Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast E27: The Lead-Converting Marketing Secrets Most Cleaning Businesses Get Wrong

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Introduction

Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast: “We have all—every person listening knows who that is, and that’s because of Facebook ads. The competition who sucks is doing that, and it’s working. They’re getting people from…”

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.

Welcome to the Marketing Master Class

Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I’m your host, Stephanie Pipkin, and today I have a marketing master class treat for you with my guest, Horacio from Grow Baby Grow. I can’t wait for you guys—we’re gonna delve into every single lesson that we possibly can in the next hour or so, all about marketing funnels, paying for advertising, which you guys know that sometimes I don’t necessarily suggest. So I am here to learn as well. Horacio, thank you so much for joining me. I can’t wait to learn from you.

Horacio: Yeah, thank you for having me here, Stephanie. I’m really happy to be here and hopefully share some valuable things for you and your audience.

Stephanie: Absolutely. So first and foremost, tell me about where you come from. How did you get involved in the cleaning businesses?

Horacio’s Journey

Horacio: So I am Horacio. I’m originally from Nicaragua. It’s a complicated name—Horacio, Oracio when you’re feeling like a risk-taker. I started my first business over there. I actually had a backpackers hostel that I opened in a surf town south of Nicaragua. Nicaragua is close to Costa Rica. I ran that for about five years until COVID. COVID hit, had to shut down. Closed it for about 18 months.

During that time, I was like, “Oh man, my entrepreneurship career is kind of taking a spin. I have to get a job now.” So I was applying for remote jobs from Nicaragua, and I actually got a gig. It was a freelancing gig at Made This Cleaning. You know Neil, and I was actually my first client, but he only got me for about 10 hours. So I’m like, “What else do I do with all this free time?”

So I got another gig, and then through referrals, I started building my agency. That was about five years ago when we started. I was pretty much doing a little bit of everything and for different industries. But over the past two and a half years, we’ve niched down into home service and particularly cleaning.

We’ve been part of the Maids franchise as they scale, implementing these systems and trying new marketing initiatives, growing with them, and then focusing more on the system side. We do a little bit of paid advertisement, but the real opportunity that we saw is on fixing what happens once you get a lead and once you get customers. How do you fix the leaks in those buckets?

A lot of people just don’t have the right follow-up, or maybe they’re not doing the follow-up. Or if they’re doing it, they don’t know what their metrics are. They don’t know if their scripts are working out. If you have a customer, you don’t really know if the customer is going to come again.

So a lot of it is the lack of clarity on the metrics that you need to run your business. And then once you have that, it’s understanding that there’s money to be made after the initial sale, and that gives you a lot more room to invest in ads or any other marketing initiative. So that’s kind of where I started and where we’re focusing on right now.

The Importance of Follow-Up Systems

Stephanie: That’s amazing. Quite the journey you’ve had, it sounds like, and I love that you’ve niched down. I’m sure universally with small businesses, we all struggle so much with managing leads as they come in—number one getting leads, but then totally screwing it up when we do have them.

Honestly, I see it almost like lighting money on fire when you don’t have a proper follow-up system. And I would say 99% of small business cleaning business owners do not have a proper follow-up system in place at all, and they just drop the ball. Is that something that you’re seeing a lot with small business owners?

Horacio: Yeah. So I see three main categories whenever I talk to somebody who’s curious about what we offer. The first type of client is those who already have these systems. When I talk about the system, just to be clear, I’m talking about a four-piece system that follows the journey of your customer.

The first step is you’ve got to generate your leads, right? This is through ads or marketing initiatives. Then you’ve got to nurture and close these leads—you’re going to turn them from a lead into a customer, which is your follow-ups on that hot lead pipeline. Then they become a customer. Once they become a customer, that’s a different relationship from a lead. Do you want to do a different onboarding? Do you want to send them a postcard? Do you want to follow up after the first clean to leave a review?

So what is the process after they become a customer? And then there’s all those lost deals, churn customers, or leads that didn’t convert. How are you still top of mind for these people?

So those are the four parts: you capture your lead, you close the sale, you get them to come back as a customer, and if not, you have a long-term plan to bring them back.

Three Types of Business Owners

Horacio: Some people have these systems and they’re happy with it. They’re converting like 40-45% of their leads. They know what their average purchases per year per customer are. They have all that, and that’s super good.

Then there’s another group where a lot of people have these systems. They already got a CRM and they paid someone to implement the systems. But a lot of times, I get there and nobody’s even looking at these systems. The tasks are all uncompleted. There’s no data because they’re not managing the system.

And this is a system that’s not only the system, it’s the process of how you move your company with these systems. How do you evolve? The system should evolve as your company evolves. You can try different things—more follow-ups, less follow-ups, different scripts, different offers.

And then the third ones are people that don’t even know these systems exist in their business. You have a follow-up process. It could be really bad, like you could not even be returning missed calls, for example. But that’s a process—you’re not doing it.

A lot of people just don’t have that clarity, and for me, that’s even more dangerous, because how are you going to invest money if you don’t know if you’re making money back? It becomes really hard. Then a lot of people get stuck on that fear that “if I invest in Facebook, I’m not making enough money on the first purchase,” and they have no clarity on the back end. So they just freeze and they stop spending. They stop growing.

So those are the three types of people that I see.

The Limitations of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Stephanie: Absolutely, especially that latter one. A lot of those folks are getting most of their leads through word of mouth. And because they’ve gotten to the point that they are now by word of mouth, they think that’s going to be what they just need to do in the future, and 100% that’s not gonna always be that way.

Word of mouth really ebbs and flows. Not that all lead channels don’t ebb and flow somewhat. But when it comes to consistency, you can’t guarantee that somebody’s going to come to you through word of mouth. And if that’s the way you’ve gotten to a couple cleaners or your own schedule booked up, it doesn’t mean that’s what’s going to work in the future.

We have to learn and change, and that’s what this conversation is going to be about—some of these different avenues of marketing, especially with paid advertising. I know so many people get burned. Either they set something up and they don’t know what they’re doing, or they pay somebody to set it up and they get massively burned, or maybe have incorrect expectations related to what is about to happen.

So I’d love to hear how you help your clients set expectations. Or, if somebody is looking to utilize paid advertising, which everybody should from what you are saying, how would you suggest they set that expectation of what is a reasonable thing to expect to happen out of it?

Working Backwards with Marketing Systems

Horacio: That’s a great question. I know that lead generation is kind of the first part of the system. But in reality, I would recommend working backwards, because if you don’t have your proper follow-up in place, and if you’re not tracking the right data, then we don’t run ads for anybody if the back-end funnels are not at least visible.

Because the reality is, the prices of the ads are going up, and that’s historically how the marketing world goes. You get something new—Facebook just came out, and the ads were really cheap on Facebook, and they started going more expensive. Instagram came out, same process. TikTok right now is cheaper, but it will get more expensive.

And you see things like LSA (Local Service Ads), which are huge for home service and cleaning companies. There’s not a lot of optimization—it’s pretty simple. You just create your profile, turn it on and off. So there’s not a lot of skill in bringing the cost per call down. There’s a few things that you can do, but we’ve seen like a 40-50% increase in LSA costs over the last year and a half.

Unless you’re raising your prices by 50% in your business, it’s a different dynamic. What needs to be happening is you need to focus on retention. If you want to be able to afford the rising cost of ads, you need to focus on retention. You need to make sure that your one-time customers are coming back. You need to make sure that your recurring customers don’t cancel—about 80% of recurring customers cancel within the first three bookings.

So if you’re not designing that specific journey and tweaking things and testing, then that’s where you’re going to be leaving some money on the table.

One of my clients right now—we are losing about 20% of the money that we’re spending on ads on the first purchase, but we have scaled ads by about 200% because we know that customers are coming back. We know, for example, that every one-time customer is going to come back 2.5 times in the next year on average. So we know that by booking number two or three, we’re going to be profitable.

That creates a lot of leverage, because then you can spend a lot of money. Right now, we’re in a situation where we’re asking “how much money can we spend?” Even at $60 per lead, because you understand the math behind it, and that allows our business to scale.

The Importance of Recurring Customers

Stephanie: So focusing on the recurring nature of it and why we need to focus so heavily on converting somebody from a first-time to a recurring client. For example, for us, our offer always has been: book your first cleaning, get your second 50% off to entice them to do the second one.

I’m not personally comfortable with giving a bunch off the first because that could be a $1,000 clean or whatever. Some people run it that way, and that’s totally fine. That’s how we’ve decided to do it. And honestly, it just helps get them into that habit of having cleanings.

And then working so hard to nail it those first couple ones, because they’re just trying you out. They’re trusting you, and all of these things—if you screw up in those first couple ones, like you said, they’re way more likely to drop. And then you invested this money into getting them, and then you lost them, and they might tell other people that you suck.

Horacio: I know, and then you get less word of mouth—exactly, reverse word of mouth. That’s a bad funnel. We don’t want to be in that funnel.

Improving Communication and Client Management

Stephanie: Yes, yes. So is there anything that you would say are some low-hanging fruit for our listeners to do a better job on building out the back end of the process, meaning being able to actually nail the cleanings and nail the communication?

Improper communication is such a widespread problem, I would say, across all businesses everywhere, but specifically in home service-based businesses. Because a lot of times the owner is out cleaning or out doing the physical labor, and that just makes it really hard for them to be quick about it with leads.

Horacio: Yeah, definitely. Well, this is where having software really gives you a lot of leverage. If you have a CRM—and I know that a lot of people already have some sort of CRM—I would say the lowest hanging fruit is to make sure that you’re tracking the data. Because at the end, you’re working off a conversion rate.

When I work with my customers, we look on a quarterly basis: how many leads did you get? How many did you convert? What’s your conversion rate? You can look at it from different sources, like your Google My Business, so that you can see it. But you have that number, and then on that number, we apply a very simple experimentation process.

This is where we are right now—if we make these changes, we think that this is going to happen. This can be trying a new offer, changing the message, more touch points, less touch points. So we do a big experiment on a quarterly basis. We have our benchmark, and then we get the results.

If the results are good, then that becomes the new control for the next round of iteration. And if it does not work out, then we understand why, and we get insights for our next iteration. So it’s a systematic process that we do on a quarterly basis for big experiments and month to month monitoring.

Because at the end, what we find is that many cleaning businesses have like 18-20% conversion rate, and they don’t even know sometimes. There’s definitely room for improvement on that. Generally, I mean, I know that there are some bad quality sources, but we see a lot of people that start with 20% and then we target taking them to 35-40%.

Sales as a Skill That Requires Practice

Stephanie: I think a lot of times people who are starting out and just flat out haven’t had any practice at all at sales—sales is a skill, closing leads is an absolute skill, following a sales script on the phone is a skill.

When we start our businesses, we probably suck at all of these things, and we’re also very embarrassed by the fact that we suck. Unfortunately, that causes you to clam up when the exact opposite is needed, which is so much practice until you get better.

So many of us think, “My area just won’t accommodate those prices. It can’t. It won’t. Everybody’s cheap here.” And it’s like, I’m in rural Wisconsin, we’re charging $55 per man-hour. I never in a million years would have thought that was possible in that particular area, and it’s no problem.

That has to do with marketing, sales, branding, all of that stuff. The market will bear it, guys. You may suck right now at sales, and that’s okay, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying. And I love that you gave that example of experimentation. But the biggest thing is you’re practicing. You’re observing what happened, and then you’re tweaking it. It’s like a science experiment. You can’t just do it and then be like, “Well, that didn’t work. I’m gonna just stop doing this altogether.” We gotta tweak it.

The Importance of Persistence and Optimization

Horacio: I mean, I like to think that as long as you are doing that process of trying something, figuring out if it works or if it doesn’t, getting that data and then identifying the issue—in doing that process over and over again, as long as you don’t quit, you’ll figure it out in the end.

So in terms of low-hanging fruits, if they have a system, we have one simple automation: if you get a missed call, then send a text message. A lot of these missed calls are spam calls—spam calls are crazy nowadays—but you get some customers over there, and that is an automation that, if you have a CRM, sometimes takes a minute to set up, and that will be high value.

If you have to start, I know we talked about customer retention and win-backs, but just having a clear follow-up process in place and starting with your lead conversion. Whenever you’re optimizing, you want to start optimizing where you have more eyeballs, as a rule of thumb.

Unless you have a lot of people on your book-now page, changing the font color on your book-now page isn’t as important as fixing your front end—how many leads you’re getting, what your conversion rate is. You might be doing a three-step follow-up process. Is that working out? Am I getting responses or no? Okay, what if I do five follow-ups? What if I change the wording?

So focusing on the missed calls and then lead nurture as a first step in your optimization process.

Starting with Advertising: Where to Begin

Stephanie: I have a feeling a lot of our listeners are totally clamming up right now because they’re like, “I don’t even know what we’re talking about.” Because honestly, like, I would say again, 99% of people who open cleaning businesses are actively cleaning while they’re listening, or they have been most recently cleaning.

I think that’s where we go cross-eyed when it comes to spending money. We know we should be spending money on advertising, but we don’t even know where to start. So would you say—I mean, LSA, so Local Service Advertisement through Google My Business, very easy to set up, paid advertising on Google—how much would you even suggest somebody to start with? Or does it change depending on the size of their business? What is a minimum budget, would you say, that is actually going to be fruitful for them?

Horacio: It depends. I think that LSA is a lot easier to manage than Facebook and Google ads. With regular Facebook ads, you need some more tech skills to know how to create an ad. But the benefit is that if you’re just getting started, then LSA might not be getting you enough leads because you’re a new business, so you don’t have enough reviews.

And then SEO is going to take some time. So when you’re getting started, definitely be on LSA. Thumbtack is another one that can get you leads that are cheaper than LSA—the quality varies depending on the market from what I’ve seen. But I’ve seen some people that have really good results with Thumbtack. Those are the easy ones.

Now, if you’re able to run Facebook or Google ads, I’ve seen leads on Facebook ads coming below $20 cost per lead—less quality, of course—and then Google Ads similar to LSA. But the good thing with Facebook and Google is that you control it. Even if you want to spend a lot of money in LSA, if you don’t have a lot of reviews, it’s going to be hard to use that budget, versus with Facebook and Google, it doesn’t matter if you’re starting and don’t have so many reviews—you can generate traffic. But it’s a little bit harder to manage. It’s not just turning it on and off.

Creating Effective Facebook Ads

Stephanie: Absolutely. And when it comes to Facebook ads, something that I’ve seen a lot of people do is the ads are terrible, and so then they think that Facebook ads don’t work. And it’s like, the content of these ads really, really, really matters. Do you have any particular formula that you follow for these ads? What exactly do you follow when you’re drafting them?

Horacio: You know, things like before and after. First of all, video is definitely working—static images are almost dead. Some people are using regular pictures and images, but it’s all moving to Reels and TikTok-style video.

In that area, we’ve seen some success in before and after. So if you were to do “my house before this cleaning company came, and then right after.” Also, “a day in the life”—I’m a normal person, this is my day, I go to work, come back, I don’t have to worry about cleaning because everything is taken care of.

Something that we’re doubling down on, and we still need to see if it’s going to have ROI, is working with a network of creators. Since the entire ad landscape is going to video, if you want to be profitable on Facebook ads, you’re probably going to have to run video ads.

If you’re going to be running video ads, I think it’s worth exploring working with a few creators and telling them, “I’ll give you a two or three-hour cleaning for free in exchange for one or two videos.” Have them post it, and then you can sponsor their video by connecting to their account. That makes it easier because you don’t have to create the content. You just reach out to the influencer or creator, go clean the house, get the video, then sponsor and start getting leads.

Using Influencers for Content

Stephanie: That’s such a good idea to find influencers to do that. That was my old-fashion approach—when I opened, I reached out to influencers in our area, which were like stay-at-home moms who had money. And I asked, “Can I clean your house in exchange for an honest review?”

That was before I knew of the power of video. Nowadays, we get video testimonials. And actually, that’s really the only thing I’ve ever spent money on for Facebook ads—video testimonials—and it works very, very well. Would you say that’s a good use of video ads, testimonials?

Horacio: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Testimonials are good. You want to keep it short, especially if you’re running lower budget. You want to do shorter videos, so testimonials that are within 15 to 60 seconds, and then just run with that.

They’re making it easier now for people trying to get into Facebook ads. They’re using a bunch of AI, so now they really guide you—just upload a bunch of videos, write some copy. They have their own AI now that can help with copy.

But yeah, I definitely think that working with creators in that fashion, you could even think about an affiliate model with the creators as well to keep them incentivized. Like, “We’ll give you $10 per lead that we get.” We give you a free cleaning, and then we’ll promote your cleaning, and for every lead that we get, I can give you $5 or $10.

Stephanie: That is really creative. I love that. Especially considering how many owners I’ve talked to who are very camera shy, despite me trying to force them to make content, because it is so valuable. But I understand people feel uncomfortable with that sometimes. So that’s really great suggestions. My brain is already going, “Oh, who could I do that with?” Finding an influencer in our area might be a little bit more challenging, but I like the creativity for sure.

Finding the Right Influencers

Horacio: Well, at the end, it’s not so much about the reach for these tactics. So you can go with smaller influencers. You just want to make sure that they have really nice quality.

Because technically, if you want to use an influencer’s reach, it’s because they reach your target audience. But in local businesses, it’s a little hard because you might have somebody in fashion who has millions of followers, but they’re everywhere in the world.

So this tactic is more about getting high-quality content for the cost of a two or three-hour cleaning, and then having them share it. But at the end, it’s about having that video and then sponsoring that video so that you can control the amount of leads that you’re getting.

Website Importance and Alternatives

Stephanie: That makes perfect sense. This just makes me think—wherever you’re advertising is pushing people, most likely to a website. There are some bad websites out there in our industry. I’ve seen a lot of bad websites, and honestly, sometimes I don’t even want to tell people to run any ads because their website is so bad—I think, “This is going to turn people away.”

So what advice do you have about websites? What do our people need to hear about having a good website and why it’s so important to invest in it? A lot of people are scared when they see the price tags of a good web designer. “I don’t have that kind of money.” Any tips there?

Horacio: That’s a great question. There are other options that don’t require a website for advertising. You’ve got Facebook leads. You can advertise through Messenger. You can do WhatsApp. So there are other ways to advertise, and we actually do a little bit of all of them.

I think it’s more important to get to a lead fast. So whichever method you’re more comfortable with—if you’re going to be on Messenger and can reply to a lead within a minute, that will be your best chance.

Now, having a website allows you to seduce the person a little bit more, share more about your offer and your specific service. But in reality, specifically for cleaning companies, if you have a straightforward offer like a cleaning service, I think that running Facebook leads, where the person just sees something and you can ask for the information right there, works well. You don’t need to explain the service super in-depth, unless you have a different offer.

If you want to do something like a specific offer for recurring customers, giving a discount on the second cleaning, then you might want a website to explain that. In terms of building the website, it’s becoming easier nowadays with AI. Having a super nice, branded website can be expensive, but if you just want to spin something up, you don’t need to be a developer. I’m not a developer. Now it’s kind of drag and drop, and you have templates. You pick a template, change the colors, change the copy, change the pictures.

So it’s becoming easier, and if not, there’s always freelancers that can spin up a quick site as well.

Website Basics to Remember

Stephanie: Absolutely. And you can find a lot of good quality people online who can do it for a more affordable price. So that is good to hear that you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg. It’s just more about being clean, being professional, and making sure your offers are very concise.

Something I see too is just not being clear. Sometimes I get to websites and it’s like, “Well, where do you even serve?” And I’m searching to even find their service area or what city or state they’re in. So just the basics, guys, are sometimes forgotten—”Well, I know where my business is”—you don’t even think to put it on your website. So little things like that can be easy mistakes to make.

Understanding Marketing Funnels

Stephanie: I’d love to go more into funnels. Can you define what that means in a marketing sense? What is a funnel?

Horacio: Everything is a funnel. We’re in a funnel right now. So basically, a funnel represents a process or a system. It’s the way that a person goes from awareness—like discovering your brand—to being a super customer.

They first have to see an ad, and they click on the ad, then they’re not convinced, so you send them a few emails. It’s that process, and in a business, it usually goes from discovery phase of being aware of the brand, to making the transition from a lead to a customer. That’s a really important time.

You see companies like this COVID company—their ads are everywhere, the $19 service.

Stephanie: But that’s, you know…

Horacio: One of the reasons they’re able to do that is because the moment that you enter your credit card information, even if it’s $1, the relationship changes. It’s a so much hotter lead whenever you already have that.

So that’s the next step—you go from lead to customer, and then once you have a customer, the way that we design it for cleaning companies is we have a journey for one-time customers, and then we have another one for recurring customers.

For one-time customers, it’s about getting them to come back. So they become a customer after their first cleaning. There’s a message to get a review, a follow-up call from the sales team. And then there’s a promotion—”Hey, it’s been a month since we last went to your house”—on month one, and then we have another promotion on month three, another one on month six. You can change it for your cleaning company.

For recurring customers, what we do is break down the journey for every stage. For example, if you want to send a postcard after the second cleaning, you can do that. We do a referral program, so after they complete three bookings, we tell them about our really good referral program. And we can do that for bookings 7, 8, 9, 10, however many cleanings they have.

That’s where most of the money is. If you get all your customers to purchase two times per year instead of one, or if you get your recurring customers to go from five visits on average to seven, that is huge. That’s the core of the business.

So once we get to about 35-40% lead conversion, then we focus on how to increase your customer lifetime value. So we have those two journeys, and then the final funnel is our win-backs, which is for customers that canceled or leads that never converted.

We’re sending spring cleaning promotions right now, trying to reactivate them. And once they’re getting reactivated, whether because they’ve been clicking on the emails or they just tell us they’ve been interacting with the brand, then we have a specific follow-up for them.

Balancing Offers and Brand Perception

Stephanie: I’m curious about this—what do you think about having offers and coupons and sales and things cheapening a brand? For example, at Serene Clean, we’re really focused on high quality. We’re not cheap. We don’t skip anything.

I’ve always been really averse to doing sales or coupons or offers outside of what I’ve already described to you, because I think, “Does that not cheapen us?” What do you think about that? I’m open to being persuaded.

Horacio: I think there are two different strategies. If you have the flexibility to really go premium and over-deliver—if you’re different and better than other cleaning companies in some ways—then you can frame it differently. Instead of having the promotions be like, “We’re cheaper,” they can be about how you bring more value.

You could highlight your checklist or include a different deep cleaning on certain areas. So if you have something unique in your brand, you can focus on that.

But the reality is that coupons are effective. It can affect the brand, and it’s hard to measure the impact on your brand, but it’s easy to measure that when you send a coupon—what is the reply rate? You can compare that.

So I would say, consider it. And if you’re not going to do coupons, make sure that it’s because you are able to add value in a different way.

The Reality of Differentiation

Stephanie: And I think what you just said about “are we differentiating enough that we are able to justify the lack of coupons?” I think when you’re starting off, the answer is probably no. There isn’t anything different about you than most cleaning companies, which nobody wants to hear, but you probably haven’t established a strong brand identity or have the overhead to accommodate the things that make you different.

For us, our whole culture is about our staff and pouring into them—super heavy benefits and family first—and we really promote that as our brand. So we can now afford to not do coupons. But I would imagine for a lot of people, it is exactly what makes sense.

You brought up Homejoy, and of course, I’m pissed at them, but we’ve all heard of Homejoy. Every person listening knows who that is, and that’s because of Facebook ads. The competition who sucks is doing that, and it’s working—they’re getting people. So that means we should be too, because we’re actually good!

Understanding Customer Lifetime Value

Horacio: And you can tell they’re not making money on that first purchase. You need to know what your lifetime value is. That is the most important metric of your business. It’s not how much you’re making per average ticket sale, it’s what is the lifetime value of your customer.

You can download your contact base and see how many bookings everybody has had, add everything up and multiply by your average ticket value—$220, $250, whatever it is. You don’t have to be super exact, but get that average so that you know how much money a customer generates for you, and then use that as your reference of whether you can afford ads or not.

Try to get this number higher through your retention funnel and systems. But that is the most important metric, because if you know that your average customer is going to leave you $1,000 in a lifetime, then you know $60 for an LSA lead—even if you’re closing one out of three, you’re paying $180 for a customer, but that customer is giving you $1,000.

If I’m going to give you $1,000 for every $180 that you give me, you would do that trade as many times as possible. But it starts with knowing what your lifetime value is.

The Importance of Tracking Metrics

Stephanie: I’m so happy you said that. It brings it back to tracking and key performance indicators and so many things that so many owners don’t do. Because it’s like, “Oh, math, yuck, I don’t like that,” they just dismiss that they need to do it. And they’re like, “Well, it feels like it’s going well,” and they’re just going off of vibes. That’s not a good thing.

I actually just recorded a whole solo episode this morning about all of the problems that come from just going off of our emotions and how we feel things are going in our businesses.

In your world, what other metrics would you suggest that we track if you had to give it to somebody who’s maybe a little overwhelmed? Where should they start with tracking metrics that’s actually going to be super important for them?

Horacio: So lifetime value definitely, and that is just basically adding your entire revenue over the amount of customers that you have—you can get an estimate on that. Then your second would be your customer acquisition costs. And you want to break it down by source.

So if you invest $500 in Thumbtack, you want to know how many customers that brought. If you spent $500 and got three customers, then you know you’re paying about $160 for a customer in Thumbtack. And then, because you already did your lifetime value, you’ll know if it makes sense or not.

So those at the very least would be the relationship between those two—how much does it cost you to get a new customer, and then how much money you’re making from that customer? That’s the basic economic model of the company.

And then it’s a lot about your ad channel performance, especially in the cleaning world. Wherever you’re spending money, how many leads are you getting, and what is your cost per lead, and then how many of those are becoming customers?

If you were to see it as a funnel, you have so many people that saw your Facebook ad, then so many people clicked on it, then so many people became a lead, and then so many people became a customer. Those metrics—wherever you’re spending money, get those four metrics and they’ll tell you where it’s more profitable for you.

Tracking Where Your Leads Come From

Stephanie: That’s really good advice to just narrow it down to those few things, which, depending on where you guys are advertising, will determine how complicated this is. Something I’m wondering about—we get so many organic leads just from people Google searching. We don’t have any Google Ads going right now. So say I was running Google ads—obviously we ask people where they come from. That’s where I start to get confused. Was this organic or was this paid? How would I figure that out?

Horacio: A lot of people, what we do sometimes, is the simplest thing is just create a landing page, which is like another website. It could be exactly like your website, but just a duplicate page, and change the URL. Then just make sure that if you’re running Facebook ads, it’s going to that page.

So you’re running Facebook ads to one page, and Google ads to another page, and then you can say any lead that comes to this page can be attributed to that channel. That’s the simplest way—just make sure you have one page per channel.

There are more sophisticated ways, but if you have no technical expertise, then the easiest is to duplicate your page and then have one page per channel.

Stephanie: That’s great. I’m definitely going to do that, because this is something that’s always frustrated me. People will just say, “Well, your website, that’s how I found you.” And it’s like, well, clearly there was something happening before that.

Horacio: I know, “website” is your worst source.

Stephanie: Yeah, asking people where they heard about you—they just leave it blank, because for some reason people seem like, “I’m not gonna give you that.” It’s like, I’m about to be in your house. How you found me doesn’t make any sense to me.

Horacio: Worried about privacy.

Stephanie: So funny sometimes, or they don’t want to give you their house address and you need to give them a quote. “I don’t trust you with my address.”

Horacio: Remote cleaning, I guess.

Stephanie: Yeah, “I’ll pay you, and you can clean your house.”

Horacio: “I’ll tell you how to start from the top.”

Stephanie: That’s funny. Like, open a consulting business and just Zoom coach people through their house. Maybe that’s probably a thing, honestly.

Horacio: I mean, there are so many cleaning products nowadays, and I’m scared.

Stephanie: I don’t even know what to use. For sure. Well, that’s really practical advice.

Understanding the Stages of Funnels

Stephanie: Coming back to the funnels, if you were to describe the stages—meaning the discovery, the first interaction, the follow-up—where do you think people fumble the most?

Horacio: Across the board, but the most important part is fixing your follow-up. I think because it starts there. Even if you think about the amount of people that become new customers, it’s very small compared to the amount of leads that your business is getting.

So if you’re gonna take anything from this, I would suggest just making sure that you have a way to track, and if you don’t have software, you can do it on a spreadsheet. There are actually simple things that you can do—either you have your phone system who calls you and then just add them to a spreadsheet and then just make sure that they’re being followed up with three or four times.

That will be a simple way—how many people call you? Grab those numbers, put them into a spreadsheet. If you don’t know how to do it automatically, you do that on a daily basis. And then you can have follow-up one, follow-up two, follow-up three—little columns that you can just check, check, check.

But you want to make sure that you’re doing enough follow-ups. Five to seven, eight times is where we’ve seen the best conversion rate for home service, including cleaning companies.

The Importance of Persistent Follow-Up

Stephanie: I’m so happy you just said those numbers, because I guarantee that nobody’s doing that much follow-up. And they’re averse to it. And may I remind everybody listening, these people reached out to you. They want you.

If people are busy, they don’t answer their phone. I get a ton of promotional texts every single day. It’s just happenstance if I happen to look at one—you just have to catch me at the right time, and I don’t pick up my phone.

So it’s not even bothering them. Just follow up on what they asked you to do, which is reach out to them. So I’m really happy that you said so much follow-up is needed.

Honestly, that’s how we’ve tracked our leads for a long time—in a spreadsheet like you’re describing, the different places they could come from across the top each week, and then I just tracked how many, left a comment, who it was, and we just made sure we were doing the follow-up. That was before we had a more complicated CRM process, now that we’ve scaled so much.

It doesn’t have to be as complicated as you think, especially if you are starting out and don’t have the money for anything like that. Of course, I’m gonna tout ZenMaid—we push everybody towards the booking form on ZenMaid so that all of our leads are in one place.

That’s where I fumbled in the beginning—I was giving people prices on Facebook and over the phone and in person and by email. And then when I was trying to find whatever I said, it was like, where did I even talk to them? So that would be one of my suggestions—trying to keep things consolidated in one space as much as possible, especially when you’re so busy starting out.

Automating Your Lead Management

Horacio: 100%. You want to streamline your communication. I have created a specific video that I can share with you later on about how you can use Zapier, which is an automation tool.

Stephanie: Oh, me and automation. I spent literally five hours on Friday tweaking our CRM with automation.

Horacio: Oh yeah, exactly the same. I can geek out for hours and hours. But what I created was—with the free plan in Zapier, you can create one-step automations. And basically, if you have a phone system like Dialpad or RingCentral, whatever you’re using for your business, this is all free.

You can create a Zapier trigger that, for every new call, adds the number to a spreadsheet. So that’s your first CRM, if you want. If you were to build that, it takes about 10 minutes. It’s free, and it connects your calls. You get a new phone call, the number is in the spreadsheet, and then the spreadsheet has all these columns so that you can add notes, if they’re interested, or what you quoted them.

And then just make sure that you’re following up. So if you’re able to do five to eight follow-ups, implement that. Doesn’t have to be all phone calls—text messages, emails. There are now tools for voicemail drops—you record an audio and then it leaves a missed call and a voicemail, so it looks like you called. “Oh, I missed a call,” and then you hear the voicemail. So there’s another touch point that you can do.

The Value of Phone Calls

Stephanie: I love that, because talking on the phone is so time-consuming, but it’s so important, especially in the beginning. Honestly, when it comes to service-based businesses, somebody actually calling you back is like an absolute miracle on Earth nowadays.

So people get dazzled when you call them back. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, nobody called me back.” In our competition, in our area, nobody calls anybody back. It makes it really easy to impress people, because they’re shocked that you’re actually reaching out.

It is so easy. You literally have to do the bare minimum to impress people, because the competition is so bad. And I’m not suggesting just do the bare minimum, but if you’re not doing it, it’s like, come on guys, it’s so easy.

Even sending, especially if you’re in the field, setting something up so that it texts them back, as you suggested earlier—an automation to send a text. How would you set that up? Are there any softwares you would recommend for a “missed call, send a text”? What would that look like?

CRM and Automation Recommendations

Horacio: A lot of CRMs—customer relations management systems—basically where you host your contact database and can manage communication. A lot of people have their own systems where you can implement something like a missed call automation.

All automation is a trigger (what starts an automation) and the process of the automation. So the missed call text is just, basically, there’s a missed call, and then send a text message.

Whenever we start working with a new client, we implement a few things. The first thing we do is get on a call with them to do some branding exercises, understand the target customer, and just make sure that we’re creating content that resonates with their values.

Then we build the systems—your lead nurture, customer retention, your win-backs. We build all the emails, all the SMS, all the text messages, set up tracking. And then we also have—oh, that’s another thing—if your audience is not doing pop-ups, I know that a lot of people are like, “Oh, I don’t like pop-ups,” but they are effective.

If you don’t like them, there’s one that is only for exit intent—whenever somebody’s exiting. The cool thing about pop-ups is that you can give offers, like promotions, but you can also create things that are just valuable, like a PDF or a little guide using AI, and then just get some more leads.

So we make sure first that your website has a pop-up and chat bot so you’re capturing more leads. Then we build your lead nurture process—emails, text messages, voicemails—we create tasks. So if you have a sales team, or if you’re running sales yourself, you also have a checklist of daily to-dos. Today you have to follow up with this person because you gave them a quote two days ago. You also need to follow up with this person because they had their first booking yesterday, and you want to get a review.

So you have a task list of everything that your sales team needs to do, and then we build your customer retention processes. And the last thing that we do, once everything is ready and we continue to optimize, is we create monthly campaigns. Right now we’re doing spring cleaning, we just did February for Valentine’s so we ran promotions for Valentine’s. We’re doing spring cleaning right now and then it goes on monthly.

We basically become CRM as a service. Instead of getting a CRM, they can just get our service, and we become their CRM, with all these funnels already built and an ongoing optimization process that we do.

Comprehensive Marketing Services

Stephanie: That is very impressive and something that, especially in the beginning, I would have loved to have. For our CRM, we actually use ClickUp, and we have just highly, highly customized it to our exact needs because of the task management and the automation that it offers, integrating with Zapier.

But it’s a lot of work, and we know what we’re doing in that aspect. It’s very overwhelming to start from scratch in that way, and a lot of people simply do not have the time or bandwidth to even figure it out. And then when it starts going wrong, now you really are freaking out because you don’t know what’s going on.

That is very impressive—all of the things that your services offer. Who would you say is your ideal cleaning business owner? What would the person that you would want to work with look like?

Horacio: Usually, to really be able to get enough value from our service, you’re getting about 20-25 leads per week minimum. So you’re getting about 100 leads per month. And then you either don’t have these systems, or you don’t know if the systems are working, or maybe you have these systems and nobody’s using them, or you’re not happy with your conversion rate.

But if you’re having less than 20-25 leads per week, it’s probably not a good fit at this moment. But people can still reach out. If you’re not at the point for our services, we also can help with diagnosing your funnel.

A lot of people who are going to be listening to this, they just don’t know. They don’t know what their conversion rate is. They don’t know what their lifetime value is. So for those people, even if it’s not the right time—they don’t have enough volume right now—they can still book a call. We can review their numbers and design a map that gets them to where they can actually get our service.

And then, in the meantime, we also have some free resources that people can use to get started, like the CRM template things.

The Value of Getting Guidance

Stephanie: That’s super valuable, especially just the diagnostics. A lot of times we just get so overwhelmed because we don’t even know where to begin. So having somebody guide you through, “Well, this is what this is. This is what this is. And this is what I would suggest”—kind of that touching base, and then they’re off to the races.

The lack of knowledge sometimes is just paralyzing—you don’t know where to start, or what to do. So I love that. Any particular free resources that you would like us to link, that you would think our audience would find useful?

Horacio: I think that the free CRM resource has a video on how to set up Zapier, connect your phone system to a spreadsheet. It has a spreadsheet that you can use as a template. So I think that would be super useful, especially for those that are getting started and want to organize their leads.

Key Takeaways for Listeners

Stephanie: Well, if you share it, we’ll definitely put it in the resources below, because I definitely want people to take some action on this.

Overarchingly, what I’m getting from this is: call your leads and then call them again. Just keep following up and keep tweaking things, whether it be paid ads, whether it be your branding, marketing, anything—whatever you’re spending money on, don’t just let it sit and rest. Actually take a peek at it on a regular basis.

How often would you suggest that we’re looking at this? Is it a weekly basis? Is it monthly? How long do you let it experiment till you do the tweaking? What’s that time period look like?

Horacio: It depends on your level of knowledge on what you’re tweaking. Technically, if we’re talking about ads, for example, I like to have at least 200 people see an ad before changing anything, which is about $6 or $7 per ad.

So if you’re running a bunch of ads, run it for about a week, maybe spend a couple hundred dollars, and then you can see which ones are performing. From there you can start optimizing. But basically, you want to spend at least $50 to $100 for every single ad that you do if you want to start optimizing. Anything less than that, you’re probably going to be changing things too fast.

Testing Facebook Ads Effectively

Horacio: If you want to do something like Facebook ads, they have this thing called dynamic creative. It’s just a fancy way to say, give Facebook a bunch of different ads—a bunch of videos, a bunch of copy—and then have their AI mix and match.

That’s an easy way if you want to test ads. Instead of doing one ad, and then next week another ad, you can have five ads and then just let it run. You review it on a weekly basis, but Facebook is choosing the best of the best.

Stephanie: I love that, and I’m just so happy you said static ads are dead, and that video is the way to go. For those listening that are running static ads, which is probably pretty much everybody who’s run a Facebook ad because you don’t have any video content, it sounds like it’s time for us all to get in gear and get some video content—quality video content, either from an influencer, ourselves speaking, or a client speaking.

It sounds like that is the way to go, and it will do much better for us, because it’s actually enticing. People like to see people, especially nowadays—we’re all addicted to Reels. Might as well go in the direction that we’re all addicted to.

Horacio: Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be super fancy videos, either. The more authentic, the better. Just regular videos—you’re there cleaning, before and after, day in the life. You don’t need a professional team to record it. You just need to be in the place.

The Power of Cell Phone Videos

Stephanie: Absolutely, cell phone videos. Literally, that’s how I announced my business when I was 22—a video on my cell phone, sitting down, announcing my business and my love for video content literally started that day. I look back at that video and it’s super cringey, but it worked.

I just posted it on Facebook and I got my free reviews from doing some free cleanings. And we were off. So you’re preaching to the choir. I’m fully all about video. It’s really proved very fruitful for me. And I’m happy that you are reiterating what I already believe. So it’s nice to hear that that’s validated.

Horacio: Yes, we’re on the same boat.

Closing Thoughts

Stephanie: Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time. This has been really, really insightful. If anybody wants to find out more, perhaps, about your services, whether the free resources, the diagnostics, or the whole shebang, where can they find you?

Horacio: Yes, they can just go to our website. That’s GBG.marketing. GBG is “grow baby grow,” and then it’s dot marketing instead of dot com. Over there, if they don’t know where they are, they can just get the free conversion diagnosis so that we know what their conversion rate is. And if we can add value, I’ll share the free resource for the free CRM that they can implement. And if they’re just one of the right customers for our service, the website has that as well.

Stephanie: Awesome. Well, I can’t wait to hear how people think of this, because I think it’s going to really help clear up a lot of confusion around this topic. Because we certainly are not advertising experts, but we’re cleaners. I appreciate all of your knowledge. Thank you so much.

Horacio: Of course, thank you.

Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. And everybody hit that like, hit that subscribe. Any other questions you have, maybe we have another episode following up with all of your guys’ specific questions on anything to do with advertising, funnel systems. Would love to hear them down below, guys. So make sure you hit that subscribe, hit that like, and we will see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye, guys.

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

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

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• GBG.marketing
• Zapier
• ClickUp
• Local Service Ads (LSA)
• Thumbtack