Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast E21: Breaking into Commercial Cleaning: From Cold Calls to 7-Figure Contracts

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Introduction

Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast:

“I get so many questions from people who are like, I don’t have any commercial accounts. What would your suggestion be for them to get their foot in the door? People to actually give them a try…”

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.

Meet Mark Lineberry

Stephanie: Hello everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I’m your host, Stephanie Pipkin, and today’s amazing guest is Mark Lineberry, and he is the owner of My Clean Pivot. And I am so excited for this conversation you guys, it’s going to be quite different, I think, than all of our guests previously. And you guys are going to learn a ton, because Mark’s experience is truly mind blowing to me, especially in very specific ways. And we’ll get into all of that. So first and foremost, Mark, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you taking the time today.

Mark: Well, hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. It’s great talking to you. In terms of background, I gotta say, I didn’t have any experience cleaning before I entered the cleaning business. I was in college, I was studying political science and economics, and I was wrapping up my undergrad. I had started a business while I was in school, had saw a lot of success from that, but the challenge was I just didn’t have enough income to make it successful where I could work in that business full time.

So I was looking for a part time gig. My future father-in-law—well, I dated my future bride in college, that’s where we met—he owned a commercial cleaning business. He was an immigrant to this country, back in the mid-70s, came here, did unarmed security for a local building. And his story is phenomenal, because he was doing unarmed security, and one of the owners of the buildings, 14-story building, came down and said, “Hey, would you like to clean this building? Do you know how to clean?” He didn’t know how to clean. He goes, “Yeah, I know how to clean,” right? You know the classic startup story there.

So he started his own cleaning business in 1978. Well, fast forward—in ’97 I was finishing up my undergrad, I was looking for something, and he said, “Well, I have all these contracts. I don’t know anything whether or not these contracts are valid or if they’re written correctly. My clients’ lawyers wrote them for me,” and that’s how you got to start. I said, “Yeah, I’ll review them for you.”

I had brief stints studying law within the political science side of things. And so I was looking at these contracts—they’re definitely one-sided, right? They’re all geared towards his clients, not towards him. They’re very unfavorable. And I just restructured everything and I said, “Well, what are you going to do with these contracts? They’ve already got active contracts.” He goes, “Well, I use these contracts for the proposal.”

I said—he goes, “I use these contracts for the proposal.” What he was doing, he’s taking the contracts, he was putting white-out on it, he was changing the dates, changing the business name, put in the photocopy machine, and that’s what he’d hand out as a proposal to his prospects. And he grew to a seven-figure business just by doing that.

Stephanie: Oh my gosh, I can’t even use a fax machine.

Mark: And so he grew this business, really, from Bootstrap, it’s 100% through referrals. He didn’t do advertising. He did no marketing. He didn’t have a sales team or anything like that. And so it’s like, “Let’s redo this. Let’s make this look nice.” And so we created some really nice proposals for him, attached the contract for it, and then he said, “Well, hey, do you want to do sales?” And I never sold anything in my life.

I may come across as extrovert. Truthfully, I’m introverted. Right after this interview Stephanie, I’ll go off to the corner and I’ll just be kind of building time for myself, because I need to recharge. But doing sales that just scared the snot out of me. I said, “Well, let’s do it” right, because I’m dating his daughter and I want to look good for the future father-in-law, so, “Okay, let’s do it.”

And so one thing led to another, and I ended up doing sales for him. His company had shrunk down to $600,000 by the time I started with him in 1997 and over the next two years, just by changing the sales process—and I asked from him, “Hey, give me some sales training.” I didn’t know anything about that, so “please cover that and then give me unlimited time off, because I still had my other business and wanted to focus on that. But I’ll give you 100% during that time, and I’ll bring you a lot of success.” And we increased the business from $600,000 to $1.8 million over the course of about the next two years.

Focusing on Commercial Contracts

Stephanie: Wow. And was that exclusively commercial contracts? Or what was the spread looking like?

Mark: 100% commercial. Their target niche was office buildings. So they were targeting anything, well, generally, anything above 25,000 square feet. They just wanted one full-time person at minimum working in that location. So anything smaller than that, we said no to and passed. Our niche was office buildings, and we pulled in a lot of office buildings throughout the DC area.

Stephanie: No kidding, and especially at that time period when, you know, I think all of our listeners, hopefully their ears are perking up of like, “Oh, that was before the internet time that we are in now.” So they’re probably wondering, good Lord, how, how did you do that? Care to share Mark, how did you do it?

Cold Calling and Networking Before the Internet

Mark: Well, there’s no magic sauce. I dialed for dollars, and that’s the scariest thing for—it was scary for me, to be honest with you. I just pick up the phone, go to the phone book and start calling because, you know, we didn’t have the internet to go to. I think we had CompuServe or something like that, or Prodigy way back then.

But we grew the company just through calling, through referrals—that was our number one source at that time, just asking everyone who had a pulse, “Hey, who do you know works inside an office building?” Most everyone in the DC area. And they said, “Yeah,” I’d say, “Hey, can you make a connection for me?” And one thing would lead to another, and that lead to connections, networking.

So local Chamber of Commerce was phenomenal. I remember bringing our lawyer and introducing our business lawyer to the local Chamber of Commerce. And he said, “Hey, I’m going to your Chamber of Commerce meeting. Come to my BNI meeting.” So I started to go to BNI and just network through there as well.

Cold calling, as I mentioned, did a little bit of sales letters. I enjoy doing that. Definitely didn’t have a website. We didn’t have an email address, I don’t think, at the time. So we didn’t do anything electronic or anything like that. Everything was over the phone—everything was over the phone or in person or through a handshake.

And then we also did some print ads, which actually worked really well. We found a local Catholic Diocese had their own newspaper with multiple churches, 100% readership rate. And so we did a lot of print ads in there, and that worked out pretty well for us as well.

Getting That First Commercial Account

Stephanie: I just, I’m just marinating on the idea of asking people like, “Do you know people who work in these types of places? Can you make that connection?” That’s a really great tip. And I’m specifically thinking about, I get so many questions from people who are like, “I don’t have any commercial accounts. Why would they give me the time of day?”

And you’re like, “Yeah, you’re right. Why would they?” Because I had it really, you know, I was super lucky. I guess you could call it—I don’t know if I like to use that word, but when my first commercial account, big one came a-calling, literally two months into me existing as a business, and it was because I had a great looking website, not a lot of competition. I put on there that I did commercial. And it was a giant facility, and I got it.

And so then, you know, commercial was a part of our history. Literally from day one, the first place we got actually was a hardware store. To this day, we still clean that hardware store once or twice a week. And they’re wonderful clients. They get us lots of clients.

And so, you know, commercial from day one has been a part, even though most people, at first glance, would think that we’re mostly residential, actually, it’s mostly commercial. And so I had a pretty easy going experience getting those first commercial accounts.

Most of our listeners are not so lucky and they don’t have any social proof to point to. What would your suggestion be for them to get their foot in the door and for people to actually give them a try? Why would people give them a try? And how do our listeners convince them to give them that try?

The Wizard of Oz Strategy

Mark: Ever see the Wizard of Oz? The Wizard, right? He’s just this small little guy, and makes himself look real big. Well, I mean, that’s what we can do with the Internet. Can’t we make a really nice website, and I’m sure that’s what you did.

Stephanie: That’s exactly what I did.

Mark: And then you could have really nice branding, you know, because people look—is your email address @gmail.com or at your cleaningcompany.com, right? And so when you present a great face forward, even if you’re small, they’ll see you as big, and they’ll at least give you a shot.

They’ll give you some trust, as long as you’re addressing their pain points and their needs as a facility owner or facilities manager or decision maker within those facilities. As long as you’re addressing their needs and you come at the right price point, you’ll win every time.

And so fast forward, you know, we exited in 2022 and we had acquired the business in 2011, but exit in 2022. Our marketing in 2022—you know, we weren’t doing print ads, but we were doing email marketing. We were doing SEO with our website. We were still doing sales letters, and we’re still doing referrals and networking.

I mean, it really didn’t change other than slight electronic dynamic shift. And our top referral of new business in 2022 was actually SEO—95% of our business came in just because they found us on the web. So definitely invest in that time. Invest in the branding. It is an expensive proposition, but you could do a lot of SEO yourself. You don’t have to spend, you know, $1,500 or $2,000 a month like what we were doing before, to grow a very serious and very significant size business.

The Power of Original Content

Stephanie: And that was actually something—my managers, that was part of their job every week is “each of you write a 1,000-word article with these keywords in it, and we’re putting it on the website, because we need original content.” And now, sure, AI could make that a lot easier now, but it really does work, because you start to show up.

And you need to show up, and just—when people are unwilling or not wanting to ask for reviews or put in that time and effort, I’m like, you are shooting yourself in the foot guys. Like, I know it seems like a lot of money or a lot of time or effort. Well, that time and effort you’re going to be putting into other things that are not going to be as effective.

And considering what commercial can do for us as cleaning business owners, I mean, far and above, superior to residential, in my opinion. Like, I mean, I just, you can’t argue with the numbers. You can’t argue with the stability, and I know I’m probably preaching to the choir. Everybody wants to get it. They don’t know how.

Well, Mark just gave you some wonderful tips, guys on how to hit that pavement and go about this, even if you don’t have that type of experience. And you mentioned, you know, value and pain points. I would love to hear you go into your thoughts on that, because I just, I think you have a really great mentality about this and something that our listeners need to hear when it comes to your value proposition.

Understanding Pain Points

Mark: Well, see, this is kind of funny, because I have 25-plus years of data to pull from. I could tell you every objection. I wrote everything down. I tracked it all over the years. I still have my original proposals and my original pricing from 25 years ago.

Stephanie: I would like to frame those on the wall.

Mark: You should see my first pricing sheet. It was to a church, and I did a webinar recently where I showed that pricing sheet. And it looks really cool, but you know, I’m paying someone, I think, $7 an hour. Well, back in the late 90s, that was okay, I guess.

I forgot to add labor taxes. I forgot to add supplies to this pricing sheet. And guess what? I had everything else broken down like overhead, but I didn’t have profit. I had no net profit in there, and that’s the price I presented to this private church and school, private school and Catholic Church attached to it.

And I gave it to him, and it was a ridiculously low price. And they, they jumped at it, they go, “Yeah, I’ll sign it right then and there.” And, you know, you don’t have to be perfect on this. That’s what I do want to stress here—you do not have to be perfect.

But in terms of value propositions, probably the best way to go about this is a very simple exercise. All of you have access to this for free. It’s called ChatGPT. You could go there and you could say—this is the prompt you type in:

“You are a marketing expert. You are targeting [insert niche name here]—schools, churches, medical offices, whatever you’re targeting—medical offices. Give me a list of five different pain points that they may have around their commercial cleaning service right now.”

And they’ll tell you. I took that list—I did this recently. I actually did a blog post about this, where I took that list and I break it down by niche. These are all the different pain points that a lot of people experience. I ran it through ChatGPT, that prompt, and aligned with that list. So I mean, just something like that—it’s free. Everyone has access to it, you can know what your clients’ pain points are before you even work inside that niche.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s a fantastic suggestion of using our technology guys to the fullest, that’s completely free and allows you to utilize knowledge that you don’t have right now and also make you think differently. Because even the prompt of “you are a marketing expert,” it’s like, that’s genius, like telling it how it should be thinking, if you will. And so, yeah, I love that idea.

Choosing a Niche

I know that your company specializes exclusively in churches and schools, right? What was the reasoning behind focusing on that, and I think of a certain size as well. And how would you suggest our listeners go about choosing who they target, because you don’t want to be serving everybody, of course. So what would you suggest for that?

Mark: So I came up, just in my own head at one point, probably about 30 different niches that you could do business in—churches, schools, banks, gyms, dance studios, government office buildings, office suites. I mean, you name it. There’s tons out there, industrial, agricultural—up in Wisconsin, I’m sure there’s more than one up there.

Stephanie: Actually, yeah, for us, our bread and butter is industrial and blue-collar shops. Those are our big boys, and then our biggest is a giant government facility. But it’s definitely not—I mean, we have office buildings, but those aren’t our moneymakers. There’s not giant, you know, skyscrapers in rural Wisconsin. It’s not like that. So yeah, we like the dirty shops.

Mark: So you just make a list of all those niches. Think of as many as you can. I have a simple guide if you want access to that at the end of the show, but you could actually go into those niches, and I recommend people just pick one, focus on one.

Yeah, I had two, but we started off with one—that’s office buildings. And after a while, we realized, in office buildings, if you’re bidding in there, you’re bidding against 10 other people, 20 other companies, etc. And my business partner, former business partner, he always, always joked around about this.

We’d walk into a large office building. There might be 10 other cleaning companies in there. He’d walk around and make cow noises under his breath. He’d go “Moo” as we’re being shuffled around with all these people—herded around like cattle. There’s no way to develop relationships when you’re with all these people. You can’t address their pain points. You can’t have those one-on-one conversations. There’s no relationship building whatsoever in those type of settings.

But in churches and schools, we would bid these locations, and without exaggeration, there’d be only one or two other cleaning companies bidding the same location, or there might be three or four, but two or three of those might not even send their bid, and they just, you know, flake out for whatever reason.

So it became a natural fit for us. Our original business owner, he got active within his church, and so those connections expanded as well. So it’s just a very good fit.

I think churches are very easy to clean, right?

Stephanie: Love them, yeah.

Mark: They’re there primarily once or twice a week. They got meetings in the evenings, sometimes in daytime or whatever, but they need their facility cleaned all week long. And so it’s a great niche to build in.

Schools too, because you have, you know, technically, 365 days of school. They still have summer school, summer camps and stuff like that. So there’s never a break in a lot of these schools. And so it’s just year-round business. It’s great income.

Our average school size was probably, if I had to just throw a number in my head, probably about eight grand a month, and that’s for an average school. And so if you have 250 kids in there, yeah, you’re looking at five to $8,000 a month of revenue coming into your pocket.

Public vs. Private Schools

Stephanie: Wow. And I’ve always been intimidated, or really didn’t even consider schools, because at least in my local school districts, we always had like, janitors that were hired by the school district. So being an independent subcontractor, I should say, of the district was not even something I would consider, just because of what I have experienced in my own life. So it’s kind of crazy to hear that so many schools are going the subcontractor route, it sounds like.

Mark: Let me clarify that these are actually private schools that we targeted. We’re here in the Washington DC area, so you have different school districts—DC Public Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools. A lot of these school districts, they do not outsource their cleaning whatsoever.

Stephanie: Okay, that makes sense. Then I was a public school girl, obviously.

Mark: They do have RFPs they put out where they find people who are willing to bid to be on call in case something happens. We were invited to DC Public Schools in mid-COVID, because their janitors were all out sick or whatever. So we had opportunities there, but we found it easier just to target private schools.

So these are the Catholic schools, the Lutheran schools, the Episcopalian schools, whatever’s going on in your neck of the woods. Non-denominational or non-religious schools, tons of them out there, right? And so we just bid on these schools, and it worked out really well.

Commercial Pricing Strategies

Stephanie: That’s amazing, and I know at least even just for myself, the overwhelm of thinking of actually pricing and getting it right. So I would love to hear about any tips you have for me or for our listeners when it comes to pricing these large facilities.

Because, you know, we’ve gotten it down pretty pat, I would say, based on just going off of our other accounts. How does somebody who does not have a lot of commercial experience bid? Because I’ve always been of the mindset, you don’t do it by square footage in commercial facilities. Because, you know, one building the same size as another could be wildly different on time. So throwing that idea out the door, what do you got for us? How do we do this?

Mark: Well, I mean, I echo what you’re saying there, Stephanie. If you bid a 10,000 square foot office, and it’s just enclosed offices, that takes a lot quicker to clean than 10,000 square feet in cubicles.

Conversely, let’s say you’re bidding a 10,000 square foot construction office, that would be a lot quicker, because the level of clean expected is a lot lower than a surgical center, for example, where the same square footage takes a whole lot longer than the other.

So we never, ever, never bid square feet whatsoever. But what we do target is guesstimated time. We guess that time, and here’s how we do that.

So we’ve done, or I’ve done over 1000 walkthroughs, so I’ve seen all sorts. I could walk into any facility roughly 50,000 square foot or less, and know exactly how much time it’ll take, just based on that experience.

But then there’s times where the building’s bigger and I get a little nervous, sweaty palms. We all get them. I still get them. I still make mistakes, lots of mistakes. We were talking before the show about the encampment cleaning for the refugee cleaning. I could tell you, our price based on what you’re telling me before our pre-call—in our pre-call, I would have underbid it. Even someone at 25-30 bucks an hour, I would have to pay a whole lot more based on what you described.

Stephanie: Oh, absolutely. And honestly, it’s gonna sound crazy. And for our listeners, we’re talking about how Serene Clean got a really once-in-a-lifetime job. Basically, when all of the Afghan refugees came over a couple years ago, they got put at our local military base, and we were one of the local subcontractors.

And so they were insisting, meaning my contractor for the bid, they wanted a day rate. They wanted a day rate for cleaners, but the problem is, like, no idea scope of work. How long are we talking? What does that involve with OT? That’s where it was going to screw me over. So I insisted on hourly, and I charged hourly, and this turned out to be a million-plus dollar revenue job.

And you have no idea how grateful I am I did hourly, because the scope and complexity of the work changed so much throughout, like, as it evolved and as time went on. So, oh yeah, never thought I would suggest hourly for like, a giant commercial account, but it worked.

Time-Based Pricing Methods

Mark: And for our schools, we will go in and guesstimate that time. And there’s a lot of steps you could take to guess that time.

Number one, you could ask them, “Hey, how many people are working in here, and what are their hours?” And so you could get a rough idea.

You can factor in square footage. The average cleaner—or we required all of our employees work 3,000 square feet per hour per person cleaning a school facility. That includes mopping, dust mopping, stuff like that. So 3,000 square feet—if the school’s, I don’t know, 24,000 square feet, you know, that’s eight hours. That’s a full-time gig, right? And so you could hire one person or two part-time people, whatever you want to do.

Or you could do an account method, what I call, for lack of better term—you say, well, there are 10 classrooms. Each classroom should only take five minutes, right? You’re taking out the trash, you’re dust mopping, you’re mopping and you’re doing a quick dust. That’s it.

You know, because you’re there every day, it doesn’t have to be 100% perfect every single time. It’s not a surgical center. So you’re going in there 5-10 minutes, let’s say 10 minutes. And there’s 10 classrooms, for example, that’s 100 minutes. So you got 100 minutes there.

And then I like to use ISSA’s 3x Rule on bathrooms. You add up toilets, urinals, sinks, and so if you have a bathroom with eight toilets, two urinals and two sinks, that’s 12. 12 times three is 36. Takes 36 minutes to clean the entire bathroom.

And so you could add up all these different bathrooms. Add up all the time. Add it to the classrooms, figure out pricing separately for, let’s say, library, gymnasium or common areas, entrance way, offices, stuff like that. And you just add up all the time, and you got common areas left over, and that’s roughly a quarter to a third of the entire facility. So you work math backwards to come up with a total time.

And I’ll do that as well. I’ll do a comparison method to other locations. Like, if they got 10 classrooms and a place over here has 10 classrooms that we clean, it’s like, “Okay, well, they’re roughly the same size. Let’s make it the same price.” And so that’s how we go about our pricing.

Stephanie: Oh my gosh. I hope everybody—I’m going to be rewinding and listening to this. And my customer relations manager, who does all our bids, she is going to be watching this. Katie, I’m making you watch this because what you just said even like the three times rule for bathrooms and things like, gosh, these are such good tips.

And how we do it, yes, is a lot of comparison to other facilities, like facilities. Obviously, that’s hard in the beginning, but truly breaking it down by these rooms. And as you said, it makes me—it validates that you know, there is a lot of guesstimating, educated guesstimating, based on our own experience as cleaners, and that there truly is, even in a very seasoned person doing so many walkthroughs, so many bids, and knowing your stuff, you are not whipping out a laser measure it sounds like.

Because that’s oftentimes what I’ll see online, like, “You need to measure it all out and plug it into a software.” And I’ve never, ever wanted to do that. And that oftentimes has to do with—that sounds great. So you go do the walkthrough and it is not like that. There’s people working—the person wants to get you in and out of there. It’s just not practical for my experience of what walkthroughs look like. Do you concur? Have you had experiences where you’re like, “That wouldn’t work.”

Mark: I’ve never used the laser pointer thingy for lack of better term. I did just recently—the church was up in Maryland. I did a walkthrough, and there happened to be another cleaning company there. And it’s like, why didn’t I realize we’re doing kind of a joint walkthrough? He goes, “No, he’s been there for the past hour, measuring things, and he’s literally going to the wall, you know, pointing this laser, room by room, length times width, multiplying together to come up with the area.”

It’s like, wow. I mean, for me, I’m about reducing friction points in my interaction with the prospect. And something like that is a friction point. In my opinion, your time taking up being a disruption—that’s a friction point. And I don’t want that.

Walkthrough Do’s and Don’ts

Stephanie: Now that you’ve mentioned that, what are some of the biggest or some of the top mistakes, or the worst things you can do on a walkthrough, and what are some of the key things that you should be doing. And if you’re willing to share that story, the first time we talked about the floor thing, if you would, I’d love to hear it, where you had insulted the floor work or something.

Mark: The guy—I’ll start with that first, before I jump into mistakes. That is one mistake. There’s a Catholic church and school in Triangle, Virginia, just right outside Quantico Marine Corps Base. And I remember doing the walkthrough in there, and we were hitting it off—my business partner and I and the facilities manager. I mean, we’re like jiving. We’re joking. We’re getting—I mean, we’re like kindred spirits, right? It’s like, I’ve got this in the bag. I felt so good.

Then we get to this room, and this room is kind of like a great room, where they have meetings and dinners or whatever. And so we’re in this room, and I look at the floors, and you can see like waves in the wax. It looked horrible.

And I turned to him, I said—let me back up a little bit. He’s complaining about the previous cleaning company that he’s about to let go. And I said, “Man, this cleaning company really did a bad job on these floors here.” And he turned to me, he goes, “I did those floors.”

And oh no. And so I shot myself. We lost the bid too, and we deserved that.

Stephanie: You lost the bid that day, Mark. Let’s be real.

Mark: My business partner, as soon as I said that, he kind of looked at me, and as soon as the guy responded with his reply, my partner goes, “Oh, come on…”

Stephanie: I would so do that! I am the worst when it comes to mouth moving much faster than brain moves, and so all of our listeners probably know that. But that is right there—make sure, because we’ve done that before too, where we do the walkthrough, and I’m noticing, like, it’s horrific, like it’s bad, and I’m trying to basically set myself up to be able to sell our quality, right?

And our quality control system, and how robust it is, and how that’s going to be great for them, blah, blah, blah, but please, guys, make sure you know who the heck is doing the cleaning first before you start insulting it. Because a lot of times it’s a friend, it’s a daughter of an employee, it’s their wife—you don’t know. So just get that context before you start going in for that kill, if you will.

Never Quote Pricing During a Walkthrough

Mark: In terms of mistakes, that’s a big one. Another one I would say that I see other cleaners do—I’ve never done this—don’t ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, ever, ever, never give a price during the walkthrough. A lot of people do that, and here’s why you don’t want to do that.

Number one, as soon as you announce your price, they’re going to judge you on the price. For the rest of that walkthrough, they’re going to judge you. They’re not going to listen to a word you say. They’re just going to be thinking about that price.

Number two, when you’re shooting from the hip and giving a price right there in the spot, it’s so easy to make mistakes.

Stephanie: Yep, it’s very easy.

Mark: And so there’s times early on, I’ve couple times I’d go, “I know this, I’m going to give a price here.” So I’ve been in a facility just like this, and I’ve made a mistake, and I’ve gone back—it’s like, “Oh, my numbers are all off here.”

And so it’s easy to make that mistake, and it’s easy to underbid unfortunately, or even overbid where they’re thinking about you and judging you for the rest of the walkthrough. So never, ever do that.

I would say, outside of wasting their time with laser pointy thingies—I think everyone should do pre-research or do some research before doing a walkthrough. So sit down, go on Google Earth. Look at the facility. Look at the facility size. Figure out how many or how big it is. Look on their social media. Look up all the pictures, and see if there’s dust in vents and stuff like that. See if there’s a pain point there you can solve for them.

As you look on Google Earth, if you see shrubbery or shrubs or plants or trees adjacent to the property, they have a bug problem inside that property, because those bugs enter from those window points right there by the trees and shrubs and everything else like that.

So definitely do your research on that, study that, figure out what their pain points are, figure out who the decision makers are. And if you see one decision maker when you show up, you ask them point blank, “Hey, are you the decision maker here? Or are there other people we should talk to after this walkthrough?” And so you just want to figure out these different nuances to developing those relationships before you even show up.

And obviously goes without saying, always show up on time. And if you showed up with a dirty car, you’ve blown it, right?

Stephanie: Yes, like houses, yeah.

Professional Appearance Matters

Mark: So if you showed up in a dirty car, you’ve blown it. And I can’t tell you how many times they would walk me to the car after a walkthrough. And so make sure the inside of the car looks nice too, so they’ll judge you on that.

Show up five minutes early. God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason, so we could listen twice as more than we talk.

The Perfect Walkthrough Formula

And so when I do my walkthrough, I’ll do two minutes of pleasantries. “Hey, how you doing? You know, what do you think about the Super Bowl this past weekend?” that type of thing. And I’ll talk to him for two minutes, and I’ll say, “Hey, can you show me around?” That’s the first question I ask. “Can you show me around?”

And so as we’re walking through, I have about a dozen questions I’ll ask them. I’ll ask, obviously, “How did you hear about us?” because I want to know what marketing sticks, but the other questions, half of them are designed to discover their pain points, and the other half are to get answers to logistical questions I ask.

So pain points questions include, “What do you like best about your cleaning service right now? What do you like least about your cleaning service right now?” Related to that. And they always give a different answer. “If we could change one thing tomorrow, what would that one thing about the cleaning be?” And so you get all these different perspectives.

And then you ask, “Hey, how many days would you like us here if we were selected? What’s the earliest in the evening that we can start here?” That type of thing. And you look around and bring up all these different points.

So if you see trash liners in trash cans, if you see toilet paper in the bathrooms, you just say, “Hey, I see you have toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, trash liners. Do you provide us these? Or do you need any of these items here at your location?” So you just ask all these questions, get a feel for them, and that factors into our price, which is another reason why you never want to price on the spot.

Changes all the time. They might say, “Hey, we need you to clean, but we need you to disinfect every single service.” We saw that during COVID, right? We’d go to disinfect. It adds time, because now you’re with the trigger sprayer or bucket with disinfecting solution, and that just adds time, right? And so all these different nuances.

After the questions and we conclude the walkthrough, then I summarize everything in two minutes or less. There’s a study out there for tippers or at restaurants, right? Servers get more tips if they repeat back what the patron ordered, right. And so if you’re repeating back, “Hey, let me get this right, you would like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And those who do that get more tips than those who do not do that.

And so I figure if it works for tipping, it works for cleaning too. So I repeat back. “Let me get this right. You want us to come in five days a week, do this, this and this. Your biggest pain points are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then I leave it that. Two minutes or less, and then I dive into a 30-second elevator pitch.

I only sell our services for 30 seconds the entire walkthrough. I give our elevator pitch. “Hey, you know, we’re My Clean Pivot. We serve churches, offices, schools and banks just like yours. We’ve been in business for such and such years. And here’s what separates us from the competition”—you know, quality control program that involves surface checks, surveys and in-person walkthroughs, joint inspections, so forth, whatever you want to come up with, whatever your USPs are.

And then I give the next steps. Say, “Hey, this is what we’ll do next. Let me confirm your email address. I’ll email our proposal to you, and I’d love to follow up with you in two days. Would that be okay if I give you a call?” And that’s it, you leave it at that. Walk away.

Building Trust Through Active Listening

Stephanie: I love it, because it just doesn’t feel like you’re hard selling. It just feels like you are making sure that you understand them. And I’d imagine that’s where the raise in tips and everything comes from, is the person is feeling heard and understood, and you’re also giving them an opportunity to clarify.

And I know for us, with a lot of walkthroughs, oftentimes the person that is doing the walkthrough, they’ve been just tasked this, and they are themselves unsure. Like they have never done that before, at least for a lot of our walkthroughs, I’ve seen that where they don’t even know what to expect.

So we really have to take charge and say, “Well, let’s—will you show me around? And—like, they just don’t even know—can you show me the janitor’s closet? Do you guys supply these? Or do we need to supply these?” Like, all of these things. So you really do have to place yourself as the expert.

And I know that that is easier said than done, especially in the beginning. And I do think of that big walkthrough I did very early on at that manufacturing facility. I was just turned 23, with no commercial under my belt, barely any cleaning under my belt. And the guy doing the walkthrough, Jacob was his name, and he was asking where I went to school, because very small area. And I was like, “Oh.” And he was like, “Oh, what year did you graduate?” He was trying to figure out how old I was, because I look so young. And clearly, he was like, “This girl’s full of shit.”

And he was like, “Oh, do you do a lot of facilities?” I’m like, “Yeah, I do another manufacturing facility, actually.” Or “we”—I always use the phrase “we” to make it sound like it wasn’t just me.

Mark: Exactly, the Wizard.

Stephanie: That’s—I love that. That’s such a good way to think of it. And so I was like, “Yeah,” and it was actually my parents’ company. They, you know, I cleaned their shop, so technically, you know, just as part of my job.

So I just said whatever I had to say in order to seem more competent than I truly was. And then I knew the beautiful thing is, guys, we could figure stuff out after the fact, and just, just trust in your ability to figure things out. And everything is figureoutable. It truly is like we just have to give yourself an opportunity to test yourself.

So, love, love the giving them an opportunity to feel heard, just a small elevator pitch, and tailoring it to what they’ve expressed as their pain points, which you have established because you’ve asked for their needs. You’ve asked what they like, what they don’t like. So you can really hone in on that and not say things that are irrelevant to them.

They don’t care about a lot of things. And so keep that in mind, guys, that whatever you think your selling points are, maybe they’re not to your ideal and likely buyer who you’re trying to target. So you have to listen, and I love—I need to cross-stitch that—”two ears, one mouth”—and put that on my wall, because that’s a reminder I should tell myself often. So I really, really love that.

Specialized Services Offered

And so I would love to just hear when it comes to the services that you guys do offer, some of them are highly specialized, or at least what I would consider specialized, which is like the specialized floor care, which I’d imagine comes into place a lot for schools, probably churches, too.

I’d imagine, you know, portering services—number one, what does that mean for our listeners and Stephanie, who didn’t know that before we talked the first time? What does that mean?

Mark: Sure. Let me go back a few steps. So when I first started doing sales, our company, entrepreneurs fall into the trap where they want to say yes to everything. And that’s what the previous cleaner, or the owner of the cleaning company, did—he wanted to say yes to everything.

So yeah, we did janitorial, porter, specialty floor work. We even did disinfecting before COVID—we disinfected. But then we did other things. We did light maintenance, light plumbing, light electrical. We didn’t have any licenses or anything.

Sometimes we did some landscaping. We did parking lot services. Because we’re in the DC area and parking is at a premium, so we’d have someone out there, parking lot services. We did unarmed security, we did maid services, and then we did an in-home chef service.

Stephanie: Jack of all trades, master of none, exactly.

Mark: Master of None, for sure, and we weren’t known for anything. Yeah, we did cleaning and stuff like that. We’re really good at it. But when we took over the company, we just sat down. It’s like, “Okay, where are all the dollars going?” Let’s track this. Let’s relate it to marketing. How are we spending on marketing? And let’s compare the two.

And we realized, “Okay, we need to dump all these other things.” Because the In-Home Chef service, we didn’t have a food license. We were in there, and that came about because we’re cleaning Catholic churches. Catholic priests don’t know how to cook, and they have their own in-house residents, so we’re in there cooking for them. But we didn’t have a food license, so we were kind of operating under the table.

Unarmed security, our insurance company always frowned—come renewal time, “You can’t be doing this,” but we do it anyway.

Stephanie: They’re office workers. Like, just sneak that in there. Hopefully my insurance lady is not listening right now, but that’s kind of what I did before my managers were full-time managers like, “Yeah, you guys just do not get hurt on the job. Just don’t do that.”

Mark: And so we just started slash and burn all these different services, and we started saying no to everything. Now we did keep the parking for a while only because it was with our very—by the way, our very first client, 1978, was the same client through the very end in 2022. They stayed with us the entire time. And then caveat there, asterisk, in 2020 they were acquired by CBRE, but we still continue doing work with CBRE in those facilities. So it’s really cool to have that relationship.

So we kept a couple things going, but we didn’t add anything new. And then once those contracts disappeared, we were out of there. We never offered it again. So we focused on our core four and it’s janitorial, porter, specialty floor work and disinfecting.

Janitorial, you’re in there in the evening, you’re cleaning this one surface one time, and that’s it. You’re in and out right.

Porter Services is a little different. Some of our clients, by the way, for porter services, include schools, car dealerships, office buildings. They needed someone in there during the day. You’re cleaning the same surface more than once. You’re restocking the bathroom more than once. You’re cleaning it more than once. They need someone in there throughout the day just to keep the place tidy for the influx of people that come in and out throughout the day. And so we would do Porter services.

And then disinfecting, self-explanatory. We started doing that in a big way when norovirus hit. Our greatest fear is that norovirus would hit one of our schools. And at the time, if you got hit with norovirus, you made the news. I remember there was a local school that hit national news when norovirus hit their school and all the students were out sick. Now it’s like everyone has it, and so we were so focused on making sure our facilities were clean and safe for all the people coming in.

And then lastly is specialty floor work. So stripping, waxing, carpet cleaning, scrubbing floors, buffing floors, that type of thing. We didn’t get into resurfacing. We weren’t resurfacing marble floors or anything like that, but we would just do the basics in terms of stripping, waxing, carpet cleaning.

Adding Specialty Floor Services

Stephanie: Okay, I know a lot of folks I talked to, including my own company, has been asked about offering these kind of floor services. And we have always suggested another company—just said, “We don’t do that.”

And truly, I have no interest in getting into it until I could actually focus on it heavily, because I made the mistake of—we brought on carpet cleaning before we knew a damn thing about carpet cleaning, because I was like, we’re getting all these calls, all of our current customers want it.

And so I very much prematurely jumped in without knowing what the heck I was doing. And that didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel like we were providing a service full of integrity, which is one of our core values. So I stopped it, and I was like, I will revisit this when I am fully ready to 100% go all in and understand this, and make sure the tech understands what the heck they’re doing, so that people are getting what they deserve to be getting.

And so that was definitely a mistake of mine, of getting into something that I was not prepared or ready to fully understand or dedicate myself to. So if somebody is interested in doing this, or their clients keep asking for the floor resurfacing, or the stripping and the waxing—how would you recommend they go about learning how to do this, or deciding if this is a good choice for their business at all? Is this something they should do?

Mark: This is something you should consider if you’re doing facilities. You might bid on some facilities where it’s part of the scope of work. You have to do it. I can’t tell you how many government bids—we don’t bid government, you know, because we won’t be herded around like cattle—but we’ve bid on government, and even the smallest locations, they require stripping and waxing or carpet cleaning.

Stephanie: Yep, yeah.

Mark: It’s helpful to know. If you’re doing schools, they need that summer work done to get the school ready for the fall. If you’re doing hospitals, you gotta have those floors all shiny. Retail—the floors need to be all shiny.

If you get a church, you have weddings and stuff. You can’t have a coffee stain in the middle of the aisle with the bride walking down. You need to keep the place clean, nice and organized.

And so learning that’s very helpful. And there’s a lot of things you could do. Number one, you could outsource it, just subcontract it out.

Stephanie: Yeah, if you don’t know how to do if you don’t want to invest, you know, $4,000 in a carpet extractor or, you know, $1,500 on a swing machine or something like that—19-20 inch. You don’t have to do that. You could sub it out, let other people do it. They pick up the expense, they take care of all the supplies. And you could always make an arrangement, “Hey, can I look over your shoulder and kind of learn from you? I just want to learn the process.” A lot of them will say, yeah, they’re eager to help you out.

In terms of learning yourself. You can learn yourself. When you buy supplies as a commercial cleaning company, you don’t want to be going to Walmart or Target or Dollar Store, because you’ll be throwing tons of money away. You’ll be spending like six bucks a gallon for glass cleaner, when you should be spending 50 cents a gallon for glass cleaner.

And so we shop from your local suppliers, your local janitorial suppliers. You might have to dig around for them. Even local can be defined as a couple hours away. Some of these suppliers, they’ll have classes and training that you could go and learn absolutely for free. They’ll teach you how to do it. They’ll give you a fancy little certificate. Your employees can take home with them and put on their resume or whatever. And so you could take those skills and spread it throughout your company.

The reason they want to teach it for free is they want you to buy their cleaning supplies, so they have incentive to do it. Some of them will even loan you the floor machines to do it, because, hey, if you’re using the floor machine, you might be inclined to go ahead and buy it, because, you know, they’re not going to let you keep it forever. After a week, they want it back. And so you could get in and get out, use the machine for a week and buy one if you really want to, use the money from that job and actually purchase a machine with it.

So you can learn so many different nuances just by learning from other people, watching other people, and taking classes yourself. And there’s classes online, great resources. Train the Trainer, certified through ISSA and their or through CMI. And CMI is custodial—basic, custodial, advanced—really starts the training on floor work, so you could learn how to redo a basketball court if you really wanted to. Their training is very specialized in there.

Stephanie: Oh, wow. I definitely will be looking into those resources for sure. Again, like just looking—for us, we don’t want to continue to increase our service range. Now that we have three locations, it’s more going deeper into the service range that we have, including getting more money out of our current clients, which what you’re describing is the perfect avenue to do that.

It’s just that—I think because I feel so comfortable, because I know how to house clean, I know how to clean a business. The risk is so low. I mean, obviously you can break stuff or damage something for sure, but my risk aversion to the level of damage or screwing up that could happen increases drastically as we get into some of these more specialized things, as well as the training associated with techs.

Because when I did do the carpet cleaning, that was such a barrier for us—like, okay, we can get somebody ready to do houses or business cleaning in a couple weeks, right? They’re going to be good. Whereas I get a lot more weary—it was much more challenging for that.

So you know, all of these are definitely excuses that could be worked over, but it means just not being willing to work through them until probably in the future.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s a good avenue, it’s good revenue, and you might run into the client one day where you have to do it.

Stephanie: Absolutely. And that was that big government facility—you’re 100% right—it was required that we do carpet cleaning. So we do have the extractor there, and we have our guy there that does it, and it is so profitable once you get into it.

Pricing Specialty Floor Work

And so—you had mentioned the 3,000 square foot production rate for your janitorial staff. How do you configure that then with the specialized floor care? Is it totally separate? Or how do you do the pricing of that? Because I’m sure people like, “Well, how do I do this?” Because I’m wondering, how do I do this.

Mark: So that’s a great question. My business partner was a floor artist. I swear he could do a floor—he might as well sign it. I’ve never seen floors look so beautiful. After he did—I would do it, and he would make me redo my own work. He goes, “Man, you suck. You gotta redo this.” And that’s okay. I accepted the criticism.

But the production rate will certainly vary in floors like that, because you could be in some facilities where you got tons of old wax on there. It’ll take forever to get off. And you got other locations where the tile underneath that wax is old and brittle, maybe breaking apart. You have to be very careful and take your time.

You might go into other facilities, like a school. You might have 20-25 desks in a classroom that you have to move out, and you can’t keep them in the hallway, because it’s a fire hazard for egress in case there’s an emergency.

So there’s a lot of nuances to that. I never came up with a one set price. I would go with my business partner, and he would tell me it’ll probably take four hours to remove this wax, and then adding each layer of wax would take about an hour. We’d factor in—because you gotta do it, and then let it set before adding that next layer. And then repeat the process. Repeat the process.

Putting on the wax is easy. You just mop it on the finishing mop. It looks great, because it evens out, looks glossy. It looks like a mirror once you’re done. But it’s the initial part, the stripping part, that could take a while.

And then once you finish it, you can’t be putting a 200-pound desk back onto that wax, even after an hour. It’ll start to indent into the wax. So you gotta be very careful with that.

So each location had its own time and place. I would always ask him, “How much time would we take on this?” You know, in a typical classroom, you might take probably a good six hours, give or take seven hours, depending on the amount of wax that’s on there. But you’re doing other classrooms in tandem with that. So you’re not sitting around watching wax dry. You’re on to the next big thing, taking care of that, continuing on.

Stephanie: It is a very labor-intensive process, it sounds like, but, yeah, very satisfying. I mean, yeah, nothing like seeing beautiful, beautiful, shiny floors after you’re done. It has to be quite satisfying.

But it is good to hear this is—I mean, to price that, it sounds like it is a big price tag like to give a school for floor refinishing. I mean, we’re talking about, like, hundreds of labor hours for an entire school. It sounds like.

Mark: So, yeah, there’s a private school. I’m just thinking, in recent numbers, one of the last jobs we did through the first clean company is about 24,000 square feet, and that invoice was about 12 grand just to knock it all out. But we were moving pianos. We were moving desks, chairs, you name it, we’re moving it.

And thankfully, we had the hallways to do a lot of our work. But in some facilities, you just don’t have that option. You got to move everything to one side of the classroom and then shift it over to the other side of the classroom. That’s a lot of work.

Employees vs. Subcontractors

Stephanie: Which makes me just think of your workers. Do you use subcontractors or independent contractors, should I say? Or do you use employees? Or is it a mixture?

Mark: It was a 50/50 mix with the first clean company. I preferred employees because I wanted to provide the supplies. We had locations like schools, where you had to have the SDS binder. We needed to control what supplies were in there, in case Little Timmy went into the janitorial closet, somehow, some way, and drank such and such chemical. We needed to have those safety data sheets in there, just to keep track of all that.

So we preferred, “Hey, this is who we want to hire. This is how we want to train them. These are supplies we want to provide,” and we were okay with that.

But then other times we’d hire subs, and we were okay with that. Let’s say you have a facility where you’re cleaning once a week and they shut off the lights to go home—the workers at 6pm—and they don’t show up till Monday. It’s easy to go to a sub and say, “Hey, you got between 6pm on Friday and 5am on Monday to get this job done. And we think it might take such and such time. What do you think?” And kind of leave it then we negotiate a price that way.

But our prices were the same. Whether we hired a sub or employee, our net profit or our gross profit, I should say, was exactly the same, and that’s how we structured our pricing. So it didn’t matter if we hired subs or if we hired employees, we still made the same amount.

Stephanie: I’m just thinking, is that because typically, I mean, I’ve always exclusively ran employees. And obviously what you’re describing is a wonderful strategy, and something I would recommend everybody consider—truly, subs should be like a strategic move, not something that you base the whole staff on. I mean, some people do that really, really successfully. Just my own bias, perhaps.

I just think employees are fantastic for a lot of reasons, but when you just said, your profit at the end of the day was the same. Did you not have to pay the subs a higher percentage? Or are you saying—because you didn’t have to cover the insurance for them, and you also didn’t have to cover the supplies for them? Is that why those numbers?

Mark: Well, here’s how we did it. Our pricing is the same either way. If you pay an employee, you’re paying their gross wages, you’re paying labor taxes. I consider that part of labor. You might be paying some benefits, like vacation. We gave all of our employees three weeks of PTO per year, plus paid holidays. So you got a big chunk in there for that. Then you got supplies that you’re providing them, and so you get this big expense on employees.

Well, subs—all we did was take that money and shift it over here. We added it all up and we presented them a price. “Hey, here’s our price per month.” But that price, we tell them, “Hey, you gotta provide labor, you gotta provide supplies and insurance.”

And so this way, it’s still the same. Either way—either we’re paying it through here on the employee model, or paying it over here through the sub model. Either way we’re paying it. And so it’s even at the end.

Stephanie: Oh, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for clarifying. I just wanted everybody and myself to hear that.

Staffing Challenges and Solutions

And I would love to hear just as time has gone by, I’m sure you’ve seen trends and ebbs and flows when it comes to retention, turnover, things like that. Did you experience during COVID a pretty bad time, a good time? And how has it been in recent years when it comes to staffing? Because obviously that is one of the biggest stop gaps for most of us in this industry—staffing can be challenging and retention can be challenging.

Mark: I hear you, and yes, we experienced this ourselves. So my business partner was in charge of hiring in terms of training, hiring, etc., and he had his own process. And we hired based on referrals. We never put any ads into Indeed or anything like that. It’s just like, “Hey, who do you know who needs a job?” And, “Oh, my wife needs a job.” “Hey, great, we’ll hire. We’ll train her.”

And most of the time it worked out. Sometimes it didn’t, but most of the time it did. And so that loyalty was there. It showed that we trusted the employee or sub even to make a judgment call on referring their own friend, family, relative, whatever. And so that worked great.

But then COVID hit, and my business partner, probably a week before COVID hit here in the DC area, made a decision to fly to El Salvador, that’s where he’s from, to see his family. And I said, “If you go to El Salvador, you won’t be coming back.” And he goes, “Yeah, I’ll just come back next week. I got my return ticket.” I said, “No, you won’t be coming back.”

And he flew down. And no joke, within three days of him flying down, the army comes in. They shut down the airport. They put troops on the main road to the airport. They said, “If you cross this, we’ll shoot you.” Oh my God. And so he was stuck there for the next three months.

And he was in charge of hiring and stuff like that. Now we had slowed down because we niche in churches and schools. We had a 70% hit in revenue. We bounced back from that. We figured, “Okay, well, who’s in the parking lots here in the DC area?” That’s who we’re going to target. And that’s what we did. We grew from there. So we’re targeting government, government contractors.

You know, GDIT, for example, is a big client provider of ours, so we’re growing through those opportunities. So it didn’t really hurt our employees. And—I heard on your first episode the PPP—we took that in as well, and that’s a big lifesaver as well.

But once he came back, he lost the passion for hiring people and training people, and so I was bringing in new clients, and he wasn’t staffing them, and we were losing—we had high churn rate, and it was so, so frustrating. It’s like, “Okay, I’m not hiring guy.”

Remember I said before this episode, I know it doesn’t sound like it, I’m introverted. I don’t want to be interviewing someone. That’s—

Stephanie: I hate hiring. Terrible at dealing with it. I’d rather—

Mark: I’d rather give birth to a flaming porcupine than hire someone. I really don’t want to do that.

And so we were doing where it’s just a high turn rate with both employees, with clients. Like, “Okay, I gotta take this over, because he’s just not doing his part on this.”

And so I started doing the hiring on this, and I realized real quick that if I called people, told them to come to our office or to meet somewhere, that most of them wouldn’t even show up, right? It’s a nightmare. It’s like, “Okay, I obviously suck at this.”

But then I started reading other people’s posts in these Facebook groups. They’re going through the same challenges at the time. It’s like, “Okay, well, I’m not the only one, but I need to reinvent my process here.”

The List of 100 Hiring Strategy

And so what I did, I came up with my “List of 100” and what I would do, I would do a three-step interview process with every candidate that called—and not every candidate, they’d get to at least the first step, not proceed to the next.

So they would go to apply. I always requested a resume or work history. If they didn’t have a resume, I’d say, “Just jot something down. I just want to see where you worked at and who you worked for.” And so they would give me a list, and I’d filter through, and I hired based on experience.

I realized that if I hired someone who worked for ABC company, that ABC did phenomenal training compared to XYZ company. And so I knew that if they work for such and such company, I knew to exclude them from hiring because they went through a terrible training process.

I suck at training. My business partner—he’s in la-la land. But I realized I need to refocus on this and hire based on experience only. And so that’s what I just targeted—experience.

So I had my list of competitors who I knew did great at training. I hired from that list. So if you work for such and such company, your odds were pretty high getting in.

So for every 100 resumes or applicants that applied with us, for every 100, 90 I would toss in the trash. And I don’t mean that in a negative way, but you get the idea.

Stephanie: I totally get it. Yep, yep. 10%.

Mark: I’d go after that 10%, and they’d get the first of possibly three steps from me, where I’d give them a call. I just have a five-minute conversation, just verifying that they’re applying to the right place, and, you know, they’re still looking for a job, that type of thing, just basic stuff.

It’s like, “Hey, if you get a second call back, I’ll send you a message, and we’ll do a second call back, and it’ll be a more in-depth interview.” And that second interview was 15 to 30 minutes, and I would do it over Zoom like this. I didn’t want people coming to the office where they weren’t even going to show up. We’re in the DC area. Our service area was an hour and a half end to end, so I didn’t want someone driving an hour away just to do an interview with us that didn’t—

Stephanie: You don’t want to waste their time too—very, very considerate. That’s why we’ve switched over to exclusively—I mean, we do group interviews on Zoom for that first filter. That’s our filter, is if they can’t show up to the dang group interview, they can’t show up to anything else.

Mark: So we do that, and if we had a good vibe, then I’d invite them in for a third interview. That third interview sometimes involved lunch, right? Take them out to lunch. Sometimes I would ask to have their spouse come. I want to see how they treated their spouse. This is for manager or supervisor level, and I’d bring my wife with me. And so we did all these things just to boost our knowledge base on that person.

So for every 100, we would eventually find one or two to get to that third interview, and I just picked the one. But with that 10 from that first step, I built that list, and I call it my “List of 100.” I kept a CRM, a database of every single person that ever applied with us for the past 10 years. I got this list built up.

And so this way, when, you know, someone calls out or whatever, I could go back to that list like, “Okay, well, they applied before. They made it to the first round. They might be worth giving a call back to,” because maybe they’re looking for a new job. They probably already found another one. Hopefully they found a new one after a few years, right?

But I’d give them a call, and I’d talk to them and they’d say, “Yeah, I’m looking to jump ship.” And that would lead one step to another. So I always kept a stack of 100 resumes on my desk. I could pull from any of them. And if I had 100 already pre-vetted and already had that first interview, I will find one or two out there for sure.

Stephanie: Oh, I love that. It makes me think of the whole concept of just soliciting clients and doing sales behaviors—what is it, only like three or 5% of people are right in that moment looking to actively make a decision, right?

So what you’re talking about is the same thing, except from the employee standpoint of, you know, it may sound like, “Oh, isn’t that a big waste of time?” Well, listen, guys, they’re only this small amount of people who are willing, or currently, actively looking to change their career path.

But really, you’re just keeping this database on file, so you have a list to go to. And we do that—that’s so funny. We do the same thing. We have a tracking sheet of all of our applicants, our notes from that. If it’s a no, if it’s a maybe. So that exactly what you said, if something happens, we have already at least done some vetting, and we’ve got people to go call.

It’s like, “Okay, it’s been a year. They were good then. We liked them and we just didn’t maybe have the position for them at that time.” It’s worth a shot, guys, it really is worth a shot. So, oh, what a wonderful tip, Mark, to keep your hiring going, and has that—would you say that that has drastically improved your retention and your ability to keep the clients?

Mark: Totally, totally. It was a life-changer for us, and we kept ads running 24/7, even if we didn’t have a position open. And we just, we’d have dummy ads, and we’d be transparent, like, “Hey, we’re hiring for a potential position in such and such area. Here’s a possible rate that we might be paying for this location. Here’s the shift that we’re looking to hire for.” And so we let them decide and run on that, you know, if they’re looking, they’re looking, and we’ll just add them to the list. And so when something opens up, they get first call. They get first dibs.

Wrapping Up

Stephanie: Oh, oh my gosh, such great practical advice. So thank you, Mark, on this whole interview. I could keep going with you for hours, because you have so much experience and knowledge and especially in things that I don’t. So those are my favorite kind of people to talk to. We all can learn from you.

So where can people find you? Obviously, now you have transitioned and started doing coaching and consulting. I’d love to hear about that and where our listeners can find you if they want to learn more from you.

Mark: Absolutely. So COVID hits, right? And there’s a lot of slow periods for all of us, and so I wasn’t on these Facebook groups or anything like that. During that time, I didn’t know there’s cleaning Facebook groups out there, and I discovered them, and I started posting and sharing and helping people and stuff like that.

And I eventually worked one-on-one with this young lady up in Michigan somewhere, and I was helping her with a bid, and she won. It’s like a seven-figure contract—7 million or a million square feet. I forget what the numbers were. They’re huge numbers for her. It’s a life-changer for her.

And she goes, “You helped me do that?” And it’s like, “No, I didn’t do that. You did it. You did your bid, you did the sales.” And it’s like, “Okay, well, maybe there’s something there,” because she told me, “Hey, you should be a coach.”

And so one thing led to another. I ended up coaching. I announced on Cleaning and Cocktails, if you guys listen to that podcast, I was doing coaching and announced that to the world, and that was in January 2021. Haven’t looked back. Focus—that’s my love. That’s my passion.

So coaching, courses, some consulting within the cleaning space. I’ve done that as well. Community is the latest big thing where I put together a community.

And one thing in my coaching, a lot of people say, “Well, Mark, you’ve never started a cleaning business.” And that’s true. I never started a cleaning business. I bought one, an existing one. So what I did, I started a cleaning company from scratch. So I transitioned clients to My Clean Pivot, and then I started a new company, and it’s called Cleanliness Janitorial Services.

And what I did, I built this community around that cleaning company. The community named the cleaning company for me. They decided what it was going to target. And in return to this community—it’s a pay community—I offer them templates, sales letters, sales emails, proposal templates, employment agreements, you name it, whatever I use in that cleaning business, any business I’ve done in the past.

I give it to them just as a gift from being—I shouldn’t say gift, but as a value-add for being in the community. So this way they get to see me fall flat on my face, and I’ll be fully transparent here in front of your zillions of listeners—I’ve fallen flat on my face. I started this cleaning company in September, and we’re still struggling.

So hats off to any of you guys starting from scratch, it’s not easy, and I didn’t realize that until I started from scratch this past September. So kudos to you guys.

Stephanie: Well, number one, what a humble person you are to go through that experience and also be able to reflect and say, “You know what, this criticism or critique, I’m gonna fully own that, and I’m gonna actually put myself through it so that I can teach better.”

Because there are people out in our space who have not done anything, it’s more like they’re talking in theory, as opposed to going through the actual struggles. And that’s why I so far love this podcast, bringing in people who are willing to share their failures and their mistakes, because I think that’s where the learning absolutely is.

You know, winning all the time, you don’t learn much, I find, because that’s where the challenges are. And I bet your learning has skyrocketed because you’re putting yourself through that despite having, I mean, decades of experience and knowing the ins and outs of all of these different things, but to build it from the ground up.

I love that you’re doing that and documenting it for all of your followers to see and learn from your experience. So we will absolutely be linking all of that in the show notes. Everybody, if you are interested in checking that out, because there’s a wealth of knowledge here, Mark.

That’s how I found you—online on the ZenMaid Mastermind, I believe, as you had posted or commented and I messaged you, was like, “Hey, can I call you? I just want to—we’re really gonna be focusing on commercial in 2025 even more heavily than we already do. Can I get some pointers and things like that?”

So thank you for being so willing to share your knowledge. And obviously we are kindred spirits in the fact that our joy comes from helping our people, our community, learn and grow, because it’s a very wonderful and very motivating industry to be in.

The fact that, like one, it doesn’t take a lot of money to get into it, and you are truly helping people. You are helping people, and it feels so good to be in a business that you get to help people every single day and provide great work for people. So thank you, Mark. We’ll link all your stuff down below, because this was fantastic.

I really appreciate it. Anybody got any questions, just leave them in the comments below—what your favorite “Aha” moment of this episode was, because I mean, I’ve got a million. I’m going to be watching this over again, because I’m like, gosh, this was so good for commercial. So thank you, Mark.

Free Commercial Cleaning Resources

Mark: Well, I put a lot of this stuff together into a free resource anyone can have access to. All your listeners have access to. If you go to www.mycleanpivot.com/filthyrichcleaners, you can actually pull up a landing page and see all these different links that we talked about here on this episode, including access to templates—some basic ones for email marketing, for sales letters, for cold calling scripts, you name it, it’s in there. Tons of links, tons of resources.

Stephanie: That’s so generous of you. Thank you so much for doing that, and we’ll put that in the show notes. Guys, everybody go click there and check out all of these wonderful things Mark has put together for our very special, giant, huge audience of millions of people.

Mark: Soon, soon.

Stephanie: Well, thank you, Mark. We’ll definitely put that down there for everybody, and I would love to have you back on in the future, because this was so informative and truly enjoyable. So thank you again.

Mark: Thank you so much, Stephanie.

Stephanie: You betcha. We’ll see you on the next episode guys of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye-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

• My Clean Pivot
• Free Commercial Cleaning Resources
• ISSA Certification
• CMI (Custodial Management Institute)
• ZenMaid Mastermind Group
• Cleaning and Cocktails Podcast
• ChatGPT