Filthy Rich Cleaners Podcast E6: Running a Cleaning Company from 7,000 Miles Away with Chris Schwab

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Stephanie: Coming up next on the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast: “So many of us get burned and decide to never love again, if you will, when it comes to delegating and allowing other people to help you.”

From your first dollar to your first million, welcome to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, presented by Zen Made. 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.

Introduction

Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome back to Filthy Rich Cleaners. I’m your host, Stephanie Pipkin. And today I have quite the treat for you, the Mr. Chris Schwab.

I have been watching and learning from him pretty much since the very beginning of my business. And I’m so excited to share his wisdom with you guys today. So thank you again, Chris, for joining me early morning in Japan for you. So I really appreciate your time.

Chris: Thank you for having me on. It’s an honor. I appreciate the words for me, and I’m excited to be here.

Background and Business Origin

Stephanie: Yes, absolutely. So for those of you who have never heard of Chris, he is kind of one of the pioneers in working completely remotely, utilizing a lot of different techniques that we’re gonna cover today to make that happen. And I’m sure you’re as intrigued as me to hear the how and the tactical side of it, as well as his thought processes on how to effectively manage a business from remote.

So Chris, can you just give your story, you know, Cliff Notes version?

Chris: I’ll try, I’m a bit of a talker. (laughing)

Stephanie: It doesn’t need to be Cliff Notes. (laughing) We’ve got my bullet points right here.

Starting the Business

Chris: The two-minute nutshell is I started my cleaning company back in 2016. This is my final year of university over in DC. But just before that started, I had met my then-girlfriend, now-wife, at a study abroad in career that we did.

And at that time, back in 2016, there weren’t many viable options for working remotely or kind of, unless you were a senior executive or a web developer or like a travel blogger, there weren’t really many options for you to go abroad and live in another country and earn a good living without like a total change of your entire life circumstances.

Motivation and Initial Challenges

Chris: I was looking for ways that I could be with my wife over in Japan and still make money and support us, which is tricky because most of the jobs over here were English teaching. Unless you get a university job, it’s not what you want to do when you’re 47. There’s a very low income cap that’d be difficult to have a family with.

So I was looking for ways that I could sustain myself. And it was just good timing. I don’t know what it was, but I came across the infamous Reddit case study on building a clean business that many of us are here from. And I thought, okay, well, if I can earn a few hundred bucks, maybe I can give this case study a go and I’ll just try it.

Initial Steps

Chris: So I ended up writing vampire Botox articles for SEO articles for vampire Botox and I earned my first six, seven hundred bucks that way online. I took this money – I still have those articles somewhere – and I invested it into this cleaning business. I invested it in the website, in Thumbtack, and in paying the cleaners for the trial clean. That’s where my money went.

And I’m very, very, very lucky that it turned out to be profitable from like a week or something. That was luck. I don’t advocate people start a cleaning business on that type of a fund anymore, but that was truly just a lucky break for me those first couple weeks that we had good cleaners and we had clients who paid on time.

Early Business Growth

Chris: But it worked and I was very fortunate that I had a lot of time on my hands because I started this the summer before my final semester. I grew this very quickly, not having had any prior business experience, just knowing that if I worked hard and I knew a little basic marketing, I could get some clients. So I worked at it and it grew.

As it started growing, my final semester started and I was juggling the business and I was juggling school and then this long-distance relationship and it was a lot. So it all came to a head about Halloween 2016.

First Major Challenge

Chris: I was new to being a business owner, so I didn’t ask my teams if they were gonna work on Halloween day. I just assumed they would want the extra jobs, so I booked a bunch of jobs for my teams, and half my teams didn’t show up that day.

I had a lot of pissed off clients who I had to refund, who I couldn’t afford to refund, but I did. And this was kind of one of those points where I was doing my midterm exams, I was losing all the money in my business that I just charged people for.

Stephanie: And that’s a breakdown, yeah, I’m sure.

Learning from Mistakes

Chris: It was not my prettiest week, but that was a good moment for me in hindsight because it made me recognize I was at a critical juncture of growth where I couldn’t do everything in the business anymore to a good level of quality. I could do everything in the business, but I was dropping balls everywhere.

I wasn’t checking with my team schedule. I was just booking them in for cleans, which is a ridiculous thing to do. So it made me realize I needed help in the business. This was a pivotal moment where I know I wanted to hire help, but I’m in what one of the fellow coaches in our industry calls the cleaning Valley of Despair, where you’re so busy, but you’re not profitable enough to afford full-time help in the office.

Seeking Solutions

Chris: So for me, that signaled that I need to find some other pathway or part-time help that I could use to just take a little bit of the load off my shoulders. At that time, I read the Four Hour Work Week, which is a famous book in the Nomad remote space these days.

Stephanie: Correct, correct. I still hope to meet him someday.

Chris: I know, right? (laughing)

Stephanie: He’s a hermit now too. He doesn’t get out much these days.

Exploring Remote Management

Chris: But he wrote extensively on VAs for e-commerce and drop shipping type businesses. And so no one was really doing this for cleaning, but I thought, is there any reason that I couldn’t train someone to take my phones for me, because VOIPs were already big by that time – Grasshopper, RingCentral, all these softwares already existed. ZenMate existed, right?

So a lot of the core softwares we needed to run remotely were still kind of in their infancy, but they existed. So I was thinking there’s not really any reason that I couldn’t train someone to manage this for me.

Finding Virtual Assistants

Chris: So I found two admins from New Jersey, who had done adminning for a long time, but they wanted to try being VAs. They didn’t want to work in an office anymore. So I just said, “Hey, look, I know this is a little unconventional, but how would you feel about running a cleaning company in D.C. from New Jersey?”

And they didn’t bat an eyelid. They said, “Let’s try it.” So I trained them to manage the phones and the schedule. And this is not another good moment of mine, but I just went off to Japan for a week after having them for about seven or ten days. And I said, “All right, take care of my business, bye guys.”

Taking a Risk

Chris: I just ignored everything for a week. Again, I don’t advocate that in hindsight now. But I was just so crushed from the experience that happened at Halloween a week ago that I just wanted to break with my girlfriend. So I took a break with her and ignored the world.

When I came back, I found that my business was fine. There were no fires. They did a good job and had mostly good reports. So I started talking about this and said, “Hey guys, look, I’m growing this cleaning company. I just took a trip to Japan. It’s still alive. My cleaners didn’t quit. I still have clients. I have these great two VAs who are helping me manage it.”

I asked, “Is anyone interested in how I’m doing this?” And people were interested. So I started sharing that in the ZenMaid Mastermind and a couple other groups, just showing people how I was doing this.

Moving to Japan

Chris: A few months roll by, and then in March 2017, I moved full time to Japan. This was like the moment where it was like, we did the test run, we did the dry run, now let’s kind of make this a life together, right? So I got my visa, packed up, and went to Japan permanently. I’ve been here ever since – we’re going on eight years now.

Reflecting on the Journey

Stephanie: Wow. All right, we’ll cut it off there guys, just kidding. There’s so much I mean, in what you just said I have so many strings I want to pull, but I hope what everybody, you know, takes from it overarchingly is that it can be possible.

And especially I know we have a lot of listeners who are just starting out. And I think the way you open the business with the end game insight of you knew it had to work with you at a distance, which probably set you on a path very different than a lot of owners start at, which is most people just start as individual cleaners, at least in my experience.

Then they get so busy, they’re like, “Well, let me bring on some helpers.” But they never get out of what I call the trenches or the valley of despair of the cleaning and not letting go of the control.

Exploring Trust and Delegation

Stephanie: So one of the first things I want to talk about or ask you about is trust and control. I think that so many of us get burned, sometimes very early on, and decide to never love again, if you will, when it comes to delegating and allowing other people to help you and hiring people and giving off the responsibilities.

Can you, I’d love to hear your thought processes on trust. Any times you’ve been burned when it comes to that and how do you relinquish that control?

Chris: Sure, I’ve been burned a few times. It’s just part of business and life, unfortunately. But you can put safeguards in place. And one of those safeguards is your vetting process.

Another is, if we’re talking specifically about remote cleaning, another is doing trial runs with that person before you give them full control. I assume you’re talking specifically about cleaners, not off as admin or anything, right?

Stephanie: Yes, of course. Well, either really, I mean, I’ve gotten burned on both on both ends, but I’m curious to hear about that as well.

Chris: It’s strikingly similar, actually, for both. But for cleaners, there’s a couple different parts that you need to tackle. Part of that is also luck, by the way. I’ve been very lucky, as well, with some of my staff members of early on getting some – I mean, some people who are still with me today came on within those first few months.

Building Trust in a Cleaning Business

Chris: I can totally relate of just like you got a good couple of good straws pulled. Exactly. And that was for me too. I mean, I literally started a cleaning company with a couple hundred bucks. Like there was every chance for it to fail, but luck was a big part that it didn’t.

But in terms of trust and control, I take a more hands-off approach than most, I think. I run a contractor-based cleaning company. And what that means is all of our contractors are technically their own small business owners. They have their own insurance, they’re legally eligible to work, they have their LLC, so they’re their own legal entity that then bill us for services.

They’re not employees that we put through a training process and get to know personally one-on-one very closely. Our contractors will go from their house directly to the clients’ house, then to the next client’s house and then back to their home. There’s no office meetup that happens.

Vetting and Safeguarding

Chris: Trust and safeguarding and vetting, these are the three things I’ll talk about briefly because they’re really what go into any type of, it doesn’t matter if it’s in-person or remote, but it’s more important for a remote cleaning business that these things are tight because you don’t have any face time with that person.

So you don’t know them in the way that you do in an employee-based model. For me, I take a very hands-off approach once they’re as full cleaners with us, but until they reach the stage of being a full cleaner, there’s a number of steps that they go through where they have to prove themselves to us and we have to prove ourselves to them before we trust them.

Recruitment and Initial Screening

Chris: That looks something like we put up a post, right? We found candidates we think are good. That whole typical early stage process is the same for everyone. You invite them to a phone interview, if you like the sound of them. This is all normal, but after the phone interview is where it changes a little bit for us.

For us, the first trust step is we actually have them go and clean a current client’s home on a trial-clean basis. So we’ll approach a current client that we’ve worked with for a while now and we’ll say, “Hey, look, would you like a free deep clean in exchange for an honest review of a new cleaner that we’re looking to bring on board?”

Detailed Vetting Process

Chris: We’d like you to note the way that they arrive, if they arrive on time, if they’re polite, if they’re kind, if they have their supplies with them, if there’s any issues. We ask our clients to do a mini evaluation for them. It’s not an extensive thing, by the way, it’s like a five or ten minute evaluation.

But we ask them to be in the home at the time that that trial cleaning takes place. From the cleaners’ perspective, this is a normal clean that they’re paid for. It’s their first normal clean with us.

If that trial clean goes well, and they score highly on what we consider to be important, we will then give them their first three real jobs through us. These first three real jobs are typically new clients rather than regulars because we want them to slowly build their own schedule of recurring clients if it’s possible.

Monitoring New Cleaners

Chris: So we give them their first three real jobs and then we pay very close attention to the feedback from those jobs. One of the things that we try and do is we try and see if it’s important for them to go back and fix any mistakes that happen.

So one of the things that we do is, if something’s missed on the checklist, we will send a team back to correct it free of charge. We’ll pay the team for their time, but we won’t charge the customer anything.

One of the things we try and do early on in the cleaning process with a new cleaner is we try and see and test some of their boundaries. Are they willing to accept feedback on what went well and didn’t go well? Are they willing to go back and fix a mistake? Are they kind in their interactions with the office staff as they are with the customers? We try and test some of these things during the first few cleans to make sure that they’re just a professional through and through.

Onboarding Full-Time Cleaners

Chris: If they get through those first few cleans, we welcome them on board as a full-time cleaner, but we tell them it takes them a couple months to get a full schedule of recurring clients. There’s gonna be some in and out. Some people you’re only gonna clean for once. If it’s a move in, move out clean, you’re never gonna see them again.

So we let them know there’s gonna be a time period where they do have to build up a schedule. But that’s the basic, very basic overview is we have a fairly intense vetting period to make sure that they are a suitable applicant. We then assign them tasks where we can slowly build our trust with each other, we then make, we then welcome them on board as a full-time cleaner.

Stephanie: Okay. That’s a great process regardless if you’re going the IC route or the W2 route guys. I think that that is a really, like all of the time spent on the front end will save so much headache on the back end and obviously there’s going to be people who slip through the cracks who can make it through this intense vetting and feel, perhaps fall apart later on, but this probably helps you avoid a lot of headaches.

Team Culture and Independent Contractors

Stephanie: So one of the questions I always have, because I never get to talk to somebody who like successfully runs ICs fully, sometimes it’s a combination, and in my area, like Roll Wisconsin, well, I’m in Savannah, but the business is in Roll Wisconsin. And so ICs are kind of like, that isn’t even within the realm of how people run things.

So for me, I see W2 is the clear option in my area, but clearly, you know, this can be done in this way. So when it comes to something I feel is one of the biggest strengths of Serene Clean is our workplace culture and our sense of team. So can you talk to, I’m so intrigued, how do you handle that aspect and just any sense of loyalty truly when it comes to you as an employer or somebody who gets some jobs, I should say.

Chris: Sure, we’ve been very fortunate that many of our cleaners have stayed with us for six, seven years now, one of them for the full eight years we’ve been in business, or I guess nine now, getting old, but. (laughing)

Stephanie: How old were you when you went overseas? How old were you when you started this?

Chris: 23.

Stephanie: Oh, look at that. I was 22 just about to turn 23. So it’s so intriguing to I like to talk to people who get into this young, especially because it’s like, it is a different thought process. And we also don’t have the years of experience to tell us not to do this. You know because I think a lot of times naivete is a wonderful thing because if I had known how much work it was going to be I probably wouldn’t have done it.

Chris: Oh, yeah. Ego helps a little bit.

Stephanie: Absolutely, so sorry to sidetrack. I just had to ask that question since you’re pretty young.

Chris: You’re good. You’re good.

Approach to Team Dynamics

Chris: We’ve been very lucky that a lot of our cleaners have stayed with us for a long time. But in all honesty, we also have had some attrition with cleaners over time. Cleaners do come and go just like clients come and go, you know, just like office managers also come and go. It’s just people on their different paths in life.

And sometimes you’re compatible for a period of time. And sometimes you’re not or that period ends. For us, we have less of a company culture in my cleaning business than many others do. I’m very much one of the core pillars that I as a business owner on my end of things trying and still in all my businesses is a minimalist way of running things.

I strongly prefer to be more hands-off when possible. I’m not trying to grow a massive multi-million dollar company. My primary or secondary goal is not actually growth in profit. It’s giving me more time and control over my life to do what I want.

Business Philosophy

Chris: There are certain financial goals at minimums I have to achieve to get that. But for me, the goal as a business owner is to have a minimalist business which doesn’t take a lot of time for me to run but which functions consistently over a long period of time.

There’s a lot of people who will just let the business go. They’ll just go take a break for a month and the business will crash and then they don’t want to do it anymore. I want to have this business year after year, right?

Team Approach

Chris: In terms of company culture, we don’t have much of a company culture. Several of our cleaning teams know each other well because they’ve worked on jobs before together, but everyone really just has a very independent mindset. That’s part of who we try and hire – husband and wife teams or teams of two or three who are very independent minded, who have some of their own clients.

So they’re not looking to have employee pizza parties. They’re not looking to have meetups with the other teams so much. They’re really focused on doing a good job and going back and doing their own thing. That’s actually what I try and strive for when we have our teams.

Stephanie: I love it because you don’t disappoint at all. It offers such a different perspective that I’m really happy to be given because it really is truly finding your people and everybody has their definition of your people.

For us, like one of our core values is family first and so that means we’re quite intertwined with our staff members and that’s what we’re known for and what we kind of sell on. But that means that yes, there is, I mean, there’s a lot of problems that come from all of these things that we’re talking about is, you know, the same, the other side of the same coin is a lot of negatives when it comes to, you know, your cleaners being so close to you and feeling like they know you and all of those things.

But for you, you may not have that company culture that you can point to, but you have people who don’t need that to be able to thrive and survive, it sounds like. So I love to hear that kind of different thought process and truly coming back to the long game.

Long-Term Business Vision

Stephanie: It sounds like from a very early stage or maybe right in the beginning, you kind of envisioned like what you wanted for this and that it wasn’t like you said, a multi bajillion dollar cleaning company with a million cleaners.

And I think a lot of times we don’t have any clarity in the beginning. I certainly didn’t have clarity. But once I started to see where this was going, there had to be something in sight of what does this look like. And like, for me, that literally was a number of like, okay, what number am I happy with? And then anything over that is like, is bonus.

Business Growth and Perspective

Stephanie: And really like why are we pushing for growth, which is what the beginning was – it was just like this race. Now it’s like slowing down and appreciating each stage. Looking back, the absolute tornado race that Serene Clean was in for the first several years and like giant successes, it was like, it didn’t even phase me because it was like, okay, next, okay, next. It was just this whirlwind.

So sometimes I, you know, like I try not to regret it, but I wish I would have appreciated each stage for what it is because now it’s like the numbers, once numbers get big enough, you don’t, they don’t hit you as hard as I remember hitting like 7,000 a month, it was like, “Oh my Lord, this is the top, it’s never going to get better.” We’re now like, I almost feel nothing when we hit certain numbers because it just, it’s almost meaningless now, which is a good problem to be.

And I know that comes, it sounds very privileged. But what I’m trying to say is like, I’d love to hear more about your thought process of appreciating each stage and kind of your mentality around just how you how you think as an owner and as a business person.

Philosophical Approach to Business

Chris: The first one I want to give is a framework shift. This is actually from a passion of mine as well as from Zen. I do as a hobby what is called hand balancing. This is a circus art where you’re balancing either in a handstand for example in a gymnastic style or you’re doing a duo act where you’re balancing with a partner, where you’re about doing hands on their head or something, right?

So this is a movement system centered physically around balance, but also emotionally around balance. You have to find a stillness within your body and your movement so that you can maintain the lines that you do in these difficult balance positions. This is a physical art that I’ve done for a long time now that I’ve gained much from philosophically.

But it’s also something that I try and apply to entrepreneurship and it’s something I’ve also gained from Zen. One of the beautiful points of Zen is the equanimity that you learn to display in all aspects of your life.

Balance in Entrepreneurship

Chris: So this concept of balance is something that I want to touch on for entrepreneurs. In American culture, we’re very focused on progression and growth and hustle. We often think working smart is good, but we often also think working our asses off is what you need to do. Just as business owners, we got to work our asses off. That’s part of our identity.

This is a very unbalanced way of living life. And it’s one that pretty much every business owner I’ve ever met has burned out at some point because of. They’ve worked too much and they got tired because we’re human, right? We all need our sleep and so on.

Finding Stillness in Business

Chris: One of the perspective shifts I wanna give is how can you bring stillness into your business? When I was very in growth mode, it was very much about KPIs, it was very much about tweaking my numbers, it was about inspiring my team to close an extra couple sales or cleaner to upsell the client while they’re in the house.

It was very focused, like my entire being was in growth mode almost. But because of that, there was no appreciation of what I’d already built. There was no reflection on where I wanted to go in my business, and there was no moments for me to pause.

Even though I had an office team, I could pause if I wanted to, but I built myself a life where I didn’t have an option to pause and just appreciate and relax and decompress.

The Importance of Reflection

Chris: So one of the perspective shifts I wanna give if possible is the importance of stillness as a business owner. It is every bit as important to allow stillness and reflection in your life as it is to hustle and grow. There’s a balance we have to achieve between these two seemingly opposing forces.

But when you recognize that by staying still and appreciating what you built and reflecting on what comes next, when you recognize that that’s the groundwork for which you will then hustle and grow, it makes sense that you need that part of it.

A lot of us just, we get to a seven-figure business and then we think, okay, let’s go build an eight-figure business. You didn’t even take like an evening to have a nice dinner and appreciate that you just built this incredible business and what it’s given you these past few years and what you want out of it next. You just assign a growth goal and then go on with it.

Finding Joy in Business

Chris: I found that I love my businesses and my teams more and they get much more out of my daily life in terms of gratitude and joy from my business when I stop and just look at what I’ve built through my hard work and through the hard work of my team.

So the first thing I’m trying to say here is really how, I’m gonna give you the tools to do this in a second. How can I build these moments into my business where I am grateful for what has already occurred and the current situation of the business despite its difficulties rather than where I’m going next?

Taking a moment to appreciate that is a big, it’s really a huge fundamental part, I would say, of a long-term business. If you’re going to have this business for 20 or 30 years, you have to love it. You can’t hate me for 30 years, otherwise you’re really going to hate your life for 30 years.

Stephanie: I love that and not to derail, but it really makes me think of, well, first off, I can absolutely 100% relate to being so driven by the numbers and by growth. And it felt necessary at the time. And looking back, I don’t regret it because it got me to where I am now.

Energy and Balance

Stephanie: However, I really wish I would have had the what you’re describing of the… and now that I’ve taken some time and kind of thought about these mentalities and looked into it, I’m really drawn to the concept of like masculine and feminine energy that everybody has it and that to be in your feminine energy is to, you know, be in the flow and enjoying the moment and things like that where masculine energy is very much like goal driven results, logical things like that.

And so, I definitely was very much in the masculine energy for years. And it’s not to say that that, I mean, that’s a wonderful thing. You need both. But I think once you get into one or the other too strongly, then that is where things start to break apart, especially like as a woman who is like very much in touch with her emotions and feelings when it comes to the business.

Like every time I lean into that in a positive way, meaning not to get overly emotional or jump to things too quickly, but to take a step back and really see what’s going on. It served me very well, whereas anytime I’ve tried to force a leadership style or to be somebody that I’m not, it’s very painful.

Personal Growth and Business Approach

Stephanie: It’s like I’m like butting heads with who I should be, which is somebody who is an emotional woman who is very feeling, have very strong emotions about this entire thing that we’re doing. And I can’t separate those. So anytime I try and just lean into the numbers too much, it’s like it sucks the joy out of the business for me.

Chris: Yeah, me too, actually. Gosh, you know what you just said? I thought was really interesting because I’ve been thinking about energy a lot recently, particularly as it pertains to the seasons. Early on, I was just gung-ho work all the time. I didn’t notice how my energy and my emotional positivity or negativity changed throughout the seasons of the year.

But the last couple of years have been a more relaxed pace for me. So me and my wife have really noticed we’re different summer than winter, you know? And winter is traditionally more of a time for downtime and reflection and not so much growth oriented in any domain of life, not just business.

So one thing I’ve really noticed is my energy has very much changed throughout the year and I try and honor that a little bit now. But that’s not necessarily related to what we were talking about.

Stephanie: No, I know, but this is such an intriguing conversation to me and also like seasons not only seasons the year but seasons of your life and of your business is that is that it’s funny that you use that word because that is oftentimes how I think about different periods of the business as it grew is a season.

Business Seasons and Growth

Stephanie: And framing it that way and it kind of helps you accept what’s going on too of well this season is one of this or, you know, where we’re not growing, where we’re focusing on making our internal processes better, or we are, you know, trying to make sure that our cleaners are getting the most benefits they can or whatever, or this is a push season.

And like for Serene Clean, we’re coming into a season of hopefully sustained growth in the most intelligent way possible, meaning we are trying to get the very best clients that make us the most money and are the ones that work like work for us the best. And we have a beautiful relationship with them where both parties are mutually valued and benefiting.

And so like that’s the season we wanna be in is like intelligent growth and not just like full steam ahead, like screw all the consequences, hire a warm body. Like that’s really where I was at because it’s like we got to go and just that frazzled rushed tensed person I was like incredibly I mean even more excitable than I am now but just like almost like like spastic and like just jumpiness.

And really trying to relax and saying like what’s the rush like if it’s going to be here forever what’s the rush, you know? And so I I love that philosophy and and oh, yeah, that’s really cool. I’m not resonating. You know, I’m sorry, I keep going on tangents today.

Chris: No, I’m a very tangential person, so tangent away.

Business Tools for Balance

Chris: So I got three tools for you today. I’ll run through them quick. One is business tool and two is a tool from ours and tradition that we’re talking about really. Well, having I keep dog helps, she’s thinking for attention now.

So the business tool I think is very helpful to bring this balance and stillness that I’m talking about to entrepreneurs is what I call a quarterly business health check. You can do it monthly, you can do it yearly. I like quarterly ’cause then it’s not something I’m stressing about every month.

I do a quarterly business health check with me and my students where we will look at different areas of the business, and it’s kind of a three-part process, but to keep it simple, we’ll rank each area on a scale of one to ten for how well they’re doing. One being variable, ten being perfect.

Quarterly Business Review Process

Chris: We’ll then rank order those different areas of the business and hone in on the area of the business that’s causing us the most strife, whether that’s fires or a system that’s not working, or we’re just banging our head against the wall in that area of the business.

We’ll look at the lowest ranked area and we will then create a plan for the next 90 days to fix that area of the business so that it’s running as smoothly or more smoothly than the other areas of business. And we will then keep that 90 days later. So we’re constantly shoring up our weaknesses and fixing our weakest part in the business so that we’re not overly stressed about one area of the business.

This is a very low hanging practical tool that you can use to ensure that there’s no major deficit in your business. I find a lot of the stress that business owners go through is because they’re unbalanced in their strengths and weaknesses that they’re very good at marketing or they’re very good at cleaning or they’re very good at managing cleaners but there’s not a roundedness in their skill set.

Business Improvement Strategy

Chris: So they’re stressed by the areas that they’re not good at and they tend to push them off to the side and not fix them. But if you can spend some time every quarter, actually implementing specific action steps and to-dos to fix the areas that you’re not good at or to get better at them, this will take up such an immense amount of stress that you have in your business that it will transform the way that you do business and your relationship to your business, because you won’t be fearing any area of your business anymore.

As a practical example, I’m good at growing businesses, but I’m not good at bookkeeping. So I’m not that great at keeping the money that I grow and earn. So for me, there were years where I would get into bookkeeping nightmares because I didn’t have professionals helping me.

And this was an area that I just kept putting off and putting off. And it caused such an immense amount of pain and stress in my life that I didn’t need to have. If I had taken some time to attend and learn basic bookkeeping and learn how to actually do my taxes and accounting properly.

Appreciating Business Achievements

Chris: But because I put it off and just focused on growing the business, there was this demon behind me a book, you know, just like leading to, you know.

So this first tool is doing something like a quarterly business health check where you are honest with yourself about where your business is at. And you work on the weak areas. That’s the first part.

The second part is to appreciate what you’ve already built in your business. So part of the quarterly business health check that I do is I also list everything that’s going right in my business. Cleaners that might be your cleaner showing up on time, it might be the new clients that you gained, it might be that you only have to spend two hours a day running it, but listing all the things going right in your business to remind you of how far you’ve come is very important.

Stephanie: I love that, and I would love to hear all of them.

Chris: You really need to consciously remind yourself of what’s going right in your life because we’re so primed for negativity in modern life. We’re always so focused on what’s going wrong or what’s stressful or we’re trying to avoid something we don’t want to do that we don’t unless it’s conscious effort we don’t actually appreciate what is currently in our life.

Gratitude Practice

Chris: The second one is more immediate. I do this a lot. When I’m going to have a difficult conversation, whether that’s with a cleaner or a client or whoever, I have a small gratitude practice that I do right before the call or right before the interaction. It could be in person, it could be virtual, it doesn’t really matter.

But if I know I’m getting on with someone who’s pissed off at me, rather than getting worked up and like, “Well, I really don’t want to get on this call,” I will actually sit for just two, three, five minutes before my interaction with that person. And I will express gratitude for that person and the situation that I’m in and recognize, try and recognize rather what I can learn from the situation I’m currently in.

So I actually try and bring forth consciously a feeling of gratitude and love for this difficult situation. And I know this may sound a little woo-woo, I’m very, very aware of that, but it’s a genuinely impactful practice if you do it and you go through with it. You will really feel a difference if you consciously bring these feelings up and you recognize the value in this tough situation.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm. I absolutely can attest to this working because when I say this is something that has served me incredibly well is every single time something seemingly terrible goes wrong or bad or how I in the moment did not want it to go in the business, literally 100% of the time, looking back in hindsight, I’m so grateful it happened exactly as it did.

Finding Silver Linings

Stephanie: And so now I have shortened that time gap of as soon as something bad happens, my mind immediately goes to, “Okay, what’s the silver lining here?” Because it’s teaching me something. There’s something to learn, even if it’s very difficult to find in that moment, there’s always something to learn from it.

And that really helps me get over how upset I I mean, ’cause some of the things that happen really suck in the business. And so whether that be a cleaner ghosting or a client being terrible or you guys getting a bad complaint or whatever the bad thing is, it’s just, yeah.

I can, anybody who thinks that this is woo-woo, it’s not. It 100%, it helps. And doing it on the front end, as you said, I love that idea of going into it with a sense of gratitude and and taking a moment and trying to find something in that situation before going into it so you have the mindset like I’ve I’ve done it a lot in hindsight and immediately after something happens but I love the idea of of kind of prepping your mind for ahead of time.

Intentionality and Focus

Chris: The last one is a little difficult to choose between because there’s two. So what I will say is having intentionality in what you do is crucial to it occurring.

When you meditate in Zen Buddhism, there’s different forms of meditation that do. Some are focused on the breath, some are focused on bodily sensations, some are focused on external senses, some are focused on the joining of them together and recognizing that they’re one.

There’s different insights that you’re trying to make happen that hopefully after a certain amount of time you get or not. But one of the crucial things that you do is you bring a practice. You’re fully present when you’re doing it, you’re engaged with it, and you’re focused on whatever it is you’re doing to the utmost of your ability.

These base-level instructions when you’re meditating are also helpful for our business. Well, your business is chaos incarnate. It’s totally opposite when you’re sitting in Zen, you’re sitting on a cushion staring at a blank wall often. There is nothing happening around you and then so it forces you to recognize what is happening and the sounds and sensations that you can hear and feel to recognize that there is a whole world right.

Applying Zen Principles to Business

Chris: But business is the direct opposite of that in our day-to-day experience. You wake up at 6 a.m. and you check your phone, and that was definitely a mistake. And there’s 30 things you have to do, and it’s 6:01, and you just, “Oh, I don’t want to get out of bed now.”

So what I’m saying here is they’re kind of opposing forces, but the practices that you do in Zen directly help the chaos in your business. So, if you can learn how to focus, if you can learn how to set intentionality in your business and in your day, I do this in the morning before I start my day.

Because I’m over in Japan, there’s a big time zone difference. My team are ending the day and leaving me nice big notes of all the stuff I have to do for them just when I wake up. So when I wake up in the morning here from five to eight a.m. is very chaotic ’cause I have to walk the dog, organize my day. I have to do 20 things before I eat breakfast.

Setting Daily Intentions

Chris: So for me, a very important step is being intentional about my day. So when I sit down to work in the morning, I have my full focus planner diary here, which I highly recommend. They’re a great company. That’s Michael Hyatt, he’s a great business coach.

So I use this planner to set intentionality in my day. What are my big three tasks? What are the other tasks that I have? Can I rank order them? What are the appointments that I have? I actually set out my day before I start my day. That’s the setting of the intention of what I want to do that day, even though other things may crop up during the day that I can’t foresee yet.

But setting an intention for how you handle your day and then founding it with a plan is critical.

Task Prioritization

Chris: So what I do, and I’ve talked about this a little bit before, is I have a rank order system for tasks of different importance. It’s A, B, C, D, A being crucial, time sensitive, super important, big task, E being unimportant, maybe I’ll do it someday. It doesn’t really matter if I get to do it or not.

And every day, once I’ve sorted all the chaos that my team has left me and all the emails that I have and all the Facebook messages and all that, I will actually spend 10 or 15 minutes organizing all of that in level of importance and setting up my day intentionally.

And then adhering to it with as much effort as I can throughout the day, I will tackle those tasks one at a time in the order that they’re assigned.

Managing Unexpected Challenges

Chris: So the last tool that I wanna give you is to bring the level of intentionality into your day and to each moment in your business, because if you’re able to do that, it’s actually going to be much easier, even when you’re in a chaotic situation, to see what you need to do.

Because when there’s three things happening, it’s very hard to know what you can do. But if you’ve set your intention, if you know what the priority is at any one moment, and you’re focused on completing that, it’s actually not that chaotic, it feels very manageable, because you know what you need to do, even if there’s other things happening around you at the same time.

So I apologize, that was a lot of talking.

Stephanie: So practical, like, and I’m so happy you kind of like, countered yourself in it, because as you were talking about like, being Zen and bringing calm to your, you know, your space, and I’m just like thinking, okay, listeners who are in the field right now are saying, “Screw you, Chris.”

Applying Zen Principles to Cleaning Businesses

Stephanie: I’m really happy that you, – You explained exactly how to do that in a working cleaning business, especially, I mean, in the beginning, those first couple of years, I mean, chaos is the name of the game and sheer just pandemonium, it truly felt that way.

And so how do you see through the cloud and figure out, like you’re getting pulled in all of these directions, how do you manage yourself, especially if you’re doing all of the administrative work yourself as well as probably cleaning? And so using this tool of ranking priority and getting it down on paper and those things may derail you putting those things in rank as well. I would imagine is that how you would handle something that kind of comes at you unexpectedly or you would just fit it in the rank?

Chris: Sure, so yeah. Like you may have your plan for the, you know, the Mike Tyson quote, like everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Yeah, it’s very true for business. I mean, really, it’s so true.

Handling Unexpected Disruptions

Chris: To give you a practical example, maybe you have two great cleaning teams, and you don’t want to be in the field anymore, but a team no shows. So this beautiful plan you had out for the day suddenly is destroyed because you have to go at 2 p.m. and clean a home because the team didn’t show up. That’s something that all of us have faced at some point, I’m pretty sure, me included.

So, what do you do when that happens when you have this intentionality and you have this focus and you’ve prioritized everything and you’ve got your neat plan for the day and then you can’t do it? What do you actually do practically when that occurs?

Well, what I do is, um, just like you follow your breath in meditation, but we all get distracted, you come back to the breath again and again, and gradually get less distracted and more focused on the breath as everything goes silent around you. It’s a practice of coming back.

Returning to Your Plan

Chris: This same way of viewing it applies to your daily plan. Okay, you have your daily plan, what you’re going to do, time blocked beautifully from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And then this team knows shows at 2 p.m. and you’ve got to go clean. What do you do?

You go clean and then you go back to your daily plan and return to the next task on the list. You don’t let it derail your entire day and the plan that you had. You attend to it and then you return to what you were doing anyway. And then you attend to the next thing that happens, and then you return to your plan again anyway.

That’s the key here is a process of constantly returning to what you were focused on before. We will always get drawn away in a million different directions from our goal. There’s a million distractions. The skill that you’re developing with this intentional plan that you’re doing each day is the skill of returning again and again to what’s important, even if things momentarily distract you.

Maintaining Composure

Stephanie: Yeah, being focused and being able to come back to that focus is absolutely a skill. It’s a muscle that you build and I think also maintaining composure while you do it and not having frankly a pissy attitude because something went wrong or derailed your perfect plan.

And I think being malleable, you know, as the willow tree, you’re and you can bend in the storm instead of snapping off your branches, the better disposition you can have. In the chaos, the better you’re going to feel at the end of the day and allowing yourself to, you know, feel frustration, but not stay in it.

I find it is very useful. And I know that that may sound easier said than done. I happen to have a pretty cheerful disposition, so it’s easy for me. But I can sometimes get very annoyed if people dropped my perfectly time-blocked day that I had planned all out. So this is a good reminder for myself of like it hurts to nobody but myself and probably others if I attend to these pull away sessions in a bad manner or a bad attitude, I should say.

Personal Growth and Attitude

Stephanie: So I don’t know, you seem to be a pretty calm person, but I mean, what is your disposition like when these types of things happen, and has that changed over over time?

Chris: Good question. I’m much more positive of a person these days, but to be honest, my base personality is fairly oriented towards pessimism, I would say. But I’ve had wonderful mentors in my life who have guided and helped me grow in the right ways at the right times.

And they’ve instilled a positivity in my everyday experience that feels authentic to me now. But my base personality or when something happens is to catastrophize straight away. And I have to catch myself otherwise it’s up. You know, if you met me at 23 when I started this business, despite the amazing opportunities and the quick business growth and all these lucky things that happened to me, I was quite negative in many ways, I would say.

For whatever reason, I don’t know. It could be upbringing, it could be a million things. But, but I’m very stubborn, and I have strong willpower. I will say that. And so even when situations were tough, I just was not someone who would give up. I would just beat at it, beat at it senselessly. More than was healthy for me, to be honest.

But over time, through these practices, through some mentors, through some luck, really, I would say with the situation coming as it did, I’ve developed a real positivity as my kind of natural state these days.

Authentic Positivity

Stephanie: I love that. And, you know, with the phrase toxic positivity and really being fake about it or forcing yourself is definitely not what it sounds like you’ve developed and not something I would ever suggest to people.

And, you know, there’s different levels of what that looks like. And, you know, core values, one of our core values is positive and grateful attitude. And again, I think I chose those because I wanted to find my people that fit me. And so me being the way I am, like, I wanted to surround myself with people who behaved in the same manner or maybe had the natural disposition.

I remember one time we did interviews and we always go over our core values in it. And the guy emailed after he’s like, “Well, if I’m just going to have to be happy all the time, then screw this job.” It’s like, if that’s what you took away, that’s not what we meant at all.

Growth and Emotional Intelligence

Stephanie: So it’s interesting for you to say like, and be able to analyze your former self, or your younger self, whatever you want to call it, and see how you’ve grown in that area. But it sounds like in a very healthy way, not in a trying to put a round peg in a square hole. It’s just you’ve developed and changed.

Chris: At the risk of giving too much credit to me. Thank you, but I guess I would say your comment about toxic positivity is a great one because there’s like a certain subset of entrepreneurs who are just super 100% positive all the time and you’re not able to play a single negative emotion or word and that’s annoying too.

Stephanie: So annoying.

Chris: I would say it’s fake, and also just it’s painful because you will then be suppressing emotions that might be telling you something important. There have been instances that I’ve started or times in my business where I was overwhelmingly negative and I would just push on and work anyway.

But as I’ve grown, I listen to those feelings now. It doesn’t mean I’m going and just jump ship and abandon what I’m doing. But if I feel really bad about something that’s going on in my business, I actually take time to listen to that emotion and maybe see if it’s trying to tell me something now instead of just push through forward with that.

Emotional Awareness

Stephanie: Oh, absolutely. And I definitely used to have a bad relationship with anger and thinking, not knowing how to even connect to it. And sometimes anger to me is one of the best telltale signs that something needs to change.

And so anytime I felt angry in my business, I don’t try to just like shove it away and say, “Stephanie, you shouldn’t be angry. That’s a bad emotion.” Listen to it. There’s a reason for that and trusting your intuition of like, this is an alarm bell that something needs to change because it’s your business. There shouldn’t be things in it that are frequently causing you to be angry.

So something needs to change. So totally agree that it’s like, if you’re trying to force something like that all the time, you’re probably completely turning off your intuition.

Reflecting on the Conversation

Chris: Yeah. Oh, that was good. I know I like this took a direction I didn’t expect that all in like, given even talked about delegating.

I have a feeling I could talk to you for hours about this stuff because it’s so and just how it all connects. And yeah, this is definitely a different interview than anything we’ve done thus far. And I would imagine pretty unique going forward.

The Importance of Mindset

Stephanie: But mindset is always going to be a big topic at hand, and you’ll probably like for the listeners, you’re going to hear us have these conversations over and over and kind of attack mindset from from many directions and we’ve touched on it in a very different direction today.

But the reason every single successful cleaning business owner is going to talk about mindset is because it truly is the maker break of like when I see who’s going to be successful or who’s not, I almost can pick it out. Like literally by one conversation, I almost can tell. And that’s not to say like I’m some expert or anything like that, but it’s just, I know it when I see it.

And I guess I’d love to hear Chris, like if you could name like five traits go, what do you see in somebody who’s gonna make it or not? As a business owner specifically.

Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs

Chris: Grit is definitely one, for sure.

Stephanie: Hey, you had a discipline.

Chris: You do, you have to, it is a reality.

Kindness is probably another that I see. There are, I’ll be honest, there are some dicks I know who are very successful entrepreneurs.

Stephanie: Oh yeah, yeah. Do people like them? No.

Chris: No, I would say overwhelmingly kindness is a trait for most business owners that will take you far.

Authenticity is incredibly important. If you’re inauthentic in your relationships or the service that you’re offering, you will burn bridges quite quickly and people will not trust you.

That’s three.

Stephanie: I asked for five, I think, so keep going.

Chris: (laughing) I’m trying to think of the word, it’s related to meaning, like the ultimate goal of your business, having a vision, sorry, that’s what I was looking for, vision, having a clear vision of what you want.

If you don’t have a clear vision, you don’t what you’re working towards. You’re just working, right? Um, having a clear vision of what you’re working towards is important.

Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs (Continued)

Chris: And I would say the ability to… well, I’ll give you six. I can’t do four or five. Sorry.

Consistency over a long period of time. You can’t just be fired up for two months. You have to love this. It’s too difficult otherwise. It’s just too much for a single person to do unless you love this with your whole being entrepreneurship.

So that would be the fifth one. I would say some method of prioritizing what’s important, whether that’s having a list of your goals, one, two, three, whether that’s delegating to a team, but having some system in your business that will allow you to always be working on what’s most important, while simultaneously having everything else taken care of through managers or whatever, that would be the one that’s important.

It would be the structure that you provide yourself to be successful.

Stephanie: So I had to give you a on the spot that was to be the ones that give you those are very excellent and could not agree more on every aspect of, you know, like when I think of diligence and and one thing that I’m curious about because, you know, speaking about stillness and things I have such a for me when I think of who I believe is going to be successful it is somebody who does not get is paralysis and takes action even if it’s imperfect.

Balancing Action and Stillness

Stephanie: And so how do you how do you relate those two things of I think action is so important and I know that you do as well but how do you connect that with stillness and how do they play together and and and taking moments and and analyzing like where where’s the balance for you there?

Chris: Sure. Well, I do it in a few different ways. I do meditate every day. That’s an important part. I mean, how do I say this? I think about it through different levels of lenses.

What I mean by that is balance is a core value. Balance and equanimity are core values that I try and live at all levels of my life. So earlier I mentioned a hobby of mine is hand balancing. That’s a physical expression of balance that I try and achieve. But I also try and achieve it in my business philosophically and in terms of the way I spend my time.

I also try and achieve it spiritually through my meditation practices. So for me, a core virtue that I’m trying to instill at different levels of my being is this virtue of balance, and that’s expressed in different ways, physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and so on.

So this quality becomes a practice in itself.

Practical Application of Balance

Chris: In terms of stillness as a quality that you want to instill into your day, I swear to you, Stephanie, I’m not trying to pitch a product here, but this full focus planner by Michael Hyatt is a fantastic planner. It’s the wellness versus planner.

Stephanie: You can’t print that check out.

Chris: There is no affiliate or relationship. He doesn’t know who I am.

Stephanie: Okay, he will now after this podcast. (laughing)

Chris: I’m trying to think if I can share this page or not with you, ’cause I just started the day, and I don’t think the quality of my video is good enough to show you.

But I’ll run you through, I balance out the action and the stillness. So I have a morning ritual that I go through, which is walking my dog, I get my movement in, and then I meditate. I literally move and then become still, physically. Then the end of my morning routine is sorting out and prioritizing my work for the day in this planner.

I have my daily big three tasks and then my other tasks. Can I rank order them? What are the appointments that I have? I actually set out my day before I start my day. That’s the setting of the intention of what I want to do that day, even though other things may crop up during the day that I can’t foresee yet.

Intentional Daily Planning

Chris: But setting an intention for how you handle your day and then founding it with a plan is critical. Throughout the day, what I will do is I will pause for five or ten minutes, sometimes for thirty if it’s lunch, and I will just relax. I’ll play with my dog for a few minutes, I’ll talk to my wife, I will sit and meditate for five minutes and just focus on my breath.

I will literally build in, in the most literal sense of the word, I will build in moments of stillness where I’m focused on nothing other than what’s happening around me in that moment. So this is a way that you can do that, no matter how busy your day is. You could have back-to-back meetings, but you might have a five-minute break between those meetings, and you can actually take advantage of that.

Obviously go pee or whatever, but you can take a moment, you can take a breather there too. So the way that I do that is I build in the tasks that I need to do, but I leave space between those tasks to decompress. And I think that’s really important.

Evening Reflection

Chris: The last thing I do is I move again in some way in the day. Usually my evening is some reflection in my morning. So in the evening after dinner, I’ll walk my dog, I’ll meditate, and I’ll reflect on how my day went and what’s coming tomorrow. It’s almost identical to my morning routine. I’ll go read for the night.

But I hope that answered the question. Maybe that was one more than you were looking for, but–

Stephanie: No, no, it’s, again, it is truly practical, even if it sounds somewhat esoteric, it’s practical, because you need to create those little spaces for you, even if it’s you’re in your car and between cleanings or between calling clients or whatever it is that you are doing in your cleaning business every day, like it’s finding those little pockets of time.

And then in relation to taking action, I find that that allows you then to take more focused action. And yeah, like centering yourself truly before you tackle the to-dos, and it’ll probably cause you to, you know, have a better attitude, be more calm because people can sense franticness 100%. It makes them uneasy.

Impact on Team Dynamics

Stephanie: And especially if you’re talking about your cleaners, they’re going to question. And even if it’s subconsciously, I find that if you are frantic, they question your abilities, because clearly you are feeling chaotic. And you are the shield of the chaos for your cleaners.

And that is definitely a mistake I made often early on was allowing that chaos to pass through to them and try to ease it in myself by pushing it onto them. Like, please help me bear this load, but it’s not their load to bear. It’s yours as the owner. And so that may sound challenging, but it is.

And it’s truly not their problem.

Chris: Gosh, that was good. You know, and just to add to what you said, part of why you want to build these moments into your day is so that you can mentally switch off from what you’re engaged in. Are you familiar with the psychological term rumination?

Stephanie: Oh, of course.

Breaking the Cycle of Rumination

Chris: This is one of the great difficulties I had on my business building journey is I would spend more time ruminating about the problems that I had than fixing them. And so one of the most powerful aspects of bringing these stillness practices into my life has been that I notice what’s happening around me and I’m not thinking about the bad situation in my business even when I’m not doing those tasks.

It gives me a chance to switch modes mentally away from those issues. And then when I come back, I’m refreshed and focused. I find if I have a big problem in my business and I sit there and think about it all day, I may only spend two hours working on it, but I’ve spent 16 hours thinking about it, which is exhausting, you know? But I still haven’t solved it.

Whereas now, I try and spend more time working on fixing the issue, and when I’m not working on it, I’m present with everything else, because if I’m still focused on that and then also working at it, it dominates my whole life. And that’s a quick path to hating your business.

So moments where you can disengage and detach and change modes, they’re actually really important to relaxing.

Challenges of Being a Business Owner

Stephanie: Yeah, and that’s something that, oh gosh, did I struggle? And I still sometimes struggle and much better with it now, but turning it off, ’cause it’s very hard to turn this off when you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, because it just never ends, where other people have like a finite, and they may still, you know, stress about work and things like that, but not to, you know, self-inflate ourselves. It’s so much more when you are the owner. It really is, is it feels like it can be the weight of the world on your shoulders.

But let’s all take a step back and realize, you know, it’s just cleaning guys. Like we’re not brain surgeons here. So it’s gonna be okay.

Handling Business Challenges

Stephanie: But I even had that this week where, you know, we just got some big accounts last week, I should say, three big commercial accounts all came to us at once. And all of a sudden I got this wave of strong feelings from my management team and like, because they were overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed. And so they’re pouring that into me and just problem, problem, problem, problem.

And it wasn’t necessarily delivered in the way I would prefer it to be, not saying anything bad, but it just, it kind of took me aback, the level of stress that slammed into me from them. And I was like, “Whoa, I thought this was a good thing, guys. Like, why are you freaking out?”

So all night that night, I was just so bothered by it. Can’t they see that this is a good opportunity? This is great. Why are almost upset at their very valid feelings and reactions?

Problem-Solving Approach

Stephanie: And then the next day, I woke up and I was just like, “Well, this is a problem to be solved.” And expressing a problem that I can, it’s my job to solve. And so total, you know, refresh came in, had a great management meeting of like, “All right, this is what we’re going to do.”

Including one of them being great sideways is we need a VA for the evening time so that they can turn off when the commercial cleaners need things. Because right now my managers are pretty much kind of on call if something goes wrong in the evening. And that’s not fair to them, because that means they feel like they’re responsible for work at all times, and that’s not fair or right. And certainly not my intention since life balance is truly what I want for my team.

So it’s like, okay, just because something is delivered in a package that you don’t like the wrapping doesn’t mean it’s not a good package. And they delivered this package to me and so I unwrapped it and said, “Okay, let’s turn it into something.”

And the solution is clearly we need somebody in the evening so that they can completely shut off. And so all of this rambling to say, like if I had let that ruminate for days and faster, instead of switching into problem solving mode, it would have gone poorly. And I also wouldn’t have been communicating well to them ’cause I would have been resentful to how they brought their problems to me.

Which again, like get over yourself, Stephanie, that’s your job, is to solve their problems even if they come to you not pretty.

Chris: You got it. You’re doing a good job.

Closing Thoughts

Stephanie: Oh, gosh, yeah, this is so interesting because I know we’ve probably gone way over time, but I’m going to have to have another conversation where I promise we’re going to talk about, like, delegation and things like that, but this is so interesting.

Chris: Sure. I mean, if you and I are open to it, we can do a part two and I can run people how to build an office team and manage them on a day-to-day basis. That would be fun. And I’ll take the philosophy out of it.

Stephanie: Good. I’m going to try to walk down that path. I’m so happy we did, though, because this really was very refreshing and just touches so strongly on what’s up here is what’s going to make it be successful and successful in the way you want it to be.

And for the business to develop you as a person, the person that you want to be, because it can certainly take you down a bad path 100%. And I’ve seen that in a lot of people. And I’ve seen it in myself before I, you know, kind of got on the right path with what is this about? And why am I doing this?

And truly, yeah, keeping the vision in mind and not getting distracted by very shiny objects that maybe are not the best. So yeah, so it definitely is a learning, but yeah, Chris, I’m so grateful for this time with you and that we finally got to meet over, you know, years of admiring your work and wanting to learn from you.

So yeah, if you are open to it, let’s definitely do another episode.

Chris: Thanks very much, Michelle.

Stephanie: Stephanie, I appreciate you. Thank you for having me on and yeah, all right. Let’s talk soon.

Chris: See you later.

Stephanie: Thanks guys, and we’ll see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye.