Never Clean Again University – Choosing Your Service Model
WEEK TWO
DEBBIE: Everybody learned some things from your homework? Yes?
FEMALE ONE: [unintelligible] my spreadsheet but I learned to love them.
FEMALE TWO: That homework I thought was amazing. I thought was amazing. It was kind
of almost like an aha moment.
DEBBIE: That’s what it’s for because you learn so much. By playing with your own numbers
you learn a lot. [unintelligible]
JIM: Jim here Debbie.
DEBBIE: Hello. Welcome.
JIM: Thank you.
CLAUDIA: Hi Debbie Claudia.
DEBBIE: [word] Claudia. Good to have you on.
CLAUDIA: Thank you. Nice to be here.
DEBBIE: Good, good, good, good.
EARL: Good morning this is Earl [unintelligible].
DEBBIE: Good morning or good afternoon for some people, I don’t know, for me it’s
morning. We’re going to start in about 3 minutes. That will get everybody a little more time
to get in. Okay we’ve already asked some of you about the homework. Did anybody else feel
like it was an eye opener?
JIM: I did.
DEBBIE: Shocking, isn't it?
OLIVIA JOHNSON: Olivia Johnson from Missouri.
DEBBIE: Hello Olivia.
OLIVIA JOHNSON: Hi.
FEMALE ONE: I thought it was interesting to see the numbers come together in that
homework. And I was also very pleased to see that I currently charge $25 an hour and on the
breakdown, I came up with $24.85 per hour.
DEBBIE: So you were really right on where you thought you would be.
FEMALE ONE: That’s not too bad. I thought that was pretty darn good.
DEBBIE: Yeah, I mean, it’s good when you’re not surprised. What’s revealing is when you
thought you were 25 an hour and you discover you’re 20 or you thought you were 30 an hour
and you discover you’re 25. You know, you don’t know what to work on if you don’t know
where the problems are and you cant know where the problems are if you’re not tracking and
measuring everything. Anybody else have a few eye openers from doing your homework?
Anybody else have any eye openers, any new revelations?
FEMALE TWO: I didn’t particularly like the numbers as they’re related to, I guess how much
we are charging. As a young lady she just kind of really [unintelligible] that in the end, we did
not do the rest of homework as it relates to how much we were charging per hour. We’ve
done nothing to that point, I do believe. Am I correct Andre?
ANDRE: [unintelligible]
FEMALE TWO: Oh he said we ended up with $30 an hour.
DEBBIE: Okay, okay. So you did end up averaging 30 bucks an hour.
FEMALE TWO: Yes.
ANDRE: We averaged $81 per job [unintelligible]
DEBBIE: Okay. So you guys averaged $81 a job and you’re averaging $30 an hour.
ANDRE: Yeah.
DEBBIE: Great. Anybody else want to toss out what you learned? What is your average per
job and what are you averaging by the hour, billable hour?
SCOTTIE: This is Scottie. The jobs averaged at $103.64 and it was about $34.03 an hour.
DEBBIE: Alrighty. So 103 and 34 an hour. Anybody else?
RITA: This is Rita. I found out that on the high side our average per clean was 123.33 but I
was shocked when I learned what my billable per hour which on the low side was 26.35.
DEBBIE: Got it. Anybody else? Anybody else want to share what you learned? Average per
hour? I have somebody, I think was averaging, no I think that’s the one, 103 and 34 an hour.
Anybody else discover what your average price per home was through your exercise and your
average billable hours?
RHONDA: Well I thought I kinda went to town. Hi Debbie it’s Rhonda. I’m late joining
everybody. Hi everybody.
FEMALE ONE: Hi.
RHONDA: I kinda went to town on mine but I don’t think I did that. Did I? I just did
percentages, which freaks me out that they were, my labor percentages were in some case
77% as a fee.
DEBBIE: Exactly. Well if you’ll just add up all the hours for the month and divide it by the
total revenue generated from those hours then you’ll have your average per hour. I don’t
know if you have that in front of you. But your spreadsheet was pretty long, you might want
to, if you have it in front of you, you could do that and see what you’re actually averaging per
hour.
So that means all the hours that you paid out or all the hours that was spent cleaning a house,
so even if you helped clean a house and you didn’t pay yourself, all the hours that it took to
clean houses and all the revenue that was generated by those labor hours divided by the
revenue and you’ll figure out your average per hour. It’s going to probably fall between 20
and 35 an hour which is what most people end up being. So you come up with that figure in a
little bit, you can share that.
But one of the main reasons for the homework is to get you in the habit of learning how to
track and discover your numbers because the worst thing you can do is start making decisions
for change that’s based on assumption instead of based on facts and so once you know you’re
charging 35 an hour or 30 an hour, then you’ll know, okay well my per hour labor rate is not
the problem.
If we’re trying to figure out why aren’t you profitable when you have five employees or 10
employees, how come I’m not profitable? How come there’s nothing left over for me? If we
don’t know accurately what your numbers truly are reflecting, then you could apply the
wrong solution to the problem that you’re having and that’s very important. And I forgot to
put the do not disturb sign on the door. I’m in a hotel in Chicago. So I’m going to go take care
of that real quick. I’ll be right back. Hang on guys.
I meant to do that and I am kicking myself for that. That’s what you get when you have live
coaching. But the cool part is I can do this from anywhere, right? So I can do it from Chicago.
MALE ONE: Debbie the hours per month cleaning divided by the revenue equals what, your
per hour labor rate?
DEBBIE: Your per hour labor rate, yes.
MALE ONE: Thank you.
DEBBIE: So if it took you 331 labor hours to do about $8600 worth of cleaning, then your
per labor rate would be right around 26 hours. Obviously you can do that even just on a
weekly scale. You could take a week’s worth of client’s revenue and a week’s worth of labor
to make that happen and divide that number and you’re going to be pretty on target just about
anyway you slice that pie.
The main thing is you want to find out what are you actually charging per hour because at a
certain point you’re going to be frustrated when you have employees as to why you cant make
profit. You see it’s easy to make a profit when it’s just you cleaning and it’s not so hard to
make a profit when it’s you cleaning and one helper, who’s fairly low paid and helping you
clean the jobs because you’re getting all that revenue in.
But when you’re not cleaning and others are cleaning for you and there’s two of them and
then four of them and eight of them and then six of them out cleaning, when you struggle with
profit, we’ve got to know what area of your company needs addressing and sometimes it’s the
client fee and that’s the main problem. And sometimes it’s not the client fee. The clients may
be paying 35 an hour and you still can’t make a profit.
So then we’ll look at expenses. Probably labor expenses are out the roof, like Rhonda said she
discovered some, some of her labor expenses were actually 77% of the sale. And if your labor
is 77% of the sale, there’s probably not going to be anything left for the owner on that one
house, on that sale. You duplicate that by 10 houses a week, there’s nothing left over for the
owner. So knowing these two numbers are very critical to help you identify where your profit
leaks on and so forth. If you didn’t get all that done, make sure you do it before next week
because we need to know what is your billable hour per client and that’s [word].
MALE ONE: Okay. [unintelligible] you said you take what you made and divide it into the
labor hours.
DEBBIE: Yes and here’s what I would like for you to do and I don’t know if I clarified this
last week and if I did I probably didn’t make enough of a big deal about it for you to
understand. I would like for you to write down next to every house the number of hours that it
takes to clean that house. I don’t want you to write in necessarily all the hours you paid in
labor because if it takes 3 hours to clean a $90 house, three man hours meaning two people
for an hour and a half or one person for 3 hours. Then that’s the number I’m looking for.
I don’t want the number that includes 20 minutes driving there, 20 minutes driving back to
the office, 10 minutes picking up equipment, okay? Cause there you have 50 minutes that you
paid labor for but they weren’t cleaning. So I literally want you to put like if you use this
spreadsheet, you put down Mrs. Jones $90, three hours or four, whatever it takes you. Mrs.
Smith, $100, four hours. That’s how long it takes Mrs. Smith’s house.
I don’t want you to mix in that number maybe what you paid in labor because you might have
paid all this travel time and time stopping at the office, filling up chemical bottles and picking
up cleaning rags and things like that. So, literally the number of hours that is actually taking
to complete the hundred dollar house or the $150 house or the $90 house. So does that make
sense?
MALE ONE: Yes you’re saying took an hour and a half to clean the house and you got three
people, so that makes it 9 hours. That’s the time you want.
DEBBIE: Well no. If it took an hour and a half to clean the house, let’s do one I can do in my
head. If you had three people in the team and they were each there one hour, that’s three labor
hours.
MALE ONE: Okay.
DEBBIE: If you have 3 people in the team and they were each there three hours each, then
that’s 9 labor hours.
MALE ONE: Okay.
DEBBIE: Right?
MALE ONE: Yeah.
DEBBIE: So an hour and a half would be four and a half labor hours. [unintelligible].
MALE ONE: I was doing [unintelligible]. That’s right I was doing two visits for that
particular house for the month.
DEBBIE: Per house, let’s just do it per house. If I pay 90 bucks and it’s taking 3 labor hours
to clean that $90 house, then that’s what I want to see. Mrs. Smith, 90 bucks, 3 hours. Mrs.
Jones, $100, four hours, whatever it takes. And then you can repeat it cause obviously if Mrs.
Smith gets twice in the month, you can put that in. The second time February 28 th when we
cleaned it was, maybe it took three and a half hours that time. Maybe you had a new person in
the team and it took three and a half hours. But however long it takes to clean the house,
that’s the number we want to work from because when you divide that by the total, you will
see what you’re actually charging your clients per hour. I hope that makes sense. Okay was
there another question?
SARAH: This is Sarah with [unintelligible].
DEBBIE: Okay Sarah with [word] go first and then we’ll get the other question.
SARAH: Okay Andre just figured out that we are below, real low with three people. So I
guess we’ll talk about later how to...
DEBBIE: How to improve that number. That’s what today is all about. So what you’re
discovering, this is what’s going to be shocking. Let’s say you clean this $90 house often, you
know the house well and when you and Andre clean it together, the both of you work very
well together and you’re in and out in an hour and a half. So that customer gets 30, I’m sorry,
gets 3 labor hours every time you cleaner her. Right?
MALE ONE: Right.
DEBBIE: Hour and a half. Then you bring Lamont in and he’s helping and the three of you
are in that house, an hour and 15 minutes. The job just went over 45 minutes and you didn’t
get paid anymore money. Correct?
MALE ONE: Correct.
DEBBIE: If all three of you spend an hour and 15 minutes in a house that the two of you can
do in an hour and a half, then that's 15, 15 and 15 for each person that somehow got wasted.
That’s 45 minutes of wasted time that nobody gets paid for cause if your rate is 30 an hour or
you hope it is or you want it to be, then you are getting your 30 an hour when two people did
it in an hour and a half. Okay? Is everybody with me?
SARAH: Yes.
DEBBIE: What happens is productivity tends to go down every time you add a person to the
team. So it’s rare unless you really got a good system and you have a handle on your training
and a handle on your system and you’re committed to the speed cleaning aspects of this
business. It’s very difficult to keep a three hour job at one hour when there’s three people on
it and that's your goal.
If you two can do that three hour house in an hour and a half together, your goal is well then
when I add a third person, we’re in here 1 hour flat. Because every minute we’re in that house
more than an hour, we’re working for free. Got it. So, the worse thing that happen is when
you add an entire hour to a job. That whole hour nobody got paid for but the owner’s paying
in labor more than likely.
So we’re going to talk about that. That was good way to launch into the model cause that’s
what this week is about. If you don’t set this thing up right from the beginning, you don’t set
your business up right from the beginning, you are going to be treading water and doing the
whole two steps forward, two steps back thing from here unto eternity. And I’m a firm
believer, if you cant make any money, any profit with two people, it’s not going to get better
when you have four. It’s not going to get better when you have eight. It’s not going to get
better when you have 16.
I don’t know how many owners that I’ve talked with who have said, if I could just get 6 teams
go in, I could make some money. But you know I just cant make any profit my 4 teams. I
can’t make any profit with my two employees. If I just had 5 employees I could make that
profit. I mean, there is a breakeven point if you have a lot of fixed expenses. If you go out and
get an office, so you’re paying light bills and internet connection and rent.
When you have certain fixed expenses, yes. You have to have a break even point or you’ll
never get ahead. But when you’ve kept your fixed expenses to the bare bones minimum and
most of you, if you are still cleaning houses yourself and some of you have gotten an office
and you have employees, and you already have a set of fixed expenses. But for the most part,
you’re kind of at ground zero here starting really from scratch.
And if you are operating out of your home right now or you have a very cheap office,
something small and cheap, then you already got your expenses to a bare bones minimum.
I’m going to encourage you to keep those expenses incredibly low until you grow to a certain
point. Most people do it backwards.
They add all these expenses. They buy a couple of cars. They get rent and now they have
utilities and they have renter’s insurance and oh I got to have an extra computer and I need to
hire a part time clerk to help me. You add all these huge operational expenses before you
even have the profits coming in to pay for them. It’s very difficult to get ahead unless you
have some start up capital to begin with.
So we’re going to talk about a model that I believe is the easiest model to make money in this
business if you start out and you don’t have a lot of money. We’ve talked a bit about
franchises. If you were to spend the money to buy a franchise, they would teach you all kinds
of things that you need to know to make a profit. But you will probably spend your life
savings. You know, 50 to $90,000 to become someone’s franchise, to become a Merry Maids
franchise or a Molly Maid or Maid Brigade.
And so a lot of independents, of course don’t have that kind of cash to invest in their business
so they start with a broom and a mop and almost no money in their pocket and they start
building. That’s how I started. I didn’t have the money to start a business and that's how most
of you have started or you’re just smart enough to know you probable don’t need to spend 50
to 90 grand to do this but you quite haven’t figured out how to make this whole thing work
and transition to [word].
Well here’s what they know that they are selling, that you don’t know, which is preventing
you from really getting into the next level. Most independents will copy the franchise model
for business. Most franchises, I’m going to say 90% or 95% of them maybe even 98% of the
franchises operate with the two person team or the three person team concept, most definitely.
You wont find very many franchises operating on the solo cleaner concept which is the
method I use. And like The Maids, I believe they have four in a team, okay? So most
independents will copy that model and they tend to have two in a team or three in a team.
What’s missing is how on earth do you make a profit when you have two and three and four
people in a team? That’s what missing. Without that information you’re not going to make a
profit or you’re going to make such a small profit that it’s going to require so much volume
for you to make that great paycheck you’ve always wanted to make.
You’re going to have to be that $900,000 gross sales a year company before you’re making
the percentage you, or you’re making the decent profit margin owner’s net income that you
thought you should’ve when you were half that size. So what’s missing is the information on
how on earth you make teams make a profit? And I will tell you this, when you don’t have a
lot of start up capital in your pocket to throw at marketing, that is the biggest secret to this
business is to have some marketing capital to take you to each level that you’re trying to get
to.
If you don’t have all that cash in reserve, if you buy a franchise, not only will they make you
pay 50 to 90,000 for your territory if you want a large metropolitan territory, you’re probably
going to pay like $90,000. They also want you to have about 50 grand in the bank like on a
line of credit to spend on marketing your first year. Most of you on this call, well I don’t have
$50,000 to spend on your marketing in 12 months.
The reason why most franchises require that is they need to get their franchisees in that first
year to grow to a certain level. Because if they don’t grow to a certain level then there’s not
enough profits coming in to fund the business, grow the business and pay the owner. So they
make them come up with all this money upfront, which means most people out there,
independents for sure, people who have started their business with a broom and a mop and a
car, most of those people, it’s just not accessible to buy a franchise.
So that secret that’s missing is oh my gosh if I have teams and if I want to grow fairly
quickly, I need a ton of marketing capital to get me to where I need to be. Let me help you
understand why and this is why I truly encourage the solo cleaner concept for starting a
business on a shoestring, for starting a cleaning business when you don’t have a ton of capital
sitting in the bank to throw at marketing.
Again, I didn’t have any money when I started my business but I was able to grow my
business with no money, with the single maid concept. And let me explain kinda where this is
all going. First of all I want to start with this, when you set up your model, whichever model
you pick and when I say model that is the system you live and die by with your company. The
system you live and die by. You pick one and you live with it, okay?
The problem that people have and the thing that I’ve seen with owners is they’ll have a
system in place and when they start having problems, bumps in the road, instead of figuring
out how to solve that problem, they change their system. Oh I guess if I had 3 people in a
team instead of two, this wouldn’t happen. So then they start putting three people in a team.
Man I guess if I was paying percentages instead of hourly, this wouldn’t happen. So then they
switch from hourly pay to percentage.
Then they have a whole new set of problems. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to
who will go to one of those conventions, like if you’re a member of ARCSI or something, go
to a convention, talk to other business owners about a problem that you’re having and that
business owner isn't having that same problem you’re having and they use teams of three
instead of teams of two.
So you switch to doing teams of three thinking you’re going to solve that problem, you don’t
solve your problem because what I’ve seen, I’ve literally seen owners go to a convention, go
back home and change the way they do everything. They go from hourly to percentage or
they go from two-man teams to solo cleaner. And they don’t solve their problems. They just
create a whole new set of problems and they keep switching and I’ve literally seen them come
back a third year and go back a third time and change the whole model from what they
operate on.
What I would encourage you to do is pick the model, live with it and make that one work.
Don’t keep changing it back and forth every time you have a problem because you’re
probably applying the wrong solution to your problem. Please remember that. So every time
you do have a problem, remember what your model is. If you don’t buy cars and if you do use
single cleaners then when you have a problem, don’t go to two in a team or three in a team
and don’t go and buy a car or vice versa.
If you decide you’ve just got to furnish vehicles for your employees and so you have to have
three in a car to make that cost effective, then when there’s problems don’t be switching
around. So pick the model, live with it and every problem that comes your way, solve it but
stay within the model that you have. One problem I see with independent cleaners who don’t
understand the concept of picking your model and living with it is I’ll ask so do you use two
person teams or three person teams? I rarely ask if you do the solo cleaning concept because
most people don’t do it.
And invariably, the majority of the time the answer is usually two to three in a team. That’s
not answer. So which model is your model? Well it kinda depends on how many people show
up for work on Monday morning. Okay, so you’re not even committed to a model. You’re not
even committed to we do two person teams, that’s what our company is built around.
Now, yes once in a while something crazy will happen. That’s called the exception to the rule,
something crazy will happen, everything will go wrong, four people are out sick, the flu bug
is rampant in my company this month and yeah once in a while we’ll have to punt and we’ll
send a third person on a team of two. But that’s different than the model that says oh we’re
between two and three in a team. Well that’s your model. Your model is we wing it.
So you got to pick your model and your answer should be we’re built on the three person
team concept. Oh we are built on the solo cleaner concept or the two person cleaner. I don’t,
nobody on this call is thinking about or doing the four person in a team. It’s very hard to
make a profit with four in a team. It can be done but it is not easy. So which model are you
and pick it and be it and make sure when you make exceptions, it is exceptions. It’s rare.
If you’re always making exceptions then those aren’t exceptions. That’s the way it is. You’re
always between two and three person teams and you’re shooting yourself in the foot when it
comes to profit and routine. Routine is extremely important in this business. You cant develop
a routine if things are changing all the time. And if you’re switching around on the model,
sometimes you’re a two person team, sometimes you’re a three person team. If you’re
switching around on the model, it’s really hard to identify the problem that you’re having and
applying the solution to it.
So make sure you pick the model that you’re going to live with. Your model is your bible,
period. If something isn't working then you take a look at your model. If it’s not changing all
the time, you’ll be able to identify some problems. A lot of times when people see they have
turnover with employees, they’ll change how many people they put into a team. If you’re
having trouble with high absenteeism, they’ll tend to wait till the morning to divvy up the jobs
because they never know who’s going to show up.
Monday mornings tend to have that problem. If you’re having problems with profit, if you
haven’t really identified your model yet then you may think well I’m just paying too much in
wages and maybe that’s not the problem. So again we can’t apply the right solution.
This is interesting. I was coaching one of my clients recently and she’s struggling with profit
and so she said I think I just need to go and buy a van and I was like why would you spend
more money and take more away from your profit margin to solve this other problem that
you’re having that you think is hurting your profit. And she hadn’t identified yet where the
problem was but she was about to throw a solution that was going to be very expensive.
And her problem was net profitability. She cant make any money yet and she was about to go
buy a van to help her net profitability. She was about to create another fixed expense that she
cannot get out of and that van isn't bringing her money. She thinks it will solve some
headaches but it’s not going to the net profitable issue that she was hoping to solve. Have a
reason for everything you do.
If you’re constantly changing what you do because of the headache that has come your way,
then you are reacting to problems instead of creating systems and policies and adding to your
model because it works. You’re reacting to problems. Have a reason for everything you do. If
you go buy cars, you should know why you need to furnish cars for your employees. It cant
be because I can’t figure out how to stop this other problem.
I cant figure out how to prevent my jobs from being missed because somebody’s car broke
down or their transmission went out and they cant afford to replace the transmission, so I’m
going to buy cars. Well you’re not buying cars based on a smart decision in business like
visibility with the car signs on it, a better image in the community because clunkers aren’t
driving up into the driveway, something nice with your logo was on it. Those are reasons to
buy a car.
It’s marketing, it’s going to get the word out in the community. Every time that car drives
around town, it’s got my company name on it, there’s a reason. Another reason image, looks
great. But it’s the wrong reason. I’m going to buy cars because I’ve had too many employees
this past year have to quit on me with no notice and I had to lose customers over it because
their transmission went out. That’s reacting the problem. That's the wrong reason to go out
and buy a vehicle.
So you need to know why you do everything you do so that you’re not reacting when you
make a new decision and you change your system. Why are you a solo cleaner concept, if you
are? Why do you put two in a team if you do? So make sure you understand why you do
everything you do. Why are you employees, why do you have employees instead of 10-99
workers, contractors, independent contractors? Know why you do it instead of just reacting
because you couldn’t make it the other way. That’s never the reason.
Well I couldn’t make it the other way so this is why I do it. If that’s your answer to why
you’re making a change, cause I couldn’t make it work the other way, then it’s not time to
make a change. Let’s find out if you could have made it work the other way, you’re just were
[word] the wrong solution to that problem.
Let’s talk about the model specifically. I’m going to give you some pros and cons and then
I’m going to let you guys jump in and ask questions cause you’re going to have lots of them.
So just write your questions down as I talk because you’re going to have lots and lots of
questions. There are pros and cons of course to whichever model you choose. And I think
there’s three critical things that once you make that decision, everything else is pretty
standard. And when you look at the franchises, there’s three basic things that you will see in
franchising.
First of all, depending on how many people should be in a team. Should there be one, should
there be two to a team, or should be three to a team? I would say let’s not even talk about four
to a team because it’s just too hard. So one, two or three in a team. First of all, how many
people should be in the team? That’s the core model. You live with what you pick.
Second of all, should I buy vehicles for these people to drive around town in. Should I
provide the transportation? Meaning should I go out and buy cars for my employees? Very
important decision. If you buy cars more than likely, the same decision is does my company
provide the equipment and the chemicals? I’m going to say 99.9% of the companies out there
provide the chemicals and the equipment.
So do I provide vehicles and equipment? How many people belong in a team? And then the
last most important thing you have to decide is should I pay via percentage of the job or
should I pay hourly? You have got to get those three things worked out and they cant be
going back and forth all the time. Pick what you are and live with it and make that work. And
what I see is owners think they’ve picked what they are and then never live within it.
Well we’re a two person team but you know, people are always out sick so there’s always a
couple of teams that go out with three. Well then you haven’t picked and you’re not focused
and committed to what you are. We pay percentage but if they go over on the job I go ahead
and pay them hourly. So you’re not really percentage. All these things that you keep doing to
compensate for the problems that you’re having generally whittle away your profit.
Most of the time the owner pays for all those mistakes. The owner pays by not getting a
paycheck, by not having anything left over to write yourself a paycheck because you’re
applying the wrong solution to your problem. So those are the three things you got to decide
what are you going to be. How many in a team, will you be paying on a percentage basis of
every job, that’s called percentage pay or commission pay. Some people call it piece work.
Like if you worked at a factory, they pay you how many widgets you can make in a day.
If I can make a 100 widgets a day, I’m going to make $100 but if I can only make 80 widgets
in a day, I can make $80. And if I’m really slow and I can only make 60 widgets a day, then I
only can get 60 bucks. But I worked 8 hours, I worked 8 hours no matter what. So that’s
commission pay or percentage pay. If I can clean two houses a day by myself, I’m going to
make a certain amount of money whether I get done in 6 hours or 8 hours. That’s percentage
pay. That’s the easiest way to control expenses.
Most people who are making a decent profit have their employees on a percentage pay.
They’re on a commission basis. I’m very partial to paying on a commission because you can
control expenses. What’s incredible is, when you pay on a percentage, it’s what I call a self
correcting model and please make sure you get this. When you pay on a percentage, it creates
a self correcting model. If you are constantly underbidding jobs because you’re just not good
at this. You go out and look at jobs and you think it’s a three hour house and nobody can do it
in less than four cause you’re just not that accurate with your bidding and estimating.
If people are on a percentage pay, they’re going to get that job done on three hours and
they’re going to be coming in to your office going, this is not possible. This is no way
anybody can clean that house in 3 hours complaint free. And if I do a sloppy job and start
cutting corners, so it’s self correcting cause they’re not going to work for free. When you pay
hourly and you’re constantly underbidding jobs, it’s funny the owner will keep punishing
themselves and it’s not self correcting. Cause the owner will keep underbidding jobs because
the employees don’t care if they’re paid hourly and you underbid, well guess what, you’re the
one not making money, not them.
If you tell them this is a three hour house and they’re paid hourly and they take four hours to
get it done right, you’re the one not getting paid, not them. So it isn't self correcting, unless
you’re in so much pain after a year or two years of not making a profit, you become self
correcting. You’re like what can I do? I’m not making any money. Well then you’ll start
correcting it. But we tend as owners to be the last ones to [word] our paycheck.
So when you’re on a percentage pay, it really does create a self correcting atmosphere for
bidding and estimating, underbidding jobs and here’s a good part, people who wont work
efficiently. It becomes self correcting because if they’re on a percentage, they are going to
stop [word] in the house because they’re on their own time. When they’re on your time and
they’re getting paid 10 bucks an hour, you have incentivized them to work slowly and you are
actually incentivizing them to go ahead and take that cell phone call, nobody knows it and to
check their voicemail real quick cause they’re on the clock and you’re paying them.
When you’re paying people by the hour, you have incentivized them to take a long way to get
to that house because they can have a little extra smoke or they can check their voicemail
while they’re on the drive over there, quick run-through to McDonald’s on your clock, on
your time because they’re hourly, cost them nothing.
Or just standing and sitting in front of the house talking about the house, a team of three in a
car and they’re sitting for five or ten minutes talking about the house, reading the work order,
oh by the way how’s your husband, is he okay now, is his surgery gone well? Ten minutes
here, ten minutes there, three in a car, that’s 30 minutes of paid time on the clock.
And there’s no incentive to hustle. If I’m being paid hourly, I’m not motivated to hustle. Why
should I break a sweat? If I break a sweat and hustle, I make less money that day and I got a
babysitter to pay and I put gas in my car to drive out here so if I’m on an hourly wage, there’s
no incentive to hustle and that’s not just these people who are dishonest and they’re crooks
and they’re trying to gouge you, that’s not it.
If I hustle, I’m going to get a complaint and I know the cleaning tech mentality, they like to
please and they cant stand to get complaints. It demoralizes them. So they’d rather drag their
feet, work a little more slowly, clean that job perfectly and get zero complaints than hustle,
break a sweat only to get done early and make less money. Hourly pay, hard to make a profit,
hard to incentivize people to work quickly and efficiently.
I’m not talking about hurrying. I don’t ever want to incent people to hurry. If you get your
team to hurry, they’ll start breaking things and producing sloppy work. But if you can get
your teams motivated to work efficiently and to maximize every minute they’re in that house,
meaning they don’t stand there and gab with the customer and their cute baby and that
adorable puppy.
I am on my time when I’m talking. If I’m being paid by the percentage, it’s my time that I’m
squandering, not my boss’s time. But at 10, 12, 14 an hour, hey I don’t mind talking to this
customer. I’m building relationship for the company. I don’t mind talking to this customer for
10 minutes. If I do that at 3 or 4 jobs a day, building relationships, there’s 30 minutes of time
you’re going to pay for everyday. Look how much time that…
MALE TWO: Are you taking questions?
DEBBIE: I’ll let you jump in and grab one. Go ahead.
MALE TWO: Well I’m in Pittsburgh and I have to pay for travel time. I do the team share,
the percentage when they’re in a home they get, it’s a four hour job, you got three people, you
should be out in an hour and twenty minutes. But I still have to pay them the travel time. I’m
required by the state of Pennsylvania to do that. So they go on the hourly rate then and I
wonder how long it takes them to get from job to job. I know because I can do a Google map
etcetera.
But one of the dynamics that I’m having a problem with right now is a team of three people
and I’m going to talk to you too about whether we should change our model to go down to 1
person but my team leader is very efficient, wants to get done, understands she can be in and
out of the house ahead of time as long as its [word] she gets paid.
Cause if the she was there for the full hour, one of the other two people are more relaxed,
they just want to, well they’re not going to run the job over but they’re not worried about
getting in a more efficient manner. They want to make sure it’s done right. But if it’s a three
hour job, three people, they’re in and out an hour, they’re happy. [unintelligible].
DEBBIE: [unintelligible] getting ahead in time. I’m glad you asked cause that will help get a
little more focused on some of the dynamics of teams versus solo and I think some of these
questions are going to be answered as we go through. So let me try to work on answering
those as I work down my list. So I’m building a case right now, for percentage pay. And I
realize in California and in other parts of the country, you have some laws that will prevent
you from paying via percentage.
But there are ways to pay people minimum wage plus commission based on the job to ensure
people are averaging like 14 an hour. So there are ways to make it work, to make sure you’re
within the laws. Most of the rest of the country you’re not too uninhibited by percentage pay
as long as at the end of the day, nobody averages less than minimum wage cause that’s illegal,
no matter what state you’re in.
My people are all on commission or percentage pay but they can average 14 to 18 dollars per
hour and what that means is the commission is so high that they almost have to be working
backwards not to average at least minimum wage. And so even somebody who’s kind of slow
is going to average in a day’s time, the hours worked for the money they make, it’s going to
average well above minimum wage. So I never have to worry about the illegal activity of
paying below minimum wage.
Now if your percentage pay was really low, and people could only average maybe 8 or 9 an
hour because of your percentage, then you’re going to run the risk that a slowpoke, being paid
on a percentage could actually operate below minimum wage and you’re going to be in
trouble. You cannot do that. But usually when you pay on a commission, you can enable
people to average more per hour than you could have afforded to pay them hourly.
One way to get around the time in the car, the time in the car in my opinion, especially for
new hires, you cant go back and change the way you’re paying people to work for you now.
But the best way to pay people who are driving around in a car and they’re not on the clock
on the billable clock is to make sure that when they’re driving, when they’re not cleaning, if
they’re being paid, it’s that minimum wage.
But then when they’re cleaning, it needs to be way above minimum wage. You cant pay a
dollar or two more. They’re not going to be really impressed with your job and you’re going
to have a hard time finding people to work for you. If I were being paid minimum wage while
I’m driving, about 14 an hour while I’m cleaning, I would probably be okay with that
minimum wage. But I probably wouldn’t be okay with minimum wage while I’m driving and
a dollar or two above minimum wage while I’m cleaning.
So there are some things you can do to improve that. But overall, the best way to pay, to
control the expenses and to motivate people like Jim just said, I think it was Jim, to motivate
people to get in, break that sweat and hustle is when every minute of their time, it’s their own
and not yours, they will hustle. They’ll be highly motivated to get in and get out. When you
have teams, it’s easier to make a profit and it’s easier to motivate people to move quickly,
when there’s two in a team.
And I realize we have companies on this call that already have a company in place and we’re
going to have to work out somewhat slightly individually to help you improve some of the
areas that you’re struggling with. This…
DEBBIE: .. opinion especially for new hires, you can’t go back and change what, the way
you’re paying people who work for you now, but the best way to pay people who are driving
around in a car and they’re not on the clock, on the billable clock is to make sure that when
they’re driving, when they’re not cleaning, if they’re being paid, it’s that minimum wage.
But then when they’re cleaning, it needs to be way above minimum wage. You can’t pay a
dollar or two more or they’re not going to be real impressed with your job and you’re going to
have a hard time finding people to work for you. If I were being paid minimum page while
I’m driving, but 14 an hour while I’m cleaning, I would probably be okay with that minimum
wage.
But I probably wouldn’t be okay with minimum wage while I’m driving and a dollar or two
above minimum wage while I’m cleaning. So there are some things you can do to improve
that but overall, the best way to pay, to control the expenses and to motivate people like Jim
just said, I think it was Jim, to motivate people to get in, break that sweat and hustle is when
every minute of their time is their own and not yours. They will hustle. They’ll be highly
motivated to get in and get out.
When you have teams, it’s easier to make a profit and it’s easier to motivate people to move
quickly when there’s two in a team. Now I realize we have companies on this call that already
have a company in place and we’re going to have to work somewhat slightly individually to
help you improve some of the areas that you’re struggling with.
This call really is to help people who are right at the ground zero building it from the
beginning. And so, I’m not going to try to get everybody on this call to overcome the
problems of two and three person teams. I’m going to try to get everybody on this call to start
off with a model that makes it much easier for you. So, it’s a little bit unfortunate but it is
easy to correct some of the things that you will deal with even if you have to stick with the
two person, three person team.
Cause you’re already an operating business. The last thing I teach any of the people that I
coach is to go and dramatically change the system that you have. You can find the profit leaks
with the system you have if you’ve got a system in place and you have 8 or 9 employees, it
would be very difficult to change things overnight. So instead we just identify those profit
leaks and we’ll plug those and leave your system intact.
But for people starting out, trying to get themselves out of the field and trying to create a
model that’s the cheapest model to get you from A to Z quickly. Here’s why I’m
recommending the solo cleaning concept. First of all, all the billable hours that you can
squeeze into a day, much easier to squeeze into one person in a team. When you have one
person in a team, you don’t need to buy vehicles for them. And I’ll be happy to answer
questions about oh what about insurance and oh what about somebody having a wreck and all
this stuff.
When you have one person in a team, there’s really no obligation to buy a vehicle and put
them in it because I work for myself, I drive to those two houses and I’m done. The goal is to
clean eight billable hours a day if humanly possible per person. That’s your goal. I can
maximize my revenue day if I could bill out 8 dollars per 8 hours per day per person. That’s
easier with a one person team, not impossible by any means with a two person team, much
harder to bill out 8 hours per day per person with three in a team because most people have a
good ten minutes between houses of drive.
And I talk to way too many people who have between 15 and 20 minutes and occasionally
some people have 30 minutes between houses. You have three people driving 20 minutes
between houses; you are not going to squeeze in 6 jobs a day or 18 billable hours. Does that
make sense? If one person’s working in a team, I could bill four hours. I can have her at the
first house at 8:00 in the morning till noon, four billable hours in a perfect world.
She can go grab lunch 30 minutes, off the clock. I’m not paying for her lunch hour, half hour.
She can go grab lunch, kind of on her way to the next house, go through the drive thru, grab
some food, sit in the parking lot, check her voicemail, call the babysitter, check on the kids.
Within 30 minutes, maybe 45, worse case an hour, if you have somebody who just needs to
take a lot if time. So fine they take 30 minutes to an hour to get to their second house.
All of that time is off the clock and you are not paying for it cause that’s their lunch break and
they need to get to their second house, some of the time during their lunch break. Technically,
that means eight to noon at the first house, 30 minutes drive time and lunch time or an hour
between houses. They’re at the second house by 1:00. If they don’t want to take a long lunch,
they can be there at 12:30. They can eat an apple and banana on the way to next house if they
want to.
I mean you’re not going to control what they do on their 30 minute lunch break. You’re just
going to say you are off the clock and I’m not paying you during that time. So they can take
their sweet time and get there about 1 or they can hustle, eat quick and get there by 12:30.
Bottom line is they can be in that house cleaning or at least unloading their equipment and
getting organized between 12:30 and 1:00.
And they could spend another 3, 3 and a half, 4 hours cleaning on the clock while you’re
getting paid and still be done by 4:30 or 4:00 if their first house got done 15 minutes early
because they’re highly motivated to work efficiently and not stand and chit chat with the
customer and the baby and the dog and might leave 15 minutes early and they might be highly
motivated to get home early so they don’t take a full 30 minutes for lunch but that’s not your
business.
And they get to that next house by quarter to 12, and they’re done by 3:30 or 3:45 or 4. It is
possible. The cool thing is they control it. They work alone, they’re not in a team where you
got one that really likes to move slowly and check her voicemail and take a good 30, 45
minutes for lunch. She’s working alone. If she needs to take a little more time between houses
on her lunch break, that’s her call. If she likes to hustle and get over there and get done by 4,
that’s her call.
But the cool thing is with one person in a team, I can bill out 8 hours a day of cleaning time.
Now, realistically, am I probably going to have two four hour jobs for every person in the
team, probably not. But you don’t either when it comes to having two and three in a team.
You can do this fairly closely with two in a team, much harder. Because when there’s two in a
team, they spend a little more time at the office loading up the car and getting all their
supplies.
And then of course they’re both on the clock on the way to the first house and they’re on the
clock on the way to the second house and then they’re off the clock 30 minutes for lunch. And
then they’re back on the clock between houses. You got all that travel time you are paying.
And it’s very hard to not pay people for their travel time. When they have no control over the
time that they’re not on your clock. Kind of border line unethical unless your pay is so high or
your percentage is so high that even though they’re not paid on the clock while they’re
driving around, they’re really making great money.
But if their pay is just average and you’re not paying for them to drive around to three and
four locations a day, number one it’s probably a little bit unethical. Number two, they’re
going to resent you for it. I believe that a person will resent you more if you pay them $10 an
hour only in the times they’re cleaning and you don’t pay them for driving around, they’re
actually resent you more than if you pay them $8 an hour and they’re always on the clock.
They will just resent all the time you didn’t pay for or if you were paying 12 an hour juts for
the time they clean and they actually could make more a day doing that. Then if you were
paying them 8 an hour and they’re on the clock every minute they’re driving around and
cleaning. There’s that resentment factor of I’m not getting paid for all this time and I’m sitting
here with Chatty Cathy and wastes so much time every day because she talks to the customers
and she has to sit in the car and smoke for an extra five minutes before we can go in.
So you know they never have control of their time in a team. So if you’re not at least paying
them hourly while they’re in a team, they’re going to have some resentment. It’s harder to pay
people really well when you pay hourly. It’s very hard to pay people 12, 14 an hour if they’re
on the clock because of the abuse that occurs whether it’s on purpose or unintentional. There
is clock abuse there’s a little psychology.
There’s no [word] of the hustle and my goodness if I were being paid 14 an hour, you better
believe I’ll find a way to waste 10 minutes a day that I could have saved by hustling and not
sitting and checking my voicemail and my cell phone, returning calls. You know, they’re all
urgent, have to. We can all excuse what we do. But if I were making 14 an hour, I would find
a way to slow down. But if I were on percentage pay, I’d find a way to speed up and still
make my 14 an hour and get home at 3 instead of 4:30.
So I am going to build a strong case for solo cleaners. You don’t have to buy cars when
people are solo cleaners. There’s nothing wrong with letting people use their car for work.
Now I’m going to give you some downside to having cleaners but I think they’re easy to
overcome. But when you have a team of three, it’s kinda hard not to provide vehicles.
You can get away with a team of two, letting one be the driver and she uses her car and one
being the team member and she’s lower paid. You can also get by with those slightly lower
skill set when you have teams. You only need one person to be a leader, one person with
strong communication skills that can communicate with the homeowner. One person who’s
sharp and responsible, who will check that work of the other person, make sure that she’s not
leaving smudgy mirrors and cobwebs in the corners.
So you can deal with half of your people can be less skilled and lower paid then the other half
of your people with a team of two. There’s some advantages there. If you are in an area where
it’s very hard to find people with ample skills to qualify as a team leader, but there’s lots and
lots of people who don’t really speak English and don’t have driver’s licenses or don’t have
vehicles. If you have lots of those people and you can hire them, very low pay because they
should be paid low if they don’t have the skills of a team leader.
Why should I be making 12 an hour if I have no car, no driver’s license, and I don’t speak
English or I don’t have enough common sense or personality skills to deal with a client, then I
shouldn’t be making the money that a team leader makes just cause I worked for you for two
years and the team leader’s worked for you for 6 months. The team leader has a car. She has
the communication skills and she has the common sense to deal with the homeowner. Then
she should be the top paid person in the group and the person with the less skill should be the
lower paid person.
But that’s one of the upsides of team cleaning is you can hire a lower skill set and it would
still work. As long as one person in the team has the minimum skill set required to get the job
done. Meaning, communicate with the homeowner, ability to work unsupervised, whereas
that team member probably doesn’t have the ability to work unsupervised. She needs the team
leader to go check her work and tell her no, don’t do that in each house.
So the downside for solo cleaners, everybody I hire, they have to b team leader material
because every one of my employees are team leaders. They work alone. That means, they
have to have a car. They have to have a driver’s license and they have to be skilled enough in
personal skills to communicate with the customer without running them off and saying absurd
things. They have to have good common sense because they have to be able to work
unsupervised. They’re alone.
So I don’t have the luxury of hiring people who are only qualified to be a team member. In a
tight labor market or if there’s plentiful labor, cheap labor but unskilled people than the team
concept might help. What happens in my company is I end up with all team leaders working
for me. And yes I have to screen, I have to be very careful who I hire and I can only hire
responsible people.
I think in the long run for quality of life, I end up dealing with employees who tend to be a
slightly higher caliber. People who have cars in this country obviously have the ability to buy
insurance for their vehicle and they have to be able to afford to keep it running so they tend to
have a little bit more stable home life, a little bet less toxicity in their lives.
In our country because everybody has a car, there’s a certain segment of society who doesn’t
have cars, doesn’t have driver’s licenses, doesn’t have vehicle insurance. Well that segment
of society probably has a whole lot other issues in their life as well. So there’s a lot of
interesting dynamics to go on when you have everybody in your staff has to be a team leader,
they have to be a certain caliber a person to come to work for you.
You’re probably going to have fewer headaches with absenteeism and people who don’t give
a [word] about their job. Not always the case but that is a plus. It forces me to hire only team
leaders, only people with the driver’s license and the ability to supervise themselves. They
don’t other people to supervise them. Are they all perfect? No. Do we have better team
leaders than weaker team leaders? Yes. But so we have better teams than weaker teams.
But if you have 3 people in a team, it’s very difficult not to provide the vehicle because
there’s a lot of resentment that goes along with I got to drive my own car and I get these
smokers in my car and I don’t smoke and they all want to smoke on the way to job because
they’re not allowed to smoke once they get on that job. And I don’t like people eating and
drinking in my car, all kinds of problems that occur when you ask a team of three people and
you have the team leader driving her own car.
So you almost have to provide vehicles when you have three or more in a team. And some of
that dynamic can occur in a team of two but you can lessen the effects of that problem when
you have a team of two. Because what happens is they do tend to level out personality-wise.
You have the team leader who can’t stand smoke, only want to work with the other team
members who don’t smoke and that will kinda work itself out.
And you’ll find that the team leader who could care less that people eat and drink in her car,
she’ll end up with workers who just have to eat and drink in between every houses. So you
can kind work out the dynamics of the team leader driving their own vehicle and you not
providing vehicle when you have a team of two. If you have a team of three, you’re probably
going to provide cars. If you have a team of three you are probably going to have to pay
hourly because it’s very difficult to put people on the clock when they’re expected to drive to
four, five and six locations.
There’s so much time in the car they’re not being paid. It’s kinda unfair, will create way too
much problem and some legal issues if they’re only being paid while they’re cleaning cause
they’re driving around so much. So you’re probably going to be paying hourly if you have
teams of three. If you have teams of two, many times you can do the commission with teams
of two and what you do is you create a commission for while you’re cleaning so that when
they’re cleaning, they’re making really high pay. Like let’s say 14 an hour, only when they’re
cleaning.
Then you could put them on minimum wage while they’re driving around and not cleaning.
But [word] offset, that low minimum wage has to offset, it has to be offset by a fantastic
cleaning time pay. Otherwise, you’re going to have too many people saying I’m not working
for him. I’m not going to work for her. She’s going to pay me minimum wage? That’s all
they’ll focus on, minimum wage. I'm not working for them. And it’s not going to be so
impressive that when they’re actually cleaning, they make a dollar more minimum wage or
two dollars more. It’s just not going to excite them.
You’re going to have turnover, you’re going to have people unimpressed and not want to take
your job. Now if you have the team cleaning and you want to do some commission pay, then
you could say when you’re driving around and then you need to give people a reason, you
cant have people driving 45 minutes, 30 minutes to a house and try to do 3 or 4 of those a day
in a team and they’re being paid minimum wage, you’re going to have to compact your
schedules and get your routes real tight, combine your routes so that people aren’t driving 30
minutes for that house, 20 minutes for that house and 15 minutes for that.
If you’re going to do that and put them on minimum wage while they’re driving around town,
then try to get those homes clustered. And that might mean that your system tells your clients
what day you’re in the Wellington Estate Division? Wellington on Monday because we’re not
driving 30 minutes for this clientele. So Wellington, we do 12 houses in the Wellington area
on Mondays and so we’re five minutes to this house, five minutes to that house, five minutes
to that house.
Then people don’t mind that they’re five minutes a day here and there is on minimum wage
when they’re making 12 or 14 an hour when they’re actually in the house cleaning. A little bit
hard if you’re going to make them drive 30 minutes on minimum wage and then they get
inside that house and making 12 or 14 an hour and then they drive 30 more minutes. So you
shoot yourself in the foot if you have teams if you don’t cluster your jobs close. So you have
all these obstacles you have to overcome when you have teams if you want to make a profit.
What happens is I find owners just don’t make the effort to overcome all these obstacles. It’s
too hard too cluster your houses because this customer wants Friday and she won’t hire me if
I don’t give her Friday. And so we put her on Friday but we have all these people in
Wellington on Monday and so we’re driving 30 minutes. [word] it’s the owner who ends up
paying in profit when you don’t make it work if you have teams.
So if you’re going to do teams, it’s almost impossible to be on a straight commission but you
can do a low pay when they’re not cleaning and a really nice high pay when they are cleaning.
But then it’s your job, it is your job to make sure when they’re not cleaning, that that time is
very minimal. The frustrating part for these employees is they have no control over their time
when they’re in a team.
That’s at the low pay or at the no pay that they were straight commission because if you have
team members that want to [word] and want to go through the drive thru twice and it’s like
well the owner won’t know it, they kinda don’t have control over that. If they want to sit and
talk for 10 minutes, that third person isn't going to make waves with those two that like to sit
and milk the clock.
So they don’t really have control over their time when they’re in a team. It’s a little more
frustrating. But the biggest thing is if you’re going to be paying hourly, when you’re in a
team, try to make the hourly in the car extremely low, as low as you can legally and you want
to make the hourly in the house for the time that they’re in the house cleaning as high as you
can.
And for me, I say put them on a commission inside that house because if they’re on straight
hourly time while they’re inside that house instead of commission, then again, there’s
absolutely no incentive for them to hustle and get a three hour job done in three hours. They
might drag their feet because this lady is really picky anyway and she kinda makes me
nervous, they might drag their feet and do that 3-hour job on 3 and a half.
And like Jim said, they also won’t be motivated to do that house in 2 hours and 45 minutes if
it is one of those easy as pie jobs and you actually did overbid. Well they’re always going to
spend 3 hours because hey I’m making 12 an hour. I’m making 14 an hour. Why would I
spend 2 and a half? I’m going to make less money. So at least try to get them on a
commission while they’re inside the house cleaning. And that commission’s got to be well
above minimum wage or they’re not going to be impressed.
So I hope that helped somewhat there. So it’s hard to not buy people vehicles if you have
three in a team. And there’s just too much vehicle abuse that happens, that’s just not fair and
you’re going to have all this resistance and push back. It’s hard to control expenses if people
are on the clock. So what I have noticed is if you always pay hourly, from the time they leave
your office to the time the clean their jobs, to the time they get back to your office because
everything is in the clock.
What I’ve noticed is those companies tend to pay lower by the hour because you can’t
survive. So you have to pay low wages because people are milking the clock and they aren’t
hustling. And when you hire them and you did not have enough work, they had to slow down
to survive because you only have 3 houses for a team of two. And my goodness if they had
worked efficiently, they would have only worked a 6-hour day and they’re hourly and they
got a babysitter to pay.
So they’ll find a way to kinda make that day turn into 7 or 8. It’s called survival. It’s not
necessarily dishonesty. They shoot themselves in the foot. So if you’re straight hourly, I
signed those companies tend to be the lowest paying companies between 8 and 10. If you
want to pay really well to attract a higher caliber of people, if you’re hourly, oh my goodness.
You know how expensive it is if I pay people 14 an hour and they just milk the clock 20
minutes a day?
At 14 an hour I’m really hurting. At 10 or 8 an hour, I could kinda get by with people milking
the clock. So I just found that when you have teams and you don’t pay on a percentage, you
tend to pay low to compensate or you won’t make any money at all. So I’m building a case
for the solo cleaners. Now let me get back to the billable time and this is really important.
If you want to maximize 8 billable hours a day per person which is a goal. Obviously,
realistically it could be 6 and a half or 7, but if you want to maximize between 7 and 8 billable
hours per day, per person, that would be fairly achievable with one person per home. She can
clean 8 hours a day and I’m not going to go into overtime. She’s got her 30 minute lunch
break.
She’s getting paid for her four hours on her first house. She’s getting paid for all four hours
on her second house. And her drive time between houses and her lunch was on her own, that’s
easy. I can do 8 billable hours per person. Now when I add two people to my team, it’s a little
bit harder to bill 16 hours a day. I’m not going to say it’s impossible but it’s pretty difficult
because it’s probably going to take about 9 hours for them to clean 8 billable hours. Because
you’re going to spend at least 30 to 40 minutes getting from here to there to there to there.
There’s going to be about 40 minutes there, 40-45 minutes there. And if they do take a 30
minute lunch break, there’s another, you could lose an hour easily when you try to do four
jobs for 8 billable hours per day per person. You try to bill 16 hours in a day, client billable
hour. Because of all the drive time, where’s that extra hour to an hour and a half going to go?
Where is it going to come from? They’re going to have to work longer hours to achieve that.
So what generally happens is you’re not going to get your employees to work a nine and a
half hour day. It’s not going to happen. So what generally happens is the owner just takes a
house off. So what I have found is most of the time, and you might be the exception, but
when there’s two in a team I rarely see people doing four jobs a day that are the equivalent of
8 billable jobs.
Now some of you are thinking, yeah but what about the big castle? Well I’m talking about
typical houses that are three and four hour houses. I’m not talking about the 6 hour house.
Because obviously you could do 3 six hour houses and get 18 hours a day of billable time.
[unintelligible]. So I’m not talking about the castles. I am talking about your typical house
with most residential cleaning companies is 3-4 house, 3-4 billable hours.
So with the two person team, if I want to try to bill 8 hours for person 1 and 8 hours for
person 2, I’d like bill out 16 hours. Probably not going to happen when there’s two in the
team because of all the drive time. I’m lucky if I can get 3 jobs done, 3 4 hour jobs. That’s
about 12 billable hours and then the 14th hour is spent driving around and then there’s really
only two more hours, 30 minutes for lunch, could you squeeze in a little tiny apartment?
Maybe. So it’s much harder.
Now you do that by 3 in a team. So 3 in a team, can you really squeeze 24 billable hours into
a team of 3? No way. So you’re never going to bill 8 hours per person in a team of three. Not
going to happen. There’s no way you can bill 24 billable hours in 1 day with a team of three.
Because you’re going to spend about an hour and a half driving around, period. And then
maybe 30 minutes or maybe you can talk them into eating their lunch during that hour and a
half they drive around. But you’re going to lose an hour and a half of productivity, period,
that you cannot bill into that day.
And so at the most, hour and a half, you’re going to lose it, good 30 minutes per person that
can never be billed no matter how good and efficient you guys are in your day. And I’m going
to say you’re going to lose probably 2 hours per day. I don’t see very many teams of three
doing, well I almost never see teams of three doing six jobs a day that would bill out 21 hours.
It’s just rare.
I don’t see it and I think just because it’s difficult and you get a lot of [word] from employees.
They’re like it’s exhausting. They got to really hustle. They got to be super efficient. They
can’t squander a minute between houses. Their houses have to be clustered really close. Now
I’ll tell you where this does work. If I’m doing some high rises, no problem. Because you’re
literally talking 3 or 4 minutes between jobs.
So I’m doing some high rises, yeah. I could send a team of three in there and they could easily
do six jobs. Apartment 1, apartment 2, apartment 3, apartment 4 or if I took over the whole
neighborhood, I could do house 1, go next door and do house 2, go across the street and do
house 3, yes, in a perfect world you could make that work or if you’re in this really tight, tight
metropolitan area it could work or if you don’t have three and four jobs, most of your houses
are real small.
You’re in New York and everything 900 to 1200 square feet instead of Texas where
everything is 3,000 square feet., 2400 to 3400 square feet is our typical house. So yes, there
are exceptions. I could squeeze six jobs a day but if they’re that small, you should be doing 8.
If they’re really clustered and you have no drive time. You can overcome this problem.
But again, I'm not going to tell you to build your model on the exception. I’m going to
encourage you to build your model on what is typical for your area. And I’m going to tell you
that when you have teams of three, you’re probably going to bill out six hours per person,
about an 18 hour day if you’re lucky. You’re not going to bill out 8 hours per person. So it’s
much harder to make the maximum amount of revenue off of each person and profit off of
each person.
Now here’s another scary thing. What I find is the bigger the team, the more part time work
they tend to work. Let me take that back. The more part time billable hours they tend to bill
out but they tend to work 8 hours. So the bigger the teams, generally they’ll put in an 8 hour
day and you’re only going to bill out about 6 hours billable hours in that team or 18 billable
hours.
Part time employees are expensive for employers. If you’ve ever done the math, part time
employees are expensive and he can make the most money from fulltime employees. So if
you can get your employees fulltime, the quicker you can get each employee fulltime, the
more money you make quicker. It’s just more expensive to have people part time. I mean
there’s a certain percentage of payroll you will pay, up to a certain dollar figure that they
make each year, whether they’re part time or full time.
I think for our area, the workforce commission makes you pay a certain percentage of the first
$9,000 any employee makes. So if I had 30 part time employees, I’m going to pay a certain
percentage on all 20 of those employees and if I had, and they’re all part time. So instead I
could have 10 part time employees and I’m going to pay that percentage on only 10 because
it’s based on a certain amount of money. So there are certain expenses that you have,
especially if you buy cars and they’re kinda working billable hours part time but you’re
putting them in these cars. If you could fill up their day with full billable hours, you could
make more.
So it is harder to make a profit the bigger that your team is. It’s easier to make a profit the
smaller your team is. And I contend that the easiest way to make a profit is through solo
cleaner concept. Now I'm going to let you ask a couple of questions but I’m afraid you’re
probably going to veer off down a path that’s we’re going to answer a little bit here in a few
minutes.
But if anybody needs to take a break right now, now’s the time. You can stop and take a break
and if you don’t want to take a break and you want to ask your question, go ahead and start
asking some questions right now.
MALE ONE: I have a question Debbie. With the solo team concept, what happens when
somebody [word] quits on you, how do you handle coverage for that customer that just has
one person coming to clean?
DEBBIE: Good question. And how do you handle absenteeism? Same way you handle it
when you have a team of two, no difference. So if I have a team of two, we’ve all seen
sometimes people come in pairs and go in pairs, not always. But if you have a team of two
and they really like each other and one’s been making the other disgruntled, he’s so greedy.
He doesn’t pay us enough. We could go out and do this on our own and make more money.
Okay, you could have two of them in a team of two leave and you’re going to be scrambling
the same rate that you’re scrambling when one person quits, okay? Because when two people
in a team quit, I now in theory have 4 houses to cover today. Here’s what I’ve noticed. What
owners tend to do is they’re scared to death to fill up their teams to the brim because they’re
always thinking how do I compensate if they quit on me.
So what I’ve noticed is, when there’s a team of two, they rarely have a full day anyway. So a
team of two tend to only clean about three houses when they probably could have done 4,
and so if one of them quits, you kinda divvy up this house to that person, you put this person
with that person and you give them that house and you could still [word]. But if both of them
quit, you still have three houses to cover, if everybody else is full. If they weren’t all full, you
just spread them out.
There’s really no difference. There’s just that psychology of what do I do if one person quits
and she’s been working alone? The same thing you do when person quits in a team. And if I
had four houses on these girls today, and Susie didn’t show up and Martha did, well Martha’s
not going to do all four houses. And you know what I could do, I could send Martha out to go
do 2 of them.
I get half of it covered and the other two just wont get done or the other two get absorbed by a
team of two who will take on a fourth house. Here’s what I’ve noticed Jim, because we’re
always worried that might happen, we keep everybody kind of light. Nobody’s doing four
jobs, oh yeah you could squeeze in a fourth house today cause they’re usually doing three.
They’re usually never maximized on what they could be doing.
And so yes, they could pick out that fourth house and it wouldn’t be impossible. Might get a
little grumbling, well I thought I was going to get done at 3 today. I made a doctor’s
appointment at 3:30. Well you know what, you got a fourth house. So what happens is you
compensate. You throw; you spread that extra house or two around. Here’s what you
discover, by golly, those girls can do four houses when pressed.
And that’s when you for the first time when they’re covering for a crisis, for the first time
people realize shoot, when I put some pressure on them, they can do four a day. But we tend
to not…
MALE ONE: But then you would just take that one house and assign it to somebody who’s
only doing one house, basically.
DEBBIE: Yes. If I have one person who quits on me she’s going to do 10 houses this next
week and I’m going to be like I got 10 clients to reschedule. Well if I have four other
employees, there’s usually two or three of them that need an extra house anyway. Well now
you got an extra house. Good I needed the work. Here’s what’s interesting. When you’re used
to doing team cleaning, two in a team and three in a team, this business attracts people who
like routines.
They like things to stay the same and they can’t stand change. And it really isn't about, well
our cleaners just like to be in teams. They would never like to be solo cleaners. Well it is
because you trained them to like that and because this business attracts people who are what
they call in the [word] analysis, pacing and conforming, it is the personality type that is best
suited for this job.
People like you and me, entrepreneurs; we get antsy and bored doing the same thing
everyday. We want change. We want challenges. Well this group of people that works best in
the cleaning industry don’t like change. So you think that they love cleaning in a team
because they love cleaning in a team. No they don’t. They love cleaning in a team because
that’s the way it always has been.
They won’t like solo cleaning because we’ve never done it that way and they’re scared. Your
new employees won’t care because they will have nothing to compare it with. It’s interesting.
My solo cleaners say of the team cleaning concept, oh I can’t imagine working in a team, I
would hate that. They hate it because it’s not what they do. They’re pacing and conforming.
They live by routine, so they love solo cleaning because that’s all they’ve ever known.
And when we’ve hired teams, we have a couple of exceptions because we do spring cleanings
and we always have to have teams for spring cleanings, talking about repeat jobs solo
cleaners, always put three in a team or two in a team for brand new first time cleans, eight
hour jobs, 9, 12 hour jobs. But when I’ve hired permanent teams because I have a couple of
permanent teams, they’re two at a team and they do the big giant houses. Don’t want anybody
in the house five, six hours.
So I’ve got a couple of permanent teams, the permanent teams can’t stand to clean solo. They
don’t like cleaning solo cause that’s not their norm. So here’s what happens. When you have
a team of three of team of two, let’s say you have a team of two and they have four houses on
them and one of them no shows today, you’re going to have a hard time getting that girl to go
clean at least two of those jobs by herself because she never does solo cleaning.
So she’s not going to want to do that. So then you got to make her team up with somebody
else who’s not used to working with her and they don’t like either. There’s always something.
So in other words, the solution isn't that solo cleaning doesn’t work. You got problems in
every situation. If I have three in a team and two people quit, or I had two in a team and one
person quit, and it’s been my experience that people who gel well when one leaves the other,
because they don’t like change and maybe she was already kinda thinking about leaving this
job anyway, then when team member quits, she’s like oh I’m out of here.
I don’t have to get used to a new person. What if she’s a smoker and a cusser? And I don’t
like that. You know what I’m saying? So then if she was even on the [word] she’s out of
there. Does that make sense?
JIM: Yes.
DEBBIE: I’m telling you the solo cleaner has a lot of ease built into it for the owner.
FEMALE ONE: Do you typically only give them about two houses a day?
DEBBIE: That’s it. I give them two jobs a day. Because is that not equivalent to four a day
with two people and six a day, six jobs a day with three people? And how many teams of
three do you really see out there cleaning six jobs a day? I find that rare. They usually don’t.
JIM: You’re right about that, I can get mine to do it but gosh the team leader [unintelligible]
she wants me to go out with them all the time when you need an extra person.
DEBBIE: That’s right. You’re lucky if you can get them to do 5 jobs if there’s a team of
three. And see that’s the problem it’s the psychology. Six houses and then it’s all that driving.
I got to drive to six places.
FEMALE ONE: You say that you pay your solo cleaners drive time?
DEBBIE: No, Absolutely not. Don’t need to because they’re not driving all over the planet to
get their work done. See that’s the cool thing about solo cleaners. And again Jim, don’t get
discouraged because you’ve got a system in place. We can fine-tune some of the things that’s
not going well for you, that you’re not happy with without changing your model.
But for the benefit of the people who have not begun their models, I’m going to teach them
the easiest, cheapest way to get from A to Z, spending the less money and making the most
profit. And my biased is the solo cleaner if you’re just now starting out and you don’t have a
model to undo.
So don’t get discouraged because you’re thinking oh my gosh, you look at all these
companies out there that are making a ton of money and they have teams of two’s and teams
of three’s. It is because they overcame the obstacles that the people who can’t make any
money never figured out how to overcome.
JIM: Let’s say the advantages of having single cleaners and I’m thinking I would like to
change that model with the new hires.
DEBBIE: The new hires, exactly. You don’t mess with your existing staff, you’ll run them
off. What happens is you eventually replace the people that are working for you, that are
making a lower profit per person for you with people who are going to make a higher profit
per person for you.
Now when I get [unintelligible] in a second. It’s going to blow your socks off when it comes
to solo cleaners. And that’s why I get so excited about this for a new [word]. Does anybody
want to ask another question before I move on to some numbers?
FEMALE TWO: Yeah Debbie, Can you hear me?
DEBBIE: Yes.
FEMALE TWO: [unintelligible] you were saying like the cheapest way to start off, but you
have all of this equipment for like if you have two or three people then you have to buy two
or three different groups of like the vacuums and all this stuff that you, you know, all of their
equipment. So what do you think about that? [unintelligible] I guess.
DEBBIE: This is true. You know and I know that the cheapest equipment are the chemicals
and the mops. The most expensive are the vacuums and if you really put a number to it, if I
use one vacuum on six houses a day, then that’s 6 cleans for that vacuum, it’s going to wear
out sooner. If I buy one vacuum and it only cleans two houses a day, it’s going to last three
times longer. I contend that the expenses are about the same.
So, I’m going to replace my vacuums three times more often in a team of three and three
times less often in a team of one, and I’m probably going to end up buying the same number
of vacuums in a year.
FEMALE THREE: And the team of one looks after it better because they can’t blame it on
somebody else.
DEBBIE: That’s true.
FEMALE THREE: Oh there’s so many benefits to solo cleaners I will never go back to team
cleaning. Never.
DEBBIE: It’s incredible.
FEMALE THREE: And its psychology like you said. On the days when I have to go back out
there to cover somebody and it’s like okay, there are three of us. So we’re going to be in and
out in 45 minutes because I’m going to work myself like crazy. There’s still four more.
There’s three more. Oh my God there’s two more. But when it’s just two houses, it doesn’t
matter if it’s four hours. There’s only psychologically one more job and you’re done by 4:00.
DEBBIE [unintelligible] that by myself I can do one house in the morning and I can do one
house in the afternoon and I can get home in time to pick up my kids or get home in time
about the time they get off the bus. There’s a great psychology there. The other example there
is I can control the time I waste. I’m not stuck with somebody who likes to waste time. So if
I’m one of those people that’s all business and I need to get home, I’m not going to squander
a minute.
I’m going to eat an apple and a banana in my car on my way to the next job and I am not
going to run through drive thru and spend 15 minutes in the drive thru. And I’m not going to
sit in my car and talk on the phone 15 minutes because I’m on my own time and I want to get
home at three instead of four. So there’s psychology and then like Rhonda said there is a
psychology of I’ve got four houses to do today. Eight hours is eight hours. Yeah but I got four
houses to do. Or I got two houses to do and she can do it in 8 hours. It’s just there’s a weird
psychology.
FEMALE TWO: Do you buy each one of your employees vacuums and all the cleaning
equipment? So if you have 30 employees, you have 30 vacuums?
DEBBIE: Nope. Now I have a weird system and I’m going to give you the benefit of deciding
what works for you on this one thing because I think it’s a fairly cheap decision either way
you go so it’s not going to kill your profit one way or the other. So I’m going to tell you what
I do but this is the one thing I’m going to say I don’t care what you do because it’s not going
to really hurt you or help you. It’s whatever is your preference.
I’m all about quality of life and when I started this business with one employee and then two
employee and then four and then five, I quickly decided I didn’t like standing up there
washing rags at night and folding them and refilling bottles. It was just me. Unless I had 10
employees, I don’t have any helpers in the office. So I didn’t like washing cloths and folding
them and setting them all up and filling up bottles and all this mess.
So I said, forget this. So I pay people better and we have a model where our customers furnish
everything. Now this does doesn’t work if you are a green cleaning company and your unique
selling position is we provide all the non toxic green chemicals. So that wouldn’t work for
you and that’s okay because it’s not expensive to [word] the chemicals.
But for me, starting out, I don’t want to buy all these equipment so I required when I hired,
you have to have a vacuum and it has to stay in your car while you work for me and that’s
you backup. That’s just backup, you don’t use it everyday. Then when I did my in home bids,
did my walkthroughs, cause remember I was an independent cleaner just like you. So as an
independent cleaner, I use my customer’s vacuums. I used my customer’s chemicals back in
the day.
If you’re not doing it, that’s fine. But that was how I started so I didn’t need to change that.
So when I started doing estimates and hiring solo cleaners. I told my customers. Of course I
turned it into a unique selling position just like you’ve turned it into a unique selling position
that you brag about bringing supplies and chemicals. The wonderful thing to be able to sell
your customers. They like that, oh good you’re going to bring it all, good. I don’t have to
bother with that, that’s great. But that didn’t fit for me.
So instead, I turned into a unique selling position. I make a big deal about how it is so much
more sanitary for us to use your things in your home. And so I sell that and I even say things
like, you know Merry Maids and all those other companies, they bring in all that dirty
equipment and they don’t sanitize it between houses. So I turn it into my selling position. And
you know they clean because they have teams of two, they clean five, six houses a day and
you should see the houses they just came from. And they come in to your nice clean house
and they bring that dirty equipment.
So you know if you choose to have your customers provide the equipment provide the
equipment, you can sell it. I did that for pure convenience of the owner. I didn’t want to be up
there fixing vacuums and changing belts and trying to replace the [word] brushes. I didn’t
want to deal with that. I didn’t want the storage cause my business was in my home for the
first, I’m trying to think when I moved out into an office, but it was in my home till I had 10
employees.
Cause I’m really a tightwad and I wanted the profit. So I couldn’t have 10 vacuums in my
house. I could have, I could have had them in my garage but that wasn’t quality of life for me.
So my point is, here’s my point, there’s nothing wrong with you providing vacuums and
chemicals. That’s fine and especially if you are building your program around green cleaning
or non-toxic cleaning then that’s your unique selling position, you need to keep providing it.
One way to get around that is to provide the cleaners but don’t provide the vacuums and the
mops. Then you could teach your clients through education and through relationship building
that it’s much more sanitary for us to at least use your vacuum and your mop after all. 98% of
the people out there have a vacuum and a mop and they’re happy to buy a new mop based on
your recommendation.
Oh well that one’s really falling but I’m going to tell you now it’s so much more sanitary for
us to use your mop and your vacuum in your home. A little bit of a hassle. For solo cleaners
it’s not as big of a deal because the solo cleaners, they get to know their houses. They do the
same houses over and over again and they get to know oh that’s that stupid Rainbow vacuum.
I have to fill that thing with water.
Oh hers is the Kirby. I hate that thing. So we allow our girls to bring in their own. We sell our
girls Orc vacuum cleaners at cost if they want. It’s totally optional. They don’t have to. They
can go buy a $66 Hoover vacuum at Wal-Mart if they want to come work for me. And I make
it part of the job requirement. If they cant, and we also have about 10 vacuums at our office
that are all available to check out.
You can borrow, it’s like a library. You can borrow our vacuum anytime you want. You have
to bring them back within 24 hours. So they don’t have to go out and buy a vacuum when
they first come to work for us. But we’ve created a system that’s a little bit of an
inconvenience for them to come borrow our vacuum. So eventually if they’re serious about
this job and that’s who I really want. It’s who I’m trying to attract and that’s who I’m trying
to keep are people who are serious about this job.
[all talking at once]
Here’s a good one. When I hire my employees, we put together a kit. We call it the maid’s kit.
And this is going to blow some of you away. So just deal with it. I’ve been doing it for 27
years. We actually charge our employees for the maid’s kit. And again, people take care of
what they bought. They lose what you buy; They don’t lose what they buy.
So we put together a $55 kit and if you come to work for me you need your own kit and it
comes with a big gigantic stack of cleaning rags, which they wash every night on their own
time at home. Comes with a big stack of cleaning rags, comes with a couple of company
shirts, comes with a bucket. It’s filled with the basic chemical they replace when they run out
or they come to our office on their own time and they can refill for free anything. Cause we
do stock chemicals.
Some of them don’t bother. They buy their stuff in the dollar store and they just, that’s all
their back up cause our customers furnish everything. Say you wanted to furnish the
chemicals and you would probably need to create a grab and go system that they can grab and
go once a week. You don’t want people coming into your office every single day on the
clock, eating up the time.
You create a grab and go system if you want or every two or three days or [word] when you
feel like you have to do it. But with our company, our girls wash their own rags at night. And
again they’re not washing the rags of three other people. So it’s not like this mountain of
laundry that they’re doing and they resent. It’s their own cleaning rags. It’s only about three
dozen. And they wash them every night or every two nights. It’s up to them. So they, now we
sell them these stuff now you could give it to them if you wanted.
I find people don’t appreciate anything that you give and I also find because new hires
turnover like crazy, I’m not giving that stuff away. So it’s kind of different. I realize it’s
different but everything we do was designed for me, the owner. And most of what cleaning
companies do is your designed to help them, to get them to bribe them to stay. To make it so
easy they can’t quit. Well guess what, no matter how easy you make it, they still quit on you.
So I made my system easy for the owner.
I don’t want to wash rags. I don’t want to have to have an office big enough to have all these
washing machines and dryers. Now, that probably limits my company to the million dollar
side, okay? I will admit that. There are some limiting factors, I'm not convinced they’re at,
cause I never really tried to become a two million dollar company. I’m happy with the million
dollar size and that’s really all I want. That’s my focus. I want to stay there. I don’t really
want to be below but I could care less if I’m ever a 2 million dollar company, it’s not my
goal. But it could be limiting me, maybe. Does that make sense?
[all talking at once]
JIM: What about your staff using other people’s vacuum cleaners and the damage that can
occur there?
DEBBIE: Inside the house? Inside the home?
JIM: Yes, yes.
DEBBIE: Very good question. If they’re damaging vacuum cleaners, they’re probably also
banging furniture and damaging $4,000 dining room tables. So, careless people break stuff.
Careful people hardly ever break and damage stuff. So if they’re going to [word] up our
customer’s vacuums, I’d like to know because if the vacuum is cheaper to replace than an
expensive table.
So, it’s indicative of that person. If she wont be careful with the vacuum, she wont be careful
with that house, you might as well find out now. Once in a while we have to buy a customer a
new vacuum or we have to go and repair it once in a while. They’re also going to [word] my
vacuum that I bought them and they’re dragging it in and out of the car and dropping it.
So it’s indicative of how careful they are with everything. Does that make sense? If you just
cant get past that, if you just have to provide it, it’s not that expensive. Just equip the newest
people with about a hundred dollars worth of stuff. You buy; I get [word] vacuums at cost
practically. I get them very cheap. I get my [word] for $144.50 and I could stock every
employee with an [word] and require that they take care of it and maybe even hold a $25
deposit [unintelligible] for damage and stuff, if I wanted to.
But we basically have our customers furnish the vacuums, the mops and the chemicals. And
the girls furnish the wool duster and see we put in our kit what they need to succeed in speed
cleaning. So when we create a kit, it’s going to have a wool duster, a feather duster, a big
stack of cleaning cloth, scrubbing brushes, rubber gloves, toothbrushes, company apron. So
they’re going to have everything they need and the only thing that really gets replenished on a
fairly regular basis are the basic cleaners that are in that bucket. And those are used very
minimally cause they’re only used as backup.
They get to the house, that customer didn’t buy Windex again. [word], we’ll probably because
she didn’t leave a note. So she just grabs her own backup and uses Windex and leaves a note.
By the way, don’t forget. Now have I lost customers because of this? Yes. I have lost
customers who said well I don’t want to furnish anything; I don’t want to use your company.
If I had attempted to change my model every time I thought I’d lose a customer, then I’d be
like, oh we’ll furnish it. Then I’ve messed up my model.
So I’m like okay I guess we’re not a good fit and I try to convince them how much better it is.
You don’t have to worry about this cheap furniture polish being used on your $10,000 table.
Yes, we can use [word] furniture polish. You don’t have to worry about these toxic products
being used on your floors. If you are particular about non-toxic cleaners, you’re going to
provide.
So we turn it into a positive and we sell it 98.9% of the time and yes I lose a few customers
over it but I also don’t have to fix vacuums at night. I’m not washing and drying rags or
paying someone 10 bucks an hour to wash and dry rags and fill bottles and buying chemicals
and worrying about the MSD sheets and the whole nine yards. So it’s simplicity. Does that
make sense?
[all talking at once]
FEMALE ONE: Are you saying that MSDS sheets are not required if you’re using the
customer’s product?
DEBBIE: Technically no.
FEMALE ONE: Are you saying if the employee is an employee or if they’re 10-99 does that
vary?
DEBBIE: Well if they’re a 10-99, then no you don’t have to deal with that. If they’re an
employee, there is a gray area. If I [word] to court, if by some odd remote chance somebody
had some problem with the bottle of Windex in the house, if by some remote chance they had
a problem with that and by some remote chance that actually ends up going to court over that,
there’s a chance that I could have some fines because I didn’t provide an MSD sheet. But it is
gray enough and the likelihood of that happening is so remote, I don’t worry about it. Cause
these are household products. There’s nothing specialized about it.
So if that is a concern, if that is a fear for you, then it is so inexpensive to provide chemicals
and have those MSD sheets and to buy vacuums, it’s still not that expensive. You could spend
2% and you weren’t buying water so don’t go buy water. Never buy water if you’re buying
chemicals. So you could spend 2% and you’ll be fine if that’s a fear for you.
FEMALE ONE: I don’t know whether it’s the area that I'm in or not but I seem to have and
maybe it’s like you said, maybe it’s what it is that I’ve built the model on as it is. But I find
the customer that I attract wants us to be in and out of their home. They don’t want us to be
there for three, four hours a day because they’re leaving somebody that has been doing that
because it ties up too much of their time.
DEBBIE: I would be willing to bet that the majority of what you’re hearing is based on what
you’ve told them you offer. And I have also noticed that most team cleaning companies
whether they’re independents or not, are not as efficient as they could be. And so they end up
spending an hour longer in the house than they should, that 3 hour house instead of doing it an
hour and a half with two, they’re still in and out in two hours. So there’s not a whole lot of
time saved.
Yes there will be some customers that want you in and out in an hour. But the reality of it is
when there’s a team of three, they rarely do the job in the third amount of the time. You are
aiding those customers because that is what you offer and oh I like what you offer. It’s so
funny. I can start a conversation with a customer who thinks they love the idea of chemicals
and equipment being provided by the cleaning company. By the time I end that conversation,
they love the idea that they get to furnish it. It is all in the way you sell your service.
The way I sell my independent cleaning, my solo cleaner, one of my plusses on the phone is
our unique selling position, one maid per home. You don’t have a bunch of people in and out
of your house all the time. You get used to one person that improves the consistency of the
quality. It enables that person to get to know your home and you don’t have to deal with all
these strangers coming in and out. You don’t even know who’s in your home.
One maid per home. They take their time to do your house right. We’re not in and out forty
minutes like those other companies. So you turn it into a unique selling position and they’ll be
all over it.
FEMALE ONE: Are you saying that that’s not an advisable idea to switch to a one maid per
home set up when you have customers that you had for years and you’ve been servicing them
with two and three in a team and you want to change the model to one?
DEBBIE: No, I don’t recommend that you make big changes with what you have. I
recommend that when you are starting fresh or starting new or adding people, adding staff,
adding customers, your change starts with the new customers and the new employee because
you will upset that [word]. You will run your customers off and you’ll run your employees
off.
Your employees who are used to working two and three a team even if you’re not making any
money off of those girls, you kinda don’t want to lose them and if you start jerking on their
chain, they’re going to leave. So if you make change, you make it with the new staff and you
kinda have two models going, you keep this model but it will dwindle because people quit.
And so as they quit you add a new person.
FEMALE ONE: Can you talk at all about the percentage of difference between a one maid
per home versus a two person team? Is there a lot in a profit margin that changes? I mean
you’re talking about 10% change or you’re talking something like maybe 1 or 2%?
DEBBIE: I have been doing some math and I’m going to do a little more investigation but as
best I can tell, with some numbers that I’ve been running, it is my opinion that when you have
teams, and for sure 3, I’m going to tell you right now, for sure when there’s three in a team,
but I’m even going to say close to two, because of the expenses you absolutely have to have
when you have teams, I mean, you have to provide vacuums, chemicals, mops and cleaning
rags when you have teams. And you’re probably going to have to clean that stuff. You cant
get them to do it more than likely. Somebody is going to be on the clock while vacuums are
being repaired, while rags are being cleaned and folded and while bottles are being filled.
So when you have teams, because of the additional time and expense it takes to maintain,
purchase equipment and keep it going, because of the lost productivity, you can’t seem to
squeeze in 6 jobs a day and 24 billable hours because they have a lost productivity. Because
of the wasted wages being paid while they’re not cleaning, I contend that the owner gives up
5% profit. I’m not talking about 5% expenses or higher. I believe the owner loses 5% profit.
So if I can make 20% or 22% net profit after all bills paid, including an office manager’s paid,
then if I’m having team cleaning, I’m probably going to make 15% profit at best. So it is my
opinion that you will give up 5% profit when you have teams because of all the other
expenses you almost have to commit to. Cars, equipment and wages that are being paid when
they’re not cleaning, when you’re not being paid and it could be as much as 10%.
I have seen the 10% differential on companies that just don’t know how to squeeze their
profit margin. So if you have a real struggle on maintaining expenses, you could literally be
down 10% net profit.
[all talking at once]
MALE ONE: [unintelligible] what are your thoughts?
DEBBIE: Well this is probably not a good time to work on that cause that’s a whole another
subject. But as a quick answer, I would say if the majority of your homes are mostly carpeted
then upright and then carry some type of a little type of vacuum to compensate for all the bare
floors. If you have tons of homes in your area that are mostly bare floors, then you probably
going to have to do canisters. That’s way too much in the weeds. That’s like Windex or
GlassWorks? So let’s try and save that for another conversation.
MALE ONE: How about paying people 30 cents a mile for travel for using their vehicles?
DEBBIE: You could do that. That’s not a bad plan or if they’re solo cleaners you can pay
them really high percentage and think of it this way, here’s what happens with cleaning
companies. They end up paying people low per hour and then bonusing them all kinds of
bonuses. Well we pay $9 an hour but if you clean complaint free for a whole month, you’re
going to get a $50 bonus and if you have no absences, you’re going to get a $25 bonus and
I’m going to pay you by the mile so you’re going to get 30 cents a mile. So if you added all
those numbers up, you’re probably paying people 14 an hour.
So what happens is, as a business owner, you don’t get credit for that. You’re just a
cheapskate who only pays people 10 an hour and everybody resents you. But you’re paying
14 an hour, if you added it all up. So my belief, because of this psychology, it’s so much
easier for me in a job interview to say you work here, you can average 14 an hour working for
me. I’d rather pay them this nice big percentage. Let them deal with mileage.
I’d rather build it in so that they’re averaging this great pay per house and I’m not
piecemealing it. I’m not paying $3 a house for gas and miles and I’m going to give them an
extra $3 for chemicals and equipment that they have to purchase and cause in a sense because
my pay is so high, I am paying them to provide the vacuum. I am paying them to have a mop
in their car as a backup and to have some chemicals because my girls make 14 to 18 an hour
per average.
But I could break it down and I could say well we only pay 40% but we give you a gas and
[word] mileage and we give you $4 a house to cover the chemicals and the equipment. I can
do all that but it just sounds so much better to pay them really well and they absorb the cost of
folding and cleaning their own rags at night and they absorb the cost and time and expense of
driving from house to house. Does that make sense? It just sounds better and it is better and
they can control.
FEMALE ONE: I got a question. I’m giving up the subject of the mileage thing and the cost
of stuff. You might think I’m a little old fashioned but we use kneepads and we still got on
our hands and knees and do the kitchen floors and the bathroom floors because 90% of my
customers want that. Is that gone? When you’re talking mops and stuff, we don’t do that.
DEBBIE: There’s nothing wrong with that. If that’s your model and that is your unique
selling position then you should make a big deal about that in your marketing. Because here is
my belief, your customers, everybody wants it. I mean, if you’re selling perfection, oh I want
that too, I’ll take it. Everybody wants it but nobody is going to demand it and I’ll tell you
why. When I have a customer on the phone, I’m giving a bid, and they say now I do want my
floors by hands and knees, cause in our company we don’t do that. It’s a rule, we don’t do it.
There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with us not being willing and there’s
nothing wrong with you doing it but make sure you maximize the fact that you do it. Make
your competition look bad because they don’t. Don’t just silently do it and it’s never in your
marketing because it is kind of an extra special old fashioned way of cleaning. A great way to
standout from your competition. It should be, you should never have it where people only find
out when they call you cause that really is a big deal. That should be in marketing.
FEMALE ONE: When you say marketing though, when a potential customer calls you, you
explain all these things that you’re going to do…
DEBBIE: That’s not marketing, that’s selling. You want people to call you because of that
distinction.
FEMALE ONE: So how do I market that? I mean…
DEBBIE: Well in my opinion. That’s a unique selling position. Cause if they call my office
and they say I want my floors cleaned on hands and knees, I have to be a very good sales
person to overcome that. That’s called overcoming the objection. So my answer is I never
change my model just to win a sale.
My answer is well, we don’t clean on hands and knees if you can imagine these girls cleaning
homes everyday and they all clean two homes a day, five days a week, they wouldn’t have a
back and they wouldn’t have knees at the end of six months if we did that. So we don’t clean
on hands and knees.
But we do the next best thing. We clean your house with an old fashioned string mop and
[unintelligible] for sanitary purposes and that’s almost as good. If they properly sweep and
vacuum that floor beforehand, that floor will be just as cleaned, almost just as cleaned.
Now if I’m good at selling that, what I’ve done is I’ve overcome her objection. If it’s really
not a big a deal to her, she just heard that that was better. If it’s not so big a deal, if it’s not a
deal breaker, she’s going to say, oh okay, as long as my floor’s clean, I don’t care. If it is a
big deal to her, if it is a deal breaker, she’s going to hang up and I’m not going to win her sale
and I don’t really care cause that’s not how we do it.
So my contention is when you tell people they clean floors on hands and knees, they are
thrilled And so you think it’s a requirement. It’s not. It’s a freebie, it’s a plus. And so if your
plus is not in your marketing, you’re not getting anything for it.
FEMALE ONE: Oh you mean, okay. I should be charging more for that kind of service.
DEBBIE: You’re charging more for it and people didn’t call you because of it. They just
called you because you were in [word] and they just found out on the phone. Well that didn’t
help you marketing wise. So if that is something unique and your other services in town don’t
do it and you want to stand out because of it, that should be in your marketing.
For instance in my marketing, when I place an ad anywhere, people will see one maid per
home, same maid each cleaning. That’s my unique selling position. I want people to read that
and go oh I never thought of that, ooh, I like that. So now they’re going to be a little bit
annoyed when they call Merry Maids or The Maids and they find out four in a team cause
they so my ad that bragged about something.
The same thing for you. This puts pressure on your competition. Your little ad will say,
whatever it says, non toxic chemicals are provided, green cleaning chemicals are provided,
we clean floors the old fashioned way, hands and knees. That should be in your ad because
they look at that and go, oh. I like that. So what you do is you create demands.
FEMALE ONE: Now often do you need to market yourself? I mean do you send postcards
out?
DEBBIE: All right, we’re going to go there. Let’s go there. Are you guys ready to go there?
MALE ONE: I wanted to ask a question about employee with the single maid concept.
You’re going to need a lot more maids. What’s your time interval on average form the time
you first talked to somebody that’s interested in a job to the time you actually hire them and
get the started?
DEBBIE: You know what’s funny is that you were thinking you need more maids with the
solo cleaners. You actually need fewer people which is incredible. The same amount of time
with team cleaning. You know, we all know the numbers. If I put an ad in the paper and I get
25 phone calls, probably 12 of them will sound halfway decent enough for me to invite them
in for an interview. The other 12 I’m like, so I get 25 phone calls.
I invite 12 of them because I thought they could answer the questions that I asked well
enough for me to invite them in for an interview. Six of them will show up. 25 people called
me, 12 of them got invited to come for an interview, 6 of them showed up out of the 6, I only
liked 3 of them. The other 3 I wouldn’t hire. So I like 3 of them and out of the three I liked,
I’ve offered all three of them the job, at the end of the week of training, only one of them will
be here.
Because if I hire three, only two will show up. The other one didn’t tell me why but she didn’t
show. She said she was coming Monday but she didn’t. So you got to learn these numbers.
Put the ad in the paper, talk to 25 people, invite 12 out to an interview. Six of them show up,
only 3 of them are worth hiring and out of those three, only two will even get through training
and out of the two that came to training, only one’s going to make it. It’s scary.
FEMALE ONE: Speaking of training, do you train them there at the office or train them at
each house? You train them, show what you expect out of them in the houses? Or is there a
video that they look at before they go out and actually work for you?
DEBBIE: That’s an entire workshop. I cant answer that workshop in 5 minutes. The answer is
yes. That’s the whole workshop. We’ll get into that I promise. We got 16 of these workshops,
I promise you we’ll get there. But we’re not ready to get there cause we need to talk about
marketing. We need to talk about numbers. Are we ready to go down that trail? If anybody
has a burning question that cant wait, go ahead and jump in cause we’re going to go down the
marketing trail.
MALE TWO: I have one question Deb. Can you hear me?
DEBBIE: Yes I cam go right ahead.
MALE TWO: I’m the solo clean, can you give me your example on a four hour clean, your
cost is how much, your percentage to that girl is how much?
DEBBIE: She is probably going to make somewhere between 40 and 45% if you have really
high payroll cost in your area or 45 to 50% if you tend to have some low payroll cost, I’m
talking about worker’s comp and all the other things if you’re in California and all the other
stuff.
So at the end of the day, most of us in this industry whether we’re franchises or independents,
whether we do team cleaning or solo cleaning, the people who make money on this business,
whether they pay their employees via percentage or hourly, they have learned to not pay out
of pocket more than 55% including their payroll burden or the labor cost, whatever you want
to call that, including their payroll taxes.
So 45 to 50% in wages and about another 10% in payroll expenses, worker’s comp, [word],
not paid vacation, not health insurance. So these are optional. The other things are not
optional. If your law requires worker’s comp in your state you’re paying it. If your law does
not require worker’s comp, it is optional, you can choose not to. So I’m going to say your
goal as a business owner is that your payroll, fully loaded, when I say fully loaded that means
all payroll taxes paid and wages is to be at 55% or below.
And the real goal is about 50% but it’s probably not going to happen when it’s fully loaded,
it’s probably not going to be 50%. In a high unemployment time like we have now, where
there’s going to be certain parts of this country where there’s 15% unemployment. You can
hire people for lower pay, bottom line, you can. And you probably can get your expenses
down about 50% and not have problems with turnover. But realistically, you’re going to be
about 55%, fully loaded. Does that make sense?
Now here’s the problem. You don’t charge enough, paying out 55%, there’s not going to be
much left over for overhead and profit. So what happens is if you pay your people right it will
force you to go up on your rates for new business cause you wont be making a profit. If
you’re charging 22 and if you’re getting 22 and 25 an hour, 26 an hour, couple of you, there’s
not going to be a lot left over for the owner.
The going rate for a professional service who takes care of payroll taxes, who has insurance
and liability, who does criminal background checks, legitimate companies are charging 30
and 35 an hour typically and they’re getting it. So that extra 10 bucks an hour that you’re not
charging or five an hour you’re not charging will go in your pocket once you are. So let’s
move on to what it takes. This is interesting. This is why starting out was easy for me as a
business owner who had no money.
FEMALE ONE: Debbie can I stop you for one second please? I want to ask you something
that pertains to what you just said with regard to customers. Would it be an advisable idea to
take the calculations that you gave us last week to take total hours and divide it into the total
revenue for the month to determine, would it be advisable to do that on a daily or per job
basis in order to determine the jobs that are less profitable and then try and hone in on why
and then maybe [word] just them?
DEBBIE: Yes. In fact at this point it’s exactly what I want you to do. Take each job
individually and find out how many labor hours is it taking and divide it and find out, oh my
goodness, Mrs. Smith, I took her on 8 years ago, we only make 20 bucks an hour there. We’re
only charging 20 an hour because it takes 5 man hours to do her house.
And the house that we just took on last week, the new customers, same house, same size,
same square foot, we could do that house same price in three hours. Wow we’re making 30 an
hour in that house, we’re making 20 an hour in her house. And you do that…
FEMALE ONE: Thank you I didn’t mean to interrupt.
DEBBIE: No cause that was a very good question. Your volume is really loud. So I don’t
know, something is being amplified by the [word]. But that’s a very good point because in the
beginning, you’re going to have a lot of [word] customers and you were fine with that
because you were the one cleaning and you kept all that was left over. And you didn’t mind if
you average 20 an hour.
But when you’re paying 12 or 14 an hour, and you’re only charging 20 an hour and you have
some overhead and some blah, blah, blah, you’ll find that there are certain customers you
make zero off of. And they’re actually taking up a spot on your schedule that you could fill
with a profitable client. So when you do math, then you’ll decide which customers you want
to go away, which customers you want to send a rate increase letter to, which customers you
just want to be benevolent from your heart. There’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping Mrs. Smith who’s only paying you about 20 bucks an
hours because she’s elderly and she’s on a fixed income and she was your first customer you
took on. Fine, but at least you know. I don’t make anything off of her so I’m taking her off
Friday. Cause I can [unintelligible] Friday over and over again. I’m moving her to Tuesdays
cause we always have light days anyway and you can give it away if you do it on purpose.
Just don’t give it away by accident.
Okay, let’s talk about some numbers. When you have the solo cleaner concept, one thing I’ve
noticed is the bigger your teams, the more your people are part time. If you have two and
three people in a team, they rarely work an 8 hour day and worst case scenario they do work
an 8 hour day and you’re paying for 8 hours but they’re only generating about 6 hours worth
of income. That’s even worse.
Bottom line, everybody tends to be more part time when there’s bigger teams. It’s easier to
get one person fulltime to fill up an 8 hour day than it is to get two and three people to that
fulltime level. Unless they’re milking the clock and they’re getting paid for 8 hours but you’re
not. So I find that people with teams of three, it’s very hard to bill them up for the full
schedule.
And here’s the really scary part. If I have to do a team of three or a team of two then of course
it takes twice as many customers to fill up a new team when I’m ready to grow. It takes three
times as many customers to fill up a new team if I have a team of three. I contend that when
you average out your weekly clients, your biweekly clients which is going to be two thirds of
your customers will be biweekly and your monthly so those are people that use you every
four weeks.
When you average those all together, you need about 22 customers to fill up one person
fulltime. If they were working, 4.33 weeks in a month, cause nobody works 4 weeks every
month. They work 4.33 weeks every month because there’s always a couple extra days in
every month and all this stuff. So some months have a fifth week. So in order for me to hire
Sally and she needs fulltime work cause she’s got to pay her bills and she’s divorced and
she’s got a baby and all this stuff and she cant afford to work for you if you can only offer her
part time.
So, and the most profitable employees are fulltime employees. The least profitable employees
are part timers. Don’t forget that. So I want to attract people who need fulltime. I see owners
who have struggled with turnover, putting ads in the paper hoping to attract that stay at home
mom or attract the family women and so they’ll out ads in the paper. Make fulltime pay for
part time work.
That's a mistake you want to find and attract people who need a job and who need fulltime
work. Those are your best workers. I mean, there’s plenty of good workers out there who
don’t necessarily have to work for a living and they just love having fun money. There’s
nothing wrong with that and plenty of them work out. But your best core workers that will
make long-term, I’m talking that will work for you three years, five years, 10 years are people
who need a job.
And they are counting on you r paycheck to put food on their table and to pay their car
payment and those people need fulltime work. They can’t afford to [word] with six hours a
day, puts pressure on you as the owner. I need to fill her schedule, I’m going to lose her.
She’s a good worker and if I don’t fill her schedule she’s going bye bye. She’s going to work
somewhere else.
She’s going to work for Wal-Mart cause they can giver her 8 hours a day. So it put pressure
on you as the owner. If I do solo cleaning, I only need 22 customers to make her fulltime. If
there’s two in a team, I have to get 44 customer to fill them both. How long is it going to take
you to get 44 customers and how much money is that going to take you in marketing get 44
customers,
The numbers are staggering and you’re not going to like them when you see them but it’s the
reality and I have to tell you. Now if I have a team of three, I’m either going to attract people
who really don’t care if they have fulltime or not or I’m going to attract people who need
fulltime work and they’re not going to last if I don’t give it to them.
So if they’re in a team of thirty, I need 66 customers. Well they’re not going to clean 66 jobs
a day. So I don’t really need that many customers but they’re going to work fulltime and I’m
not going to get paid for fulltime and you know that story, we’ve already talk about it. But in
the perfect world, if they were all full I need 66 customers, probably need about 50.
So here’s what happens. If I have a team of two, I’m going to need probably 40-44 customers
to keep us both busy full time. How quick can I get 44 customers? Well I’ll tell you how
quick. However much money you have is how quick you can get them . Though it takes more
money to get 44 customers than it takes to get 22 customers.
And if I needed 3 months to get my 44 customers, I would lose those girls that I hired who
desperately need fulltime or I would turn them into employees that love working part time.
And then there’s all that resistance when I try to make them work till 4:30. so you create this
new monster. Well I like it done at two. I don’t want four houses now. Well you turned them
into people who don’t want fulltime or you attract people who can afford to work part time
and they’re going to resist when you fill them up finally, two months later.
They’re going to resist. I like it done at two. I don’t want four houses. So the goal is hire
people who really need and want fulltime and get them to fulltime as quick as you can and as
quickly as they prove they deserve fulltime. There’s a catch 22. With the solo cleaner I only
need 22 clients to make sure she’s fulltime. And here’s the sad news, I have to break it to you
but you need to know.
When you built your company with you cleaning houses and you built it on referrals, you
didn’t spend any money on marketing. If you’re a franchisee and you were paying 50,000 or
90,000 to become a franchisee, the other thing they would tell you is oh by the way we wont
even sell you this franchise unless you have 50 grand in the bank to spend on marketing your
first year in business.
They want you to spend $50,000 on marketing. Well I doubt you have that money. And I
know I don’t and I know I didn’t when I started my business. So the problem is you got to get
22 customers on board to fill the schedule of your new hire. And it’s even harder to get 44.
And you need to do it in about a month to 6 weeks, 4-6 weeks. And you do need about 4-6
weeks to know if you have a keeper in this business. It’s a sad reality.
Cause remember I said it takes 25 phone calls to get, to talk to 12 people that are decent
enough on the phone to invite in for an interview. And then only 6 or 8 of them will show up
and then only about three our four of them would be people you’ll offer the job to. And then
maybe two will show up by the second day of training. And by about two or three weeks,
only two that you hired and got through training are even still there.
So one person gets hired but that process has honed in the best worker. And they made it
through training and they’re actually still with you and your pay is fantastic. You did it right
on the front-end, you didn’t just hire people that have worked at that job for 3 months and that
job for 3 months and this job for 3 months. You waited and you waited and you fine-tuned
until you found the right people and you only hired people that were on their last job a whole
year.
And now we’re going to talk about hiring. So we’re not going to go down there with his\\. We
will talk about how to attract the best people and how to hire the people that will stay, so
don’t worry about that. But let’s say you’re doing things right and you’re getting the right
people in and they are sticking and your pay is really good so it’s worth it for them to stick.
and they have vehicles so you don’t have to worry about losing people because their
transmission exploded.
They have vehicles and this is how they make their living, driving to work. And you need
your 22 customers to fill them up. But you need four to six weeks to see if you’ve got a
keeper because two weeks into the job they’re like oh I don’t know but so my back is starting
to kill me. I cant do this kind of work and those are gone. Okay fine, so starting over you
didn’t need your 22 customers but that buys you time because you’re still trying to get your
22.
And so then you get your next one in training and you pull her in and hopefully, four weeks
into the job, you are discovering everything you needed to discover. She’s always on time.
She has not called in sick. She’s not telling you her carpal tunnel’s acting up. She’s not
cussing and smoking in the house, in front of those customers. You’re not doing all the things
that you’re scared to death you might get when you hire and you don’t know, so you try them
out.
So about the end of the four weeks, she’s getting faster. She could handle two homes a day in
the beginning. She’s a newbie. She doesn’t know how to clean a house in 3 hours. It’s taking
her four and a half hours to clean one house that should be three. But that’s okay she’s getting
faster. So you buy yourself about 4-6 weeks of time as you let her get used to the job, as you
help her speed up and you provide a great training program to give her the tools and the
information to clean quickly and efficiently.
You’re managing her quality cause she’s new so you’re sending team leaders out to go check
her work, supervisors, maybe yourself, whatever. You’re easing her in slowly, you only let
her clean one house a day and you told her that when you hired her. Our pay is great but it
only kicks in when you’re fulltime. While you’re part time, you only make this much. And
there is some lower pay skills I’m going to explain to you how you need to pay when they’re
a trainee and they’re a newbie on probation.
And you can hire people at $8 an hour for training for a week and bump them up to 10 an
hour the second week. And then put them on a commission pay that means you’re only going
to average about 12 an hour. And then you can cushion it for four weeks if they’re kinda slow
but the quality is great. So I’m going to show you how to do this. Don’t worry and panic.
But if they’re rocking along and they’re learning gradually and they’re doing their one house
a day and they’re finally cleaning without complaints, or you’re finally getting the point when
you do check their work it’s fine, It’s acceptable. And now they’re actually starting to see that
because this is their week 3 and now they’re actually going to a house that they did do two
weeks ago because most people are biweekly. And you’re assigning them the same clients,
which is incredible because customers love that and employees love that, who are pacing and
confirming.
\
You’ll notice about four weeks, she’s starting to pick up her speed and she’s starting to say,
ooh, I could do a second house now. Whereas that first couple of weeks they’re like cant do
two houses a day and you don’t want to give them two cause you don’t leave yourself in a
bind in case she doesn’t work out.
So you keep them real light the first few weeks. You add houses as they prove they can
handle it and as you take on the clients. So it’s a balancing act. If I had to fill up a team of
two, man I got to add double the clients when they’re ready, when they’re hungry, when
they’re working fast. If they’re in a team of two, they’re going to be done by noon and asking
for more work if I only gave them one house or two little bitty houses.
So you can add the houses a little more gradually when they’re a team of one. You can let
them demonstrate that they’re ready and that buys some time to get out there and do a bunch
of estimates and do a bunch of marketing and put flyers everywhere, oh my gosh, I hired
somebody and she seems to be working out. I got to get my flyers out there. I need to call that
[word] rep. Yes put me in the next [word], whatever.
You can bump up your marketing, get your 22 clients or at least get your 10 and now she’s
got a couple of days that she’s full and now you’re buying time, I’m getting a couple more
and a couple more. Usually [unintelligible] six to eight weeks, you can have her 22 houses
and that’s about the time that she’s proved to be a keeper anyway or she’s proved to be a dud.
And if she’s proved to be a dud then you’re not sweating it cause you don’t have your 22 yet
anyway. You’re replacing her. Yes it’s a balancing act but it’s a whole lot easier to balance
when you’re trying to spill the schedule of one employee, the one you’re trying to fill the
schedule of two or three. Does that make sense?
JIM: yup.
DEBBIE: Okay. Now let’s talk about some numbers. Let’s talk turkey. This is where it gets
scary. When you clean and built your business based on referrals, you only needed 20 clients
to keep you busy. And it’s really not that hard to get 20 clients based on referrals. It probably
took you a couple of years, you probably didn’t get those 20 clients in 30 days. Most of you it
took you 1 to 5 years to get your 20 or 30 clients and it was all by referral.
Well you cant take 1 to 5 years to get the next 20 to fill up a fulltime employee. You need to
do that in about 6 weeks. Now here’s what other people know that you need to know.
Referrals are kind of free but it takes a while. It took you a year to get your 20 clients. If you
cant wait, you either have to physically go out there and shake those bushes if you have no
money, meaning get out there and network, get out there and put your own flyers, sweat
equity.
Get out there and lick stamps and type letters and send them out or you need to spend some
money on marketing and you’re going to have to spend some money on marketing to get this
thing rolling quickly. The truth of the matter is, once you are hiring employees, you have to
spend money on marketing because it just wont come in fast enough to keep them working
for you if you try to rely on word of mouth.
It’s just not going to happen. Statistics will tell you that it’s going to cost you about $175 to
get one repeat client in marketing. So if I need 22 clients, it’s going to cost me about $3800 to
$3900 to fill up her schedule. The good news is that would be double if I needed the schedule
of a two person team to be full. And that would be triple, we’re looking at over $11,000 to fill
up a team of three if I want those three people to be full time. It would cost me $11,000 in
marketing to fill up those three people.
So about $175 to make your phone ring, enough time to get out and clean one or two times to
turn somebody into a repeat client. It costs at least 175. Now the scary part is for some people,
it’s upwards of 350 per client, per repeat client. So we’re going to just be optimistic and I’m
going to assume that as soon as you get out of the field you are going to spend some time on
sweat equity cause you’re going to have less cash than you will have sweat.
And so you’re sweat equity can save you money. And so you go to he Chamber of Commerce
and you network like crazy. And you go to those networking events at night. And you get out
there and you put fliers on doors and you get out there and you create some barter
relationships which I will teach in one of these modules.
You create barter relationships where you’re not writing a check for $400 for marketing to go
flyer 10,000 homes. You’re going to clean it and when you clean it your labor cost can be
around 220. So you just spent 220 to clean $400 worth of marketing. So I’ll teach you to do
some bartering and you’re going to have to do some sweat equity. But your new customers
are going to have to come from somewhere and they aren’t coming to you for free.
So you’re going to have to spend time marketing to get those new clients or you’re going to
have to spend money to get those new clients. The good news is as soon as you replace
yourself in the field, and I'm going to guess, if you’re not making a ton of money right now
cleaning houses, you will have your self replaced income [word] with two full time
employees.
And for some of you, if you haven’t been really making that much money, you’re kinda
cleaning part time, you’ll actually replace your own income with one fulltime employee. But
probably most of you it will take two fulltime employees to replace your income. That means
you third employee hired is pure profit. So really all you have to do is get to two employees.
And some of you have been killing yourselves already, cleaning more than your 22 clients. If
you’re already got thirty to forty clients, you already have enough to have a couple of
employees out there you’ve replaced yourself and you’ve got enough profit to where if you
have to live on a paycheck, talked to somebody last week on this call that said well what if I
don’t need a paycheck and I can reinvest all that money in my business? The answer is a
penny of it goes to marketing.
Don’t go buy a new computer. Don’t go buy a software. Don’t go buy vehicles. Don’t go buy
new vacuums. Spend every penny you can on marketing but not stupid marketing. Spend your
money on marketing that works. Don’t go out and buy any marketing without checking with
me first cause I’ll help you not waste a ton of money. I helped one of my clients who was
spending $1200 a month on radio advertisement and her phone wasn’t ringing at all.
I said stop it. Don’t put your money on marketing that doesn’t work. Spend your marketing
money on marketing that we all know works. So the good news is as soon as you have two
people out there cleaning full time, you will probably be pretty close to replacing the income
that you desperately needed. And if not, that’s money that goes right into your marketing
fund. The person number three, once they’re fulltime, you’re probably going to have, if
you’re squeaky clean and I am all four, don’t raise your expenses in the beginning.
So you have between five and ten employees, I want you to be as lean and mean as you can
be on the budget, not with people. Don’t go buy new faxes and new computers and software
and new equipment. Don’t go put yourself in an office if you don’t already have it. We can
make this thing work out of your home with real tight expenses. So person number three is
going to start bringing you profit which that profit, instead of putting it in your pocket or go
on buying a new car, that profit can go to your next marketing campaign.
That could be easily 450 bucks a week with that one new person, that third person, 450 a
week times 4.33, we’re talking $1900 a month. That could be spent on marketing from that
one new hire if you don’t take the profit from her, if she’s fulltime and stick it in your pocket.
You take the profit from her, stick it into your marketing budget, okay? 1900 bucks,
technically if you do this lean and mean. Maybe 1500 if you’re not as lean, you’re furnishing
equipment and supplies and paying mileage and stuff like that.
So worst case scenario, about 350 a week for that third person. Now I know I’m throwing a
lot of numbers and you’re probably going, whatever, too many numbers. But the reality is that
third person, unless you can do without a paycheck, now if you can do without a paycheck,
then all the profit from everybody you hire to clean, I would tell you to pour it into marketing
and just paying your minimal bills.
I would like to encourage you to keep your business expenses to about 10% if you’re in your
home and you just haven’t added a whole bunch of fixed expenses yet cause that’s going to
grow later. But if you can, keep your business expenses at about 10% and then everything left
over poured into marketing. And when I say marketing, marketing and advertising is making
your phone ring. It’s not good enough that your phone rings once a day. It’s not good enough
that your phone rings with two or three quotes a week.
You cannot fill the schedule of your new hires with three or four phone calls a week. Cause
only half of them are going to pay you. Half of them are going to say well you’re too
expensive. Hopefully better than half will keep you. Probably 7 out of 10 if you do it right.
And if your prices have always been kinda low, then you’re already used to people hiring you
at a 9 out of 10 or an 8 out of 10.
So it’s probably going to go down a little bit if I get you to charge more. So your conversion
rate will go down but your profit will go up. Does that make sense? Anybody have any
comments about that part? Is that a stark reality for some of you, that it will probably cost you
about $175 for a new repeat client?
JIM: The reality for me Debbie is the phone ringing more than once or twice a day. I mean I’d
grown slowly in 5 years but to pick up 22 customers in 6 to 8 weeks is kinda shock and awe
to me.
DEBBIE: It is shock and the shock is that probably cause you’re not used to spending $3900
to get that many clients. But here’s what happened. You prevent yourself from growing
because you’re not spending enough on marketing so you’re getting just enough customers to
replace the customers that go away. And you’re getting just enough customers to kind to keep
your teams kind of full but part time teams mean teeny teeny profit.
Fulltime teams mean much better profit. It’s just the way it is. So your teams kind of stay sort
of part time, billable hours part time. So your profits are smaller so there’s not enough profits
to throw at marketing, so there’s not enough money going into marketing, so there’s not
enough people calling you, not enough new business. It’s like this horrible vicious cycle and
that’s why you have never clean again university and people who had been in business for 10
years and cant get from A to Z or A to B.
JIM: Debbie I had 40 customers for over a year. I mean I’d get 38 then 41 and then 39 and
then 42 and then 38. I mean you’re speaking a lot of truth.
DEBBIE: How much money do you spend consistently every single month on marketing?
JIM: Me?
DEBBIE: Yes.
JIM: Very little right now. I mean most of my calls are generated from my website. I do do
the Adword campaign that [unintelligible] I really wasn’t really spending all heck of a lot of
money. Maybe a couple if hundred dollars a month, 300.
DEBBIE: There you go. You’re spending maybe two to 300 a month. That is the enough
money to replace the customers leaving and that’s it, fairly. Period. That’s only enough
money in marketing to, there’s no money in your marketing budget for growth. You’re just
going to tread water at that rate and so that’s the sad reality and that’s the piece of
information, one of those pieces of information that’s missing when the independent cleaner
can’t quite get past a certain level. It’s like my gosh I’ve been at 40 customers for 5 years or
two years or whatever. It is, bottom line, you’re not spending enough money on marketing to
grow.
FEMALE ONE: On average, how much do you think we should be putting away for
advertising? How much should we be spending a month?
DEBBIE: Here’s what I recommend. Of course it depends on how aggressively you want to
grow. But the franchises want their franchisees to spend 10% on marketing because they want
them to grow quickly. When you get to a certain size, you can ease back off on your
marketing. What I would tell everyone of you on this call, at this point, you need to commit a
hundred percent of what you can to marketing, to what you can.
So I would love for you to spend between 30 and 40% of what you’re bringing in on
marketing because at this point, that’s going to double and triple your response, hopefully
quadruple. If you could just find an extra 400 or 500 a week in profit from a new employee,
by cutting some expenses that have been wasted. And you said, you know what, I’ve been
doing without that money anyway all this time, I am not going to pay off my credit card with
this 500 that I found. I’m spending it on marketing.
That’s 500 a week or 400 a week or whatever you find and create. There’s your 1600 a month
on marketing versus his 200. You don’t think that’s going to make your phone ring more?
Now here’s the sad reality. When you don’t have marketing in place, it takes about three to
six months to really get your marketing dollars to start rolling in the numbers. And that’s
when people get discourage.
Independents seem to go, spent $400 on [word] and I didn’t get anything. I’m canceling it. It
takes 3 to 6 months for that stuff to kick in to work. So, you’re going to have to spend a
thousand dollars a month on marketing if you can find that for $500 a week in your profit.
And it might take you 3 months to really see the results but when you start seeing the results
after three months, that phone’s ringing like crazy. And it’s all a numbers game. So
remember, I’m always going to nag you about tracking everything. This business and every
business is a numbers game. I can tell you how many times your phone will ring based on
how much you spent on marketing.
And I can tell you how many conversions you will get to a sale based on a number of rings
you get. If you’re telling me you only can seem to get 5 new clients a month, then I can tell
you how many times your phone rang and how many conversions you did. So if you put in a
thousand dollars a month in the right kind of marketing that is proven to be effective for our
industry, then you will get enough calls in your area pretty close to what I would get.
Now I might have a better response rate because my branding is very heavy and very
thorough in my area. If you’ve done a good job of branding, if they’ve been seeing your name
out there or your cars with logos, and they do hear about you in the community, you hold
fundraisers, you go to chamber meetings. If you’re already kinda known out there and you’ve
already done a good job of branding then your marketing will be a little more effective than
the ones on this call that haven’t been branding themselves.
Nobody really knows who you are except for your 25 customers. Then fine, the first three,
four months of marketing, you are the new guy on the block. It doesn’t matter that you’ve
been in business for 10 years. You’re the new guy on the block if you’re marketing for the
first time. Go ahead.
FEMALE ONE: What types of advertising work? What is the most effective?
DEBBIE: Okay. In a nutshell, yellow pages still works for most of us around the country. The
more baby boomers you have in your area, the more yellow pages still works, believe it or
not. It’s relatively cheap. Boy have I ever gone way overtime. I wasn’t watching my clock. I
apologize everybody. But this is really the final part.
Yellow pages still works. Internet is great if you are search engine optimized. Jim was talking
about search engine marketing, pay per click. Internet works great, yellow pages works great,
direct mail campaign is what builds maid services. [unintelligible].
FEMALE ONE: When you’re talking about direct mail [word] like postcards that you send?
DEBBIE: Those are very expensive but they’re effective but they’re too expensive. For you to
mail 10,000 postcards, one postcard and one stamp is extremely expensive. It works but it’s
expensive. So direct mail [word] when you’re sharing the expense in an envelope filled with
competitors and other people [word], money mailers. The chamber is helpful, not phenomenal
but it helps you brand.
It doesn’t necessarily make your phone ring with customers. It just helps you brand yourself
which is an important element but it doesn’t tend to bring in the [word]. Sometimes it will if
you’re kinda on the [word] price wise. Money mailer, [word], anything that gets mailed by
10,000 at a time and they charge you 4 to 600. And I know some of you are thinking I tried
that and it didn’t work. But did you do it five times in a row? And did you have a very good
call to action or a great coupon or something on there that made people think twice before
they threw it in the trash? Word of mouth, referrals are incredible. You can ramp that program
up by sending a letter one of your customers that says you want a free cleaning? Refer a fried,
we’re growing.
You know, once their friend uses you three times you give your customer a free cleaning.
That’s cheaper than 175 it’s going to cost you in marketing. So you know people think well
I’m not going to give her a free cleaning. That’s too expensive. Cheaper than 175.
FEMALE TWO: When you don’t see where your franchises that are around you cause I have
multiples, I don’t see where they’re advertising anywhere. Am I left to assume they’re doing
like these postcards, direct mail to people? They got to be doing something.
DEBBIE: It depends on where you live. So, if you live on the expensive side of town, you’re
probably seeing the marketing. If you live on the less expensive side of town, the smaller less
expensive homes, the zip code that you don’t service then you’re also not getting that
marketing. So I don’t know if that helps. But if you live in a zip code that you don’t service,
you’re also not going to get the marketing that goes to the zip code that everybody wants to
sell to.
FEMALE THREE: How much commission should we be paying our employees? How do you
figure that out?
DEBBIE: I would say most of the time it’s going to average whether you do a little bit of
minimum wage parts commission or straight commission. It should average between 40 and
50%, most of the time, 40-45%.
FEMALE THREE: Of the amount of the job?
DEBBIE: Yes. $100 house, she’s going to make 50 bucks or 45. And $100 house, hopefully
she can do it in 3 hours. So 50 bucks for 3 hours work is not bad. And then on my way to the
next house, 50 bucks for another 3 hour house, I’m done for the day. I only worked 6 hours
today, you made 200, she made a 100 and she works 6 hours. She loves you. She loves her
job. Pretty cool. She can make 500 a week and be home by 3. Or she can make 600 a week
and be home by 4:30 if she’s a solo cleaner and she’s not driving all over town.
FEMALE THREE: I have about 11 houses right now. I’m just kind of a baby in the, I'm not a
baby in the business but I just don’t have that many clients. And I have one employee. Can I
hire her to be a fulltime employee? Right now her and I are working together. Can I drop out
and just say look I’m going to let you take over.
DEBBIE: Sure. That's why you do it. That’s how you ease in to the next stage. If you begin to
groom her to do the job without you. Now you’re probably not going to walk off cold turkey.
So you’re going to say you know what, I’m going to get you started here and I’m going to go
and run and do an estimate and I’ll be back in an hour. You go and do an estimate, you come
back in an hour, you check her work, oh my gosh you did this better than I do. Great.
Tomorrow or whenever you’re ready, I’m going to get you started here and I’m going to have
you finish up and I’ll meet you at the second house. You just ease people in.
FEMALE THREE: And rather than easing them in, do you start them on the commission
while you’re just easing them in?
DEBBIE: Not if you’re cleaning. If you’re not cleaning, you sell the benefits of getting out
from under you as her handicap. You know what, as soon as you’re cleaning these houses by
yourself, instead of making $30, let’s say she’s making 10 bucks an hours and you two
usually work about a 6 hour day plus 30 minutes driving time. So she’s used to make $65 a
day.
And now she’s probably going to work about 7 hours and now she’s going to make 80 bucks
a day, whatever cause you’re going to pay her commission. Explain that to her, she’s going to
be tickled to death. Now the problem is if the two of you have only cleaned two homes a day
together, then she’s not going to be too thrilled about cleaning two homes by herself and all of
a sudden now she’s a fulltime worker and she liked being part time.
So you’ll have to find out if she wants to be a fulltime worker. Worst case scenario, she goes
no I only do one house a day now because I like being done by 12:30 everyday or 1:00. Then
you just let her do one house a day and you do the other one. And she’s going to be your part
time worker and the next person you hire is going to be somebody that wants two houses a
day. You don’t have to run her off, just let her do one a day. And that is her commission off
that one house and she’ll be happy and she wont quit on you.
FEMALE FOUR: Debbie can I ask a quick question? My flyers are good, they look nice but
they are done at home, probably not very cost effective but is it going to help actually charge
that $30 an hour and be accepted if I get it professionally printed? Cause I don’t have the 600
bucks to, I’d rather put $80 today.
DEBBIE: Let me put it this way, the more you look like a trunk slammer, the cheaper people
expect to pay when they call you. So you’ll tend to attract people who look for a bargain, who
want to hire people who are illegals, take cash under the table, could care less if they’re
insured and bonded.
FEMALE FOUR: So the same flier, professionally printed is going to help that image?
DEBBIE: It well help you attract more of the right kind of customer. Now it could be [word]
your response rate. But not necessarily. There are people who would never dream of calling
on the low business cards stuck on their door that says I clean you house. They wont even call
them. They just throw it in the trash. Then when they get the Molly Maids professionally
done flyer and [word], they set that aside and call tomorrow when they get to work.
There are people that wouldn’t dream of calling the on the, the little business card, those little
crappy looking flyer on the door. They wont do it, they’ll throw it away. Then there’s
customers who wont call on that Molly Maid flyer. Those people are too expensive. I’m not
calling them. And they wait for that little business card of the trunk slammer on their door.
FEMALE FIVE: Would it be possible if we sent you our postcards and then maybe you could
possible critique them and tell us what we’re doing right or wrong? I will be happy to. Feel
free to send me your postcards or your flyer. Let me leave you with this last thought. If
you’re doing it yourself, there’s a good chance it could be more professional. If you’re doing
it yourself, the volume that you can crank out is so much lower and more expensive than if
you were paying professionals like [word] to A, design it and B, mass produce it. So yeah, it
seems cheap to print postcards and send them out you know a 100 at a time, but if you had to
send 10,000 of exactly what you’re doing, would it still be that cheap or would you say I
guess I’m going with [word]. I guess I’m going with money mailer or I guess I am going to
buy that yellow page ad that’s $65 a month or $100 a month.
FEMALE FIVE: I’m meeting with a printer on Monday and they’re hungry for work. But
I’ve never negotiated with one before. Is there any way I can make myself an advantage when
I talk to them?
DEBBIE: Well, if they’re hungry for work of course you want to ask them for the absolute
best price they can and always bump up your quantities. So when you print 500, it’s barely
that much more to print a thousand and when you print a thousand, it’s not that much more to
print 5,000. So for sure, work on heavy quantities to get the cheapest price.
The other thing you always want to do is I can’t really afford to do this. Is there any chance
we can barter half of this? Cause I’d love to print every single month 5,000 a month from you
and I cant afford that but I’ve got girls that need work and I bet your wife would love to have
a clean house. So any chance we could barter for half? And you’ll find somebody that will
say yes. [unintelligible].
BETTY: Debbie, hello?
DEBBIE: Yes go right ahead.
BETTY: Yes this is Betty. After all we have heard today as it relates to solo cleaning, if we
still have on our minds that we want our models to be a two teams cleaner, is that okay to do
so? And also what do you think about male, female teams?
DEBBIE: Yes, you can make it work with a two person team. It’s not as easy and it’s more
expensive. But yes you can. It’s being done all over the country and I will help you make it
work
BETTY: What do you think about male, female teams?
DEBBIE: I am not crazy about that. This industry attracts about 90% of your staff will be
females unless maybe geographically you’re in a little bit of an unusual area. It tends to attract
females. Customers feel more comfortable with women cleaning their homes. You have
moms, stay at home moms with babies, nursing their child. It’s much harder to find men who
are a good fit. Men are a great fit for commercial, janitorial building clean. It’s what people
expect. They are more intimidated by men in their home and I am even less thrilled about
males and females working together.
BETTY: Okay I own a family owned business and right now, it’s working for us
[unintelligible] as a team. My husband and Lamont and right now the people don’t appear to
be intimidated by that because I’m there. And some of them [word] welcomes the fact that
there’s a male around cause the male can do, you know.
DEBBIE: That’s all fine and good. But my point is on a mass scale. On an individual scale,
it’s an easy sell and it’s easy to overcome. On a mass scale, it’s harder to overcome and
eventually Lamont will probably be the one who ends up being more supervisory role
especially if you wan him to take a little more active role in the company.
Eventually, he’ll be the one going out and doing quality control checks. He’ll be that fifth
wheel that fills in when somebody’s out sick or he’ll be the floater of he’ll be person number
three on a team for a big spring cleaning or here you go or he is one of two on a team.
But he will be the exception, the guy and the girl. He’ll be the exception. For all the future
teams, you’re going to build your teams with two women, two women, two women, oops
there’s another guy. He’s highly qualified kinda small framed, doesn’t look intimidating,
doesn’t have giant muscles and big tattoos. [unintelligible]. So Lamont can be the exception.
There is no reason why he cant be but that’s not the model you will pursue.
You always run the risk disgruntled, nasty employee, filing a complaint because you fired her,
she steals. And later you get some charge that Lamont molested her while they were cleaning
a house. You have that risk when you put males and females alone in a house. Whether it
happens or not, it’s hard to defend when somebody who hates you because you fired her
wants to lash out at you.
BETTY: Right, okay. Oh great. Thank you.
DEBBIE: My husband is a former cop and I’m always nervous about people make false
accusations.
BETTY: Yes, I’m always kinda watching and stay in the homes when my husband or Lamont
is with me, you know, just because of what you just said.
DEBBIE: Absolutely. Cause you can be falsely accused, anything can happen.
BETTY: Okay, thank you.
DEBBIE: Good question.
FEMALE THREE: Debbie.
DEBBIE: This is the last question and then I got to go to my trade show.
FEMALE THREE: Oh I’m so sorry. My situation is you were talking about limiting your
overhead and don’t get an office and that thing, yeah if you cant afford it or whatever.
DEBBIE: What I’m saying is don’t add to your expenses until you absolutely have to.
FEMALE THREE: Exactly. Then I have got this like rare situation where I can have like two
offices in a very respectable area. It’s got several other offices in the building and I’ve kinda
liked bartered a deal with the guy where I would clean his other office but it’s only going to
cost me like $125 a month that I have, like all my utilities are paid, my internet’s paid, my
phone’s paid. I have a receptionist.
DEBBIE: What are you waiting for?
FEMALE THREE: Exactly and that’s what I was going to make sure that that’s okay. I mean
you know that you think that that would be, I mean I just cant imagine, I mean for the image,
I think that would be a really good opportunity.
DEBBIE: Go get that now. Make sure you understand. My caution is adding a bunch of
expenses.
FEMALE THREE: It’s just like an unbelievable deal.
DEBBIE: Oh my gosh, go get that, quick.
FEMALE THREE: Okay, okay cool.
DEBBIE: Okay good question. I’ve got to run guys and I apologize for going over but it
means so much to me to make sure you get the information you need that I’d rather give you
45 minutes of time than leave you hanging and I promise you every single week you’re
always going to feel like oh my gosh I had a hundred more questions. So don’t be frustrated. I
promise we will answer these questions as we go.
The questions about training, the questions about pricing. More in depth information about
marketing. I’m not going to leave you hanging but I think I’ve dwelled into you the
importance of every employee you have to be as fulltime as you can get them. And if you can
get those employees fulltime, you can make more money off of each employee and that’s
very important.
And so the smaller the team, the more full time they can be and the more you can make with
ease and the cheaper it is to get started. So I hope this helps. Be ready next week. There’s no
homework this time and next week 10:00 we’ll be right on target. But do send me your
questions if they’re burning issues.
FEMALE FOUR: Thank you.
FEMALE THREE: Thank you for a great Saturday.
DEBBIE: Have a great weekend. You’re welcome, thank you. And I’ll be sending a survey to
see how I did. Take care. Bye everyone.