Transcription
You're stuck in your city because your cleaning company can't or won't run without you. You probably haven't had a real vacation in years because you're the one putting out fires, handling customer complaints, dealing with last-minute callouts. And the second you leave town, everything falls apart. If that's the case, you don't own a business, you own a job, but at least it's a really stressful job.
I've helped over a thousand owners of cleaning companies break free from that exact trap. And by the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to build a business that you can run from anywhere. Whether that's across town or across the globe. Last month, I was in three different states. My business didn't skip a beat. And I'm going to show you the exact systems, team structure, and mindset shifts that you need to make that happen for you.
Now, I've been on the interwebs and I've seen the gurus promising you can have a cleaning company that runs completely autonomous without you at all. Just spits out money like an ATM. I got to tell you, anyone telling you that's either full of crap or smarter than me. That's crazy talk. The good news is what you can build is pretty god-dang sexy. We coach our clients to make at least well the first step is a million-dollar cleaning company with 30% profit. That's $300,000 for those of you who went to public school like me that you can run in, I don't know, 0 to 15 hours a week from anywhere in the world.
So, let's talk through what remote really means like in the real world. Big picture, it means working on your business, not in it. It's real hard to clean toilets from halfway across the world, but when you're working on systems and culture and kind of dealing with financial data or even clients, you can do that virtually. So, working on your business, not in it 5 to 15 hours a week, really managing systems and certainly not cleaning toilets, managing people, or like god forbid answering the phones.
The harsh truth about why most cleaning company owners can't own remotely, they are the business as opposed to having systems that they run and the systems run the business. The owner is the business, right? The whole thing's held together with duct tape and hope. And the second the owner leaves, the whole goddamn thing falls apart. Wheels fall off.
Having done this for over a decade, I've discovered a really important truth. Your business exists to serve you. You and certainly your family do not exist to serve it. If you start feeling like your business owns you or like it's a prison or if it's killing you or not giving you the life that you want, we got to remember it is not your baby. Right? A lot of times people kind of lovingly say, "Oh, my business is my baby." But the problem is we love our kids. They're going to treat us poorly or good or bad and we're going to love them no matter what. That can't be the truth with the business. If the business is killing you or hurting your relationships with your family, amputate an arm. Murder it in its sleep. We have to disassociate and know our business is this and I'm over here. It's not me and it's not my baby. It exists to serve me and my family. The moment it starts hurting me and my family, kill it in its sleep.
So, let's talk through the three systems that make owning a cleaning company remotely not only possible but completely desirable. So, the magic is all three of these systems have to work together. Communication systems, quality control systems, and financial visibility systems. The crazy thing is, if you miss one, you're going to have chaos throughout the entire business.
Let's start with communication systems. Step one is to decide in your heart, I'm only going to respond to employees, customer, drama, whatever it is once a day and let everyone know, here's when I respond. I'll get back to you then. Step two is to decide the one way people are going to get a hold of you, right? I mean, it's not the end of the world if you're just doing it once a day. We can make it work, but it's so much easier opposed to I got to check DM and Slack and Box or my text and my, you know, Instagram and all that sort of stuff. Just let everyone know, here's how I respond and here's how I do everything. Not a huge deal if you're just doing it once a day, but it'll certainly help.
The next step is key. A lot of owners have people, customers and employees, with their cell phone. Certainly, if you're a client, we kind of wean you off of that. And if you're not, you want to wean yourself off of that. If you're not willing or able to do that, which you should, you've got to be disciplined enough to ignore the double dial, right? Because what happens is if they call and you ignore and they call again or call three times, if you pick up, you're just teaching them, oh, call more times and you'll get the result that you want. So, super important when you tell them, "Hey, this is what I want." And they don't do it, you can blame them. But if you pick up the phone or respond to their emergency, whatever, you're the one training them that you're not really serious about this.
Big picture, the goal is to hire core values matched people. These are people that share your core values. For us, it's have fun, make money, be real, and help out. And they make decisions based on the rules. And the rules are your shared core values. So instead of calling you for help, especially if you do this right, when you do call them back once a day, you go, "Well, what are the core values? Way to handle this? What's the most way to be real? How can we help out? How can we make money?" So you just go through the core values. What'll happen is two things. One, they'll go, "I'm not going to call Mike. He's just going to go through the core values and I'll just figure it out myself." They think tricking you. You're like, "That's the whole goddamn goal." Or two, they'll be like, "I don't want to wait till 3:00 and I'll just figure it out myself." Either way, it's a win. We're trying to teach them to start figuring it out themselves using your shared core values, not just going with their gut and doing crazy stuff.
So, here's where the magic happens and it all comes together. Once you have your team, your clients, and everybody trained that you only respond to texts, calls, DMs, whatever it is, one time a day, you can now do that from anywhere, right? So, once you're kind of in town for a week, and you realize, I only reach out to people only by phone call, texting, whatever you're going to do, Slack, Zoom, once a day and only for 20 or 30 minutes, now you can travel and as long as you have that 20 or 30 minutes where your team knows that that's when they can get you and they can do it virtually, not in person, you're free.
Let's dive into quality control systems. And core values are going to tie right through as a foundation of this system as well. The truth of the matter is if you hire the best cleaner in the universe who's not a core values match, you're actually going to get far inferior results than if you get the worst cleaner in the world who is a perfect core values match. Let me give you an example. Say you've got a cleaner that is literally got references for air. They clean fast. They clean good. They're better than you. They're better than your best cleaner in your town. But they're not a core values match for us. That means they don't have fun. They're not into making money. They're not real. and they don't care about helping out. So, when they're in your client's home or building and they're cleaning, they're not fun, right? So, if a client's around or their partner's around, everyone's going to kind of be bummed out. They don't care if you make money. They don't care if they make money. They don't care if a client makes money. If it's a business, they don't care about that. They're not real. So, they kind of lie or they'd say one thing and do another. And they don't care about helping out, right? If a partner doesn't show up or something happens or they throw their hands up and go, "Not my gig." So, either if they're a great cleaner and not a core values match, you're going to have a tough time with them.
Now, let's go the opposite. I always use myself as an example. You can ask my wife if you don't believe me. I'm a terrible cleaner. You wouldn't want to hire me. I'm awful at it. But I do have fun. I do uh like making money. I am super real and I love helping out. And if I'm not a very good cleaner, which I'm not in this example or in real life, if I don't know what to do, I'm going to call someone. I'm going to figure it out because I want to make money because I want to help out. And I give a crap if it looks good. So, believe it or not, core values-based hiring is at the foundation of quality control systems. The biggest mistake people make is they hire someone that doesn't give a crap about the business or what you're doing. And when that person does a bad job, they go, "I need better training videos. I need better SOPs. I need to update my checklist. They think having a checklist that's better. Trust me, the person who's not a core values match can ignore your crappy checklist just as well as they can ignore your fancymancy shiny checklist. So, at the foundation of quality control, it's always core values-based. You can train anyone to clean. You can't train people who don't give a crap to give a crap.
Another reason the core values-based team is so important for working remotely is they'll actually maintain the culture for you. So, as our owner, our job is to get core values-based people in and kind of set that momentum going. And once you do, you can back off because the core values-based cleaners will kind of really gravitate to other people that share those values and people that don't share those values be like, "This is a weird place. I don't I don't like and they kind of wander off. You don't even have to fire them." So the cool thing is when you have a core values-based team that all share the same values, they're going to make the right decisions because the core values are in charge, not you. And they're going to start making decisions based off the values that they share. Right? These aren't your values. You're beating into them. You found people that already have these values. You're living them in the world. Long story short, when the core values are running the company, you don't have to.
Hopefully, that gets you excited and feels great. Now, let's talk about client communication. The big thing is we want to set expectations from the beginning. The huge mistake that owners of cleaning companies make is they all say the same thing. We're the best cleaners. We don't cut corners, we clean them. So, the reality about selling on we're the best cleaner is your competition says exactly the same thing. And you're probably all wrong. So, the expectation shouldn't be we're going to be the best cleaner. When they go, well, the other cleaner didn't do that. The other cleaner didn't do this. you and every other competitor is going to come in. We'll never mess up it. But that's what the other guy said when he started, right? So, it just it doesn't serve the client. It doesn't serve you. So, the expectations we're going to set is not that you're the best cleaner, which is impossible to live up to. The expectation we're going to set is when you come home from or into your business from a hard day work. Are you ready for a day's work? It's going to be your favorite day, the day that the cleaners come. So, the goal isn't perfection to be the best cleaner. The goal is to make them feel amazing and let them know when you make a mistake, you got their back. You're never going to leave them high or dry. The cool thing is your competitors aren't making that claim and it's a claim that you can keep and actually do a great job on. Turn goes down, happiness goes up, and it's a ton more fun to serve those people with the goal of making them feel good and loved and having their back when a mistake happens than trying to be perfect all the time, which is impossible.
So, that's a lot of it, right? If you get that down, you're going to be great. But, I do want to give you one little tweak on the checklist, the actual logistical checklist. 75% should be your like kind of standard checklist that you do for every one of your buildings. 25% should be client notes, like specific details on they've got a cat, don't go here. or if it's a commercial building, here's the alarm code. You know, Mr. Whatever doesn't like his stuff messed with, whatever the case may be. So, we still want checklist. You once you get a core values-based team and you set expectations properly with the client, the checklist is just, you know, icing on the cake. It's not the main thing. And of that checklist, again, 25% should be specific to that client just to make sure you can do a great job there.
The next piece of your client communication puzzle is the customer happiness manager. These people's job is to check on clients. Every like three cleans, give or take, or if there's a new cleaner, they can check on them. If there's ever a problem, they can check on them. The biggest mistake people make is they call and look for mistakes. Hey, how was the clean? How did we do? Anything we could do better? The problem is that client might have had a seven experience, like one out of 10. They might have had a seven out of 10 experience. And when you ask them, they tell you how you could do better. You're really going, "What went wrong?" And they go, "Well, they're in now their brain, cuz you'd ask them that question is going to start looking for wrong." And after you hang up the phone, they end up mooding from a seven to like a five. So, we're going to go the opposite. Frame for positive response, but be open to concerns. So, as opposed to saying, "How do we do or what could we do better?" You want to say things like, "Hey, we came yesterday. As you know, back to the earlier client communication." Her goal is to make sure you feel amazing when you come home. I just want to make sure. And then if you can do the cleaners by name, you know, Allison and Jennifer were just so excited to be there and they just love serving you and they had a great time and they wanted me to call, make sure you felt phenomenal. See how I'm phrasing in a positive way. So, if they had a seven and they go, I dear feel and they're so sweet and that it was good. We actually went moving from a seven to a nine, they might remember, go, "Oh, that was fantastic." Now, we're not trying to bully, you know, if there really was a problem. And we're not trying to like happy walk past it. We do want to hear. So listen for concerns because the goal is to get them before they quit. We all know that it's tough when someone calls or emails or text like, "Hey, we're done." Trying to save that a bear. We do want to make sure that we're trying to not framing but asking questions that help them answer positively. But any sort of negative we can take as, oh, they're just being a pain in the butt or they're complaining or we kind of want to argue they didn't do that or I'm looking as an opportunity for a save. Right? The reality is again once they call us or text us say we're quitting, it's a bear to keep them. But when they say on the phone to the customer happiness manager, I don't even want to complain. Not a big deal. We tend to want to also minimize. Yeah, you're right. They did a role and like we kind of minimize it. I go the opposite. Not a big deal. You know, Linda, are you out of your goddamn mind? You're supposed to feel phenomenal. It sounds like you felt less than phenomenal. That's completely unacceptable. So, I'm getting on Linda's side of the table here and fighting against the, you know, not the cleaners, but my company. So, she's now kind of downplaying what the thing is. We go double. No, this is unacceptable. And then the cool thing is we don't just try to get them say they were at a seven and maybe they went down to a five or six at a small thing. We want to get them to a 12, right? We don't want to just not be upset. We aim to stay forever. So we might send them a little box of chocolates or a thank you note or just anything to let them know you love them. So the goal is not to just get them back to where they were. The goal is to take this opportunity to get them to be crusaders for your deal cuz those are the things that tell that do stories, right? The reality is we get excited about keeping new clients and so I got a new client. It's so super fun. Keeping the clients we got makes more money is a lot less work.
That brings us to the last piece of the quality control pie, which is a ton of fun. Surprise and delight. We touched on it just a second ago, but every time they clean, you can just be a little bit creative. Doesn't have to cost a lot of money. And just do something that makes them feel special. For four bucks, you get a 100 chocolates and put a little chocolate on the pillow for, I don't know what it would cost, a hands- cost nothing. A single flower, a cookie, a dog treat if they've got dogs, a little kids toy, $10 Starbucks card, anything just to let them know that homebaked cookies goes a lot farther. like I made these for you, right? So, just surprise and delight. And again, these are the thing that we all always want to do, but because we don't have systems and processes and employees to do a good job, we don't take an extra, you know, hour a month to figure this out. That's that on the surprise and delight.
The last little piece of this puzzle is we encourage you to have every cleaning team check at least one other team once a week. Right? So, if you're residential and they do, you know, two houses a day, five days a week, that's 10 houses, they're just going to check one other team. And the customer happiness manager based on the feedback is going to kind of have them which houses or which businesses need to get clean. Same thing for businesses. If they do, you know, one or two or three nights, they're just going to once a week they're going to check another building and another clean team did. They get paid for that. And because everybody's checking each other, they don't have the tendency to like really nitpick everything and they're really just trying to help. That package together is going to make sure you've got happy clients that churn low and your business runs without you having to be there.
If you've ever had trouble hiring cleaners, we're going to fix that right now with our six-step core values-based hiring funnel. Let's jump right in. All right, we'll start with step one. This is where everybody thinks is their hiring funnel. We'll say, "What's your hiring funnel?" They go, "I use Indeed. That's not a hiring funnel." It's a leads course, right? So Indeed can be a fine place to get leads. But if you notice, that's not a hiring funnel. This is a hiring funnel. It's not even step one. It's just the leads that go into step one. So the big thing with step one is we've got this core values-based hiring ad. Really, really important. Applicants versus craplicans, right? A lot of people are going to come in. Most of you guys are like, "I've run a hiring ad. It's not that I can't get applicants. It's just that I'll get a 100 applicants and I have to go through the resume and they all suck, right?" So, the core values-based hiring ad is going to attract the people that really share your values and repel the ones that aren't with your vibe, right? A lot of people want to have their hiring ad be like fast-paced, fast growing cleaning company looking for hardworking people, flexible hours, competitive pay, paid training, and you get people that are looking for competitive pay and paid training. You know, you might say, "Are you the hardest working person you know? Are you the type of person that does a great job even when no one's looking? You're going to repel the wrong people and the right people that are into that, have been doing that, no one ever noticed, are going to feel really good. So, this core values-based hiring ad is going to do a great job kitty the crap applicants out as you can see and the applicants in.
The first step we're going to have is a group interview and in there's not a little step one and a half here. But you've got an automated sequence here that's going to text and email people. That's it. Right? So, the goal of the automation prior to the group interview is you or we're going to teach you how to turn this over to your whole cleaners. um just show up and if you get two people at the group interview or six people, it's fine. You're going to spend the same 30 to 50 minutes and you don't have to do any work, right? So, you've got automated text and emails. And I'll be honest with you, we can typically get good applicants for our people for about a buck a piece. We only expect 10% to show up, which is great because people are like, "Oh, I'm missing out on all of them." Half the job is showing up when and where we tell you to show up. So, we automate text people, here's when and where to show up. And they don't do it. Great. They just disqualify themselves. People complain about no call, no shows. And then we're like, well, the people didn't show up for the interview. Maybe I should have called and begged. Well, is that what you want to do with your cleaners or do you want to just say be here at this time? So, it's totally okay if you have a group interview and 90% of the people don't show up. Again, this core values is going to be a theme throughout. You're asking core values-based questions, not cleaning questions. A lot of times we don't know what to ask. So, we might say, for us, one of our core values is to be real. You might ask a question like, when is it appropriate to lie at work and when's it appropriate to tell the truth? One of our core values is make money. You go, how important is making money at a job to you? How important is it to you that the company makes money? You don't want to do like, hey, one of our core values is have fun. You like having fun, right? You want to ask questions where the right answer isn't obvious. And believe it or not, this is going to be my favorite part. You all scratched out. Big X. One of your existing cleaners is going to do this. And when you do it right, you've got core values based people. Cleaners love interviewing and they're getting new skills and they feel like you're pouring into them and they're going to do a better job than you are cuz they're picking who they get to work with. And when they say this is a great place to work, it's going to hit differently to an applicant than when you do it. And bonus, you don't have to do the interview. So, step two is a group interview with core values-based questions run by one of your cleaners.
Step three is one-on-one interview. Again, this is going to be a different cleaner in a different day. Still not you. And if you're in town and want to do one of these interviews yourself, you can, but you don't want to have to. The one-on-one interview, believe it or not, is mostly the same thing. It's still core values-based questions. So, over here, the group interview is going to be basically 100% core values-based questions. And if they ask about the pay or whatever, you can answer. But it's just really you asking core values-based questions. And then on the one-on-one interviews, it's going to be 80% core values-based questions, 20% logistics. Do you have good transportation? When can you start? You know, anything like that, right?
Once the one-on-one interview is done, this is the magic, which is step four, the working interviews. This is really important. The best way to know someone's going to be a good fit is to see what they do, right? Like if the best interview process ever without them doing the job is going to be limited. This working interview is going to be with a third cleaner, same cleaner for the whole working interview. Typically, you can have a couple, but it's better if it's the same person. It's typically like three to four business days. You know, maybe 2 hours the first day, maybe 3 hours the second day, and the third one might be a full day. But them actually getting to work with a person, seeing them clean is going to be a much better indicator of how they're going to fit with the team than you just asking questions. And the cool thing is, if you notice here, they've shown up three different times at three different places before they're even hired. So, by the time you hire them, are people still going to know call no show? Sometimes, yeah, but it's way less because they have to prove themselves a ton more. And then again, this is the applicant watches your cleaner. Your cleaner watches the applicant. There's a whole process. Step five. So this is all part of the working interview. So step four and five is kind of one step. Applicant watches the cleaner. Cleaner watches the applicant. The cleaner and applicant check another job. So we know that the applicant knows how to look at other jobs. And then number six is the best part. Their official new cleaner. And that's where you're going to get them into your regular flow of weekly meetings, monthly parties, quarterly reviews, all sorts of stuff that you can make them feel good. But that is a six-step process. And the cool thing is, I know it sounds like a lot, but it's a system that you set up once. It really takes you virtually no time. Your cleaners can do it automated. They'll actually stay longer. Pick better people. It's a ton of fun and you'll never have trouble not having enough cleaners again.
All right, we're there to the last piece. If you're a nerd like me, this will be your favorite. Financial visibility systems. Big mistake owners of cleaning companies make here. And we all do as owners of any business, not just uh cleaning companies, they focus on revenue, not profit. If you're not at a million dollars yet, a lot of times you think, "I want a million-dollar business." Not because you've done the math. You're just like, "Oh, at a million dollars I'll be quote unquote rich." But there's a lot of multi-million dollar companies that are broke and there's I just talked to a client yesterday that's doing about 750 in revenue. She's going to make like 250 280 this year. Pretty gosh darn good. So step one when it comes to financial visibility is understand what we're optimizing for. Revenue is great for the ego. Profit is great for just about everything else. So that's the first thing. The next thing is most people don't track key numbers and we're going to go over those right now so you know what they are. Everybody tracks revenue. Check that box. Most of us know what that is. The next thing they totally miss is cost of goods sold. Now, cost of goods sold is just people think, "Oh, I know what I play my cleaners. It's super easy." But if you're paying W2, which we would coach you to do for cleaners, that includes workers compensation insurance, payroll taxes, things like that. Some people would even include credit card fees, but we don't have to get into that here. So, you want to make sure you track your cost of goods sold separately. And then the last thing is expenses. Yeah. So basically everything that's not cost of goods sold, marketing, software, you know, if you've got a customer happiness manager, some of the things we've talked about, all basic expenses that aren't physically doing the work, you know, cleaner payroll basically and all the expenses associated with that. And the cool thing is if you track revenue and you deduct cost of goods sold and expenses, you end up with profit. And that's the most important thing that we're going to do. So the key numbers on financial revenue, cost of goods sold, expenses, profit.
Now let's talk about marketing. Most people think they've got a and it can be overwhelming because you know Facebook wants to track there's just an infinite amount of cost per click, cost per this, cost per that. It's really just four things. How much you spent, how many leads you got, how many recurring bids. We coach you only to look for recurring bids and how many recurring sales. And you track that by lead source. So if you're doing Facebook ads and local service ads and door hangers, you'd want to track all four of those things by each lead source. The last kind of bucket of important things to track when it comes to your numbers are for hiring. And almost nobody does that, right? And that's going to be what you spend on applicants, interviews, and starts again by lead source. So if you're advertising in Indeed and Craigslist, you'd be like, "All right, Indeed, I spent 400 bucks last month. I got 163 applications. This many people came to our we coach group interviews to start and we had this many starts by lead source." When you do that, you start knowing pretty quickly what your cost per hire is, which is phenomenal information.
Okay, so that can sound like a lot. I don't want you to get overwhelmed. The reality is to track that doesn't have to be you. can be you or someone else can track all that stuff and really just a couple minutes a day. Obviously, your financials might take depending on the size of your company, two to 20 hours per month, right? 20 hours would be for a multi-million dollar company, but most are like 2 to 5 hours a month. And then the leads, bid sales, you know, cost per lead bid sale and cost per applicant interview start that can literally be like just ticked off in a spreadsheet. We give our clients a spreadsheet. You can make one of your own in like 2 minutes a day, right? So, the tracking part is not that big of a deal. All you need is accounting software. That's going to be for all the cost of goods sold revenue we talked about. And don't use like oh Job where I use all my building through my like scheduling software. Get a real accounting software like QuickBooks to do all your accounting even if your scheduling is done somewhere else. So you need accounting software. You need an accountant to yourself to enter the data in there properly. And once you've got that literally you're going to review this data at the minimum once a month. And that can take if everything looks great it can take 5 minutes. You just look at it. It's all green. You move on. The maximum might take an hour if you're like oh my gosh everything's a mess. We got to figure out what to do with that data. And the beauty of that is you can start making decisions based on data, not on drama, not on your gut. So you can move forward with a lot more confidence and make better decisions.
By the way, if you're a cleaning company owner doing at least $15,000 a month, or obviously ideally more, and you want to build the systems to run your business remotely while scaling revenue and profit, click the first link in the description to learn more about how we can help.
Great job, and welcome to the third piece of the puzzle, which is super important. The team structure you're going to need to build to have remote operations that runs smoothly without you. Now, I want to start by dispelling a key myth. So many of you guys think if I just hired an operations manager. If I could just get that one guy, I'd be free forever. The reality is that guy doesn't exist or gal. And even if he does exist and you can't afford him, you're not fixing your business. You're not decentralizing power. You're not creating systems. You're just moving the bottleneck from you to somebody else. So, we know what our million-dollar admin team shouldn't look like. Just one guy or gal that we kind of have a list of crap we don't want to do and just hope that they can figure it out. Let's talk about what you want to do and exactly who to hire and all that good stuff. Now, this does assume that your cleaning hiring funnel is rocking, right? You've got to make sure you've got good cleaners doing their job doing the cleaning. They actually are on your hiring funnel. So, the cleaners have to do their job first and then this admin team is going to be great. We're going to break down exactly what you need, generally the order that you're going to want to hire them. So, here's a quick breakdown.
Once you've got your cleaners locked and loaded and kicking butt, the first thing you're going to want to typically, not always, get off of your kind of plate is the scheduling. People get really hung up on this thinking I'm the only one that knows and I can't do it. I promise you it's just an if then series in your head. If this guy does this, then this guy does that, and we just go over their head naturally, it can be written down. It's not a big deal. Bonus content. If you let employees and and customers have all sorts of demands, this is a very difficult job. Like if this customer's like, I won't work with I don't want Susie and she can't come here and then Susie's like, I don't want to work with Diane and Steve's a pain. But more of you like trying to or I can only work on a full moon every third. It's going to be a bear. But if you just make clear to your clients, our job is to make sure you feel great when you come home and we're going to put qualified people in there. That's the deal. The scheduling job is super easy if you let customers know you're going to send someone great and get an outcome, but they don't get to pick and for sure with employees. So don't get precious about the scheduling. I know it can feel like as the owner, you're the only one that can do it. But it's a bear that you can do it remotely, but you're just tied every goddamn day. If someone calls out or one of the drama comes, it's on you. You hire a scheduler. They handle all that.
Once you've got the scheduling off your plate, typically next we want to do some sort of an answering service. Don't like a lot of people want to hire like a receptionist, but it's expensive. One person has to sleep. They're not going to work 24/7. If they're on the phone, it's someone else. Like there's just a lot of things that go wrong with that. An answering service can typically be like a buck a minute, give or take a couple hundred bucks a month. It's not a big deal. And they've got, you know, someone quit. It's just they're 24/7. They've got a bunch of people. It's just no big deal, right? So answering service is the best way to go. For commercial, literally nothing's going to be an emergency. For residential, speed to lead is really important. So, we need to either train the answering service to set appointments for you or if they can't, they do need to send those hot leads right away to someone that can get them taken care of. Ideally, not you. So, an answering service is an easy slam dunk. It's only a couple hundred bucks.
Next, we talked about a little bit as an accountant. There's really three ways to do it. One is what most owners do and we just don't do a great job of it. It gets done sloppily or not at all. Two, you as the owner happen to be really good at it and do it. Not the best use of your time, but if you really love doing it, it's fine. And then the ideal is we just hire an accountant. So, their job is just to make sure the data is accurately put in. So you've got an accurate profit and loss. I would expect for anyone under like 50 60 grand a month. That P&L should be ready. All the data for the last month should be ready by the fifth. So your accountant's job isn't to give you coaching, isn't to give you feedback on the numbers. Most think they can and they're not very competent at that. It's just to make sure you have accurate data in a timely way. So hire an accountant. Cheap accountant might be in the states or in Northern America might be 25 bucks an hour. High dollar one might be 50. You shouldn't really be paying more than that just for an account.
Next is the customer happiness manager that we talked about. Again, their only job is just to call or text or reach out to the customers to make sure they're happy. It's a fun job. It's a part-time, five or 10 hours a week. This should be like 500 bucks a month, maybe less, maybe a couple. It shouldn't really be much more than that depending on how many clients you have. And the last person you want to do is an appointment setter, right? This is kind of a not really a sales job. It's more of a disqualification, right? So, when it comes to commercial, daffodil owner should be doing all the sales. When it comes to residential, you can hire a salesperson, but if you're below like 40 50 grand a month, I'm going to have the appointment setter, whether it's DMs or calls or however you're getting leads. They're just going to screen the leads and kind of book like 10, 15, 20 minute sales calls. So, you're only talking to people as the owner that are likely to buy and you can try and sell over the phone, go in person. Obviously, you're going to have a lot more effectiveness in person, but it just depends on how fast you want to grow, how much time you have, all that. So, like I kind of touched on before, each of these jobs can be part-time and from anywhere. They don't have to be in your area, just like you don't have to be. And generally, they're going to cost between 300 bucks a month on the low end, thousand at the high end. Big picture, you want to spend less than 10% of your revenue on this entire team. And this depending on the size or the revenue of your company, this whole team can be anywhere between like two and $5,000 a month, right? Because it's thin sliced, right? As opposed to one operations manager that you feel you got to pay four or five grand a month who might be good at some of those and I can almost guarantee is going to be poor at some of them. When your operations manager quits to hire someone that could do all those tasks for all that money is painful. And if you're traveling or gone and they quit, you're screwed, right? But if your industry service quits, it's very easy to get another one. If your accountant quits, it's very like because you're just replacing a very thin slice piece of work. much easier to replace and you can move the dials.
Here's the reality of this team. If you get it wrong, you are going to be trapped. For you to run remotely without the cleaners we talked about, core values-based and aligned and without the admin team in place, you're going to be trapped. The good news is if you get this right, you are free to move about the country.
Awesome. So, we've talked about what everyone else should be doing. At this point, you might be asking, well, what do I do? What's my role as a remote owner? Let's dive into that. Again, we want to be working 0 to 15 hours a week. And you're like, what's the difference? It is absolutely reasonable if you have this in place that there can be weeks that you work 0 to two hours and there's going to be two or three or four weeks where there's a bunch of nonsense and drama and you might have to work 10 or 15 but on average that 10 hours 5 hours a week very reasonable right the big thing is you want the bulk of your time to be working on the business checking financials setting the culture creating installing the right systems reviewing your KPIs your key performance indicators that we covered we want to review those monthly other thing is if you're in town we coach our people and I'm going to coach you don't have to do it your team can run these weekly meetings monthly parties these quarterly reviews. And if you're in town, definitely attend those. And again, they take weekly meetings about an hour a week. Monthly parties about 2 hours a month. Quarterly reviews is half a day, a day, once every 3 months. It's like really a low time commitment. If you're traveling, let the team run them without you. If you're there, of course, you'd want to be there cuz if you got core values matched people, you're going to enjoy doing it. Enjoy spending time with them and actually being at those weekly meetings, monthly parties, quarterly reviews. So again, zero to 10 hours a week. The big thing is you want most of that to be on the business, not in it. So you're not doing a ton of putting out fires. you're doing more tweaking systems, looking at KPIs.
Let's jump into the reality of what it actually takes to make this happen. Believe it or not, the tactical stuff could actually be done probably in two or three months or even less than that. But so many people we and we've learned having coached so long that it's the beliefs of the owner that need to be changed as much as the tactics. So sometimes 3 months to get all this taken if you're really good at business, you've done this a lot would be really much on the short end. six to 12 months, sometimes even 18 months can take depending on how properly you want to build it, how automated you want it to be because you're going to make hiring mistakes. People are going to quit. You're going to have weeks thinking this will never work and you'll start freaking out. I actually just mentioned one of our clients, Sally. Gosh, when she started with us, she was doing like 60 hours a week. She was doing all the cleaning. I think she was 150 grand a year, give or take. I don't know. I don't think I know she's making any money or not. She's only in a tiny tiny tiny little town of like a,000 people or something. And now she's doing gosh, you know, I think she's almost 7800,000 making two 300,000 profit. And uh cuz she does short-term rental, she works like 40 hours a week, like 2 months a year, and the rest is like 0 to 10 hours a week. So, all that to say, this is absolutely something you can do if you put in the work. You just need to system, get the right help, systematize the process. You can be free, and you can actually make more money with the freedom than you're probably making now being, you know, buried in chaos.
So, this all sounds great, and it is, but I want to make sure you've got a realistic expectation of how this really looks and feels. So most of this, believe it or not, we can get the systems in place under just a couple months. But the owner, obviously the beliefs that kind of where they're at. It can take really 6, 12, even 18 months for them to like kind of catch up because the reality is you're going to make hiring mistakes. People are going to quit. You'll have weeks freaking out thinking this will never work. But the big thing is you come in well, you got to make sure you've got systems and processes and obviously someone to help you through it. And you just got to keep doing when it gets hard. I'll give you an example. I mentioned Sally before. She started with little company doing 100 200 grand a year. She was working 60 hours a week doing a lot of cleaning. It's movable. She's now built up in less than 24 months. About 24 months I think 7800,000 making two or 300,000 and working on average less than 10 hours a week. It's really just the fact that she put in the right systems and the right team just like we talked about and she's got the freedom and there's no reason you can't have that as well.
At the end of the day, running your cleaning business remotely comes down to three things. the right systems for communication and quality control, solid financial visibility so you actually know if and when you're making money and a team structure with a core values-matched administrative team. It's not about working zero hours from a beach. Anyone promising you that is lying or way smarter than I am. It's about working 0 to 15 hours a week depending on the week from wherever you want while taking home 30 cents out of every dollar that comes into the business while leaving plenty of money in the business to stay healthy and grow so you're not starving. And look, if you're sitting there thinking, "Yeah, but Mike, I need zero hours." I can't help you. Go find another guru who will make you feel good. I am not your guy. If you want to build a real business that serves you instead of enslaving you, you want time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom. That's what my team and I are the best in the world at. If you want us to help you build these exact systems in your business, we work with cleaning company owners to create businesses that give real freedom, create tons of impact. And if you want that, click the first link in the description to learn