How Tommy Built a Cleaning Business While Working Full Time

Vic: Okay, welcome to Cleaning Company Blueprint. I'm Victoria and today we have Tommy from Cincinnati House Cleaning, and Tommy's going to share with us his experience starting his own cleaning company while working a full-time job. So Tommy, thanks for doing this.

Tommy: Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Vic: Yeah, anytime. So Tommy, let's go through your backstory. You have a full-time job. Tell us as much or as little as you feel comfortable telling, knowing that YouTube is an international audience.

Tommy: So I've worked in tech for the past 15 years. If you have an app on your phone I've been pretty much involved in helping build software just like those. Learned a ton, it's been an incredible experience. I've worked out on the west coast of the United States, in Silicon Valley, in Seattle, I currently reside in Cincinnati, Ohio.

But I just wanted a different challenge, something to take the skills that I've learned in the tech sector or building software for a living, and could I apply those to business building and start a business on my own. I'm sure we'll get into all the reasons why I decided to take this leap, but really it boils down to wanting to have a good learning experience and then also build something that I'm a little bit closer to on a day-to-day basis. So I get to talk with our customers on a more daily basis, I get to work with our cleaners and have a more meaningful impact at times, closer to the folks that I get to work with.

Vic: Right, and you've worked with some pretty large companies, I'll say that. You have a successful career, but ultimately time freedom is something that I know you and I talk a lot about, where we'll joke about me wanting to buy a sailboat and live the rest of my days traveling the world and owning my own time, and I know that's something that's really resonated with you. So let's talk a little bit about your day to day right now, because you work from, I'm assuming 9 to 5, or even 8 to 6, because in professional work, insane hours, right?

Tommy: Yeah, it can be busy at times. Normal hours are 9 to 5, but the company I work for is fully remote, so I work with folks all around the United States as well as around the world, so my hours can vary quite widely. But one of the reasons I wanted to start a cleaning company, or a service based business like this one, there were several criteria. One, I had to be able to do it remotely no matter where I was in the country or the world.

It needed to be something that didn't require a ton of capital up front, which cleaning fit that bill. It needed to be something that was repeatable, so if I open a cleaning business there's a lot of other businesses that are very similar to those. And then there needed to be little barrier to entry, so not a ton of licensing or regulations in terms of getting into starting your own cleaning business. So those all fit the criteria for the type of business I could start while still working a normal 9 to 5, because at the end of the day I still really do like what I do, I'm not planning to leave my current job or career anytime soon, but I needed something that fit around my schedule that I could also build at my own pace.

I needed something that I had control over, how quickly we grew and how much it could grow, as fast or as little depending on the time that I could invest into the business.

Vic: And I think that's exactly why I asked you in here, because your story is a little bit different than many of the others we feature on this channel, in that you've really controlled your growth. There's so many people that get into this because they need to grow fast, whether they've lost their job or something has happened, divorce, whatever, and so those folks push hard and fast. But your story is quite unique in that you're like, hey no, I want to control the growth, I don't want a 50k month today because that would be too much in terms of how much workload you would have.

Tommy: No, that's exactly it. I think it's great when folks start these businesses and they hit the ground running, they're fully committed, it's the only thing they're doing, their back is against the wall, they need that income and that revenue to support themselves and their families, and there's a lot of benefits to that. My situation was a little bit different in that, after working in building software and dealing with venture capitalists that give you money to build a business, force you to build a business very fast at very large scale. For example, the products that I'm in charge of building have millions of people use them every day, and we didn't start like that, we started with one or two users, but we had to grow quickly to have millions of people using our product, and that's a very high stress environment, takes a lot out of you at times.

I wanted to grow something where I had a little bit more control over the pace at which we grew, and I wanted to make the right decisions for the longer term benefit of the company, as opposed to making decisions that I might not want to make but I need to because I need the money right now.

Vic: Love that. So for anybody listening to this, Tommy's on Convert Labs, which is the software that we use. Our community is attached to Convert Labs, that's how we've all met each other. If you're interested in trying it, it's just Convertlabs.io, and that will give you 30 days free. I'm just throwing that in because I always forget to mention it, I'm really bad at actually mentioning that.

So when Tommy was mentioning about the startup cost being low, let's dive into that a little bit more. Can you reflect back, when did you start the company and how much did it cost you to start your company?

Tommy: It's a great question, this is actually a good story. I technically started my company, I would say middle of 2023, that's when I registered my original name. Of course, like anybody starting a business, you have reasons and excuses of why you don't really hit the ground running and you don't really start building the business, so no different than anybody else. But I officially, I don't want to say pen to paper, but I really got serious about it in December of 2023, and we officially, I would say I started January 1 of this year, 2024.

In terms of startup costs, this is one of my favorite topics. I think the barrier to starting a business today is pretty much close to zero. You can come up with an idea on a Sunday and you can have that business up and running on Monday, legally, with all the tools that are available to you. I had actually at one point thought about buying vending machines and starting a vending machine business, long story short I came across Convert Labs, and going through that process and building software and knowing a lot about various different tools, I was really impressed with the ease of use.

It was fairly affordable to get started, up and running with all the features and functions that are available, and so to me that was a no-brainer. I actually don't know exactly what Convert Labs costs per month, but let's just call it 197.

Vic: 197 though.

Tommy: Yeah, I would have to use probably 10 different tools to get what I get out of Convert Labs, so I just decided to use one tool that did a lot of the things I needed it to do. And then on top of Convert Labs, I actually have it in a spreadsheet, I do spend around $550 on total software cost, but that includes everything from insurance, that includes, I use OpenPhone for communicating with my cleaners and customers, I use QuickBooks for all of my accounting and paying my cleaners, which is a little bit different than other folks, there's a couple reasons why I did that, but I'm happy to share the full list of software, but it's roughly around $550. So I knew if I could get to $550 of operating profit margin I would break even, and I felt like that was 100% reasonable and a good goal to attain.

Vic: I'm just going to inject there and let you know that Jen and I spend only 700, maybe 750 a month now, and are averaging about 50k a month in revenue, so just for perspective. That continues, it doesn't matter, even though you're growing and your revenue is growing, your actual operating costs really can remain the same if you just follow the program, the steps, the blueprint.

Tommy: Yeah, I think that's such a good point that you just made, the cost to operate the business remains roughly the same as you continue to scale and you get more and more customers. And it does take a little bit up front, it's not free to start the business, it did cost a little bit of money, it's not trivial, and you have to incorporate, so there's a little bit more expenses there in the beginning.

Vic: But you didn't have to buy vending machines.

Tommy: No, there's a lot of. Or let's say you do pressure washing, you have to buy pressure washers. So maybe you want to paint homes, but the insurance costs a lot more, there's more liability associated with it. So there was a whole suite of reasons why I chose cleaning to start.

Vic: Yeah, so great. And so you're in month nine approximately now. If we count January as your official go time, so around month nine. And so revenue wise, let's talk numbers, where you at?

Tommy: I should have looked this up right before, but this is also a good point, that they're going to find folks that are all about the numbers and know exactly where their business is at and how it's performing. Actually just got a large book of business the past week, which is great, but in terms of recurring revenue I think we're right around, we're between 2,700 and 3,000 a month.

Vic: And how much time is it taking you in your day?

Tommy: It depends on the day, obviously. If I have a week where it's mainly recurring customers, my time spent is less than an hour, honestly. We referenced last week we got several move in move out cleans or post construction cleans that were the right fit for the type of jobs we wanted to take, so we did take those on, so it probably spent three or four hours last week in terms of communication with the customer, making sure that I had all the right details about the properties, making sure we got the right cleaners assigned. I had to move some schedules around because one of our cleaners is getting married, so there was this scheduling complexity that came up.

So it goes in ebbs and flows, I would say on average it could be a couple hours a week, usually in my mornings before I start my normal 9 to 5, or it's in the evening. Usually schedule changes come in the morning or the evenings, and then I check in throughout the day when our cleanings are happening to make sure everything's going as planned.

Vic: That's it, so it's not an exceptional amount of time, but also not an exceptional amount of stress, which was a big thing for you, starting a business on your terms in your own time. And I know one thing that I really like about you Tommy is you're a really good student, you listened very well to the advice given to you by myself, Kevin, Rohan, Jen. One of the things that you paid attention to is the unwritten rule that if a potential client asks more than three questions, that person might not be the right fit for your business.

Tommy: Yes, we could talk about this for hours, we shouldn't, but there's a couple rules that you've given me and that by far is in the top three. Just for reference, there was a few weeks back where I actually didn't accept several cleans in one week, even though I really wanted to, because we hadn't had new bookings in several weeks, but the customers that had called asked dozens of questions. It was clear that they were either price shopping, were not going to be easy customers to work with for a variety of reasons, and I ended up not taking on those customers. I did work with other cleaners in the area that could potentially take on that work, and I was very transparent around why I ultimately didn't take those customers.

But that rule of thumb has saved me so many times, and the two times where I didn't follow it, it was a complete, I don't want to say disaster, but it was a headache and it wasn't worth it.

Vic: Yep. I had one today where I was like oh wait, how many questions, and I went through and I thought of you, because I was like what would Tommy do, he would say no. It's really hard to say no.

Tommy: It is hard, right, in the beginning because you're so excited. I remember those first two months, when you answer the phone and you have a potential to get a new customer and your adrenaline's running, pumping, and you just want to take on that customer. But over time you realize that you want to set your cleaners up to be successful, because you want to put them in the right environments, which you taught me, everything is about the cleaners and making sure that they're happy and that they can be successful. And then ultimately I don't want my life to turn into customer management 24/7.

Vic: No, nobody wants that, and you don't want to replace your day job with another day job.

Tommy: That's a lesson that I've really learned for myself. I did not get into this business to work 9, 10 hours a day. I got into this business so that I could pay cleaners more than they're used to getting paid, give them more respect than they're used to getting, more autonomy than they're used to getting, and at the same time treat myself the same way.

Vic: Yeah, because it's easy I think when you first start any business to focus on sales, like sales sales sales, and in this particular space you really shouldn't need to. If your cleaners are good you eventually shouldn't need to anyway, it takes time.

Tommy: I think there's a good point there. I agree with everything you just said, but what this business has actually taught me is that sales do really matter. I'm not particularly good at sales, I'm more introverted at my core, doesn't mean I can't be extroverted and function well in groups and hold a conversation. For instance, wearing the shirt that says Cincinnati House Cleaning, in the beginning I was nervous to wear this shirt because folks would come up to me and be like oh, do you own a cleaning company, and of course me being a little bit of an introverted self would feel awkward in those initial conversations.

But it really forced me to become comfortable talking about the thing that I own and operate, and that ultimately I'm providing value for someone, and it really helps me grow that way. So yes, sales are very important, and this helped get me out of my shell a little bit and learn how sales really do drive business. But you also see your point, if you grow the right business your reputation should help drive a lot of those sales in the long term.

Vic: Actually that brings me to a really good point, so two things. Number one, the name of your company, how did you come up with it, because I love it and you know why I love it, but let's tell the listeners. And number two, the decision to print t-shirts, because this was different. Or a shirt, is it a long sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt?

Tommy: This, it's just a workout shirt.

Vic: Yeah, so let's talk more about that, because that is unique to what you were doing within our community anyway, and it's worked really well for you. So first your name, how'd you come up with it?

Tommy: Yeah, so naming is very important. I didn't realize, there's all these things you learn when you start this that you don't realize how important they are. So my original name before Cincinnati House Cleaning was Cleaning Huz, so cleaning and h-u-z, a little twist, it was a very techy cool name, totally tech. Which, I won't go, we can talk about this, but you told me to keep things simple, and in order to keep things simple and also help from an online search or SEO perspective, having something with Cincinnati, so it should be your geography and the thing that you do, so Cincinnati and cleaning are two things that we do.

Our actual name is Cincinnati Premier House Cleaning. The reason for that is there's a couple other businesses that have similar names of Cincinnati house cleaning, so for legal reasons I didn't make my legal name Cincinnati House Cleaning, but our URL is cincinnatihousecleaning.com. No one had purchased that URL, I don't know why, it was a little bit more expensive but it wasn't outrageous, and so I took the advantage and purchased that right out of the gate. If you can get that anywhere that you are in the world, if you can get your location and your keywords, house cleaning, cleaning company, cleaning services, gold, and it will pay off so much in the long run.

Vic: In the beginning you won't be sure, and maybe you want to be creative and funky and come up with something, but trust us, that is the magic formula, it works very well with Google, which is where you need to be found so that people can book your services. So stupidly simple that nobody does it.

Tommy: Yeah, I think before I started the business I did a little bit of searching through the various tools on Google to understand what were the terms folks were searching for locally. House cleaning is one of the top ones, and Cincinnati is very well known for supporting businesses that are in Cincinnati, even more so than other geographies, so having Cincinnati in the name is actually very important to where I am. And I believe, I don't have the data to show this except for knowing all of these people within our community, I truly believe that post pandemic loads of us want to support our local businesses over franchises. So if there's an independent pizza shop that's called Cincinnati's Best Pizza, I'm going to call them over a Domino's.

I just think a lot of us made those kind of decisions where we went, hey, we want to support our local community businesses.

Vic: The sad thing is franchises are often actually owned by local folks, they employ local people, but they seem like big businesses so we go for the small guys. And that is, for the first time in my life anyway, that I've seen this shift towards local small businesses.

Tommy: Totally agree.

Vic: So great, so let's talk about your shirt. So cincinnatihousecleaning.com is right there on your shirt, introvert, what are you doing?

Tommy: So before I actually had the shirt I had sweatshirts. On Saturdays, as I was building the business, I would go to a local coffee shop and make sure that I was planned for the upcoming week, maybe research things around SEO or whatnot that I didn't fully understand and was getting better at. I would wear a sweatshirt that said cincinnatihousecleaning.com and I would sit at a coffee shop and get my work done, and I know I've gotten two customers, one recurring, one was just a one off, through just wearing a sweatshirt. So with that one customer it already paid for the cost of purchasing them, and I'll have them for at least, well until they get holes in them, so again it was an investment that I knew would just pay off with one clean.

And then this is going to sound very cliche, but I recently learned how to play pickleball, and so I go and play random leagues around this city and I will just wear, this is just a normal workout shirt, but I just got workout shirts, five of them, that say cincinnatihousecleaning.com. And even this past Saturday I was literally walking to go play and a woman stopped me and she said my daughter needs her house cleaned, do you have a card. So people actually do read the things that are on your shirt, they will stop you, they will ask you questions, and it's been one of those simple things instead of paying exorbitant amounts of money for Google local service ads or Google ads in general or ads on any platform. This was a simple way that I could get good quality leads by just wearing it and walking around.

Vic: That's so smart, and it's so funny because so many times I've told people don't spend money on branded clothing for your cleaners, but I love your approach, which is it's for you as the business owner out and about, encouraging people to talk to you. How much did it cost you?

Tommy: I think six of these, these were a little bit more because they're higher quality Adidas shirts, I think these were for five of them, I think it was right around 200 or 225, which might sound expensive but I will have these for at least five years, and I've already got one clean from them that paid for that. And I'm sure our cleaners, if we were to buy them shirts like that that were nice high quality, they would wear them so that they didn't have to think about what they had to wear to work, we just didn't want to ever go the uniform route because we value them having autonomy, and I don't care what they wear.

Tommy: It's actually a good point, so our cleaners don't wear branded Cincinnati House Cleaning attire. One of the reasons is they don't just work for my company, some of them have their own customers, some of them work for another company or two as well, which gives them a ton of flexibility over their time. We don't require cleaners to wear shirts. And then I think on top of it, it's interesting, if you're attracting customers that want cleaners that are wearing branded shirts, that's a very particular type of customer that may or may not be the type of customer that you're going after.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, there's just pros and cons to that, so that's one of the reasons we don't require cleaners to wear shirts.

Vic: I mean the reality is they usually are wearing yoga pants and a t-shirt, or shorts and a t-shirt, they have to be comfortable in what they're working in. So yeah, I totally agree. I know you are really good at setting goals, so let's talk through your goal setting, in terms of your personal goals for the company and how you track if you've reached them or not.

Tommy: Yeah, this is a good topic. Coming from a software tech background, they're very metric data driven, and so of course it has been built into how I operate. But my goals in the beginning sound actually very simple, they're very attainable, but they get more challenging and difficult as the years go on. So my goals for year one, these are going to sound very simple, it was 12 recurring customers, my goal was to get 24 online Google reviews, and it's hard to measure this, but learn what I don't know about cleaning.

You come into starting a business and you have all these assumptions about how it's actually going to work, and then you actually start doing the business and you realize that you were wrong about 99% of things. And I would say we already have more than 12 recurring customers, we will reach most likely 12 or 24 reviews by the end of the year, and I have undoubtedly learned more about cleaning than I ever thought I would learn, or more just about starting a business and the fundamentals of business building. But beyond just those first year goals, my goal was to get the company up and running in year one and then double it every year for the next six, eight years. So it sounds really simple in the beginning, but if you go from 12 to 24 to 48 to 96, and once you get to year five or six you have a very large substantial business.

Exponential growth is hard to wrap your head around at times, but if you can stay consistent and do those consistent things over a long period of time you can be pretty successful.

Vic: And I honestly think you will be much more successful by setting those milestones than someone like myself, who, we used to have that same thing where it was like we're going to double every year, and then actually life gets interesting and other things. My goal has changed in that I'd rather spend my time teaching others how to grow theirs, and we're totally happy with where ours is right now. So it's a funny thing but for you, absolutely, because in five or six years if you have, how many recurring clients would that be, let's say in five years?

Tommy: It would be almost 200.

Vic: Over 100, yeah okay so yeah, 200. Yeah, then you would have to hire somebody if you're not going to be managing it. Although I do manage, we have almost 100 recurring clients right now and I do manage to do all of this YouTube stuff and go to yoga every day and have a life outside of the cleaning company.

Tommy: It still is more time than I would expect you to be able to manage with a 9 to 5 job. So my goal, another, I want to say this isn't really a goal per se, but something I really wanted to learn was, so I'm running the business remotely, I don't do any of the cleaning myself. I think a lot of folks will start a business but they're running the business but also they are the business, and there's nothing wrong with that to start, but I actually have not cleaned a single home since starting the business. My goal and my job is to hire really high quality professional cleaners that are exceptional at their job and have them tell me and show me how a home should be cleaned the right way, which is really hard to do in the beginning because you don't have as much control over that.

And then ultimately as I grow this business I won't be able to handle all of the scheduling, rescheduling, the daily operations of the business, and at some point I will have to hire an operator to help me along with that, what that looks like I don't know yet, but that will be another thing that I will have to figure out.

Vic: So how do you leverage, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but how do you leverage folks that are working for you or labor to capitalize on your time, so it's a one to many ratio?

Tommy: Yeah, you got it.

Vic: And there is no magic answer to how to do it, how to scale. I suspect you'll be more like us, where you'll probably control that rather than taking on too many one time clients just for money. The focus for your company and our company has always been recurring clients, and knowing that an 80/20 rule is kind of the magic rule for life really. If you can have 80% of your clients be recurring, then 20% of the time you're dealing with people that you need to hold their hands a lot more and it's just a lot more work, so that's okay, but it only brings in 20% of the revenue.

So you focus your energy and attention and mindset on the 80% that's actually bringing in a lot more revenue over time. Quality customer service, quality cleaners, quality treatment of your cleaners just means people stay with you longer. And the other thing that I know you do is you have real Google reviews, you didn't ask for fake reviews, right?

Tommy: No, not, yeah.

Vic: So going for a goal of 24, my goal is to reach 200 by January, we're at 173 and we're in year three, and they're all legit, and so you see different cleaners' names, you see a bunch of other people being mentioned, and it works really well.

Tommy: So we have cleaned friends' homes, and of course a few of them have left reviews, but I've never told them and I've never wanted to tell them what to write or how to write the review. And we just had one recently, it's our neighbor actually two houses down the street, he had never had his house cleaned before, so we cleaned his house, he signed up for a monthly recurring clean, but his review was so genuine because he talked about how having his house cleaned reduced his stress and anxiety when he comes home. And no one else had written a review that had mentioned cleaning actually made my life less stressful, and he actually truly meant it, so it wasn't just about oh great price or they arrived on time or whatever. Those are all great things, but he left a really authentic review, which is helpful.

Vic: My favorite reviews say exactly what we do, and it's always some customer who just really gets it, and that's it, like you are reducing the stress, especially for people that manage their households, have jobs, have other things going on in their lives. It's absolutely, we're outsourcing the stresses of our lives to someone else better at it who enjoys it, that's my favorite part, people we hire actually like doing this thing way more than I do.

Tommy: Yeah, and they take a lot of pride in it too.

Vic: And it's really exciting to see. How many cleaners do you have now, Tommy?

Tommy: So we only have, we have four cleaners, four contractors, we don't have any full-time employees. I would say the majority of our cleans are done by two of those cleaners, that's only because the two others, one of them has their own construction in the summer and landscaping, and the other one actually has their own business on the side. But we have a relationship where when we get busy I can tap into them if we need extra capacity or cleaners.

Vic: Perfect. That's an interesting thing to learn, as you grow, figuring out when you need to hire and when's the right time to hire, and there's no right or wrong answer to that.

Tommy: And what I found is if you treat your cleaners really well and you pay them well and you build your business and your operations around them, then ultimately you will attract and retain really good cleaners. I had a moment three months in where a cleaner had mentioned anecdotally, just through talking because they also clean my home, whenever you have a customer we're going to take your customer, because you pay us more and you treat us better than XYZ company, doesn't matter what they are. And so their time will free up and they will have more availability the better that you're able to get them high quality customers and you're treating them well, paying them on time, and you're honest and transparent. Transparency wins, honesty and being kind.

Vic: And sometimes I'll admit I use ChatGPT because sometimes I'm a little bit too blunt, and I've learned so much from it. I have the paid ChatGPT account, which is so much better than the generic one, and I don't advise anyone to use the generic because they can be terrible, but I've worked on my ChatGPT for a year now, it's very well programmed to speak in my voice. What I've learned from it is that sometimes I can be a little too blunt, and so it will always soften, and then I'll use that when I'm feeling particularly short, if I'm giving feedback to a cleaner or even feedback to a client. I have a cleaner right now that doesn't want to clean a certain client's home, and I don't just swap the cleaner out, I give a softer version of that feedback, because we're kind of like the intermediary between the two parties, right.

And I know you've really understood that, Tommy, because you treat yourself like a coach of the cleaners and likewise the clients, where you just want to have a great cleaner come into your home.

Tommy: That was something I had to learn, was providing feedback. I have an aversion to controversy or heated conversations, and of course I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, it's in my nature not to be the one to do that. And so providing feedback when a customer might have feedback that needs to be relayed back to a cleaner, that was and still is a challenge for me.

Vic: And it's, if it just comes from a place of caring and you're timely with it, honest, direct, but also friendly, and it comes from a good place, then it's a really good thing to learn how to do. And it is a really important part of having a successful cleaning company. There's a couple people in our community that I know really struggled to grow, and when you read their comments in the community you can see that they just kind of hang a little bit more negative, and that will come across in a million different ways. I know for me that's why I use the chat, because I'm like hey, help me, so that if I'm having a bad day I don't want that to be reflected on this person.

And I know it's a challenge, you have to be positive in delivering something negative and to do it without being patronizing or condescending, but supportive. So the way I frame it, I'll explain it here, is I always say to the cleaner, hey heads up, we got a complaint, just want you to know you're just like everyone else, we all get them, okay, so before I give you the complaint just know every single cleaner gets complaints from clients at some point or another, I'm not upset, the client's not upset, but here's what they said. And then sometimes they'll automatically get their back up and kind of defend themselves, but if I frame it that way then they tend to be more likely to go, hey no problem, I'll go back tomorrow, just knowing that they're part of a team of people and that that's our policy, we always do a re-clean. And some clients are going to complain, and usually I'll say, hey this will probably take you less than an hour, I got to send you back in, you forgot the freezer, you cleaned the fridge but you forgot the freezer, and they're like oh my god I did, and it's like yeah, turns out you're human, I also make a lot of mistakes and apologize a lot for those mistakes.

And I think that sets the tone of, oh hey, turns out I'm human too, I screwed up, I forgot to blah blah blah. So I'm always like, I know I've worked for bosses in the past that never own up to their mistakes, have you ever had that, Tommy, it's brutal.

Tommy: Of course, right.

Vic: Isn't it the worst where you're like, dude just say sorry, just own up to it.

Tommy: I think one of the things that's also helpful, and I'm sure you do this as well, is I let our cleaners know when they get really positive feedback. So a customer might text me and provide feedback and they might be like it was incredible, I'll take a screenshot of it and just send it to the cleaner, so that they're constantly getting positive feedback so that when something negative does come by it's not just all negative. You're not only reaching out when things go bad, but you're constantly reaching out as things are going well, but then if something does happen it doesn't override everything.

Vic: Yeah, that's exactly it, and because you do get way more positives than negatives. We always say the rule is between 2 and 5% of people are going to complain in this industry, so that means you've got 95% of your client base happy or satisfied, and if you ask them they will give it to you, they will say why, and then you pass that on to the cleaner and it just makes them so happy. And even if they've heard it before from the same client, some clients text every time, they're so cute, they'll be like oh my god you did an amazing job, my house smells so good, I'm always like screen cap, exactly like you, and I forward that on and it just makes them feel good. Plus we give a $25 bonus every time they get a five star review, even if they're in a team, so if I send a team of two or three cleaners out that will be $50 to $75 out of our pocket, which I'd rather give to the cleaners than to Google ads right now, because we put a lot of money into advertising in the beginning, now we don't spend that money because our organic traffic is so great because of the cleaners, so we just pass that money on to them.

And there's nothing better than getting money you didn't expect to get.

Tommy: 100%. Yeah, we do $25 as well, which, most companies here do 10 and we wanted to be better than that. And in the beginning I was worried, I was like, you think payday might be the hard day because you have to take money out of your account, pay folks, and it is absolutely the best day, because we pay actually the same day just like you do, so paying our cleaners is an absolute joy, I have no problem doing it.

Vic: And your pricing model is I think the same as ours, right, you're paying out your cleaners 60%, you're taking 40% of the total and then that covers your business costs and then obviously your profits are in there.

Tommy: Exactly, yes.

Vic: Yeah, that's the Cleaning Company Blueprint, that's it right there.

Tommy: Yeah, I would say in the beginning, this might be helpful for folks starting out, is there were times in the beginning where let's call them family or friends that we did give some discounts to, but I paid our cleaners per our normal prices. So we may have not made money on that clean, but our cleaners got paid the normal 60% of what that would have been quoted on our website, and then if they got a review they got the bonus as well. And so we prioritized getting five star reviews, quality reviews, over making money in the immediate short term, because it's already starting to pay off, because we get most of our leads organically through Google search.

Vic: So that's amazing, you're in month nine and most of your searches are coming from organic.

Tommy: Most of them, yes.

Vic: That's incredible.

Tommy: Our Google ads, I've shut it off at this point.

Vic: Amazing.

Tommy: So I will turn it back on at another point, but for sure.

Vic: But that's a combination of your name being spot on, exactly what people are searching for on Google, they're searching Cincinnati house cleaning, boom, you're going to come up first. But then also your reviews, your reputation, even though you don't have that many. And that is also why last week you got more move in move outs or post construction, because the other companies in your location were probably full or turning those away, because that typically is what happens. Most cleaning companies after a couple years start to go, hey, move in move outs and post con are really hard, they're more difficult than any other kind of clean, they burn my cleaners out and they complain more, so most of us start saying we don't really want those anymore.

So then the new guys, that's what you guys get, because they'll call through all the companies until they find one that says yeah sure, and then eventually you'll be able to turn those away if you want to.

Tommy: The best cleans we get, and this is true for move in move outs or post construction, are those that book online without them calling you. So if you have a customer that books online and you didn't have to answer the phone, that means one, they're comfortable using technology, they're the type of customer that you want, they probably have had cleaning done before so they're used to how this system or process works, and we've had quite a number of those recently, but those are the best organic types of customers to get truly.

Vic: Yeah, and 90% of our clients now in year three come exactly that way. I didn't even answer the phone today once, I'm just thinking about that, I'm like holy cow I didn't have to answer the phone today. Usually I go to the gym and I'll come back and be like oh shoot, I missed like five phone calls or something, but today we didn't have any and we did still take a booking.

Tommy: And being in a space where the norm is that they have to phone to get a quote, to ask questions, to understand everything, and having a Convert Labs website it's truly all there, they're just templates, you just fill it in, you tweak your frequently asked questions and you tweak your pricing and you add in your location, but it's a no-brainer, and those are our kind of clients.

Vic: Totally agree.

Tommy: Yeah, I think something interesting to touch on is the recurring nature of the customers as well. Coming from software, companies that have a subscription model end up getting acquired or going public 10 to 20 times of a higher value than a company that doesn't have a subscription model, and so I wanted the sort of business that had a subscription nature to it, which cleaning does. And a good example of this is midsummer I had someone reach out, they had 20 plus Airbnbs, they were looking to have someone clean, I ended up turning that business down. This is going to sound crazy to a lot of folks just starting out, the reason being is I didn't have the cleaners to do those on an ad hoc basis based on when their Airbnbs needed to be cleaned, and it just wasn't where we were focused, so it was hard at the time but I ended up recommending they work with another company.

On the flip side of it there was another customer we were working with that we did a move out clean with previously, and unbeknownst to us they had moved in and purchased a large 3 unit complex across town, they lived in one of the units, they renovated the other two, long story short we now have all three units as a bi-weekly clean with three separate customers. So we're focused on the recurring nature of customers in business, as opposed to those one off cleans which require a lot more time and investment from you.

Vic: Yeah, and some people do try to make a business model case for Airbnbs being perfect, and that's fine, it's not what we coach, I'll tell you why. And Tommy you already know this, but for anybody listening, it's the simple fact that Airbnb cleans happen between 11 and 3, and most of our cleaners want to clean one house at 9 and one house at 1 and be done by 4, 5. And Airbnb is going to pay out, if they're willing to pay our premium prices which they're usually not, they almost always try to negotiate the rates down, the cleaner will maybe make 60 bucks and they've lost the 9 o'clock job, they've lost the 1 o'clock job, and they've worked in the middle of the day. That is a very particular type of cleaner that wants that gig, plus it's on random days, it's not actually recurring, it's not every Monday at 9, it's whenever the host takes bookings.

So it is truly as simple as that, and so we don't tend to get Airbnb bookings now, people will book them online, but in the beginning Tommy I made the mistake of accepting one client who said he had 30 properties for us to do the Airbnbs for, and that client was a manager of Airbnbs, so he kept trying to negotiate the rates down and he kept changing the dates and he kept calling a half an hour before his guests were to arrive to say oh my god my other cleaner didn't show, can you guys come, and it was just a total nightmare. And I ran the numbers and I went, wait, 80/20 rule, this guy is not even bringing in 20 and he's taking up 80% of my time, he's got to go, so we let that client go, somebody else can take that business. And by the way, anybody who wants that, it's wide open, because most cleaning companies are like ours, we're all like, hey, that doesn't make sense for us, go.

Tommy: I love that story. I think what you just described is what I meant by I wanted to learn what I didn't know about cleaning, because nine months ago if you would have said what's the difference between Airbnb cleaning and a monthly clean I wouldn't have given you an answer, but now I understand the nuances between a move in move out clean, a post construction clean, Airbnb cleaning, commercial cleaning which is a whole other world, and then you have your recurring types of customers. There's all these nuances that you don't understand when you start, which just takes time.

Vic: Yeah, it just takes time. And the community, I know Tommy you don't spend a ton of time in the community because you're busy with your other job, but there are people that log in the community every single day, hey guys this happened for me today, what are you doing, and it's become this social space for a lot of people, but also there's a lot of learning that happens in there. I've heard so many funny stories and interesting ideas, and then we really focus on what works, only passing along what actually works. Somebody recently said they're having huge success with Yelp, and most of us were like what, we heard that years ago, it's working for you now, and they're like absolutely I love it, like okay, made me kind of go, oh I should look at Yelp again.

Tommy: I think maybe you mentioned this, and I'm sure I've heard it other places too, is what works for you or what works for someone else might not work for you or might not work for them, because we all have very unique circumstances and goals and things we're trying to achieve. And it doesn't mean what someone else is doing can't work for them, but it might not work for you, it's just very dependent on your situation, what you're trying to achieve, where you live in the region and all sorts of things. And so there's no wrong way to run your business, there's just pros and cons to the things that you're trying to do, and there's certainly easier ways and harder ways I will say that. The harder way is to do it on your own, to reinvent the wheel, to design your own website, to try to create, like you didn't create your own software even though you probably know how to do that now.

I think if there's one piece of advice I would have for folks, even if I did it all over again, of course I'd do something slightly differently, is I think I could have started my business for a fraction of the cost than I did, I probably only would have needed Convert Labs and maybe one other tool, and I could have been up and running and gotten my first five reviews without any of the other headache of setting up some of the other systems and processes. You really don't need to over complicate in the beginning, you just need a customer, a way to accept their payments, and you need to hire cleaners.

Vic: And I totally agree, and I will say my first year I created a full-time job for myself in setting up this company, and it was my own need to feel important, my own need to feel busy, my own need to reinvent a bunch of wheels that didn't need to be reinvented. And now my best advice would be to go back and listen to the videos again, we've got the launch in 21 days playlist below. I still go back every once in a while where I get that itch to get busy, and luckily I have my sister, she'll call me out and say, hey Vic, you were just making work for yourself, stop, go work out, like okay.

Tommy: That was really hard for me to learn, in terms of always feeling like you need to be busier or optimizing something. For context I get paid for my normal job for optimizing things, like yes, if we change the color of a button the business might make 50 more million dollars a year, it sounds crazy. Changing the color of the button on my cleaning business means absolutely nothing, it will never make a difference. What the cleaning business has taught me is you have to get the fundamentals right, then you'll be off and running, and I had to teach myself not to keep myself busy or just do things because I was trying to prove something to myself or someone else.

Vic: Yeah, I love that you use the button example, because I took a course in my first year to learn exactly that, and here's what I learned, you copy whatever Amazon has done, because whatever Amazon has done is the most optimized it can be, and I even shared it in the community where I was like, look, it's this blue, it's this number, this one, and now I look back and I'm like it didn't matter at all, made absolutely no difference, but I felt important. And when you're transitioning from working, when you've worked so hard your whole life and now you own a business that is paying your bills, you actually have an enormous amount of time, because you're not doing the actual hard work in the business anymore, you've built it and now you just maintain it. And I wish that I'd known that from other business owners 20 years ago, because I've always thought they were just spinning their wheels, now I know they were just spinning their wheels.

Tommy: I would argue that if you don't have a spelling error on your website you're probably not moving fast enough, meaning you shouldn't overthink everything that you're pushing out there. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about what you're doing and quality doesn't matter, it all absolutely does, but at the end of the day what matters is that you have really good quality cleaners, you're matching them with the right customer, and you're just doing those fundamentals. My life is absolutely no different today than it was when I first started the business, the only thing that's different is my mindset and my bank account.

Vic: And Rohan talks about that in our very first video in our launch in 21 days series, it's all about mindset, and it's the one thing we come back to again and again, how many times have we talked about mindset, it's number one, and it's the thing that just takes time and perseverance and patience and talking to other people. I think it's 99% mental, really that's it, but getting this screwed on right and you're good to go. So okay, my last question, because we've gone over time and I knew we would, because you and I always have such great conversations, but can you tell us the horse story?

Tommy: I was just talking with this individual right before we got on. Long story, I'll keep it as short as possible, but my wife and I ran into an individual that had started a laundry delivery service, so same day laundry, delivery, pick up, wash, we bring it back to your house same day. He had just started the business, was just getting it off the ground, really driven individual, had worked on an oil field for five years before this, so clearly has the work ethic and the ability to put in the work to do the job. And talking with myself and my wife, my wife and I we have a horse, my wife rides and does dressage, and so horses have horse blankets, they need to be cleaned regularly because if they're not clean they might carry bacteria or disease that gets your horse sick.

So everyone that owns a horse has horse blankets, and my wife said, oh if you could somehow learn how to clean horse blankets you will make a killing in the local area, because no one is doing that here locally and it's a huge pain. And light bulbs went off in this individual's head, he had never been around horses, didn't know anything about horse blankets, but he asked dozens of questions that I just was extremely curious. Long story short, a month later this guy is now cleaning close to 150 horse blankets on a monthly basis at 35 bucks a pop, you can do the math. Now it's not as easy to clean horse blankets as it is just laundry, anyway he figured out all the nuances, he actually rented a barn from somebody, has a whole system in place on how he washes these horse blankets.

But I think the moral of the story is, and this is a quote from someone else that I follow online, but the biggest impact in your business won't be on your road map or won't be in your plan, meaning it doesn't mean don't have a plan, it doesn't mean that your idea won't come to life, but you will learn things along the way that will dramatically change how you do business or how your business operates, and you don't know about them yet. I'm sure there's things that you knew or you didn't know when you started that you now know that have fundamentally changed how you run your cleaning business.

Vic: Yeah, like maybe you didn't know you were going to be doing this when you originally started the cleaning business, which is remarkable, that's the cool thing.

Tommy: And so I just encourage folks to have an open mind to things they might learn along the way, and you'll know when you should double or triple down on those things, you just always have an open inquisitive mindset. At any point you could learn something that dramatically changes the trajectory of your business and how successful you'll be.

Vic: Love that so much. There's a woman in our community who told the story in one of our group calls, she got a phone call once where they asked her does she clean stadiums, and because she'd been coached by Kevin and Rohan, this was before my time, she knew the answer was yes, as simple as that, yeah we clean stadiums, really, okay cool, can you clean, and it was like a football stadium, and she's like yeah absolutely, how about I do a walkthrough with you, and so she did the fake it till you make it, now she only cleans stadiums, she has a complete niche market just cleaning stadiums. And so Jen and I added stadiums to our website, sure, we clean stadiums, there's only one stadium here in our small city so it's really silly that we did it, but I love it.

Tommy: Yeah, me too, I love this, I love the stories of any business that started as one thing and then either transformed into being something completely different that is now wildly successful, or they just learned something along the way that completely changed how they operate their business, and those are just the things that inspire me.

Vic: So me too. And I love, so to go back to this YouTube channel, Jen and I had no intention of ever being YouTubers, this was not in our game plan, but the more that I was talking to people the more I was like, people around the world need to know this. So if you've come this far, click that subscribe button, because it really will first help us but also you, because you're only getting the best information here. Thank you Tommy, this has been so good, I really appreciate you giving your time.

If people want to follow up, are you doing that thing we talked about?

Tommy: Yes I am, starting a newsletter where I want to talk about the authentic lessons that I've learned by starting this local small business, not the traditional of like you can earn $10,000 in a week in 30 days sort of newsletter, but these are just the raw thoughts and feelings and reactions that I've had going through this process. And I wanted to do something similar to what you're all doing with this channel, but something that's more in a written form that arrives in your inbox, something that you can read when you have time, that's not too long not too short but something that's valuable and meaningful. So I can put the link in when you post this video, figure out the best way to do it, so folks can subscribe, and we'd love to hear from folks if they find any value in what they're reading, if they just have feedback on something, also interested in hearing how folks are responding to what they're reading.

Vic: I love it, and I got to read a couple of Tommy's first posts just to check it out, and really well written, really good stuff in there, there's no fluff, you cut through it and you tell great stories, and I think it's going to do really well.

Tommy: I appreciate that. Another piece of advice that you gave me, and you were like, just do it, just start, you have to push publish.

Vic: And so yeah, just start it, so whether it's your cleaning company or something else you want to do, you just have to start and learn and iterate. Your stories are going to be really geared towards the folks that either want to start their business that haven't maybe taken that leap, or just taken that leap and you're in that really awkward first three month period, and you might feel like you're drowning, you might not feel like you know what you're doing, we have all been through that on this call. But just to help others through that, to have like a sounding board or just read something that'd be like, oh okay, so they've all gone through this and this is normal and this is a human reaction. That's always the feedback, is just hearing that someone else is struggling with this thing makes me feel better.

And our last group coaching call somebody said that they hadn't, they signed up for Convert Labs a year ago and they still hadn't launched, they were a bit embarrassed and ashamed by it, and then another person jumped in and was like oh my god I'm so glad you said that because I'm in the same boat, it took me six months from signing up to launch my business, and I wasn't doing anything during that six months, I just signed up and wasn't doing what I said I wanted to do. So yeah, thank you.

Tommy: Awesome, thank you.

Vic: Peace out everybody, thank you.