Task Force Entrepreneur
Task Force Entrepreneur (TFE) is a podcast for entrepreneurs interested in the service industry. It began as a way to document the creation of a new service-oriented business, and aims to provide a no-fluff narrative on all things entrepreneur!
Task Force Entrepreneur
From High Tech to High Clean: A Story of Entrepreneurial Resilience
Picture this: You’re flourishing in the tech industry, riding high on a wave of success. Then, out of the blue, you decide to pivot - due to unforeseen circumstances - and start a house cleaning business. Sounds crazy, right? It’s a turn of events that raised a lot of eyebrows, but for me, it was a decision grounded in entrepreneurial spirit and creative drive. I'm here to share the exhilarating journey of starting from scratch, having swapped silicon chips for scrubbing pads. And I want to share it with you.
Craving a genuine story of jumping from a comfortable, tech-centric career to a service-oriented venture? Then join me as I demystify my transition, shedding light on my motivations, the entrepreneurial itch I’ve had since childhood, and how my tech expertise is primed to revolutionize the cleaning industry. I’ll be charting the steps I've taken towards realizing my vision, from business registration to designing a logo and developing job scheduling software. So, buckle in and lend an ear – it’s time for some entrepreneurial insights, tech transformations, and a clean sweep towards success!
Hey everybody, mike here and welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur. The podcast I started went from being a tech engineer to starting a house cleaning business. Yep, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I hope you enjoy the show. All right, so welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:As you heard in the intro, I'm starting a cleaning business to be more specific, cleaning people's houses and my background is probably just close to 20 years in the information technology field. I've worked for a variety of companies. I've worked all over the place, all over the United States, with very, very large household brands, and, to be honest, I've had a lot of success in this career and I don't mind the work and the people are nice and I really don't have a lot of complaints. So then the next natural question I get from friends and family is why would you ever start a house cleaning business when you could just put more time into your existing career and get raises and promotions and all that fun stuff? And to that I say I've always been built as an entrepreneur. I mean, when I was seven years old, I created bracelets, right, and I'm not the most artistic person, so I don't know why I made these, but someone showed me how to make them when I was seven. So I created the bracelets and I sold them for $2 at church. My dad wasn't happy about that one, by the way. I ended up having to donate all of the proceeds, but I made 80 bucks in the period of like an hour. So I don't know. I think I've always just kind of had the bug to find creative ways to make money and I've started many businesses over the years. Most of them have just kind of just fizzled away due to inaction or me getting bored. That's probably my kryptonite is I'll do a little bit and then I'll get bored and move on to the next thing. The others failed because I put a lot of hope and I depended on other people. So I would say well, I'm going to team with this person and the minute that they lost interest, I use that as an excuse to just say you know what I'm done here. You know, the funny thing about it is, I did mature over the years and I realized what was going on.
Speaker 1:So I started another business this is my most recent one and this was in the tech field. I was providing training, producing video training and it went really well and, to be honest with you guys, in the next six months after I ended it, I was actually planning on going full time with it and I was going to produce a massive catalog of training and I was going to really be a force in that field. I was really, really sure of it. Things were on the right track, profit was looking good, no customers were happy, everything was good.
Speaker 1:But then I ran into an issue. The employer that I worked for decided it was a conflict of interest and, to be completely honest with you, it wasn't. I was actually, if anything, helping them, I was excited and telling people about their products and ultimately, it was a good thing for them. There's no other way you could look at it. It was always a good thing for them. But all it took was the wrong person to look at it and they sent me a letter and told me to stop or I would get fired.
Speaker 1:So at that moment, to be honest with you, I spent two days in bed just not doing anything. I didn't want to talk to anybody, I didn't want to do anything, I was just done. I had worked really, really hard on that training company for two years, two and a half years, and then it was just instantly taken away, days before Christmas on top of all of this, so the timing couldn't have been worse. So finally, you know, after a couple days of feeling sorry for myself, I kind of sat back and took stock of you know where I was at in life. Right, I am 36 now and I'll be 37 in a few couple weeks. So you know I was.
Speaker 1:I kind of looked at everything and I'm like man, I'm not where I want to be. I have the skills, I have the knowledge, I have a background. I've done some form of you know, marketing, advertising. I work in sales Technically, even though I'm an engineer, so I have lots of customer-facing sales experience. I built websites. I know how to automate things, I know how to do email marketing. So I was looking at all of these skills and I realized I have a really good skill set, but I just have been Bad at using it or maybe focusing it on the right thing. And don't get me wrong, I don't think I know everything. There's a lot of stuff I don't know. I I'm just saying I felt like I had the right tools to be in a position to grow Significantly as a business and learn along the way and get better at all of those things.
Speaker 1:But, that said, you know why. A house cleaning business right. Why not create my own software? Or do consulting? Right, I actually have a background in that. Right, I've quoted customers for large projects with companies, multi-million dollar projects, and I've been the one performing the engineering work. So I've done all of that.
Speaker 1:Well, the problem is when, when you're competing with those people, you're computing against. You know really smart people, really good people with a lot of resources. And the other thing is that when I look at service businesses, a lot of service businesses operate like it's still 1990. I mean, they're using fax machines and they're, you know, having to return phone calls based on a voicemail. You know they're not even picking up the phone, they're not showing up for the job, right.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of things that I feel like is just lacking in the service industry as a whole, right, especially if we start talking about home services. You know things like pressure washing, gutter cleaning. You know lawn mowing right, that's a huge one. Landscaping companies I've had multiple that just didn't show up. Pest control companies right, same story there. We pay for pest control and and we're actually about to cancel the contract because we've had it for years and they show up for about five minutes. They, you know they were really on top of it first one or two times. They came out. After that they basically do nothing and have done nothing for the last year. So you know things like that right. So I think that it's easier to compete in the service business because you just provide a superior service, use technology. That's a huge piece of my strategy and I think that will be enough to differentiate and to grow a profitable business.
Speaker 1:Now, I guess, to finally kind of wrap that up, right, why a cleaning business? I keep saying that but I haven't actually answered it. It's, it's kind of funny, you know, I would have never thought I would be talking about starting a cleaning business, never, not in a million years. But I started considering it because I was looking for something that was had a low barrier to entry. I wanted something that Everybody needed and that was still, you know, regularly sought after and probably had no chance of, you know, reducing the demand. For in the near future, right, everybody still will have homes. I also wanted something with relatively low cost to run and, you know, admittedly, with cleaning, a big cost is going to be personnel, right, hiring people to do the work. But you know, overall it's not like. You know I'm going to be buying a bunch of vehicles and real estate and stuff like that and heavy machinery or anything like that, so the cost is relatively low. So we kind of checked all of those boxes. But the one last box I had was it must be a business where I feel the average operator is Lacking technically or has not used technology to the the fullest extent that they could to grow their business. And I think that is absolutely the story with residential cleaning businesses.
Speaker 1:Now, to add to this, there's another kind of X factor here that's kind of crazy, and that is my mom actually Ran a cleaning business, for I think it was 10 or 15 years when I was young. So she ran, she was self-employed, she was kept it up for quite a while. I mean, it was really just her. But it was successful. She had a steady clientele and you know she liked it right. So when I was a kid I actually went with her, you know, fairly often on different jobs and you know, I guess helped out as as much as a little kid can help, right. So it wasn't scary to me it didn't seem like too much was unknown.
Speaker 1:I've kind of always had this knack for cleaning, which is really weird, but I am definitely a self-proclaimed clean freak. I like stuff, clean, I scrub, I clean, I like it right. So when you put the tech side of me together, you put the competitive side of me together and the entrepreneur and then the cleaning, it just kind of makes sense. Now, as far as why I'm documenting it, you know there's podcasts out there and they talk about businesses and all of that and they talk about how they make, you know, 80 grand a month. Right, and I hope to be there and I hope to be one of them at some point. But I really wanted to have this documented from the beginning, because I don't think that you get to see that a lot. A lot of times you don't get the benefit of seeing the whole story. So my goal here and I don't know if you know I'll be successful in it, I hope I will is that I want to document this from the beginning so that you can listen to this now and Then you can listen to this five years from now to another episode and say man, mike, just you know, look where he came from right. At the beginning he was talking about, you know, which vacuum to buy, and now you know they're doing two million dollars a year in business. Right, that's, that's my goal right there.
Speaker 1:And I'm quite a bit, you know, inspired by people like Nick Huber from the sweaty podcast, or sweaty startup rather. Sweaty podcast would be a weird concept, but the sweaty startup podcast with Nick Huber is excellent. Nick is a huge fan of service businesses, so I became one as well and I owe it a lot to him, you know, in terms of the motivation and even considering them, to be honest with you, because I was all about making software and passive income and all of that, and you know he made me a believer for sure. But you know there's other podcasts to write entrepreneurs on fire with JLD. If you have never listened to that podcast, he's a huge inspiration to me, especially because he's former army. I'm former army as well, so I served in the US Army for about seven years. So we kind of have that connection right.
Speaker 1:So, listening to him and the success he's had with his podcast, granted, you know he is a professional podcaster. I don't think I'll ever be labeled that, you know, but I just wanted to document it for other people. Really, that's the goal of this podcast not to, you know, profit on or anything like that. I just want to have something to share and hopefully it helps someone going through these struggles. I know I personally, like a lot of other entrepreneurs, I suffer from analysis paralysis. I will analyze things 50 ways to Sunday and then end up not doing anything. So I've gotten a lot better about that, but hopefully seeing me go through some of this will inspire some of you to look inward and learn some things and get better and maybe just ask some questions or reconsider things you hadn't reconsidered. In a nutshell, doing this podcast is my way of giving back to those that have gone before me and had a lot of success. And yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking.
Speaker 1:All right, so where am I now in terms of the business? So I have the name of the business selected, I have registered it with the state and I've got a whole list. I've got a list of like 100 different things to do for this business. I've registered the domain name, I've got an EIN with the IRS, I've gotten I actually wrote. One of the first things I did was I wrote a five-year vision statement and I'm not sure I want to share it quite yet. But in a nutshell it was kind of me saying where is this business going to be in five years? And it's all those lofty big ideas that you have. And it's not just about money. Some of it is even things like how I want employees to feel going to work that day. How do I want customers to feel when we mess up right and then we make it better, so all the little things. It's very granular. So I sat down and wrote that before I lifted a finger for anything else and I hope that that'll kind of guide things. But let's see what else.
Speaker 1:I've hired a couple of graphic designers to come up with some logo concepts. I used Fiverr for that and for this. I wanted to get it right. So instead of hiring one artist, I actually hired two at the same time. I gave them the same brief and the same color palettes and that kind of thing and said go crazy, right, give me some concepts. So I'm hoping, between those two different artists, that I'll get something back that I like.
Speaker 1:I've also gone through starting to lay the groundwork for the website. I do have a background to some degree in basic web design and web development, so setting up the website should be, to some degree, definitely sort of a breeze. I won't need to hire anybody for that, so I will be able to get that up. I've also gone through things like how am I going to schedule jobs right? So, selecting software, I will be using Jobber that's the plan at least so that will allow me to schedule jobs, to be able to put customers on the calendar, invoice them, communicate with them, that sort of thing. I've also selected a phone service, so I'll be using Ring Central to get a 1-800 number, and then I will also have a way to route those calls to whoever will be answering them. Right, so in the beginning it might be me and hopefully, as soon as possible, for the sake of scaling, I can offload that to someone else. So, yeah, that's just the kind of things we're going through right now.
Speaker 1:In addition to that, I am definitely leaning towards sort of a clean or green approach in terms of the cleaning supplies that we'll be using. So the plan is to kind of offer an all-natural option in terms of cleaning supplies, and that's something that I just think is trending very much, and rightfully so Chemicals that you use in your house, even basic stuff like 409, multi-purpose cleaner. There's some bad stuff in those cleaners, right. So I'm hoping that having an alternative option will not only be better for people, their homes or pets, their children, but potentially it'll be something that we can justify an upcharge right, even if all be it fairly modest, but that might be something we can do. So you know, there's some things like that that I'm kind of working through a lot of very tactical things. You know, obviously this podcast is one right.
Speaker 1:I had to start very early in recording this. I mean, I actually formed the business and took my first steps towards it yesterday. So a lot of stuff to do. I suspect that by the next week I will have, hopefully, a big chunk of my to-do list will be, you know, kind of knocked off and looking a little better, because, if I'm honest with you guys, it looks very intimidating right now. But you know I'll get it done. The idea here I've got full-time employment right now is not to do everything in one day or one week, it's just to do a little bit every single day and move the needle forward every single day and be consistent. So that's what I'm going for Alright. So that said, that's all I got for today.
Speaker 1:This podcast was probably one of the longer ones that I will record, but I just wanted to give you guys a lay of the land, to kind of share where I'm at and what I'm going through and some of the whys, because I'm sure I'll. You know I'll get a lot of questions about those and you know I'll go into more depth in all of this throughout the series. Right, but yeah, for now, if that's it, listen before you head out. Give me a favor If you would leave me a review. It would mean a lot for a brand new podcast. Basically, you know, getting listeners depends on positive reviews. So if this is something you enjoy listening to and you want to follow along with this journey, then it would be amazing if you could just leave me a review. So that's all I got, take care.
