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Introduction
Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast: “These are the things when you don’t have the ability to offer all sorts of robust benefits. This is part of building culture, guys. This is workplace culture.”
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
- Celebrating Business Milestones
- Client Anniversaries
- Creating Client Anniversary Videos
- Client Anniversary Gifts
- New Client Welcome Gifts
- Employee Celebrations
- Employee Anniversary Recognition
- Celebrating in the Company Newsletter
- Employee Birthday Recognition
- Building Workplace Culture Through Celebration
- Business Anniversary Celebrations
- Running a Cleaning Giveaway
- Selecting Winners and Prize Distribution
- Conclusion
Celebrating Business Milestones
Stephanie: Hello everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie Pipkin, and I am the owner of Serene Clean. Today we are going to be talking about celebrations, because tomorrow, when I’m recording this, is Serene Clean’s six year anniversary in business. I feel, first off, that’s awesome. I can’t believe it’s been six years.
Also, side note, when you think of my top, I love it, right? I feel like a genie. Amazon. I ordered it in three colors, because when I like something, I want it in every color. So if I keep doing this wing thing, it’s because of that. I just like this shirt a lot.
So celebrations, guys, I feel this is something we have really nailed at Serene Clean – really taking advantage of opportunities to use celebration time as a way to boost the business and to stand out from the competition. We are going to be talking about celebrations in three realms: clients, employees, and the business as an entity. I’m going to break down exactly how we utilize celebratory moments in each of these realms.
Client Anniversaries
We’re going to start out with client anniversaries. I feel this is something that has been going really well. I just started doing this in January of this year. Today, actually, earlier today, is when I did my batch anniversary client videos.
If you’re not in the ZenMaid mastermind, by the way, I recorded a video of exactly what I do for this about a month ago. So this is old news to everybody who’s there. So if you’re not in the mastermind, what are you doing? Go over. We’ll link it below.
This is what I do: I go to the ZenMaid settings, and I click on my celebrations. This is a feature that they released late last year, and it’s fabulous for this exact purpose, so that we can actually see what’s going on. Client Anniversaries are a great opportunity to celebrate, thank them for their loyalty, because that means that they’ve been with you at least a year, and also it makes you really appreciate the length of time some clients stay with you.
Today, I did probably about 20 videos. I use the software called Loom. If you’ve never heard of Loom, it’s just a really easy way to create videos that you can share super easily just with a link. It’s pretty affordable too. I would recommend it. I’ve used it a lot the past six months, and it allows you to hit a button and get rid of all of your filler words, your “ums,” your awkward silences. You can cut and chop things.
That is something I’ve worked on really hard since starting the podcast – not using filler words. If any of you have seen my original Maid Summit talk three or four years ago, I was a little bit younger, and I had a terrible habit of “ums” and “likes” and all of these things. Luckily, different software now allows us to sound more intelligent by reducing those filler words. I’m very proud of myself with the progress I’ve made. I find the more tired I am, the more chaotic life is, the more I use filler words, and it just makes you sound less intelligent.
So one tip I saw, I Googled how to do better about this topic, and this is for you guys from a communication standpoint: I highly recommend you working on this, because it was such a problem for me, and I feel like I come across so much more intelligent and competent when I’m not using filler words. The suggestion works really well for me – every time you would usually use a filler word, close your mouth, because if your mouth is open, “ums” and “likes” are going to spill out. So I have just trained myself now, when I’m thinking, to close my mouth instead of saying “um” or “like.”
Creating Client Anniversary Videos
So I record these Looms, and I just go through and filter by date so that it is, for example, all of April’s anniversaries. I have it scheduled on my list of tasks every last Monday of the month. I batch it, and it probably takes me less than an hour to do this. Then I pass the task off to my executive assistant, Veronica.
We have a template for anniversary emails. She grabs the link from the Loom, and she copies over the template in Outlook, and she just fills in the correct information for that particular client. Then instead of sending it, she schedules it to send on their anniversary date. So if their date is on the second, their five-year anniversary with us, then she schedules to send on the second.
Everything’s happening exactly when we want it from a time perspective, but we’re only dealing with this once a month. The feedback has been really great. We just got a really awesome Google review from one of our clients. His name’s Tim, and he left a review for the cleaning, but then he also mentioned this thank you video saying, “I got a really nice thank you from Stephanie,” and he named me in the review, which I haven’t been named in a review in so long. It was really nice.
Clearly they are appreciating it, even if they don’t say anything. The point is, I feel that customer retention and appreciation of their loyalty goes a long way, and coming from me, the owner, especially since they’re not dealing with me ever, I think it makes a good impact.
Client Anniversary Gifts
The second thing we do for client anniversaries, using the celebration feature, is Katie, my customer relations manager, goes through and does the same thing, but with a different task. We have candles made, Serene Clean candles. This was actually a really cool thing that we did last year – get a custom scent blend created from a local vendor in our area. We have room spray in that scent, and then our candles in that scent.
There are two instances where people get candles: after their second cleaning (when they’re now on their recurring service, we leave a candle and a thank you note), and anniversaries (we have the cleaners leave a candle and a thank you note with their cleaning checklist).
This is exactly what Katie does: Katie pulls up the list of anniversaries. For example, Abby – looking at this client – it was her anniversary in January. Looking at this appointment in ZenMaid, Katie has the note: “Please take a Serene Clean candle and thank you note from the office to leave with the checklist at this cleaning. Take a photo of the candle, note, and checklist and attach it to ZenMaid, or send in your manager chat. Thanks.” Just so that we have that double checking that is actually getting done, making sure that we’re covering all of our bases.
The cleaners take candles and thank you notes from whatever office they’re coming from, because remember, we have three locations, and they leave it. Client is getting appreciated, not only from me, but then the warm fuzzies from the cleaner. The candle is just a little token of appreciation.
I think it’s well worth the expense and administrative labor, because having loyal clients who stick with you, we all know financially, what that means – thousands and thousands of dollars when we can retain our clients. When you need to do price increases, all of these clients who have been with me four or five years, they’ve all had multiple price increases, and they stuck with us.
In the video, I literally call out, “Thank you so much. I appreciate everything you’ve done and your loyalty, and as we’ve gone through growing pains…” and then I also say, “Any feedback you have, we’re all ears. You know that, but I just want you to know this service is for you, and we really want to just keep taking the stress off your shoulders. So if there’s anything we can do better, whether that be from a cleaning perspective or a communication perspective, anything at all, I want to hear it so that we can improve your service and be the best we can be.”
Just really earnestly saying it exactly like that goes a long way. It’s well worth that time to do that once a month. So far, it’s been really sustainable, and we’re handling it great.
New Client Welcome Gifts
As I mentioned, that other touch point that we do is on the third cleaning. We do the whole “book your first cleaning, get your second 50% off.” That is our long-term offer that we always do for residential clients. By the time they’ve had their third cleaning, this means that they are now a recurring client. They’ve had their first two cleanings, we’ve gotten any hiccups out of the way, really learned the house, and now it’s “you are a regular client of ours, and this is what it’s going to be like to have us.”
That is what we are doing from a client appreciation standpoint, and I think it is well worth the time, the effort, and the financial side of it for candles. You can get any candles you like – order them online, go to Vistaprint and get your custom little sticker with your branding on it, slap it on there and leave it with them, or any other little token that you like. We just know our clients like candles. I love candles, so it makes it nice and easy, and obviously it goes with our room spray too. We’re really trying to be on brand.
Employee Celebrations
On to employees. I think that it is silly to think we are too grown up to celebrate things like birthdays and anniversaries. If you were to survey all of my staff, this is one of their favorite things – how appreciated they feel on their work anniversary.
From day one, we have always called out on their anniversary in the group chat and said thank you. I have also always created a graphic in Canva. I just made a template, and we just use the same one over and over, and I write a heartfelt post from me on our social media. That’s going to go out on Facebook, Instagram, it’s going to go on the website, it’s going to go on our Google My Business locations as a post.
We have always been very public about our appreciation of them, and this is where I really think about the individual. I try to avoid generic as much as possible, which is hard now that I don’t hire any of the staff members. So it takes me some time to get to know them, but one of the things that we do on our orientation or intake process of new staff members is we ask what their favorite things are – their favorite drink, their favorite scent, their hobbies and interests, their kids’ names, whatever they like, their favorite color, we ask all of these things, their favorite genre of music – so that we know about them a little bit more. If we want to do any random tokens of appreciation, we want to bring them a drink, we want to bring them a candy bar when we’re doing quality checks or training, we have that information to really make them feel seen.
Employee Anniversary Recognition
I’m going to always make the anniversary post. I’m going to call out on their actual anniversary – we send that in our team chat. It’s going to go on social media, as I mentioned. And something that I’ve started in the past six months, which I know is absolutely so extra, and you guys are all gonna roll your eyes, but I create a custom song for all of my staff members.
I know that you’re thinking, “ain’t nobody got time for that.” Well, Stephanie got time for that, because I find it very enjoyable. With the tools of the AI overlords that are going to overtake us at some point, right now I’m just trying to appreciate all the technology that we have.
What I do is I go to ChatGPT and just word vomit about the staff member. I put all of the details that I mentioned – color, food, music, hobbies, what they are like as an employee. I go put that in ChatGPT, and I say, “Write me a song about this person in this genre of music,” because whatever they said their favorite type of music is, I’m going to try to make a song in that way.
I go to ChatGPT, I tweak, I get it the way I like. ChatGPT is really good at writing songs. So it writes a song, and then I go and take it to this website (I think it’s called AI Tubo or something), and it has a music generator. I plop the lyrics into that. I do pay for the more premium one so that it does a better job, because the free ones aren’t the best songs, and you have to work at it to get it the way you want it.
I put the lyrics in, I tell it exactly what I’m looking for, and just go through multiple iterations until I get it to create the song that I want. From there, I download the song, and I put it into Clip Champ, which is just Microsoft’s free video editor, and I put lyrics to it. Then on their anniversary, I share that in the group chat, and that is where they get their own custom song. I know that’s super extra, but they do really love it.
Celebrating in the Company Newsletter
One more thing we do – we put this in the monthly newsletter that we send out every month. On the first, we have a section of anniversaries and new employees, and we just put those in there, celebrating that.
The thing is, the longer you have staff members, it gives you something to look really good to clients, too. This all helps in multiple ways. It appreciates your cleaners. It calls them out. It gives them a chance to feel seen and heard in front of all of their peers and in the public. It’s so great, but it also looks really good to clients. It shows that you care about your staff members, and it shows that you have retention.
Because if we’re calling out that we have staff members – some of my staff members have been with me for five years, and the business is turning six. Well, really they’re almost six years actually, because Crystal will be six years in July. So I have staff members who have been around for the entirety of the business. We’ve got people who are 3, 4, 5, now coming up 6 years in, and that looks really good to the clients. Clearly they’re sticking around for some reason, and they seem to be happy.
Employee Birthday Recognition
For birthdays, we now get to see it on ZenMaid, which makes it way easier to know, so we never miss a birthday. Every single staff member, we call it out on the group chat, and they just get hit with happy birthdays from everybody. We’re all jumping in, saying happy birthday and celebrating. And then Crystal (my HR manager) actually writes a birthday card, she mails the card, and she mails it with a gift card for our local gas station – just 10 bucks, I think.
So it’s not anything big, and you guys can absolutely afford $10 on their birthday. Come on, you can, I promise. And it feels good to get mail, right? Isn’t that exciting to get something in the mail that’s not a bill? Nobody gets letters in the mail anymore, so little things like that show effort.
If you just create a system around that as part of the onboarding process, put it in your email, or however you do your reminders. I use ClickUp for all of my tasks. So a week before an anniversary, it pops up in my to-do’s to do all of these side tasks, basically sub-tasks. It’s just part of the system, and that’s how you start to build into all of these things. It’s just part of the workflow now. It’s just normal to us.
It’s very important to me that everybody is feeling appreciated on their birthday, on their anniversary. It’s those little things to look forward to, because I think life can be really hard and suck, and why not take every opportunity to celebrate? That’s my philosophy for sure.
Building Workplace Culture Through Celebration
I think that just taking those moments to celebrate – these are the things when you don’t have the ability to offer all sorts of robust benefits. This is part of building culture, guys. This is workplace culture, of those little things of “I feel appreciated at my workplace,” and that will make them stay and make them be loyal, far above paying them obscene amounts of money. Obviously, that’s great too.
The kind of culture you build, it’s little things like this, where they feel seen and it’s authentic. It’s not just blowing smoke up everybody’s asses and saying that we care about them. These are the actions to show them. I’m such a big proponent of showing, not telling. It takes a minute to just call out a birthday, call out an anniversary. They gave you a year of their life where they could have worked somewhere else. Think about that. These are not robots.
Business Anniversary Celebrations
On to number three, this is business anniversary. That’s what prompted this whole video. Tomorrow is our six-year anniversary in business, and now, I think every single year, I’ve done a big cleaning giveaway on our business anniversary.
Cleaning giveaways are such a useful marketing tool, and honestly, it’s a really just wonderful thing to do to give away free cleanings. But let’s focus on the marketing, because it gives us so many clients and views and eyes and brand awareness to do cleaning giveaways. In the beginning, I did a lot of these. Now I probably only do two to three a year. It just depends how things are, but that’s been historically what I’ve been doing the past couple years. I always do one on our anniversary, and I typically will do one on Christmas in July, where I give out huge cash bonuses to our staff, and then we do a cleaning giveaway.
Running a Cleaning Giveaway
What we do is, every single year, so far, I have been doing whatever the year is – that’s how many giveaways I do. So this year, we are giving away six free house cleanings. And you may be thinking, “oh my gosh, that’s so much.” Well, we cap it at six man-hours. So six free house cleanings, six man-hours each.
I record a video that goes on our Facebook, and it’s already live by the time this is going, so we will link that video in the show notes. You guys can go see exactly what that looks like. You can go and look at any of our past cleaning giveaways. They’re all videos on our Facebook. Just go to Serene Clean’s videos, and you can scroll through and see what that looks like. You can also see that each of those get like 10,000-20,000 views.
How we make this go kind of viral in our area, organically, is having rules of how they get submitted. We are choosing three clients and three non-clients (or former clients) to win, to express loyalty to our current clients. They exclusively get to win three, and then the other three are for anybody – they don’t have to have been a client.
They must like the video, they have to comment “shared” down below, and then they actually have to share the video. That’s how they get entered to win. I have a parameter of one month, and so them sharing it gets us more views, because then their friends see it, and then they share and they comment, and it just starts growing and growing and growing.
This is a perfect example of where I would boost a Facebook post, because videos get way more views. It’s a cleaning giveaway, so people are incentivized to share, and then you boost it. You don’t have to spend very much money. You’re just gonna get so many views, and people are going to go to your page, they’re going to like it. That’s another thing – you can certainly require them to like your business page, too. This is a great tool to do cleaning giveaways, to start getting some traction on your social media, especially if you’re a newbie.
Selecting Winners and Prize Distribution
Once the month is up, we will have one of my managers’ adorable children pull from a bucket (we’ll print all the names off, and we’ll cut them all up). It’s just super cute. And then we post that video too. I’ve called winners as well. It works really beautifully for us.
Of course, what we’re going to do for our current clients, we’ll just apply that to their next cleaning. Say their regular cleaning is only three hours, well, then they get two free cleanings. That’s why we do it by man-hours. So if you charge flat rate, just make sure you’re very cognizant of putting a parameter on that, because you could be really hurting yourself. What if somebody who wins has a 6,000 square foot house? And now, all of a sudden, it’s a free house cleaning that you must, you are obligated to do.
The nice thing is, if you don’t have the availability now to schedule, you can always push it out. It’s a great way to get reviews too, because people love to leave a review on a free cleaning. They feel very obliged to do so, because they’re probably very satisfied because it’s a free cleaning.
Conclusion
I just feel that we all need to celebrate more, and celebration can be used as a wonderful marketing tool. I feel that a lot of us are probably leaving this opportunity on the table. So I highly encourage you guys to look at your audiences – your clients, your employees, and then your business as a whole/your community. These are three audiences that we’re serving. How can we utilize celebration to really showcase who you are?
It will help you figure out who you are, because you might not have a strong sense of culture or community yet. Doing these types of things brings everybody closer together, which is only going to be positive for you.
That’s what I have for you guys today. We’ll leave those links down below. So if you want to take a peek to get some inspiration – I know you all feel nervous about being on camera – go look at the oldest videos on Serene Clean’s Facebook, if you want to see my cringe. All right, just put yourself out there. It’s not that serious, and you’re probably thinking about yourself a lot more than you should, because people don’t care. They want their free cleaning. They want to see what your business is like. They want to see what you’re like.
I know it’s very hard to hop on camera. We’re not all extroverted. Stephanie in 2025 – I wasn’t always like that. I was super duper nervous. Now I don’t care about anything, and I’m not self-conscious at all. So it gets better with age.
Go out there. Get some systems in place to celebrate. Celebration systems is where it’s at. And like I said, go join the ZenMaid mastermind if you want to see some other types of content. Get questions answered from the community. I try to be as active as I can in there. It’s a great place to be, and that’s what I got. I’ll see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Give this a like, hit that subscribe. Leave me a comment – what you think of these ideas, what do you think of my shirt? Give me compliments, that’s what I want. I’ll see you guys in the next one. 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
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