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
Mission Cleaning Pre-Launch Update #1
As we begin our long journey to $1M/year in sales, we kick it off with our first update. We get our first recurring job, I freak out and delete our entire CRM, and generally am high-strung in this episode as I navigate the stressors of a new service-business owner. Originally aired August 10, 2023.
Well, I'm having a little bit of stress here because about probably about 10 minutes ago, I trashed all of the work I had done on the CRM in the last few days.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:What's up everybody Mike here in today's update. This is the very first update I've done for mission cleaning and you know it's such a big update that I actually had already recorded this. I recorded one only. I think it was only about five days ago, and so much changed in five days that I literally deleted the previous podcast before publishing it, because the previous update was pretty much hey, everybody, I'm waiting on a bank account to get set up and let me tell you, the bank account got set up and a lot of other stuff also happened, so we're going to go over some of that today.
Speaker 1:All right, so just diving in, where are we currently with mission cleaning services? Also, I'll often just refer to it as mission cleaning. So I set this date. I said that September 1st I want to be open for business and I use that to just push myself to keep the momentum, and I'm really upset with myself over that date. It's causing a lot of headaches for me. Now, that said, where are we currently? Well, the bank account got set up, like I said, and the next thing on my list was to set up all of our internal systems. So this was our customer relationship management, or CRM software, or scheduling, dispatch software, quickbooks for our accounting and invoicing, those kind of things.
Speaker 1:So the first thing I started working on this week was the CRM, and I've actually got some experience with CRM. Specifically, I've got a lot of I mean probably 10 plus years with Salesforce, but I think Salesforce is kind of awful. Maybe it's okay for like an enterprise, very large organization, but I think it's way overkill for a small business. So I evaluated a few different solutions. Now, one of the pieces of software that continually kept coming up in my search was for service businesses specifically was Jobber, housecall Pro, service, titan Service, fusion. There's a couple of them. Mostly Jobber, though, was the number one that kept coming up. So I really took a close look at it, keeping in mind I come from a tech background, right, and the problem is I heard multiple complaints about Jobber being slow, locking up, having some issues that to me sound like poor software, so I wrote that off the list instantly.
Speaker 1:The next one I kind of looked at a little bit was Housecall Pro, and then, you know, ultimately I said you know what, if I'm building this for scale, these solutions are really small businesses. If I really want to build this company to scale, then why not just start with software that can scale? So I started evaluating CRMs and my approach changed and I said I'm going to look at multiple pieces of software and I'll just stitch them together. It shouldn't be too hard, as long as I make sure they integrate appropriately which, on that note, by the way, if you are a business owner, you're starting a business.
Speaker 1:Definitely look at Zapier. It is Z-A-P-I-E-R. It is essentially an automation tool that allows you to stitch different pieces of software together based on triggers and events. So, basically, you can do like you could say hey, when you create a new contact in the CRM, then update a spreadsheet in Google Sheets I don't know, that's just an example or send an email from Gmail, for example. There's, you know, a million different combinations of this. But the point is, if you're trying to integrate two pieces of software, as Zapier should definitely be your number one stop, and that's not a sponsorship or anything, that's just me you know, that's good advice.
Speaker 1:It's one of my favorite tools. But that said so, that was my plan to have all these different pieces of software, you know one for scheduling, one for CRM, that was to maintain the leads, that was to generate emails and handle inbound messaging and that sort of thing, and that was also going to be used to schedule our estimates. So the flow of the business in my mind was kind of like this Someone would call us or email us, Our team would receive this and then use HubSpot to set up a new lead schedule, an estimate. Once the estimates set up, myself or one of the team members would then go on site and do a walkthrough of the house and ultimately generate an estimate on the spot and provide it to the customer. And then the rest you can kind of. You know pretty straightforward right, if they say yes, we schedule a time to come clean, we come clean, we invoice them, we collect payment, everybody's happy.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm having a little bit of stress here because about probably about 10 minutes ago, I trashed all of the work I had done on the CRM in the last few days and I decided to go with House Call Pro as our one piece of software. And I did this because I was having a really hard time finding a tool that handled field service management well. And if you're not familiar with that term, it's basically the concept of, like, when you dispatch a team, how do you handle the scheduling of that team? How do you or a cleaner or technician, or whatever your industry is right, but it's really about handling the entire process. Once they're in the field, how do you communicate with them? How do you have a checklist so they know what to do? How do you generate an email after the job is done asking for reviews? How do you, you know, send a text message to the customer telling them you're on your way? All of that, right, I wasn't finding anything I was really happy with and it just became apparent it was going to be a headache. So, you know, I went back to Jobber and House Call Pro and, as I mentioned earlier, I just wasn't a fan of what I'd seen and heard about Jobber. So I'd heard excellent things about House Call Pro and that's what we're going with. So I'll definitely let you guys know what I think about it as I dive into it more, but I will be messing a lot with that in the next week setting it up and then hopefully, once it's all set up, starting to train the team. We have one admin person that will be helping to handle, you know, inbound calls and that sort of thing, scheduling, estimates and jobs. So I'll need to do some training on that. But let's see what else.
Speaker 1:So there's been some really big developments literally today, and it's such a crazy thing how small the world is. So I had a professional contact reach out to me today to ask a question about something technology related and just in the conversation it came up that I was starting Mission Cleaning Services and this friend of mine said hey, you know, my parents are moving into a new house. They could use a cleaning right, and I pretty much offered to do it for free. At that point I said you know what? This is a great learning experience. We can, you know, test our process and our scheduling and all of our back end systems.
Speaker 1:So that was kind of my thought right, we could use it as a really good live test before we go actually live on September 1st. So in this conversation he says hey, by the way, you know, I think I'm going to hire you to just come out weekly or bi-weekly, right. So you know that was cool, so that was kind of like okay, we have our first free occurring customer, right. So that's pretty awesome. But where it got really interesting is it turns out that he's very good friends with one of the local house builders that's building you know, several brand new large communities.
Speaker 1:So then it became kind of a conversation about hey, if I talk to him, you guys might be able to handle, you know, cleaning these brand new houses right before people move in. So we're working on setting up a meeting and that could be big, you know that.
Speaker 1:I mean we could be talking who knows right, that could be very steady work and very large scale, so that's really cool. In addition to that, I am scheduled I did some networking. I'm scheduled to do a very, very brief presentation at a realtor meetup. I heard that a bunch of realtors do a local meetup and I went ahead and invited myself. They said, yeah, that's great. I think their only ask was that I bring a giveaway gift over $25 of value. I'm happy to do that. That's again part of the networking trying to build our brand and get known in the community. Hope to do more stuff like that.
Speaker 1:I also started this is an interesting one. I started trying to do what I would call preliminary interviews. The last couple of days I basically put out on social media that I'm going to be looking for our first cleaner. I really had a specific idea of what I wanted. I wanted someone that was very hardworking, extremely reliable and had the capability to grow into sort of a lead cleaner so that they could sort of to some degree manage a team, not necessarily as a full-time thing, but just take over some of those duties.
Speaker 1:Eventually, and of course, have their pay reflect that. I'll spare you guys the details, but I'm learning the hard way that the quality of candidates you get on social media are pretty. They vary pretty widely. That's probably the best way I could put it. The search continues. That's pretty much where we're at. The search continues for that person. Still working on that.
Speaker 1:In addition to that, I started ordering supplies, lots of supplies. I probably made the largest order of cleaning supplies I've ever done in my life. That's all coming. I'm working on getting a storage unit rented out. My plan is to use a storage unit to set up some shelves and that kind of thing and have just kind of the basic stuff there rags, brooms, backings, whatever, mops or dusters or whatever. Just have all of our supplies kind of stocked there. That's it as far as the major checklist items that I've accomplished or have been working to accomplish the past week. I'm sure next week's update will be pretty significant as well.
Speaker 1:As far as attitude, I would say I was very, very optimistic a few days ago and now I'm kind of shifting into being terrified. If I'm being honest with you guys, I guess the reality of having employees depend on me to pay their bills is kind of hitting me. That's something I take pretty seriously. Wanting to live up to the things that I think a good company should be, that kind of weighs on me a little bit. I'm definitely feeling the pressure of that. I'm keeping things moving forward and hoping it all works out. That's all you can do. Hey, if you enjoyed this podcast, if you found it entertaining, maybe you just picked up some tips, some things that might help you with your business, I don't know. Either way, if you liked it, do me a favor and leave me a review. It means a lot and it helps this thing grow faster. Have a good one.
