Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast E20: What to Do When Your Revenue Is Down (Hint: Don’t Panic)

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Introduction

Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast: “It’s not just the finances are off. There’s not enough money. We’re spending so much we’re not bringing in enough. How would more customers have helped us in this situation?”

From your first dollar to your first million, welcome to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast presented by ZenMaid. Join your host, Stephanie Pipkin, founder of Serene Clean as she shares proven tips, tricks and hard earned lessons. Whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale, get ready to discover how to build your own cleaning empire. Let’s roll up our sleeves and dive in.

Facing Fear and Shame in Business Decision Making

Stephanie: Hello everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie Pipkin, and it is bright and early on a Monday morning, and I want to talk about the mistakes that I was making last week in my cleaning business that I know every single one of you is going to face or is currently facing, and that is fear and shame related to our decision making processes as business owners.

This was something that was literally keeping me up in the middle of the night last week, Tuesday, because I was afraid. I want to go into the specifics of the situation that I am describing, and it is about the business finances. I know so many of you, just from speaking to a lot of you privately, feel this fear a lot, feel a lot of shame related to the business finances. I want to share how I was making mistakes related to it and how I worked through it, and give you guys kind of a framework of how to work through when you are letting your emotions just absolutely override any sense of logic or reason when it comes to your business.

As the owners, we have so much on our shoulders, and nobody else can really understand this feeling except other business owners, especially when you have built it from the ground up, as I know myself has, as I know so many of you guys have. Most of our listeners I know are either in the field or they’ve just been out of the field a couple years. And you guys built it from scratch, and the level of pride that we all feel is amazing because we built this, but there’s just so much pressure. The weight of the world feels like it’s on our shoulders sometimes, and that’s how I was feeling last week.

Understanding Seasonal Business Patterns

Let me jump into what was happening. Historically speaking, January and February are always going to be the slowest time of year for cleaning businesses, unless you guys are in perhaps like Florida, and you do a lot of vacation rentals then it happens kind of year round for you guys. So there are some caveats to that, but overarchingly, for reoccurring cleaning businesses in the residential space, this is going to be the slowest time of year for us.

Reason being, people are broke, people are trying to cut back on expenses, and they haven’t given up on that goal yet, and come crawling back to us, which is always the goal for us. So overall, just slower leads. People are less likely to bite while it’s tighter, all of the things, right?

That is normal, and that is to be expected. I didn’t see this necessarily in the first couple years of business, but now I’m seeing this pattern as we have grown and kind of established the rhythm, and not just chaos, if you will, of the beginning of the business. So I expect the revenue to be lower. I also expect the leads to be less. However, I was up in the middle of the night just worrying about finances because I had expected, or maybe unrealistically, that we would be higher than where we are, and especially as I was running the numbers every single week.

My Financial Management Process

So you guys understand kind of my financial management process, since I still do all of the finances for the business. That being said, April, my payroll administrator, she takes care of paying the credit card and doing all the bookkeeping related to the actual transactions. So that is something that I have delegated. But when it comes to looking at the numbers and running reports every single week and tracking all of that on a spreadsheet, I’m still doing that.

I run how much money came in, how much did we spend, looking at each category and seeing what each entailed, and then, most importantly for me, comparing that to last year of the same month. Something that I was doing incorrectly for a long time, or what I felt was incorrect, is looking only month to month, or kind of at this year. So what did we make last month? Okay, can we make that again?

I realized how inaccurate that was, based on not only the cyclical nature of our business, which has slower and busier seasons, but also things like payroll runs and number of weeks. Because if I have five payroll runs in a month, because some months have that, versus four in a month, which other months have that, the numbers are going to look way different. Though we are bringing in potentially more money those months, maybe, I’m actually running five payrolls, and so those months, I can 100% be sure that we’re probably going to make very little profit comparatively to the four payroll run months.

Comparing Financial Data Effectively

So now what I have gone to doing is looking at last year, now that we’ve had years in the business. If you guys are newer and you’re like, “I didn’t have last year, I’m new,” totally cool. Look at last month. Look at the past couple months. All good. It really should be on a more month to month basis. But as your business grows and you have more time under your belt, that’s when you can start looking, “What did we make last January? What did we make last February?” And so that’s what I’ve started doing when looking at the finances.

Especially week to week, I’ll compare, what did we make the same week last year? And literally, that’s what I’m doing each week, is comparing to see where we’re at. Because for me, the goal is maybe February wasn’t as good as August last year, because August is always our highest revenue month every single year. But is it better, or at least similar to last February, or is January similar to last January or better?

Growth Expectations and Goals

Being that I fully anticipate us to hit the highest revenue we’ve ever had this year, that is what I assume, just based off of all of the things that we have put into place last year, including getting some larger commercial accounts. We just got a new commercial account that we’ll be invoicing for the first time in March, that’s five times a week, and I think it’s between four and five grand. So in a year that’s a lot of money. Five times 12 is 60,000 extra dollars, and then on top of all of the other growth I expect us to have this year, because I do expect us to grow.

The goal is for us to hit 1.5 million this year. We have been flirting with that now for a couple years, and that is my financial goal for the business, and I think it is fully attainable, going off of last year’s metrics. I think that that is a reasonable goal. Usually I don’t set revenue goals before this year, or if I did, there was no basis behind it, I’d be like, “Oh, that’d be cool.” And this year is the first year that I’m saying, “This is what I want. I want us to hit that. I feel like we are at full capacity to do that, and we are able to accomplish this goal.”

So what you do then, obviously, is figure out what you need to make every single month, but knowing that we’re going to have slower months, January, February, being those, I don’t expect those months to be exactly equal, of course, and knowing that August is going to be higher.

The Financial Reality and Stress

All of this context to give you guys – January was about what I kind of expected, maybe a little bit lower. I had hoped to be five to 7000 more. And then February has just tanked, tanked in revenue, and it’s just so low. Again, looking at week to week, looking where the profit is, and I’m just like, “Oh my god, money’s just going out the door. We’re not bringing anything in.”

Literally, I’m up last week, thinking, “What is going on? Is it leads? Is it our close rates? Where? Why are we not making what I thought?” And just this sinking pit in my stomach of “What am I doing wrong? And why is this happening?” I’m the leader, and I’m at the helm of this ship, and I don’t know why this is happening, and it’s my job to know, and is my job to fix this problem, right?

Because I’ve got 28 people and all of their families relying on me to make sure the business finances are in order. And I know the pressure that you guys all feel, not only to feed yourself and your family, but to feed the families of the people who work for you. And I will say that as time has gone on, that weight only gets bigger. I must say, because you have more people, you have more people that are relying on you and looking at you.

Luckily, as my staff has grown, so has my ability to handle that pressure, and also just seeing consistently that things are going well, and really feeling safe in that. But then as soon as they don’t feel like they are where they need to be, all of that pressure and shame and embarrassment and feeling stupid came crashing down on me last week, and I was so stressed about it, and it was just this cloud of “Why is this happening? Why is this happening?”

Fear: A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep

Leila Hormozi, if you don’t know who she is, I love her and her husband. Their content is great. Leila says that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep, and this is exactly what it was last week. Also say hi to Lily. If you’re not watching, take a minute. There’s my border collie right there, snuffling around.

But anyway, fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. And what that means, or how I interpret that, at least, is looking back on last week. I had all of these thoughts just whizzing around and it was overwhelming. And then on top of, obviously, just being busy and the business running and things like that, but overarchingly, it’s “Oh my god, money, money, money, right? The money is not where it needs to be. It’s not where I thought it was going to be. We are not profitable.”

Which we’re never profitable in January and February, just to throw it out there, we’re never profitable. Usually, though, we have a nice, big old, sexy, chunky buffer of money sitting in savings to accommodate for that to basically live off of so the money starts actually rolling in profitably starting in March. March is usually our first profitable month. And typically it’s either we’re breaking even or somewhat under it, just depends what is happening. But usually we have that buffer. We didn’t.

The Unexpected Financial Hit

Because, if any of you guys recall, I had an unexpected $30,000 bill that came at us in December, and from a tax perspective, it made sense to pay that, because if you got a big bill, it’s better to pay it, so you’re not just paying taxes on that money at the end of the year. So we’re like, “Screw it. We’re gonna pay this. We’re not doing a payment plan. We’re gonna pay this.” And it was fine. We had the money because I’m a big proponent of having a lot of savings. And I save every single month. I put money away in savings for rainy days. And thank God, thank the Lord that I had that.

Things were still fine, but it was tighter than I like to be. And then going into January and February, usually, I’m like, “It’s fine, because we have this buffer to live off of if necessary.” And all of a sudden, a big 30 grand of that buffer was gone.

And I know a lot of you are thinking, “Oh, my God, these numbers,” but it’s all relative, right? So for you, maybe that’s $1,000 maybe that’s $2,000 of buffer or something that you’re building towards of rainy day, something goes wrong, etc. This is where we’re pulling from. So keep that in mind. Don’t compare that number. Just think about what that number would be for you. What would make you feel safe?

The Operations Meeting Revelation

So we don’t have that. And now all of a sudden, things are not where I expect them to be, and I’m just racking my brain. Why is this happening? And so going into my Wednesday operations meeting, I’m coming off of a sleepless night, pretty much, and stressing.

On Wednesday, I meet with my management team. That is going to be my three managers, and then Hannah, who is going to be our lead trainer, as well as our field development specialist. So she is highly involved in the cleaners. She’s not been exposed to a lot of the finances as of yet, where all of the other managers have access to our QuickBooks. It’s very transparent, all managers have access to that.

I come in and on our agenda is to revamp commercial, the commercial lead and supply process, basically like, who provides what? Does Serene Clean provide this? Does the facility provide this? And what that looks like? Because there’s a lot of confusion right now for our cleaners, there’s a lot of gray areas, and we just want to spell out specifically what the client provides. So that was on the agenda, because now, going forward, we’re trying to be a lot more focused in our operation meetings and saying, “This is what we’re working on, and don’t look at anything else. We’re working on this, and we’re figuring this out.”

We’re trying to be a lot more focused, because focus is definitely been one of my downsides, one of my weaknesses as an owner and a leader and a person. Thanks, ADHD, we’re good at hyper focusing, though, on things that are totally not relevant to whatever’s going on.

Sharing My Concerns with the Team

So we are supposed to do that. But I decided, because I had all of this stuff bubbling inside of me that I hadn’t shared, I’m gonna just say, “Just so you guys know, revenue is definitely not what I was expecting,” and kind of going into expenses, and basically sharing my fear. I dumped my fear on them and about the money. And then I was like, “But not really sure why this is happening, but just want you guys to know this is how I’m feeling.” And then jumped into an hour and a half of commercial supply management topics.

And my managers were just all like, they seemed very down and negative and I could sense the energy. The vibes were off, guys, the vibes were totally off. And so towards the end, I’m like, “Something going on with you guys. What’s going on?”

In my head, I’m thinking, “This is my burden to bear. This is my problem, and it’s my job to fix it and figure it out. Because I’m the owner and the money is my stress, not anybody else’s.” But obviously, it’s going to – I just dumped this on them with no solution and no information, just vagueness, and then tried to focus on something. And they’re like, “Well, we’re stressing out about this.”

We had just lost some commercial accounts due to price increasing and things like that. Because we crunched the numbers and saw we weren’t making enough, so we did a price increase, and they’re dropping. So that’s what happens sometimes. That decision had to be made, and I feel confident, all good there. And our cleaners hated cleaning there because it was walls and walls of mirrors, because it was a dance studio, beautiful facility, but just horrific to clean that many mirrors and studios.

Getting to the Root Cause

But they all start just sharing with me. They’re like, “Well, maybe we should figure out why this is happening. Maybe instead of focusing on the thing that was the plan, if you’re feeling this level of stress, that should be the priority, and we can all try to figure this out.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I guess.”

And I had known, and we had seen or just discussed, we’ve had so many call outs. We’ve had so many call outs. It feels like unheard of both in January and February. “When is this going to end?” For multiple reasons, a lot of sickness hit our area. And I don’t know if you guys experienced this in your area. Let me know if this was also your experience, either with clients canceling or with cleaners calling in because they’re sick or their kids are sick.

But at the same time, I’m thinking, “Well, this happens every January and February. This is the worst time for call outs for us.” And so in my mind, I’m thinking, “Yeah, that’s happening, but it can’t be that. It can’t be that.” Or I just kind of dismiss that as a reason, because I’m thinking, “Well, that always happens this time of year. It can’t have been this big of an impact.”

So my managers are like, “Well, maybe it’s this. Maybe this is the reason that we’re seeing these numbers.” And in my word vomiting, I was saying, “We need to up marketing. We need to do all this. We need more leads, leads, leads. We’re not bringing in enough.” So in my mind, I’m thinking, “That’s a leads problem, that’s an input problem,” which is exactly not the case, and we’ll get into that in a moment.

And so Crystal’s like, “Well, why don’t we see how many call outs we had? Why don’t we run a report and see exactly how much, and maybe it’s not that, but why don’t we eliminate that possibility before we just continue to be freaking out?” AKA, gather the data before you start losing your shit. What a concept. I’ve never thought of that before. I’ve never suggested you guys do that, and then me not listening to my own advice, right?

Gathering the Data

So we get off the call. I’m like, “Okay, yes, good plan. Let’s do that.” And then from there, we will make decisions on what needs to happen, which is always what should be the steps here, and we’ll get into that a little bit later.

So she runs the numbers, and she sends us the message. And I did update the numbers today before I started recording so it would be accurate, because when she ran this, it was through January 1 to February 16, and she ran the numbers, and I have updated them now to be through February.

Now that February is over, I want you guys to think how many hours of call outs did Stephanie have in January and February? And what would that be equivalent to in money, in revenue loss? So what we consider a call out is not a planned absence, where somebody requests time off. That’s “Today, I’m sick. I cannot make it.” And so where they would normally be available, they are not. That is what we are talking about. But then we’re also going to bring in planned absences, people requesting off.

The Staggering Numbers Revealed

Okay, from January 1 to February 28 we had 447 hours of call outs, 447 hours of people calling out. In that same time period, we had 335 hours requested off in advance that were approved because people have PTO they can use it, or if they need time off and it’s unpaid, we’re not going to tell them no for the most part.

So in total, from January 1 to February 28, 782.25 hours of potential worked chargeable hours that we could not charge for, that we could not book clients for. We had to cancel on clients, or have Hannah, who’s also on call, go do as much as she can. We also were training new staff members. That meant Hannah could not go fill in, because she’s also the trainer, right? So there’s limits to all of this.

Do you guys want to know what 782.25 hours of revenue at our typical hourly rate is? Currently, we book people, new clients at $55 an hour on average. I would say $50 an hour is probably our most typical residential rate. So if you do that math, 782.25 times 50, that comes out to $39,100 of lost potential revenue that we could have made in those months. And that would have been at full gears if we booked everybody in every single hour. So it’s probably more like $35,000.

But can you fathom my relief when I realized, “Oh, my God, that’s where it is. We had that many call outs. That’s the amount of money that we could have made, that we didn’t.” $35,000 – if we made that, that would have brought us well over last year in revenue.

The Power of Data in Decision Making

It’s amazing what having knowledge and having data will do for your confidence and for your stress management, and for your sense of control and for eradicating fear, because as soon as Crystal sent that, it was like, “There it is, there it is.” Does that get into problem solving mode? No, not yet, but it immediately turns off the freak out, right?

And all of a sudden I’m thinking logically again, because when I understand what the problem is, now I can solve the problem, or I can at least work towards or brainstorm around it, because now we’re specific. It’s not just “The finances are fucked up. There’s not enough money. We’re spending so much, we’re not bringing in enough.”

And as you noted earlier, where was my gut? Spend more on marketing, bring in more leads. How the f would more leads have helped us in this situation? How would more customers have helped us in this situation? It would have hurt us. We would have had to cancel on more clients. We would have had more people that we’d have to wait list. Not the worst thing in the world, and obviously, having leads is a good thing, but more to manage when we’re already managing all of these call outs.

The Administrative Burden of Call Outs

Also, my managers had to manage 447 hours of call outs. Do you know how much administrative labor that is, even with a bang ass scheduling software, even with the best automations and systems? Rearranging the schedule that much to accommodate and deciding who to cancel on. Do you know how stressful that is?

Of course, you know how stressful it is because you know what it’s like to rearrange, and if you don’t have a scheduling software, I cannot fathom even managing a quarter of this in Google Calendar or on pen and paper. I couldn’t – you can’t. I would have a mental breakdown, right? So, despite having ZenMaid, despite having really great systems in place, this is more than anybody could handle, and work effectively.

The sheer amount of waking up every day, “Who’s calling in? Well, seven of them are calling in today.” We’ve never seen anything like that. And she pulled the numbers from last year, and it was over double, over double the call outs from last year in that same time period.

The Power of Tracking and Information

So all of this information to say, and I know I’ve thrown a lot of numbers at you guys, and it may not feel relevant, but I promise you, you are afraid of something, and that fear could be solved by information and the fact that we have not been tracking our call outs for the past six years.

I’m such a tracker. I love tracking, and it gives me so much sense of control and confidence of knowing where my business is, because then I’m not going off of feelings. “I feel like we’re having a lot of complaints. I feel like we don’t have a lot of leads. I feel like we’re not closing very much.” All of those feelings can be solved by tracking, tracking what’s going on in your business through various softwares, manual, writing it down, whatever you need to do. All of these things can be solved by that. Yet, here was this blind spot.

I was pondering this on Friday with Katie, my customer relations manager, as we were meeting. And I’m thinking, “Why? Why is why have I not thought of this? Why have we not tracked this? This is crazy. Call outs have always been a thing for us, obviously. I mean, all of our staff are parents, and usually the ones who are having to stay home or handle that when their kids call out too. So it’s not just the cleaner themselves, it’s their families that are causing call outs.” Which we wouldn’t have it any other way. Family First is one of our core values. So this is a side effect of that somewhat.

When Pain Becomes a Catalyst

Katie and I came to the conclusion that the pain has never been high enough from this. We’ve never been in this exact situation where I do not feel comfortable financially because we don’t have this big buffer because of this anomaly of a situation, and we are having record level, unheard of level number of call outs. We’ve never had this situation that causes this pain.

And I guarantee all of you guys have simply not felt the pain in the situation yet enough to solve the problem, because until the pain is high enough, it can just be a mild discomfort, and we can push it off, and we can push it off, and we can push it off.

“We don’t have enough leads, but we’re doing okay. We’re getting word of mouth, so I don’t need to worry about getting reviews yet. Or the finances seem to be going well. We’re not bringing in that much. But I’m not worried about it. There’s always enough money in the checking account to pay the bills. I don’t need to do bookkeeping.”

Until something totally comes and just – car crash explosion sound effects, please – something totally comes and just rocks your world. And now that’s all of a sudden the pain. “I need to solve this right now.”

But the problem is, when you wait until that point, all of this, all of those feelings that I was describing, those come out of the woodworks and are just clouding your ability to see and problem solve, because you’re just so overwhelmed by a lot of things, and as I mentioned before, a lot of shame. I was ashamed that I didn’t have the answer right away. What is that? That’s Stephanie’s ego saying, “Stephanie, you’re the boss, so you should know it all.” And it’s like, no, come in with a humble attitude always and know that the people around you are smart and you have resources available to you.

Sharing and Problem-Solving

Many of you have nobody else. And so I’m going to give you guys some tactical ways to solve this problem, of course. But I brought up, “Maybe I shouldn’t share with you guys when I’m feeling this way,” and they’re like, “No, of course, share this because we need to problem solve. If there’s something keeping you up at night, we damn well need to solve it, because that doesn’t happen anymore. I sleep like a freaking baby most times, the business isn’t stressing me out. So if that’s happening, that is alarm bells, something’s going off, and we need to solve this right now, everything else gets pushed off. Because if Stephanie is not sleeping well because of something to do with the business, it’s a fucking problem.”

The mistake I made was not sharing and not getting off of the plan, meaning I was trying to be too rigid to “This is what we’re working on,” as if that matters. And that is so irrelevant compared to my stress. So really paying attention to what is relevant to you guys. What is the burning fire? I talk about burning fires all the time. Right now, this was the burning fire and it needed to be put out.

Finding Solutions

Okay, I’ve just gone on for what the problem is for half an hour, but when it comes to solutions now, it’s solution time. How are we going to solve this? How are we – why are they calling out like this? What can we do? And there’s only so much, or is this an anomaly, etc, and I do think that somewhat, this was totally a one off experience. We’re not going to experience this level of call outs, but there are things that we could put into place to incentivize better attendance, or de-incentivize calling out, right?

That could be in the form of bonuses, that could be in the form of a lot of things. You could come at this from multiple angles, from punishment versus reward, and really thinking about our culture. We’re not big on punishing for call outs. That does affect their raises, but truly, are we going to fire somebody for calling out a couple times in a month? No, we’ll never do that.

So keeping in mind what the reality of the situation is for our business, and the type of people that we hire are likely to call out at least once a month, right? That just because of their situation, and they make the best cleaners. So there’s a lot of discussion and decisions to be made related to that, but now I can see clearly. I can see clearly now that the rain is gone, the rain being my psychotic emotions last week. And now it’s “Okay, I feel confident that we can try things. We can problem solve. We can experiment and see what works, what doesn’t work.”

Finding Support When You Have No Team

And that could be a whole other episode. I should be talking to my managers, literally today about this problem. And one of the solutions that I’m going to suggest to you guys is if you don’t have anybody, and you’re like, “Well, that sounds great, Stephanie, I don’t have anybody. I don’t have a coach, I don’t have a mentor, I don’t have managers, I don’t have a spouse or a partner that gives a shit about the business, or could even help me. They don’t know or I just don’t have a partner at all. I don’t have a friend who I could talk to. I have nobody.”

Well, you can just talk to me, guys, but put it in the comments. Go ahead, put in the comments right now. What’s freaking you out, and we can talk about it in future episodes. You have this. You got this, okay? And especially over the past couple years, holy crap. This solves a lot of problems.

You also have YouTube, you have podcasts. You have access to the brains of people who have done what you want to do, and you can learn from them. So no, do you need a mentor? No, not necessarily, not at all, but you do need to be consuming information and learning. This is a learning problem. This is a knowledge gap. So we always have to be learning. I am constantly consuming information on how to run my business better.

Or perhaps, if you are very specifically having a problem with “I don’t know how to clean this thing,” well, guess how I learned how to clean things? YouTube. If I didn’t inherently know, I went to YouTube. Shout out to Angela Brown. She taught me a lot of cleaning things, a ton of cleaning things.

Continuous Learning and AI Support

When it comes to business information, I am literally hours a day consuming information. If I’m doing the dishes and I’m walking Lily, if I’m doing my makeup, YouTube, I’m listening to podcasts, watching educational videos. That’s what I’m doing. And some things stick and some things don’t. But if there’s a nugget, I’m writing it down. I’m giving myself voice mail message to try it out.

So if you’re cleaning right now and if something resonates with you, I’ll go and record a note to myself so I remember, because then it’s out of my head. If you try to rely on your memory for things, stop, stop, don’t do that because it’s too much stress.

Literally, everybody, if you are not using ChatGPT, that’s your coach and mentor. That is your educational tool – better than a lot of people could ever give us, right? Because you can say “You are a cleaning business expert, you have grown your business to multiple million dollars a year, and you specialize in XYZ, in residential,” and then you just tell it your problem.

Yes, there’s this little icon. That’s the microphone. I don’t even type into ChatGPT. I word vomit into it, and that’s exactly what I did about this problem. There is this huge, like scrolling paragraph of all of my words about this situation and kind of what I was considering as a solution, of an attendance bonus in a very specific way.

And I was like, “I would love to hear your ideas based on the fact that our core values are related to family first, and being very balanced for life for them, and not having super rigid punishments for call outs, because we know what happens. So being that and knowing what you know about human psychology and what is more likely to entice people, what other suggestions and ideas do you have?”

Using AI for Problem-Solving

And it gave me like eight different systems of incentivizing or de-incentivizing to consider. And then I picked the ones I liked, and we narrowed it down. I was like, “Give me specifics.” So literally, this is how I’m working it out. So now, when I go to my managers today, I’ve got several concrete laid out bulleted ideas to discuss with them, and now we can talk pros and cons. And it’s not just, “How do we fix this problem?” but “Here’s some options. What do we consider?” And this can get our brains going and start thinking and brainstorming.

Because sometimes it’s hard when you don’t have anywhere to start. So AI is amazing, and I know you’re probably sick of hearing about it, but that’s because it truly is, and you can use it for anything you want. I like to prompt it to be whatever it is that I need. “You are a marketing expert,” or “You are this person.” I say, “You’re Alex Hormozi.” I literally did this last week going off of his principles for Facebook ads.

“What would you suggest? And this is what I’m doing, and this is our offer. Please tell me exactly how to set it up with the audience. Literally break it down for me.” And that’s how I use ChatGPT. Because I don’t have a coach or mentor right now, the internet is my coach and mentor. And maybe at some point I’ll get another one when I feel that I could get more benefit out of it than the internet, but it’s all about using it intelligently.

So if you have never heard a prompt like that, “How can it help me? I don’t know how.” Well, that’s how it can help you guys. Take the problem of “I don’t know how to get leads,” and you don’t have anybody else to talk to. Obviously, you can watch all these videos. You can listen to these podcasts, which are going to give you a lot of context, which is very important. Context is super important. That’s why I’m such a fan of long form content over reels and shorts. That’s great for surface level, but you wouldn’t have got all of this pain that I was feeling if you didn’t hear just this last 40 minutes of me blabbering.

So all of that to say there is a lot of free resources out there. There’s the ZenMaid mastermind, that is an excellent wealth of information, but in your pocket you have this gold mine for free that you could be exposing yourself to. And it may be even in passing, you hear something on a podcast of, “What is that? What is that nugget there? I’m considering this,” and then you take that to ChatGPT, and “I heard this idea. And this is my business, and this is where I’m at, and this is what I’m struggling with. How could I implement XYZ in my business and lay it out step by step for me, and with a timeline, perhaps.” Those are the types of things that I’m saying to it. And it just gives me such incredible killer ideas.

So don’t discount that, and don’t poo poo on it, because “Oh, that’s not gonna work.” I can’t tell you how well it works for me. So I’m really excited to talk to my managers. My outlook is so different than I was pretty – I was not good last week, guys because of this.

Always Get To The Core of Strong Emotions

It just reiterated that it’s always, when you are feeling strong emotions, you need to get to the core of what is causing it and get all of the information related to the problem that you can because I was blind to the problem. I dismissed what it was, and the solution I came up with because I didn’t understand the problem was totally wrong. And would have screwed everything up even more if I just started pumping money in, and all of a sudden we got all these leads coming in, and we have, not only do we not have any normal availability, we have negative, negative, negative availability.

So it would have just made the problem worse. That’s why it’s so important. And the whole point of this is, do not take action until you understand the problem enough to take an intelligent step towards action. Try it out, take that data, see what happened. Okay, now we shift, and we adjust, and action is so important, guys, we can’t just do analysis paralysis. That’s not what I’m suggesting here. But do not just jump to your first instinct until you take some time and literally ask yourself, what is the problem? Do you understand it? If you don’t, take some time to figure that out before you start trying solutions, because you don’t even know what the problem is.

Oh, feel like I just went to a therapy session right now.

Closing Thoughts

So I hope this was helpful to you guys. Please leave in the comments if anything resonated with you. And of course, give us that like. I’m thirsty for your likes. Give me that subscribe, please. If this resonated with you, I promise to you I will continue making content that is based off my own experience as an active cleaning business owner.

I know a lot of you may be like, “Oh, that’s the end goal. That’s aspirational.” I understand that, but please understand I am still struggling with a lot of things today, and I’m still learning and I’m still growing right alongside of you. I may just be a few years ahead, and so I am trying to share my experiences so that you can learn from them and hopefully avoid some mistakes.

Because truly, that is what I experienced when I did get mentors, or I got coaches, or I was exposing myself to lots of content to learn and listening to books because I leapfrogged. Why did Stephanie grow so fast? Because I knew stuff, and I tried stuff, and then when the stuff didn’t work, I tried something else. It was constant learning, experimentation and refinement of what was working, throw out the rest, and just adding more and more of what was working. Until now we have this thing that works really well.

Doesn’t mean that I don’t get these feelings sometimes, and that should be an alarm bell to figure out what the actual problem is, and that is the mistake I made last week, and I feel so much better now that we understand the problem and now we can take action.

So anyway, I’m long winded, but hopefully this was helpful. I can’t wait to see you in the next episodes. We’ve got some killer interviews coming up. I love talking to the guests, but I also love just talking to you guys directly and sharing what I’m going through, and hopefully you can relate and feel like you are seen, because I see you. I know exactly what you’re going through because I went through it myself, and I’m still going through different versions of what you’re going through, for sure.

So have a great week, guys, whatever day it is, if you’re cleaning, if you’re driving, whatever you’re doing, I can’t wait to hear from you and see you in the next episode. Bye, guys.

If you enjoyed this episode of The Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, please be sure to leave us a five-star review so we can reach more cleaners like you. Until next time, keep your work clean and your business filthy rich.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• Leila Hormozi
• Alex Hormozi
• Angela Brown
• ChatGPT
• ZenMaid Mastermind