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
Cleaning Biz Update: Making a difficult choice
In this show, I talk about some challenges we've run into, and a pretty major decision I'm making: to quit our residential business completely. Listen in as I talk through some of the reasons we're making this change, and what the plan is going forward. Originally aired Nov 20, 2023.
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. Hey, what's up? Everybody Mike here, welcome back to today's show.
Speaker 1:It's been a little while and you know, I think a lot of times when you know, you see someone on social media or you know a podcast or YouTube channel or whatever the case is, when they drop off the face of the planet, usually you kind of think either A they've lost interest, b things are not going well, or, c they've just quit completely. Well, I can tell you I've definitely not lost interest. I can tell you that I've definitely have not quit. But I can't tell you things have been super smooth and you know it's kind of funny. You would think. You know the whole point of this podcast was to document the good, the bad, the ugly as we build towards a million dollar cleaning business. And I will tell you it's a lot easier to say that than it is to do it, because I am by nature a relatively positive person. But when you feel like you're reporting on bad stuff all the time, it kind of makes you not want to report in on it, right To skip over it because you're tired of being negative. So let me give you guys kind of a breakdown of the last few weeks.
Speaker 1:I guess now, officially we've been in business for two and a half months. The first two and a half months I'd say the first month, was really slow. The second month was crazy, very, very busy, really, really promising. And then the last two to three weeks has been like completely dead, like we for a week didn't get any leads, we didn't get any responses from customers that we had quoted. We didn't get answers when we called anybody text messages, emails we got nothing. So during that time I revamped some of our pricing and that sort of thing which you know. I don't think that had anything to do with the lack of, you know, activity. I think it was just a slow time. We're getting towards Thanksgiving and I think a lot of people just you know they want to start thinking about that stuff but they're still not quite in that mode. So I think it was just a dead time. Thankfully, I will say that this week has actually been pretty busy and we are actually on track. If everything goes well, this week will be our highest revenue week since we started and I think we'll be at about $1,000 in revenue for this week, which you know I know that's that's nothing, especially underway to a million dollars. But when you consider that we have been in business for two and a half months just barely I would actually argue less than that Then I'll take it. I'll take it. That's not a bad start.
Speaker 1:So, in other news, we've had some improvements in terms of pricing. I kind of mentioned that already, but I switched our pricing to essentially to a flat rate model, and it's essentially what's the best way to put it. It's a flat rate for kind of the base price. So, for example, the way I break out the base price is one time cleanings. That would be. You know, you call us and just say I just need you to come out for this thing. You're not interested in scheduling biweekly, monthly, none of that. You just need us. For now, that would be one time pricing and again, that is all flat rate and it's based on number of rooms, which you know. Initially I had some hesitation switching to that model, but I do like it so far because it makes it a lot simpler for our team to quote, and it also makes it really simple for the customers to consume that right. It's real easy to just say, okay, well, we priced by the bedroom, how many bedrooms? We don't have to do a whole lot more to give them their pricing right. So that's actually something that's really nice. And I know there's someone out there saying that's a risky. You know that's a very risky approach that could lead to under-bidding a job. And you're right, it absolutely can, it does. But what I will tell you is that it definitely is offset by the number of jobs we have where we didn't underbid because of that flat rate and it actually worked out so that we're profitable. So I'm not a huge fan of the model, but so far I do like what I'm seeing. So anyway, there's the one time.
Speaker 1:Another category I mentioned is move out, move in cleanings. That's pretty straightforward You're moving, you need a cleaning. That's a lot more work than the other types of cleanings. And the same story goes there. We have flat rate for move out or move in cleanings and it's based on bedroom. Now, moving on, we also have recurring flat rates. So those are based on bi-weekly, weekly or monthly. You know, at the end of the day, there's a few of those kind of base categories, right, one time, move in, move out, recurring and then we also have add-ons. Things like do you want us to wipe the inside of the kitchen cabinets? Would you like us to clean the inside of the oven, the inside of the refrigerator? How about the baseboards at the bottom of the wall? So those are kind of things we consider add-ons.
Speaker 1:But the nice thing is, at the end of the day, pricing this is super simple. I mean we pretty much say, hey, you want monthly. We have a chart five bedroom here's your price. Would you like this, this or this? And add-ons no, okay, that's your price and it won't change. That's it. So that's been working out okay so far.
Speaker 1:Another thing we did is I actually started publishing kind of a snapshot of some of that pricing on the website. It's not a holistic view of everything, but it definitely gives you an idea, price-wise, of where we're at for just general cleanings. So I will say I don't know if that's been helpful. I know for me, being a consumer and using services from other companies, seeing the pricing on the website is pretty awesome. I like it personally. So let's see.
Speaker 1:In addition to all of that I would say one thing that's kind of working well for the business is it's mostly hands-off. For me right at this moment, I definitely still spend a little time here and there as needed, doing just about anything that needs to be done, whether it's helping out on a clean to get it done quicker, or whether it's answering questions about products, that sort of thing. I definitely have been helping a little here and there, but it's not every day and it's not too bad. Time-wise the investment is relatively small. So that's been good and that's good because that's been giving me time to focus on building the business, partnerships, advertising, getting our name out there, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Now, moving forward, the plan is to basically stay on the course we're on Focus on excellence, focus on getting good customer reviews, building our Google reviews that's been a big focus of mine and basically just making sure that we're highly responsive to customers. I will say most cleaning companies answer your pricing questions and that sort of thing, if you're lucky, within a day, believe it or not. A lot of them never reply and I've heard this many times from our customers. So our goal is to be extremely responsive. My personal goal is within, I'd say, two hours at the most. You have pricing and we also will communicate however you prefer to. We'll text it to you, we'll call you, we'll send you an email, whatever you prefer we can do that.
Speaker 1:So that's really it. We're trying to just stick to the basics and watch the customer base grow, which it has been recently. As I said, we had a couple of weeks there where it was just completely dead, but I think things are picking up. I don't know, it might be too early to say that, but we'll see. Hey, thanks for listening to the podcast. If you genuinely found this podcast useful, helpful, maybe just a little bit entertaining kind of following our journey to a million dollars do me a favor and leave me a review. That's the thing that will help me more than anything. Thank you and have a great day.
