#3: The Secret Sauce to Growing from $10K to $40K Monthly Revenue

Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast. Anybody who feels stuck at their revenue point. Maybe your far past ten thousand, but you're still at a sticking point. These are the things that can help move that needle. From your first dollar to your first million, welcome to the Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast, presented by ZenMade. Join your host Stephanie Pipkin, founder of Serene Clean, as she shares proven tips, tricks, and harder lessons. Whether you're just starting out or ready to scale, get ready to discover how to build your own cleaning empire. Let's roll up our sleeves and dive in. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast. I am your host Stephanie Pipkin, owner of Serene Clean in Western Wisconsin. And today is a dreary Monday morning. It's about 7.30 a.m. When I am recording this and on Mondays, we have our full team meetings every single Monday morning without fail. If you are not doing team meetings, that should be a big priority in the new year because it does wonders for the culture, for anything issues in the bud. And for everybody to actually spend time and get to know each other, it's a huge cultural strength is having those team meetings. And if you're like, Stephanie, I can't do team meetings. We're all out cleaning. Well, yeah, we have lots of people who don't make it in person. So we host it virtually. I just do a Zoom meeting. They all jump in and listen and talk while they're driving to their jobs or maybe they're getting their kids ready or whatever they're doing. They're at least listening and being involved. And then they can just like jump on. So we do probably over half of the people, probably half of the people in our team meetings are virtual. So team meetings are great. So I always look forward to that on Monday mornings. But I thought I would hop on and record a quick little episode based on a great post. I saw this morning in these then made mastermind. And if you are not a member of these then made mastermind group on Facebook, highly recommend you don't need to be a Zen made customer to be part of that group. You can just join in, but you can join. And it is a wealth of knowledge from all different people in the cleaning industry at all different sizes of businesses, which is super helpful. I've been in that since I opened and so you can literally if you click on my name, you'll go back and see like my original post like asking questions and trying to figure out like how do I bid this commercial account and all of that stuff because I didn't know what I was doing. Not that I feel like sometimes I know what I'm doing now, but still I know a smidge more. And that's why we are here. So this post is from Cassie and her post was curious to learn from those who have scaled their business from 10,000 revenue per month to 20,000 revenue per month. What were your main areas of focus when growing your business and what helps you get past that 10,000? So this video and podcast is going to be super relevant to anybody who feels stuck at their revenue point or maybe you haven't even opened yet or maybe your far past 10,000, but you're still at a sticking point. And these are the things that can help move that needle, but I would say especially relevant for those under, you know, 20 to 30,000 dollars a month. These are the things that I did in order to grow very, very quickly. And Serene Clean is, I would say fairly unique. And we took some really, really giant leaps and bounds and you'll see that within those first couple of years, especially, we've kind of like leveled out now because my focus has much more bends so on sustainability and making everything as high quality as possible and being very particular about the types of customers that we take on so that it makes sense and really focusing more on increasing profit as opposed to just sheer revenue because obviously we could do that, but is it going to be the best choice customers is more the focus now. But in the beginning, it was like, let's get, you know, let's get those numbers up, right? Let's, let's grow it because I was in the trenches just like most of you were in the trenches. And what I mean by the trenches is you are cleaning and you are doing everything else too. And that is a terrible, awful place to be where most of us have to go through that if you are not using independent contractors. And even if you are using independent contractors, that has this whole whole host of problems. So we took giant leaps and bounds and to get out of the trenches quickly, I needed to increase revenue. And so for the first year and a half, I was maintaining my full time job. I was cleaning on the nights and weekends and I was doing all of the administrative work, everything that had to be done. So this meant I was in, you know, cleaning clients' house is going to the bathroom responding to other clients to get them pricing or checking in on other employees who are probably not showing up or doing a terrible job. So it's a, it's a bad place to be. And so the goal is to get out of there, to get the revenue above the point where you can start to delegate to get yourself out of the field, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't need to explain this to you guys of how painful this point is because you're probably in that point. So these are the things that I did looking back and I actually did pull the numbers because I was curious. And so when we made this leap from 10 to 20,000. So to give you reference point, Cering Clean Open in April of 2019, it was just me. By November of 2019, we hit that 10K mark so that was seven months into business. And then June of 2020 was when we hit $23,000 in revenue. And if you all can go back to 2020 in March/ April of 2020, that is when COVID started. So by June, so we were dealing with that and the stress and uncertainty. But COVID was good for us in a lot of ways because of commercial. And then once the shutdown orders were taken off, we were able to get into houses. And houses exploded too because everybody was working from home. Their kids were home. And so though it was difficult to finagle as any of you who went through COVID totally can relate to, it was good in a lot of ways because we're in the cleaning industry. And this was a pandemic. So it worked out okay when it comes to revenue. So June of 2020 was 23K in July of 2020. So a month after that, we were at $37,000. So from November of 2019, we went from $10,000 a month to July of 2020, we were at 37,000. Right? So over three times bigger in what is that? Less than a year. Less than a year. So December of 2020, we finished a year out at $45,000 a month. So hopefully this makes you snap up and say, hmm, maybe there's something to this. So maybe give her a listen. And I cannot pretend to have known what I was doing at the time. And honestly, I don't remember those leaps and being like that. So the quick and dirty things, if you're like, get to the point, Stephanie, these are the things. All right. It was getting social proof and I'll go into that, getting commercial accounts and focusing on quality and getting a hiring system in place. Those are the three things I just want to mention. And I could do the whole entire episodes about all of these topics, but I'm trying to keep this one to a short one. So number one, you need to be getting Google reviews. If you are doing all of your reviews on Facebook or elsewhere, Yelp, whatever, wherever people get reviews, you need to be getting Google reviews. And side note, you need to have a website to point people to. But you got to be getting Google reviews because people who are searching for cleaning companies are going to be going off of quantity and quality of reviews when they are making the decision to even reach out to people. If you are getting three leads a week from Word of mouth or Facebook, you could be tripling that by getting Google reviews because people are searching online for cleaning companies. Think of when you go and search for a restaurant. Are you going to look at the restaurant that has hundreds of five star reviews? Are you going to look at the one that has three from a year ago? Right? Point made, I would hope. So are you going to get to 100 reviews today or tomorrow? No. But can you get a review this week? Yes, you probably can. So that was the goal I set for myself was get one Google review a week. That was the goal. And if you get more, that's great. But just creating that habit of asking and leaving behind review cards. So all of our cleaners leave behind a little card that I designed on VistaPrint's Supercheap. And it just explains and links to where they can leave the Google review. And the cleaner can actually walk them through. And to get your cleaners to ask for reviews all you need to do is pay them every time they get a review that mentions their name. So we pay our cleaners $5 per positive review when the review mentions their name. And so that incentivizes them to ask for reviews because otherwise it's just benefiting you and not them. So it needs to benefit the cleaners. Other than that, you just need to be bold and ask for reviews at every single instance that you talk to a customer and they're happy. That is a chance. That is the most likely time that they're going to give you a review is when they have expressed satisfaction and excitement with your service. So that's the time you go in for that kill and ask for the review. Second part of social proof is going to be video testimonials. If it's taking you a while to get Google reviews rather and that traction is taking well in all of your competitors. have a ton of Google reviews. The way you jumpstart and jump over them and leap ahead is getting video reviews. These things are worth their weight and gold. I know I say that all the time if you have paid attention to any of my content before but I will continue saying video reviews will give you things that nothing else can give you because there is nothing more compelling than seeing a real live customer in your area who has used a service and describing it themselves and not coming from the company. It is coming from another customer. Video reviews are worth their weight and gold. I know that those are hard to ask for but when I say those are one of the main reasons we were able to get people coming to us asking for quotes and whatnot was because we had these video reviews. We put them on our website, we put them on Google, my business and we put them on Facebook. Those three areas is where we put those and they are worth their weight and gold. The other part of video reviews is people ask, how do I ask for those stuff and what do I say? I just send an email a text or ask in person if I am at the cleaning or if my cleaners are feeling real jazzed up, they will ask for it but usually it is going to be coming from the office because the cleaners don't like to ask. Pretty much what I say is I ask them three things or we are going to ask them three things in the video. I say would you be willing to do a one minute long video review so we can show other people in our community about our services. We would so appreciate it. All these are the things I am going to ask you. I am going to ask you what your name is. How long you have been using serene clean? How did you hear about serene clean and why would you recommend serene clean to other homeowners in our area? Telling them in advance whether that be in the email in the text or verbally in person is going to allow them to feel less nervous and know exactly what is going to be asked of them so there is no unknowns. They may say no, totally fine. They will be like, I really don't want to know. Thank you. Most people are going to say no to this. That doesn't mean you stop asking because they are so valuable. If you had 10 video reviews on your website or Google my business, I guarantee your leads would probably double or triple or even more if you are not getting any leads. Right? So it is going to be so impactful. It is really, really worth it. Side note, just a little tactical thing. Make sure your phone is horizontal in landscape instead of vertical so that the videos look more professional instead of having black bars on the side. So just a little tip there. So getting those video reviews is going to be huge for you. Okay, next thing is going to be getting commercial. So this is a whole nother can of worms I know. But when I talked about those numbers earlier of going from like 10,000 to 37,000 in less than a year and so early on in the business life too, right? Because again, the open in April of 2019 by August of, I'm sorry, by July of 2020, we're at 37,000, right? So just over a year, we got to nearly 40k a month. And commercial is one of the biggest reasons for that because this is simply a numbers thing guys. And I know a lot of you are like Stephanie, I can't do commercial. You know, I thought that too until I started doing it and realized it's just like cleaning houses except easier and we make more money and they have us come more often and it's easier to manage because it's not somebody's house. So commercial is so so wonderful. And honestly, I got one of our first commercial accounts, one of the biggest ones actually just a couple months in the business and they found me on Google. They found me on Google and they saw my website. And so that's why they called Stephanie, little Stephanie with like zero cleaners, they called me and asked me to bid their giant 100,000 square foot facility. And I understand that's not going to happen for everybody, but it's what happened to me. And that bolstered me in so many ways and that literally changed the trajectory of syring clean because I had fully intended staying with residential. That was my vision when I opened up was like, I'll just clean houses and thank goodness that is not the way things happen and that commercial started calling right away. Those commercial accounts think about how many houses you would need to clean, how many clients you would need to get to make $5,000 a month in revenue. Think about that, right? At what, $120 a pop for each appointment, that is what a lot of I don't I can't do the mental math. That is a lot of residential clients. One commercial account could be $5,000 a month if it's like a five night a week account, right? Or five day a week account because they're not all nightly. Most of them can be done during the day shockingly or done at a decent time of the evening. So it's simply a number of things of managing one account versus managing how many cleaners to cover 20 houses or whatever it would be the equivalent in revenue for that commercial account. So would highly recommend looking into commercial and I will be doing full podcast episodes on commercial because I know you're all chomping at the bit in the meantime before I before I can get to that. There is a YouTube video that I did recently that talks about transitioning from residential to commercial. We will link that in the show notes so that you guys can go watch that. There's a ton of stuff in there. So commercial is one of the biggest reasons by that 37k amount we had I think five five night a week accounts. So those were giant leaps and that allowed me to really skyrocket quickly, higher quickly, get administrative help quickly and get things off of my back. It doesn't mean I stopped cleaning but it also allowed me to leave my full time job which was a huge weight off the shoulders obviously. And then finally getting a hiring system in place because once you start getting these leads rolling in you need to be able to staff them correct and so group interviewing is going to be one of the game changing things that you can do especially in the beginning when you do not have the bandwidth or time to schedule a bunch of the interviews and have nobody show up because that's what happens is the majority of people do not show up to interviews and most of you have experiences. If you have tried to hire anybody is that 75% of the people don't show up and then all the 25% that show up maybe only 10% of them are quality candidates that you would actually consider hiring. So the group interview is the filter process. We need to see a lot of people and go through a lot of people all at once. You do not want to be wasting your time by meeting with all of these people when in the first five seconds you immediately know you're not going to hire them. Why are you about to waste half an hour of your time when you probably could have been cleaning or working on something else or in that half an hour you could have met with 10 people and decided that only two of them you want to have a second interview with. So this is why group interviews are so valuable and I will be sure to do an entire episode on group interviews at some point to explain tactically how to do a group interview because it's not as hard as you think at all. Again if you go to the mastermind group I guarantee I posted about group interviews somewhere and you can just search my name or search group interview and we'll talk about that. Otherwise I will be sure to make an entire episode about this but that is what's going to keep the candidates rolling and then the second part is always have job listings going. Never turn your job listings off just because you feel like you're fully staffed. You always want to have a pipeline of candidates because at any given time somebody could quit or fire and the only way we were able to keep this ball rolling is I had somebody in mind to replace other people when they quit or they knew to get fired or we were just growing quickly. We needed to have a pipeline of candidates and if you only have job listings going when you actively need to fill a role then you're behind the ball. Right you need to be having job listings going and we'll talk about listings and you know how to handle indeed and how to have great job great compelling job listings at some point as well just so many episodes to do guys we're just getting started and I have so much to teach you but that is going to be my third point is going to be the group interview process and always have job listings going so that you have candidates rolling in at all times for you to consider. So those are the three topics that we're going to cover in today's episode guys that are going to get you over your sticking point whether that be getting you to your first 10k getting you to 20k or getting you beyond 20k a month and getting you to the point where you're out of the field and you can start hiring administrative help and really start getting that ball rolling towards the company of your dreams. So if you have any questions guys leave it in the comments if you have a quest for future videos also leave that in the comments because I'm sure I've mentioned and opened a Pandora's Box in just this episode of well what about this what about this and I wanted to keep this one short and we'll go into things in depth in future episodes but this will hopefully get your mind churning on what needs to be done immediately to get you over that hump and I will see you guys in the next episode of filthy rich cleaners things for listening bye. If you enjoyed this episode of the filthy rich cleaners podcast please be sure to leave us a five star review so we can reach more cleaners like you until next time keep your work clean and your business filthy rich.