked that we send them cards because the husband just passed away. And we&#8217;re like, no, cards \u2014 flowers. That&#8217;s a flowers thing. But guys, definitely, yes, we want to give them something. So you can automate some of that with technology by using a card service, getting online with a company that just does flowers. You&#8217;ll pay a bit more versus maybe getting a local florist if you want to do that. But just getting a handwritten card, very meaningful for your customers. Some flowers, things like that. So a lot of that stuff goes out. Probably two bouquets a day and maybe a half dozen cards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I love that. I like the point that you made of, they can buy whatever they want to buy. It&#8217;s not about that. It&#8217;s the thoughtfulness of it, that handwritten card, flowers, and the tech noticing, right? They&#8217;re noticing things. So you&#8217;re basically just instructing your techs, like, have those conversations. If you see a change in anything in the house or the household, let us know so we can send them something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. Sometimes, like when Fluffy dies, it&#8217;s hard to send flowers for that because we just only have so much budget. But a card. And it&#8217;s still \u2014 they&#8217;re sending these things so much that we have to make some executive decisions on what these are. But our staff has really bought into this, in terms of creating this delight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-24\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where the Industry Is Headed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> And probably the last thing that I&#8217;d love to cover would just be where I see the industry going and what&#8217;s coming for the future, what we should be thinking about. So that&#8217;s maybe a good place to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Tell me, what do you think is the future, even in the next year versus next five years? Obviously AI huge, but \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> So I think AI is huge, but here&#8217;s the thing. What I think of AI is, for indirect labor in our businesses, we&#8217;re gonna need to lower our costs. There&#8217;s a lot of ways we should be thinking about reducing indirect labor. I think that private equity is coming for the industry. Could be a bad thing, could be a good thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Like an Amazon type thing? I&#8217;ve heard that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> More like companies that want to buy up 10 or 15 of these things, that are my company size, and build a $50 million company, and then build a $100 million company. Economies of scale, right? So even though my company seems bigger than some of yours, there&#8217;s still so much inefficiency in what we do. Our marketing manager could do the same work for 10 markets, right? So I look at it as there&#8217;s a couple of directions we can go. We can sell to PE, or we could probably be PE ourselves and kind of \u2014 I think co-op models, where maybe 10 of us come together, share brand, share back office resources. We&#8217;re gonna have to let go of our egos a little bit, to kind of get there. But it&#8217;s gonna be healthy for us because we&#8217;re not gonna have to have an HR specialist for a $500,000 company, or a million dollars. It just doesn&#8217;t make sense. Even a five million dollar company. There&#8217;s just \u2014 and my indirect labor is probably half of some of your guys&#8217;, but we&#8217;ve put that towards benefits or other things. So I think consolidation is gonna happen. I think technology is gonna drive some of that. I think we&#8217;re all moving onto similar technology platforms. There&#8217;s so many companies on ZenMaid, there&#8217;s so many companies on all these other technology platforms. So I think that&#8217;s coming. And I think we have to kind of shift our thinking about, do we do it on our own? Do we create some partnerships and work together, work in a more collaborative nature than we have in the past? We&#8217;re always willing to share, but we&#8217;re kind of just doing it on our own. I&#8217;m imagining in the near future, to fight off PE, that we really need to have 20, 30, 50 million dollars of top line revenue, so we have resources in our markets to build really good marketing campaigns and share them across 10 or 15 different locations. And I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a tomorrow thing, but it&#8217;s certainly in the next few years thing. Bigger and bigger investors are coming after the space, because \u2014 whether or not you look at this as the ideal model, it&#8217;s gonna be around for a long time. It&#8217;s not gonna necessarily be easily replaced by robotics technology, not right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Right. Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Someday that&#8217;s a threat too, but that&#8217;s not a tomorrow thing. But the bigger threat is just that these bigger companies come in and decide that they&#8217;re gonna drive down costs because now they have the keys to the house, and they are just using cleaning as a loss leader to run their plumbing company, to run their other things. So they just look at the cleaning as like, we don&#8217;t really care what we charge, because now we&#8217;re in the house and we notice that the plumbing is broken, and that&#8217;s a $7,800 fix. So we made all the money we ever needed to make off this cleaning. We can just give away the cleaning for free, practically. Not for free, but very marginal. So there&#8217;s a bigger threat there that we&#8217;re not seeing. We&#8217;re like, they&#8217;re not gonna make money on it. I&#8217;m not sure that they care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. When you&#8217;re like an HVAC or plumbing, like you said, or electrical, that&#8217;s where the money is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-25\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How Independent Owners Can Compete: &#8220;Out-Human Them&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Now, where I think they&#8217;re gonna fall flat is that I have never seen one of these really do well without somebody that really cares running it. So we can out-human them. We&#8217;re gonna have to get financially savvy, we&#8217;re gonna have to get more sophisticated in how we run our businesses, we&#8217;re gonna have to be better operators, and we&#8217;re gonna probably have to create some partnerships we hadn&#8217;t been thinking about five years, 10 years ago. All that&#8217;s gonna happen. But we can out-human them, because they&#8217;re just gonna be looking at spreadsheets, looking at numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah. A commodity of it, as opposed to like, no, to do this well, you have to have the heart in it, for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, so that&#8217;s where I think we have some advantage, and we just can&#8217;t squander it. We can&#8217;t think that we have unlimited time. There is a time period where this will start to happen faster and faster. The biggest threat to our industry is how fractured it is, and that&#8217;s the biggest opportunity to people that are gonna be opportunistic, that have a ton of money to come in and disrupt it. So there&#8217;s some things that have been on the horizon for years, but they&#8217;re starting to come together. You&#8217;re seeing it in other industries, and PE rapidly evolving. So I would educate yourselves on private equity, on what they&#8217;re good at, what they&#8217;re not good at. When those calls come for your company, is their offer what you want? I think even the smaller companies will eventually \u2014 if you have 10 plus employees, will eventually be appealing to private equity on some level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Yeah, I definitely can attest to \u2014 it seems like even in the past year, the number of cold emails I get about like, we&#8217;d like to buy your company, it&#8217;s shocking, I guess. Obviously I&#8217;m not interested in that right now, but I think a lot of people will be. So like you said, that kind of conglomerate will be occurring whether we want it to or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> It&#8217;s happening. And we&#8217;re driving it faster and faster with technology. And I think we all have to be adopting technology quicker. I think we need to be really looking at how do we compete in a world where prices are going up dramatically. There&#8217;s gonna be some price sensitivity, but it really comes down to running really efficient companies, using technology to reduce waste, reduce indirect labor. Make sure you&#8217;re scheduling as tightly as possible, creating as much revenue per head as possible. So I talked about it \u2014 we&#8217;ll probably do six million dollars with 60 techs. So that&#8217;s about $100,000 a head, not all of them being full time. I think that needs to expand to probably more like $120, $130,000 a head. I know some companies that are already there, and I&#8217;m feeling behind a little bit because I see them already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Amazing. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> So that would have sounded like I was \u2014 I wasn&#8217;t saying that to sound good. I&#8217;m saying I feel behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> No, I really appreciate your transparency and just sharing that, because I just love when people are willing to share actual numbers so that we can get context. It&#8217;s just so useful, for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah. There&#8217;s gonna be some folks that are gonna really excel in this new \u2014 and I don&#8217;t know that AI is the big threat that we think it is, because I think it&#8217;s gonna be baked into all the technology we&#8217;re using, and we&#8217;re not gonna have to build all this stuff ourselves, right? But it&#8217;s gonna change the way we do work. I&#8217;m already seeing it in some beta stuff that I&#8217;m looking at, where it&#8217;s making suggestions on things we should be doing, where I&#8217;m like, wow, it&#8217;s actually right. That&#8217;s a really good suggestion, we should do that. And it&#8217;s not even asking us. We didn&#8217;t ask it a question. It&#8217;s looking at the data and creating a suggestion. We&#8217;re like, okay, that&#8217;s interesting. So that&#8217;s the next level of AI, where it starts to be suggesting things and it&#8217;s right more often than it&#8217;s not. The next level is just gonna do stuff for us. So yeah, I think we&#8217;re looking at a very fast moving future. A lot of good, a lot of opportunity. There&#8217;s still tons of opportunity in this for people that are starting, that are established. This is wide open for people that are gonna just deliver a really good experience to customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-26\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Real Meaning of &#8220;Filthy Rich&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> It is amazing. It&#8217;s a fantastic industry and it&#8217;s just amazing to see what can be done. I think you&#8217;re the biggest owner \u2014 not physically, but biggest owner that we&#8217;ve had on the podcast. So I just \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> On the podcast. I was going to say, I&#8217;ll get you a couple that I know that have bigger companies than I do. So I know a few people that might. It may not be your audience, but they&#8217;re out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I like having large owners on because it just shows what&#8217;s possible. Because I think you were gonna blow a lot of people&#8217;s minds of, this is \u2014 those types of numbers are possible. Very difficult, but possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Well, here&#8217;s what I think is possible. I remember \u2014 this is the thing that used to \u2014 we&#8217;d go to these conferences and be like, who&#8217;s at a million dollars? This gives me tingles when I say it. Who&#8217;s gonna make a million dollars? We&#8217;ve got people that have million dollar clubs, all this stuff. That&#8217;s irrelevant. That&#8217;s revenue. But we&#8217;re gonna have people making a million dollars in profit in the next couple of years. It&#8217;s already \u2014 I already have some peers that might already be there. And I&#8217;m gonna throw them a party when they do, because it&#8217;s really exciting. And I hope to be right behind them. And that is possible. And that&#8217;s where you start to have resources to grow faster and do some really great things, and also start a nonprofit and do some other stuff. We couldn&#8217;t do that if our base needs from this weren&#8217;t being met, right? We&#8217;re making more money than we need to make. So now we&#8217;ve been one of the largest donors to some nonprofits that are affecting this disease for our son, for years. Just individual donors. We want to expand that reach. We want to create almost a million dollars in financial benefit for fighting these diseases, right? And we have the time and energy to do that because we have a business that&#8217;s big enough to do that. So that&#8217;s what I want for more people, is that they can have that financial freedom, create good things with their money, right? Money&#8217;s not a problem. Money is a tool. Money can do really great things if you put your energy in the right stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> You&#8217;re giving me chills. That&#8217;s literally the ethos behind the name of the podcast, Filthy Rich, of like, we&#8217;re not just talking about having a pile of cash. It&#8217;s like, what can you do with that? And that&#8217;s the beautiful thing about money, is look at the change you&#8217;re gonna make in the world because of it. Why we have to run great, profitable businesses. You gotta go, Matt. Thank you so much. We&#8217;ll link all your stuff down below. Talk to you soon. Bye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Matt Ricketts:<\/strong> Yeah, I gotta go. All right. Talk to you soon. Bye, Steph. See ya.<\/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 today&#8217;s guest is truly a legend in the cleaning industry. And I cannot wait for you guys to hear his story. Matt Ricketts, thank you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17415,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"How Matt Ricketts Built a $6M Cleaning Company","_seopress_titles_desc":"Matt Ricketts shares how he scaled his St. Louis residential cleaning company to $6 million \u2014 covering solo conversion, hiring, retention, delight, and PE.","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17414","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=17414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17417,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17414\/revisions\/17417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}