How John & Layla's Cleaning Company Made $450K In One Year

Vic: I've hit record, so we're good to get going. John, your name on the screen says Layla, but that's your wife, who is dealing with the baby right now. I'd love to get started, I want to know all about your backstory. I know you guys hit 450K after your first year, which is mind-blowing to me, and I'm so excited to learn how you did that.

You beat us on revenue, so I'm excited to have you beat us again this year and then teach us what you've learned. Thank you for being here.

John: I appreciate you having me.

Vic: So first, where did you get your start? You're in Austin, Texas, you have your cleaning company, but where were you a couple years ago before you started this?

John: A couple years ago we were in Santa Monica, California, that's where we met, in a completely different industry. I'm a trained chef by trade, and my wife is in the film industry, which means she's also a server, and that's how we met, working together. Her family lives here in Austin, so when we got pregnant and knew we'd be moving out here, that's how we made our trek to Austin, driving in with the U-Haul across the states, bringing your own bed sheets and staying in hotel rooms, pre-vaccine.

Vic: That makes so much sense, because your restaurant would have been shut down, you'd have had to look at your life and go, what am I doing, do I want to keep doing this, you and everyone else who worked in the restaurant industry during Covid. So is that what led you to start a cleaning company?

John: Actually no. When we moved out here I stayed in the restaurant industry, and we had our first child, our son Jamie, he's three now. The restaurant hours are brutal, nights, weekends, holidays, you're working when everyone else is off. I got a week of paternity leave when my son was born, and then after that I literally missed his first year of life.

My wife and I have been together 12 years now, and we always knew that wasn't the life we wanted. I've opened businesses in the past that were okay, but we knew that wasn't it. Luckily I got fired, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me. So we were like, let's take some time, do some research, figure it out.

We took six months and stumbled upon home cleaning. That's why we're here, I got fired from the corporate world.

Vic: So why cleaning?

John: We wanted to figure out what we wanted our life to be like five years from now, and then work our way back. What industry can we be in that provides enough income, and passive-ish enough income, that we can travel, be anywhere in the world, and still run it remotely? We looked into a lot of home service businesses, buying a pool cleaning business, vending machines, a bunch of different industries. My wife saw this tweet from Rohan about the whole Reddit thread on owning your own cleaning business.

We started diving in and figured, what could be worse, we could do it, and if something doesn't happen, we either close the business down or I end up cleaning homes myself. At the end of the day we could pay our bills, so it was a pretty low-risk move.

Vic: Because the investment when you initially start is under a couple of grand. You're not buying supplies, you're working with independent contractors who have their own supplies, you're just paying for your software, your phone line, your insurance.

John: Exactly. We had a one-year-old and were pregnant with our second, and that baby was four months from coming, and we had no income. It was a really scary time to make that kind of leap, but that sense of urgency, that I've got another mouth on the way, really fueled a lot of our success.

Vic: I think we should dive deep into how you reached 450K in a year. Rohan has been teaching this stuff for years, and I can tell you as one of the coaches now in Cleaning Company Blueprint, there are a lot of people who reach these big numbers, and a lot who don't. What do you think the difference is between you and Layla, or me and Jen, and people who don't do exceptionally well?

John: I'll be frank. A lot about the industry of opening your own home cleaning business is kind of being sold to people that it's this passive, easy thing to do. Set it and forget it, build a website, hire some contractors, hire a VA, and that's it. My experience couldn't be further from the truth.

I've worked harder this last year than I ever did working for corporate. It wasn't 10 hours a week, it was 60 hours a week. Your phone rings, you're at family functions, it's your son's birthday, and OpenPhone rings and it's an LSA call and I'm stepping outside to answer it. It's a grind, and you really do have to put a lot of effort into it.

Getting down to basics as far as customer service, putting the customer first, for us it was more than just the clean, we wanted a really well-rounded, positive, hospitable experience, and my wife and I coming from the restaurant industry, that was really important to us.

Vic: Really good point, because a lot of people who struggle have exactly that. They think it's set it and forget it, this is a remote gig, be on the beach chilling while your virtual assistants do everything. Rich has a question. Rich, go for it.

Rich: Hey, thanks, John. You're talking about working 60 hours a week, and I'm right where Vic was saying, I'm on the struggle bus and fighting hard. I think a big part of it is being hungry. I'm curious, when you say 60 hours a week, back-of-the-napkin math, where are you putting most of your time? Is it like 40% goes to ads, 60% to customer service? What's your average day or week like, if you don't mind me asking?

John: Great question. In the very beginning, 80% of my effort went to sales, prospecting, cold calling. When I started a year ago, it was really painted to me that LSA was this gold mine, sit back, the phone's going to ring off the hook, it's like printing money. That's literally a quote from someone that got me into this industry, and that wasn't my experience.

I know a lot of people in this industry where the phone's just not ringing. So 80% of my time in the first year was sales, and then the next 10 or 15% was, once I got customers, doing everything we could to make the best offer possible and nurture those relationships to make sure those customers remained happy. One of the things about the cleaning industry is we are a commodity service. If your customers don't love you, and they get an ad from a competitor who's five bucks cheaper, you're gone.

So we have birthdays down from all of our clients, we send a happy birthday, a $5 Starbucks gift card to their house with a handwritten letter from my wife. We really personalized it, and I think that's what set us apart from a lot of that cookie-cutter competition.

Vic: Let's talk about the sales you generated. What's the percentage of recurring clients you have now versus one-time? Because a lot of what we talk about in Cleaning Company Blueprint is getting to the level where you have good recurring clients.

John: Right now it's about 60-40 recurring to one-time. It wasn't that way for the longest time. The big turning point was in October. We started in January of 2023, so month 10, in October, we only had 10,000 in recurring, and we were about 40 to 45,000 a month in revenue. Since October we've really doubled down and focused on recurring, so in the last four months we're now at 24 in recurring.

We've more than doubled our recurring revenue in four months, and that's our focus moving forward.

Vic: And that will reduce how much work you have to do. That's the magic, that's why your first year you spend so much time and energy getting those first clients and then retaining them. Okay, Rich, go for it.

Rich: Two follow-up questions if you don't mind. The fact that you've drilled into the recurring revenue model is brilliant. How do you do that, how do you attack that group? And when you talk about 80% outreach and calls, were you calling homeowners, organizations? I don't mind picking up the phone, I just feel a little like, who should I be calling, if that makes sense.

John: Great question. The first thing I'd tell you to do is identify your target avatar, figure out who you're going after, who is your ideal client. My wife and I have two young children, three and 10 months old. We own a home, we own a cleaning business, and our house is a wreck. So we sympathize with working parents and people with young kids.

At the end of the day, the kids are finally in bed, it's 8:00, my wife and I sit down and we feel like we've gone to war every day. Who has time to clean? That's the community we wanted to go after, so we started targeting our ads and our content toward moms over 100k in income who could afford more of a luxury service. The thing about cleaning is people don't put a value on it, because everyone knows how to push a vacuum, the question is do you want to do it or pay someone else.

Your toilet breaks, you need a plumber, that's a little more important. So finding that target avatar and really drilling down, the riches are in the niches. You don't have to do residential, I know people in commercial doing five-plus million a year. There's a lot of money in a lot of different areas. Just drill down, find out what you're passionate about, what part of the community you want to serve, and who your target customer is.

Vic: When you're able to say, young parents of young children who earn at least 100k a year, you're really talking about Google ads, because that's the only place you can narrow those factors down, unless you're doing Facebook advertising.

John: We're not doing Facebook ads yet, that's around the corner, but yeah, we're doing Google ads. All of our ads, metatags, descriptions, everything is geared toward families. One of the things we had to do was remove value shoppers or bargain hunters.

Vic: There are different rules in Canada than in the US when it comes to advertising and privacy laws, so there are a few things you can do in America that we can't do as easily, but certainly the demographic targeting is the way to go. We call those tire kickers down here.

Rich: That's great. Awesome, thank you.

Vic: You're welcome, Rich. So you're at 60% recurring, 40% one-time. The recurrings just keep going, and the 40% adds on. You mentioned before we hit record that you just reached another marker you set for this month. What was that?

John: With the idea of focusing on recurrings, we wanted to hit six recurring new clients a month, that was our goal. In the beginning it was all about, I wanted to sell $1,000 a day in cleans, that was the goal for the first year, and if I didn't hit $1,000 I got bummed out. For everybody new to this, there will be days where the phone doesn't ring and I freak out and my wife tells me to calm down, and sure enough two days later 10 calls come in. It ebbs and flows, the manic-depressiveness of being an entrepreneur.

Now that we're focusing on recurring, our goal was to hit six recurring clients per month, and it's the 5th of February, and we just hit our sixth already. So we're bumping that target up to 10 per month now, because we can.

Vic: I love that. And January was your best month yet, which is totally not what anybody in this space is saying. What was your total revenue in January?

John: In January we did 53,000.

Vic: So what's the next goal?

John: The next goal is 80K a month, that's what we're really trying to go after, hit the million dollars a year. But I'm going to give a little caveat to what I said to Rich about drilling down with your target avatar, because while that's really important, diversification is important too. Don't close yourself off to other target markets. We got a great opportunity to work with a nonprofit organization here in Austin that works with parks and rec and the city, and they turn community centers and recreational centers into shelters for the homeless when it drops below freezing, so people have a warm place to sleep.

That organization needs those rec centers cleaned to turn back over to the city the next day. That's why we did so well in January, it was really cold, and I billed $12,000 just in that one sector.

Vic: How did they find you?

John: They found me on LSA.

Vic: And sorry for those watching, LSA is Google Local Services Ads, which a lot of people use in the cleaning industry. So they saw your ad, saw Austin cleaning company, and called you. Technically it's a commercial client, but it came through a residential ad.

John: Correct.

Vic: One of the questions a lot of people have in our community is how do you get commercial contracts. Anybody who gets them, like we do, says the same thing, they found me and then I said yes. The other way to do that, and I'll do a call on this eventually, is to actually bid on government contracts. There's a lot of support for small businesses, for BIPOC, women, queer folks, to be able to bid.

That's a whole other beast and it's the long game, it's government, so it's slow, but it's a good way to pad your monthly revenues. Do you know your percentage of commercial versus residential now?

John: Probably not. We're still like 95% residential. January was a little bit of a fluke, but yeah, still 95% residential.

Vic: We're about the same, probably 90 to 95% residential. All of our commercial clients found us just by looking for the best cleaning company near them and calling us, it's as simple as that.

John: Absolutely. I've got a great relationship with a construction company that has a contract remodeling all of the convenience stores here in Texas, in Austin and San Antonio. When they're done remodeling they call me and we do a construction cleanup, a couple grand a month. These clients are really important, but it's important that you nurture and foster the relationship, back to customer service. You can't set it and forget it, they'll find someone else, they won't have the loyalty to you.

Vic: This is maybe going to sound naive, but I really believe, especially post-pandemic, one of the positive things to come out of it is people starting to focus on and genuinely care about local businesses. Austin's whole thing is keep Austin weird, which is about those small local businesses. When it comes to the cleaning industry, there's Merry Maids and Molly Maids, the big guys, even though those are actually franchises, so they are small local businesses, but your average person on Google doesn't know that, they just see a nationally recognized brand. So if it's that versus John and Layla, this little cleaning company in Austin with over 100 five-star reviews, they're probably going to choose yours, and that's what's exciting to me.

John: It happens all the time. A lot of our clients, when they find out we're local, it's like, oh, I was looking for someone local, great, I'm glad to support locally. That's a motivator for a lot of our clients.

Vic: The downside of that is when people have a local business and hear, oh, I can hire a VA to do this. We've done exactly this, we had two full-time virtual assistants and I love them, but the downside was they're not actually local. Even if their accents sounded like they were in Canada, they don't know the geography, they can't. When somebody locally calls and says something specific to your area, you know it, and immediately you're able to turn them into a good, loyal, reliable client.

John: We did the VA thing as well, we let them go, and at the moment we're not planning on doing another VA.

Vic: And you shouldn't need to if you keep getting your recurring up, because then you don't need to do the lead generation you had to do your first year. So let's talk about your next big goal. We've talked about the small goals, adding 10 recurring clients a month. What's the big goal for this company and your lives?

John: The next big goal for the company is 750K this year, so year two, 750, with one month of vacation, that's important to us. And then year three, 2025 for us, will be 1.5 million and three months of vacation. That's what we were really designing, our lives, we wanted to be able to travel for three months a year with our kids. A lot of people think you need a lot more money than you actually do.

I think if you hit 1.5 you can live any life you want.

Vic: I would agree with that. So what have you screwed up on? What were your mistakes? I know there's always lots.

John: A laundry list. First off, and I don't want to paint a bleak picture, but hiring is absolutely critical. You're going to interview a hundred people to find one really good one. I'm now at the point where I finally have a group of cleaners I'm fairly confident in, that I don't need to check in on throughout the day.

People are clocking in, clocking out, taking their photos, following the checklist. That's something to point out, I know people who don't use checklists and systems, and I'm a big advocate for checklists, all my cleaners fill one out on every single clean so we don't miss things. But part of the pains of growing so quickly is we were beholden to our crews, because I couldn't afford to let people go, because if I did, I couldn't fill the work, and I had people I knew were terrible and a threat to the business. There were a few episodes that really put our business in danger.

I had a cleaner get arrested at a client's house.

Vic: At the house? Oh my gosh.

John: At the house. We had a client who noticed their wallet was missing during a clean, and it was just him and the cleaner in the home, so they called the police. I got a call from the client saying, hey, do you want to know where your cleaner is. I drove out to the client's house myself, replaced the money he said was in the wallet, I don't even know if that's true or not, doesn't matter.

There's nothing worse you could possibly get than a review that says your cleaner steals. My big one, which I'm a little proud of by the way we handled it, I had a cleaner lift a $30,000 engagement ring from a recurring client's house. And the best part is we got the ring back and gave it back, and they are still recurring clients six months later, because of how hard we worked to get the ring and how seriously we took it. So show up for your people, show up for your clients, go above and beyond, and they'll be lifelong fans.

Vic: Did you run police checks on your cleaners before hiring?

John: Absolutely. And these were two different cleaners that both stole.

Vic: That is really unfortunate.

John: The client was like, I guess lesson learned, don't leave a $30,000 engagement ring lying around when you're not there. We were cleaning the home while they were at work, but still, if you're in your own home, you should be able to trust that your things are safe. There have been some doozies, but luckily we got out unscathed.

Vic: Having heard those stories, anyone else probably would have quit at that point. So what keeps you going?

John: Honestly, my kids, my wife, we're a fierce team. When I get low she props me up and vice versa. Back to it, if anybody tells you this game is easy, it's not, but the way to win is you just never quit. There's a lot of competition out there, but there are so many people who aren't taking it seriously, and the second they hit their first wall, they quit.

So there's a lot of competition, but if you're doing the right things day in and day out, you will win.

Vic: And if you care. You mentioned you're finally at the point where you've got a good crew you can trust, and that's where we're at with ours, it's just so different now. We started July 2021, and that first year I didn't put in 60 hours, that's too much for me, but I was a good solid at my computer, answering every call, returning every email and text. In all honesty, a lot of what I was doing I can now look back on and go, I didn't really need to do that, but I needed to do it for me, so I felt like I was all in.

Today, you mentioned you'll have days where the phone doesn't ring, today was a day the phone didn't ring, and my work now is almost all mental, managing my own emotions, my reactions to stuff that goes wrong, because it's inevitable something will go wrong, and that's okay. It's really more of a mental game, and it's not something people necessarily talk about when it comes to being successful, but to me it's the most important thing, so that when bad things happen I'm my best version of myself as a boss, on the phone for a client having a horrible day, for the cleaners.

John: Absolutely, that's half the battle. And having someone else check you, you're so lucky to have Layla. Tomorrow you'll get 10 calls.

Vic: In our business we always find Tuesdays are really busy, Mondays are chill, by Tuesday the moms are like, okay, I'm sick of this, get someone in here.

John: I don't handle anxiety very well, my genetics, and in that first year especially, when sales are low and that phone doesn't ring, I had plenty of freakout moments. You've just got to keep going. Alex Hormozi talks about it all the time, if you're not willing to play this game for the long haul without any indication of success, don't even start, you're wasting your time, because it's not an overnight thing. Anything that gets built that's huge takes a long time.

Vic: And to be fair, a long time for you guys was not a long time. One year, 450K. What's your profit margin on that, do you know?

John: We're 33% net.

Vic: So you're good. I love that. We're talking a year out, we're not talking, I think about anybody who's gone into other industries like film or wine. Wine takes five years to grow good quality grapes, so you can buy land and plant a vineyard, but you're not making wine for at least five years, and then you sell that first bottle and you still aren't making any money.

So I love looking at this industry and going, you can get in for just a couple of grand, and then hold and carry on and do great customer service, because that's what you're so good at, John, clearly, it's the customer service angle.

John: It's how you react to situations. I can't tell you how many clients we've turned around, clients where we didn't show up our first time on the job, we botched it, and they were going to be a recurring customer if they were happy, and we just didn't show up that day, or our cleaner didn't do a good job. I'm on the phone and I'm like, look, I totally get it, we screwed up, that's not what we guarantee, how about I come back out, we're going to reclean your home for free, no strings attached. I've gotten so many clients back that way.

Vic: One of the things, I don't know if you find this, having had that restaurant experience, and I've been in customer service my whole life, I swear I've been in sales in one capacity or another, what I found, and I wonder if this resonates, is that I have to reduce my standard of expectation so it's not as high. We know in this industry 2 to 5% will complain no matter what. So if you go back through your records, there are days where you feel like every single client is calling to complain and all your cleaners suck, but then at the end of the month you run your numbers and go, oh, we had less than 2% complain, but man, did I take them seriously. They are important, but they're not 98%.

Your 98% that are totally happy are really important too. Do you find you focus in on that 2% that are complaining?

John: I'm a little calcified now that I'm a year into it. I definitely did in the very beginning, someone complained, they threatened to go on Yelp, and I'm freaking out. Now I have the luxury of 115 five-star reviews on Google, so if I know a customer is being difficult and just trying to get their money back and I know we did a good job, I sent a good cleaner, I'm much more willing to stand my ground now and be like, fine, if that's the kind of person you want to be and you want to tear into me on the internet, go ahead, I've got so many reviews to back it up. But in the beginning I zoomed in on 2%, that's all I focused on, and I'm sure I left a lot on the table by not focusing on the 98%.

Vic: Have you had any negative reviews yet, any one stars that are brutal, and how do you respond?

John: I have three one stars, only one of them is real. One was a guy who wanted to be hired and I didn't hire him, so he gave me a one star and then got his friend to write one as well. Just so everyone knows, Google doesn't care, I submitted screenshots, his name, Indeed, the conversations, everything, and Google said, well, he didn't violate our policy, so the review stays. So I have two one stars that are false.

When you go back, you just write a response, hey Adam, I think maybe you got the wrong company, I'm not really sure, we don't have a customer under your name, but if you ever need a great quality clean, we'd be happy to help you out, just kind of deflect a little bit. The one real one star, we did a deep clean for a client who has unsealed limestone floors in his bathroom, why you would do that I have no idea, but he said, I only want you to use this cleaner, I'll supply it to your cleaners. So we did, and lo and behold, he sends me photos after saying we stained his limestone floors. My cleaners are like, that's not accurate, we used the cleaner he gave us.

After going back and forth for three months trying to help him, he basically says, well, I'm going to tear you a new one, and posted photos saying that's what we did. The only response you can do is, hey, we worked with you for months, we tried to help you fix something we didn't do, and you move on. It hasn't hurt business.

Vic: So don't freak out about every little thing that happens. Getting a couple of bad reviews isn't a bad thing, there's competition out there.

John: I've had a company we see on LSA, I'm sure you look at your competition and their reviews, and it had like 285 five-star reviews, perfect. And I'm like, there's no way those are real. So having a couple of reviews that are not great, or even better, reviews where they had a terrible first experience and then you went above and beyond and fixed it and they wrote a review about how you fixed it, nothing better than that. I got a four star because it was originally a one star and then I fixed it, and they came back and said, hey, I can't give a five because the first experience was terrible, but the second was awesome, so I'm giving it a four.

Vic: And you're using NiceJob integrated with your website, so it's automatically asking for reviews.

John: They're asking for reviews from only the people I want them to ask. I don't have it automatically turned on. Once we've connected with the customer afterwards and made sure they were really happy, we ask, are you good with us sending you a link for a review, and they say of course, and we know it's going to be a good review, then we invite them to the campaign.

Vic: Okay, Rich wants to know more about that. Rich, go for it.

Rich: When you talk about customer service, I'd love it, John, if you wouldn't mind talking about all the different touch points. Someone calls, what that process is like, then you get them onboarded, I'm assuming you contact them when the clean is done, maybe after you bill. What does that look like on your side? I totally get how you're making all these connections that deepen the relationship and make you more than just a commodity.

John: Great question. One of the things I don't think is talked about enough, and in full transparency, I took a course when I first started, and you get your sales script. One of the things people don't stress enough in the sales script, which works really well for me, just being in the hospitality industry, is finding a way to connect with that customer on a human level as quickly as possible in the call. If someone calls and says, hey, we need a clean, we're two working parents and I've got a three-year-old, it's instant, oh my God, I've got a three-year-old, misery loves company.

Or they talk about their dogs, and it's, oh, I have three dogs, I really do, I'm not making it up, I have three dogs and two cats, I totally understand, my house is a wreck. So finding a way to connect on a human-to-human level, you're no longer a stranger, they trust you a little more than just a cold call. Then find a way to weave into your sales script what sets you apart, why you're different, and have guarantees, I think that speaks volumes. We have a couple of guarantees at Swept Up.

We guarantee the service, if there's anything we miss or don't do well, we come back and fix it for free, as long as you bring it to our attention within 24 hours. The other thing, we were getting a lot of complaints, and Vic, you probably get this, someone calls, hey, I had a moving clean scheduled and they canceled on me last minute, can you come out? Customers complain that they get canceled on at the last second, especially for move-outs or a party or family coming into town, where canceling is catastrophic in their eyes. So we have a guarantee that if we cancel, we pay you a hundred bucks.

The reason we do that is because it never happens, and I can leave that in my sales script, we literally have a policy that if we cancel on you, we pay you $100, and I've only had to do that once in a year. That gives you a lot of credibility, that you're going to show up because you're putting your money where your mouth is.

Rich: My kids are a little older than yours, and we also have the dog, I totally get the nine o'clock at night, homework's done, and I haven't even eaten. Can that be something I mention, kind of concisely, that what makes us different is we understand and appreciate just how hectic lives are today and we want to help make yours a little easier? Is that enough, or are you talking about something more unique?

John: When I hear you say that, my initial gut is that's too formal. I would try to make it more candid, where if someone says something about their kid, you're like, totally get it, I didn't get to bed till 9:30 last night helping my kid with homework. They know you understand their pain just by you dropping in that little example. It's more of a conversation, friend to friend, rather than business trying to sell.

Vic: We overcomplicate it by saying even the word sales script that John mentioned, and my spidey sense is always, and yet I'm very good at sales, but as soon as someone says this is the script, you have to be more natural than that. You do have a script, you need to know the size of their house, how often they want it cleaned, do they have pets, are they expecting a deep clean, is it a move-in, move-out, those are the questions you need answered, but there isn't a set order, the order is dictated by the person calling you. So you can literally just have a conversation.

Rich: That's very cool, and it makes a ton of sense.

Vic: It's so chill, and the bar is so low, that's what's so fun. We always teach in the course to research your competition first, call 10 cleaning companies in your area and find out what they're doing, but it also shows you just how not intimidating this is, they're just regular people, and the person calling looking for a cleaning service, that's who they want on the other end. They don't want a salesperson to convert them, they want a human being that understands their needs.

John: Correct. Keep it conversational, and to your point, reiterate the problem, because when you do that they now believe you understand what you're trying to solve for them, so make sure you repeat that back. And to your point on the sales script, you've got to start somewhere, you want to make sure you have the appropriate questions answered, but when you get a year in, two years in, and you've done hundreds of calls, I don't have a script in front of me anymore. I've done it enough times where I can react, I can change things up based on the conversation I'm having.

Vic: All right, last five minutes. What advice would you give yourself today, now that you know what you know? If you could time travel, what would you tell your previous self on day one?

John: Don't say yes to every client, or every prospect. I've done that, and as you do it more, you'll get the red flags and you'll know, but you're so desperate to make that sale and get that customer that you take them on anyway. You're probably going to end up doing the job and they're probably going to complain and threaten a one-star review, so you'll give them all their money back anyway, because when you only have 10 reviews, you can't get a one star, that'll destroy you. So when you see the red flags, run, it's not worth it.

Vic: So what's a red flag? Give us some examples.

John: Someone calling me up and saying, hey, I've been through a dozen cleaning companies, they all suck, come help me. I'm like, no, run away as fast as I possibly can. If they start with, I've hired a bunch of cleaners and they all suck, this is not someone I'm going to make happy no matter what I do. And this didn't happen to me, but I know someone who had it, an 8,000-square-foot home, they wanted a recurring, and said they were getting it for 200 bucks and wanted to see if this person could price match it.

Well, number one, you're not getting it for $200. So just let customers go who shouldn't be customers, they're not good customers, they're not worth the hassle. I had a customer claim we threw away her glasses, worth 800, but she'd be willing to take a $400 refund, which was ironically the same price as the clean, and my cleaner is like, we didn't see any glasses, we didn't throw anything away. And then don't sweat all the small stuff.

I kept myself awake at night too much, especially my first year, I don't anymore, but my first year, so many times I'd be stressed out, and that comes back to my standards being so high. Just realize there's no such thing as a cleaning emergency, it's okay, it's not brain surgery, there's no one open on the table. And especially, our growth was so fast that we felt hamstrung by our cleaners and couldn't get rid of bad ones. When people show you they're not reliable, get rid of them, don't hold on because they're going to do it again and again.

Vic: So many times I wish I had listened to that advice for years, I should have gotten rid of people way faster than I did.

John: That's all my stress. Now that I have a crew that's awesome, we want to expand to three more cities this year, and I have the bandwidth to do it. I'm doing more sales than ever with no help, no VA, but I have less on my plate because I'm not having to micromanage everyone. Nor do they want to be micromanaged, they've got their good recurring clients, they just want you to pay on time, be nice, be courteous, and keep going.

Vic: That's so great. Congratulations, I'm so excited for you guys, to watch your journey and see you expand to other cities, and to learn from you, because I know I'm going to learn a lot. We've been trying to expand a number of ways, there is no road map for how that works, we're all just fumbling our way through it. Rich, do you have any other last-minute questions before we say goodbye to John?

Rich: No, this has been awesome. Thank you so much, John.

John: Thank you so much, Vic, this has been really helpful.

Vic: Thank you, John, really appreciate you taking the time.

John: Thanks so much, Vic, I really appreciate it. Rich, great questions, this was awesome.

Vic: And for everybody watching, if you enjoyed this and want to reach out to John or myself, please leave a comment or ask a question, we're happy to answer, and if you're interested in booking a call with one of us, just click the book a discovery call. Thanks, guys.

John: Thank you so much. Bye.