{"id":17573,"date":"2026-07-30T13:43:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T13:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17573"},"modified":"2026-07-30T13:43:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T13:43:12","slug":"how-vanessa-muir-doubled-her-cleaning-businesss-revenue-in-one-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/how-vanessa-muir-doubled-her-cleaning-businesss-revenue-in-one-year\/","title":{"rendered":"How Vanessa Muir Doubled Her Cleaning Business&#8217;s Revenue in One Year"},"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\/161-how-vanessa-muir-doubled-her-cleaning-businesss\/id1791590022?i=1000779098587\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/2lLP5WK68vstBB2IkdYvl2?si=40e89cd3ed7046ac\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4IzWIltgUCs\">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: #161: How Vanessa Muir Doubled Her Cleaning Business&amp;apos;s Revenue in One Year\" 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\/2lLP5WK68vstBB2IkdYvl2?si=40e89cd3ed7046ac&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>&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 fabulous guest, all the way from Canada, Miss Vanessa Muir. And she is the owner and founder of The Cleaning Guild. And I cannot wait to share her story, guys. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me. So happy to have you here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Thank you. Yeah, I&#8217;m excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Story Behind The Cleaning Guild<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Absolutely. Now, The Cleaning Guild, the name \u2014 I am a recent converter to Dungeons and Dragons because of my nerd boyfriend. And it&#8217;s so fun. I&#8217;d never played before this year. So please tell me the name, the story. We&#8217;ve got a dungeon master in our presence, guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I do run a D&amp;D campaign, which is kind of separate to the \u2014 I think I started The Cleaning Guild before I started running a D&amp;D campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;So I started \u2014 it was 2022. And we had recently moved back to New Brunswick from Halifax. My husband&#8217;s in the military, so we were down there for a couple of years. And we had had our first baby. She was now five. And during COVID \u2014 so it was 2020 when I got pregnant. So I got laid off from my job. I was managing a car rental office at the Halifax Airport. So I got laid off from that during COVID. And I had my whole pregnancy off work, which I couldn&#8217;t really complain about. It was great. It was very relaxing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then we moved back here mid-maternity leave, which is great. I&#8217;m from here, where we are right now, in the Fredericton area of New Brunswick. So it was nice to move back with the military as well and then have my family close by when we had our first little one. We now have two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then after the maternity leave ran out, I wasn&#8217;t really doing anything. I was like, I don&#8217;t know what to do for work. I always wanted to own my own business. I went to school. I have a bachelor of philosophy in leadership but a minor in business administration. And when I was a kid, I always thought it was going to be a bakery or something fun and exciting like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And when I had Lena, that&#8217;s my first kid, and the maternity leave had run out, I was like, I don&#8217;t know what to do. I don&#8217;t want to go back to rental cars. It was kind of rough overall. We didn&#8217;t have a lot of \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, I can&#8217;t imagine. It must have been like horrible customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, it&#8217;s a lot of yelling in car rentals. And I worked at the Halifax Airport branch, and the rentals would just keep pumping in. But we didn&#8217;t have the cars. So I had to pick people up at the airport and tell them we didn&#8217;t have a car for them to take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;m sure they were thrilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, or they reserved a small car and I only had F-150s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yay, free upgrade. Oh, setting you up for failure, basically. You&#8217;re taking the brunt of it. I can&#8217;t imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, and they don&#8217;t have to deal with it, because they&#8217;re in their corporate offices behind desks. So they just have the managers and the customer service representatives getting yelled at on the phone and in person. So a lot less yelling in the cleaning world, which is great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I thought Canadians were all friendly, Vanessa. I thought there was not a single rude Canadian. All super friendly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;All so friendly to the face. The phone is, I would say, harder than the face, for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Really?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;People will get a lot snappier way quicker on the phone than they will in person, because they&#8217;re not looking at you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, and then when I had \u2014 she was like 10 months old. I guess she would have been \u2014 I started March 2022, so she would have been one and a half. And I had this knitting group. I didn&#8217;t actually do a lot of knitting. It was more like a bitch and stitch kind of deal. But it was a friend of mine and her mom and their family friend. And her mom had a cleaner. And I was really into cleaning my own house. And my youngest was only a year and a half. So we had this really good routine when I was at home where we&#8217;d wake up, have breakfast. She&#8217;d do her little playtime. I&#8217;d clean the house. The house was always so clean. It&#8217;s not like that anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I was like, well, I want to start cleaning for her. But I don&#8217;t want to ask her to fire her current cleaner \u2014 like, she already has somebody. But then at one of the knitting nights, she asked me if I would want to start cleaning for them, because they were looking at firing her, because the other girl had been doing it for a couple of years and she had started to kind of slack off in some areas. And they were quite particular. So that&#8217;s how I kind of started with just her. And then the other friend who was in the knitting group eventually started at their house as well. And I was pregnant at the time with our second baby, whose birthday was yesterday. She turned four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, happy birthday, baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. I know. I can&#8217;t believe one more year with toddlers, and then we&#8217;re back to just little kids. But yes, I started with them, just the two of them. And I think maybe I had one or two other clients while I was pregnant for a few months. And then took a couple months off after I had her, and then started to pick up after that, pick up word of mouth clients from them. I filled my own schedule. And then January 2025, I hired my first employee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so a couple months before that, I guess, I went through the naming process and trying to find a name that was available. I think The Cleaning Guild was probably my ninth or tenth try. But it worked out, because it was the best one, by far the best name that I even submitted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s a great name. It&#8217;s unique. It immediately allows \u2014 I was looking at your website. I love your ZenMaid booking form, where you say &#8220;book your quest.&#8221; Like the masterclass of branding, of just, when you are able to pick something like that, then it immediately makes it clear what to do with everything else. Because it&#8217;s just a theme. And it&#8217;s so fun. It&#8217;s unique. I am obsessed with it. I can&#8217;t wait \u2014 as soon as we&#8217;re done with this, I&#8217;m going to be texting my boyfriend, like, look at this cleaning company. It&#8217;s so cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I&#8217;m trying to keep it a happy medium between nerdy marketing and not nerdy marketing, so people know that we do clean. But it has definitely brought in a lot of people who play Dungeons and Dragons. And that&#8217;s the only reason why they hire us. They look at the list in the area, and they&#8217;re like, well, obviously, we&#8217;re going to pick The Cleaning Guild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I love that. It is so funny. I had no idea how many people play this until I started playing it. And then my hairdresser does it, all of these other people, these women, that I was like, oh, we all do this, and we just don&#8217;t talk about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, we all \u2014 you know, we read fantasy smut, and we play Dungeons and Dragons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Pricing: From $25 an Hour to a Hybrid Model<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Exactly. Exactly. As it should be, Queen. OK, so you take these first couple of clients. I&#8217;m curious, with the pricing of it all, were you just totally guessing? Did you just say, what were you paying your former lady? I&#8217;ll take the same. How did you make those decisions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, when it was just the couple clients I started with, I think I was at $25 an hour. They were friends, and it was kind of like a side gig. It wasn&#8217;t really like I was starting up a business at the time. It was more like, OK, I&#8217;m going to do this for a little bit of income on the side. And I didn&#8217;t know what I was doing. I was a good cleaner, but I had never done it professionally in this large-scaled house that they had. So yeah, I started at $25 an hour with them and the other friend as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then when I came back after having my second kid, I think I upped it to $35 at the time. $30 or $35. It might have been $30 for them. And then when I started adding people, the first couple I added was probably $35. And eventually I bumped to where when I was adding new clients, it was at $40 an hour. And now that I hire people, totally different. I mean, I try and get at least $55.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I find I&#8217;ve been going through recently and doing some price adjustments as well, because when I hired, it was just the one employee at the start. And it was never really like, I&#8217;m going to hire a full team of staff and just work in the office type of deal, though that&#8217;s now kind of where I&#8217;m at right now. So originally it was like, I&#8217;m going to hire him. He&#8217;s going to take on some more people, but I&#8217;m still going to clean full time. And I started out at $50 an hour when I was hiring him, but I went to flat rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I found I wasn&#8217;t doing a very good job at estimating time for employees. I was estimating how long it would take me to clean that house, but not how long it would take this employee to clean my house. So doing a very bad job at estimating flat rate, especially for initial cleans. So I&#8217;ve switched now, do kind of a hybrid where we do hourly for the first time clean, and then a flat rate past that. And so I&#8217;m kind of cycling through the people who have gotten their flat rate from before, and upping some of them that haven&#8217;t been upped in a little while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I love what you&#8217;re saying right now, because you&#8217;re really touching on what pricing truly is in reality for pretty much all of us, is that you&#8217;re not, one, going to nail it, and two, it&#8217;s something that evolves. And three, it&#8217;s something that you can change, right? Whether the method \u2014 you know, I just showcased that we switched to flat rate after years. And if we didn&#8217;t have our production rates solid, I absolutely would have done exactly what you are with the hybrid. Because, you know, you&#8217;re still relatively new to having staff members and figuring out what does it look like of how sustainably can they clean on those first times. So this makes sure you don&#8217;t lose your ass, right? On those first times. You could always switch back if you so choose in the future, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I lost it a couple of times on some first time cleans. Some that like four people did and took way longer than I had initially quoted for the set rate. And I think that last one, the four people one, is when I switched to hourly for initial cleans, &#8217;cause I didn&#8217;t want to pay out of pocket to clean anybody&#8217;s house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Right, for real, yeah. The pain is a good teacher, like a catalyst of, let&#8217;s try something else, shall we? And I also like that you showcase where you started. I mean, it&#8217;s very similar prices to where I was at in the beginning of that, $30 an hour and then just incrementally increasing it to what market rate truly is for cleaning with a team, right? We have to charge that, especially with Canadian laws and rules and all of that stuff. I mean, you guys have a lot \u2014 it&#8217;s more expensive, certainly, to run a business in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, and I&#8217;m charging about the same amount, but as a Canadian dollar, so much less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">When a Commercial Account Doesn&#8217;t Make Sense<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, yeah, it&#8217;s wild. So are you fully residential? What does a split look like for your clients?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;No, revenue-wise, it&#8217;s like a 50\/50 split. Client-wise, it&#8217;s quite a different split. We have 41, give or take, recurring clients, and three of those are commercial. One of them is quite a big five-day-a-week \u2014 three apartment buildings that we maintain four to five hours, Monday through Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Very nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;So that one&#8217;s a good contract. And then a tiny office, an accounting office that we do. And then two others, and one of them I think is going to be done soon. They don&#8217;t wanna pay company prices. They&#8217;re used to solo cleaners. That&#8217;s what they usually hire for their buildings. It&#8217;s also apartment buildings. And I took it on in September. I actually know the guy who I&#8217;ve been booking it with, the property manager. And so I took it on thinking, they have a lot of apartment buildings in Fredericton. So if we added on more apartment buildings, eventually that profit would pick up and we would be making more money, but it just hasn&#8217;t worked out that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I met with him last week and I offered \u2014 the girl who does it, she&#8217;s working full-time &#8217;cause we&#8217;re doing seven of their apartment buildings right now. So she&#8217;s working full-time doing those. I&#8217;m like, I don&#8217;t want her to lose a job, and I don&#8217;t want you guys to lose a cleaner. So you could just take her, pay her the money. She&#8217;d make ever so slightly more, and not much, &#8217;cause obviously I&#8217;m not making any money from it. But it would depend, &#8217;cause she would turn into a contractor, right? So then she&#8217;d have to worry about paying her taxes. And I don&#8217;t know if she wants to do that. Waiting on them to get back to me on what they want to do with that. But regardless, we won&#8217;t be doing the weekly maintenance cleans anymore &#8217;cause they just don&#8217;t wanna pay for me. And it&#8217;s just not worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;m so happy you shared that, because \u2014 and I don&#8217;t wanna gloss over what the situation is that you just described \u2014 sometimes commercial doesn&#8217;t make sense. Sometimes an account does not make sense, and us trying to fit that square peg into a round hole and forcing it, it&#8217;s just not going to work, right? We&#8217;re trying to make it happen. Fetch isn&#8217;t gonna happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so what I also love is you being open to what you just described with this employee, as being like, here you go. If this works out for you, there you go. We&#8217;ve done the same, where we offered that where a cleaner was already leaving and we&#8217;re like, well, here you go. It was a furniture store. But they didn&#8217;t even wanna pay what she was going to charge either. So I love this solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And it also points to, a lot of times with commercial, if they&#8217;ve had employees doing it, or like you said, individuals, they have no understanding and they refuse to see the reality of, this is what companies charge. And so as much as we talk about commercial being big, juicy, and I love it, whatever \u2014 it doesn&#8217;t mean all commercial, guys. And I&#8217;m really happy, Vanessa, that you&#8217;re looking at the numbers and the facts and not just, oh no, I don&#8217;t wanna lose this account. If the money doesn&#8217;t make sense, there&#8217;s no reason, right? There&#8217;s no reason for us to be working for no money. You know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, that&#8217;s kind of where I was. Like, I don&#8217;t wanna lose this account. Like, how does it make financial sense to lose $4,000 a month? But if it&#8217;s costing me $4,400 a month, then it makes financial sense to lose that $4,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Exactly. Yup, gross versus net revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;They&#8217;re definitely used to the \u2014 like, the contractors, that&#8217;s who they have at most of their buildings. And there were some, you know, red flags about that when I took on the contract, but they were talking about how they wanted to try companies. But then, when I talked to them about it last week, I found out that when they have individual contractors, they&#8217;re doing quarterly deep cleans. Like, well, I&#8217;m trying to maintain these buildings to deep clean level for the same price. If we&#8217;d had that, maybe it would have been better, &#8217;cause then we could have just been maintaining it with less time. Also, the buildings are huge and definitely need more than one day a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Landing a Five-Day-a-Week Apartment Contract<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;How did you get this? &#8216;Cause, okay, so the first apartment complex that you talked about, the buildings, that&#8217;s the five day a week \u2014 that&#8217;s a separate one, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;How did you get these? &#8216;Cause I&#8217;m sure everybody&#8217;s like, how are you getting these apartment complexes? Do you mind sharing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;The first one, the property manager is an old boss of mine, Amy. And so she reached out to me because she knew that I had started a cleaning business and had started hiring people, &#8217;cause obviously I had posted on my Facebook and shared the page when I got the Facebook page up and running. &#8216;Cause when it was just me, I didn&#8217;t have one. The schedule was full, I didn&#8217;t need the Facebook page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So she reached out and I did bid on it. And then I think it was like two months passed when I bid, and I was like, well, surely they&#8217;re not hiring me. I would have heard by now. But eventually the guy got back to me and then gave me two weeks notice to get it staffed. A five day a week job. It&#8217;s worked out \u2014 it&#8217;s actually a year today since we took that contract, and the cleaner is the same, Jeff. So it was also his year anniversary today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh my gosh, how&#8217;d you find Jeff? Where&#8217;d you find him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Indeed. Great commercial cleaner. &#8216;Cause I couldn&#8217;t do it. I could not do five days a week at apartment buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;It was so boring, bored out of my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I swear some of my commercial cleaners are like built different. They love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, they like the mundane work. They don&#8217;t mind it. It&#8217;s easy, I mean, and it&#8217;s the same thing every week. And those ones are smaller \u2014 like, it&#8217;s three buildings that are together, but they don&#8217;t have extras. They don&#8217;t have gyms or laundry rooms or any kind of social room or anything. It&#8217;s just hallways, staircases, elevators. Just the other ones, which is the contract that we&#8217;re dropping, are massive 82 unit buildings with a gym, a bathroom, a social room, a laundry room, like massive entranceways with couches. And we&#8217;re only there one day a week. Not willing to pay what&#8217;s needed there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;m curious on the pricing of the one that Jeff services. It sounds like you nailed the pricing, I mean, and the bid. Was it just a lot of educated guessing, or how did you handle it? Since it was like your first commercial account, it sounds like, or the first big one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, first big one. So I worked it out to try and make it $50 an hour. They knew what they wanted in terms of time. They were going from having superintendents who lived there and received a discount on the rent to do the maintenance and do the cleaning as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;But they weren&#8217;t finding that was doing very well. Like, they weren&#8217;t getting it cleaned five days a week. And so she came to me and wanted like four to five hours a day, five days a week. Which worked out, because there isn&#8217;t all those extras. I think if they&#8217;d had gyms and stuff, it wouldn&#8217;t be enough time. So I kind of went with, I&#8217;ll do $200 a day, because then that&#8217;s four hours at $50. But if we&#8217;re only doing a couple of days at five, it will work out. And then times 20 for the four weeks of a month, give or take. So it&#8217;s just a flat four grand a month plus tax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then it&#8217;s kept at a good \u2014 50% goes to payroll, 10% for overhead, though I will say that we don&#8217;t go through a lot of product there. Most of it&#8217;s vacuuming, right? The vacuum we&#8217;ve replaced once or twice in the last year, but in terms of actual products, we&#8217;re not going through very much there. So then about 40% gets left for profit. So it is priced very well. This one, I don&#8217;t know how I managed to pull that off on my first big commercial contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s fantastic. Thank you for being willing to share the numbers. It&#8217;s very useful. And a lot of times, if the potential client is willing to share and is actually being honest with how long it has taken historically, it gives you clues. Sometimes it&#8217;s like, well, the quality&#8217;s shit \u2014 clearly four hours wasn&#8217;t enough, right? Or if they were getting done early, that type of thing. So it can help. It&#8217;s not the end all be all source of truth, how long is it taking right now, but it can be a good context clue for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So that&#8217;s really awesome that it has worked out so well. And it sounds like a fantastic account, &#8217;cause those are the things that really skyrocket, is when you can get something like that and it&#8217;s just steady. It&#8217;s great. The problem is, of course, risk. &#8216;Cause they&#8217;re a big old whale. And so if something were to happen, it hurts very, very badly. But let&#8217;s not talk about that. And how we minimize that is just keep growing the rest of the business, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, they got a new boss there a couple months ago, and the property manager sent me an email asking for the full weekly schedule. And I was like, no, don&#8217;t. But then I guess he was in there and the cleaner was there, and he said that the boss was like, these buildings are way cleaner than our other ones. So it&#8217;s fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;There you go. They&#8217;re not gonna go anywhere. Yes, good job, Jeff. That is awesome. Love to hear it. Okay, so that&#8217;s fantastic. So you got some of these big old commercial accounts, residentials happen. Sounds like you have what, about six staff members right now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, six. We&#8217;ve been up to eight. They are mostly \u2014 well, I say mostly full-time. That one at the apartment buildings is 25 hours a week, so that&#8217;s not full-time. And I have two full-time residential, two part-time residential, and one full-time commercial, the one who does the other buildings that we&#8217;re about to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transitioning Out of the Field<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Got it, that makes a lot of sense. Talk to me about \u2014 you had a full schedule, you were bringing your first staff member on. I&#8217;d love to hear about that transition, &#8217;cause this is where a lot of people struggle, is transitioning out of the field. And we get so many questions about this. We&#8217;ve made a whole episode. I wanna hear about your experience transitioning out of the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;It was rocky. I feel a lot of people would have just decided not to hire anybody again. I hired my first staff member. He was great in the beginning. You know, a lot of talk, a lot of, I wanna stay with the same company for a long, long time and grow with your business. I got to the point where he had his own full-time schedule and I had my full-time schedule. &#8216;Cause for the first month or two, he came with me and we were just able to fit in a little bit more into the week, because I had somebody with me helping. So I was able to add some clients that way, until I got to the point where I could make enough clients to have his own schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And there was this one particular house he really didn&#8217;t like doing. And so after he did it one week, on the Sunday \u2014 at this point I had also hired on his wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, dude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;She was working part-time. And a couple other things that I also regret \u2014 like, I helped him significantly. I helped him fix his car. I gave him an advance to fix his car and only took half of it back. A lot of things I won&#8217;t do anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so he didn&#8217;t like this one house. It was dirty. Like, don&#8217;t get me wrong, it was dirty. I knew her personally, so he thought that I had this personal reason why I was overlooking these things in her home. To me, it&#8217;s just like, she had two kids. Her husband was away, &#8217;cause she was in the military as well. So he was gone for nine months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, she&#8217;s drowning. That&#8217;s what that house looks like, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, the kids are the same age as mine, right? Five and three. So just crazy times, especially to have one of the parents go away. &#8216;Cause my husband does help out a lot in the house and with the kids, so I can&#8217;t imagine having him leave for nine months. And so she needed help, but that&#8217;s what she hired us for. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re there. She hired us &#8217;cause she knows she needs help cleaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And you know, he&#8217;d find a diaper, a couple diapers in the kid&#8217;s room, and then like a moldy apple or sandwich under the couch. And he&#8217;s telling me about it \u2014 to him it was like CPS level, needed to be caught. I was like, it&#8217;s just not that. And so after one Friday when he did it, on the Sunday I said, hey, I could schedule his wife with him for those cleans, since I know it&#8217;s a lot. And maybe that will make it a little bit better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just lost it. Like, I can&#8217;t \u2014 I don&#8217;t even wanna think about this house when I&#8217;m not there. I don&#8217;t even wanna think about her having to come there with me. Like, you don&#8217;t know the stuff I see. But \u2014 if you see anything gross, you send me a picture of it. So it can&#8217;t have been that bad. And like, I get it. I get it&#8217;s a dirtier house, but not every client is a clean house that you&#8217;re going in to do the deep cleaning on. We have a lot of those, a lot of really clean houses where we&#8217;d go and scrub the tubs and everything looks the exact same when you leave it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I was like, you know what, I&#8217;ll take it. I&#8217;m gonna start doing her house. I&#8217;ll just take it off your plate. And he was still just talking to me as if he was in charge. I&#8217;m like, this is your schedule. I&#8217;m giving it to you. I&#8217;m going to take this now as an accommodation to you. And I don&#8217;t think he liked the authority. I also think that he wanted to leave. It&#8217;s quite a physical job, right? And so I think he was a bit tired and wanted a reason. And so he said, fine, if that&#8217;s what you think, then take this as my notice. I&#8217;m going to drop everything off tonight. Sunday night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So then for a couple of weeks I did both of our schedules. Not a lot of parenting. And then I found Brittany, who is still with me now. Her year was in May. I hired her, and then about a couple of weeks into it, she had already scheduled like a three week vacation. And so I was like, yeah, you can go to that. It&#8217;s all good. So it was quite rocky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And his wife stayed on for quite a while, actually. She was part-time. She had another job and no car, so she would do ones that she could walk to from the office and come with one of us too. And then when we moved offices in February, I let her go with two weeks severance. At this point she was doing like a couple of hour shift a week where she would clean our office and clean the vacuums, like maintain them. So I let her go with a couple of weeks severance when we moved, because she could no longer walk to where the new office is. But yeah, she stayed on. And so it was her and Brittany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then in July, a year ago, I hired on Jeff, and one of my part-time residential cleaners also started the same week. Her yeariversary is on Friday. And in September, a couple more. And at this point we had somebody doing our laundry who would come take it and take it to the laundromat. This new office has laundry, so we don&#8217;t have to do that anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;But then I think it was the fall when I told \u2014 I had a handful of clients who only wanted me, because they had started when it was just me solo. And so I told them in the fall that they have to take somebody or leave. And a couple of them left, and a couple of them took on an employee. I just went for a couple of cleans with them and cycled them into that. And so in the fall is when I stepped out of cleaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve been back and forth now since then a little bit, but not full time. I will say this last month and a half, I probably cleaned more recently, because I need more part-time people who don&#8217;t require 40 hours to pay their bills, which can be hard to find. And then also just trying to schedule move out cleans in the summertime, when my residential cleaners have full recurring client schedules. And so I want to do these move out cleans &#8217;cause they&#8217;re more money, but that means I have to do them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I know, I know. I&#8217;m doing a lot of move out cleans recently. It feels so good when you&#8217;re booking them. It&#8217;s like, oh, all that money. And then the day comes and you&#8217;re like, shit, why did I do that? Now I have to go do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. Actually, recently we did the move out clean for the client that my first employee had quit over. So they&#8217;ve been posted right now and they left, unfortunately. But yeah, it happens in the military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, it sounds like \u2014 is it a big military town? Is there a base nearby or something?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, Base Gagetown is the second largest land-wise in the Commonwealth. And so it&#8217;s quite a large military community in Oromocto, and then Fredericton because of that also. I mean, there&#8217;s also a lot of military, but the military housing is in Oromocto. So those are the ones that are a little bit more stringent on the cleaning, even though they&#8217;re gonna rip them apart and renovate them after people move out anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh yeah. You clean it head to toe first and they come check. Not like when you&#8217;re selling a house, and it&#8217;s just like, well, if you missed a little bit, you can actually go do the inspection on that. I know, when we do our military housing turnovers, they told us, we&#8217;re gonna find something. And they come around with their tape, and their tape&#8217;s on the ceiling, and it&#8217;s just like, damn it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;They are usually pretty chill here. It just depends on who you get. You could get the person who comes and wants to check every little thing. Usually if they walk in and they see that \u2014 they&#8217;ll check a couple of things, like the inside of the window tracks, the floor grates, and then the air vents. And if they can tell that those things are done and you say you hired a company, they&#8217;re usually pretty chill at that point. They&#8217;re not gonna go around and check for every little crumb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hiring Is the First Trench<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes. I really wanna highlight what you just described, which is extreme tenacity and perseverance when things are challenging, especially early on, when this is the first time you&#8217;ve ever had employees. And the reason I wanna just reiterate this for everybody listening is, that is the typical experience. What Vanessa just described, that&#8217;s normal. So if that sounds very unappetizing, it is. It is very unappetizing. It fucking sucks, guys. &#8216;Cause that&#8217;s exactly what it is. You take a step forward, you fill their schedule, and then they do whatever they do, and all of a sudden you&#8217;re handed back a full schedule. And it just sucks. It absolutely sucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that&#8217;s the trenches. There&#8217;s multiple trenches in business. That&#8217;s like the first one that you have to get through, of hiring. And it is incredibly challenging. And I would say outside of the physical challenge of you&#8217;re cleaning so much, &#8217;cause you&#8217;re trying to go past your capacity by bringing other people on, the mental \u2014 I would say the mental bandwidth and hurdles that that causes are much more challenging. Because you&#8217;re so disappointed, and this is your brand new fledgling baby. And you&#8217;re like, okay, I&#8217;m gonna put myself out there and hire. And they always talk a big talk, the ones who cause the worst problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I find they always like that I&#8217;m really personal, and they like working for a small business too \u2014 until they get fired. And then it&#8217;s like, you&#8217;re the worst boss ever. Long message about how I&#8217;m too personal and stuff after I&#8217;ve let people go. But when they&#8217;re working together, this is my favorite job I&#8217;ve ever had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Quick little break here. If you have ever been listening to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast and thought, oh my gosh, Stephanie would die at this story \u2014 well, guess what, guys? I wanna hear that story. Okay, we are looking for guest applications for the show. And I know many of you have never been on a podcast before, but those are my favorite episodes, to be frank \u2014 the owners who are just here to share their stories. So if you are an owner who wants to share their story, or perhaps you would like to have a free consulting call with me and ask me your questions live for everybody else to learn from, that is also an option. And then finally, if you know somebody in our industry, you have a friend or somebody that you look up to and have learned from who you think would be a great guest option for us, please go to the link down in the bio, and we would love to see you apply or nominate them, and we will take it from there. And I would love to have a conversation with you and get to know you more closely. Back to the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And you know, it&#8217;s so funny, you were describing this guy, and I was literally picturing my first male employee, who was one of my first employees ever. I think he was like my second or third employee. So right away, I&#8217;m picturing him as you&#8217;re describing what you&#8217;re describing, &#8217;cause it was like the same guy. You know, I don&#8217;t wanna say mocking, but making a big deal out of things that were not a big deal when it came to clients&#8217; homes. It didn&#8217;t feel like he was actually embodying \u2014 he was willing to do the work, but he&#8217;s going to be like, oh, this is so gross, how could they \u2014 like, really shame the clients, even to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think, now looking back, it&#8217;s like that never should have \u2014 it&#8217;s not like he ever did it to the clients, but he&#8217;s thinking that. And if you have somebody who&#8217;s thinking like that, it&#8217;s gonna slip out at some point, whether that&#8217;s to another staff member or, God forbid, a client, or people around town. You know, people talk, like, yeah, I did this nasty house, blah, blah, blah. It&#8217;s a bad look. If people hear that, they may not say anything, but all of a sudden they associate, oh, you guys go into people&#8217;s houses and then you make fun of them. Great, that&#8217;s a really good look, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so, yeah, those warning signs are exactly what we wanna be looking for. And also what you said about you laying down, you know, respect my authority, and he is like, cool, here&#8217;s my notice. I can&#8217;t tell you how many times I&#8217;ve gotten that, specifically with men. Not always, but a lot of times I get that from guy employees, where anything like that happens and they don&#8217;t like it. And I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s just my feminist goggles being put on and being like, you don&#8217;t like it &#8217;cause a woman&#8217;s telling you \u2014 it&#8217;s you. But I feel like that happens so often, where they just push back. Where when we have women and we&#8217;re giving them feedback, they&#8217;re more likely to burst into tears and wanna throw themselves off a bridge, but they don&#8217;t typically push back on the authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, no, definitely, definitely, I agree. I think also age \u2014 I think we&#8217;re the same age, so I&#8217;m 29, and I find that can be a little bit challenging. Some of my employees are older. And then I&#8217;ll meet a client of theirs and they&#8217;re like, oh, you&#8217;re the boss. I&#8217;m like, yes, yes I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, sometimes that has definitely been an issue. Or for me, that&#8217;s personally why I don&#8217;t like cleaners who have a ton of experience, because they think they know better. And they may be an excellent cleaner, but we&#8217;re doing things the way we&#8217;re doing them for a reason, and they really tend to dig in their heels on things. Or anytime people are just constantly combative on why we do things, even though there&#8217;s always a reason \u2014 we don&#8217;t do things just for the shits and giggles of it. There&#8217;s always a reason. And if it&#8217;s just that instant combativeness of, well, why would we do it that way? I don&#8217;t like that. I&#8217;m willing to explain, but if that&#8217;s your attitude, of just constant butting heads, I don&#8217;t really like that from a management perspective either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Life After the Field<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;So it sounds like you had some pretty intense times in the beginning. And transitioning clients is never easy, because especially if they&#8217;ve had you, they don&#8217;t like it. Right? They don&#8217;t like it. But you did it, from the sounds of it, in an excellent way. You went to the houses with them, which is exactly what we do, as much as possible. Obviously sometimes you can&#8217;t do that, but the ideal situation there. So talk to me, how has it been since getting out of the field, mostly \u2014 obviously move outs notwithstanding. What has that been like for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Pretty good. We moved offices in February too, so it&#8217;s been a lot nicer. The last office was very small, like 160 square feet. So I had a hard time working there, &#8217;cause it just felt so tight. And we buy our cleaners in bulk from a local store, a local refillery downtown. So we have these massive jugs of cleaners, which definitely crowded in the space. So now we have more \u2014 it&#8217;s about 480 square feet now. So it&#8217;s still not huge, but a lot bigger, with a washer and dryer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve definitely done a lot more working in the office. I do find that I get tied up with the busy little tedious work a lot \u2014 the going and buying supplies, or going around to do the quality checks and stuff. I&#8217;m not yet at the full-time manager part. I do have \u2014 the girl I hired right after my first employee quit is a manager in a sense. She helps with some of the admin, and I had her here with me this morning and we went through and tidied up the office and the stuff that hasn&#8217;t got touched in a while. And then we did some work on the admin side of things. But I&#8217;d like to get to that point where I have full-time office help. That will definitely take some stress off as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I find I haven&#8217;t done as much at night as I need to lately. I&#8217;ve been taking too much slack time at night, but after the girls go to bed, it&#8217;s just like \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;How dare you? You&#8217;re on max of like two hours before you have to go to sleep, after the kids go to bed. I mean, that&#8217;s disgusting, Vanessa, that you would actually take any time for yourself. You should be ashamed of yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, it&#8217;s funny. I think I have grown a lot in the last year management wise, like being able to have those tough conversations. I had to let a couple employees go. So it hasn&#8217;t been fun. But at the same time, it&#8217;s nice to hit those steps and get those first ones in the books. And by the time I got to the third person that I let go, I was like, I don&#8217;t care. They gotta go, they gotta go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Tough Conversations and Letting People Go<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, and that sounds cold, but if you are just emotional and distraught over this, it&#8217;s gonna just destroy your week. I&#8217;d love to hear about some tough conversations. In reflection, since you&#8217;ve had staff, what are some that you avoided too long, where you&#8217;re like, I was way too late on having that conversation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah. There&#8217;s some like, if I go do a clean with an employee and then do the check at the end and they&#8217;ve missed something small, sometimes I&#8217;ll just let some of those small things cruise through so that they&#8217;re not like, oh, Vanessa&#8217;s the worst to work with, or, she&#8217;s so nitpicking. Sometimes I just need to be a little bit better on giving them everything that was missed, so that they know for next time. I mean, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve let that go too long where many of them have become an issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think more so it&#8217;s like, they&#8217;ll start working for me \u2014 I&#8217;m very easygoing, very personal, and it&#8217;s a small business, so I&#8217;m gonna get to know you personally. They&#8217;ll see that I&#8217;m very easygoing. And some of the commercial jobs \u2014 the one that we&#8217;re leaving has been the hardest one. All the employees I&#8217;ve fired have come from that job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Interesting. What do you think that is?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I think &#8217;cause it&#8217;s not supervised at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Ah, cat&#8217;s away, mice will play kind of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;They are alone in these apartment buildings, and the superintendent&#8217;s there, but she&#8217;s not their boss. So she&#8217;s not keeping track of them. I think that has really impacted it. The first one, he only worked for a week and he didn&#8217;t do anything. So he was easy to fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I don&#8217;t think he did a thing in the six hours that he was at those apartment buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Gosh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;The second and the third, I would say, were similar, where they both started really good, with a lot of motivation for the job. And then they discover that I&#8217;m easygoing and they start to use it. They&#8217;re like, okay, well, can I move this shift here? Oh, well, can I leave early today? Or one of them, the second one who had the job, she did a lot of leaving early. Not a lot of calling in sick, but definitely called in sick some, but over dramatic things. Like, she called an ambulance once because she had a migraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yep, yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;The week that we decided she needed to go, she was actually residential this day, with my two full-time residential employees. Did a house, was complaining about a migraine, drove to the next client. As soon as she got there, she&#8217;s like, I need to go home. I&#8217;ll come back tomorrow and finish it. It was a move out clean. I was like, oh, well, I&#8217;m going to have to go do it tonight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yep, yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;So I went and did it that night, didn&#8217;t tell her. She called in sick the next day, so she wasn&#8217;t going to do it the next day anyway. And then she&#8217;d also yelled at a tenant in one of the apartment buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I wanted to ask about this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, she did not tell me that this is what went down. She told the superintendent, who then told me, like, oh no, she yelled back. And I was like, oh, okay. It was over a DoorDash driver, because obviously when we&#8217;re cleaning apartment buildings, we can&#8217;t let people in to these secure buildings. It&#8217;s a rule. And they&#8217;ve all been very good at following that. Don&#8217;t open the door for anybody. Unless, you know, you talk to them every day in the hallways and they&#8217;re at the door and you know for sure that they live there \u2014 then yeah, let them in. Open the door for them, please. But this was a DoorDash driver there to deliver food. And so she wouldn&#8217;t let him in, which she shouldn&#8217;t have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;And the tenant came downstairs and was yelling at her. And she told me, she just, you know, said, I can&#8217;t do this. I can&#8217;t let them in. No \u2014 apparently she yelled back at the tenant. I was like, no, you cannot do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh my gosh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;You still have customer service. Like, on the phone I was able to handle getting yelled at. Just walk away. Anything else besides yelling or getting physical back at the tenant \u2014 don&#8217;t do that. But yeah, so we let her go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then the next girl who started there, same thing. Started very good, lots of motivation. And then starts to, you know, message me at 2 p.m. \u2014 oh, my energy is really running low. Can I call it a day? No. Like, my energy is really running low too. It&#8217;s the middle of the afternoon. Everybody&#8217;s energy is running low right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s a blood sugar dip, honey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, finish your shift. And then I&#8217;d go to the apartment buildings to check and she&#8217;d be in the social room. They were both still within their \u2014 you get six months here to fire without reason. So they were both still within that. So I didn&#8217;t give any of them reasons to actually write down and try and take me to court over or anything. But she did a lot of, this third one, did a lot of clocking out at other places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Ah, good old time theft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, down the street. Yeah, a lot of time theft. Like 10, 15 minutes, I think. And so that was the main reason, but I mean, I didn&#8217;t tell her that. And then same thing \u2014 you know, I fired her, and then a long text message about how I&#8217;m too personal and how I&#8217;m not gonna be able to find anybody else who&#8217;s gonna put that much effort into the buildings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;It sounds like an abusive ex-boyfriend. Like, you break up with them and they&#8217;re like, you&#8217;re never gonna find a guy like me. It&#8217;s just like \u2014 a loser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I can find you, don&#8217;t worry. And then \u2014 I broke up with you. Yeah. So yeah, I think it&#8217;s the lack of supervision at that job, and then just because I&#8217;m flexible and easygoing. But I mean, if you take advantage of it, I&#8217;m not gonna deal with it. I will let you \u2014 if an appointment comes up and you need to, especially apartments, if you need to push it into the evening, usually it doesn&#8217;t matter at apartment buildings. As long as they&#8217;re getting clean, they don&#8217;t care when you&#8217;re there. Since you&#8217;re not vacuuming the hallways at two in the morning, it&#8217;s usually okay. But houses are different, because houses, people want you to do all the grunt work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Not while they&#8217;re home at nighttime trying to hang out. Yeah, I think that&#8217;s been the main issue with that job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I find it&#8217;s quite the pattern, actually. Guys, if you have an employee who ever says that they are frequently going to the emergency room, they&#8217;re not going to work out. I promise you that, because the type of people that go to the emergency room for every headache, they&#8217;re going to be a problem. Literally, you&#8217;re describing these people and I&#8217;m picturing specific employees that I&#8217;ve had. You were describing this person, I was picturing Gina, who worked for me within the first year. And I&#8217;m like, you&#8217;re talking about Gina. So no matter where we are in the world, people are people, guys. And they give you clues, for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I really love that you&#8217;re describing yourself as easygoing and all of these things. And it&#8217;s like, that&#8217;s wonderful, but that doesn&#8217;t mean that you let yourself get taken advantage of. And I think that \u2014 my best friend always says, everybody&#8217;s best trait, it&#8217;s like two sides of a coin, is also their worst trait, right? So it&#8217;s like, that&#8217;s your best trait, but the negatives to that can be these other things. But it&#8217;s like, are you willing to take that? If yes, pass go. &#8216;Cause that&#8217;s exactly how we are at Serene Clean. Like, okay, we&#8217;re flexible. We allow a lot of part-time work, all of these things. That means I&#8217;m not gonna get as much money out of somebody as if I only had full timers, or if we had a really psychotic attendance policy with a point system. We don&#8217;t have a point system. And it definitely hurts us in some ways, but in other ways it really benefits us from a cultural perspective. And I&#8217;m willing to take those consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it&#8217;s like, it doesn&#8217;t mean change yourself, but it&#8217;s like, okay, am I willing to take the consequences of having this more laid back personality? Okay, yes. Because if that&#8217;s who you are and that&#8217;s the kind of culture you wanna build, that&#8217;s fantastic, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;And they&#8217;ll bitch about something, so might as well be that, right? Might as well be that I&#8217;m too personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Exactly. You&#8217;re too nice. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Payroll Software Struggles<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I would love to hear \u2014 you know, you mentioned tracking, and that you feel like that&#8217;s one of your weaknesses. So I&#8217;d love to open the floor for you to ask me whatever you wanna ask about that, about management work, that type of thing. From the sounds of it, that&#8217;s where you feel like you could make some improvements. So I&#8217;d love to help anywhere I can here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I switched to ZenMaid in the fall at some point. I can&#8217;t remember the exact time, &#8217;cause I wavered in and out of it for a few months. I&#8217;d signed up for it and then never filled it out. Never put in my clients, just left it there, &#8217;cause it was such a big change. We had been using QuickBooks scheduling before that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I didn&#8217;t even know they did scheduling. Interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, I had all the QuickBooks. The past couple of months, payroll wise, has been really \u2014 we&#8217;ve been going everywhere. We tried a bunch of different ones, &#8217;cause QuickBooks had this big issue. I was on vacation in Europe and they were like, we need you to call us and resend this through, and then you&#8217;re gonna have to go to the bank and send us a wire transfer. And I&#8217;m like, oh my God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the employees I let go, her bank account number had changed, but they didn&#8217;t tell her and I didn&#8217;t update it in the system. And so that money went nowhere. And so I canceled it on the bank end of things \u2014 I went into the bank and canceled it, and then just e-transferred her. Well, then QuickBooks flagged it as a double payment and then sent me back the money for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Geez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Such a mess. So I had to wire transfer them that money, and it was a huge mess. And I was like, I&#8217;m done with QuickBooks. But now we&#8217;re actually \u2014 we went back to QuickBooks this week. None of the other ones have been any better. I tried a couple of the other, like, better for Canadian payroll softwares. We tried Wave, which was just a pain, to have to import the kilometers and the tips and that kind of thing. I had to edit everybody&#8217;s profile every single pay period to do that. And I tried Wagepoint, which is another good for Canadian one. Well, you have to submit it for direct deposit five business days ahead of time. My pay period&#8217;s not even over yet \u2014 how am I supposed to? So I&#8217;d never be able to do direct deposit. So we&#8217;re back to QuickBooks this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Have you tried Gusto at all? I&#8217;m curious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I haven&#8217;t, because to my knowledge, Gusto is better for the US than it is for Canadian payroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That makes sense, okay. Yeah, &#8217;cause I&#8217;ve been very happy with it. But if that makes sense \u2014 I know countries definitely make it more challenging, for sure. So yeah, no software is perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Back to QuickBooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;I know. Customer service at QuickBooks is atrocious. It&#8217;s horrific. That&#8217;s why we switched to Gusto, &#8217;cause I was so fucking annoyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, they&#8217;re the worst to have to call and deal with. But hopefully we won&#8217;t have any more issues for a little while, and we won&#8217;t need to call anybody or deal with them. And then it&#8217;ll be fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s smooth sailing if you don&#8217;t have to talk to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, exactly, exactly. I&#8217;ve had QuickBooks in terms of the bookkeeping side, and I switched back to Wave, which is another Canadian one, and it&#8217;s been going well, and it&#8217;s much cheaper than QuickBooks. I did my own taxes last year, and I found that having QuickBooks did not save me any time. So I was like, well, why am I paying a huge amount of money to do the bookkeeping on here when it&#8217;s not saving me any time during tax time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Which is the whole point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, yeah, exactly. For using QuickBooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Metrics Worth Tracking<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, in terms of tracking, I struggle to track much. I have my bookkeeping, where I have how much money I&#8217;ve spent on the different stuff \u2014 that is no problem. But then other things, like, if I wanna know it, I&#8217;ll just calculate it out. But I have no schedule where I sit down and track any of my metrics. So I was curious what you do. Do you have, like, a Monday to Friday, different day of the week that you track different things, or how do you keep up with it? And obviously you have a team of admins. So also, if they have different things that they track through the different days of the week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, so absolutely. There&#8217;s a cadence for everything, and a lot of things are just happening automatically, or are kind of happening as a by-product of another process. And what I mean by that is, we use ClickUp as our CRM for how we process leads and customers. So we have it hooked up to speak to ZenMaid through Zapier, and then we have our process in ClickUp, right? And so in ClickUp is where a lot of the tracking is happening. In addition to that, everything else is still gonna be in Google Docs. So those are kind of our two main tracking places \u2014 spreadsheets in Google Sheets, and then the ClickUp dashboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So for example, when it comes to a schedule, right \u2014 every Tuesday in the history of the company, that is my financial tracking day. So I just have a task every week, and what that&#8217;s going to look like is updating my financial tracking sheet. And that allows me \u2014 that&#8217;s when I do my portion of the bookkeeping, because I don&#8217;t do the credit card and all of that stuff, but I do some basic bookkeeping and just double checking everything. I&#8217;m looking at what the weekly revenue is, what the yearly is so far, weekly expenses, what was the profit this week, what are we at for profit. That&#8217;s the basic \u2014 that&#8217;s on the financial tracking spreadsheet. Then I have number of staff members, what the monthly revenue was, and then all of the bank account balances, because that&#8217;s how we do it, is Profit First. So that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m actually doing that. That&#8217;s a spreadsheet, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As for everything else, when it comes to tracking, it depends which department it is. Let me pull it up. Please hold, because I want to look at some examples here. Okay, so for example, some metrics \u2014 some of these are going to be less important to you potentially at your size, but I&#8217;m just going to read some of them off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So for us, we are running a report in ZenMaid every week and looking at how many available hours are not booked in advance, because that tells us how much capacity we have for booking, especially first times. So if that gets under, you know, 50, 60 hours, all of a sudden things are starting to get pretty tight at our size, right? So available hours not booked, that is going to be updated \u2014 actually, April does that daily, so that we can see on a daily basis, because availability is very important for us. So that&#8217;s going to be updated every single day for us so that we can look ahead. So that&#8217;s going to be April&#8217;s job. You don&#8217;t know who these people are, so it doesn&#8217;t matter \u2014 that is my payroll manager and accountant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I listen to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, you know who they are. Okay, okay, so like, these people, yes. The next section is going to be interview data. So this is going to be updated by Crystal. Again, everything I&#8217;m describing right here, we&#8217;re doing this in a ClickUp dashboard. So their dashboards are things that you can customize to showcase data that exists in ClickUp. So interview data, this is another one. And all of this could be done in literally a spreadsheet, right, with different tabs. What I would suggest before you get into a whole new software or anything \u2014 spreadsheet tabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so before I go on in the ClickUp, the spreadsheets we still maintain in Google Drive, I have these as my favorites. We just star these. We have our HR related tracking sheet. We have our marketing and sales tracking sheet. We have our MRR change log, which is going to be the monthly reoccurring revenue. Very important. We have our quality control tracking sheet. And that&#8217;s it. So those are the sheets. All of those are getting updated on a weekly basis, right? So you can literally do a task of, like, I&#8217;m doing my sales and marketing \u2014 whatever, I would start breaking it apart that way. Go update the spreadsheet, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The ideal is going to be having everything consolidated into things that happen automatically. But before you can make automations, you got to walk before you can run, kind of thing, of laying out the process of, what is the end goal? What is the data I want to know? And do I want to know the data because it&#8217;s nice to know, or because I&#8217;m going to take action on it? So for me, that is one of the biggest changes this year that I made compared to any year prior \u2014 information for me to plan ahead as opposed to reacting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So for example, how many interviews we did last week indicates how are we doing for hiring in the future, right? How many people are saying they&#8217;re going to show up? How many did show up? How many offers did we make? That is helping us proactively understand, do we need to up Indeed spending? Are we going to be able to hire, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next area \u2014 this is going to be a big one. If you&#8217;re not tracking this, there&#8217;s a couple that I would suggest you start with, of course, outside of profit and loss. Number of leads and close rate. How many leads did you have come in? What kind of leads were they, residential, commercial? How many closed, right? And then on top of that, how many of those closed leads have become reoccurring? This is super important, right? Because that&#8217;s how we actually build the base of the business, is recurring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this is where us tracking our monthly recurring revenue \u2014 this has been the one KPI that has changed everything for us. So everybody, please get on that. Start tracking your monthly recurring revenue and the changes that happen each month. So what is the net, if you will? How much did you lose? How much did you gain? Because last year \u2014 I&#8217;m looking at the net MRR graph \u2014 last year, every month was negative except two. That was before I started tracking it. Every single month this year has been positive, because we&#8217;re finally looking at it and looking ahead. Like, I know already in July, we have already added $4,180 in recurring revenue. And we&#8217;re only 13 days into the month. We&#8217;ve already added two grand in August, right? So it&#8217;s making us look ahead at the business. And so I highly recommend tracking net MRR \u2014 how much we&#8217;re losing, how much we&#8217;re gaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next is going to be number of reoccurring clients gained and lost. I think that this is really valuable as well. And the frequency of those clients, &#8217;cause obviously every client is not equal, right? A monthly versus a weekly, that&#8217;s two different things. But that&#8217;ll tell you then your number of active recurring clients, which of course you can know in ZenMaid too \u2014 we just have this in ClickUp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We also have our churn rate. I think churn rate calculations are very valuable, meaning number of clients lost this month over total active clients on the first of the month. Our goal is to have really less than 1% churn rate. Typically it&#8217;s 0.5% or less. We want a low churn rate, right? Obviously, how many clients are we losing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Great one to track \u2014 first time cleans. How many first time cleans every week? How many every month? And this is pulling \u2014 again, this is one of those that&#8217;s automatically happening, &#8217;cause we&#8217;re entering that date in ClickUp on that client and then it&#8217;s doing that. And spoiler alert, this is a huge conversation. I&#8217;m going to be talking about all of these things with ZenMaid, all of this kind of reporting. And I&#8217;m pushing them to start getting more of this into the software itself with AI and things like that, because then it&#8217;ll help us with all of this type of stuff on the dashboard. So that&#8217;s a big one, first time cleans \u2014 that tells us growth too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then finally on this dashboard, how many hours are getting called out? How much approved time off, right? So that tells us kind of capacity related questions too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But if you&#8217;re not tracking any of that right now, start with your leads and close rates. Start with how many convert to recurring. And then, how much money are you making? That&#8217;s truly what I would focus on first. Throw out everything else I just said \u2014 I just wanted to throw a bunch of shit at you so that you have an idea. That would be where I start first. If you&#8217;re not tracking any of that, that&#8217;s gonna be the first place. Where are the leads coming from? That&#8217;s important too, the marketing source of these people. And then you can start getting into more metrics, like the area that they&#8217;re in, that type of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And if you&#8217;re not adding them to an email marketing list, I&#8217;d get on that as well, because start building your email marketing. Just as an aside, anybody who doesn&#8217;t have an email marketing program \u2014 I use Mailchimp. I think the free option is great up till a certain number of subscribers. And you can hook up ZenMaid to Mailchimp via Zapier so that you never have to do that manually again. So keep building that as you go. So I know I just babbled a lot. Those are gonna be my biggest KPIs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I&#8217;ll just listen back to this and then write them all down. Yeah, right now, if I wanted to know my lead close rate for June, I would just work it out. But I don&#8217;t have any sheet where I am tracking it consistently. Every time I check, it&#8217;s good. So I&#8217;ve just left it at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;But is it better than last month? Is it better than last year? You know what I mean? For me, that&#8217;s the biggest thing, is to see trends over time. And how did it compare to the year before in that same month? Since for us, our business is highly volatile \u2014 not highly, but you know what I mean. There&#8217;s seasons, we got the busy season, right? And so comparing our close rate to January versus June of last year, those are two very different time periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I think that will allow you to see, and also allow you to see what to expect and not be so blindsided. Like, okay, clearly I need to hire starting in April for summer. You know, it can help you start looking at trends that way, of, okay, we gotta get on hiring faster because of what we know to be coming, which is lots of move outs or whatever. Maybe hire a student. You know, we hired like three students this year. They&#8217;re all gonna be gone in September, but they&#8217;re gonna help at Christmas time or whatever. &#8216;Cause we&#8217;re like, yeah, this is great. We need more capacity in the summer and it dies down just a touch on move outs. So let&#8217;s use them, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I think it&#8217;s like the second real year of business, because the years before that, obviously, I was quite capped with a personal schedule. But because I only have last year to compare to, it just feels like I&#8217;m just crushing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, well, you are, girl, you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;We&#8217;ve already made it past last year&#8217;s total revenue, but it took me until July, when we got this big commercial contract last year, to really be making good money every month. So it just feels like we&#8217;ve already grown so much this year. But I really need to track this stuff, and it&#8217;ll help me next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, yes. And not growing at such a rapid rate \u2014 yeah, it really can get so explosive. You&#8217;re in such an exciting time of your business, and it doesn&#8217;t have to end, of course. But I think just tracking a few key metrics is really gonna help you, and help you start bringing those systems into place so when you do have a full-time admin, it doesn&#8217;t feel so chaotic, right? There&#8217;s so much tracking that&#8217;s happening that I&#8217;m not the one responsible for \u2014 I&#8217;m just the one reviewing it. And so it&#8217;s very helpful, and it helps, especially if you are on vacation or whatever. Just look at the dashboard \u2014 good, cool. Check the bank accounts \u2014 we&#8217;re great, awesome. It allows you to feel a lot more secure of, what the hell&#8217;s going on in my business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Supplies, Vacuums, and Inventory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I&#8217;m trying to get my manager right now set up with a good inventory tracking. So right now I track how much money we spend on supplies, but not how many supplies we&#8217;re going through, and based on supply, &#8217;cause obviously some things cost a lot more money than others. Like, we switched everything to this Canadian company \u2014 we&#8217;ve tried to switch everything to Canadian companies, but Scrub Daddy has lasted. There&#8217;s just no sponge out there like it. So it&#8217;s my sole remaining American product that we still have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But with that, I mean, obviously some of them cost more money than other alternatives, but I don&#8217;t mind it given \u2014 I mean, a lot of Canadians right now like that we&#8217;re getting Canadian products. And they&#8217;re all also eco-friendly, which is definitely added to the cost, but allowed me to say that we have all eco-friendly Canadian products. So it&#8217;s added to the cost, but helps with the marketing and that side of things. And I like having all of the eco-friendly stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What we need, though, is \u2014 I think you were talking about it once \u2014 like a room fragrance for the end of the clean, because eco-friendly does not last. And so when they get home, it doesn&#8217;t have any kind of smell for when they walk in the house. If the house is clean, you can tell we&#8217;ve been there, but not from scent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, yeah, definitely dissipates. Highly recommend a room spray. We used to do essential oils in our vacuum filters before we realized that can melt your vacuum. So we don&#8217;t do that anymore. But it did work so well \u2014 but it can damage your vacuum. So don&#8217;t do that, guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, vacuums have been a stress. I just recently replaced them all. I said, we&#8217;re just gonna buy all new ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Okay, so what I would suggest \u2014 label all of them with a sticker and a number, keep track of your vacuums and what gets replaced, and assign each staff member with a vacuum. Like, this is your vacuum, you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s a good idea. Yeah, we have labeled them, but with fun stickers. Not with stickers to really tell the difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, it&#8217;s helpful. &#8216;Cause then it&#8217;s like, for us \u2014 I mean, some of them have gone through Vietnam and are just Frankensteined together at this point, but they can last a long time. We just have a huge parts drawer, and April&#8217;s repairing them or whatever. So yeah, that&#8217;s very helpful just to keep track. &#8216;Cause otherwise it felt like, okay, we&#8217;re just buying vacuums. We don&#8217;t even know how many we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I mean, at my size, I can at least keep track of how many we have. But we buy them and the place that I buy them from, you can&#8217;t buy extra filters. So we found that that&#8217;s the biggest issue. But they&#8217;re a good price \u2014 they&#8217;re only $110. So I feel like I could start buying a more expensive vacuum. It&#8217;s probably gonna break in the same amount of time, and then it&#8217;s just gonna cost me a lot more money, but not do a better job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Vacuums are the bane of our existence sometimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, it&#8217;s a huge, huge cost for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Goals: A Million Dollars, 20 Employees, and Survivor<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Well, what is the goal for this year, Vanessa? Do you have a number in mind, or a staff size in mind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yes, well, my goal sheet \u2014 I had &#8220;do a podcast&#8221; on it, so I can check that off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yay! Woo, we did it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;I won&#8217;t hit the million dollar goal this year. I&#8217;m hoping \u2014 I definitely wanted to at least double. Last year we did about $140,000. And this year we&#8217;re already at like 160. So we will definitely at least double. But long-term goal, obviously \u2014 I feel like most business owners, it&#8217;s hit a million dollars in revenue in the one year. I&#8217;d like to have \u2014 I have six staff right now. It&#8217;d be nice to be back to eight. Eight&#8217;s where we were at the end of last year. And then just with this office move, we no longer needed somebody to do the laundry, so that person left. And then the one who was doing the vacuum maintenance every week, she left, so we were back down to six. And then kind of alternated back and forth from that again. So yeah, to be back up to eight, like last year, and then eventually up. I think my goal sheet that has &#8220;do a podcast&#8221; also has 20 employees. And my top goal has nothing to do with business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;What is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;The top goal is that I really want to do Survivor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, that&#8217;s so cool! You&#8217;re a big fan, I assume?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Survivor, make a million dollars \u2014 which, I mean, go hand in hand if you win. And then have 20 employees, do a podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;That&#8217;s badass, I love that. Well, you&#8217;re gonna accomplish every single one of them, Vanessa, I have zero doubt of that. Not if \u2014 it is when. And I&#8217;ll watch you on Survivor, that&#8217;s amazing. I haven&#8217;t watched Survivor in so long. I love that show, it&#8217;s so good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, you should check it out. They just finished season 50. So now it&#8217;s the lull in between seasons of the year. My employees all know, though \u2014 they know when Survivor starts back up, &#8217;cause I talk about it every week on Thursday mornings. They&#8217;re just like, all right, just tell us what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where to Find Vanessa<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh, that&#8217;s fantastic, I love that, I love that. Vanessa, where can the people find you if they want to follow along with you or your business, whatever you&#8217;re comfortable sharing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, we&#8217;ve got Facebook. We have a nice website that I designed. Facebook and the social media side of things, can&#8217;t lie, they&#8217;re very slacking. It&#8217;s never really been my thing personally, so I feel like it&#8217;s hard to jump into it for business. I really need to get somebody on that. But we do have Facebook, Instagram, and actually a couple of videos on TikTok. So yeah, you can find us all on there, on The Cleaning Guild, and then thecleaningguild.ca.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Hell yeah, we&#8217;ll definitely link all that down below. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me, for being a wonderful listener. And this has been fantastic. I am so thrilled for you, your business. You&#8217;re gonna kill it, I can&#8217;t wait. You&#8217;re gonna hit that million probably next year, I feel like \u2014 that&#8217;s my guess, personally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Vanessa:<\/strong>&nbsp;Yeah, I&#8217;d love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong>&nbsp;Leave Vanessa some love down below, guys, in the comments. Hit that like, hit that subscribe. We&#8217;ll see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Stephanie:&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 fabulous guest, all the way from Canada, Miss Vanessa Muir. And she is the owner and founder of The Cleaning Guild. And I cannot wait [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17579,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"How Vanessa Muir Doubled Her Cleaning Business's Revenue in One Year","_seopress_titles_desc":"Vanessa Muir of The Cleaning Guild shares how she priced her first big commercial contract, survived rocky first hires, and stepped out of the field by year two.","_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-17573","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\/17573","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=17573"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17581,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17573\/revisions\/17581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}