How I Built a $125K/Month Cleaning Business

imagine going from zero to making nearly a million dollars a year in just three years of starting the business and accomplishing all of that while traveling all over the globe you can have a local business be managed completely remotely if you pick the right model and hit three main pieces of criteria and I tried a lot of these industries which are like remote and everything flopped so now we're probably doing around between 100 and 150 000 per month in Revenue there's actually fast forward buttons in business you can have and you can see everything through the dashboard over here someone's already figured this out why am I doing everything myself yeah we've made millions of dollars with this exact sales script I love finding those types of Industries we're picking up the phones at competitive Advantage this is definitely one of them you mentioned a secret strategy to sales I'm dying to know what that is stick around and I'll show you exactly how I did it and how you could do the same foreign tell us where Neil was before made this came into the picture and what Drew you to starting your own clingy business yes I was actually working in Corporate America I was working in finance and private equity in normal nine to five in the cubicle and uh yeah yeah I dress up every single day go to work early in the morning leave late at night time it was one of those types of jobs heavy on the computer heavy on Excel yeah and when I was there I realized that this is just not really the life I wanted you know two years of vacation every year being overworked underappreciated I just wanted something more for myself and I knew I wanted to start some sort of side hustle I didn't really know what it was going to be but I knew I had to fulfill some key characteristics I was looking for in my Lifestyles okay that's awesome and one other thing I want to touch on is the finance world right Finance private Equity yeah that I can imagine just from my own experience knowledge takes a lot of time training while you're doing that you're also building the side hustle made this how did how did you do that like what do you want to highlight in part of that moment yeah there's a lot that goes into it I made a lot of mistakes and I finally kind of cracked the code of what would make this a what I call remote local type of business interesting you want to learn more absolutely but don't share now you guys keep watching because we've got a ton of other things coming up so where are we Neil so we're now in my home office this is where I get most of my work done sweet not a lot of room no not necessarily needed right I really need you just need a laptop and some Wi-Fi and you're good to go that's what he's us where the magic happens I guess all right well and then obviously you haven't been here for too long but you've always had an home office before uh what were the startup costs for made this back in the day break it down for us absolutely so I probably spent under a thousand dollars to get going that's all you really need for this type of business it's pretty lean there's not like trucks Vehicles wraps nothing like that you just need internet connection so sweet I spent probably like 100 bucks on a WordPress template and built my first website I didn't know what I was doing like I found hosting and I got a really crappy website and just got it up as something like version one and now now it's so much easier because there's all these AI tools that make spin up websites a lot of different tools to make easy websites for less than 100 bucks either oh yeah yeah and uh my logo was so bad I was on the Microsoft Word and I just came up with a name from Reddit and I just have to made this with the exclamation mark and that was my logo that was it they didn't give me much thought no and I don't think you really need to I think people overthink these small things you could always make changes as you go the real cost for me though is the amount of time I spent hundreds of hours of researching stuff trial and error to get anything's going now could I have done that much faster in hindsight yeah for sure but a lot of your earlier stages in business is just kind of figuring it out figuring out what to do and just that's the biggest cost in reality it's not the money it's the time spent yeah you only have so much time absolutely gorgeous Place tell us just in a snippet where we are and why here specifically yeah this is one of our clients Airbnb homes so our specialty is actually Airbnb turnovers and so this is one of the homes that we actually take care of and spend a client for a long time and how many clients do you have today as we speak I know just throw it out yeah it'd be well over 400 clients well the other question that is next is the importance of picking up every phone call in this business oh yeah we want more clients we want more homes to take care of and clean how did you build a system around that to make sure that absolutely every phone call from a prospective client is answered you know what's funny for this industry I always tell people that picking up the phone is a competitive advantage and I love finding those types of Industries we're picking up the phones at competitive Advantage this is definitely one of them if you try to call the top 10 competitors in your city for cleaning seven of the morning they won't even pick up three of them I pick up and am I yeah shocking right if you try any home Home Services uh it's very rare to find someone who actually picks up and is really good at sales so with that in mind you just got to pick up the phone then you're already ahead of the game right so what we do to make sure we always pick up the phone is we use Global Talent to service this local location so call us get routed to my team in South Africa and they are the ones who pick up the call and what about time zone I'm I'm guessing they're answering 24 7. yeah so we always handle things is within business hours of the location oriented so if it's our location our Branch's location if they're Pacific Time or east coast time whatever remote team members you hire are going to be for that location that's one aspect of it but really you know if we don't pick up the calls I found that our close rate dropped significantly so get this if we pick up the phone call on the first couple rings right our close rates around 50 to 60 percent if we don't pick up and call them back in a few minutes the close rate jumps down to 16.5 percent so it's a massive massive difference in what your close rates are for phone sales so we have a system of just not only finding remote team members but also linking everything together so let's say we miss a call automatically we use AI technology to text the customer and say hey I'm sorry you missed it and depending on what their answer is we can provide them guidance on here's how to book online here's what to do gotcha well I can't wait to hear more about the specific tools that you use and how you built everything around when did you know that it was time to quit and go full time to pursuing made this yeah I think the number is personal for everyone it's what I call the freedom number right A lot of times if you ask people hey how much do you want in monthly income coming in to feel comfortable the most common answer is ten thousand dollars a month all right it's kind of like if you ask someone pick a number between one and ten and everyone says seven yeah right but the real number what I call the freedom number is probably a lot less so for me the number was relatively small it was around three thousand dollars a month and I hit that around the end of year two you know in hindsight I probably could have hit that way quicker if I actually knew what I was doing uh but I did it but I hit that number I just side hustle too yeah there we go and I booked a one-way flight down to South America Colombia I quit my job and I just started traveling that's it yeah and I was supposed to travel for one year I loved it so much and it's becoming seven years of travel across 50 countries I also was able to build my business and get this in the first year of me quitting my job to travel we tripled the business in terms of size yeah well I think that kind ties into the secret sauce that you are using implementing that is sending new customers his way in droves you guys and keep watching to find out what that is because when you hear it you're going to be like how in the world did I not know this before so we were at your customer's house beautiful in terms of the clientele in the homes that you take care of we went to your home office as well where all the magic happens as we talked about tell the audience where we are today because we're on the 33rd floor downtown L.A downtown Los Angeles Skyline beautiful view in the background uh this is a common co-working space I work from so the business I'm in is fully location independent that was the goal when I started it and a lot of that means I could kind of work wherever I want I do love working at home but sometimes a change of pace is pretty sweet and this is a normal that we're from as well let's dive back into the interview and the question that I have in my mind is how you took a local service based business and share with our audience as much as you can on how that transition happened and so forth absolutely I mean when you think of a local business you don't normally don't think oh let me go and make that remote right that's not what you want to do and especially cleaning that's the most old-school industry the cool part about the model is if you figure out the right remote local method which is what I'll talk about you could turn any specific local business fully remote and uh you know when I first started I mentioned that I wanted to pick a business that suited My Lifestyle right that's kind of reversing the formula of starting with what is your ideal lifestyle like finding business models would suit it and I wanted to be fully location independent that was a big big thing for me and I tried a lot of these industries which are like remote and everything flopped and what was kind of working was this cleaning business I just happened to start on the side and when I decided to really look at I realized huh most of the pieces in this I'm already kind of doing remotely because I was working at a corporate job all the calls to route to my phone the cleaners to go straight from their home to the job site there was just a few key pieces I need to switch up to actually make a filler mode which was totally doable with how fast technology has moved and that this is 10 years ago now it's even easier to do this yeah I will tell you there's probably three main characteristics involved because not every single local business can be fully remote I was going to say what does one look for to identify a service space business that can go remote so why don't we save that later you guys keep watching what are some challenges of starting your own business like managing the time while you're doing your full-time job and then you're working on something on the side kind of what did you learn through the process when I was working at nine to five this was the first time I was actually starting my own business and I think there's a lot of things you don't know and one thing I realized in hindsight is a lot of people who are working a nine to five to have that employee mindset and you know we're always taught you just got to work harder and grind and that's kind of what I was doing I was doing everything myself for my business while I was having a nine to five it was just a lot to do and the reality is in business it's a little bit different you know you there's actually fast forward buttons in business you can have which don't really exist in the nine to five and it took me a while to realize that wait can I just like pay a coach or someone to tell me what to do someone's already figured this out why am I doing everything myself yeah and it's a big deal earlier on business that's the struggle people get into they think they got it figured out themselves the rally is they don't the treasure maps kind of already built people have done it before why not just speed up the process a lot more so key takeaway if you don't know what you're doing don't necessarily spend months potentially Years Learning it get somebody else that's already done it find a sherpa it's kind of what I would say so like you know let's say you're going to go hike Mount Everest yeah you're not going to show up with all your pack and say all right there's the mountain I'm just going to go to it right you're going to hire some local Nepalese dude who's going to be able to guide you along the way tell you what to do say step here don't step here why not just do that in business it'd be so much faster give us the breakdown on Revenue I know you've got multiple locations right now with the franchises but maybe just focus on yours specifically what the average industry is and the the ebb and flow of you know low margins to high margins and how that's affected yeah absolutely and it totally varies depending what stage of business you're at so my business now is pretty mature I'm able to manage it with a few hours per week 10 years now 10 years I can't believe it's already been a decade but yeah it's been 10 years already since the start of the business so now we're probably doing around between 100 and 150 000 per month in revenue for my La location alone now each franchise location is of course different but that's typically the growth rate we're at right now and then margins on that vary from a low to high what yeah and again when you start your business you're probably over investing in marketing and growth so maybe the margins are less we're at around 25 profit margin at the moment and I'd say industry standard varies between let's say 12 and a half to 30 for this kind of remote local type of model gotcha not bad what do you tell people watching who always ask the question well I don't have the money therefore I can't start any businesses right can you start this particular business with zero to very little money you've had a thousand bucks what if I have less how would you spend it now with your 10 plus year experience what would your advice be yeah let's say first of all you have to choose your business model wisely right if you don't have that much money to spend you're limited in terms of what you can do so you're going to pick what I call remote local type of business which is one where the labor dispatches the job directly right you're not gonna have an office you'd want to spend money on that you don't want to spend money on vehicles equipment supplies so what business model lets me do it from my computer so I don't go overhead where the labor is going to dispatch to the job site directly cleaning for example like me this is one of them but there's a lot of other there's mobile car washing there's mobile pet room there's a lot of things you can do using that premise now if I was getting started 10 years ago and I had absolutely no money yeah the first thing you absolutely need is still a website so I'd figure out a way of spinning up a website and there's so many ways you could do a free trial website now or website for 20 bucks next I'd go online and try to find labor now there's tons of ways of actually finding labor but the easiest way without spending money would be going to like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace finding people advertising their services next would be our I gotta find customers and we'll get into actually all the cool marketing tactics on being able to do that but I would run some marketing tactics and funnels and there's things where you don't need money to do to get customers and that's how it start from ground zero you'll mentioned remote a few times already in the beginning of this interview and I just want to know what do you mean like does every business have the ability to go remote be in the local business to answer directly no not every business can be remote you have to have a remote local business and explain exactly what that is but what I realized when I was doing let's say e-commerce Drop Shipping all these kind of things is those are traditionally remote businesses but it's really hard because you're competing against the entire world when you're doing that when it comes to a local business you're competing against owning against your local market right that makes it a lot easier to get new sales the reality is with how fast technology is moved you can have a local business be managed completely remotely if you pick the right model and hit three main pieces of criteria number one the labor has to dispatch to the job directly right you might have a lot of places with your where your staff has to report to a location let's say you have a gym like of course your staff has to be there and there's the actual physical location this can't be a remote local business so you think what are the business models where the staff could go to the job site directly a lot of Home Service hits this category if you think about it because of course you're doing the work at the client's home the second one would be not a lot of capex or overhead right if you have a gym or office space or places where you're holding a lot of supplies it's really hard to be remote if you have to go to a place to give people supplies and the last piece is Key Management pieces have to be able to be done remotely picking up the phones we talked about routes to my team in South Africa or if cleaners need help that could route to my remote team and everything's done via phone call even customer quotes if you think about it all of that gets done over the phone and that's how you could find a remote local business intern a traditionally old school business to be remote that's really cool let's talk about boots on the ground marketing right as opposed to digital have you been doing that are you still doing that the pros and cons of that and cost and so forth My Philosophy when starting the business was I want it to be fully remote a lot of that makes digital marketing the go-to Avenue the reality though is that you need to combine digital marketing along with what I call boots on the ground or offline marketing it really is a combination if you relying just on one that's the easy recipe for disaster so we don't do door-to-door knocking we don't do things where like me the owner has to break my back and going to do it but we do things through automation which allow for offline stuff so for example um we do flowering of certain neighborhoods like once we a home is cleaned we probably have a good sense that that neighborhood's a great place to flyer right because we've already had a client there it's a good demographic so we can automatically flyer the neighbors around that house that's the five step that you mentioned earlier yeah the five rounds five rounds yeah five rounds for the neighbors and put them on an ongoing sequence a lot of the things we're doing are for Rio current customers I remember there's initial sales there's customers who are recurring customers and reoccurring reoccurring means a customer is booked with us who wants the book again now how do I make sure they book again after surprise and Delight the customer so we have ways online of doing one-click sending of brownies to these customers handwritten postcards around this would be boots on the ground to try to get more and more business and build a great system for them cool the thing is I think a lot of people try to find what's the one best tactic honestly all of them can work as long as you know how to track it and as long as you have a good idea of where to go track can go from there absolutely I can't wait to show to have you show us more details on that because I think you mentioned there's someone on the computer system that you want us to view and take a look at yeah all the automations and funnels be awesome keep watching we'll show you guys those details you have staff across eight countries at this point in time what are the challenges that come with that and how do you what do you use to make things work like clockwork essentially so when I first started out again I didn't really know what I was doing so with a lot of the stuff I'd onboard them and not have a great onboarding process for them a lot of things we use now are just the technology to be able to communicate with people around the world so for example let's say someone calls in we use a service called dialpad which will route that person to my team in South Africa we slack for internal communication tool it's a lot of different Technologies exist now which did it 10 years ago when I saw started that makes life a lot easier for everyone the hard part though honestly is not really just figuring out the technology to use it's the back end stuff like what are the processes and systems to get team members to talk to each other how do you have communication be seamless across different people who are in different countries right a lot of that kind of stuff is just developing the right documentation the right systems the right onboarding and that's what takes more time rather than just figuring out the technology cool how much are you spending on marketing in general right now and what are you seeing as far as Roi you know new customer acquisition basically on online marketing as opposed to this marketing the concept I'm kind of kind of talk about is called capturing Demand versus creating demand never heard that before yeah capturing demand would be like people online who are already searching for let's say a cleaning service right where are they going Google Yelp Thumbtack that's the easiest leads to get right because they're already searching you just got to get in front of them next is creating demand that's kind of what we're doing here where people might not think they need a service but then they get something in the middle and they're like you know what maybe I do need a cleaning the cool part about that is that you're hitting them one to one there's no other competitor right because they they think I need a cleaning oh these guys send me a postcard I'm gonna go with them so the goal is to combine them both and they both have hugely different return on investments we're spending at Scales it's a little bit more more mature it's about five percent of Revenue and that's for your La location all right La location specifically yeah typically when someone's starts a business in their earlier stages I recommend them starting higher 15 to 20 of the revenue on just marketing here's the reason this business is a recurring Revenue business if you get business that first year it stays the second year and third year as long as you keep them happy yeah right so overspend that first year to scale up your marketing and then you can level it down after over time Blitz time with Neil let's just jump into these questions they're fun icebreakers you don't have a lot of time to answer so this is the tricky part what would be the worst buy one get one free sale of all time vaccines what negative thing would your last boss say about you uh you know I found out about starting a cleaning company on Reddit so probably that I was on Reddit too much when I was supposed to be working oh all right that's a great answer why should someone not do what you're doing if you like not traveling if you like the stability of a nine to five that's probably a great reason to stay in a job but I don't think entrepreneurship is for everyone nothing wrong with that what would you tell your previous boss I would tell him honestly thank you I actually really liked my previous bosses they were great to me it wasn't the right fit for me but they were nice people name one object that you would like for to eternally disappear from planet Earth one object can I say mosquitoes that'd be a great one I'm gonna go with mosquitoes that's a good answer female mosquitoes that's the only ones that bite is that yes today I learned so customer reviews absolutely freaking important right 100 of your real estate agent like me whether you're doing airbnbs in residential cleaning the question is how do we how do we get them and get the positive ones absolutely so I'd say there's an automated piece and then there's an unautivated piece of an element of it two of them so there is an automated review system so after each cleaning the customer would automatically get a text message and in that would say hey how was your experience here's a happy face or sad face they click it it'll automatically go to the next page where it says tell us more about it and if it's a good review or not it'll go on to Google Facebook or let's say Yelp with one click so how long is the process for me as a customer to go through that process and get to the review point 10 seconds so okay so super quickly we're trying to make this as seamless as possible now here's a trick which is huge I think in getting reviews which most people don't even think about if me as the company calls the customer and I've never been to the customer's house the person's like cool you're calling from made this that's great thank you you guys did a great service they don't know me they don't know my face but who do they know the cleaner the cleaner so here's the trick you're trying to make this as personal as possible if they clean or ask for a review the customer is way more likely to actually leave the reviews to the company absolutely and here's the other tricks is you could attach bonuses to it if you want you could attract attach incentives to it if you want and that's the easiest way to Skyrocket the number of reviews you have tell me more about bonuses and incentives what do you mean what are you talking about yeah a lot of our locations might offer the cleaner let's say 25 if someone leaves an online review and it doesn't have to be a five-star review uh it could be just being hey just get someone to leave a good review for you in whatever way it is and we'll give you a bonus for it now for the technicians or the cleaners that's great for them they just say hey I just need to ask this person for review on top of that the company will automatically text the customer to make it easy for them to leave review it's really a win-win for everyone that's awesome well this is a perfect opportunity for me to give you guys a quick shout out to upflip.com if you go there that's where you can find proven blueprints courses in everything business from A to Z and how you can build scale and really be successful in anything you do so take a moment check it out all those resources are there for you what would you do differently now that you have 10 plus years experience and running and managing this business what would you do differently if you could go back I think I would have quit my job earlier I think if I just bet on myself off I could have got more traveling in you know I did go to South America I traveled a lot I traveled across 50 countries but I think just doing that earlier and just having a little bit more of that experience earlier I think I would have got to the same place faster and I would have grown my business faster if I just bet on myself earlier what stopped you from doing that then now that you look back was it just fear fear not really knowing the next step like I didn't really have a guy that was figuring out on my own I didn't know if I could do it so even though we hit like my freedom number I was so scared like what if this thing went bust what's going to happen to me so I thought you know what let me just stay a little bit longer cushion up my bank but now that I know what I know now I could have grown so much faster if I just went full time on this way sooner so you just then at that point not knowing what you needed to know hire someone that would walk alongside you is that what you're saying hire alongside me join the system figure out that there's other people who've already done what I want to do like I'm not Reinventing the wheel here the cleaning's been around forever right someone once told me that there's people less wise than you who are probably already accomplish what you want and that kind of really stuck with me when I realized it's not really about how smart you are or any think it's really just about getting going and conquering that fear and actually trusting yourself and I wish I knew that a little bit earlier on awesome well well said show us what's going on on the computer side of things you know digital marketing I know we talked about how important it is for clients to just experience the convenience side of things and I know there's some things we need to look at and see in person so take it away absolutely so if you look over here this is our online booking form and it's a gamified booking form that will make you click through and this just helps with a lot with conversions and getting people online to book easily without even calling in so once someone books we could drop them into a lot of different automated funnels so if you ask me the secret for marketing the Secret's not really where to find the lead just how do you follow up with the customers once you actually get the leads in that's the key all right that's the secret sauce here so what we have is a dashboard where let's say anyone online who books or doesn't book gets dropped into this dashboard we could constantly follow up with them and work the leads so you'll look at you'll see some opportunities here these are all people who are on dramatic quote follow-up sequence that haven't signed up for service haven't signed up yet so we're hitting them with multiple emails automated text messages phone calls from our team and you can see everything through the dashboard over here that we use to follow up with them you asked me for about um how to get reviews right so here's an automated system where we could just send review requests and track reviews here comment on them and just lets us get higher volume of reviews as well all right tell me about this huge it says franchise operations manual you wanna lift it uh sure I mean I could probably work out with it what do they what do they call them uh Russian Twists exactly twist whatever you want to call them did you write this whole thing or a little bit of rip-off and duplicate I would expect that a little bit of duplicate but a lot of this is just like the hundreds of thousand dollars of mistakes I made earlier in my career and we fixed it systemized it and put it in this operations manual for everyone okay so this is a thousand plus Pages here uh get this this is not even as long as it would be because now we have it online the cool part is franchisees could kind of rip this and put it into their own location for their own team members we'll provide them to the template my business model isn't how do I sell the most franchises it's how do I make my franchisees the most profitable and luckily the way everything is set up incentives are aligned and it makes so much sense and I do think someone's starting out if they want you to move faster I think franchising is a fantastic move it's almost like getting the business with the guard rose on and bowling right like you're not gonna reinvent the wheel you don't got to reinvent the wheel though they'll keep you from going to The Gather or going to zero so I do think it's a de-risk way of getting into business so if I wanted to start one in my hometown in Bellingham can you give me a discount or maybe hook our viewers up tell you what I'll do for you for you and the viewers everyone's gonna get six thousand dollars in marketing credit off of your French recipe with made this exclusively for upflip viewers you're gonna do that for us and how's that money going to be used to help my business scale and grow a lot of brownies man lots and lots of brownies ending which then results in more customers exactly yeah so we actually spend it on uh digital marketing for you so as part of the franchise system we do search engine optimization for you we do social media marketing for you we do all your email marketing for you and all of this is done in a discounted flat rate package so we do that for you guys and as part of being a part of upflip all the viewers are going to get access to that too for free we're going to come back to that but that is an incredible opportunity let's talk about engaging our customers right a lot of businesses use mainly lists and if there is a prospect incoming they capture the email they get 10 000 emails on their mailing list and then they use that to grow their business Share value absolutely do you do that if so what other alternative tools it means do you why is that important let's let's elaborate on that yeah and I think capturing leads is incredibly important right you're not going to close every single sale and even if you do these are customers in the future it could be customers again right so capturing the email address and phone number is key but what's even more key is the follow-up sequence after that so with that let's say we capture a lead that comes in and maybe we actually have the home cleaned because we converted that sale how do we get more business from that sale in an automatic way so the first thing we do is we make sure that customer is happy right we mail them a automatic postcard which is a little looks like a tangerine but just automated and we also make sure we fly the neighbors next door automatically we call it five rounds and we just say hey we just cleaned your neighbor's place do you want a job as well would you want to clean a job as well five arounds why is that called five rounds because we just hit the five houses close five just five and if you think about it this home is probably our ideal target market it goes to stand that probably the homes around are going to be a Target demographic as well so why not get in front of them so we tried to stay in front of the customers at least two to four times per month so we send messages to the customers via email and we actually put them on a drip campaign so this part's Keys it is a one month reminder email and a call and we can do ringless voicemails automated text or actually calls from the sales team in South Africa they say Hey you haven't had your place cleaning the month it's probably dirty why don't we come out again but we also put them on a three month six month nine month 12 month reminders and this goes for two years so they get the newsletters they get our automatic mailings and phone calls you're gonna get postcards in the mail the goal is just to stay in front of them yeah right so when they the home's dirty again and some his wife's getting mad at them they could say oh my God made this they've been emailing me let me call them so try to make the content more light don't be a stiff company but besides that it's more just staying in front of the customers consistently I think a lot of business owners mess up on this they get the sale once they don't really do that good of a job of staying in front of the client and just based off the system we have we do it automatically for us and for the franchisees as well I want to help our viewers understand more specific steps of the onboarding process absolutely give us an Insight so when you're recruiting and this is whether recruiting technicians in your company which could be cleaners or other laborers or remote team members the key with this is to get them to jump through multiple Hoops before they reach you and your next stage so I'll give an example yeah let's say we're recruiting for cleaners we have an elaborate five-step recruiting process for this to make sure they get through the funnel some pieces of it would be let's say you do an initial call and do phone screenings with them make sure they're validated in what they're doing do you have a license are you legal to work here yeah after that we invite them to a zoom he knows I don't do it on the same call I want to see if they actually show up the main thing is I'm looking for three main characteristics when it comes to a team member I'm looking for good reliability communication and attitude you have to have all three of them or this is not going to work so a lot of the steps of what we teach and what we do with this funnel is to to check a lot of those three factors so exactly I just came up with an acronym so we uh screen them on that second call we might send them out to a test job a paid test job to see how they perform check their communication after that we could do a proper onboarding with our technology and let them know how actually things work and then monitor how they do there's a lot of different steps in that yeah and we have an automated process through a Trello dashboard we created which guides people on what questions to ask how to qualify them what their score is and like honestly this is the biggest trick in this business if you know how to find biggest trip keyword biggest trick yeah I said you know yeah if you know how to find the right labor your business is smooth and a lot of people when they started like myself I didn't know what I was doing at all and we were just onboard whoever came in and who applied and who had a post I said yeah come on come aboard and that's how you get into trouble in this business and that's what a lot of novices don't really know is this is a people business you got to invest a lot into the people so one of the ways that we can have mentors in our life is books right we always mind asking this question is what has been an inspirational book for you as an entrepreneur watching this what's one book you'd recommend they read and why see I love this question because there's so many books uh and so many things so these are my favorite books right over here um so if I was really gonna pick one and you're making me pick one yes funny enough I'd probably pick a book called The one thing boom oh yeah so Keller Williams it is yeah yeah it is Gary Keller it is Gary yeah yeah he's a real estate guy the premise of the book is pretty simple is not all tasks are created equal right I think we always think oh I just got to work harder and I'm going to get more things done that's again like employee mindset that's not really true some tasks are worth way more than other tasks how do you figure out what that is I remember there's been months where let's say like I don't feel the motivation to work as much or I'm traveling and I'm not going to I found that if I just do the one biggest impact item that day the business don't move forward so that's kind of the premise of the book of just understanding not all tasks are made equal and focus on the one big lever that you can pull that makes the entire difference give us an example of implementing kind of the one thing mentality in your business yeah so let's say I realize I'll go even super small I know that let's say we have a franchisee who's going to sign on and we're at the very end stages and I I don't feel the motivation to do anything that day but I know pushing that forward is closest to my goal I'm just going to push that forward follow up with the franchisee the rest yeah because the rest of stuff which is like update my CRM or send out the email blast these are lower on the priority list in reality for my final goal so as long as you realize that and you prioritize that first thing to do it's going to make such a huge difference in what you do and what have you been enjoying really enjoying as as being an entrepreneur and doing your own thing like what's the beautiful side to all that people watching as opposed to just doing there's nothing wrong with being an employee yeah working and enjoying that job that's a blessing that's a gift absolutely but there's also something bigger I think here that we're talking about that I want to hear from you yeah you know honestly in terms of Lifestyle like I don't think I could go back to doing a normal 100 Vibe uh the reason is because I get to set my own schedule right so I'm kind of a night owl I like working late waking up a little bit later and doing that and that's when I'm the most productive so I think control over my schedule if someone says hey we're going on this epic trick somewhere I can say great let me just work remotely and I'll go do it over there there's a lot of flexibility plus you realize that every amount of work I put in is coming back to directly benefit me doesn't go to the man it goes straight to me I think that's a level of motivation which makes you feel like you have a lot more control over your life whether you actually do or don't is completely different but I think it just it's kind of empowering you know like I've made this money myself I've done this myself I could have control over my schedule and it feels very empowering I think that's an understated benefit of being an entrepreneur yeah and the bigger picture too is not just you now it's the franchisees that have joined the the ship yeah and whatever you do directly in a way impacts them in a positive way right and their family and their lives and their goals and aspirations I think I think there's a lot of Ripple effects um from doing something like franchising or even home cleaning right like you can save a lot of people time for cleaners they have a lot more jobs and income coming in for our remote team members especially when they're making US dollars in a lot of their countries it's so huge I think there's just so many Ripple effects that happen from starting a business that you don't even think about you only know when you actually get into it what is your goal for me this give me a five ten year Vision yeah we're on track to hit around 30 franchisees by the beginning of this next year we are currently at 17 locations and my goal is really to focus on growing the franchises right so I love working with the franchises a lot of them are people who want to get out of the Rat Race a lot of them people who um you know they're kind of destined for more with entrepreneurship but aren't really sure what to do or how to get into it my goal is to help them and actually get out of the Rat Race So my goal is to scale the franchise business specifically and just pick the best franchisees that's awesome dude yeah it's a pretty good goal and I think that ties in well to the next question and that is sort of a moment in your life when it was tough you wanted to give up you know we all go through that whether it's business related or personal yeah Financial physical anything you want to highlight to us and how do you kind of overcame that I think that would be pretty encouraging and inspirational to a lot of us yeah you know when I was first starting I uh honestly everything I did kind of flopped I tried the e-commerce I tried Drop Shipping I tried digital marketing and like nothing was really working I remember getting really down on myself because at the time I just wanted to keep the grind I want to help my parents but it just wasn't working and I think a lot of people get into that right you hit failure after failure and you're like why should I keep going this is kind of because she had to just stay in this job right I remember um after college I was working at this this firm and there was a guy there his name is Paul I'll call him partner Paul uh and he was 52 or 53 years old and he was set to retire my co-grade is like dude partner Paul is 20 million dollars in the bank wow and I remember thinking this guy's made it he's figured out the American dream this is what it is and within one year of retiring he had a heart attack and died and if you think about that that really set the tone for my early career of realizing like time is very precious and even though I was getting down to myself things weren't really going well what is the alternative is it you know slaving away for 30 years is it working the grind and not being able to provide something else that's out of my job and I think that story has always really resonated with me and has kind of kept me going to actually try the next thing and try the next thing and try the next thing and uh I think that's all people need you know sometimes there's business models which are easier and harder and you know those are different things to talk about as well but a lot of it is just having the motivation to keep going even if you're not getting early success right early on we will inevitably make mistakes you know I don't know what I'm doing but I'm learning you said that a number of times I just want to highlight one of the biggest ones that you you made you learned a lot from it what was it I think the biggest mistake I made would be not really betting on myself earlier on what do you mean so what I was doing is when I had started business I kind of did my tone a little bit and take it well and even with may this I started it and it started to get real attraction from it and when I was getting traction I was kind of afraid to spend big I kind of wish I told myself dude just reinvest it back into the business to grow faster because the big money comes later I do think it kind of goes back to fear I wasn't sure if this was going to work or not therefore I said you know what let me hedge my bets and let me just take out half do it and have done to it yeah and I think I would have grown so much faster save to one to two years of growth or sped up growth if I just kind of bet on myself earlier on and I wish I told myself that earlier on you mentioned just briefly a secret strategy to sales right essentially I'm dying to know what that is let's dive into that yeah well you know I mentioned earlier that as long as you pick up the phone it's a competitive Advantage so it ties into that absolutely and once you once they pick up the phone the question is how do you get them to not only close the sale but convert to a recurring customer so we have a system we've developed in battle tested I think we made millions of dollars with this exact sales script with us and our franchisees we have training programs around it for a franchisees and it's something that we teach everyone because it just works I'm calling I'm looking for a cleaning business um hey this is Neil from made this cleaning how can I help you hey Neil moved to LA uh hate cleaning and your top top choice on some of the platforms I noticed you on so I just wanted to see kind of about your service and so on so yeah absolutely and by the way I'm going to pause the different sections just explain to you the Keynotes the script is very long but there's some key psychological elements that they should have in this all right so first I want to build a rapport that's the first thing I want to do there's a million other companies out there you could call but why are you going to work with me probably because you like me on the phone right so I'm gonna I'm gonna say perfect hey thanks so much for reaching out first of all what's your name my name is Paul Paul nice to meet you man my name is Neil and welcome to Los Angeles thank you dying to move here yeah so Paul tell me what is it you're looking for in your home to get cleaned it's a 1500 three bed two bath our yard is pretty small anyway we're not cleaning the yard the house specifically and uh you know I just want to focus on the kitchen the laundry rooms the bathrooms essentially okay everything else is not a big deal for us I do have three daughters so to clarify this is you're moving in you want to get the place very clean I'm guessing it's probably Dusty because you've just moved in you want to get that knocked out the main points of the home kitchen bathrooms you mentioned these are the main focus areas will make happy perfect so one thing I did over here is I clarified what you actually wanted to do so now I know you're hearing I'm hearing you but also a lot of times the customers like to call and they like to be the one saying I want to pay this amount of money this is what I want done here's the thing those customers don't actually know what they want they don't know the business as much as you so now I'm kind of taking control of the conversation asking you the questions I need to know to be able to price the services on my end make sense yeah let's say great uh amazing and I think I got all the notes over here he told me are you looking for a monthly weekly or bi-weekly service probably monthly monthly yeah awesome and here's a tip which has made us millions of dollars you notice that I did not ask if you want a one-time service oh you're right I didn't even realize that psychologic trick monthly bi-weekly weekly and you're like I guess I want monthly I didn't give you the option for one time I heard the options and I answered with absolutely this is how we get people on the recurring plan to begin with then with our follow-up sequence we make sure they stay happy and there's a lot of things we do for that but on the initial sale this is what we do okay and let's see I'll throw out a price for you and say great you want monthly service great um yeah your first cleaning which is going to be deep clean is going to be around uh 280 for the first time cleaning I don't know man I've looked around on Google and all that and that seems a little on the steeper side for me you know okay even though I like what you're saying I like the options you're giving me can you do anything on the on the price point yeah so the worst case it's a no so in this case I want to show you the value we have I don't want it to be an Apple's Apple's comparison where you're looking at us and a bunch of other companies right so this is what I'm going to do I'm going to say hey Paul you're totally right you could probably go to another company and have it way cheaper but there's some risk in that what you're really paying for with us is peace of mind you notice our reviews we're really good at what we do on top of that you get our guarantees now guarantees are that if there's anything missed we'll have someone come out for a free two-hour Requiem For You on top of that only two percent of the cleaners in our system uh who apply actually make it onto our system so you're getting the best cleaners in the market background checked and everything sounds like it on top of that Paul I know you just moved here and I want to make sure this is important for you I want you to try us out see how you like it if you like it continue if you're not it's okay scripts do work scripts work and with that script um you could close a lot more sales convert them to recurring and just have a booming business cool well this has been awesome I've learned a lot I always do I trust that our viewers have what would you like to leave with our viewers as far as pieces of advice for entrepreneurs anything on your heart mind and soul whatever you want to say yeah um honestly when I got started I got so stuck into like I said watching YouTube videos podcasts courses everything without just trusting myself and getting going if I could have told myself something back then the advice would I would give would be just trust yourself worst case it fails you learned a bunch you keep going but trust in the process and keep going that's how you actually achieve the success or lifestyle you want out of just the nine to five sweet man it's been a pleasure thanks so much likewise well that's a wrap I hope you enjoyed this episode if you want to learn more about starting and growing your cleaning business make sure you check out episode 135 with Chris he's doing an incredible phenomenal job thank you so much for watching take care wow is that a Hollywood sign oh yeah [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: UpFlip

Views: 269,263

Keywords: cleaning business, cleaning business start up, cleaning company, starting a cleaning business, how to start a cleaning business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, upflip

Id: kVyLriqFVdc

Length: 42min 6sec (2526 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 28 2023