{"id":17655,"date":"2026-08-20T14:18:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T14:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17655"},"modified":"2026-08-20T14:19:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T14:19:13","slug":"groundhog-day-why-youre-dealing-with-the-same-sht-every-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/groundhog-day-why-youre-dealing-with-the-same-sht-every-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Groundhog Day: Why You\u2019re Dealing With the Same Sh*t Every Day"},"content":{"rendered":"    <div class=\"zm-cta\">\n      <div class=\"zm-cta__head\">\n        <div>\n          <div class=\"zm-cta__eyebrow\">ZenMaid<\/div>\n          <h2 class=\"zm-cta__title\">Brought to you by <em>expert cleaning business owners<\/em><\/h2>\n        <\/div>\n        <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"zm-cta__mark\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/images\/zenmaid-logo.png\" alt=\"ZenMaid logo\">\n      <\/div>\n\n      <div class=\"zm-cta__list\">\n        <div class=\"zm-cta__item\">\n          <svg viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" width=\"21\" height=\"21\" fill=\"none\" stroke=\"#01676c\" stroke-width=\"3\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><path d=\"M20 6 9 17l-5-5\"><\/path><\/svg>\n          <p><strong>Tips and advice shared here have helped us grow our own maid services.<\/strong> The ZenMaid team currently has 5+ current and former cleaning business owners on our team, including our Founder and CEO, Amar. We&rsquo;ve been in the maid service industry for 10+ years and counting.<\/p>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-cta__item\">\n          <svg viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" width=\"21\" height=\"21\" fill=\"none\" stroke=\"#01676c\" stroke-width=\"3\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><path d=\"M20 6 9 17l-5-5\"><\/path><\/svg>\n          <p><strong>We partner with amazing leaders in the cleaning industry,<\/strong> including Debbie Sardone, Stephanie Pipkin, Angela Brown, Chris Schwab, and many more &mdash; all to provide you with the latest industry insights.<\/p>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-cta__item\">\n          <svg viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" width=\"21\" height=\"21\" fill=\"none\" stroke=\"#01676c\" stroke-width=\"3\" stroke-linecap=\"round\" stroke-linejoin=\"round\" aria-hidden=\"true\"><path d=\"M20 6 9 17l-5-5\"><\/path><\/svg>\n          <p><strong>We&rsquo;ve built the easiest-to-use, comprehensive cleaning business software, built specifically for the industry!<\/strong><\/p>\n        <\/div>\n      <\/div>\n\n      <div class=\"zm-cta__actions\">\n        <a class=\"zm-cta__btn\" href=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/\">Check out ZenMaid<\/a>\n        <div class=\"zm-cta__chip\"><span><\/span>Easy 5 minute setup<\/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\/167-groundhog-day-why-youre-dealing-with-the-same-sh\/id1791590022?i=1000784579501\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/0Puh7XnILEY35Zm1GrMuKh?si=133cbd73354b4d6b\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=87wzqnfYL0c&amp;lc=Ugyf32tx-evGMlGmFrF4AaABAg\">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: #167: Groundhog Day: Why You\u2019re Dealing With the Same Sh*t Every Day\" 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\/0Puh7XnILEY35Zm1GrMuKh?si=133cbd73354b4d6b&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<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and today&#8217;s episode, my friends, is inspired by the humble groundhog. And you may be wondering, Stephanie, where the hell is this coming from? Well, my friends, my co-workers, my European co-workers at ZenMaid did not know what Groundhog Day was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I, of course, had to enlighten them several months ago. And at the ZenMaid work retreat, I brought everybody these delightful little groundhoggies. Aren&#8217;t they the cutest little thing? So I gave everybody a little groundhog. And my attire today was supposed to also make it on my trip. It didn&#8217;t get here in time because I forgot to order it fast enough. Alas, here we are. Now I have a groundhog hat, and it honestly completely inspired me for this episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because if you don&#8217;t know what Groundhog Day is \u2014 are you an American? If not, it just means when our friend Punxsutawney Phil, or some other type of varmint in other places \u2014 so I hear that they do it differently and don&#8217;t pay attention to Phil \u2014 we all wait for him to come out of his little burrow and decide if there&#8217;s going to be six more weeks of winter, depending on if he sees his shadow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other part of Groundhog Day is the movie Groundhog Day, which is what this episode is about, which is reliving the same fucking day over and over and over again. And that right there is what we are going to talk about in today&#8217;s episode. Because if you own a cleaning company or a business of any kind, there&#8217;s a pretty good chance that you have woken up and thought, did I not deal with this same shit yesterday?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The two kinds of groundhog problems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> That&#8217;s groundhog days, friends. All right. And there are two kinds of groundhog problems that we&#8217;re gonna talk about. Number one is things that are going to keep happening, right? Call-outs, cancellations, leads, client questions, employee questions, schedule changes. This is our groundhog day. This is what we are going to continue dealing with every single day until you&#8217;re completely out of your business. But somebody&#8217;s gonna have to deal with them. So when I say we, I mean our businesses as an entity, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That section of the podcast is going to be focusing on making these responses repeatable so that we are not having to reinvent the wheel and have, like, the most horrific version of said Groundhog Day, right? Second part is going to be things that should not keep happening: same confusion, same mistakes, same manual tasks, same management conversation, or same fire that you are personally putting out without any process or system in place. So we need to figure out, why do these things keep happening, and put something in place to make it easier to deal with or eradicate the problem altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The three-time rule<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So how I want you guys to start thinking about problems in your business \u2014 or should I say reoccurrences. Let&#8217;s not even call it a problem, because some things are just realities. They&#8217;re not problems, right? Like all those things I listed in the beginning, those things aren&#8217;t problems. They&#8217;re just what is in the business, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I want you to think about these things as, like, a three-time rule, right? So the first occurrence is just that. First time is one occurrence of something. Doesn&#8217;t mean we always need to do something about it, right? It doesn&#8217;t mean we have to do something. Sometimes there&#8217;s just random one-off things that happen. The second time that same scenario comes to be, we need to start paying attention to it. And then the third time we need to be asking ourselves, why the hell don&#8217;t we have a system in place for this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So there are some questions we can start asking ourselves to deal with these different scenarios. Can we automate it? Can we templatize it? I use the phrase templatize. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s a real word, but I do like the way it sounds. So we&#8217;re gonna say templatize. Can we document it in some flavor? You guys know I love a good Loom, I love a recording to explain how to do something so I don&#8217;t have to explain it again. Can we delegate it, or can we prevent it altogether?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I want to use this framework throughout every single instance when we have a situation coming again and again. We need to be asking ourselves these questions. So I came prepared with some examples of how we lessen the effect of this Groundhog Day situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Example one: templates for the things you type over and over<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So one of the problems that we have had over the years at Serene Clean is going to be management repeatedly answering and writing the same things. I&#8217;m sure you are very, very accustomed to this both on the customer side and the employee side, right? And so the solution for both is to put different systems and processes in place when it comes to templates, when it comes to policies, when it comes to just having something that you can copy over, aka a template, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was just in a consulting call earlier today, and I showed her all of our snazzy little templates that are called snippets in our OpenPhone account, because it just makes things so much easier. I also showed her the templates for our ZenMaid notes, because that&#8217;s going to be, of course, templatized. I never want to type the same chunk twice, right? If I&#8217;m doing that, I need to be copying that over and putting it into a template so we can just copy and paste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I also showed her our commercial cleaning checklist template that every time we bring out a new commercial account, we just make a copy of that and boom, there we go. Obviously, you guys know \u2014 shameless plug here \u2014 I sell a lot of templates, because it makes your life easier, because that&#8217;s how we operate at Serene Clean. Everything is templatized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So some examples for areas that we can have Slackbots or templates, etc., are gonna be hiring, job offers, training information, day-before-training text, what you send to the cleaner, termination, common employee questions, and instructions managers repeatedly give.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So in the before scenario, what that&#8217;s going to look like \u2014 and what is probably happening for you guys \u2014 is someone has to remember what to say, we type it all out again, and then inevitably you&#8217;re saying it slightly differently. So the nice thing is, when you have templates, you can really think about what is the ideal response and then adjust it for that specific situation, but it just gets the bulk of it taken care of. And then you just have to tweak. You don&#8217;t have to reinvent the wheel every time and use your precious energy and brain power and attention to retype something that you could have just had in a template, right? So we have already answered this question. Use that answer again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we just need to stay organized on ease of use of accessing things, right? We use lots of little sticky notes on our desktop for things that we need to copy over often in Slack or whatever messenger type situation that you guys use. We literally just have a whole section where we have all of our auto responses or things that we&#8217;re commonly typing. We just add that to a canvas there for us to go and copy and paste from easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So templatizing your repeated communication is going to make your life so much easier. Trust me. I know that I have talked about Slackbot responses before. And for those of you that don&#8217;t know, we use Slack for our internal communication. So external communication with clients, that is going to be Quo slash OpenPhone. And that is where we are going to be using snippets for our templates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Slackbot autoresponders, and teaching your team to communicate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> And then in Slack, where we message with all of our employees \u2014 that is where we are going to have Slackbot responses, which is an automation that is triggered when they say certain key phrases and words. What that does is it responds for us and says, looks like you might be locked out. Looks like you might be calling out, because you mentioned your stomach hurts or whatever. Give us this information and we will get back to you, right? Because as I&#8217;ve said so many times, getting information out of the people is like pulling teeth. Pulling teeth, I tell ya. Herding cats, one could say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this teaches them over time how to communicate more whole and fully for the information that you need to help them, right? Because we want to help our cleaner get them the info that they need. We want to help them come up with a plan of action or know what to do next. But we first need certain amounts of information. And instead of us manually typing out each of these questions that we need in order to come up with a solution for them as fast as possible \u2014 when you have lots of staff and lots of clients, then we need to get all of the information at once, right? So it&#8217;s going to respond back: hey, it looks like you might be calling out, do this, this, this, and we&#8217;ll get back to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And as a little fun freebie for you, my favorite people in the world, my Filthy Rich Cleaners listeners \u2014 you guys are going to get my Slackbot autoresponder for free. We&#8217;re gonna have that linked down below for you guys to download.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And if you don&#8217;t use Slack, the nice thing is, however you communicate with your team, you can start doing this now. You can pin it to the top of the messenger thread. I keep saying messenger, but what I mean is the message thread in whatever chat that you&#8217;re using. You can pin the responses of, hey, if calling out, make sure you provide all of this information. If you&#8217;re locked out, provide this information. Obviously, the automation \u2014 that&#8217;s top tier, we love it, right? But there&#8217;s always a step below that too. So this will get you started and get you starting to think, how can I teach my staff to communicate more effectively with me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I like to say, everybody is kind of a tit baby until you teach them not to be, right? Because if they&#8217;re being a tit baby and you keep allowing it, it&#8217;s kind of on you, right? And I&#8217;m sorry \u2014 I don&#8217;t think that phrase is offensive, but it&#8217;s the best way I can say it. They won&#8217;t get off your tit, right? They just need you to handhold them throughout the whole time. Where I&#8217;m just like, no, you need to help them. As owners, we need to help them communicate more effectively. And every time this autoresponder goes out to them, it teaches them, I need to send all this information the first time, and it teaches them how to communicate, right? Give a cleaner a fish, right, and they eat for a day, that type of thing. I&#8217;m pretty sure that&#8217;s the saying, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Example two: automations and follow-up you don&#8217;t have to remember<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, example number two is going to be, of course, automations and autoresponders. So as I just alluded to with Slackbot, that is one. But when it comes to our schedule and our clients, that is where autoresponders and automations are fantastic, right? Additionally, when it comes to follow-up, checking back in, and reminding things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So someone has to remember: follow up with this person, send this message, check back in, remind someone, move something forward, right? So some Serene Clean specific examples, probably for you as well: following up after second cleans, recurring clean conversion offers, former client reactivation, and scheduled employee onboarding messages. If we need to remember something \u2014 can technology remember this instead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Especially for us, once we started doing a lot more follow-up after the second clean because they haven&#8217;t converted, and sometimes even after that first-time clean, right? So first-time clean or second-time clean has happened. They haven&#8217;t signed up for recurring services yet. This is a perfect instance. Last year, we used to have to try to remember to follow up on them manually. And that&#8217;s just silly. The goal is to not have to remember anything. The goal is for our tools to tell us when to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, you can do this in a variety of ways. As you guys know, we use ClickUp for this. This is going to be how we use our CRM. However, you can certainly do this just in your calendar. Whatever you use for your online calendar, just say follow-ups to do, and when you have your first-time cleans, go manually add that list to the next week follow-ups that you need to do, that type of thing. So it&#8217;s still a somewhat manual process, like doing your follow-ups and entering which ones need to be done, but at least it&#8217;s going to pop up and force remind you to do that thing. And it&#8217;s not all just living in here, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So again, there is an ideal to this, but there is something that you can do that moves you forward towards that. Because I would say one of the number one things when I&#8217;m doing consulting with you guys \u2014 you&#8217;re not doing follow-ups. You&#8217;re not doing follow-ups either after the lead initially reaches out to you, which is another part of remembering, or you&#8217;re not doing them after the first time. So you kill it, you pay all that money to get that clean done and you do a good job, they&#8217;re happy, but then they never book for recurring and you never follow up with them. So it just kind of dies. And that&#8217;s sad. It&#8217;s a sad thing to go away on. So we wanna be doing that. And the only way to do that systematically is to have something in place that reminds you. Trying to remember anything \u2014 trust me, it&#8217;s not the way. It is not the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Getting everything out of your head<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So we need to remove that mental load of remembering everything, because you&#8217;re a busy person. I know it. I know you&#8217;re busy. And so every time you try to remember things, it just is mental load. Like yesterday, I had the most productive Sunday of my life, I swear to God. You know I love ClickUp. I&#8217;m never gonna stop loving ClickUp, but just any task management software. And I literally took every possible thing \u2014 personal life, professional, blah blah blah \u2014 and just started brain dumping it, to the point of, like, I don&#8217;t want to fucking remember anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ll give you some examples. Because obviously I&#8217;m a homeowner, and these are the things that just pop into my head. I&#8217;m like, did I do that? You know, switching out my HVAC filters, cleaning the cat water filters \u2014 what other random things? All of the random house projects that I want to get done. I just dump them in there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So when I&#8217;m like, okay, I got a couple hours, what&#8217;s gonna take a couple hours? I ranked them by difficulty and cost so that I can be like, I&#8217;ve got two hours, I need an easy project to do, and I don&#8217;t wanna spend any money. Great. Assemble that box. There&#8217;s a box down here that&#8217;s been sitting there for a month. I need to assemble that garbage can holder. So just all of it. I&#8217;m just brain dumping all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And same with the business. I just want it to be to the point that I have one hour of planning a week. That&#8217;s what my Sunday is going to be. And I show up and I execute. And of course, I&#8217;m not having to go out in the field. I&#8217;m not having to deal with cleaners and clients like you guys are. So I get it. This is a very privileged place to be. But I want you to hear this is how I&#8217;m managing myself now. I don&#8217;t wanna have to show up at my desk and wonder, what do I need to do? Who do I need to talk to? I don&#8217;t want to have to be doing that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And you guys can do that in your own life. You can absolutely do that in your business no matter what stage you are at. When it comes to who do I need to talk to, what do I need to follow up on \u2014 all of these things. Because I know for myself that especially when I was in the field, that overwhelm came from so many things. But one of them was just this nagging terror that I was forgetting something. Because I always was forgetting something. And the best way to not forget something is to obviously have, you know, to-dos and reminders. You can have sticky notes, but I much prefer this digitized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then when you see patterns of things \u2014 especially things that are not, like, maybe every day or every week, because you just automatically do those, but those quarterly tasks, those monthly tasks that can really get away from you \u2014 that&#8217;s where they can really come in handy as well. Or those things that have no steady reoccurrence, they&#8217;re based on something else, right? Like a first-time clean happens. That&#8217;s where these types of reminder systems can really, really come in handy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Example three: a policy is a decision you make once<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, example number three to cut down on the Groundhog Day: why am I still doing this every day? So the problem is we keep debating the same situation at Serene Clean, right? So client asks something, the manager decides, then the next client asks, and then another manager decides or has to make that same decision, or how did we handle that situation last time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So examples could be cancellation, parking, damage, limitations of scope, client expectations, soliciting or hiring employees \u2014 all of these different scenarios that you guys run into with clients. If you have to continually, again, write it out or think about what you want to do \u2014 the goal is that we think about this once, make adjustments if we need to, but this is a policy. And this is where the client guidelines come into play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So a policy is the decision you make one time instead of a thousand times, right? We want to make this decision and then we can just say, yep, that&#8217;s the policy. This is what we&#8217;re doing. You can always adjust the policy. The point is we need to have something there to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And of course, our client guidelines are on Serene Clean&#8217;s website. We will link that down below if you guys want to see all of our policies, and that has evolved and changed over the years. Like, for example, we don&#8217;t touch taxidermy. We do not touch taxidermy, because we don&#8217;t want to get crushed by a giant elk on a wall, or have to somehow tell the client that we destroyed their giant elk on the wall because it was attached poorly, right? So we just don&#8217;t want to touch them anymore. So we don&#8217;t, all right? That&#8217;s part of the policy. And now we don&#8217;t have to explain it ever again. It&#8217;s like, yep, that&#8217;s policy. Easy peasy, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if you already have had that go through an argument multiple times, or go back to how you handled it previously to try to stay consistent \u2014 that&#8217;s another thing. Especially with employees, consistency with policies across employees is a huge thing. And just consistency in general with how we handle things and how we communicate with them, what we allow \u2014 it&#8217;s very important that we are consistent. And the policies allow you to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like, for example, we don&#8217;t do any cash advances or loans or anything like that. So anytime a staff member has come and asked \u2014 because they have \u2014 and even if my heart strings are just a-yankin&#8217;, my managers will be like, if you&#8217;re willing to do it for them, you have to be willing to do it for all of them. And if that&#8217;s not the case, then we cannot do it here. And so that really keeps me on the straight and narrow of, like, you&#8217;re right, this is not a good thing to do in a business. We can help them out in other ways, but we are not a bank, and it&#8217;s a bad precedent to set that we would do that. So we want to make our policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Example four: checklists and standardization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, number four. I know this is beating a dead horse \u2014 certainly not a dead groundhog. We would never kill a groundhog. Checklists and standardization. How do we avoid so many issues with repeated problems when it comes to quality, scope of work, scaling, making sure all of your cleaners are consistently doing the same tasks at the same level? That&#8217;s gonna be checklists and standardization, baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the problem is if we don&#8217;t have these things in place \u2014 I know you&#8217;re like, Stephanie, you talk about this all the time. It&#8217;s because you guys still aren&#8217;t using checklists. You&#8217;re still not using checklists. I meet with several of you every single month, somebody new, and they&#8217;re like, I know I need to, but I&#8217;m not, but I want it to scale and I wanna grow, but the cleaners are blah blah blah. Because you&#8217;re not using a fucking checklist. I don&#8217;t know how else to say it to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We do not want everybody deciding what good is and what it means to clean a house. We cannot have that. So without standards, the cleaners are going to decide what gets cleaned. The clients have their own expectations. Managers have different expectations. Trainers potentially teach it differently. And that&#8217;s how you get sheer chaos as you try to grow. And then you&#8217;re like, I shouldn&#8217;t have cleaners at all, let me just go back to solo cleaning. No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is not necessarily the answer. Most likely it does not align with your goals whatsoever, but you&#8217;re afraid to push things or grow because you&#8217;re like, nobody can do it like me. Yes, they can. They just don&#8217;t have a checklist or a standard operating procedure for how to behave. And that&#8217;s how we get into Groundhog Day of you&#8217;re cleaning every day, and that&#8217;s your life, because you can&#8217;t get out of the field because you don&#8217;t have a checklist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this is why at Serene Clean we have standardized cleaning checklists. We&#8217;ve had them since day one. The employees should not have to reinvent the job every time they walk into a house. And when you have turnover of staff members, you should not have to worry if they know what to do. You may have shown them, or your trainer may have shown them, and you could still be nervous, like, are they doing what they&#8217;re supposed to be doing? They&#8217;re not, probably, because you don&#8217;t have a checklist \u2014 or you provide it to them but you don&#8217;t require them to fill it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The ZenMaid digital checklist update<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> And this segues perfectly into something I just saw at ZenMaid, a little product improvement update. It&#8217;s actually not little at all, it is huge. They listened to what we said on the feedback for their digital checklist product \u2014 product? Feature. Feature. Duh. Sorry, my brain is addled because it&#8217;s cooking. This is the hottest hat ever, but I&#8217;m committed to the bit. I can&#8217;t take it off now. I have a sweaty neck. Okay, serious time, guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The checklists are now shareable. That is right. You can now print the checklist both before and after it&#8217;s complete. And it also has a shareable live link, which means you can share with your clients the completed checklist and it&#8217;s live. So as changes are being made, they can see what&#8217;s happening, if that&#8217;s what you want. You can share it after the fact, of course. But the beautiful thing is that means that we can now show our clients exactly what got done, which is incredible. That was one of the reasons I&#8217;ve stuck with physical checklists, because it&#8217;s so important for me that my clients see our work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And for you guys that are using digital checklists already, or maybe you looked at it and dismissed it \u2014 please go take another look at this, because this is going to really change the game to be able to send it to the clients and showcase what you guys have accomplished. The clients are gonna absolutely love that, and it really stands out against cleaning companies who, one, don&#8217;t use checklists, or two, do not provide it to them, right? So this is a great selling tool. It&#8217;s a great scope and expectation tool. It&#8217;s phenomenal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I&#8217;m so excited. Bravo, especially to you, Raf, at ZenMaid. You&#8217;re killing it. I know you&#8217;re not gonna watch this, but I just wanted to shout out there is an amazing team who is listening and putting a lot of things into place to make our lives easier as owners over at ZenMaid. So that is going to be the cleaning checklist update there. So please, if you&#8217;re not using it \u2014 they just made it even easier, guys, to use this. So please, please, please go use it. All right. That&#8217;s what I have to say about checklists, at least today, because I&#8217;m gonna say it until every single one of you is using an effing checklist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Example five: quality control and complaints<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> All right, example number five of what Groundhog Day is going to look like, related to quality control. At some point, someone is going to miss something. Every single week, we&#8217;re gonna have some issue, most likely. It may not be something that a client reports, it&#8217;s something that we check in a quality check. So you probably cannot achieve zero quality issues forever. So at the end of the day, we&#8217;re still gonna have some Groundhog Day-esque behavior in the business, of course, but we can eliminate the \u2014 oh no, we got a complaint, shit, what do we do? Right? We need to eliminate that part of it, because we know it&#8217;s going to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we can put things in place to know how to behave with the complaint. So we can systematize who responds, what questions do we ask, how is it documented, do we do a re-clean, how is coaching and the complaint communicated to the cleaning tech, how we handle quality checks. Is this a one-off or a pattern, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like, for example, a lot of you are surprised, especially when you hop on a call with me, that what we do is as soon as we get a complaint, we actually share the email or the message with that cleaner. We just straight up screenshot and be like, this is what we got. Can you give us some feedback? Tell us what the situation is. And just see how they respond. And we want to get that moving as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes it&#8217;s tough if it comes in, like, on a Friday night or something. We do not want to bother our cleaners while they are not during work hours, of course. So we are time sensitive when it comes to that, but we just share that immediately as much as possible within work hours so that we can get that feedback and start moving through the process of what needs to be done, right? And if it&#8217;s obvious, they&#8217;ve shared photos, we are going to, of course, offer a re-clean. But you need to think through these things. And then, okay, complaint happens, this is what we do. This happens, then this happens, right? And we just need to have a process for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Again, especially as you continue to grow, you add more admin staff, or perhaps you&#8217;re bringing a cleaner into the office. You don&#8217;t want to have to be the one that they come to when you&#8217;re finally on your well-deserved vacation and they&#8217;re like, we got this complaint, what do I do? We ended up getting three complaints last week, actually, and I did not know about two of them, I think, until this morning when I did my team meeting, and then I followed up on them, because I&#8217;m not the one handling the complaints. Obviously, I&#8217;m going over them weekly with my ops team \u2014 my management team \u2014 during our ops meeting on Wednesday mornings, but I&#8217;m not the one handling any of it, because they are handling it. They have a process for how it should be done, right? So if you guys want to know how we handle complaints more in depth, I can certainly talk about that in a future episode. Let me know if you would like to know. But I think we&#8217;ve talked about it a lot on the pod before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So an issue happening twice doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean that your system has failed. That&#8217;s going to happen. That&#8217;s where the Groundhog Day stuff comes in. It doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean that there&#8217;s a problem. It just means that there may be a problem, right? We need to look at it. But a huge issue across the board is having no standardized response to the issue, right? So you get a complaint and you&#8217;re having to type up something new every single time, right? Again, we should have something templatized. We should have a baseline of this is how we are going to react, and then tweak it based on the situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Example six: onboarding a new hire<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, next example is going to be onboarding. So a great example of a very complicated Groundhog Day process can be onboarding, when you get a new person in and you&#8217;re trying to reinvent the wheel every single time. So every single employee for us needs Gusto, ZenMaid training, Slack, orientation, they need their training schedule, they need their equipment, they need to have their policies signed, they need to have scheduled messages go out, they need to be added to our tracking sheets, they need to have follow-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the old way is like, great, we hired somebody, what all do we need to do again? Where our systematized way is we literally have an onboarding checklist of everything that needs to be done that lives for Crystal, our HR director, in ClickUp. And it&#8217;s literally a checklist. She adds a new staff member in there, and boom, here&#8217;s her checklist of tasks that she needs to do. Again, not reinventing the wheel. Obviously, bringing new people on is going to keep happening, right? That&#8217;s the part that is going to keep happening, but we don&#8217;t need to keep remembering how to do the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then finally, of course, follow-up. We already talked about CRM, ClickUp. I already talked about that ad nauseam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Don&#8217;t oversystematize<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> But I think that this is a perfect example. One of the biggest examples is the follow-up stuff. So the thing I wanna have distinction about for you guys, though, is we do not need to oversystematize. A lot of you guys wanna write a training manual of, like, how to clean, and have a big giant manual. I do not suggest that at all, because nobody&#8217;s gonna read it. And that type of thing happens best in the field, with showing, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes I&#8217;ll use the word system and people are like, what does that even mean? Or that sounds complicated. Sometimes the solution is literally a saved response, a checklist, a Slackbot, a recurring task in your calendar. Maybe we add a sentence to client onboarding. We make a frequently asked questions video and we add that to our cleaning estimate. If you guys have ever seen our cleaning estimate online \u2014 I think, yeah, if you bought that or anything, the FAQ video is literally linked in there so people can click to see frequently asked questions about working with us. It&#8217;s also linked on our YouTube and our website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Or it could be just making sure that who owns that task is very clear, because that&#8217;s another problem that we experienced: lots of people touching the same problem. And then we were all trying to solve it and it was messy, sometimes very embarrassing, because we&#8217;d be sending multiple emails to the client, and it makes us look stupid, because obviously it shows that we&#8217;re not communicating well. So really clearly labeling, once you start adding more admin, who owns this, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-14\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Call-outs: the old way versus a protocol<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So I really want you guys to think through your business, think through the situations that are getting you most frustrated. And when things are happening that are frustrating repeatedly, I really want you to think about, what part of this am I actually frustrated by? Because you may not be able to eliminate the actual event, but we could eliminate the chaos surrounding the event, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because there&#8217;s certain things that are going to keep happening. Like, a perfect example is call-outs, right? So the old way \u2014 or how you&#8217;re handling it now \u2014 is like, oh no, the cleaner called out, shit, what do I do now? Who&#8217;s gonna call the people? Who can go work? Who contacts the clients? Which jobs do we move? Who makes the decision? Has anybody called her? What did we do last time? Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the correct way should be like, somebody calls out and we start that call-out protocol, right? Whether that be asking them more questions related to how long they&#8217;re out for, are they out for the whole day, explaining, make sure that they check in at 4 PM. We have this whole procedure of what the message is going to look like. And then we need to go behave in a certain way for the calendar, communicating to the client, all of that stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So even coming up with a simple little sticky note on your desktop of, somebody calls out, what needs to happen? And all you have to do to do this is next time somebody calls out, just write down what you all need to do, right? There you go. Boom. That&#8217;s the first step, is just documenting how you handle a problem, and then putting it somewhere so that you can have easy access \u2014 or whoever needs to access this system, this process, can have access to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I&#8217;ve mentioned this book a million times, but a really great book for a lot of this stuff is going to be called Buy Back Your Time. It is incredible. It teaches you how to systematize, delegate, document processes so that you can either, one, delegate them, or two, just make it all easier, right? So that all of these Groundhog Day scenarios are now a lot easier to deal with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-15\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The goal isn&#8217;t zero problems<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So the goal is not necessarily that nothing bad ever happens in our business, right? That is going to happen. The goal for us is to be able to say, we&#8217;ve seen this before and we know what to do, so that you can deal with it faster. You can deal with it without a lot of mental capacity or thinking or problem solving. We can just say, this happens, this is what the triggered response from me is, right? It just makes it so much simpler. You like how when I knocked on my head, I knocked on my groundhog, because that&#8217;s my thinking noggin right there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the groundhog&#8217;s not gonna go away, guys. That&#8217;s not what I&#8217;m saying. All right. Employees are still going to call out, clients are still going to cancel, cleaners are gonna miss stuff sometimes, leads are gonna ghost you. But systems make the groundhog less expensive for you to deal with, from a time, a stress, a decision-making process, manager involvement, owner involvement, right? Reinventing the wheel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For me, oftentimes things will get brought to me at the very last stage, where they can&#8217;t figure it out themselves. Or it is brought to me, I start the process \u2014 the decision-making process, the problem-solving process \u2014 and then they take it from there and boom, they handle it. So again, I have an amazing management team. But I want you guys to think of it like this: if a problem is brought to you in any capacity, how can I either make this easier the next time I have to deal with it, or not have to deal with it at all because I put something into place? It could be a policy, it could be better client guidelines. It could be lots of things, right? It could be a checklist. Lots and lots of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So remember, ask yourself: can I automate it? Can I templatize it? Can I document it? Can I delegate it? Or can I prevent it altogether? So we do not want to be waking up every single day solving the same problems as yesterday in the same manner. We want to be making it better every single day so that it is faster for you guys to deal with, because you got too much shit going on already. All right? So we&#8217;re not trying to make it harder on ourselves. And we don&#8217;t want to be, you know, starring in Groundhog Day and our own personal hell of a Groundhog Day, right? Because there is gonna be some things that are repeating again and again. That&#8217;s not necessarily a problem. Let&#8217;s just make that as efficient as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-16\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Before you go<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So I know I talked really fast in this one. It&#8217;s because my head is literally feeling like it&#8217;s gonna melt off my body. And wearing a themed hat always makes me feistier. Like, it&#8217;s like a 12 percent feistier output. So I don&#8217;t know if that happens to you guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you made it through this episode, please leave me a little rodent emoji. I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a groundhog emoji. If there is, that would be fantastic. But anything that kind of looks like this, or a woodchuck, or, you know, whatever \u2014 just leave me a little emoji to show that you made it through this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you guys can hype this video on YouTube, that really helps us reach more cleaning business owners. If you are on any of the podcast listening apps and you didn&#8217;t watch this \u2014 guys, I&#8217;m wearing a groundhog hat. You might enjoy watching it. But please leave us a review on any of those listening apps. It really helps us reach more owners like you. Hit that like, hit that subscribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Join the ZenMaid Mastermind. Don&#8217;t have to be a ZenMaid customer, on Facebook, to join. Lots of great stuff there. We&#8217;ll link the newsletter down below. If you want to ask me a question, please go subscribe to the ZenMaid newsletter. Again, don&#8217;t have to be a customer. Respond to any of the newsletters with a question you want me to answer, and I would be happy to do so and add it to my list of things to work on. Let&#8217;s see, what else, guys? What other reminders? I think that&#8217;s it. Oh yeah, and again, those cleaning checklists are now new and improved. So if you want to take a gander at those, I highly recommend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this is Jenny. Jenny says goodbye, guys. Have a good week, guys. See you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and today&#8217;s episode, my friends, is inspired by the humble groundhog. And you may be wondering, Stephanie, where the hell is this coming from? Well, my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17656,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"Groundhog Day: Why You\u2019re Dealing With the Same Sh*t Every Day","_seopress_titles_desc":"Stephanie breaks down the two kinds of repeat problems every cleaning business owner faces, and the templates, policies, and checklists that end them.","_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-17655","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\/17655","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=17655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17657,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17655\/revisions\/17657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}