How Jake and Emmy Hit $14K in Their First Two Months

Vic: Today we have Jake and Emmy of Dubuque Iowa Clean, who found us on this very YouTube channel just a few months ago and are here to share their success, their failures, and everything in between. Today is May 20th, 2024. Let's start with, when did you guys find us?

Jake: I was reading on a subreddit, I forget which one, and I found a post by Rohan. I was digging, it was one of his 29-day things, and I didn't want to wait any more days for any more information. I wanted to get started, so I found a Facebook version of it, then a Twitter version, and then eventually stumbled on the YouTube page you guys created. Then I saw that you, Vic, had a bookable Calendly for coaching calls.

I booked one for the next week. This was in February 2024.

Vic: This is the important piece, because it's May 20th, 2024. Anybody watching this on YouTube, you can watch it at any time. February to May. February, March, April, May.

Jake: So it was a Wednesday, and I booked the intro call with you, Vic, for that next Monday. In between Wednesday and Monday, I binge-watched all the YouTube videos on this channel and I was really ready to get things set up. I had the call with you, you said, yep, you can totally do this, and literally as soon as we got off that call, I bought Convertlabs and started setting things up.

Vic: You got your first 30 days free because you used the blueprint link, which again is below. This is the important part, because we're really bad at saying click, like, and subscribe, and book a call. You went through the whole run-around to find the stuff, because Rohan really has been teaching this for 10 years, showing and sharing. The difference here is you guys did the things.

There are lots of people learning who don't do the things. You did the 21-day course on your own, it's free, it's on YouTube, and you could not be better students. This is why we do this. It makes us feel like what we're doing is important, because we're sharing this for free with everyone around the world, going, here's the road map, here's the blueprint.

And you guys are doing it, and it worked.

Jake: Literally we just followed video by video how to set things up. I'm a really meticulous person, so I took notes on every single video and followed it word for word, and it worked. We had everything set up in Convertlabs by like March 17th. That's the day we posted our first Indeed ad to start hiring.

We got our first couple cleaners ready to go, and March 20th we posted on Facebook, hey, we're starting this company, follow our Facebook page, and started advertising on Google. We started calling realtors immediately, spent like two days calling realtors, and ended up getting our first commercial property, about 8,000 square feet, just out of doing those calls. It all happened really fast.

Vic: Now I want to preface all of this. You're in Dubuque, Iowa, which has a population of 60,000. So there are a lot of what I'd call golden horseshoes. One, you listened and followed directions and did the things. You turned off any entrepreneurial brain, the what-about-this brain we all have, and didn't reinvent the wheel.

But also, you did it in a location nobody else has done this yet. I want people to hear that, because there are a lot of people struggling who are doing the things but are in locations where they're not first. Somebody in New York City, or Boston, or Los Angeles, or Toronto, because Rohan's been sharing this for over 10 years, they all have others who got to be first. You guys got to be first in Dubuque, Iowa, which other people would ignore because they see it as too small.

Emmy: I think that was part of the reason we decided to go for it. I remember after the discovery call Jake had with you, he was so excited, because you said this would be perfect because we were first. I don't think we were scared. That excited us and pushed us more.

Jake: We were super worried. Rohan talks about this all the time, people invest so much money in college but don't want to spend any money on a business. It's so true, we were so scared to spend the $200 on Convertlabs, or the $100 on insurance. The free trials helped. Ultimately it came down to seeing that other people have done it and just a little bit of encouragement. Once you decide to pull the pin and say go, then you're all in.

Jake: I'm not going to lie, I'm the back end of the business and Emmy's the front end. While I might be talkative one-on-one, I'm terrible with sales. I spent probably 200 hours setting up the business, going through every single possibility, being super meticulous. Now, running it day-to-day, week-to-week, I spend about eight hours on the back end per week, and Emmy spends about 12-ish hours, depends on the week.

Vic: That's not bad, Emmy. That's actually impressive, because usually when people hit go, they think they have to do everything and work really hard. The fact that you're only doing 12 and eight, that's impressive. Before we dive into who's doing what, let's talk some numbers. Are you comfortable sharing where you're at as a business?

Jake: Yeah, go for it. For the month of April we had $6,500 in revenue. For May, which is this month, we still have 10 days left and we're projected to hit $8,000 in revenue. Right now our net income at the end of May should be around $1,500, because we've made some learning decisions on what to do with marketing money, and we've spent money hiring people and on tools.

When you do the math on your hourly rate, right now it doesn't make sense at all, but we can see this will scale and grow with the exact same effort we're putting in now. So we're telling ourselves we're putting in the effort now so we can grow.

Vic: And this is your first true business on your own. You've worked for other people, but this is your first business on your own, so you don't know yet just how amazing it is to be profitable this fast.

Jake: Yeah, we talked to people and businesses aren't usually profitable in the first year, let alone the first two months.

Vic: The whole thing Rohan teaches with that 30-day or 21-day thing is it's about launching, because most people won't even launch, they get in their heads. Then growing, then scaling. It's setting it all up from the first place so it can grow and scale. That's exactly what you guys have done. And you don't need a million people.

In our business, the numbers, it's only 100 recurring clients. Being in a small city is not a bad thing, it can be a very positive thing.

Emmy: I feel like being in a small city helps with our marketing on its own. It's such a small world in a small city. I had a client the other day tell me a realtor told her about us, and we hadn't even really talked to that realtor. We contacted her to let her know we were around, and that was it, and it got us a recurring client.

Jake: We've already got two recommendations from existing clients to another client. I don't know if it's as common in larger cities, but it seems like people are more willing, at church or whatever, hey, this cleaning company.

Vic: Reputation is what it is. For the rest of us in slightly larger cities, we do reputation management through our reviews. Our Google listing matters because that's our reputation, it's what people see who don't have a friend who can recommend a cleaner. For you guys, being local really matters in a small city because they care about each other, as we all should. And your name, Dubuque Iowa Clean. How is the organic search working for you? Because I will take that credit.

Jake: You did. Our initial name was going to be something like Instant Clean.

Vic: Which is a fine name, but it doesn't help you. In that first call I said, don't do that, make it like Dubuque Cleaning. Super boring.

Jake: That was already taken, so we did Dubuque Iowa Clean.

Vic: It's the perfect name to me. It's not sexy, it's not interesting, it's perfect, because people are searching Dubuque, Iowa cleaning company, and you hand it to them on a silver platter.

Emmy: People, going back to caring about local, we've gotten asked on the phone so many times, are you guys local? There have been people that called us who don't even know our company name, and they're like, wait, what's your company name again? It's Dubuque Iowa Clean, and they go, oh good, you're local. I don't know how they got our phone number without knowing our company name.

Vic: They probably got your number because they met somebody who said, here, give these guys a call. It's as simple as that. Simple works and simple sells, because you're solving a very simple problem: where do I find a good cleaner?

Jake: We followed the blueprint. We give 60% of all revenue to our cleaners, and that has helped us retain cleaners. It made us feel good about decisions we might question, like, well, that did take a little longer, but then you go back and think, no wait, she was making $40 an hour. For somebody in Dubuque, Iowa, that's amazing.

Vic: So that cleaner's not going to quit because you don't pay them enough. They might quit because something else happens in their life, and that's fine, that's predictable. But not paying them enough today is not a good enough reason, because your business can scale and grow as a result of having these amazing cleaners.

Jake: Going back to the numbers, we have to make $3,100 in revenue to break even while we're paying our cleaners 60%. That's because we're spending almost $700 on marketing right now, and about $200 a month on hiring because we're having to hire more as we grow, about $100 on the ads and $100 on background checks and DocuSign. As far as tools go, we're spending about $400 a month. A full breakdown: $25 a month on OpenPhone, $110 a month on insurance, which is high, the $200 on Convertlabs, $15 a month on iPostal, which is our PO box, $20 a month on Zapier because I love automating, $10 a month on Google Workspace, and $9 a month on Yoast SEO.

In a small town, Yoast pays for itself immediately. We're ranking six in organic search results. We're almost ranking above Merry Maids, which has been here for 45 years. The only people above us are Angie's List, Thumbtack, and Care.com. In the Google map pack, we're ranked number four right now.

Vic: You're in the same spot as us. We're ranked number four, for three years. Yoast paid for itself immediately. For those of us who use Convertlabs, Yoast is integrated. The free version is already there, but the paid version is what Jake and Emmy are talking about, and we pay for that as well. It totally pays for itself.

Emmy: With background checks, something we learned the hard way is to phrase it as, we require a background check for all our contractors, and then ask, will that be a problem? Because one time I didn't, and it came back not clean. That could have been solved, could have saved us the $30, if I'd just asked. Where I've had other conversations and asked, will that be a problem, and it would have been a problem, so we just stopped there, saved my money, saved their time.

Vic: For Emmy, let's dive deeper on your end, since you're front of house. You're really me in your business, and my sister is Jake. I love the way you guys think, because it's so much like how Jen and I think, and how we divide our business. So Emmy, what's the worst part?

Emmy: Dealing with people. It's the questions and the complaints and managing schedules and setting expectations. That is probably the most stressful, draining part. Talking to people, doing the interviews, that's so easy to me. Doing the 200 hours Jake did, that sounds like torture. So dealing with the difficult clients is the hardest.

Vic: People are going to people. This is the hardest part of the job. For people watching this thinking it's easy, if you find people hard, you can't fix it by having great FAQs. I've tried for three years to fine-tune the frequently asked questions, to outsource this to a virtual assistant. This is the part you cannot change. You're dealing with human beings.

Emmy: We've had a few clients that taught me valuable lessons. It's their home, their living space, so they expect it a certain way, I understand that. But there was one I spent an hour on the phone with after every weekly clean. A lot of lessons were learned with that client. We now have processes because of that client.

We have an entire booking email we send with every single booking. Zapier helps create it and brings in Convertlabs information, so it looks very personalized. It lists exactly what they should expect, has a copy of our cleaning checklist, our cancellation policy, what time we'll be there, what extras they have, and it literally says our cleaners are not magic, cleaning gets better over time, and that's why we give discounts to our recurring clients.

Vic: I'm stealing that.

Emmy: I'm pretty sure those lines are from you, Vic.

Vic: I've definitely said that a lot. It's trying to set expectations, so as long as everyone has the same expectations, they'll say, yeah, you guys did a great job. But that is easier said than done.

Emmy: The emails are great, and I'm glad Jake set them up, but something I've run into is a lot of our client base don't have emails.

Vic: Are they elderly?

Emmy: Yes.

Vic: That was the piece, I wondered, are they too young that they think email's dumb, or too old that they never got on board.

Emmy: Too old. I can think of three off the top of my head. One has been great, she's a weekly, she loves the cleaner to death. But all the others, I could see how that's going to run into issues, because they never got this, and there's only so much I can communicate over the phone.

Jake: All of our online tools require an email address to set up an account for that client. So we use a tool called Email Monster. It gives you a domain, ours is like dubuqueiowaclean.emailmonster.com, and we can create it right in Convertlabs. Say we have a client John Smith, we do johnsmith at our emailmonster domain, and it creates an email for them, so all their accounts are linked to that email.

It solves our issue of the client not having an email, and those emails get routed back to our email address, so we get them.

Vic: So this is where tech can create problems for the elderly who are not using it. It's a common complaint for people who have a high population of the elderly. The bigger issue there, Emmy, is going to be having the cleaners you assign to work with the elderly be your patient, kind-hearted, loving cleaners, because that's the piece they need.

Emmy: We do have one cleaner who is just great, and she is that person.

Vic: Perfect. In the very beginning, watching you go through your Convertlabs, you knew every cleaner. You were like, oh no, he can't go there, she can't do that, sorting through, and I thought, how does she do that?

Emmy: Literally Jake and I were talking about this today. We were talking about a specific clean and what cleaner I'm going to send, and he's like, why? And I'm like, I just have my reasons. I just know this is the cleaner to send, because this one can't, that one no.

Vic: It comes easier once you get a few cleans under your belt with each cleaner. Someone else watching would try to systematize it, and that's where I go, please don't give me a system for how I figure out which cleaner is good at what. Sarah's good at this, John's good at this, Abraham's good at this. Just let them do what they're good at, and get out of the way.

Jake: Another huge lesson learned, something we champion to each other now: do not break the rules of your business for anybody. The first call, I was taking it, and I learned I'm not great on the phone. This guy called and started asking so many questions, which now we've learned is kind of a red flag. He's asking for copies of our driver's license, certificate of insurance, references for each cleaner, on and on.

He asked us some odd request, and I was feeling pressured, and I was like, yeah, sure, we can do that. Afterwards I was kicking myself, why did I say that?

Vic: Because you're human. It's going to happen because you want to help people. Trust me, I learned this lesson over and over. It was Kevin who said it in one of our group calls, and now we quote him all the time. He said, if they ask you more than three questions, they're probably going to be a problem.

By the time you get to question four or five, you're now so invested as a human being in trying to help that person get to, can we get a booking, can we get a cleaner, can we get to the solution, that by question four or five the answer is actually, this probably isn't the right fit long-term.

Jake: Another thing that happened literally this past week: Emmy took a booking and immediately called me. I was driving home, and she's like, I made a mistake and I just need to get it off my chest. I'm like, okay, what did you do? She's like, I told somebody we could take a check.

Emmy: I was like, I don't need your feedback, I just need to tell you that I did it. It was this very nice woman, we were having a great conversation, and then at the end, we'd already been talking for 25 minutes, and she said, well, I don't have a card to use. I was like, oh no, I'm too deep now. So I had to say yes, and I felt guilty.

It happens, as humans, like you said. She's going to send the check before the clean, so I at least got that out of her.

Vic: Getting a check is not the problem, to be clear. It's whether or not the check is going to clear, and it's adding more time to your workload, which stops you from being able to grow and scale. That's why we use Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Stripe, because we can grow and scale. I've done exactly the same thing.

It takes a half an hour to process a check, because I have to go to the bank, then make sure it clears, then on the back end on bookkeeping. It ends up being about an hour for every single check.

Jake: As you grow and scale, this is what Jen and I talk about, you end up getting these big commercial clients, which is happening faster for you guys, and then how do they want to pay? 30 days net terms, and then a check in the mail. So now you're talking months before you have actual money in the bank, but you can't make your cleaners wait.

Jake: Starting up, we really tried to prioritize being super fair to our cleaners and paying them immediately. If we didn't take on a commercial client right away, we could have started this business comfortably with about $2,000. But we immediately took on a commercial building, 8,000 square feet, and they weren't able to get us a check until two weeks later. So we ended up, I don't know, 6 to $8,000 of our own money in, because we had to pay our cleaners to go do that commercial building.

We know we're making that money back, but it's exactly what you said, those commercial buildings, you need to build that up, or just not take them right away.

Vic: It's hard when you're starting out to not take opportunities that land in your lap. It's very hard to start saying no. Here's my other question: is that commercial contract safe and secure, in that you know they're not going to go bankrupt?

Jake: Yes, they're the largest property management company in our area, millions of square feet of property. They just happened to purchase this new building and wanted to try somebody new. It was very secure, a well-known company, not just some rinky-dink company.

Vic: We had a similar experience where a very well-known company did go bankrupt, and we found out by it being announced in the newspapers. I'd been chasing them for payment, luckily it was only three grand, and I said, I just don't feel good about this, and then I got the news. Jen was like, should have said no. They did end up paying us $1,600.

Just saying, residential, getting that machine going, is a good, safe, secure bet. I want to pause and plug in our laptop. It's so funny watching you guys, because there are quite a few married couples who start these businesses and they have to divide it. You don't have both of you answering the phone.

Emmy: Jake and I work really well because we have very different strengths. The behind-the-scenes stuff, not my thing at all. He can talk to people and does fine, but it's draining for him.

Vic: It's a bit like introvert, extrovert. Jen's an introvert, she can be extroverted when she has to be. Most people wouldn't know Jen was an introvert. I'm an ambivert, so I need a lot of alone time in order to do what I do as an extrovert.

Emmy: I will say that too, my social battery needs to recharge. Jake doesn't really have that, it recharges on its own, because of his behind-the-scenes things.

Vic: You also had a list, Jake, of things you wanted to talk about. Have we covered most of them?

Jake: One thing we haven't covered is our spending decisions. We spent probably about $500 on flyers, not a very smart decision.

Vic: Where did that idea come from?

Jake: Entrepreneurial brain, as you mentioned at the beginning. The first couple weeks, you've got these cleaners, and they're pressuring you, hey, we want more cleans, give us more. We were trying to generate more business, capture the entire job market, because only so many leads get generated per day. So we spent $500 on flyers that we handed out to realtors. I literally walked around with our daughter, went door to door handing them out, and no real traffic came from that.

Vic: You did say at the beginning somebody had your phone number and nothing else. That's where a flyer and a conversation with their friends happens, okay, call this number, I happen to have it on my fridge. It feels wasted, but it's just money you don't need to spend that way. You could put that toward Google Ads, or Thumbtack or Bark.

Emmy: A lot of the realtors, when we were calling them, were like, oh, can you drop off flyers at the office? And we were like, oh yeah, cool, we'll order a bunch. We probably could have just sent digital ones for them to email out. We were so excited because they wanted it. But whatever, you learn the things.

Jake: Another spending decision, we spent about $500 in Google Ads in one week.

Vic: That's easy to do.

Jake: It was painful. It generated traffic to our website, but there's a saturation point. You can only generate so much business so quickly off Google Ads. Maybe we're doing it wrong. I've learned a little, maybe we could spend more and actually get a return, but it's not something I think paid off. It was pay per click, not Google Local Services.

Vic: You're not alone in that. Everybody I've talked to in the last six months in the community has found pay per click is very much a long game. It doesn't immediately translate.

Emmy: Another thing we spent money on that I complain about every day is Angie Leads. In our area it is the biggest pain in my butt. I will advise any business owner, if you get contacted by Angie Services, Angie Leads, anything owned by Angie, just do yourself a favor and tell them no. It causes me a lot of stress, it comes in on our OpenPhone and email all at once, my phone just blows up, and then I have to drop everything and call this person right now to even get a chance.

Nine times out of 10 they don't answer, ever. It stresses me out for no reason, and we've gotten no business from Angie Leads.

Jake: What I don't like about Angie Leads is you have to pay a subscription, $300 a year, to then pay for leads, which are comparable price to Google Local Services or Thumbtack. But Angie has all these requirements, you have to call within 15 minutes, three times the first day, two the next day, then once a week.

Vic: Within our community people have been complaining about it forever. So if anybody's watching this and Angie calls you after you set up your business, tell them no. So then what is actually converting? Juan just asked that in the community too. What are you spending your money on in terms of advertising, because you said it was about 700?

Jake: About 700. We're spending about $150 a month on Google Ads, and we're actually starting to get online bookings tracked through Google Ads, so we're seeing conversions. I think we've had six online bookings in the past 20 days.

Vic: Which is amazing. In your first year to get online bookings is amazing, in your first two months.

Jake: We're spending about $150 a month on Google Leads, and those ebb and flow.

Vic: When you say Google Leads, sorry to interrupt, it's Google Local Services, where you pay the 25 or 40 or 50, whatever it is in your city, for the lead.

Jake: We're paying for them to call us, which is a huge difference from Thumbtack, where you pay for the ability to message them and you're bidding against other cleaning companies. With Google Local Services, they're calling you, it's your lead. We are the only cleaning company using Google Local Services in the Dubuque area. Even if they're not clicking call, we're still appearing higher, we're the first result on house cleaner search no matter what.

Vic: In the real world, the customer Googles cleaning companies near me, Google says, here, Dubuque Iowa Clean, and there's a phone number. If they're anti-Google, because when they click it says Google will record this call, and when they make the call Google repeats it, some people say no, and they keep looking, and they find you fourth and go, oh, there they are, there's their number, and call you. There are weird workarounds where people figure out who you are, and all of them matter two years down the line when you're billing the real numbers.

Jake: We're unfortunately right now spending $150 on Angie Leads, because we're stuck in it, trapped for a year.

Vic: Oh, you poor thing.

Jake: We should shut it off and cut our losses, but we haven't got that far yet.

Vic: Future you, from past you, would have asked the community, hey guys, what's your experience with Angie, and you'd have saved yourself this headache, because our community has your back. If anybody has a bad experience with anyone, we all hear about it.

Jake: That's such a good point. The online forum, you can search for almost any tool and it'll pop up, and you can hear somebody else's opinion on it. And you can disagree with them. We're all just running our own businesses, sharing our stuff together.

Vic: You asked before, is 700 a lot? We've spent in total $14,000 on advertising, and we're now billing between about 600 and 700 thousand a year without making any major changes to how we operate. It's continuing to grow, it's steady. It's not fast like it was our first year. Our first year was really fast, like you guys.

But our second year we started to dial back how intensely I answer everybody's questions, because I realized, oh wait, they're not ideal clients, so we refocused our effort.

Jake: That's our goal, to eventually scale back our marketing spend.

Vic: 700 is very normal for a month. Usually, from what I've seen in the last three years, people spend between 500 and $1,000 in their first year. There's an exception to the rule, Daniel, we've got his hot seat call, but he's an SEO specialist, so he doesn't spend a dime on advertising. He's still in year one, but that's the exception. You have to be very good at SEO to not spend a dime.

Jake: That's where we are now, and we still don't really know what we're doing, but we'll ask Daniel, we'll ask the community, can somebody teach us to do this better. As you said, we're in fourth position on the Google Maps.

Vic: It feels amazing.

Emmy: Maybe, is there any other really bad experience we want to share? The only other thing on my end, being the front end, we had a pretty bad cleaner experience. On paper this cleaner looked amazing, she was going to be the savior of our company, we were going to send her to all the cleans to begin with. Thing after thing happened, she couldn't make it, she was canceling last minute.

My gut told me right at the first excuse. What happened to her could have happened to anyone, I get it, but my gut told me something was off. And Jake was like, no, just give her a chance.

Vic: Jake did the exact same thing.

Emmy: I listened to him, I'm like, it's fine, that could have happened to anybody. Excuse after excuse, and then she had a three-clean day and didn't show up to any of them, and still has yet to answer my call or text, over a month at this point. Basically just ghosted us. She only did one clean for us, and we had to reclean it, I don't know if she did bad or the client was also a problem client.

It ended up costing us a lot of money to even have her. My lesson learned: if people are going to show you who they are, listen.

Vic: Vic's quotes, they will live on forever.

Emmy: I got it from you, and I use it all the time. It's true. She was throwing up red flags, she was our first hire, everything looked perfect on paper, she was very nice on the phone. That's just not how it always is. My lesson was, it's going to be okay. I was in denial that it wasn't going to work out, and it's fine, there's going to be more cleaners.

Vic: This is the hard part of the job, you're dealing with human beings that are going to be challenging.

Jake: We have a cleaner now that we just hired, she's great, but she's been pressuring us. She has a family, so she's like, I need as many jobs as many jobs. It's a battle of, I need to be fair to the other cleaners, I can't just hand everything off to you because there's other people relying on this too. So it's finding that balance between all the cleaners.

Vic: And not hiring too many cleaners, there's a sweet spot, and you will eventually find it. For us it's taking two to three bookings a day, hiring one to two cleaners a month. We don't actually want 10 bookings today. We had one day where we got 27 bookings, a pretty fun day, but that is not the norm.

The norm is two to three bookings a day, and if you average it out in your month, if you continually take two to three bookings a day, you'll grow at the same rate we're growing, which is steady and not manic. I didn't want to replace a day job with another stressful day job that I now own. I wanted to replace a day job with a steady income stream without the stress of working for someone else, and we've done that. So it's two to three bookings a day, one to two cleaners a month.

If you have too many cleaners, it's way more stress, because you've got to get more bookings. If you have one cleaner, you're going to get enough bookings to fill their schedule, and everything grows at the right rate.

Jake: That's why with this cleaner, we told her exactly what you said, we're taking about two clients per day on average, it's going to take about a month and your schedule will be full. Be patient. But you have to wait that month. Unfortunately she quit her second job, or it fell through, and now she's trying to solely rely on us, and it's a tough situation.

Vic: What I do with those is I send them to Housekeeper.com. She can register there for free as a house cleaner. She now has a criminal background check, she's done that with you, she has references because she gave you references, she wouldn't get through the door if she didn't, and she's a good cleaner, she's proven herself. All she has to do is create a profile there.

People looking to hire a cleaner directly go there, or Facebook Marketplace, and Housekeeper.com feels a little safer. So she can find her own clients, and you encourage her to, because she's an independent contractor, which is your model. Then they go get their own clients, and they'll say, hey, I can no longer work Thursdays, no problem, mark it off in Convertlabs, now I never invite the cleaner on Thursdays. Easy solution.

Vic: Is there anything you're thinking, man, I wish I had known this?

Jake: One more thing, the last thing on our list was how me and Emmy stay in sync. We run this business together, I put in about eight hours a week and Emmy about 12, and we have a very busy life outside this business. We have to stay on the same page, because if a client calls and Emmy can't take it, I'll pick up the phone, and I need to know the last conversation that was had, cliff notes on where things were left off. So we use OpenPhone, which records every call and gives you a call summary.

We have that linked to HubSpot, a customer relationship management tool, and also linked to a software called Todoist, which is literally just a to-do list, all connected with Zapier. If we get a new lead, it automatically creates a Todoist task to follow up every week until they book. If we get a new booking, it creates a task to confirm their booking, takes their booking date and creates a task to follow up after their first clean, and then one three months out to follow up about extras, hey, you've been with us three months, are you interested in an oven cleaning or getting your windows done. We even have recommendations set up, we recommend getting your oven cleaned twice a year, windows every other month, and that adds value to each customer, because then you start breaking down how much it cost to acquire this customer versus their lifetime value.

HubSpot syncs with our email and OpenPhone, so I can pull up HubSpot on my phone while I'm on a call and see, okay, Emmy sent them an email earlier today, and they had a text conversation yesterday. Between Todoist and HubSpot I can quickly get up to speed on where that client is at.

Vic: Now, if you already know how to use all those things, great, use the things that work. For those of us who are not as tech-savvy, here's what we do: we write notes in the notes inside Convertlabs. Convertlabs already texts them, emails them, and reminds them. The main thing is you do what works best for you, so that your marriage, which this is, and your business relationship can work seamlessly without the tension of, you didn't tell me x, y, or z.

Jake: Whenever Emmy tells me she has a problem, I try to figure out a software way to fix it.

Emmy: And I'm like, just stop talking. Can you just listen to my problem and not think of ways to fix it? Just let me vent.

Jake: Emmy was complaining that it takes too long to type in notes, so I figured out a way that it will automatically just happen. Now Emmy only has to put in 12 hours a week, and that's literally all on the phone, she doesn't really spend any admin time.

Vic: These are good systems to have, and they're scalable, because when you need to add somebody to your team, if you decide to hire a VA, you've set up the systems. It's all good stuff. It's just, if you don't know how to do those things, don't do those things, you don't need to. I'll add one more thing and then we'll wrap up.

We have our Millionaire Mastermind group, which you guys haven't come to watch one, I don't think I've invited you yet, but I will. The Millionaire Mastermind was a group of us that formed through the community. We met each other and were like, oh, you're billing 50k a month, I'm billing 50k a month, we should talk. It turned into a group of amazing people that get together once a month and share our stuff.

For one hour, one Monday a month, we sit on a Zoom call, and everybody shares what they're struggling with and what they're doing well with, because we know this is the magic of our business, sharing what works and what doesn't. It's saved us years and thousands of dollars. One topic coming up is automations. In June we're doing an SEO call with Daniel, because I already asked him, and the next one we're doing automations, and the people who love automations will share their screen with those of us like me who are like, just pick up the phone.

The conditions to join are you're billing 50k a month, you're transparent, you'll share your stuff, and you show up. It's free, we don't charge any fees, because we're all there to learn from each other.

Jake: And if anything, we want to be there to get more of your quotes.

Vic: We need more quotes that I ripped off other people. It is so funny, because I know exactly what it's like to be in your shoes, remembering the things you hear from the videos, because of watching Rohan. Jen and I would say to each other, no, remember Kevin said, Rohan said. And when we listen to the entrepreneurial brain, oh, that brain. Creative people, if you don't have creative problems to solve, you will find problems to solve that don't exist.

Jake: We were just complaining yesterday, looking at the schedule, ah man, I wish we had more bookings for that cleaner who was asking for more. And I thought, well, we're complaining about having this problem, but if we didn't have it, we'd be complaining that we don't have another cleaner because all our other cleaners are busy.

Vic: It's a great problem to have, and it will happen. This is the nature of the business. You'll reach a point where you don't have enough cleaners, and then you'll remember, oh wait, I need to hire one to two cleaners a month and take two to three bookings a day. You guys, I'm so proud of you.

Jake: I'm proud of us.

Vic: I'm proud of Kevin and Rohan for sharing it. Rohan a gazillion years ago sharing that Reddit post, he didn't need to do that, he found success, he could have done it by himself and never shared it. Instead he went, okay, I'm going to share this. And other people went, oh man, that guy's right.

The magic of the internet, we've never met in person. So I'm so proud of you, and thank you for sharing with us, and for taking the leap on strangers you met on YouTube.

Emmy: Thank you.

Jake: Thank you.