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Introduction
Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast: “It’s going to take practice to get good at the thing, right? You don’t just try it and then master it. Everything needs tweaking. A lot of times we’re too close to the 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.
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Understanding Shiny Object Syndrome
- Narrowing Your Service Offerings
- The Challenges of Vacation Rentals
- Taking Opportunities vs. Getting Distracted
- Learning From Carpet Cleaning Mistakes
- Too Many Offerings Without Expertise
- Don’t Rush Expansion
- Be Specific About What You Do
- Master One Thing Before Moving On
- Fixing The Right Problems
- Getting an Outside Perspective
- Focus Before You Expand
- What Worked for Serene Clean
- Don’t Get Distracted
- It’s Okay to Change Direction
- Closing Thoughts
Understanding Shiny Object Syndrome
Stephanie: Hello everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean. And on today’s episode, we are going to be talking about avoiding shiny object syndrome.
If you’re not familiar with that phrase, it basically means being like a magpie. And if you don’t know what a magpie is, it’s a bird that collects shiny objects, and Stephanie is the queen of magpies. Not only do I literally like shiny things, I proverbially also like shiny things when it comes to my business, and it is very difficult for me to not get distracted by all of these opportunities or seemingly good ideas. I have made many mistakes related to this topic over the past six years, and I want to talk about this because earlier today, I had my weekly operations meeting with my management team.
Narrowing Your Service Offerings
We decided that we are no longer going to be taking any vacation rental clients on. Vacation rental is dead to us. We are only maintaining our top five vacation rental clients.
I crunched the numbers, and last year, vacation rentals—our top five vacation rental clients—were 4% of our total revenue. That was still $56,000, so it’s not like it’s chump change. However, that’s just 4% of our total revenue. So why are we still flirting with the idea or enabling ourselves to take on more vacation rentals when, clearly it is 50% residential revenue and 50% commercial revenue for Serene Clean? That’s what it is.
Why are we distracting ourselves with vacation rentals? For those of you who have never done them before, they are much more than 4% of our stress on a weekly basis, especially during the busy season. Yes, they have more volume. And yes, if you are in an area where you can have crews who only run that, that’s great. It can be a wonderful thing. I’m not pooing on vacation rental for everybody, I am pooing on it for us.
The Challenges of Vacation Rentals
We do not have the volume to have only vacation rental cleaners, at least not unless we ran independent contractors, which isn’t our model. We don’t want just some very on-again, off-again work. That’s not how we do it here. We hire staff members, so that means weekend workers. That means unusual times. That means holiday turns when our owners want them.
All of these things just make it more difficult on us administratively: having to deal with the laundry, having to deal with the restocking, having to deal with not only owners, but guests when they be acting a fool. There’s so much when it comes to these.
We literally just said today, “Are we good breaking up with all the ones who haven’t booked this year so that they have time to find somebody else before the busy season?” Okay, and no longer are we going to be offering this. I’m taking it off the website. We’re doing a website rebrand. It won’t even be on the website. We’re not taking any more.
So our current top five, they’re great to work with. They listen to all of our rules. They pay the prices that we want them to pay, because we make sure that we are making more on vacation rentals than any other of our accounts as much as possible, because it is so much administrative labor that you have to consider and coordination and potential for things to run amok.
Taking Opportunities vs. Getting Distracted
When vacation rental clients started calling during COVID, of course, I said yes. It was money when I desperately needed it. So I don’t want to dissuade you guys from taking opportunities. I’ve taken some wild opportunities. It doesn’t mean all of them have worked out really well. Some of our biggest jobs and biggest things have, but they fell in line with what we already knew and were good at.
A big residential opportunity is still residential. A big commercial opportunity is still commercial. It’s not a whole different niche of our industry.
Learning From Carpet Cleaning Mistakes
Where else have I made this mistake? Carpet cleaning. I was like, “Oh, we can make money carpet cleaning. Let’s go do it.” Was I ready and willing to invest the time and energy and financial resources in order to fully understand and develop that branch of Serene Clean? Nope, not at all.
We were not providing good carpet cleaning services. I’ll say it outright. Our clients may have been happy. We weren’t getting complaints. I was not happy. It was icky. One of our core values is integrity. We were not acting with integrity.
The amount of relief I felt when we chopped out carpet cleaning was so strong, because it was like I was going against my core values. I also was like, I don’t want to buy the correct equipment. It’s expensive. I don’t want to maintain it. And I saw the difficulties with finding staff who could do the carpet cleaning, because all of a sudden it’s very different than house cleaning. The training for it took a lot longer than everything else, and anytime we had somebody turn over, the training for it took a lot longer than everything else.
It was like, why am I doing this? I understand that I can get more money from each client. I can go deeper, which, by and large, is great business advice—get as much money out of a single client as possible, right? That is sound advice, but if you are not ready and prepared to fully develop that area as well, it’s not going to work.
Too Many Offerings Without Expertise
Most likely, most of you guys listening are not ready to expand. I have seen so many websites of people who I’ve done consulting with, and they have no business offering all of the things that they offer, unless they are just subcontracting it out, or they’re mining it out to people that they have partnerships with.
That is absolutely an option if you have somebody that you trust and you know their work. Like, “Yeah, we do carpet cleaning or window cleaning,” but we get this company to do it, and maybe you get a referral bonus or whatever. That is an option. You just sub it out.
But when it comes to in-house, you doing the labor? No. Just get really good at one or two things and master those things before you start moving on to the next.
Don’t Rush Expansion
Just like opening locations—I’ve had conversations very recently where people are like, “Well, I’ll just open another location. I need more money.” Well, hon, you haven’t figured out how to make money at the first one yet. What do you think adding another location is going to do? We need to figure out what this problem is.
It’s just this shiny object syndrome. Same with getting an office too early or taking on things that don’t make sense for you.
Be Specific About What You Do
All of this to say, I want you guys to narrow in on what it is that you do and what it is that you do not do, and be hyper specific. This is why I’m such a fan of checklists, whether that be digital or paper. If you like digital checklists, well, ZenMaid just released the digital checklist feature. It’s fantastic. If you like paper, you can still do paper. You can still print them.
So either way, we want to get hyper specific on what we do. What are your add-on services? Do you do organization? If you want to do organization, go listen to Libby’s episode. All right, we’ll tag it down below. I don’t have the episode numbers memorized. I need to create myself a little cheat sheet, because I always want to reference conversations we’ve had.
If you want to learn about organizing or that sounds like something you’d like to do, go listen to that episode. It’s a great episode. Libby is a really good resource for that. That’s not my jam.
You want to do very niche kind of “second mother” jobs? Go listen to episode number two. Our lovely lady in Australia, Simone, is an expert at that. She does house moms. That’s her job. I love that word, “mums,” by the way. Any of my non-American listeners, I know you’re probably cringing at me saying that, but it’s just fun to say “mum.”
Master One Thing Before Moving On
We’re putting out content for these things if it’s something that you want to go all in on. But I would suggest going all in on that. And do not try to be the jack or the jill of all trades, because you will be the master of none.
So please, guys, put your blinders on, and stop jumping from situation to situation, and trying everything and not getting good at the thing. It’s going to take practice. I know you’ll hear me say that a million times on this podcast. It’s going to take practice to get good at the thing. You don’t just try it and then master it. Everything needs tweaking.
Fixing The Right Problems
I just had a great consult yesterday. Actually, I had three consult calls yesterday, all of them were fabulous. The call yesterday was very fabulous, and she knew she needs revenue. She needs higher revenue. So we started talking about advertising and marketing and all of that.
I asked, “Well, what’s your funnel like? How many leads are you getting?” And she said, “Well, like 40 a month.”
I’m like, “What? And we’re having a problem with revenue? What’s going on here? What’s your follow-up process? What’s the sales process?”
And there really wasn’t one. She was like, “I don’t want to pester.”
I’m like, “Girl, they called you. They want you.”
Right there, she was thinking maybe she needed to do all of these marketing and branding things which do need to happen. But if you get 80 leads in this month and you are still not closing anybody because the sales process is broken, well, it doesn’t matter how many leads you get. We need to fix that.
Getting an Outside Perspective
So really understanding where the problem is. Sometimes you need somebody else to come in and say, “Right there, there’s the problem. I found it for you” because we’re too close to it. Don’t be afraid to write something in the comments if you’re like, “I don’t know what my problem is, what’s going on?” Because a lot of times we’re too close to the situation. You need an outside pair of eyes to say, “Ah, right here, it’s broken.”
Most likely, a lot of our listeners do not have any type of follow-up process in place. So please, if you’d like to hear what that looks like, or how to do that, let me know in the comments. I can do an episode dedicated to sales tracking and follow up. It’s kind of, I think it might be boring to hear about, but you tell me if you want to hear about that, and I will talk all about it.
I’ll talk your ear off about anything you guys want me to talk about, because I am but your humble servant creating content for my lovely lords and ladies. So whatever you guys want me to make, I’ll make.
Focus Before You Expand
But the point is, please just—I know you’re seeing a lot of stuff. Even on this podcast, you’re going to hear things like window washing, pressure washing, carpet cleaning, organization, food prepping, all these things that are kind of adjacent. Post-construction… I’m looking for somebody to talk about post-construction.
The point being: your market and your expertise determine what you’re going to do. You can’t do it all. You may be able to branch off down the line when you really nailed at least one thing. But why do you think adding more services when you’re kind of mediocre right now is a good idea? Get good at that thing, master it and then add on.
What Worked for Serene Clean
For us, we took on residential and commercial right away because I realized once I did the walk-through, “Oh, it’s the same. You don’t need any specialized tools or products, and it’s the same cleaning process.” It’s just different rooms, basically, for commercial, and we might have to restock stuff. That’s totally simple. There’s a reason I tackled both of that.
What did I do wrong? Well, I did nighttime commercial and daytime residential in the beginning when I had a full-time job, so that was very stressful. It got my revenue up quickly, for sure, but it probably aged me 700 years internally.
Don’t Get Distracted
These are all things to consider when you’re viewing all this content and you’re consuming all of this stuff, like, “Well, she does this and he does that, I need to do all of these things.” No, you don’t. No, you don’t.
Slow down, dig your heels in and think, “What is my problem right now? What is the biggest hold up? What can I do to solve it?” Focus on that thing and don’t add any more services or add any other thing until you figure out what the problems are with your current situation.
Just stop getting distracted. I know I’m going to say that a million times. I just felt the need because today, we finally made the decision: no more vacation rentals. Serene Clean doesn’t do it. It feels good to say it.
It’s Okay to Change Direction
It’s going to feel weird to tell customers no when they come calling, especially when they see that we’ve done this in the past. I’m six years in, and I am making a decision to cut a service. You can do it if you need to. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business. You can always change your mind. You’re not set in stone.
If you made a pricing mistake, if you priced yourself too low, you lost a client—alright, we learn from it. We move forward. We don’t let it eat at us. We say, “What happened there? What caused it? What could I have done differently? What am I putting into place to prevent it in the future or to stop it from happening as much as possible in the future?” That’s what we do here, guys.
Closing Thoughts
I hope you’re having a fabulous week. I want you to hit that like, hit that subscribe. Let me know what you guys would like to see for these solo episodes. I’m honestly just doing them very much off the cuff as things are happening in my business, because as you guys know I actively operate my cleaning business from Savannah, Georgia, and I have my business in Wisconsin, so I’m still doing the thing, and still learning along the way, and I want to share all of these insights with you. I’ll see you in the next episode. Have a great week, guys. Bye.
If you enjoyed this episode of The Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, please be sure to leave us a five-star review so we can reach more cleaners like you. Until next time, keep your work clean and your business filthy rich.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
- ZenMaid
- Filthy Rich Cleaners – E13: Why Libby DeLucien Slowed Down Her $2M Organizing Company
- Filthy Rich Cleaners – E2: Building a Luxury Home Assistant Business with Simone Angell
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