More Than A Side Hustle
More Than A Side Hustle
Stop Making These Four Early Mistakes
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If you're starting a cleaning business, these are the four mistakes we see new owners make over and over again.
After coaching thousands of cleaning business owners inside Cleaning Business University, we've noticed the same patterns. It's usually not a lack of information that's holding people back. It's how they apply it.
In this video, Jhanilka breaks down the four biggest mistakes that slow new cleaning business owners down, and what you should do instead.
In this video, you'll learn:
✅ Why skipping steps actually delays your progress
✅ The mindset shift that changes how you invest in marketing
✅ Why being too rigid can hold your business back
✅ How comparison steals momentum from new business owners
✅ What successful cleaning business owners focus on instead
THE TRUTH: Building a successful cleaning business isn't about finding one more strategy. It's about avoiding the mistakes that keep most beginners stuck.
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The Big Question And Setup
SPEAKER_02So, yeah in our community, I got this question: what are some common mistakes cleaning companies owners make? And I figured I'd do a full breakdown of it because there's a few things. So I've sat on calls with thousands of cleaning business owners at every stage, beginners, people stuck at 2K, and then people making six figures. And they're almost always making one of the same four mistakes. It's not the information that's out there because there's a lot. Most of the time it's the mistake. The mistake isn't the lack of knowledge, it's what you're doing with the knowledge once you get it. And you might think you just need one more course or one more tip or one more strategy, but I'm gonna show you why that's usually not the case. So today I'm breaking down the four mistakes I see most often in the first few months of building a cleaning business are honestly a business, so you can skip it entirely. So let's dive in. Let's
Mistake One: Skipping The Sequence
SPEAKER_02do it. Number one, mistake number one, jumping around the process. Now, people skip the order and way in the word order in which we lay it out. In our course specifically, we lay things out in the way that you should be doing it, right? And I hear some of our students do it differently and decide to copy something else, and then they have to come back around anyway, right? So they're like, Johnny said that they did this, so I decided to go that route. And it's that doesn't pertain to you specifically at where you're at right now. And so now you're doing double work. There's a reason why we laid it out this way. Now we've had our cleaning business now for the past eight plus years. Order is in that order for a reason, right? I see this a lot. Someone hears, oh, this person did it this way. Instead of doing that, what actually applies to where they at, then they end up circling back to square one. The fix is pretty simple. The order exists for a reason. Follow your own sequence before you start borrowing someone else's shortcuts. Because that's really the reason you're following someone else. You're like, oh, this person got this many leads, let me just do that. You didn't even set up your bank account. You didn't even start finding people, you didn't even start interviewing yet. So following the process. You have the information. People put the information on courses, podcasts, YouTube, books, all these things. No one's reading chapter 30 before they read chapter one. That doesn't make any sense. There's a reason it's in order. We ask that you follow that as a creator ourselves. Follow the information that we laid out for you. That's mistake number
Mistake Two: Marketing Mindset Shift
SPEAKER_02one. Mistake number two is treating marketing like an expense and not an investment. Now, that is something that I had to get drilled in my head by my husband Anthony at the very beginning. The cleaning business was our first business. And so I'm like, what do you mean? We're spending $500. There's $500 going to Thumbtack. Don't tell me it's an investment, but it is. You have to market yourself. Even if you decide to do free ways, sure, right? You can do that. But more than likely, you eventually have to get to a paid market. If it's Thumbtack, if it's Yelp, if it's Google, if it's Angie Leads, if it's Spark, whatever you decide to do, you have to get to a paid market. And you're gonna have to spend some money because how are people gonna know that you exist? That's what spending money on these platforms allows. For exposure to your business, for more people to know who you are, for more people to then leave you reviews, for more people to book you. That's essentially it. The mindset shift takes time, especially on your first business, right? But people hesitate to spend it on marketing because it feels like money's going out and money is not coming back in.
Tracking ROI And Working Leads
SPEAKER_02I had this conversation yesterday. Somebody said they spent $1,200 on Google Local Services and they were charging about $80 a lead, if you will. My question was, did you make you get any clients from the time that you ran these leads on Google Local Services? He said, Yeah, I got about seven. I said, So how much money did those seven clients make you? He couldn't answer that question. That's very important to find out because you're focusing on how much they're charging per lead. But if you spent $1,200 and you made $1,200 back, or you spent $1,200 and you made $3,000 back, then it wasn't a loss at all. But you don't even have that number. Did you get any recurring clients from that? Because then even more. Is that someone that's paying you weekly, monthly, bi-weekly? That covers costs with them staying on, let's say, three months with you with your cleaning service. But people don't have these numbers. They just look at I spent $1,200, I didn't make $1,200, which in his case, he didn't even have that stat to say that. He was just looking at, oh, it's highly priced. And yes, these platforms are not cheap. I'm not gonna say that they are, because they own it and they're like, I'm exposing you to people that would never know who you are. And if you turn them into a client, so if you pay, let's say $60, $80 for a lead and your standard booking is $300, yes, you have to pay other people, but that's their thought process when it comes to these platforms. So it's not always apples to apples. Because then once again, another part of it is even if you spent $1,200 and you feel like I did get clients, but it only made me, let's say, half, $600 or $800, you can always still re-market to them. Because somebody didn't buy from you today, it doesn't mean that they won't buy from you tomorrow, three months from now, six months from now, maybe a year, right? If you're doing the right things, if you're still emailing and texting them and stuff like that. That's why we say you market to these people, you spend your money, you should be having a place where you're holding these leads. If it's at the beginning, you're putting on Excel where you have their name, phone number, and email, or if you're using one of these platforms, these CRMs, so that you can always market to them. So even though you may not get the money from them today or next month, but because you're emailing them, because you're texting them, maybe if you're calling them once in a while, you're staying top of mind and they eventually will book with you. People don't look at it that way, and that is part of how you can develop and have an understanding as to how much you're actually spending. So keep in mind it is not always apples to apples when it comes to investing. Right? And honestly, making the shift helps you to grow because then you recognize I'm gonna put more money here. That's why I told them you need to know how much money you made or didn't make from this platform because this may be the platform for your area. We mentioned Yelp to a lot of our students, and some people say, like in their area, that doesn't work for them. But how do you know that if you're not trying it, investing in it, seeing how much money you're making it from it for a few months? Sometimes just one month is hard because right now it could be a slower season, it's the summer, people are out. Then come August down here in Dallas, people are back to school, so they may be looking for it. You know what I mean? So you do tend to need a bit more time, but marketing is an investment and not an expense. You have to market your business. All of these billion-dollar companies market their business every single day. You have to do it, and so you are a new business, you are a smaller business. There's no reason you should feel that you should not be, right? I always try to reference Macy's Victoria's Secret, Sephora, Target, Foot Locker, all of these places, email multiple times a day. You should be doing the same. I'm done on my rant on that
Mistake Three: Use A Framework
SPEAKER_02one. Mistake number three, I would say is being too rigid. Now, this one is a little hard to say it's a mistake because one could say it's a business, I'm following the steps. I'm not gonna stare off of that because my mistake number one said don't jump around. Yes, but there are things that I feel like you have to take ownership on. It is your business, right? So, for example, we get this question and it's a little trigger for me. We tell people to do competitors research, meaning you're calling companies, you're figuring out how much they're charging in your area so that you can come up with your pricing because you want to be standard with what people are charging, right? Clear. But when you start to look at these websites, that one, they may not have a website, two, they don't have any information on there. You may have to call, you may have to put your phone number in, you may have to email. And we have students come back and say, I went on this website, it doesn't have the pricing. What do I do? That's what I mean by being too rigid. That's what I mean. What do you do? How do you think you get the answer to that? Getting the answer to that would mean putting my phone number, sending that email, whatever it is that they require for me to get the price, because I want to get this information. That's just an example of you gotta figure it out. You got there's certain things you gotta figure out if you're hitting, and I won't even say that's a brick wall, but if you're hitting something that you're like, oh, they didn't say this. Because there's no way in any course or anything that you listen to that someone can say every single thing that you're gonna come across and what to do for every single step. Yes, we give you the framework. Yes, we mostly give you things that you need, but stuff like that, I find people really need to, I don't want to say common sense per se, but really try to figure it out on their own with certain scenarios. So new owners tend to treat the training like a rule book instead of a framework. They don't tweak it off of their location, their market, their own strengths. Those are all important. So we go a lot of times when we talk about our cleaning business, we say we only market it online. When we started our cleaning business eight years ago, we had just moved to Dallas two years ago or one year before. We didn't know nobody. So we didn't do any organic marketing because we didn't know anybody to organic market too. We didn't have no kids, so it's not like we're marketing in school. They're day, there's none of that. There's no one. But you do. You may have friends and family, you may have a network in your area. So then someone says, Should I do that? Absolutely. Get the free leads in, absolutely do that. Those are things that I talk about with being too rigid. The information is a starting point and not a script that you're locked into, that you can't do anything outside of that. Yes, follow the same brick road. Yes, do it in the order that I said to do it in. But still, you do the tweaks, you do those things that you need to have.
SPEAKER_00I was gonna say, talk about all your students making a million dollars and I think then they build upon it to take their conferences, take what they learned, take what they do.
SPEAKER_02Okay. And so many, we have a few students that built their business to a million dollars or over 600,000, and almost all of them would say, follow the blueprint. They followed the blueprint to the T and then they built on it based on their strengths, their knowledge, things that they had. So we had Alex, he spoke about this that he followed the blueprint, but he was someone that he needed SOPs. We don't really talk about SOPs. We didn't get SOPs in our business until we were five, six years in. But he's he needed SOP. So what did he do when he started making his own SOPs? That's something that as a business owner, I know that this works for me. We had Stephanie, she had a lot of friends and family. Her first month, I think she had $11,000 because she told friends and family what she's coworkers, what she was doing. So those are just little examples about how you follow the blueprint, but build on it based on your common sense, based on your knowledge, based on your strengths. And I think something that I also mentioned is a lot of the skills you already have from year nine to five are transferable. You use them, right? We may not talk in detail of the things that we do necessarily with our contractors, but you can think of it as yourself. What is some way that I think I can keep them around? What is something that I would like if I was a contractor? Or when I look at these service-based businesses, what is something that I would like if I told a customer? What is something that you've liked that a business you use have done for you? And you can implement it into your business, right? Simple things of it's my birthday, and at work they say happy birthday. Could you deal with your contractor, your birthday from ID? Could you say happy birthday to them when it's their birthday? Right? It's not something that you get up front when you're starting the business. Now you're not gonna think about all of these things, and that's not the expectation. It's just that you need to be flexible and kind of thinking and using your transferable skills because almost all the times they can work your nine to five skills, can work in entrepreneurship, and you need to be utilizing and doing that. Maybe so if you want a full framework we teach inside Clean and Business University, the exact structure and where you actually have room to make it of your own. There's a free training link below. Now back to the video.
Mistake Four: Quit Comparing
SPEAKER_02The last mistake number four that we see business owners that I see business owners do or clean and business owners utilize is play the comparison game. And as we've been doing this longer, we've had Clean and Business University now for six years. It feels like it's gotten worse from when we first started out. And I understand why though. When we first started out, there was no one to compare yourself to. We didn't have no students, right? There was no students. And then it was at the beginning, and you were just building and doing on your own. And that's the other thing, our long being too rigid. I find like our earlier students, I feel pivoted and did things more independently than students now. Now, it could be the thought of too much information now, just the space and world that we live in, which Hat GPT, AI, YouTube, compared to six years ago. But that is something also that I see. But comparison. This one isn't unique, obviously, to the cleaning business. It shows up everywhere, especially with social media. It just makes it easier to know what's out there. Seeing someone else's numbers and decided you're behind ignores that everyone is running a completely different race. Everyone is running- who are you in competition with? Who did you start? Unless you started this with somebody and say, Let's set go, which never happens. This is your own race. You compare yourself and say, Well, they started in January, I started in January, it's now June, and they've made 20,000 and I've only made 5,000. Maybe that's what you wanted to do. Maybe for you, I just want to pay one bill. Maybe for this person, I'm trying to get out of my job before the year ends because I have other things going on. Maybe for you, I don't have no kids, so it's not a big deal. Maybe for them, they got three, they got mouths to feed, it's summer camp, there's other things happening. You never know what anybody's going through. So it's annoying when people compare themselves. We share the numbers for you to see what's possible because sometimes if we're closed-minded or in a space, we don't know what's possible until we see somebody else do it. Right? But it's not for you to say, I should be there too. We give this example all the time. We started with a young lady out in Dallas around the same time, and we would have conversations, we would go out to dinner, we would do different things. And I don't know, maybe it was six months and eight months in. I think she had hit 100,000, she was crushing it. I don't even know if we had hit 30,000. And we had the comparison game too. We're like, wow, we should be doing more. We should be doing all these things. And we had a conversation with her, and it we left at dinner. We're like, I don't know if I really want that. We had a conversation, and the conversation was, she's I'm stressed, I landed myself in the hospital, my job is going down because I'm constantly doing all this stuff with the cleaning business. She's basically overwhelmed. And we're like, we didn't build this business for that. We built this business at that time. We wanted to pay a bill, then pay another one, then pay debt. They're like, help us do that. Go at your own race. There's no one you're in competition with, and that should be okay, right? Different location, different timing. There are so many nuances. Comparison can hold you back just as much as any other mistake because you're focusing on what the other person is doing versus you doing what you need to do to get to where you are. And then also being realistic with yourself. It could the other side of it is I don't know their finances, I don't know how much money they're putting in, I don't know how much time they're putting in. How much time are you putting in? A lot of times you're like, I should be there. Then you think about it. Can you be honest with yourself? Like, how much time are you actually putting into the business or doing the thing? Is it what you should be doing? Is it that 15 to 20 hours? So it's all of those things. Cook it up. And a lot of times we like to say, you can't compare our chapter 20 to your chapter one, and that's what you guys do. That's what you guys do. Comparing to somebody else's thing was like, they've been doing this for a while. Why do you expect that you would be there? And that doesn't even make any sense. You don't expect a two-year-old to behave how a six-year-old behaves. Why? It doesn't make sense, and you're just keeping yourself inside that loop. So with the work let me see, I'm doing my last sentence. So
Four Fixes And Free Training
SPEAKER_02those are the four mistakes that I see. Jumping around, treating marketing like an expense, staying too rigid, and compare yourself to everyone else. Fix those four things, you'll move faster than most people ever do. If you're just getting started and want the full road mat, click the link below for our free training. Thank you for listening in. Alright, gotta press it off.