{"id":17734,"date":"2026-09-10T13:20:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T13:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17734"},"modified":"2026-09-10T13:20:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T13:20:51","slug":"why-we-turned-down-a-50000-cleaning-account","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/why-we-turned-down-a-50000-cleaning-account\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Turned Down a $50,000 Cleaning Account"},"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\/173-why-we-turned-down-a-%2450-000-cleaning-account\/id1791590022?i=1000788840626\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/48CNZrFgUcEXzLu6egYouy?si=f2e6dee9264741ad\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VyR457hTa80\">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: #173: Why We Turned Down a $50,000 Cleaning Account\" 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\/48CNZrFgUcEXzLu6egYouy?si=f2e6dee9264741ad&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-1\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Hello everyone, welcome, or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie, from Serene Clean, and in today&#8217;s episode, friends, I wanna talk about saying no to money, because we just had a potential account that we were going to bid, and we actually declined to bid it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I wanna talk about this because I think it&#8217;s a really important lesson that younger Stephanie would have had a very hard time doing. And it&#8217;s not because younger Stephanie was dumb. She was in a lot of ways, but I think that she was at a very different place than where I am at now and what the goals of my business is. Goals are, is, are, whatever, English is hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Do You Want, and What Are You Willing to Do?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think it&#8217;s an important topic for a variety of reasons, but most importantly, when I get emails from you guys, when I get questions from you, when I&#8217;m having conversations with you, you are asking me things along the lines of, should I do this, should I do this, what should I do, what should I do? And it all just comes down to two things: what do you want, and what are you willing to do for what you want? Because that will determine the timeline and the reasonableness of what you are attempting to do. I think a lot of things are possible. I think it just depends how long it&#8217;s going to take and what you are willing to do to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People look at my business journey. If you&#8217;ve never heard of me, if this is your first episode here, hi, hello, I&#8217;m Stephanie. I own Serene Clean. It is a cleaning business in western rural Wisconsin that is three regional locations. I have about 30 staff members, and we should hit between $1.4 and $1.5 million in revenue this year, 2026, when I am recording. And we grew very quickly \u2014 very quickly, I would say, especially for such a rural area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When people look at that, they don&#8217;t necessarily look at the context of what was happening at that time, as well as what I was willing to do. What I mean by that is, Stephanie at 23, when she opened her business \u2014 22 technically, but I turned 23 pretty shortly after \u2014 I was working full time. I really didn&#8217;t have this big vision at all, not even really. I did not have any sort of vision of what this business could be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I remember hitting $7,000 a month in revenue early on, and I was like, this is the top. I was absolutely floored by it. I didn&#8217;t think that it could even ever get better than that, because my ability to see what was possible was just \u2014 it wasn&#8217;t even there, because how could it be? It was never exemplified to me in my real life in that manner, right? I was raised in an entrepreneurial family, yes, but not in this type of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I truly had set my sights on having a couple part-timers and this being a side hustle and this replacing the money that I used to make waitressing. That was truly, at the beginning, what I anticipated this to turn out to be. When things started tumbling in, I just rolled with it, and I just did not say no really to anything. I took on things that, looking back, I&#8217;m actually shocked that I was able to do, but it was because I was just in a very let-me-do-it, let-me-do-it kind of mindset. Let&#8217;s see, right? No expectations of anything other than I wanted to do a good job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Don&#8217;t Compare Your Year One to Mine<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I look back at that time and I compare it to many of you listening right now, this cannot be said more strongly: I did not and do not have children. I did not have debt. I did not have all of these life&#8217;s work. I had nobody relying on me except me and my dog and my cat, right? There was no financial obligation to anybody else, okay? That is a privilege. That is a privilege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I&#8217;m saying this because I don&#8217;t want you guys to compare what your year one looked like to my year one. If you are in different circumstances, I will say it can be done. You can have the financial success that I did early on. You absolutely can. But it may be more difficult. And that&#8217;s because life is not fair, right? Things are not fair. We just have the cards that were dealt. We play the hand, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I was playing the hand that I was given, which again, lots of privilege, lots of financial literacy. You know, I certainly wasn&#8217;t made of money, but I wasn&#8217;t destitute. I had my full-time job. I did not need this money to live off of, right? And so that allowed me to do a lot of things \u2014 I could be patient. I didn&#8217;t really need to be, honestly. Like, when I just look at it, it comes down to a lot of fucking luck, guys. I&#8217;m not going to lie. And I&#8217;m not trying to discredit my younger self, because she did so much. She worked so fucking hard. She worked so hard. A lot of opportunities came to me, I had a great market, all of these things. Now, I did absolutely take these opportunities, very true. I took them. All of these things to say is that multiple things can be true at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I&#8217;m giving you this whole long convoluted story because the whole point of this episode is to tell you that you may not agree, for your life and your business, with what I&#8217;m about to describe to you. Because of where you are at, what season you&#8217;re in, you&#8217;d be like, what are you doing? Why are you saying no to this money? That doesn&#8217;t make sense. And that&#8217;s the cool thing \u2014 it doesn&#8217;t need to make sense to you, and your choices and your business don&#8217;t have to make sense to me, unless you&#8217;re asking my opinion, and then I&#8217;m going to ask you questions about it, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But when it comes to your life and what your business does for you, it needs to serve you. It needs to serve your life, right? So when I look at other people&#8217;s businesses and they&#8217;re working a shit ton, I don&#8217;t want to do that anymore. I did that, and I definitely still do a lot. I love what I do. I get to have the privilege of only doing the things I really like to do in my business. I love the marketing and the branding and the content and all of that stuff. I like the leadership, I like the fun times, right? I like the numbers, I love the auditing. Like, that&#8217;s the stuff I like, so I get to do that, right? I don&#8217;t have to work like I did before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so when you look at where I&#8217;m at now, know that yes, it&#8217;s possible, but it doesn&#8217;t happen right away. And how fast it happens will be determined on what you&#8217;re willing to do and willing to take. And also know that you may just have other circumstances that are going to affect you, but you have to deal with the circumstances that you&#8217;re given, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I heard a saying \u2014 it was definitely in one of our Hormozi videos, whether that was Alex or Leila \u2014 and it was just talking about, like, whatever reasons you have for not doing the thing are legitimate reasons to you. Like, okay, you&#8217;re right, you were handed this hand, right? You do have this thing. You do have four children. You have all of these things. These are true and valid. And then what? Yes, I remember, this was Alex Hormozi saying, &#8220;And then what?&#8221; Right? So, okay, that is all true. Now what? Now what are you going to do, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so all of that to say, before I go into this story: I don&#8217;t want you guys to compare. I want you to look at your life and your situation and say, okay, given all of these circumstances, what can I do, right? Because if you hear this or hear anything that I say and be like, well, I can&#8217;t do that, Stephanie, because of X, Y, Z. I can&#8217;t do that, Stephanie, because of this. Whatever valid reason \u2014 okay, what could you do? Can we do anything, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hunger, Timelines, and Commercial Work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So taking this on a sideline \u2014 I didn&#8217;t expect to go down this route with this conversation, but it just has me thinking, before I talk about this opportunity that we turned down: what you&#8217;re willing to do is different than what I&#8217;m willing to do, potentially, right? You may be hungrier than I am right now. Like, I certainly don&#8217;t have the hunger that I used to, right? I want to grow Serene Clean, absolutely. But I&#8217;m comfortable. I wasn&#8217;t comfortable back then. And so I was hungrier back then, right? It&#8217;s hard to be as hungry when you have a meal in front of you, right? And I&#8217;m talking hyperbolically, right? Metaphorically, should I say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I just want you guys to know that you don&#8217;t need to compare. But if you do compare, then ask yourself, what are you willing to do? And what I&#8217;m speaking of specifically with cleaning businesses is commercial, right? Stephanie&#8217;s business grew so fast, yes, because I did a shit ton of residential, but I took commercial on. I was working nights, days, weekends, all of it, right? And that is because I did not have children. I could do that. Some of you guys do have children and you&#8217;re doing it, and that is a huge sacrifice, right? But it will get you to the end goal faster, if the end goal is more money, right? Potentially, &#8217;cause some commercial and some money is not all good money, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I really want you guys to think about that when you&#8217;re thinking about, what is it that you want? And what timeline do you wanna reach that goal? Because it may not actually be realistic based on what you&#8217;re willing to do, right? Like, what are you willing to do? What realistically makes sense for your life? It may just take longer. And that is rich coming from me, I know. Just be patient, right? Just be patient, just do the things and be patient, right? But sometimes life circumstances are gonna make you have to take longer on the goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And at the end of the day, I want my business to be around for forever \u2014 like, for as long as my life, for sure. And my future children, hopefully, but if they want it, right? Or whatever it is that I choose to do, I want this to be around a long time. And so really just extending the timeline of, what does the 10-year look like? That helps me be more patient. But again, I can afford that luxury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So all of that to say \u2014 this was a convoluted 10 minutes, I know, before I get into this \u2014 but I just want you guys to be realistic and think about what you&#8217;re willing to do and the timeline in which you want to reach your goals, because those things directly correlate together. The faster you want something done, the more aggressive and intense you&#8217;re going to have to be, right? And so when we&#8217;re talking about things like taking on commercial, that is not for everybody, right? I didn&#8217;t give a fuck about life balance. Like, that didn&#8217;t even register to me. I did not care. I was an animal, right? Like, I was an animal. I didn&#8217;t have any life balance. All I knew was work. And I don&#8217;t want to go back to that, but I am so grateful that younger Stephanie did do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The $50,000 Account We Turned Down<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So all of that to say, we turned down a potentially $50,000 account \u2014 a $50,000 a year account. We declined to bid it. And I shared that with my whole team last Monday, actually, at our team meeting. And so I thought that this would be a really good lesson to talk about with you guys \u2014 that not all commercial is going to be for you. And take commercial out of it \u2014 not all accounts are going to be for you, and that&#8217;s okay. And something that you are going to develop in your business and entrepreneur lifespan is discernment and being able to say no. And the faster you&#8217;re able to figure that out, the happier your staff will be. I didn&#8217;t really say no to any jobs in the beginning, and it got me financially to where we could get to the place of saying no to them now. But I&#8217;m really happy that we said no to this, and I&#8217;m gonna describe the situation like I shared it with my team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So a large retailer \u2014 a big box store, right? Big box store \u2014 reached out, and they wanted daily cleanings of three bathrooms, right? Easy. So easy. Stupidly easy. Like, good Lord, is this easy, right? It&#8217;s bathrooms. I could send somebody in their sleep to do this. We did not lose the bid. I didn&#8217;t even make one. And why? Why wouldn&#8217;t you do that, Stephanie? It&#8217;s just so easy. Why wouldn&#8217;t you just do the bid? Because, my friends, it&#8217;s seven days a week. That&#8217;s why. And younger Stephanie, if she could see older Stephanie now, she&#8217;d be like, &#8220;What is wrong with you?&#8221; But I feel really good about this decision. I&#8217;m so happy we didn&#8217;t bid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So they reached out wanting bathrooms done daily \u2014 and I mean seven days a week. And my manager, Katie, did a great job. She brought it to our ops meeting. She did some kind of pros and cons analysis with Claude, and she brought that to the meeting. She was so prepared. I really appreciate that. And just like, okay, these are all the pros and cons of even bidding this, and if we get it, what&#8217;s going to happen? And obviously the financial side of it was a huge pro. Like, that&#8217;s a lot of money. That is a lot of money \u2014 so much money \u2014 and easy work, right? Easy work, centrally located. It&#8217;s ticking so many of our boxes when it comes to our ideal commercial. Daytime too \u2014 we can do it in the day. Truly fantastic. But sometimes the one negative is big enough to completely outweigh those positives. And that&#8217;s the conversation we had, right? Which was weekends. Weekends. It needs to be done every weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why Weekends Are a Deal Breaker<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And previously, again, earlier on in Serene Clean&#8217;s lifespan, this wouldn&#8217;t even be a question. We would be bidding this, right? And I&#8217;d be like, we&#8217;re going to make it work. But now that is a deal breaker for us. And the reason why is I have truly stuck by making Serene Clean work for everyone who works for me. And that is something easy to say, but it&#8217;s not always easy to do, especially when you are looking down the barrel of $50,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And what I mean by this is, we have walked away and really gotten away from weekend work as much as possible \u2014 as much as possible. We still do have employees who work on the weekends because they want to, whether that be vacation rentals \u2014 the few vacation rentals that we have \u2014 or some commercial. And the commercial that we have, though, it could be done on Fridays. They just choose to do it on the weekends, right? So very minimal. We&#8217;re talking a handful of appointments on a weekend, maybe like five a weekend. And we would have flexibility there. If those staff members left, we could do it on Fridays, like I said. We just don&#8217;t want to do that, right? We have been working for that for years now, getting away from that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the reason is not necessarily the cleaning tech side of it, but it&#8217;s the manager side. It&#8217;s the worst case scenario side, which is: somebody quits, somebody no-shows, and it&#8217;s Saturday, right? All of a sudden, what happens? Because we&#8217;ve got backups during the week. We&#8217;ve built our entire structure around having backup ability during the week. But on the weekend, that is simply not possible, and somebody is going to have to manage that, right? And of course, there are solutions to everything. There are solutions, but it&#8217;s not solutions that we are currently in a place we wanna put into place, right? Meaning having extra weekend help or doing independent contractors. We&#8217;re not going to do that \u2014 meaning to have a backup, right? That&#8217;s not something I&#8217;m willing to do, is introduce that into the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I also do not want my managers to have to be answering any questions on the weekend. They work so hard for me. They literally run all of the operations for me day to day. They deserve their weekends off. And so in order to make sure that that happens as much as possible, we cannot be taking more weekend work on. And every weekend \u2014 again, you could pay people more, you could put all these things in place to ensure that people are going to be there. But I think worst case scenario \u2014 and the worst case scenario is, yeah, no call, no show \u2014 somebody&#8217;s gotta do it on the weekend, or we have an unhappy customer, right? And I&#8217;m not willing to deal with the ramifications of the worst case scenario like I am during the week. Somebody no calls, no shows during the week \u2014 we got it. We can fix it during the week, absolutely. Even in the evening. If we&#8217;ve got evening workers, that&#8217;s not a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We just don&#8217;t even want to open ourselves up to this. Which, I know \u2014 no risk, no reward. But it&#8217;s like, we don&#8217;t need this. We don&#8217;t need to take it on. Yes, it would be wonderful. It&#8217;d be great money. It would really push me towards the Serene Clean financial goals that I have and the growth goals that I have, but I&#8217;m not willing to touch that boundary of no more weekend work. No more weekend work. It&#8217;s why we don&#8217;t take on any more vacation rentals \u2014 because it&#8217;s going to be more weekend work. There&#8217;s a lot of reasons, other things as well, when it comes to the sporadicness and having lots of last minute shit. So there&#8217;s a lot of reasons we don&#8217;t want vacation rentals, but one of them is turnovers have to happen on the weekends, and we just don&#8217;t wanna add that complexity. Because of course we could have a VA on the weekends who is fielding questions from the techs or issues, but unless they&#8217;re gonna go clean it when somebody doesn&#8217;t show up, then we don&#8217;t wanna have that overhead. We just don&#8217;t. We wanna shut off. We wanna shut off on the weekends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the reason I told that big 10-minute-long story is because you may be hearing what I&#8217;m saying right now and saying, Stephanie, what the hell, that&#8217;s so dumb, why wouldn&#8217;t you take that money, right? And that&#8217;s because where you are in your business journey and your decision-making process is a completely different place than I&#8217;m at at this point, seven years in, at the size that we&#8217;re at. I am not willing to ask my staff to do that anymore. Where before, when I was in person \u2014 somebody calls out, somebody quits \u2014 I&#8217;m there. I can go take the brunt of that, right? And I am not willing to have the overhead of an on-call person on the weekends unless we changed the entire strategy and started doing weekend work. And if we started doing weekend work, then we need techs, we need a manager, we need all of these things in order to facilitate everybody being taken care of properly. Because the people working on a weekend deserve to have somebody that they can go to \u2014 they&#8217;re working, they should have a manager available to them in case something goes wrong. The clients deserve to have somebody available to answer questions, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I don&#8217;t want to invest the time or resources in order to make that happen at the full capacity of what I am comfortable with, because one of our other core values is integrity. Outside of family first \u2014 which really influences this decision \u2014 integrity is another. And for me, if I am going to be operating any day of the week, I want it to be at the full Serene standard of, this is what we do every day of the week that we are working. And if I can&#8217;t provide that on the weekends because structurally it&#8217;s not possible, then that&#8217;s not right based on what my company values are. So I&#8217;m not gonna do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so even despite all of this money staring at us, I&#8217;m still not willing to do that, because \u2014 I&#8217;m tired, grandpa. We don&#8217;t wanna work on the weekends. We don&#8217;t want anything happening on the weekends, because there&#8217;s always that level of, things are happening, something could go wrong, and we might have to jump in. And I just wanna completely turn off. Which, I know I am able to do that, but I know my managers. I know they&#8217;re gonna be checking in. I know they&#8217;re gonna get burnt out because they&#8217;re not gonna be able to turn it off, because they know things are happening \u2014 even if we got a weekend manager or something, but it would take a long time. I just don&#8217;t think the juice would be worth the squeeze in order to put that into place. And it&#8217;s just not something I wanna do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So all of this to say is, you know, me just being like, I don&#8217;t wanna do it, so I&#8217;m not doing it. Wow, so profound, Stephanie. But I think you guys need to hear this \u2014 that it&#8217;s okay to say no, and you don&#8217;t need to feel guilty about it. Because I know a lot of you, you bring these opportunities to me, and you talk about what it&#8217;s gonna take to make it happen. And it&#8217;s not wrong to take it. Of course, you know me, I&#8217;m like, go get that money. That&#8217;s exactly what I want you to do, is go get that money. But it needs to make sense for you and what you&#8217;re willing to do. What sacrifice are you going to be willing to make? Because everything is opportunity cost, right? Everything. Every decision we make \u2014 me recording this podcast right now is the opportunity cost of not doing something else with this exact time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so we have to look at it that way: if I say yes to this, what do I need to say no to? What would need to happen because we&#8217;re saying yes to this? And if I am not willing to give those things up \u2014 whether that be money for overhead of a manager on the weekend, whether that be money because of having another on-call person on the weekend, which I don&#8217;t want to do, and whether that be the opportunity cost of any of my managers not being able to completely shut off during the weekends \u2014 I&#8217;m not willing to pay those costs, so I&#8217;m not going to do it. And so we need to look at it that way and then stand on business and be okay with it. Literally, when we said no, after we talked about this, I felt great. I&#8217;m like, this feels really, really good to say no to this, &#8217;cause it&#8217;s not for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Counter-Offer Before You Decline<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I will tell you what we did before we said no \u2014 we counter-offered. So this was actually inspired by the book we had to read for the ZenMaid Retreat, which was called &#8220;The Goal.&#8221; It&#8217;s a really good book. I really enjoyed it, actually, and I&#8217;m applying a lot of it just in my life in general. But in that book, one of the examples or storylines was, it&#8217;s a manufacturing facility, and they had a really big order come to them \u2014 an opportunity, just like I&#8217;m describing to you. And they needed the order, like, yesterday. And so Alex \u2014 he&#8217;s the main character, Alex, Al \u2014 is like, okay, I don&#8217;t know if we can do it at what they&#8217;re asking. I don&#8217;t know if we can fulfill what they&#8217;re asking. But perhaps could we take it to them and ask if we could do smaller batches of orders and release them every week, instead of having the full batch ready by X date? Could we do these smaller batches, and it gets extended a little bit more? And the customer came back and said, that&#8217;s actually better for us, because then we&#8217;re not getting this huge influx \u2014 we&#8217;re able to manage. So it was actually a better solution, and that&#8217;s what they went with. It was all fantastic and lovely and rainbows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, inspiration from that was, well, let&#8217;s counter-offer. Let&#8217;s just see, because the worst thing they can say is no. And so we said, hey, we would love to provide a bid, but we currently are not at the capacity to take on additional weekend work right now. Could we bid Monday through Friday? Can we bid that? Because if that was the case, then no-brainer, slam dunk, I want this account, right? And they said no. Spoiler \u2014 they said no. But we did counter-offer a solution before we declined. So we wanted to reshape the order, if you will, not refuse it \u2014 see if that would be of an interest. They said no, and there we go. It took us one email. That was the opportunity cost of that solution. And it made me feel confident, because I&#8217;m like, we gave them an option with something that fits within our core values and fits within what we&#8217;re comfortable doing. And they said no. Awesome. We exhausted what we are comfortable with, and I can walk away from this with a clear conscience, not worried about that money, right? So that feels really, really good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">When to Push and When to Walk Away<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And frankly, I joked, &#8217;cause it&#8217;s like, this is not what younger Stephanie would do. She would push, right? And I don&#8217;t think that pushing is wrong at different parts of your business. I think it&#8217;s exactly what you need, frankly, if you have aggressive goals or just wanna see rapid growth. The reason we are at where we are at is because younger Stephanie was very aggressive \u2014 very aggressive with, no, we are bidding this. No, we are taking this on, and we are figuring it out. I was literally physically in Wisconsin then. I&#8217;m not now. We&#8217;re at a different place. I have to behave differently now, right? Doesn&#8217;t mean I don&#8217;t continually push my managers to bid stuff that they feel uncomfortable with, right? And that is kind of my role \u2014 I&#8217;m the one pushing in a lot of ways. Oftentimes they&#8217;re coming to me, like, we&#8217;ll think about this, think about this. My personality and my skill is saying, we need to go make these sales. We need to grow. This is what we need to do. It&#8217;s not gonna be comfortable. We&#8217;ve figured out literally every other thing, right? But now my role has evolved to be more discerning, right? And really take into account, what is this gonna mean for them? What is this gonna look like to actually be able to do this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so when I look at our biggest accounts that we have, the ones that really propelled us \u2014 every single one of them, I was not comfortable with. I was like, oh, scared. Because it&#8217;s scary \u2014 I&#8217;d never done it before. Like our large government federal account. We bid that, we got it, and literally it was like, oh no, now what? Now what do we do? I don&#8217;t know how to do this, right? Because we needed all these background checks that were so extensive to get into this facility. Or when I look at our big manufacturing facilities that we still do to this day \u2014 it was so intimidating doing the walkthroughs of these huge factories, 100,000-square-foot facilities. But at the end of the day, they&#8217;re just bathrooms, they&#8217;re just break rooms, it&#8217;s just mopping floors. There&#8217;s nothing complex about it. It&#8217;s just a big building. There&#8217;s just more of them, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So me saying this is not to say turn down work. That is not what I want you guys to take away from this. I want you to look at every opportunity critically: does this make sense right now for where we are at? Does it make sense? And that&#8217;s simply what I want you to take away, because there&#8217;s going to be opportunities that come that simply do not make sense for what you are willing to do in the worst case scenario. Are you willing to go clean this thing, right? Are you willing to build out the structure to make this thing work if the worst case scenario happens, right? Like, when I look at our big federal account \u2014 we pay very high at that account. We make good money there. We pay high, and we haven&#8217;t had any turnover, knock on wood, for several years now there, because our guys are very happy. They&#8217;re awesome. They&#8217;re content. Everybody&#8217;s happy. They&#8217;re making great money. We bonus them heavily based on attendance and quality. So it just makes sense. And so we were willing to spend the money there and make it work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it really just comes down to when you look at these big opportunities. I&#8217;ve walked through several bidding scenarios with you guys, whether you&#8217;re emailing me or we jump on a call where we walk through a large commercial opportunity. I think of Yadi \u2014 Yadi Hayati. If you&#8217;re listening, your episode was so good. And she had a really large post construction job that they were bidding, and she ended up walking away from it. And I&#8217;m so proud of her for that, because it did not make sense. And you know why? They were trying to do a per-apartment price, right? Which is really normal for post construction. It was like a big apartment building, right? And it had a big common area where you can hang out and stuff \u2014 you know what I&#8217;m talking about in an apartment building. So it had these, but all of the hallways and \u2014 I mean, there&#8217;s just so much extra area that was not included in the bid, and they refused to put any money into those areas, but they were expected to do them. That doesn&#8217;t make sense. So you&#8217;re telling me we need to do this work, but you&#8217;re not gonna pay us any more for this work? It&#8217;s only gonna be for the apartments, but we&#8217;re gonna be held liable? That doesn&#8217;t make sense, does it, guys? So she walked away from it, and I&#8217;m so proud of her, because looking at that big money, it&#8217;s like \u2014 not only is it huge money, it is a huge amount of work, and it&#8217;s going to take you away from your normal business, right, and your focus away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before we got our big government account at Fort McCoy \u2014 the big federal contract, the once-in-a-lifetime, million-dollar project, you know I talk about that all the time because it was such a huge learning experience \u2014 I don&#8217;t think I often mention this. Right before that opportunity came to me, meaning I got the phone call a couple weeks prior, I had done a walkthrough at a giant retirement home renovation that was right in Sparta, one of the towns we service \u2014 the Morrow Home, for any of my Sparta listeners. Actually, my great-grandma lives there. They were doing their big renovation, right? And so they were looking for bids for the post construction clean, which I am not adept at. Post construction \u2014 we&#8217;ve done very little of it, and very small scale, right? Residential, banks, some of those types of things. Not really big facilities like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I did the walkthrough, and they needed a bid right away. And it would require exterior windows and lifts, because they had like a church, like a chapel, and we had to do all of the windows and the ceilings and stuff like that. And just so much, right? Wiping down all the walls. And I did that walkthrough and I did not feel good. I didn&#8217;t feel good. I&#8217;m like, I feel so out of my depth, and not in the way that I&#8217;m comfortable with. I&#8217;m really good at, I think, getting out of my comfort zone and pushing myself, but it felt different in that scenario, where I was going to make a huge mistake if I bid that. There was no way to know what was needed in that situation. I felt rushed. I felt I didn&#8217;t have enough information to make an intelligent bid. And I also was very uncomfortable with anything to do with lifts, anything to do with high-up stuff. It&#8217;s just out of our wheelhouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that doesn&#8217;t always mean turn something down, right? Like I said, we should push ourselves. But in that scenario, when I thought about the staffing, I was like, okay, so this is gonna be a huge job influx. How would I even staff this? I&#8217;d have to do independent contractors, most likely, which I wasn&#8217;t comfortable with either. And I would have to be there every day. And I started doing the numbers, and I&#8217;m like, I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re gonna make that much money here, considering the amount of oversight that this is going to take. And I know how multiple rounds happen, and how sometimes nothing goes to schedule with post construction, because their work&#8217;s never done. They&#8217;re bringing people in and redoing stuff \u2014 electrical, plumbing, whatever the heck, painting. And I&#8217;m like, this sounds \u2014 again, I could have done it, but I didn&#8217;t want to. I was like, I don&#8217;t think this is gonna be the job for us. So I turned it down. I didn&#8217;t bid it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I have done this a couple of times with large jobs like this. The one we&#8217;re talking about today is not super large in comparison to that. What happened then is, two weeks later, we got the call for this huge Fort McCoy job, which I was comfortable with. Crazy enough, I was more comfortable going in and cleaning refugee housing at a military base compared to doing a post construction of a retirement home, right? That&#8217;s crazy, isn&#8217;t it? Doesn&#8217;t that sound crazy? But it made sense for me in my business at that time. That&#8217;s what made sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Trust Yourself and Test Your Non-Negotiables<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so all of that to say is, I want you guys to learn to trust yourself. And if something doesn&#8217;t feel right, really dig into that of why. Why am I uncomfortable with this? Is it because it is pushing against some boundaries or values that I want to hold? Or is it pushing against me not being willing to grow? Right? We need to really analyze, why am I uncomfortable? Because owning a business is uncomfortable. It is simply uncomfortable, and it&#8217;s going to push you more than anything. It is going to push you. I imagine parenthood is similar. It just pushes you to grow in very uncomfortable ways. I never wanna just blanket say, if it&#8217;s uncomfortable, don&#8217;t do it, right? That&#8217;s not what I&#8217;m saying, right? Growth is uncomfortable. But that doesn&#8217;t mean we just blindly say yes to everything, because that also doesn&#8217;t make sense, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And especially when it comes to things like \u2014 if you wanna have dinner with your kids every single day, that is important, having a family dinner, for example, right? Let&#8217;s pick that one. And commercial work in the evening, right now, because you don&#8217;t have the financial overhead in order to have any backups in place \u2014 that means that you would have to go clean it, or you&#8217;re cleaning it, and that is a non-negotiable, is that you have family dinner. Well, guess what would have to happen? You either are cleaning afterwards into the late night, or you don&#8217;t take that job, or you hire and you figure out how to have a backup, right? So that no matter what, there is somebody who can do it. There are ways to solve for that, but it doesn&#8217;t mean you have to go back on what it is that you want. And if that doesn&#8217;t work for you, then guess what? You need to do daytime commercial. You need to do daytime residential, right? That&#8217;s what makes sense for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which, again, I&#8217;m never gonna tell you guys that you should be seeking life balance in business ownership, frankly. I know, hot take \u2014 life balance, I think, is overrated. I think it&#8217;s more about seasons of what that looks like, and you can&#8217;t perfectly balance every part of your life. That&#8217;s simply not possible. Every single day is gonna take different things of what the focus is, and every season of our life is going to determine what the focus is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so this is such a highly personal topic, and that&#8217;s why I wanted to give you guys some core examples of how I have made these personal choices for my business and my staff and my community and what we&#8217;re willing to do. And that has looked very different in different parts of my personal journey as a business owner. And so even me \u2014 even I \u2014 have seen multiple iterations of this topic throughout the life of the business. And so don&#8217;t be surprised if you feel differently than how you felt six months ago, than how you felt two years ago in your business, right? And it&#8217;s really about not just time, but stage of the business and stage of where you are at in life, right? Like, when I have children, things probably will look different, I would imagine. But that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m building right now, in order to set myself up for being able to step away a little bit, so I can focus on that when I eventually \u2014 when I&#8217;m 70 years old \u2014 have children. Just cats for now, guys. Just lots of cats. Lots of cats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But all of that to say is, I don&#8217;t want you guys to be coming down on yourselves hard. I think we should expect a lot of ourselves, yes, but we need to be realistic, given the parts of our life that are legitimately \u2014 like, this is something that is going to affect your ability to do something, and something&#8217;s gotta give, right? There&#8217;s only the 24 hours in the day. Something has to give. We either need to delegate, or we need to work longer and sleep less, or be happy with a slower business growth, right? And that&#8217;s probably gonna be the most likely scenario \u2014 you&#8217;re gonna have to be happy with slower business growth and be able to be content with that, because you have all of these obligations that I do not have, okay? So I just always like to give that caveat, because so many of you listen to me and reach out and are like, &#8220;I wanna be like you when I grow up.&#8221; And it&#8217;s like, thank you, and I think that&#8217;s awesome. And also, you have a different life than me, and your journey is gonna look different than mine. So please keep that in mind, right? And just have a healthy relationship with this thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I hope these examples give you guys some starting points of critically looking at opportunities when they come your way \u2014 of, does this actually fit? Don&#8217;t be scared to push yourself. Please don&#8217;t take away from this that saying no to everything is the answer. That is not what I&#8217;m saying, especially in the beginning of the business. You have to put yourself out there. You have to be willing to be uncomfortable really throughout the business. But just try to have that discernment and listen to yourself and say, what is non-negotiable? And the way you see if that&#8217;s actually non-negotiable is when you&#8217;re staring down the barrel of $50,000. Is it still a non-negotiable? Because if it&#8217;s not, then it&#8217;s actually negotiable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what are we willing to do, not just on the easy days when it&#8217;s easy to say no, but on the hard days? On the hard days where something is really tempting. That&#8217;s how we actually test what our values are \u2014 not on the days where we&#8217;re just existing, but on the days where something challenges that, where it pushes you and it tempts you to not live by that value. That&#8217;s when you decide, is this actually a value? And so that&#8217;s what we need to lay out for ourselves and make decisions based on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I hope this gave you guys some things to think about. I hope you&#8217;re having a wonderful day. Hey, are you coming to CleanCon? I would love to see you. Austin, Texas, end of September. I will be there with several of my ZenMaid friends, and I know a ton of you guys are coming, so I would love to meet you. Say hi, don&#8217;t be shy. Come up and say hi, give me a hug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Please subscribe to the ZenMaid newsletter if you have not done so. It&#8217;s completely free. We&#8217;ll leave a link down in the description of this podcast episode. We send out great newsletters every single week \u2014 very practical advice. I highly recommend it. You don&#8217;t need to be a ZenMaid customer. And for the mastermind \u2014 the ZenMaid Mastermind on Facebook \u2014 I would love to see you there as well. I post different types of content there, video tutorials, that type of stuff, and it&#8217;s just a great community of other owners. So I&#8217;d love to see you there. Again, you don&#8217;t need to be a ZenMaid customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And finally, I would love to see you like and subscribe to this video. If you&#8217;ve made it this far, leave me a little flower. I&#8217;ve got flowers on my dress here. Leave me a flower down below. I know, I asked for that emoji \u2014 I just love flowers. Leave me a flower down below if you made it this far. Hit that like, that subscribe, and that hype. Leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, whatever it&#8217;s called. I&#8217;m not an Apple user. And guys, we will see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye-bye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you enjoyed this episode of the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, please be sure to leave us a five-star review so we can reach more cleaners like you. Until next time, keep your work clean and your business filthy rich.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome, or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie, from Serene Clean, and in today&#8217;s episode, friends, I wanna talk about saying no to money, because we just had a potential account that we were going to bid, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17735,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"Why We Turned Down a $50,000 Cleaning Account","_seopress_titles_desc":"Stephanie explains why Serene Clean declined to bid a $50,000 commercial account, and how to decide when saying no to money protects your cleaning business.","_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-17734","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\/17734","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=17734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17737,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17734\/revisions\/17737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}