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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
The Power of Team Meetings
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie Pipkin, owner of Serene Clean in Western Wisconsin. It’s about 7:30 a.m. on a dreary Monday morning when I am recording this. On Mondays, we have our full team meetings every single Monday morning without fail.
If you are not doing team meetings, that should be a big priority in the new year because it does wonders for the culture, for nipping issues in the bud, and for everybody to actually spend time and get to know each other. And if you’re thinking, “Stephanie, I can’t do team meetings, we’re all out cleaning!” – Well, we have lots of people who don’t make it in person. We host it virtually through Zoom. They all jump in and listen while they’re driving to their jobs or getting their kids ready. Over half of our people attend virtually, but they’re still involved and connected.
The Post That Inspired This Episode
I thought I would hop on and record a quick episode based on a great post I saw this morning in the ZenMaid Mastermind. And if you are not a member of the ZenMaid Mastermind group on Facebook, I highly recommend it – you don’t need to be a ZenMaid customer to be part of that group. You can just join. It’s a wealth of knowledge from all different people in the cleaning industry at all different sizes of businesses. I’ve been in there since I opened, and you can literally click on my name and see my original posts asking questions like “How do I bid this commercial account?” Because I didn’t know what I was doing. Not that I feel like I know what I’m doing now, but I know a smidge more, and that’s why we are here.
This post is from Cassie, asking about scaling from $10,000 revenue per month to $20,000 revenue per month. This video and podcast is going to be super relevant to anybody who feels stuck at their revenue point, or maybe you haven’t even opened yet, or maybe you’re far past $10,000 but you’re still at a sticking point. These are the things that can help move that needle, but I would say it’s especially relevant for those under $20,000 to $30,000 a month.
Our Growth Timeline
Serene Clean is fairly unique – we took some really giant leaps and bounds. To give you reference points:
- Serene Clean opened in April of 2019. It was just me.
- By November of 2019, we hit that 10K mark. So that was seven months into business.
- June of 2020 was when we hit $23,000 in revenue.
- By July of 2020, we were at $37,000.
- December of 2020, we finished the year at $45,000 a month.
And if you all can go back to 2020 in March/April, that’s when COVID started. Though it was difficult to finagle, as any of you who went through COVID can totally relate to, it was good in a lot of ways because we’re in the cleaning industry and this was a pandemic.
Getting Out of the Trenches
For the first year and a half, I was maintaining my full-time job, cleaning on nights and weekends, and doing all of the administrative work – everything that had to be done. This meant I was cleaning clients’ houses, going to the bathroom while responding to other clients about pricing, or checking in on employees who were probably not showing up or doing a terrible job. It’s a bad place to be, and the goal is to get out of there, to get the revenue above the point where you can start to delegate and get yourself out of the field.
The quick and dirty things that helped us grow were: getting social proof, landing commercial accounts, and getting a hiring system in place. Let me break these down for you.
The Power of Google Reviews
You need to be getting Google reviews. If you are doing all of your reviews on Facebook or elsewhere – Yelp, whatever – you need to be getting Google reviews. And side note, you need to have a website to point people to. People who are searching for cleaning companies are going to be going off of quantity and quality of reviews when they are making the decision to even reach out.
Are you going to get to 100 reviews today or tomorrow? No, but can you get a review this week? Yes, you probably can. That was the goal I set for myself – get one Google review a week. If you get more, that’s great, but just creating that habit of asking and leaving behind review cards is crucial.
All of our cleaners leave behind a little card that I designed on Vista Print – super cheap. It just explains and links to where they can leave the Google review, and the cleaner can actually walk them through. To get your cleaners to ask for reviews, all you need to do is pay them every time they get a review that mentions their name. We pay our cleaners $5 per positive review when the review mentions their name. That incentivizes them to ask because otherwise it’s just benefiting you and not them.
The Gold Mine of Video Testimonials
Video reviews are worth their weight in gold. If it’s taking you a while to get Google reviews, and all of your competitors have a ton of them, the way you jumpstart and leap ahead is getting video reviews. There is nothing more compelling than seeing a real live customer in your area who has used your service describing it themselves – and it’s not coming from the company, it’s coming from another customer.
People ask, “How do I ask for those, Stephanie?” I just send an email, text, or ask in person. Here’s what I say: “Would you be willing to do a one-minute long video review that we can show other people in our community about our services? We would so appreciate it. Here’s what I’m going to ask you: what your name is, how long you have been using Serene Clean, how did you hear about Serene Clean, and why would you recommend Serene Clean to other homeowners in our area?”
The Power of Commercial Accounts
When I talked about those numbers earlier of going from $10,000 to $37,000 in less than a year – and so early on in the business life too – commercial is one of the biggest reasons for that. And I know a lot of you are like, “Stephanie, I can’t do commercial.” I thought that too until I started doing it and realized it’s just like cleaning houses except easier, and we make more money, and they have us come more often, and it’s easier to manage because it’s not somebody’s house.
I got one of our first commercial accounts, one of the biggest ones actually, just a couple months into the business and they found me on Google. They found me on Google and saw my website. They called little Stephanie with like zero cleaners and asked me to bid their giant hundred thousand square foot facility. I understand that’s not going to happen for everybody, but it’s what happened to me. And that literally changed the trajectory of Serene Clean because I had fully intended staying with residential.
Think about how many houses you would need to clean, how many clients you would need to get to make $5,000 a month in revenue. One commercial account could be $5,000 a month if it’s like a five night a week account. By that $37K amount, we had about five night-a-week accounts. Those were giant leaps that allowed me to really skyrocket quickly, hire quickly, get administrative help quickly, and get things off my back. It doesn’t mean I stopped cleaning, but it also allowed me to leave my full-time job, which was a huge weight off the shoulders.
Creating an Effective Hiring System
Once you start getting these leads rolling in, you need to be able to staff them. Group interviewing is going to be one of the game-changing things that you can do, especially in the beginning, when you do not have the bandwidth or time to schedule a bunch of interviews and have nobody show up.
The majority of people do not show up to interviews – 75% of people don’t show up. And then of the 25% that show up, maybe only 10% of them are quality candidates that you would actually consider hiring. The group interview is the filter process. We need to see a lot of people and go through a lot of people all at once.
You do not want to be wasting your time meeting with all these people when in the first five seconds you immediately know you’re not going to hire them. Why waste half an hour of your time when you probably could have been cleaning or working on something else? In that half hour you could have met with 10 people and decided that only two of them you want to have a second interview with.
Always Be Hiring
Never turn your job listings off just because you feel like you’re fully staffed. You always want to have a pipeline of candidates because at any given time, somebody could quit or need to be fired. The only way we were able to keep this ball rolling is I had somebody in mind to replace other people when they quit or needed to get fired, or we were just growing quickly.
If you only have job listings going when you actively need to fill a role, then you’re behind the ball. You need to be having job listings going constantly. We’ll talk about listings and how I handle Indeed and how to have great, compelling job listings at some point as well. Just so many episodes to do guys, we’re just getting started and I have so much to teach you.
Closing Thoughts
Those are the three topics that are going to get you over your sticking point, whether that be getting you to your first 10k, getting you to 20k, or getting you beyond 20k a month, and getting you to the point where you’re out of the field and you can start hiring administrative help and really start getting that ball rolling towards the company of your dreams.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments. If you have requests for future videos, also leave those in the comments because I’m sure I have mentioned and opened a Pandora’s box in just this episode. I wanted to keep this one short and we’ll go into things in depth in future episodes, but this will hopefully get your mind churning on what needs to be done immediately to get you over that hump.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
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