{"id":17555,"date":"2026-07-23T12:08:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T12:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17555"},"modified":"2026-07-23T12:08:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T12:08:22","slug":"client-red-flags-every-cleaning-business-owner-should-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/client-red-flags-every-cleaning-business-owner-should-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Client Red Flags Every Cleaning Business Owner Should Know"},"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\/159-client-red-flags-every-cleaning-business-owner\/id1791590022?i=1000778021220\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/5DCqjoTlMQex9nSooFqkAk?si=4d77d68fe22547c9\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cnP2kV7TiBM\">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: #159: Client Red Flags Every Cleaning Business Owner Should Know\" 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\/5DCqjoTlMQex9nSooFqkAk?si=4d77d68fe22547c9&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><strong>:<\/strong>&nbsp;Hello, my friends. I am so excited for you to hear this conversation with Miss Maria Dorian. She is one of my favorite people ever. She&#8217;s an absolute delight. Little content advisory&nbsp;warning: there are some swear words in this episode, so if you&#8217;ve got little ears around, put some AirPods in. Can&#8217;t wait for you to hear it.&nbsp;Enjoy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and today&#8217;s lovely guest is my friend, Miss Maria Dorian. Maria is my teammate at ZenMaid. She also is an incredibly experienced cleaning business owner with many, many years of experience under her belt. She runs several different companies. Maria, can you tell the people all of the things that you do? You do so many things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I do. Plus now I have hobbies, which is kind of&nbsp;cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, ew, what are those?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;A whole new world for&nbsp;me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;What are those?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Ah, right, I know. Okay, so first, most people would know me from being the owner of Task Away VA, a virtual assistant company. And then, let&#8217;s see, I had a maid service in Austin, Texas that I ran for 14 years, sold it right under a million in run rate, and then started another service in two locations here while doing it all remotely in Spain. That would be it. And then obviously I&#8217;m on the ZenMaid team. I should have mentioned that first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;No, it is amazing all of the things that you do. And as Maria just mentioned, guys, she lives in Spain. She runs her cleaning service in America completely remotely, and she&nbsp;just has such a wonderful mind, especially for things like automation, delegation \u2014 as she mentioned, being the owner of Task Away VA. She knows how to systematize. And Maria and I&nbsp;had a conversation a couple weeks ago with one of our content writers, ZenMaid Jenna, a fabulous writer, and she was asking about how we utilize software. And the conversation just kind&nbsp;of went a very interesting direction. We talked far further than software, I would say. And that was prompting me to ask her to be on the podcast again. Maria has been&nbsp;on the podcast \u2014 we&#8217;ll definitely link her original episode down below, guys, if you have not watched that one. It&#8217;s a great one. But in this conversation, I would love to&nbsp;expand upon what we discussed when we were conversing with Jenna a few weeks ago, specifically on how we see the industry changing, how we stay on top of things, how we&nbsp;stay in front of the&nbsp;competition,&nbsp;and&nbsp;just&nbsp;how&nbsp;it&nbsp;has&nbsp;changed&nbsp;and&nbsp;how&nbsp;you&nbsp;have&nbsp;seen&nbsp;it&nbsp;change&nbsp;recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How&nbsp;the&nbsp;industry&nbsp;has&nbsp;changed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, so when I first started my cleaning business in Austin, there really wasn&#8217;t any competition. If you guys know Sharon Tinberg, she was one of the biggest competitions. And I tell&nbsp;this story very often \u2014 she&#8217;s probably rolling her eyes going, &#8220;Okay, we&#8217;ve heard that story before.&#8221; But I remember one day driving on 35, which at the time had hardly any&nbsp;traffic, and one of their cars passed me. It was the Upstairs Maid at the time, passed me on my left-hand side. And I remember thinking, &#8220;I wanna be them when I&nbsp;grow up.&#8221; There really wasn&#8217;t&nbsp;a&nbsp;lot&nbsp;of&nbsp;competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And obviously now, fast forward, it&#8217;s a huge market. Now it seems like, like you said, everybody and their grandmother \u2014 literally everybody and their grandmother \u2014 has a cleaning service, is&nbsp;starting a cleaning service, a different model of cleaning service. Because before then, we didn&#8217;t have the digital cleaning services that we do now, which would be people like me that are&nbsp;running everything remotely and all the booking forms and all that fun stuff. So fast forward, yeah, it&#8217;s kind of a different world when it comes to cleaning. And I think even&nbsp;just the very function of cleaning in people&#8217;s homes has changed. So for me, I&#8217;ve seen massive, massive changes and lots of growth, lots of new ways of having to think through&nbsp;things, having to keep up and adjust. Even COVID was huge for us. It changed so many things, especially on the employee side. So yeah, just massive,&nbsp;massive&nbsp;changes&nbsp;and&nbsp;growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Standing out when everyone&nbsp;has&nbsp;a&nbsp;cleaning&nbsp;business<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;For those of our listeners who are new or even considering opening a business, I hear so much, or I see in the Facebook groups, like, how can I possibly stand out&nbsp;from all of this competition? Like you said, everybody and their grandmother is opening a cleaning business. And so I think that is a huge concern for people, and valid if they&nbsp;are really struggling, especially against maybe bottom-of-the-barrel pricing, a race to the bottom. I have lots of thoughts on how to stand out from the competition, but for somebody who is newer&nbsp;\u2014 what do you have to say to them? And what can we tactically do&nbsp;in&nbsp;order&nbsp;to&nbsp;make&nbsp;that&nbsp;happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;So it&#8217;s definitely a numbers game, right? And I always recommend that you use the resources that you have right now, today, at your disposal. So maybe you&#8217;ve got somebody coming in&nbsp;from the corporate world \u2014 this is really common. People from Microsoft and all these big-name companies that are starting their cleaning service. So you may not have that budget, but look&nbsp;at what you have right now, today, at your disposal. You probably have time. And so even just flyering your five rounds when you are&nbsp;cleaning&nbsp;a&nbsp;house&nbsp;is&nbsp;helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You might be able to do things that those larger companies can&#8217;t or won&#8217;t. So it could be approaching an apartment complex and saying, &#8220;Hey, how about I clean your lobby area&nbsp;in exchange for letting me put flyers out?&#8221; There are things that you can do where you are now that will help you stand out. For us, back in the day \u2014&nbsp;because I never had a big startup fund \u2014 what we did have is we were on a really, really busy street, actually the biggest street in our city. And we put&nbsp;out one of those little tents with the balloons. And we had somebody out there in costume, in a maid costume, saying, &#8220;Get your free donuts and quotes.&#8221;&nbsp;Like,&nbsp;anything&nbsp;and&nbsp;everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh&nbsp;my&nbsp;gosh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. And then, because the building was so large that we were in, we spoke to our landlord and he let us do a citywide garage sale. So of course we were&nbsp;advertising, &#8220;Hey, citywide garage sale put on by Welcome Home Cleaning,&#8221; all of that good stuff. It&#8217;s cleaning for a reason. That&#8217;s a great way to make yourself stand out. There are&nbsp;just lots of things that you can do. I would say, especially if you don&#8217;t have a huge budget, get really, really creative&nbsp;and&nbsp;find&nbsp;creative&nbsp;solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I had never heard the maid outfit thing. That is incredible. I love that. We had never done a home show or anything like that. I don&#8217;t know if every city does&nbsp;that type of thing, like home and garden shows, that trade show, if you will. We were going to do one in March of 2020, and then everything got canceled, of course,&nbsp;because of COVID. But what I was going to do is my very burly, large male employee that I had at the time \u2014 we were gonna put him in a maid&nbsp;outfit and have him go around the trade show and send people to our booth, for a raffle or a giveaway or whatever. It&#8217;s really the&nbsp;concept&nbsp;of&nbsp;purple&nbsp;cowing&nbsp;it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And what&#8217;s really coming to mind is there&#8217;s this sound bite that you&#8217;ll see on home renovation accounts and things where it&#8217;s just like, you gotta get good at being poor. And&nbsp;what that means \u2014 and I don&#8217;t mean that in any negative way \u2014 is you need to be creative. If we don&#8217;t have money, we need to use something else, right?&nbsp;And that is going to be creativity and getting out there and being bold, because you don&#8217;t have the luxury of sitting behind your computer and just running ads and paying to&nbsp;get that visibility. Obviously the things that Maria is describing do take money. However, you&#8217;re really exchanging mostly your time for the results, as opposed&nbsp;to&nbsp;money&nbsp;for&nbsp;the&nbsp;results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I think it takes a certain level of unabashed guts and going out there. You kind of have to put all shame out the window and just don&#8217;t be afraid&nbsp;to be cringe. I think that&#8217;s another thing that people really struggle with \u2014 whatever, my generation and younger, we&#8217;ll call it cringe, but like the trying, the earnestness. I think that&nbsp;millennials and above are good at it, but anybody my age or younger really struggles with, like, don&#8217;t be seen trying, because if you fail, that&#8217;s embarrassing. Where it&#8217;s like, you need&nbsp;to throw that completely&nbsp;out&nbsp;the&nbsp;window&nbsp;nowadays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Getting creative&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;and&nbsp;getting&nbsp;hungry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, for sure. And I think another thing that I had going for me was, at the time, I was hungry. And so those things \u2014 getting in a maid outfit, or&nbsp;going to a teacher&#8217;s back-to-school and offering all the teachers a free goodie bag \u2014 none of that mattered when you&#8217;re hungry and you&#8217;re in a situation of, if I don&#8217;t clean&nbsp;houses for a living, my family doesn&#8217;t eat. So I think just having that drive and motivation helped at the time immensely. So find the hunger, find the why. It&#8217;s almost like&nbsp;the expression, feel the fear and do it anyway. Just say, you know, F it and move forward, and don&#8217;t even think about the fear, and just do whatever you need to&nbsp;do to get those phones ringing and clients booked and employees working&nbsp;and&nbsp;all&nbsp;that&nbsp;fun&nbsp;stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, absolutely. And there really is something incredibly powerful about meeting people, getting out there and networking in that manner. Because a lot of people, I think they say, &#8220;I&#8217;ll do anything,&#8221;&nbsp;but what they mean is, &#8220;I&#8217;ll do anything behind the computer where I don&#8217;t have to put myself out there,&#8221; or &#8220;I&#8217;ll do anything but get on video.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, so you&nbsp;won&#8217;t do everything. You have a very limited capacity for that bravery that it takes. Because what we&#8217;re really talking about is sales and marketing, but in a very tactile, get-out-there, pound-the-pavement&nbsp;kind of way, which works really well for home service businesses \u2014 incredibly well \u2014 because it&#8217;s the trust economy, as we always talk about on the podcast. You need to be&nbsp;trustworthy, and what better way to do that than to actually meet the person? They see your beautiful shining face and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Yeah, let me&nbsp;give&nbsp;you&nbsp;a&nbsp;shot,&#8221;&nbsp;right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Naming \u2014 and renaming&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;your&nbsp;company<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. And I also think adjusting where adjustment needs to be made, and constantly moving with the times. When I first started, looking in the paper at the time, all these cleaning&nbsp;services with big names \u2014 I thought, how do I make myself stand out? It&#8217;s that getting creative. You&#8217;ve got all these big names that everybody knows: the Molly Maids, the Maid&nbsp;Brigades. So I&#8217;m like, you know what? I&#8217;m gonna be different and stand out. So I called my original service Marvelous Maria&#8217;s Cleaning Company. And it&#8217;s just me cleaning. You don&#8217;t have&nbsp;to deal with the company \u2014 which I know, I&#8217;m like, oh, that&#8217;s terrible, but that&#8217;s what I needed to do at the&nbsp;time&nbsp;to&nbsp;get&nbsp;up&nbsp;and&nbsp;running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I remember when I finally told some of my clients who were just used to having me as a cleaner, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;m no longer gonna clean your house, and I&#8217;m&nbsp;no longer Marvelous Maria.&#8221; A lot of people were like, &#8220;Well, what? We want only Marvelous Maria.&#8221; Well, sorry, it&#8217;s time to adjust, man. So just adjusting and&nbsp;pivoting&nbsp;quickly&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;huge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I feel like every time I talk to you, I learn more. Lore drop. I had no idea that that was your company&#8217;s original name. That&#8217;s awesome. Have you seen that show,&nbsp;what&#8217;s it \u2014 Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? What&#8217;s&nbsp;the&nbsp;name&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;show?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh yeah, I did, actually. Yeah,&nbsp;yeah,&nbsp;Marvelous,&nbsp;yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;yeah,&nbsp;totally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;I guess I&#8217;m like, you have to \u2014 I&#8217;m&nbsp;being&nbsp;Marvelous&nbsp;Maria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh my goodness, I love that. And I think it&#8217;s really interesting that you just said you did what you had to in the beginning, and you can always pivot. It reminds&nbsp;me of \u2014 I named my company, I always say I named it wrong, because I named it Black River Falls Cleaning Services. Obviously my business is now Serene Clean, because I&nbsp;had no foresight for how large it was going to get, or that it would go beyond serving the Black River Falls area. But honestly, if I flip that on its head,&nbsp;that did wonders for me in Black River Falls for the first two years, because it was so smack on the head. This is what we are. It was incredible for SEO&nbsp;because the town name was in it. It&nbsp;worked&nbsp;very&nbsp;well&nbsp;for&nbsp;me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I always \u2014 hindsight 2020, just like what you&#8217;re doing \u2014 it&#8217;s like, oh, long-term, in the longevity of your business lifespan, that doesn&#8217;t make sense for the five years. But&nbsp;that first year, it made a hell of a lot of sense. And so I&#8217;ve never really thought of it that way, that sometimes we do things that are not scalable whatsoever,&nbsp;but we have to do them, and they&nbsp;actually&nbsp;help&nbsp;us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, and then you pivot when that particular decision just doesn&#8217;t serve you well. And I think pivoting quickly is one of the keys to success. And it&#8217;s no different than now&nbsp;\u2014 of course, the name of my company is The Villages Cleaning. And when we look at it, wait a minute, The Villages \u2014 obviously we serve an area, so the two&nbsp;areas that were The Villages is perfect, but does The Villages really match if we were to open up in, I don&#8217;t know, San Diego or some larger city? It doesn&#8217;t. So&nbsp;even us, we&#8217;re having to rebrand to The Funky Sponge, which \u2014 yeah, it got a funny \u2014 and so we&#8217;re having to do a whole rebrand and a whole thing, and&nbsp;we&#8217;re going for it, and I fully trust that it&#8217;s gonna be great and it&#8217;s&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;be&nbsp;well&nbsp;received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh yeah, I&#8217;ve seen all the branding for that. Ryan shared it with me and instantly I was like, I love this. It&#8217;s just so visceral, it&#8217;s great, the care, everything&#8217;s amazing.&nbsp;So I&#8217;m super excited&nbsp;for&nbsp;that,&nbsp;for&nbsp;sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Communication&nbsp;and&nbsp;consistency<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Okay, so we talked about comparing now versus then when you first opened, and I wanna talk about what we now need to do in order to stand out that maybe when&nbsp;you opened before, you didn&#8217;t have to. Obviously we&#8217;ve talked about creative marketing, but I wanna talk about the service itself, company culture, that type of thing that allows us to stand&nbsp;out. So what are some of the things that you feel we&#8217;ve had to really up the ante on and provide&nbsp;more&nbsp;for&nbsp;the&nbsp;client?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I think when it comes to certain things like communication and, gosh, customer service \u2014 huge, right? Before, we could probably get away with not sending out text message reminders or&nbsp;making those phone calls. People just expect different now. So communication \u2014 effective communication, because obviously there&#8217;s a difference \u2014 consistent communication. And then when it comes to the cleaning and the&nbsp;service, same thing. Clients just need to be able to know that they can trust what they&#8217;re getting at every single visit, every single time. And I feel like that is probably&nbsp;one change that I&#8217;ve seen, that it&#8217;s imperative. You have to&nbsp;be&nbsp;able&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think some of that was always true to a certain extent \u2014 I just think people were maybe much more lenient about those kinds of things. But now it&#8217;s imperative.&nbsp;I don&#8217;t think you can actually run a successful cleaning company without those types of things. Which is where software comes in \u2014 hugely impactful in getting the communication and the consistency&nbsp;of&nbsp;service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I think you&#8217;re right. Obviously I didn&#8217;t have a cleaning business 20 years ago, but I would hazard a guess that before things like Google My Business, or Yelp, or any of&nbsp;these online review sites existed, the leniency of allowing certain behaviors or subpar service was because people couldn&#8217;t easily shop around \u2014 or as easily. Obviously you could ask around, like you&nbsp;said, you could check the paper. But now, other options are at their fingertips, for better or for worse. It&#8217;s kind of like online dating, where people are flooded with options. So&nbsp;if you start acting right, their eyes will start to wander, and you&nbsp;have&nbsp;to&nbsp;just&nbsp;be&nbsp;on&nbsp;it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I totally agree that excellent communication \u2014 but I think consistency is the key word and name of the game. You need to do it over and over again. And if&nbsp;you are just trying to rely on things like you remembering \u2014 I always&nbsp;talk&nbsp;about&nbsp;that&nbsp;as&nbsp;a\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Terrible&nbsp;system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, exactly! It&#8217;s not a system, y&#8217;all! You relying on yourself to remember anything is a recipe for disaster. You&#8217;re setting yourself up for failure \u2014 not because you are a failure,&nbsp;but because that is a failing thought process. It&nbsp;just&nbsp;doesn&#8217;t&nbsp;work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;And I will say, to counter that: &#8220;Oh, but my office manager, she&#8217;s been with me for 10 years, she knows all of the things.&#8221; That&#8217;s still a terrible system. It relies&nbsp;on the memory, and that person gets hit by a bus, and literally all of the amazing lessons they&#8217;ve learned, the history, all of it goes with them. So yeah, putting everything&nbsp;in an SOP, having a system for that \u2014 we&#8217;re preaching to the choir, but it&#8217;s the difference between having a business and having a job, or creating&nbsp;a&nbsp;job&nbsp;for&nbsp;yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The double-edged sword&nbsp;of&nbsp;online&nbsp;reviews<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;And yeah, with the online reviews, that&#8217;s another one. Online reviews are a double-edged sword. On one hand, when a client calls and says, &#8220;Hey, I found you on Yelp&#8221; \u2014 I&nbsp;see that, Stephanie, I think you&#8217;ve got like a thousand-something five-star reviews, something&nbsp;crazy&nbsp;like&nbsp;that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;at&nbsp;500&nbsp;across&nbsp;all&nbsp;three&nbsp;locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;500, okay. Yeah, I remember it being some&nbsp;crazy&nbsp;good&nbsp;number,&nbsp;I&nbsp;looked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, we got like&nbsp;seven&nbsp;last&nbsp;week.&nbsp;We&nbsp;were&nbsp;cooking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, so it&#8217;s a double-edged sword. On one hand, it&#8217;s great, it&#8217;s amazing, it&#8217;s free marketing \u2014 that marketing is on 24\/7, right? But it&#8217;s an incredible amount of accountability, because you&nbsp;have to go to those standards. The very person that found you on Yelp, Google, Facebook and thought, &#8220;Wow, this company has five-star reviews&#8221; \u2014 something goes wrong, ooh, I know exactly&nbsp;where&nbsp;to&nbsp;go&nbsp;bash&nbsp;them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;To&nbsp;hurt&nbsp;them,&nbsp;yes,&nbsp;exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;And one negative review literally can cost you thousands of potential customers. So that has upped the game. It holds us accountable, man. I love &#8217;em, but at&nbsp;the&nbsp;same&nbsp;time,&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;scared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I feel like it&#8217;s a gilded cage, or a golden shackle, if you will. They have done everything for us, but also it&#8217;s terrifying how much it can hurt you. But like&nbsp;you said, it&#8217;s a good thing, because it holds you to that high standard. If you are getting consistently subpar reviews, that is communicating something to you. And it could be not&nbsp;even related to service \u2014 it could be related to communication or setting expectations. It also means maybe you&#8217;re not doing the proper vetting, and you&#8217;re getting reviews because you&#8217;re selling on&nbsp;the cheapest option. Well, people shopping for the cheapest option a lot of times are the worst people ever to work with. And I&#8217;m not saying all the time that somebody hunting&nbsp;for a bargain is a bad person, but we have consistently had some of our worst nightmare experiences with people who are very, very price sensitive. Because they&#8217;re so price sensitive, they&#8217;re&nbsp;like, &#8220;This must meet every magical expectation I have.&#8221; So the stakes are so high, compared to somebody for whom this is a smaller fraction of their income. Obviously you still gotta&nbsp;nail it for them \u2014 you have to nail it for everybody \u2014 but the expectations of some of those very price-sensitive&nbsp;shoppers&nbsp;can&nbsp;be&nbsp;very&nbsp;hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How&nbsp;to&nbsp;respond&nbsp;to&nbsp;a&nbsp;bad&nbsp;review<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And when I look at our worst reviews \u2014 I mean, we have very few, I think we have like two one-star reviews in the life of the business, or something crazy&nbsp;like that. One of them from my very first employee, Gabby. You, she left me a one-star&nbsp;review.&nbsp;You&nbsp;suck,&nbsp;Gabby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;You&nbsp;suck,&nbsp;Gabby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Well, she&#8217;s the one who clocked in at a job site for four hours, sat in her car trying to game the ZenMaid, and then clocked out and left. So I have&nbsp;many other stories related to Gabby, and I&#8217;ll say it with my chest, for sure. But luckily \u2014 and lesson here, guys \u2014 how you respond to reviews, even negative ones, can&nbsp;shape the narrative completely. If you are pissed off, walk away from the computer. Now we&#8217;ve got AI, so there is no reason that your review responses should read anything but&nbsp;wonderfully&nbsp;professional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so in that instance, it was like, &#8220;Oh, so sorry, but we can&#8217;t service former employees as a policy, and additionally you&#8217;re out of our service range.&#8221; So the way I&nbsp;worded it said exactly to the reader, this is a former employee, without me being like, &#8220;You&#8217;re just blah, blah, blah.&#8221; It also said, we don&#8217;t even service that area. So this&nbsp;is a one-star review from somebody who used to work for me. There are ways that we can phrase things in the response. And if you did wrong, you need to make&nbsp;sure that it&#8217;s like, &#8220;As discussed, we reached out. I&#8217;m so glad that we could make it right.&#8221; Tell a narrative \u2014 thank them&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;review&nbsp;response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;You know, in the moment you get a one-star review \u2014 especially if it&#8217;s your company, and especially if you did the cleaning \u2014 you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh my gosh, did they see&nbsp;what their home looked like? And did you see,&nbsp;I&nbsp;gave&nbsp;them&nbsp;a&nbsp;discount?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, like, oh my God, dude, we were there for two days. I gave them a discount and then we&#8217;re getting a one-star review, right? And so it&#8217;s so easy to take&nbsp;that stuff personally. And especially since, as business owners, we think, &#8220;Oh, they&#8217;re attacking me.&#8221; It feels like a personal attack, like somebody&nbsp;is&nbsp;attacking&nbsp;my&nbsp;baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;But like you said, walk away, use AI. But the most important thing you said is just remember: they&#8217;ve already left you a one-star review. It doesn&#8217;t matter what they think. That&#8217;s&nbsp;their truth. Don&#8217;t try to change their truth, but speak to everybody who will be reading that review \u2014 your potential customers, your potential prospects. Speak to them. So that&#8217;s your new&nbsp;audience. Forget the crazy who left you the one-star review. Your audience is the person who&#8217;s gonna think about buying from you in six weeks, a month, two years, who will be&nbsp;reading that review. That&#8217;s the person you want to talk with. That&#8217;s the&nbsp;person&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;speaking&nbsp;to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;You&#8217;re speaking to,&nbsp;yeah,&nbsp;exactly.&nbsp;Thank&nbsp;you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s the&nbsp;person&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;speaking&nbsp;to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Treating&nbsp;refunds&nbsp;as&nbsp;a&nbsp;marketing&nbsp;cost<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;And then the other thing is, there&#8217;s so many times when something will happen in our business and we get into this &#8220;But that&#8217;s not fair. We were there for two days.&nbsp;Their house was filthy. They didn&#8217;t tell us,&#8221; whatever the thing is, right? And when the customer starts fighting us for money back, a lot of times we get stuck in this&nbsp;thinking of, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not giving their money back.&#8221; But sometimes you kind of have to count the cost. Is it worth it to not give them the money back and end&nbsp;up with a one-star review \u2014 which, especially on platforms like Yelp and the way their algorithms work, can actually hurt you, because they&#8217;re weighted&nbsp;more&nbsp;than&nbsp;a&nbsp;positive&nbsp;review?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I always count it as: okay, let&#8217;s not look at this as, is it fair, or should this client get their money back or not. Let&#8217;s look at it as&nbsp;a marketing cost. With $250, $300, is that worth it for that person to go away, if it means they don&#8217;t leave me a one-star review? If we can make it right&nbsp;so that they don&#8217;t leave a one-star review and we can keep our great ratings. So changing my mindset like that gets me out of the emotional, &#8220;I&#8217;m going crazy, I need&nbsp;to day drink because I&#8217;m so upset about this client that&#8217;s complaining,&#8221; into: all right, what is it worth to me as a marketing cost to be able to make them go&nbsp;away, but we keep our five-star Google reviews? Which ultimately, like I mentioned, is that marketing&nbsp;24\/7&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;easy,&nbsp;free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That is such a profound way to think about that. I&#8217;ve never thought about it that way. You&#8217;re really talking about kind of like an insurance deductible. You are paying in order&nbsp;to not take the hit to your reputation, considering how powerful the reviews are for you. And so I&#8217;m really happy you brought up, do not think of&nbsp;it&nbsp;in&nbsp;terms&nbsp;of&nbsp;fairness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We actually had that happen, I think earlier this year. It was kind of a regular client who really wanted to keep it at a certain amount. We could never get through&nbsp;the whole home, and expectations were just misaligned. And we did the final cleaning, and she was so upset. My managers were kind of listing, logically speaking, &#8220;This makes sense that we&nbsp;got through this much because of this, this, this.&#8221; She wasn&#8217;t gonna be using us again, and she was so upset. And I was just like, okay \u2014 because they were like,&nbsp;&#8220;How much should we comp?&#8221; That was basically the discussion, the semantics. &#8220;I think we should only comp this much, because of X, Y, Z,&#8221; trying to figure out what feels fair.&nbsp;And I was like, no. The goal is for this now-former client to walk away from this interaction at least feeling neutral about us. Can we make it neutral? Because we made&nbsp;it right. And I was like, what does that mean? Comp&nbsp;the&nbsp;whole&nbsp;damn&nbsp;thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is it fair? Technically, no. Does that matter to her? No. Can we logic our way and explain, &#8220;Well, actually, customer, X, Y, Z, and this is why&#8221;? That doesn&#8217;t matter to&nbsp;her right now. She needs to feel heard. She needs to feel seen, and we need to try to make it as right as we possibly can. And in this situation, it&#8217;s&nbsp;like, part ways. We don&#8217;t wanna work with her again, frankly, because we know it&#8217;s just not gonna be satisfying \u2014 it&#8217;s the expectations of time. She thinks we can clean three&nbsp;times as fast as what is actually possible. So let&#8217;s just part ways on amicable terms. And all my mind went to was, let&#8217;s avoid a bad review. Let&#8217;s&nbsp;avoid&nbsp;a&nbsp;bad&nbsp;review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Being right&nbsp;vs.&nbsp;being&nbsp;successful<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;And it feels like you&#8217;re&nbsp;letting&nbsp;the&nbsp;customer&nbsp;win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I can&#8217;t think of it like that. We can&#8217;t think&nbsp;of&nbsp;it&nbsp;like&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;a&nbsp;battle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Not at all, y&#8217;all. My good friend Derek Christian always said, &#8220;Do you wanna be right, or do you wanna be successful?&#8221; Sometimes it&#8217;s exactly that. And I&#8217;m definitely not saying \u2014&nbsp;because I&#8217;ll hold true to this as well \u2014 definitely not saying give money back every time there&#8217;s a problem. You&#8217;ll&nbsp;go&nbsp;back&nbsp;and&nbsp;forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Don&#8217;t&nbsp;be&nbsp;a&nbsp;pushover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Don&#8217;t be a pushover either. Don&#8217;t be a pushover, because that actually creates different problems as well. And believe it or not, it really is all in the way you handle a&nbsp;bad review, because you can handle a bad review in a way where you give money back \u2014 and I&#8217;ve seen this so many times \u2014 and they still&nbsp;leave&nbsp;a&nbsp;one-star&nbsp;review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Because&nbsp;it&nbsp;wasn&#8217;t&nbsp;about&nbsp;that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Because it was never about that. They didn&#8217;t feel heard, their lack of expectations and experience. Even money back didn&#8217;t make up for it. So in certain cases it&#8217;s like you said,&nbsp;weigh it as a marketing cost. And really just, how can I make this right? And literally say that to the client: &#8220;I&#8217;m devastated that you&#8217;re so disappointed, and this was not&nbsp;what you deserve. How can I make this right?&#8221; And a lot of times they won&#8217;t even ask for money back. They&#8217;ll just be like, &#8220;I just wanted to express my displeasure.&#8221;&nbsp;They&nbsp;need&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So I think, especially when I was younger \u2014 both in age and in business ownership \u2014 my ego, my need to be right, the principle of the matter, self-righteousness basically is&nbsp;how I would describe it. That was a huge flaw of mine. And I definitely got that from my dad, who was a business owner, and he would do anything to prove&nbsp;that he was right, as opposed to just letting it go. There was no letting it go. And some of my biggest regrets in business are not letting things go, because I&#8217;m&nbsp;like, &#8220;They need to know how wrong they are, and I&#8217;m gonna be the one to show them.&#8221; And it just doesn&#8217;t \u2014 it&#8217;s like, get over yourself. It&#8217;s just a very&nbsp;immature way to be, and self-righteousness will never, ever serve you in&nbsp;your&nbsp;business.&nbsp;Ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, true. But at the same time, you have to know \u2014 because I have studied this a little bit \u2014 it actually comes from childhood, that need of what&#8217;s fair. That&#8217;s&nbsp;instilled. What&#8217;s fair, what&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s a childhood thing. So, you know, grow up. I&#8217;m glad&nbsp;that&nbsp;you&nbsp;grew&nbsp;up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Natural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s natural, so don&#8217;t beat yourself up too much. I&#8217;m glad that you did. Now you learn, and look how amazing and&nbsp;successful.&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Thinking&nbsp;like&nbsp;a&nbsp;business&nbsp;owner<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, and I think just the biggest thing \u2014 and we talk about this time and again \u2014 is just removing yourself from the situation emotionally so that you can think clearly&nbsp;and think long-term and big picture. Right now, big picture: is this $175 gonna kill your business? Or is digging your heels in and not giving that money back \u2014 or not&nbsp;replacing the thing? We just replaced, I talked about last week, we replaced the microwave that stopped working, apparently the day that we cleaned. I don&#8217;t think we broke it, but I&#8217;m&nbsp;like, you know what, replace the microwave.&nbsp;It&nbsp;is&nbsp;what&nbsp;it&nbsp;is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;ve definitely dug&nbsp;in&nbsp;my&nbsp;heels&nbsp;many&nbsp;times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes,&nbsp;yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;So, not a pushover \u2014 but it&#8217;s about being strategic and business-minded, and also realizing that you have a responsibility to all of your stakeholders. It&#8217;s not just, what&#8217;s fair? You&#8217;ve gotta&nbsp;think about your employees. What&#8217;s the impact of looking up and seeing, &#8220;Oh my gosh, we&#8217;ve got 150 reviews and they&#8217;re all 3.9 and subpar,&#8221; because you haven&#8217;t made good decisions? And&nbsp;those reviews, like we talked about, are all symptoms of what&#8217;s happening internally. So it&#8217;s about thinking&nbsp;strategically&nbsp;a&nbsp;little&nbsp;bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, I love that \u2014 the concept of stakeholders being your staff members, and that when you are not being a good steward of your business, you are hurting their potential future&nbsp;income, benefits, all of the good that you can do. So really being able to think long-term and remove that volatility,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;only&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;benefit&nbsp;you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">When&nbsp;to&nbsp;stand&nbsp;your&nbsp;ground<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;And I say all this to say, as Maria said, it doesn&#8217;t mean that we don&#8217;t sometimes say, &#8220;Nah-ah.&#8221; We&#8217;ve been accused of crazy stuff \u2014 stealing nail clippers one time, a&nbsp;blanket, scoping out houses or jet skis, and people going to the \u2014 like, crazy stuff. And we have absolutely been like, &#8220;Absolutely not.&#8221; So when we are being accused of something,&nbsp;that is when I would say we most dig our heels in \u2014 not being combative, but also never going to admit fault when it comes to something with our reputation that&nbsp;we absolutely, there&#8217;s no proof it happened. And obviously it doesn&#8217;t mean your staff can&#8217;t steal things \u2014 we&#8217;ve all had staff steal things, I mean, Maria, I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ve had that&nbsp;happen before. But it doesn&#8217;t mean you need to just lie over just because somebody accused you, because you very well may have a staff&nbsp;member&nbsp;who&#8217;s&nbsp;innocent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;I remember one time, a client actually said, &#8220;Hey, if you clean for us, you have&nbsp;to&nbsp;use&nbsp;our&nbsp;Rainbow&nbsp;vacuum.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Ew,&nbsp;yuck!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh my God, such a&nbsp;pain&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;freaking&nbsp;ass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&nbsp;would&nbsp;never&nbsp;use&nbsp;one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Again, that and a Kirby \u2014 ah, never, never, never. 7,000&nbsp;pounds&nbsp;of&nbsp;a&nbsp;staircase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh my gosh, having to breathe&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;oh&nbsp;my&nbsp;gosh,&nbsp;terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;So we used her Rainbow vacuum, plugged it in, and her outlet blew up, which blew up the vacuum. So of course we&#8217;re like, well, it was in our care, control, and&nbsp;possession, let me see if the insurance will cover it. They wouldn&#8217;t cover it. Okay, I don&#8217;t wanna buy this lady a $1,500 Rainbow vacuum. So \u2014 talk about digging in my&nbsp;heels and being a good steward \u2014 my butt decided to do a little bit of research on why the plug blew up in the first place. So I hired an electrician&nbsp;for like 100 bucks, did a whole lot of research, to find out that whoever owned the house before wired that particular outlet incorrectly. So it was like, oh look, we&#8217;ve got&nbsp;proof, we&#8217;re not paying for it. So there does come a time where you have to defend your business, absolutely. So definitely not&nbsp;saying&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;a&nbsp;pushover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Turning&nbsp;problems&nbsp;into&nbsp;policies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, and also, things like that really help shape policy going forward. Because every time we have situations like that, it has helped guide us on how to handle things in the&nbsp;future \u2014 learning, what a concept, right? Learning from past experiences. And so for us, if we use a client&#8217;s vacuum, we are not culpable if something happens like that. That&#8217;s why&nbsp;we like to use our vacuums, because then we&#8217;re 100% responsible. We&#8217;ve had the same thing happen, where an outlet was wired improperly \u2014 old house \u2014 and it burned. It didn&#8217;t&nbsp;burn the house down, that&#8217;d be crazy, right? But the outlet was out. And they were trying to \u2014 and it&#8217;s like, no, this isn&#8217;t us. Because we plugged a vacuum into&nbsp;your house, but the assumption is that your electricity and outlets are in good, working, safe order, right? So there&#8217;s only so much to do. If you don&#8217;t want to expose yourself&nbsp;to any risk, well, then don&#8217;t open a business, go work for somebody else. But there are things we can do to mitigate that risk \u2014 with policies, with procedures, and with,&nbsp;&#8220;Okay, yep, this doesn&#8217;t make sense, I&#8217;m actually&nbsp;going&nbsp;to&nbsp;pursue&nbsp;X,&nbsp;Y,&nbsp;Z.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;So yeah, I think it&#8217;s really just taking a balanced approach to all of this, and knowing that every situation is different. You may handle a similar situation differently just based on&nbsp;how the customer&#8217;s acting. It&#8217;s just like, if you&#8217;re at the airport and the person in front of you is screaming at the airport representative because they can&#8217;t make it on a&nbsp;flight, and then you&#8217;re sweet as pie and somehow you get a flight \u2014 it&#8217;s amazing when that happens, right? It&#8217;s the same thing. I&#8217;ve definitely had situations where I&#8217;m like, &#8220;We&nbsp;really like this client, so therefore they are going to get a certain thing,&#8221; because they&#8217;re wonderful to us. And other people who are crying wolf all the time, well, we&#8217;re&nbsp;kind&nbsp;of&nbsp;sick&nbsp;of&nbsp;this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;for&nbsp;sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;I also think one of the best things you can do for your business is, when something happens, my personal challenge to myself is to instantaneously say, &#8220;All right, what do I&nbsp;need to do to make sure that this thing never happens in the life of my company ever, ever again?&#8221; It&#8217;s like a personal challenge. And so if I start to think&nbsp;that way, then at least I can be proactive and change policies \u2014 sometimes change people, because maybe sometimes it&#8217;s not a policy problem, it&#8217;s a people problem. So, what do we&nbsp;need to do to change things to make sure we never have this thing happen in the life&nbsp;of&nbsp;our&nbsp;company&nbsp;again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Systems, software,&nbsp;and&nbsp;getting&nbsp;paid<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That is such a good framework to think of, and especially just tying back to utilizing software to avoid things altogether, right? Like the reminders. Okay, you show up to a client&#8217;s&nbsp;house, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t know you were coming, because you forgot to send the reminder text last night.&#8221; Well, how about we just eradicate the need altogether and have automatic reminders&nbsp;through something like SendMate, right? And how many of our listeners have not gotten paid for a job because they didn&#8217;t have a credit card on file \u2014 just like I didn&#8217;t&nbsp;in the beginning, and then I got burned enough that I learned, because the pain was so high it surpassed my discomfort with asking people for their credit card number. When I&nbsp;lay it out like that, that was the discomfort, and I had to get over it because it was&nbsp;too&nbsp;painful&nbsp;not&nbsp;to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Sometimes you just \u2014 we&#8217;ll tell you this, and you just have to experience it yourself, and then you&#8217;ll do it. No joke, especially when you have to look at a cleaner&nbsp;in the face and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m so sorry, your check is gonna be a couple days late because Susie Jones still hasn&#8217;t paid us for that $700 job.&#8221; Why? Oh, because she&nbsp;was supposed to call with the credit card the next day. When we were on the phone, she&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh, my credit card&#8217;s in the car, can I give it to you&nbsp;later?&#8221; And then you book the job without getting it, and now you&#8217;re very, very stuck. You learn real quick to never have that happen&nbsp;to&nbsp;you&nbsp;ever&nbsp;again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes. And of course the software is&nbsp;a&nbsp;huge&nbsp;part&nbsp;of&nbsp;that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-15\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Client&nbsp;red&nbsp;flags<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Absolutely. I wanted to answer a question we got from one of our listeners, in the Facebook group, about red flags to look out for with clients. And the reason I bring&nbsp;this up is, obviously we&#8217;re talking about preemptively striking and preparing the company for success with bookings \u2014 whether that be booking credit cards, having client guidelines signed, policies. So I&#8217;d love&nbsp;to hear certain red flags that maybe you have ignored over the years, or looking back now in hindsight, what things are&nbsp;telltale&nbsp;signs&nbsp;for&nbsp;you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;So oddly enough \u2014 and I can&#8217;t figure out why \u2014 it seems like if something is gonna go wrong at a job, it&#8217;s those same-day service requests. Have you ever noticed&nbsp;that? Don&#8217;t know why&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;to&nbsp;this&nbsp;day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I think because maybe they&#8217;re frantic. Things are in a bit more of an emotional, volatile, frantic state, because it&#8217;s last minute and maybe they weren&#8217;t planning to get a cleaner, so&nbsp;they&#8217;re already stressed. A lot of times for us it&#8217;s like a move-out, right? They&#8217;re like, &#8220;I was gonna do it, I don&#8217;t have the ability now, I have to hire somebody,&nbsp;spend all this money I didn&#8217;t expect.&#8221; So I think it&#8217;s kind of like the environment that we are coming into is&nbsp;potentially&nbsp;volatile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Potentially,&nbsp;yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So lately we&#8217;ve kind of been thinking, huh, do we not need to do one-time cleans? Well, obviously same-day cleans \u2014 even if we&#8217;ve traditionally always been able to do it and&nbsp;happy to serve, especially if there&#8217;s&nbsp;room&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;So this question&#8217;s a little bit difficult for me, because I can see it from two angles. I can see it from my previous company, where we prided ourselves on being able&nbsp;to serve the white-glove client, the client who&#8217;s been through their 12th cleaning service, because we had trained \u2014 our standards were so high, and we trained our techs, and we had&nbsp;low turnover, almost non-existent turnover. So those pickier people, we were able to handle them. But it took a lot of time to get there, a lot of training, a lot of&nbsp;effort, a lot of systems. So I would say now \u2014 not that we don&#8217;t have a great, strong company, I just think we still have some growing to do \u2014 for&nbsp;me right now, a red flag would be the client who says, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;ve been through my third, fourth, fifth cleaning company.&#8221; I think that might be maybe an orange or a&nbsp;yellow, amber flag. But maybe there needs to be a lot of digging down and understanding what caused those other&nbsp;relationships&nbsp;to&nbsp;not&nbsp;work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But for me, I always joke, it&#8217;s the client who seems to micromanage and ask a gazillion questions. It usually starts off with &#8220;your people&#8221;: &#8220;Do your people, will they clean the&nbsp;top of my alarm clock? What about the shutters, will they open the shutters?&#8221; Yes, of course we&#8217;re gonna open the shutters. &#8220;Are they gonna get on hands and knees?&#8221; So maybe&nbsp;the clients who already have an expectation of how they want their clean to go, and our service is misaligned with their expectations. So not so much a red flag, maybe \u2014&nbsp;maybe it&#8217;s a red flag in terms of, hey, we need to know that if it&#8217;s not a right fit, it&#8217;s gonna end up causing issues. And I would say just good&nbsp;old gut feelings. You might do a walkthrough or a quote, and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I can&#8217;t put my finger on it. She was nice, everything seemed fine, but I just have this&nbsp;gut feeling that something is wrong.&#8221; So for me, I always teach, if you have a gut feeling, trust that. That&#8217;s your instinct, that&#8217;s your first brain and your stomach and all&nbsp;the neurons and all the science-y things behind gut feelings. Go with the gut feeling. Your brain may not have the information just yet. It&#8217;s gonna get the information, but it has&nbsp;that experience to know that&nbsp;something&nbsp;is&nbsp;off&nbsp;here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I totally agree. And I think that what you were describing \u2014 people wanting to tell you or know how the cleaning is gonna get done, meaning literally how do you do&nbsp;this task. Whenever anybody says &#8220;hands and knees,&#8221; what they really want is detailed floors, right? But instead of saying detailed floors, they&#8217;re basically saying, &#8220;I expect you to accomplish this task&nbsp;in a certain way,&#8221; which is always going to not be good, because they are not the professional cleaner. They&#8217;re also not the owner, who is going, &#8220;I&#8217;m never going to ask&nbsp;my staff to do that.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, yes, lady, you can clean your house on hands and knees. We&#8217;re not gonna do that, because of sustainability, the health of our cleaners \u2014&nbsp;and you don&#8217;t have to. That doesn&#8217;t need to be done that way. So if they&#8217;re looking for it that way, that&#8217;s not gonna be a good fit, because we&#8217;re never going&nbsp;to ask our staff to do that. So if they&#8217;re asking a lot of questions about how a task is going to be performed \u2014 where it&#8217;s like, when my house is&nbsp;getting cleaned in half an hour, the cleaners will be here and I literally don&#8217;t care how it&#8217;s getting done. All I care about is the end result. I care that it&#8217;s&nbsp;clean.&nbsp;That&#8217;s&nbsp;all&nbsp;that&nbsp;matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;If they&#8217;re rude or short with you, basically unpleasant \u2014 huge red flag. Because when you think about it, they&#8217;re calling you. They&#8217;re entering your space, your place of business, your phone.&nbsp;If they&#8217;re that way with you before you even step in the home, think about putting your cleaners there, or yourself. Now you&#8217;re on their turf, in their environment \u2014 it&#8217;s gonna&nbsp;be so much worse. So if they&#8217;re unpleasant on the phone when they&#8217;re calling you, that&#8217;s a huge red flag that it&#8217;s gonna be so much worse than you can imagine&nbsp;when&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;on&nbsp;their&nbsp;turf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-16\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Payment red flags and price-sensitive&nbsp;clients<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, such a good point. And I think another thing I would say is, anytime they are squirrely about payment, that is a huge red flag. Like you pointed out \u2014 &#8220;Oh&nbsp;yeah, I&#8217;ll call later with my card.&#8221; Obviously it doesn&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re not gonna call, but most likely they might be squirrely. And if that first clean goes rough with payment, you&nbsp;can bet your ass it&#8217;s probably gonna keep happening on maintenance cleans. So anytime they act weird or off about the payment, or can&#8217;t talk about it \u2014 obviously money&#8217;s a difficult&nbsp;subject for some people, but it&#8217;s like, this is what the price is, how are you gonna pay, these are our options. That&#8217;s how cold it should be. It&#8217;s just part of&nbsp;the process of booking. And so if they&#8217;re acting odd about that, then&nbsp;I&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;know&nbsp;about&nbsp;that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;m trying to think of other ones, looking back on difficult clients. I think anytime they use the words \u2014 like you mentioned in the beginning \u2014 kind of service hopping. And&nbsp;if they come back with anything related to, &#8220;Well, my old cleaner did it for this price,&#8221; then it&#8217;s like, then go hire that cleaner. Why aren&#8217;t you working with them if&nbsp;they were such a good deal? So that tells you a lot. If they say anything related to that, that&#8217;s&nbsp;a&nbsp;red&nbsp;flag&nbsp;for&nbsp;sure&nbsp;for&nbsp;me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;It is a red flag. And I&#8217;ll tell you, a lot of times what happens is they might go ahead and sign up for the service, but especially if the price difference&nbsp;is big \u2014 okay, &#8220;I was paying my cleaner 75 bucks a cleaning, and now you&#8217;re telling me it&#8217;s $139 per visit,&#8221; huge discrepancy. They might let you in, they might clean,&nbsp;but they&#8217;re gonna be micromanaging and picking, looking for things that weren&#8217;t done well. And of course we know, the more they look, the more they find, and the more they find,&nbsp;the angrier they&#8217;ll get. So that&#8217;s another red flag, you&#8217;re right \u2014 when they&#8217;re overly price sensitive,&nbsp;I&#8217;ll&nbsp;say&nbsp;budget&nbsp;friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I remember we had a new client who canceled immediately after the first maintenance. He just kept saying things in his emails along the lines of, &#8220;This is way more than we&nbsp;paid before, but we&#8217;ll give it a try. I guess we&#8217;ll give it a go.&#8221; And it felt very passive aggressive, as if he was trying to get us to come down&nbsp;on the price or make us feel bad about our pricing. It&#8217;s like, dude \u2014 and I just wanted to be like \u2014 and I think we responded in a way of,&nbsp;&#8220;We can be budget conscious in these ways, but how much money you can spend on this is not my epic problem. This is the price, man.&#8221; And then he did cancel&nbsp;after the first maintenance, because in his mind the value wasn&#8217;t there. And I was not going to convince him of that, and he could not say anything he was unhappy with.&nbsp;The cleanings went literally flawless. It just, in his mind, was too much for him to spend. And okay, that&#8217;s fine for him, but that&#8217;s not our problem. And just the way&nbsp;he was communicating it felt very icky to me.&nbsp;I&nbsp;didn&#8217;t&nbsp;like&nbsp;that&nbsp;at&nbsp;all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;We&#8217;ve had that too, where they hold that over your head and they don&#8217;t want to let it go. But they&#8217;re always really probably unhappy. If they can&#8217;t afford it, they can&#8217;t&nbsp;afford it, right? And we always like to say, &#8220;Hey, what&#8217;s more important to you? Is it price or is it quality? You&#8217;ve got to pick one. If you can&#8217;t pay the&nbsp;price that we&#8217;re asking, we can come down on price, but you&#8217;ve got to know that the quality&nbsp;is&nbsp;going&nbsp;to&nbsp;take&nbsp;a&nbsp;hit.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, you&#8217;re going to have less&nbsp;spaces&nbsp;done&nbsp;or&nbsp;something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, exactly. The scope of work is going to change. So no, you&#8217;re not going to get the beautiful scope of work that we normally would in a deep clean. We&#8217;re not&nbsp;going to hand-wash all your baseboards and detail all your light switch plates and electrical sockets. But with a lower price, we might be able to make something work where it&#8217;ll be&nbsp;a win-win. But yeah, when they complain about the price, and it&#8217;s the price, the price, the price \u2014 the value&#8217;s not there for them, and they probably won&#8217;t&nbsp;be&nbsp;able&nbsp;to&nbsp;get&nbsp;past&nbsp;that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-17\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Flat&nbsp;rate&nbsp;vs.&nbsp;hourly<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I will say also, we&#8217;ve switched to flat rate the past couple of months completely, and it&#8217;s gone so incredibly well. And for those of you that are still charging hourly \u2014&nbsp;obviously I charged hourly for seven years, I thought it was wonderful for a long time, and it still can work heavily. But if you charge hourly, you may run into clock&nbsp;watchers. And I will say, we just had this happen with a flat rate client who was originally hourly. We switched her to flat rate, and it does not pay for her&nbsp;whole home to get cleaned. It really should take like four and a half hours. She only wants to pay for like three and a half. So even at flat rate, it&nbsp;still applies. And she sent an email that the new cleaner left early from the job and didn&#8217;t get through what other cleaners did, because we had switched cleaners. And the cleaner&nbsp;clocked out two minutes before the scheduled end time. And that kind of clock watching \u2014 even though it&#8217;s like, no, and also, they&#8217;re not understanding that we&#8217;ve never been able to&nbsp;get this whole home done. It&#8217;s like they alter the actual facts of what&#8217;s occurred in the service. And we have that kind of thing happen a lot, where even if it&#8217;s&nbsp;all in writing, we&#8217;ve got a paper trail&nbsp;of,&nbsp;&#8220;As&nbsp;agreed&nbsp;upon,&nbsp;you&nbsp;know&nbsp;that&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;limited&nbsp;scope&nbsp;of&nbsp;work.&nbsp;Your&nbsp;home&nbsp;has&nbsp;never&nbsp;and&nbsp;will&nbsp;never&nbsp;get&nbsp;done&nbsp;for&nbsp;this&nbsp;price.&nbsp;If&nbsp;you&nbsp;want&nbsp;the&nbsp;whole&nbsp;home&nbsp;done,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;be&nbsp;this&nbsp;price.&#8221;&nbsp;And&nbsp;they&nbsp;refuse&nbsp;to&nbsp;accept&nbsp;that.&nbsp;And&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;very&nbsp;frustrating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-18\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Keep&nbsp;a&nbsp;paper&nbsp;trail<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;the&nbsp;other&nbsp;one,&nbsp;when&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;back&nbsp;at&nbsp;some&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;issues&nbsp;we&#8217;ve&nbsp;had&nbsp;in&nbsp;recent&nbsp;years,&nbsp;is&nbsp;being&nbsp;disorganized&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;phone&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;oddly&nbsp;enough,&nbsp;over-talking,&nbsp;over-communicating,&nbsp;and&nbsp;being&nbsp;kind&nbsp;of&nbsp;scattered&nbsp;on&nbsp;that&nbsp;initial&nbsp;call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Chaotic,&nbsp;yeah&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;has&nbsp;usually&nbsp;turned&nbsp;out&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;a&nbsp;red&nbsp;flag&nbsp;when&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;time&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;the&nbsp;cleaning.&nbsp;Something&nbsp;always&nbsp;seems&nbsp;to&nbsp;go&nbsp;wrong&nbsp;on&nbsp;those&nbsp;jobs&nbsp;as&nbsp;well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;But&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;that&#8217;s&nbsp;the&nbsp;thing&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;just&nbsp;seeing&nbsp;the&nbsp;pattern,&nbsp;recognizing&nbsp;those&nbsp;patterns.&nbsp;And&nbsp;if&nbsp;you&nbsp;have&nbsp;office&nbsp;staff&nbsp;or&nbsp;a&nbsp;VA,&nbsp;training&nbsp;them&nbsp;on&nbsp;how&nbsp;to&nbsp;recognize&nbsp;those&nbsp;patterns&nbsp;and&nbsp;what&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;to&nbsp;get&nbsp;out&nbsp;of&nbsp;a&nbsp;job&nbsp;gracefully,&nbsp;so&nbsp;that&nbsp;you&nbsp;all&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;have&nbsp;to&nbsp;deal&nbsp;with&nbsp;all&nbsp;the&nbsp;bad&nbsp;repercussion&nbsp;stuff&nbsp;that&#8217;s&nbsp;inevitably&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Absolutely.&nbsp;And&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;why&nbsp;I&nbsp;will&nbsp;always&nbsp;tell&nbsp;you&nbsp;guys,&nbsp;please&nbsp;have&nbsp;a&nbsp;paper&nbsp;trail&nbsp;of&nbsp;everything.&nbsp;Please&nbsp;have&nbsp;your&nbsp;calls&nbsp;recorded.&nbsp;If&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;not&nbsp;using&nbsp;a&nbsp;software&nbsp;that&nbsp;records&nbsp;your&nbsp;phone&nbsp;calls,&nbsp;you&nbsp;gotta&nbsp;get&nbsp;on&nbsp;that,&nbsp;because&nbsp;that&#8217;s&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;protect&nbsp;you&nbsp;so&nbsp;much.&nbsp;We&nbsp;use&nbsp;Quo,&nbsp;OpenPhone&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;and&nbsp;all&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;calls&nbsp;are&nbsp;recorded,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;wonderful.&nbsp;We&nbsp;also&nbsp;try&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;everything&nbsp;over&nbsp;email,&nbsp;as&nbsp;much&nbsp;as&nbsp;possible.&nbsp;Obviously&nbsp;the&nbsp;call&nbsp;is&nbsp;recorded,&nbsp;but&nbsp;this&nbsp;way&nbsp;I&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;have&nbsp;to&nbsp;go&nbsp;back&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;call&nbsp;recording.&nbsp;And&nbsp;if&nbsp;something&nbsp;does&nbsp;happen&nbsp;over&nbsp;the&nbsp;phone,&nbsp;we&nbsp;will&nbsp;send&nbsp;a&nbsp;summary&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;client:&nbsp;&#8220;As&nbsp;discussed&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;phone,&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;what&#8217;s&nbsp;changing,&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;the&nbsp;plan.&#8221;&nbsp;Just&nbsp;so&nbsp;that&nbsp;you&nbsp;have&nbsp;that&nbsp;paper&nbsp;trail&nbsp;to&nbsp;reference.&nbsp;Because&nbsp;there&nbsp;is&nbsp;nothing&nbsp;more&nbsp;satisfying&nbsp;than&nbsp;saying,&nbsp;&#8220;As&nbsp;listed&nbsp;below&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;email&nbsp;that&nbsp;you&nbsp;agreed&nbsp;to,&nbsp;X,&nbsp;Y,&nbsp;Z.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And&nbsp;again,&nbsp;it&nbsp;comes&nbsp;back&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;whole,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;not&nbsp;about&nbsp;being&nbsp;right.&nbsp;But&nbsp;if&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;regular&nbsp;client&nbsp;who&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;having&nbsp;regular&nbsp;services&nbsp;for,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;important&nbsp;that&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;all&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;same&nbsp;page.&nbsp;And&nbsp;sometimes&nbsp;they&nbsp;can&nbsp;just&nbsp;be&nbsp;forgetful,&nbsp;too.&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;not&nbsp;always&nbsp;saying&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;malicious.&nbsp;They&nbsp;could&nbsp;just&nbsp;be&nbsp;remembering&nbsp;wrong&nbsp;and&nbsp;not&nbsp;realizing&nbsp;it.&nbsp;So&nbsp;giving&nbsp;them&nbsp;the&nbsp;benefit&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;doubt&nbsp;and&nbsp;having&nbsp;everything&nbsp;in&nbsp;writing&nbsp;allows&nbsp;no&nbsp;wiggle&nbsp;room&nbsp;for&nbsp;the&nbsp;facts&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;matter.&nbsp;And&nbsp;that&nbsp;saves&nbsp;you&nbsp;so&nbsp;much&nbsp;frustration.&nbsp;Because&nbsp;how&nbsp;many&nbsp;of&nbsp;you&nbsp;are&nbsp;having&nbsp;conversations&nbsp;with&nbsp;clients&nbsp;and&nbsp;there&#8217;s&nbsp;literally&nbsp;no&nbsp;record&nbsp;of&nbsp;it?&nbsp;And&nbsp;all&nbsp;of&nbsp;a&nbsp;sudden&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;he-said,&nbsp;she-said.&nbsp;And&nbsp;clients&nbsp;do&nbsp;not&nbsp;like&nbsp;that,&nbsp;and&nbsp;you&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;like&nbsp;it&nbsp;either.&nbsp;So&nbsp;why&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;we&nbsp;just&nbsp;erase&nbsp;that&nbsp;all&nbsp;together?&nbsp;Have&nbsp;it&nbsp;in&nbsp;writing.&nbsp;Then&nbsp;there&#8217;s&nbsp;no&nbsp;confusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-19\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Assume&nbsp;good&nbsp;intent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;and&nbsp;our&nbsp;brains&nbsp;are&nbsp;funny&nbsp;with&nbsp;the&nbsp;way&nbsp;we&nbsp;remember&nbsp;things&nbsp;and&nbsp;interpret&nbsp;things.&nbsp;You&nbsp;know&nbsp;that&nbsp;just&nbsp;by&nbsp;living&nbsp;your&nbsp;daily&nbsp;life.&nbsp;You&#8217;re&nbsp;like,&nbsp;&#8220;I&nbsp;swear&nbsp;I&nbsp;do&nbsp;not&nbsp;remember&nbsp;putting&nbsp;that&nbsp;soda&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;counter,&#8221;&nbsp;but&nbsp;yet&nbsp;there&nbsp;it&nbsp;is.&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;totally&nbsp;there.&nbsp;Or&nbsp;&#8220;I&nbsp;went&nbsp;back&nbsp;and&nbsp;watched&nbsp;my&nbsp;Ring&nbsp;cam,&nbsp;and&nbsp;sure&nbsp;as&nbsp;heck,&nbsp;I&nbsp;really&nbsp;did&nbsp;leave&nbsp;flowers&nbsp;on&nbsp;my&nbsp;car.&#8221;&nbsp;My&nbsp;brain&nbsp;is&nbsp;funny.&nbsp;So&nbsp;having&nbsp;everything&nbsp;documented&nbsp;in&nbsp;writing,&nbsp;recorded&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;just&nbsp;good&nbsp;business.&nbsp;And&nbsp;a&nbsp;lot&nbsp;of&nbsp;people&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;have&nbsp;malicious&nbsp;intent.&nbsp;I&nbsp;always&nbsp;like&nbsp;to&nbsp;assume&nbsp;that&nbsp;people&nbsp;do&nbsp;not&nbsp;have&nbsp;bad&nbsp;intent.&nbsp;It&nbsp;keeps&nbsp;me&nbsp;out&nbsp;of&nbsp;that&nbsp;emotional,&nbsp;us-against-them,&nbsp;bad&nbsp;mentality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;that&nbsp;trait&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;really&nbsp;important&nbsp;one,&nbsp;and&nbsp;one&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;most&nbsp;important&nbsp;traits&nbsp;I&nbsp;would&nbsp;argue&nbsp;you&nbsp;need&nbsp;to&nbsp;have&nbsp;as&nbsp;an&nbsp;owner&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;assume&nbsp;bad&nbsp;intent,&nbsp;and&nbsp;being&nbsp;really&nbsp;cynical&nbsp;and&nbsp;thinking&nbsp;that&nbsp;everybody&nbsp;is&nbsp;out&nbsp;to&nbsp;get&nbsp;you.&nbsp;Because&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;put&nbsp;you&nbsp;in&nbsp;a&nbsp;really&nbsp;defensive&nbsp;position,&nbsp;whether&nbsp;with&nbsp;staff,&nbsp;with&nbsp;customers,&nbsp;with&nbsp;your&nbsp;coworkers,&nbsp;whoever.&nbsp;And&nbsp;I&nbsp;see&nbsp;it&nbsp;in&nbsp;my&nbsp;staff&nbsp;who&nbsp;are&nbsp;that&nbsp;way,&nbsp;or&nbsp;I&nbsp;see&nbsp;it&nbsp;in&nbsp;customers&nbsp;too.&nbsp;If&nbsp;you&nbsp;are&nbsp;thinking&nbsp;in&nbsp;that&nbsp;manner&nbsp;of&nbsp;everybody&#8217;s&nbsp;out&nbsp;to&nbsp;get&nbsp;you,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;get&nbsp;you&nbsp;in&nbsp;needlessly&nbsp;hot&nbsp;water,&nbsp;because&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;take&nbsp;offense&nbsp;to&nbsp;everything.&nbsp;You&#8217;re&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;read&nbsp;into&nbsp;things&nbsp;where&nbsp;you&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;need&nbsp;to.&nbsp;So&nbsp;just&nbsp;trust&nbsp;that&nbsp;adults&nbsp;are&nbsp;going&nbsp;to&nbsp;communicate&nbsp;effectively,&nbsp;and&nbsp;if&nbsp;they&nbsp;are&nbsp;not&nbsp;going&nbsp;to&nbsp;communicate&nbsp;well,&nbsp;then&nbsp;you&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;need&nbsp;to&nbsp;read&nbsp;under&nbsp;the&nbsp;multiple&nbsp;layers&nbsp;and&nbsp;say,&nbsp;&#8220;Okay,&nbsp;are&nbsp;they&nbsp;being&nbsp;passive&nbsp;aggressive?&#8221;&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;just,&nbsp;teach&nbsp;them&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;forthcoming&nbsp;too:&nbsp;&#8220;I&nbsp;expect&nbsp;you&nbsp;to&nbsp;communicate&nbsp;well&nbsp;with&nbsp;me.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And&nbsp;actually&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;something&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;teaching&nbsp;my&nbsp;11-year old&nbsp;right&nbsp;now,&nbsp;because&nbsp;she&#8217;s&nbsp;starting&nbsp;to&nbsp;get&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;point&nbsp;where&nbsp;she&#8217;ll&nbsp;do&nbsp;stuff&nbsp;mindlessly.&nbsp;This&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;funny&nbsp;story,&nbsp;but&nbsp;I&nbsp;was&nbsp;making&nbsp;coffee&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;you&nbsp;know&nbsp;I&nbsp;have&nbsp;one&nbsp;of&nbsp;those&nbsp;milk&nbsp;frothers&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&nbsp;had&nbsp;like&nbsp;two&nbsp;minutes&nbsp;before&nbsp;I&nbsp;needed&nbsp;to&nbsp;jump&nbsp;on&nbsp;a&nbsp;meeting,&nbsp;but&nbsp;I&nbsp;needed&nbsp;to&nbsp;pee&nbsp;really&nbsp;bad&nbsp;before&nbsp;this&nbsp;meeting.&nbsp;And&nbsp;I&nbsp;was&nbsp;like,&nbsp;how&nbsp;do&nbsp;I&nbsp;get&nbsp;this&nbsp;done?&nbsp;So&nbsp;I&nbsp;was&nbsp;like,&nbsp;&#8220;Here,&nbsp;Olivia,&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;go&nbsp;pee&nbsp;really&nbsp;quick,&nbsp;you&nbsp;take&nbsp;this&nbsp;milk&nbsp;frother&nbsp;and&nbsp;froth&nbsp;my&nbsp;coffee.&#8221;&nbsp;I&nbsp;came&nbsp;back,&nbsp;poured&nbsp;my&nbsp;drink,&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;on&nbsp;my&nbsp;call&nbsp;now.&nbsp;And&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;like,&nbsp;why&nbsp;is&nbsp;this&nbsp;spicy?&nbsp;So&nbsp;I&nbsp;put&nbsp;the&nbsp;call&nbsp;on&nbsp;hold&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;like,&nbsp;&#8220;Hey&nbsp;yo,&nbsp;Olivia,&nbsp;did&nbsp;you&nbsp;put&nbsp;a&nbsp;lot&nbsp;of&nbsp;cinnamon&nbsp;in?&nbsp;Why&nbsp;is&nbsp;this&nbsp;so&nbsp;spicy?&#8221;&nbsp;She&#8217;s&nbsp;cracking&nbsp;up.&nbsp;She&#8217;s&nbsp;like,&nbsp;&#8220;Remember&nbsp;this&nbsp;from&nbsp;the&nbsp;refrigerator,&nbsp;Mom?&#8221;&nbsp;She&nbsp;put&nbsp;hot&nbsp;sauce,&nbsp;like&nbsp;sriracha,&nbsp;in&nbsp;my&nbsp;coffee.&nbsp;In&nbsp;the&nbsp;two&nbsp;minutes&nbsp;after&nbsp;I&nbsp;peed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway,&nbsp;so&nbsp;she&#8217;s&nbsp;getting&nbsp;to&nbsp;that&nbsp;age&nbsp;where&nbsp;she&#8217;s&nbsp;starting&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;things&nbsp;mindlessly,&nbsp;and&nbsp;of&nbsp;course&nbsp;that&nbsp;was&nbsp;funny,&nbsp;but&nbsp;what&nbsp;I&#8217;ve&nbsp;been&nbsp;telling&nbsp;her&nbsp;is,&nbsp;think&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;end&nbsp;result.&nbsp;Think&nbsp;about&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;not&nbsp;to&nbsp;make&nbsp;you&nbsp;afraid,&nbsp;but&nbsp;as&nbsp;a&nbsp;thought&nbsp;exercise&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;think&nbsp;about&nbsp;the&nbsp;worst&nbsp;thing&nbsp;that&nbsp;could&nbsp;happen,&nbsp;and&nbsp;make&nbsp;your&nbsp;decision&nbsp;on&nbsp;whether&nbsp;you&nbsp;move&nbsp;forth&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;the&nbsp;thing&nbsp;based&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;worst&nbsp;possible&nbsp;outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;For&nbsp;you,&nbsp;I&nbsp;mean,&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;right.&nbsp;If&nbsp;you&nbsp;dismiss&nbsp;it&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;&#8220;Oh,&nbsp;that&nbsp;person&nbsp;had&nbsp;a&nbsp;weird&nbsp;comment&nbsp;about&nbsp;the&nbsp;beautiful&nbsp;girls,&nbsp;but&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;sure&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;fine&#8221;&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;you&nbsp;decide&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;passive,&nbsp;maybe&nbsp;you&nbsp;aren&#8217;t&nbsp;bold&nbsp;and&nbsp;can&#8217;t&nbsp;say&nbsp;no,&nbsp;or&nbsp;maybe&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;a&nbsp;people&nbsp;pleaser.&nbsp;Well,&nbsp;think&nbsp;about&nbsp;if&nbsp;something&nbsp;were&nbsp;to&nbsp;happen&nbsp;in&nbsp;that&nbsp;home.&nbsp;Then&nbsp;you&#8217;ve&nbsp;got&nbsp;to&nbsp;live&nbsp;with,&nbsp;&#8220;Oh&nbsp;man,&nbsp;I&nbsp;knew&nbsp;it&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;phone,&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&nbsp;put&nbsp;them&nbsp;in&nbsp;that&nbsp;situation.&#8221;&nbsp;So&nbsp;think&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;worst&nbsp;possible&nbsp;thing&nbsp;that&nbsp;could&nbsp;happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-20\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Safety&nbsp;first<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;and&nbsp;especially&nbsp;with&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;obviously&nbsp;we&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;want&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;paranoid,&nbsp;but&nbsp;in&nbsp;this&nbsp;instance&nbsp;of&nbsp;safety,&nbsp;it&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;very&nbsp;specific&nbsp;industry&nbsp;that&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;in.&nbsp;We&#8217;re&nbsp;going&nbsp;into&nbsp;people&#8217;s&nbsp;spaces,&nbsp;into&nbsp;their&nbsp;kingdoms,&nbsp;and&nbsp;so&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;putting&nbsp;our&nbsp;staff&nbsp;potentially&nbsp;at&nbsp;risk.&nbsp;If&nbsp;we&nbsp;ignore&nbsp;those&nbsp;types&nbsp;of&nbsp;red&nbsp;flags,&nbsp;you&nbsp;will&nbsp;never&nbsp;live&nbsp;with&nbsp;yourself&nbsp;if&nbsp;something&nbsp;bad&nbsp;happens.&nbsp;Anytime&nbsp;something&nbsp;has&nbsp;happened&nbsp;safety-wise,&nbsp;I&#8217;ve&nbsp;made&nbsp;episodes&nbsp;about&nbsp;it,&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&#8217;ve&nbsp;done&nbsp;my&nbsp;due&nbsp;diligence&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;we&nbsp;do&nbsp;what&nbsp;we&nbsp;can,&nbsp;of&nbsp;course&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;but&nbsp;it&nbsp;literally&nbsp;chokes&nbsp;me&nbsp;up&nbsp;when&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;of&nbsp;what&nbsp;could&nbsp;have&nbsp;happened&nbsp;if&nbsp;they&nbsp;didn&#8217;t&nbsp;get&nbsp;out&nbsp;of&nbsp;those&nbsp;situations.&nbsp;So&nbsp;if&nbsp;you&nbsp;ignore&nbsp;anything&nbsp;like&nbsp;that&nbsp;because&nbsp;you&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;want&nbsp;to&nbsp;rock&nbsp;the&nbsp;boat&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;if&nbsp;you&nbsp;can&#8217;t&nbsp;do&nbsp;it&nbsp;for&nbsp;yourself,&nbsp;which&nbsp;I&nbsp;know&nbsp;a&nbsp;lot&nbsp;of&nbsp;us&nbsp;struggle&nbsp;with&nbsp;boundaries&nbsp;for&nbsp;ourselves.&nbsp;But&nbsp;I&nbsp;never&nbsp;struggle&nbsp;with&nbsp;boundaries&nbsp;for&nbsp;my&nbsp;staff,&nbsp;interestingly&nbsp;enough,&nbsp;because&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;like&nbsp;that&nbsp;mama&nbsp;bear&nbsp;protectiveness&nbsp;of,&nbsp;&#8220;No,&nbsp;I&nbsp;am&nbsp;the&nbsp;steward&nbsp;of&nbsp;their&nbsp;safety,&#8221;&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&nbsp;need&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;everything&nbsp;I&nbsp;can&nbsp;to&nbsp;make&nbsp;sure&nbsp;that&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;a&nbsp;good&nbsp;steward&nbsp;of&nbsp;it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;amazing.&nbsp;That&#8217;s&nbsp;awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;They&nbsp;all&nbsp;get&nbsp;pepper&nbsp;spray&nbsp;when&nbsp;they&nbsp;start&nbsp;at&nbsp;Serene&nbsp;Clean.&nbsp;They&nbsp;get&nbsp;pepper&nbsp;spray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh,&nbsp;that&#8217;s&nbsp;awesome,&nbsp;Stephanie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;oh&nbsp;yeah.&nbsp;If&nbsp;they&nbsp;want&nbsp;it&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;and&nbsp;if&nbsp;they&nbsp;do,&nbsp;they&nbsp;have&nbsp;to&nbsp;go&nbsp;through&nbsp;a&nbsp;training&nbsp;of&nbsp;how&nbsp;to&nbsp;use&nbsp;it.&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;actually&nbsp;pepper&nbsp;gel,&nbsp;because&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;sticky,&nbsp;so&nbsp;it&nbsp;doesn&#8217;t&nbsp;spray&nbsp;back&nbsp;on&nbsp;you,&nbsp;and&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;going&nbsp;to&nbsp;stick&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;assailant&nbsp;better.&nbsp;So&nbsp;pepper&nbsp;gel,&nbsp;guys,&nbsp;highly&nbsp;recommend&nbsp;it.&nbsp;And&nbsp;again,&nbsp;I&nbsp;never&nbsp;want&nbsp;to&nbsp;make&nbsp;people&nbsp;paranoid,&nbsp;but&nbsp;I&nbsp;also&nbsp;am&nbsp;very&nbsp;much&nbsp;a&nbsp;realist&nbsp;of,&nbsp;like,&nbsp;shit&nbsp;happens,&nbsp;and&nbsp;people&nbsp;sometimes&nbsp;take&nbsp;advantage&nbsp;of&nbsp;opportunities&nbsp;that&nbsp;arise,&nbsp;and&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;alone&nbsp;in&nbsp;homes&nbsp;with&nbsp;people.&nbsp;So&nbsp;we&#8217;ve&nbsp;got&nbsp;to&nbsp;take&nbsp;that&nbsp;shit&nbsp;seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So&nbsp;I&nbsp;would&nbsp;say&nbsp;that&#8217;s&nbsp;the&nbsp;final&nbsp;big&nbsp;red&nbsp;flag&nbsp;area&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;I&nbsp;just&nbsp;want&nbsp;everybody&nbsp;to&nbsp;always&nbsp;be&nbsp;thinking&nbsp;safety&nbsp;first&nbsp;in&nbsp;all&nbsp;capacities.&nbsp;And&nbsp;that&nbsp;means&nbsp;lots&nbsp;of&nbsp;things,&nbsp;right?&nbsp;Are&nbsp;they&nbsp;asking&nbsp;your&nbsp;cleaners&nbsp;to&nbsp;climb&nbsp;on&nbsp;ladders?&nbsp;Are&nbsp;they&nbsp;constantly&nbsp;pushing&nbsp;the&nbsp;boundaries&nbsp;on&nbsp;scope?&nbsp;That&nbsp;can&nbsp;be&nbsp;a&nbsp;total&nbsp;red&nbsp;flag&nbsp;too.&nbsp;&#8220;Can&nbsp;you&nbsp;do&nbsp;this?&nbsp;Can&nbsp;you&nbsp;do&nbsp;this?&nbsp;Will&nbsp;you&nbsp;clean&nbsp;the&nbsp;gutters?&#8221;&nbsp;This&nbsp;is&nbsp;my&nbsp;biggest&nbsp;boundary&nbsp;problem&nbsp;I&#8217;ve&nbsp;had&nbsp;over&nbsp;the&nbsp;years&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;business&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;saying&nbsp;yes&nbsp;to&nbsp;things&nbsp;and&nbsp;then&nbsp;putting&nbsp;my&nbsp;cleaners&nbsp;in&nbsp;positions&nbsp;where&nbsp;all&nbsp;of&nbsp;a&nbsp;sudden&nbsp;they&#8217;re&nbsp;painting&nbsp;apartments&nbsp;and&nbsp;touching&nbsp;up&nbsp;paint&nbsp;on&nbsp;turnovers.&nbsp;And&nbsp;that&nbsp;wasn&#8217;t&nbsp;cool&nbsp;of&nbsp;me,&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&nbsp;did&nbsp;that.&nbsp;So&nbsp;I&nbsp;need&nbsp;to&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;you&nbsp;know,&nbsp;I&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;talk&nbsp;to&nbsp;the&nbsp;customers&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;phones.&nbsp;That&#8217;s&nbsp;the&nbsp;rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-21\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Goals,&nbsp;hobbies,&nbsp;and&nbsp;life&nbsp;in&nbsp;Spain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Well,&nbsp;Maria,&nbsp;this&nbsp;has&nbsp;been&nbsp;lovely.&nbsp;What&nbsp;are&nbsp;the&nbsp;goals&nbsp;for&nbsp;this&nbsp;year?&nbsp;Do&nbsp;you&nbsp;have&nbsp;any&nbsp;specific&nbsp;goals&nbsp;in&nbsp;mind&nbsp;that&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;willing&nbsp;to&nbsp;share,&nbsp;for&nbsp;your&nbsp;business&nbsp;or&nbsp;for&nbsp;yourself&nbsp;personally?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;we&#8217;ve&nbsp;got&nbsp;a&nbsp;lot&nbsp;of&nbsp;really&nbsp;big&nbsp;goals&nbsp;for&nbsp;the&nbsp;company&nbsp;this&nbsp;year.&nbsp;Obviously&nbsp;the&nbsp;big&nbsp;name&nbsp;change&nbsp;and&nbsp;the&nbsp;brand&nbsp;change&nbsp;is&nbsp;going&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;huge&nbsp;for&nbsp;us.&nbsp;And&nbsp;then&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;looking&nbsp;at&nbsp;going&nbsp;from&nbsp;a&nbsp;100%&nbsp;subcontractor&nbsp;model&nbsp;to&nbsp;having&nbsp;our&nbsp;first&nbsp;employees,&nbsp;and&nbsp;what&nbsp;that&nbsp;looks&nbsp;like,&nbsp;and&nbsp;all&nbsp;the&nbsp;culture&nbsp;stuff&nbsp;and&nbsp;all&nbsp;the&nbsp;things&nbsp;that&nbsp;need&nbsp;to&nbsp;change&nbsp;for&nbsp;that.&nbsp;That&#8217;s&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;business&nbsp;side.&nbsp;Obviously&nbsp;Task&nbsp;Away&nbsp;keeps&nbsp;moving&nbsp;and&nbsp;growing&nbsp;and&nbsp;doing&nbsp;its&nbsp;thing&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;we&nbsp;actually&nbsp;have&nbsp;some&nbsp;really&nbsp;big&nbsp;changes&nbsp;on&nbsp;that&nbsp;front&nbsp;too.&nbsp;All&nbsp;exciting,&nbsp;all&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;sake&nbsp;of&nbsp;keeping&nbsp;up&nbsp;with&nbsp;current&nbsp;trends.&nbsp;And&nbsp;personally,&nbsp;oof,&nbsp;I&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;know,&nbsp;I&nbsp;think\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;You&nbsp;said&nbsp;you&nbsp;have&nbsp;hobbies?&nbsp;Tell&nbsp;me,&nbsp;do&nbsp;you&nbsp;have&nbsp;new&nbsp;hobbies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh,&nbsp;hobbies,&nbsp;yeah.&nbsp;So&nbsp;I&nbsp;decided&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;okay,&nbsp;so&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;51,&nbsp;and&nbsp;about&nbsp;six&nbsp;months&nbsp;ago&nbsp;I&nbsp;decided,&nbsp;look,&nbsp;some&nbsp;of&nbsp;the&nbsp;things&nbsp;that&nbsp;I&nbsp;really&nbsp;like,&nbsp;that&nbsp;I&nbsp;thought,&nbsp;&#8220;Oh,&nbsp;it&nbsp;would&nbsp;be&nbsp;so&nbsp;cool&nbsp;to&nbsp;learn&nbsp;how&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;X,&nbsp;Y,&nbsp;Z&#8221;&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;like,&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;this&nbsp;was&nbsp;eight&nbsp;months&nbsp;ago,&nbsp;I&nbsp;was&nbsp;like,&nbsp;&#8220;You&nbsp;know,&nbsp;I&nbsp;really&nbsp;like&nbsp;the&nbsp;French&nbsp;language,&nbsp;but&nbsp;I&nbsp;never&nbsp;really&nbsp;sat&nbsp;down&nbsp;to&nbsp;learn.&#8221;&nbsp;So&nbsp;this&nbsp;year&nbsp;I&nbsp;decided,&nbsp;you&nbsp;know&nbsp;what,&nbsp;no&nbsp;more.&nbsp;The&nbsp;things&nbsp;that&nbsp;I&nbsp;said&nbsp;I&nbsp;wanna&nbsp;do,&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;do&nbsp;them.&nbsp;So&nbsp;I&nbsp;started&nbsp;picking&nbsp;up&nbsp;learning&nbsp;how&nbsp;to&nbsp;play&nbsp;piano,&nbsp;which&nbsp;is&nbsp;very&nbsp;slow&nbsp;going,&nbsp;but&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;really&nbsp;fun.&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;kind&nbsp;of&nbsp;fun&nbsp;to&nbsp;turn&nbsp;it&nbsp;all&nbsp;off.&nbsp;And&nbsp;the&nbsp;same&nbsp;with&nbsp;guitar.&nbsp;And&nbsp;then&nbsp;I&nbsp;just&nbsp;decided,&nbsp;my&nbsp;goal&nbsp;is&nbsp;to&nbsp;be&nbsp;fluent&nbsp;in&nbsp;French.&nbsp;So&nbsp;I&#8217;ve&nbsp;been&nbsp;practicing&nbsp;a&nbsp;lot&nbsp;of&nbsp;French.&nbsp;And&nbsp;that&nbsp;would&nbsp;be&nbsp;my&nbsp;third&nbsp;language&nbsp;that&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;fluent&nbsp;in.&nbsp;And&nbsp;for&nbsp;no&nbsp;reason&nbsp;other&nbsp;than&nbsp;I&nbsp;think&nbsp;it&#8217;ll&nbsp;just&nbsp;be&nbsp;cool&nbsp;to&nbsp;say&nbsp;I&nbsp;can&nbsp;speak&nbsp;three&nbsp;languages&nbsp;fluently.&nbsp;So&nbsp;those&nbsp;are&nbsp;my&nbsp;goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh&nbsp;my&nbsp;gosh,&nbsp;I&nbsp;just&nbsp;love&nbsp;that.&nbsp;I&nbsp;find&nbsp;you&nbsp;so&nbsp;inspirational,&nbsp;and&nbsp;you&nbsp;just&nbsp;have&nbsp;such&nbsp;a&nbsp;wonderful&nbsp;energy&nbsp;about&nbsp;you.&nbsp;And&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;very&nbsp;brave,&nbsp;too,&nbsp;I&nbsp;would&nbsp;say.&nbsp;You&nbsp;are&nbsp;a&nbsp;very&nbsp;brave&nbsp;woman&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&nbsp;mean&nbsp;that&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;most&nbsp;complimentary&nbsp;way&nbsp;possible,&nbsp;not&nbsp;passive&nbsp;aggressive,&nbsp;like&nbsp;&#8220;you&#8217;re&nbsp;so&nbsp;brave.&#8221;&nbsp;But&nbsp;because&nbsp;you&nbsp;did,&nbsp;like,&nbsp;moving&nbsp;to&nbsp;another&nbsp;country,&nbsp;and&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;very&nbsp;bold&nbsp;and&nbsp;open&nbsp;to&nbsp;experiences.&nbsp;And&nbsp;if&nbsp;we&nbsp;wanna&nbsp;dance&nbsp;in&nbsp;a&nbsp;nightclub&nbsp;in&nbsp;Barcelona&nbsp;at&nbsp;2&nbsp;a.m.,&nbsp;we&#8217;re&nbsp;gonna&nbsp;do&nbsp;that.&nbsp;Because&nbsp;me&nbsp;and&nbsp;Maria&nbsp;did&nbsp;that&nbsp;last&nbsp;year,&nbsp;and&nbsp;we&#8217;ll&nbsp;have&nbsp;to&nbsp;do&nbsp;that&nbsp;again.&nbsp;I&#8217;ll&nbsp;see&nbsp;her&nbsp;in&nbsp;two&nbsp;weeks,&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;so&nbsp;excited.&nbsp;We&#8217;ll&nbsp;have&nbsp;to&nbsp;hit&nbsp;the&nbsp;town&nbsp;again,&nbsp;because&nbsp;it&nbsp;was&nbsp;fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Absolutely.&nbsp;My&nbsp;digestion&#8217;s&nbsp;not&nbsp;ready&nbsp;for&nbsp;the&nbsp;late-night&nbsp;eating&nbsp;yet,&nbsp;because&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;such&nbsp;a&nbsp;culture&nbsp;shock.&nbsp;I&nbsp;mean,&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;in&nbsp;Spain,&nbsp;so&nbsp;you&nbsp;know&nbsp;how&nbsp;it&nbsp;is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;for&nbsp;sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;like,&nbsp;you&nbsp;go&nbsp;to&nbsp;make&nbsp;a&nbsp;reservation&nbsp;for&nbsp;dinner&nbsp;and&nbsp;most&nbsp;places&nbsp;don&#8217;t&nbsp;even&nbsp;open&nbsp;until&nbsp;about&nbsp;eight&nbsp;o&#8217;clock&nbsp;at&nbsp;night.&nbsp;And&nbsp;from&nbsp;eight&nbsp;to&nbsp;nine,&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;cocktail&nbsp;drinks&nbsp;or&nbsp;non-alcoholic&nbsp;drinks.&nbsp;But&nbsp;dinner&nbsp;services&nbsp;start&nbsp;at&nbsp;either&nbsp;nine&nbsp;o&#8217;clock&nbsp;at&nbsp;night&nbsp;or&nbsp;11,&nbsp;so&nbsp;you&nbsp;get&nbsp;to&nbsp;choose.&nbsp;Do&nbsp;you&nbsp;wanna&nbsp;eat&nbsp;dinner&nbsp;at&nbsp;nine&nbsp;or&nbsp;11?&nbsp;Which&nbsp;to&nbsp;me,&nbsp;even&nbsp;now,&nbsp;is&nbsp;like,&nbsp;why&nbsp;would&nbsp;I&nbsp;wanna&nbsp;eat&nbsp;dinner&nbsp;at&nbsp;11&nbsp;o&#8217;clock&nbsp;at&nbsp;night?&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;still&nbsp;crazy&nbsp;to&nbsp;me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah,&nbsp;that&#8217;s&nbsp;like&nbsp;my&nbsp;most&nbsp;wild&nbsp;culture&nbsp;shock&nbsp;experience&nbsp;when&nbsp;I&nbsp;went&nbsp;over&nbsp;last&nbsp;year.&nbsp;I&nbsp;was&nbsp;like,&nbsp;this&nbsp;is&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;I&#8217;ve&nbsp;never&nbsp;imagined&nbsp;doing&nbsp;this.&nbsp;And&nbsp;then&nbsp;just&nbsp;everything&nbsp;not&nbsp;opening&nbsp;till&nbsp;10.&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;just&nbsp;all&nbsp;shifted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s&nbsp;all&nbsp;shifted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah.&nbsp;So&nbsp;it&#8217;s&nbsp;a&nbsp;beautiful&nbsp;country,&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;so&nbsp;excited,&nbsp;and&nbsp;I&nbsp;can&#8217;t&nbsp;wait&nbsp;to&nbsp;see&nbsp;you.&nbsp;I&#8217;m&nbsp;so&nbsp;excited&nbsp;to&nbsp;spend&nbsp;time&nbsp;with&nbsp;you&nbsp;again.&nbsp;And&nbsp;Maria,&nbsp;we&#8217;ll&nbsp;be&nbsp;sure&nbsp;to&nbsp;link&nbsp;your&nbsp;businesses&nbsp;down&nbsp;below.&nbsp;Guys,&nbsp;if&nbsp;you&#8217;re&nbsp;looking&nbsp;for&nbsp;a&nbsp;virtual&nbsp;assistant,&nbsp;absolutely&nbsp;check&nbsp;out&nbsp;Task&nbsp;Away&nbsp;VA.&nbsp;She&#8217;s&nbsp;got&nbsp;some&nbsp;amazing&nbsp;people&nbsp;over&nbsp;there&nbsp;and&nbsp;can&nbsp;help&nbsp;you&nbsp;guys&nbsp;get&nbsp;your&nbsp;shit&nbsp;together,&nbsp;if&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;a&nbsp;problem&nbsp;for&nbsp;you,&nbsp;like&nbsp;it&nbsp;is&nbsp;for&nbsp;most&nbsp;of&nbsp;us.&nbsp;And&nbsp;Maria,&nbsp;we&nbsp;will&nbsp;see&nbsp;you&nbsp;next&nbsp;time.&nbsp;See&nbsp;you&nbsp;in&nbsp;two&nbsp;weeks,&nbsp;and&nbsp;thank&nbsp;you&nbsp;for&nbsp;joining&nbsp;me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Maria:<\/strong>&nbsp;Thank&nbsp;you&nbsp;for&nbsp;having&nbsp;me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Absolutely.&nbsp;Everybody,&nbsp;please&nbsp;hit&nbsp;that&nbsp;like,&nbsp;hit&nbsp;that&nbsp;subscribe,&nbsp;leave&nbsp;some&nbsp;love&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;comments&nbsp;for&nbsp;Maria&nbsp;below,&nbsp;and&nbsp;we&#8217;ll&nbsp;see&nbsp;you&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;next&nbsp;episode&nbsp;of&nbsp;Filthy&nbsp;Rich&nbsp;Cleaners.&nbsp;Thanks,&nbsp;guys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Stephanie:&nbsp;Hello, my friends. I am so excited for you to hear this conversation with Miss Maria Dorian. She is one of my favorite people ever. She&#8217;s an absolute delight. Little content advisory&nbsp;warning: there are some swear words in this episode, so if you&#8217;ve got little ears around, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17556,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"Client Red Flags Every Cleaning Business Owner Should Know","_seopress_titles_desc":"Maria Dorian joins Stephanie to share how the cleaning industry has changed, standing out from competition, handling bad reviews, client red flags, and safety.","_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-17555","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\/17555","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=17555"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17558,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555\/revisions\/17558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}