Our Biggest Mistakes Growing Our Cleaning Business

Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners Podcast with your host, Brandon Conry, and Brandon.

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Shane: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Profit Cleaners Podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win. Guys, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for your time. I know your time is precious, but we're all doubling down on knowledge so we can take our business to the next level.

Um, I'm joined by my co-host, Brandon Condry, in the house. What's up, Brandon?

Brandon: Oh, you know, the usual, just being a guru, allegedly.

Shane: The, the alleged gurus. People have called us gurus recently, but we just want to remind you guys that we're actually in the business with you, as opposed to some of the gurus out there. We're actually in the real, in the game with you. And this real-world stuff that we're talking about here, so just, uh, just keep that in mind. Um, hopefully makes this content that much more valuable and relatable and realistic, uh, being that we're building our business alongside you guys, which is really awesome. So, um, you get cutting-edge knowledge and innovation as we're doing it. That's the beauty of, of, uh, the mastermind in this podcast and just all the things we're doing to share with you guys.

So, uh, we have a really cool episode with you guys today. I think it's going to be really fun. It's a little bit nerve-wracking because we're going to talk about our biggest mistakes. We're also going to talk about some of our biggest successes, but we're going to talk about mistakes we made along the way. And I think it'll be fun because you guys get to hear things that we screwed up and what we learned. And ultimately, that's the beauty of mistakes. They're actually not mistakes if you learn a lesson from them. And you're going to make mistakes in business. You're going to make lots of mistakes. Hopefully, you can model other people's success, which is what we talk about. That's why mentorship is huge. That's why working with us or whoever, joining a community, people you're going to learn from other people's mistakes that have gone before you. Um, but as long as you learn a lesson, guys, that's, that's the key. And, and we're going to talk about that today. And I have a really cool quote I want to share. Anything you want else you want to add, Brandon, before I share this quote?

Brandon: No, go for it. Let's do it.

Shane: So this is from Ray Dalio. He's a, he's a big investor, business guy. From his Principles, uh, of the day. And I just saw that this the other day and I thought this was an awesome quote. So he says, "Everyone fails. Anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you're paying attention to. And I guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things. The respect, uh, the people I respect most are those who fail well. I respect them even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one. So it requires much more character to fail, change, and then succeed than just to succeed. People who are just succeeding must not be pushing their limits. Of course, the worst are those who fail and don't recognize it and don't change." That's the principle of the day from Ray.

So I love that little quote. And yeah, just, just a great reminder, guys, that it takes a lot of courage to fail and change and, and keep going. But that's what it's all about. And that's, that's the kind of the secret recipe to business is just don't give up. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to fall down. Just get back up and keep going.

So, um, let's dive into it, Brandon. Let's tell some, some of these big mistakes we made, uh, as we grew our business.

Brandon: Yeah, so these are in no particular order. Some of these were worse than others, but we're just going to give them to you and talk a little bit about each one. So the first one is not hiring more people soon enough. And that's a reference to office staff. I think like we should have hired, we should have launched with someone in the office to answer the phone, but we did not. And it slowed us down quite a bit. And I think I was the, I was the brakes on that one mostly, uh, because, you know, people are expensive and we had a shoestring budget. So that was part of the problem.

Shane: Yeah, and this, we actually did a whole coaching call today about delegation. And we're talking about this. Uh, we did start, we'll talk about this in a little bit with cleaners, but there's other things we didn't delegate soon enough. And I think, yeah, Claudia, who is actually, she's our manager, our operations manager now, but we didn't have her start that way. But, man, she paid for herself. Um, we did not, we always say that to ourselves, like, we didn't hire her soon enough. Like, if we could do it all over again, we would have hired her a lot sooner. When we hired her, just everything took off. Um, we weren't missing calls, we were getting back to people, it was just amazing. So again, just another testament to the teamwork is in the dream work. Get your team going, hire people. The sooner you delegate, the sooner you guys can scale and grow. So that's a great one.

Um, the next one is, we paid cash for cars. I think it was the first two cars in the beginning, right, Brandon?

Brandon: First two, yeah. We've talked about this one on a previous podcast episode, but, uh, yeah, we, you know, we had, uh, I think we had like $60,000 to start with to mess around with, and we spent 20 of that on cars. In retrospect, what we should have done was finance those. Even if you had to use your personal credit score to do it, finance those, have a $200 a month car payment, and then spent the $20,000 on marketing instead. So we just took a big chunk of our investment budget, tanked it into some cars. We still have the cars, it wasn't a bad purchase, it's just that from a cash flow perspective, we should have financed them.

Shane: Yeah, yeah, because it really would have freed up a lot more capital for more revenue-generating activities. Like, even though the cars are great branding, they do generate leads and attention, they're remarkable. But again, some of that cash flow, especially in the beginning, when you have a lot that you need to build out, it could have been more, more effectively used. So yeah, so that's a great one.

Um, what's, what's the next one, Brandon?

Brandon: Next, wasting money on the wrong platforms and having the wrong customers in the beginning. So, you know, we've got our, it's not even said we changed software pretty regularly. I think a lot of businesses don't do that, but we're in the middle of transitioning right now to another software, which I hope will be like the endgame software. But we definitely were, we didn't know what we didn't know, you know? In the beginning, you start out with what you think works, go for it. And then it's just a costly thing to transition from one to the other over and over and over again. You got to call the customers and get credit card numbers, and it's, it's not a fun experience to go through. So really put in the research on which software is going to meet your needs.

Shane: Yeah, it's way easier to, to just pick the right one from the start. Think about building a house. If you have to go back and rip up the foundation after you've built it, that's a really bad scenario.

Um, the other part of that too, is just some of the platforms you're using, like for lead generation, honestly, places like Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, kind of places, they just ate up our budget and we didn't know how to use them effectively. And we were fighting over leads with 10 other people and a hundred tons of other contractors and stuff. So when we started controlling our own lead flow and in controlling our own customer, you know, intake, that was when we really changed the game. So, um, so knowing, you know, again, in the beginning, we were just testing everything, experimenting because we didn't know what we didn't know. But the more we did, the more we realized the best customers are on these channels, and if we control those channels, the better, you know, result we're going to get those people. So yeah.

So, uh, next one would be a fun one. We actually talked about this on our coaching call the day two, but we hired the wrong fractional CFO in the beginning. We actually started with our finances and our bookkeeping with a company called Bench, a Canadian company. And then, uh, you can, you can tell them a little bit more, Brandon, about, I think you kind of like helped with that initial fractional CFO, and then we ended up with John, right? We just did not have a good fit. So it didn't work out.

Brandon: If you guys don't know, Bench is a, it's a Canadian company, but it's like an all-in-one bookkeeping company that integrates with QuickBooks. And I actually like Bench. We just outgrew it. That's, they just didn't offer the CFO stuff, they were only bookkeeping. So if you're in need of a bookkeeper, I think they're a great fit for a lot of people. But we went from Bench to hiring a fractional CFO and I went off of a recommendation from someone else. And as soon as we started talking to them, they just, they just had such a bad attitude, man. Like they were telling us we had to cut so much stuff, cut marketing, cut this, cut that. Like, we're in dire financial issues. And I didn't feel dire financial problems. I felt great, everything was going great. We were like picking up new customers. I mean, it was the middle of the pandemic. That part was a little scary, but the, that scarcity mindset is like a, man, it's like a virus. It spreads. I was getting freaked out, Brandon's getting freaked out, and he's Mr. Positivity over here. But it was Brandon's idea to get rid of that one. I'm like, good call. So we canceled that one and found John, who we've been with for a few years, and it's totally different. John also said, you're in some financial trouble, but here's what you got to do to overcome it. Get some more sales and coaches us along the way to get to the part where we overcome those things, as opposed to the other one, which was just like, stop advertising.

Shane: Yeah, it was like, we gotta, we gotta throw everyone overboard. We gotta burn the ship. It was like that's what it felt like. And John was much more like helpful in actually coaching us through what we gotta do and taking, you know, proactive action instead of reacting, which is what the other CFO was doing. So that was a really big move. And I felt a big shift as well, especially with you, Brandon, like just a lot less stress when we were working with John. So that was a great move.

Brandon: Yeah, yep, totally.

Shane: So the next one is, uh, trying to do too much. Um, you know, not, not staying in our lane, if you will. So we were doing move-out cleans and saying yes to whatever came through the door, just trying to build the customer base and, and, you know, just drain time and energy resources. We had people going to parts of town that we didn't want to go to. And so, really, that was a lesson. We were doing like post, post-construction clean, like breaking a bunch of equipment and making people mad. And that, yeah, that construction clean was the stuff of nightmares. I have flashbacks to that one every now and then.

Brandon: Yeah, so just, you know, don't take on anything that you don't, don't think you need, you know what I mean? Like, just, just stay where you know it's going to work.

Shane: Yeah, guys, and the riches are in the niches. When you bring a flashlight versus a laser. When you have laser-like focus, you can cut through diamonds. And that's, we were trying to do too much. Same thing with you guys. Might be doing your business. Focus and specialize in one thing. Become the best at that, and you guys will make way more money. That's what we realized too. So, um, that's a big one for sure.

So, um, beyond that, let's see. We have not having a solid financial system in place early on, making things more stressful. Again, not getting a fractional CFO soon enough, um, and not jumping into Profit First. We started doing this, I want to say it was like maybe a year in, but I just, I, I remember it didn't feel like we had the finances dialed in early on. It was a little bit scary.

Brandon: Yeah, so I mean, no, man, in the beginning, we were, we were having troubles making payroll, troubles paying sales tax. We just didn't put in the effort. And so we've learned a lot about that since then. But, you know, Profit First helped us quite a bit. Really doing the market research so that you have pricing set correctly out of the gate. That was half of our problems. We had pricing way too low in the beginning.

Shane: Yeah, yeah, that's that's critical. So yeah, just having your pricing for profit, having that financial system in place so you're managing cash flow better. Uh, once we did that, a whole lot of things changed. The stress went way down, it got a lot more fun. So that was a great one that we got in place, uh, you know, maybe a year or so into the business. But, um, so the next one, what's the next, uh, not putting the bonus system into place? This goes very well with the financial issues we were just discussing. The issue with the bonus is that we didn't have any money to pay it. We were barely making payrolls, so how could we possibly pay a bonus on top of it? So when we finally were able to put it into place, it solved a lot of quality problems, a lot of speed problems out of the gate. So if you're going to pay a bonus, go with it from the get-go. Don't, I mean, if you feel like you need one, don't hesitate to add one. But if you want one, definitely get it sooner than later so that you're not just struggling in the meantime.

Brandon: Yeah, and I remember like this, this bonus system, like we kept delaying and procrastinating because we were like, we're, we're so busy with everything else, we don't have time. But then we started getting more complaints, things were happening, issues kept popping up. Um, and so literally our mentor was like, hey, you guys put that in place, it'll change everything. And it's, and it's really true. Like, as soon as we did that, I felt like a huge, uh, momentum shift changed and quality went up, complaints went down, people were more incentivized. Like, money talks. So that was a great, great thing to put in place and a mistake we did not do early enough, for sure.

Shane: Yeah. Um, so beyond that, um, hiring good friends. Another mistake. Some, it's not always the case. I think you can definitely work with good friends, but we had both Brandon and I hired good friends, even family members, that ended up not panning out and it soured our relationship.

Brandon: Yeah, so I don't, I just don't think I recommend it unless they're a perfect fit and you know it's going to work out. It's easy, like it's easy to talk to someone that you know. And but I think the problem is, you know, if they are not, if they're not doing what you need them to do, it's kind of harder to switch to the disciplinary side of things of being a business owner and the, you know, trying to get them to fit into the system. So I think my general recommendation there is just don't do that. Don't hire friends or family.

Shane: Yeah, it could work out, but like I said, for us, it didn't. And, and we would go back and, and do it differently and keep those relationships more intact. So number nine was not delegating things soon enough. Um, so like an example is we waited a long time to do this with sales. We did it with cleaning right away in the beginning, but we waited on other things. Um, even like scheduling. You can tell that story, Brandon. We always talk about that story, but, uh, delegating is huge.

Brandon: Yeah, I just think you just need to do that sooner than later. So, you know, Claudia was our first non-cleaning hire. That's not true. We had a VA before that, which we still have, same VA, you know, seven years later. So the idea would be, don't delay. Hire someone that you want to delegate for right away. And then if they don't work out, great, fire that person and get the right one in there. But the, if you put it off and then made the wrong hire, well, now it's just going to take even longer to get there. So just, just do it sooner than later, I think is the overall message.

Shane: Yeah, just be, be bold. Pull the band-aid off. Um, if, if it feels a little bit scary, good, because that means it's important. And the sooner you do it, and the sooner you hire out your weaknesses and focus on your strengths, the sooner you can really scale your business and, and, and work on the business instead of working in the business. So that's a great one as well.

Um, number 10, what's number 10, Brandon?

Brandon: Not focusing enough on sales training and better ways to convert our marketing dollars. We had kind of had a policy of, we had so many people coming through the door that we were just like, here's your estimate, buy. Like, here's your estimate, buy. And the ones that accepted, cool, we'll service you, that's great. But we were paying money to get the ones, all of them, to come through the door, but we were kind of ignoring the other ones because we didn't have the bandwidth. And our conversion rate was like 65%. So 65% of people were converting without us trying hard. But that made us complacent. And then when things start to dip, like, you know, COVID struggles or the economy takes a downturn, you really want to make sure you're following up with every lead. And sometimes they just need a little nudge. People genuinely forget about it, they need to talk to a spouse, whatever it is, but they're not going to do it if you don't poke them a little bit. Like, hey, just giving you a call, having her back, what did you think? It's super expensive. Like, it gives you options when you get them on the phone. But if you, if you're just emailing it to him and saying goodbye, then you're not, you're not covering it very well.

Shane: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a cool statistic I learned recently, and this is again, why we're focusing a lot more now on customer experience and sales. Um, but 80% of sales guys are come, come between the fifth and the 12th follow-up. So if you're only following up like once or twice, you're totally missing the ball, right? And so, um, as we've come along in our business, we've realized like, we grew really fast in the beginning, and we were a lot more, you know, boots on the ground. I think Brandon and I were were doing a lot of that and creating more, more of those experiences. But as you grow, you don't have as much time for that. So it's really important to train your team and just create training that helps them create those magical experiences for your customers. Every touch point of the customer experience, from phone calls to like after the clean, to in between the cleans, to before the cleans, follow-up, whatever it is. So, um, that customer experience is huge. So we've really gotten a lot better at creating those experiences and, and really dialing that in, and that's helped a lot. So yeah.

Um, number 11 is too many tools, systems. We're overwhelmed. We recently actually were having issues answering the phone and missing sales and a lot of calls, like just getting missed. And it was because, you know, we're, we're very forward-thinking on like technology and systems to make things more streamlined and better. But sometimes we get caught up and overwhelmed and we actually take too much action. And we actually got into a scenario, really, even in the last year, where we had like so many different softwares and things. Um, and we're trying to simplify that now, just simplify the business and the systems so we're not doing triple data entry and stressing out the teams and things like that, right, Brandon?

Brandon: So agreed. Yeah, we try, trying to solve a problem. I'm all about optimization, that's great. But when you get to the point where you've got five tools that your reps have to bounce in between to get a customer to close, like it just, it was convoluted and expensive. So the, the one I mentioned before, we're in a, we're in a software transition right now. When we finish that, we're going to be able to cut something like $2,200 a month in other tools that ended up just being extraneous. We were able to combine all that into one.

Shane: Yeah, exactly. And it's also going to make a better experience for not only the reps, but the customers. It's just going to be, make it so we can follow up easier, we can nurture those leads easier. So, um, if you have too many things going on, it's going to be a distraction. So focus, focus is the key, which actually, um, well, that's not the next one. Um, but when you, when you eliminate those things, you're going to be able to focus a lot more.

The next one is number 12, complicating the customer experience role instead of everyone doing it all the time. I think we kind of gone back and forth a lot on this, Brandon. Tried to hire a full, a full-time rep, and I feel like it's just, we just, everyone has to do it all the time. That's the best way to do it.

Brandon: Yeah, maybe I'm wrong, but we, I mean, we talked about this internally a lot, whether it was better to have a dedicated salesperson or like the Swiss Army knife customer experience person that can do everything. And so we first went with the dedicated salesperson, and that worked out great until it was working out too well, and there's only one person doing sales, and we were having leads, having to wait up to two weeks to be able to just get the pricing. And then by then, of course, they'd like moved on to someone else. Like, it's just too long, was too much time, you know, from initial contact to here's your pricing. And so now we've gone the other way. The other part of the Swiss, the dedicated salesperson thing is like, you don't know who's on the other end of the phone. So if the salesperson's picking up the phone, but someone's like, hey, I need help rescheduling. Okay, let me transfer you. You're just making people mad. So instead, we trained the customer experience reps to be just that. Set up a good experience for the customer, whether they are calling to yell at you because you did something bad, they're a new customer, you know, they need help rescheduling. You need to be able to do it all. And that is the path that we're on, and I think it's working out better for us. You know, we're having growing pains, it, we've had some turnover in that department, and we're still fleshing out the specifics of that, but we're trying to basically build like a call center internally. We're not farming that out. I want people to get their house cleaned by us. That's part of the benefit of being an employee, and it leads to knowing more about the experience.

Shane: Yeah, absolutely. And it's just part of our culture more now, too. You know, just going above and beyond, having that growth mindset. The more we're all learning and learning new ways, new innovative ways, creative ways to create those experiences for people. It doesn't have to cost any money. It could just literally be the tone of your voice and how you handle people on the phone and how you talk to people and how you make them feel, you know? And so we've really gotten a lot better at that, and I think, like Brandon said, we're continuing to refine that, but we're just realizing more and more how important that is. So, um, so yeah, that's a, that's a very, very important one.

Um, other than that, we have number 13. Uh, Brandon, you can talk about this one a little more. Raising prices the wrong way and losing lots of customers.

Brandon: Yeah, we've done, I mean, we've been in business a while. Next year will be seven years. So we've been six and a half right now. So we've done price increases, shoot, man, I don't know, four or five times. And a couple of those were over COVID, and those were all justified by COVID. But the first one, I just wanted to normalize everybody. If you're this much square feet, you get, you pay this. So some people ended up having like 40% price increases. They quit, obviously, that's to be expected. And then another time, we just sent one out. It was just like, your price is going up on this date. I think that might have been the same one. I think now what we do actually, which is a little bit better, it's a small price increase that we do more frequently. We try and do them every year. So no one's cut off by a big price increase. And we just tell them, part of the reason is, you just, you just got to tell the customer. This is why we're raising your prices. We're not doing it just because we want more money. We're doing it because we had to increase wages to keep pace with the very tight labor market. We are adding these new tools, we bought this new software that's going to do whatever for you. The point is, you got to communicate with the customer. You got to tell them why this is going to work out for them.

Shane: Absolutely. And that was that was key. We kind of shifted from the very first time doing it, not really communicating very well, to being more communicating, telling people why, and like you said, Brandon, doing it in a, on a more normal frequency so it wasn't such a huge jump. And people understand, especially right now with the economy, people definitely understand. It's very normal. And if you haven't done a price increase in the last year or two, you should definitely do it because you're not going to stay in business unless you do. You got to keep up and people will understand. So, um, so that's a great one for sure.

Um, number 14 is not having a clear structure of roles, responsibility, of who's doing what until we started the EOS, which is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. A great book, Traction, by Gino Wickman, that we always talk about. Um, but I think kind of what happened, Brandon, is we, as we were growing, we just started like branching out and doing all these things, both you and I, and, and then Claudia, and then, you know, just, we kind of got lost in who's doing what and like who's responsible for what. We don't know who does what. And so it started getting confusing until we organized it. And now we actually have a, like a hierarchical, like a structure of the company structure, and it's helped out tremendously.

Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that's, you said it perfectly. It's just, you know, too many chefs in the kitchen. And I'll do sales one day, Brandon will do sales another day. And then the customer calls back, shoot, which one did you talk to? I can't remember which one you talked to. All of that was just back to the EOS. You build a, you build an accountability chart, is what it's called, not an organization chart. But, you know, exactly who does what and who they report to. And then on top of that, there's one in here. I'll just bump it up. It's number 17, but number 17 is not doing weekly meetings for EOS soon enough. So trying to, you know, you got things get off track. So like, it's very much related to this one. So the reason that EOS works is that there's four people inside the company that are the leadership group, the leadership committee. And every week, we get together, go over any problems that came up, discuss it as a group, agree on a solution, and move forward. And then we all track who was supposed to do what in those meetings and make sure that things get done. So before that, stuff slipped through the cracks.

Shane: Absolutely. And we really like EOS. We are not sponsored by Gino Wickman, although maybe we should be.

Brandon: Yeah, we should probably reach out to that guy. He's, he's gonna sell a million copies of that book from this podcast, probably.

Shane: Um, but, but yeah, just again, more structure in your business. Um, if people don't know, if there, that's, that's your job as a leader, guys, is that help people be in the right seat on the bus so they know where we're rowing. You cast that vision and just everyone keeps going. But if you don't have that structure in place and you're not meeting consistently to handle those issues, like things definitely get off track. And that, that's definitely happened quite a few times. So, um, so that's a great one.

Um, number 15, we only have two more here, and then we're going to talk about some things we did right. But number 15 is not doing insurance correctly and getting hit with a big audit at the end of the year. I don't know how to explain this one other than like, I just had no idea. Like, it was the first year we were in business. You get commercial insurance. Nobody told me about an insurance audit. So if you are listening and you're getting ready to start a business, business insurance is not like getting insurance for your house or car. Your house or car insurance premium is set. You pay this much, next year you renew, then you pay this much. But an insurance audit, what they do is a lot of the numbers, the, your insurance premium is based off of revenue and payroll. So I estimate we're going to make this much in revenue and we're going to pay this much in payroll. Cool, your premiums are this. And then you get to the end of the year, and it's actually like a punishment for being successful. Okay, we're going to do the math here. Your revenue was like double what you said it was going to be, and your payroll was triple what you said it was going to be. So you owe us this much. That first year, we had an $18,000 unexpected insurance audit, which was like, whoa. And so the way that we did it correctly, and you two can do this, is we just switched to a better insurance broker. And we asked for real-time reporting. So as you're going along, you file reports that say, this is how much we made in revenue, this is how much we paid in payroll, and they adjust the premiums on the fly. So at the time of the audit, you end up owing like $500, not $20,000, which was killer in our first year. That was a very, that was a very big financial mistake for sure. That was a hard one to swallow. But, um, again, guys, you learn from all these mistakes and you just keep going. Don't let these things like tear you down or make you stop because the vision is and the reason you're doing this is much bigger.

So, um, I love that. So, uh, last one before we get into some good things here. Last one is not building core values and culture early on, or early enough. And, and really, um, harder to make changes like this when you're bigger because when you're smaller, you're more nimble, you're more quick. You're not like a big corporate brand where it's like taking, it's, it's slower and harder to move. Um, when you're small, you can really put those, those culture, those core values into place. Do it as soon as you can. The sooner you do it, the more you're going to again, create that culture. You're going to attract the right people. The, the wrong people probably won't even get hired, or they won't last very long because they won't align with your culture. They just won't, they won't want to be there, you know? So, um, any issues that we had, I think, early on with employees was because we didn't have that culture there yet. We were still figuring out who we were as a company and a brand. And we only put those in place just, I think a few years ago. And I think it just really solidified a lot of things for us, more structure, just more clarity on what we're about. And, and then when everyone knows what you're about, it's easier to create those customer experiences. When everyone knows you go above and beyond, it's easy to create those experiences, things like that, when those core values are there. So I think that was a really big one.

Brandon: Yeah, this one goes back to EOS too. This is an EOS thing. And it's, it feels very corporate. So like, if you've worked at a big corporation, Brandon used to work at HP, I used to work at a pharmaceutical company called Genzyme. And they all had core values in there. But those companies are huge, and maybe it doesn't matter that much. But it felt corporate putting those things out there. But when you really thought about it, like these are the values that we want to convey to people, and you post them publicly and you convey it to your people, it just makes things a lot easier. And everyone gets it. And more importantly, we put in a reward system after the fact. So that when you are doing something, when you're living up to a value, we publicly nominate you, we give out gift cards for those things. And yeah, that ended up being a good change for us. And I, I felt silly doing it in the beginning. Like, we're going to make a poster that has these core values, just like XYZ publicly traded company. But it does work. There's a reason that all those companies do that. These are best practices for big companies that will work for your small company. Yeah, so start doing it when you're small. Don't wait till you get bigger, guys, because it's harder to implement. And core values are just, it's, it's so important to to get those in your, in your business. It's going to help. It's kind of like the glue that holds everything together. It's like intangibles and nuanced things that you can't really describe, but it's very, very important. So put those into place.

Shane: Um, let's, let's rattle off a few of the biggest things we did right, Brandon, because we didn't do everything right. We learned a lot of from lessons from those mistakes, but what are some things we did right?

Brandon: We did, we did go all in. Both, both Brandon and I had dabbled with side businesses in the past and side hustles. And Brandon and his wife had a bunch of very small Amazon companies that they would build up and sell, build up and sell. But this one, we went all in. I quit my six-figure day job and we, this was it. This is the only, the only game in town.

Shane: Yeah, and when you guys do that, when you give yourself no other option, you put your back against the wall, you burn the ships, you can't return back, you got to do it, you got to make it work. I think that's when the magic happens because you, you don't have any other options. And, and it makes it a lot easier. You just got to take action and move towards your goals. So that's what we did. And I think it really worked out, even though it was kind of hard in the beginning. But that's like anything, anything, um, you know, worth doing, anything worthwhile is going to be hard. It's going to take extra time. It's going to take longer than you think. So yeah, um, that's what it's all about.

So number two, we had many, many mentors. Uh, still do to this day. Have many different coaches that help us. We have different masterminds we're in. But we had a mentor in the beginning that helped us kind of figure out the cleaning and the systems, because we had no idea what we were doing. And that, there's a lot of unknowns. And so we probably could have figured it out, but again, it just helped us model, compress time, save time on figuring it out and spending a million hours on YouTube or whatever we're going to find out how to clean and train our teams. And so that was a really big jumping off.

Brandon: Yeah, like you, I'm a smart person. Brandon's a smart person. That doesn't mean that you have to go it alone. You should talk to someone else that's been in business before. Talk to someone that's been in cleaning business before. You know, you can, you can learn a lot from someone who's done it before you. Like, don't, uh, yeah, you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Shane: Not at all. Don't reinvent the wheel. Do what someone else already did. There's a, a phrase I love or a quote I love. It's, the pioneers are the ones that are face down in the mud with arrows in their back. Don't be a pioneer. Just follow their footsteps. And you don't get to get, you don't have to get shot. Just, just do what works, you know?

Um, so number three, never cleaned, gave up control and delegated most things right away, building a real team. I think this was a huge one because a lot of people start out doing the cleaning. We did a little bit because we wanted to understand the process, but we immediately hired a team. We immediately had cleaners. We delegated that right away. And I think that was a game changer for sure.

Brandon: Yep. I mean, that goes back to the first one, which is going all in. We went, we constructed the business from blueprint stage to scale. And you can't scale if Brandon and I are cleaning toilets. So, and we, we need to, we hired a good cleaning team with experience from the beginning. And now we have 14 teams, all with experience, and it's working out very nicely.

Shane: Yeah, you can't work on the business and do needle-moving tasks, revenue-generating tasks, if you're working in the business all the time and working in the trenches. So it's important to understand that, but you got to work your way out and replace yourself at some point. So, um, yeah, so that's an awesome one.

Um, number four is we got branded cars. I think this was awesome because even to this day, um, we are highly, highly recognized in our market because when people say, hey, what cleaning company do you own? Or we tell people what we're doing, we just tell them, oh, the, the green, funny, funny looking cars with the red mops, the red rooms on top. And people go, oh yeah, I've seen you guys all over the place. And it's like the most amazing branding piece. Like, like people just remember it. You see them all, like, if you drive around our town, you see them every day. You see multiple cars every day. They stand out like a sore thumb. And I just think it's awesome. They generate extra leads all the time. So yeah.

Brandon: We get asked a lot about those cars. Why can't I have my employees use their own cars to save money? Because no one knows who's there when they're not actively getting out of the car carrying a broom. It just looks like a car on the street. So the benefit of those branded cars is that while the team is inside working, collecting money for the company, doing that job, the car is out front looking like a billboard. And then the neighbors keep seeing this car come back every week. They're like, well, man, if John across the street is using them, I should start using them because he's really picky. So there's, there's no downside to having those cars. And it, I find it like, lean, super aggressive, no expense contractor models, just don't, they don't jive with the scale that we were going for. I feel like those things cap out at a certain amount of time. Then there's little, little tiny things like having the branded cars along the way that really make a difference.

Shane: Yeah, and I feel like things like the cars, the uniforms, all the little touches and details, acting big before you are big, that's what helps attract A-players. People want to be part of something great. And if they see like, wow, you guys are really all in, like nobody else is doing these kind of things, you already appear to be a bigger brand. That's what it's all about. And that's going to help you guys scale a lot faster versus trying to, trying to be cheap and trying to take the shortcut route, you know, like doesn't always pan out.

So, um, so next one, guys, is we hired the right people. Not always, but for the most part, we hired the right people. And we focused on building our team. And we focused on building our advisory board. We focused on building our leadership team. We focused on continuing to build, you know, our cleaner, cleaners and, and trainers and people to help with that part of the business as well. But, getting the people in place, you know, building the team, as fast as possible, dropping our ego and being like, you know what, we can't, we can't do it all. But why, why do we want to be, be control freaks and try to do everything? Let's delegate. Let's hire people. Let's build a real business. And I think that was a huge game changer for us as well.

Brandon: Yeah, be picky with the people that you're going to get in there, but get them in there fast. Like, you don't, don't hire people that don't know what they're doing. And that, you know, you're, you're as strong as the weakest link in the chain. So you got to get good links in the chain. But we're better than the, you know, man, what's the me, what's the thing that I'm trying to say? Greater than the sum of our parts. Like all of us together are better than, you know, just adding one plus one plus one. So yeah, I think that was huge.

Shane: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Um, it's all about the team, guys. And that's, you know, if, if you think about anybody who's done anything great, most wealthy people, they leverage people, they leverage time, they leverage other people's money. It's a same with building a business. You got to leverage that talent. And you're only one person. So focus on that team.

Um, and the last one, we've talked about it a lot. We've mentioned it already in the other things, but we, we got so much more structure and so much more focus in our business when we brought on the EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, and Profit First into our business to help manage cash flow. I think those are some really, really important systems that just helped bring so much clarity and confidence to what we were doing. Would you agree, Brandon?

Brandon: Yeah, 100%. We, we put those into place years ago and we still talk about them every podcast episode, pretty much. That's because they were like, these are part of our institution now. They changed the way, they changed the DNA of the business. And we can't go back. We won't go back. It was a really good change for us. And so you should consider implementing those in your world too. I think at this point in the game, like we're on the verge of outgrowing Profit First. We're kind of making our own system with our CFO. And you will also get to that point. But when we started doing it, that was huge, huge. But EOS, I think, is here to stay, man. EOS has just been such a good change for us. And I highly recommend that you guys look into it as well.

Shane: Yeah, again, guys, the more structure you have in your business, each one of those things is a system. It's a structure in our business. It streamlines things so that we can operate at the speed of excellence and we can go faster without the wheels flying off. So don't forget to put those systems in place and put that structure in place. It's hard work, but it's worth doing because it's going to bring everything together.

So, um, so yeah, I think that pretty much wraps up this podcast, guys. I think that was a really fun one, diving into big mistakes and some other wins that we did along the way. But like we said at the beginning, guys, it's not a mistake, it's a lesson. As long as you're learning a lesson from all those things as you're building your business. And more importantly, if you're modeling and you're following in the footsteps of those that have gone before you, you're going to have a lot more success. You're going to be able to save a lot more time and take more action because you're going to be more confident because you're basing that on real experience and real knowledge.

So, um, so the more you can do that, the more you can surround yourself with guys like us, coaches, we do that all the time with our business. We're always trying to grow. The more you do that, the more you can fill up your cup and you can pour into your teams and just keep growing and, and be untouchable, basically, unstoppable in your market. So that's what, that's why we do these things and continue to get better. And, um, ultimately, it's not about the, the money, it's about who you become on the journey. I think both Brandon and I can vouch that we, we've gotten better. We've gone through some hard stuff, but we've gotten a lot better, you know, doing this business and, and getting through some of the hard stuff. So it's, that's what it's all about.

Brandon: Yeah, if you want to, if you want to learn even more, if or if you like the idea of the mentor, you should check out our masterclass, which is at profitcleaners.com/class. And we talk about lots of this stuff every week. Private coaching calls, there's all good things in there.

Shane: Absolutely, guys. If you want to level up your game, check out the masterclass. Um, if you're getting value out of the show, guys, share it out. Leave us us a review. Uh, we don't run a bunch of ads and crazy stuff to annoy you guys. So just please help us out so we can reach even more people. Uh, we can bring even more awesome guests on and just keep growing with you guys. Take it to the next level and win. So until next time, you guys, keep it clean. Keep it clean.

Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff, head over to profitcleaners.com and remember, keep it clean.