I ended the November Freedom Report with peace. We had brought our plan to go to Florida to God and asked Him to show us the way. We had over 20 job applications come in with no new hires. I personally connected and made initial connection to 240 local office cleaning prospects and followed up with close to 100 phone calls to find out if they had a cleaner in house or outsourced and if they were happy. This lead to 7 interested prospects and 4 proposals sent. But the net result of all of this effort was 0 new team members and $0 in new revenue with 65 days left before Florida. Josh gave me a challenge. "1 & 1 and we're having fun." Can I add 1 new office and 1 new team member by the end of November. I recorded the November Freedom Report just prior to month end. Let me just say this. God answered our prayers and broke the dam loose! A lot has changed in 30 days!

2 exciting things happened on November 30th. Around lunchtime, I got a call from the HR manager from one of the 4 proposals I sent to an insurance agency. They accepted my proposal, signed the contract, and wanted to start service on January 1st! And get this! It was one customer and two buildings for a total of $950 per month. I interviewed a promising candidate named Joanne the day before. I talked it over with my wife and Coach Josh. We decided to send Joanne a job offer on Tuesday afternoon. She accepted. For the first time in months, things were looking up. That's 1 new customer and 1 new employee. We met Josh's challenge of "1 & 1 and we're having fun" with hours to go in the month.

We were ready for December... we thought. Let's do the bad first. I did a poor job with selecting Joanne. She worked with us one weekend. Her work was good, but something about the job wasn't a culture fit with Joanne. I can only speculate that she wanted complete autonomy sooner and that she didn't like the family business aspect. I had two of my kids working and helping me teach Joanne our cleaning system. Ultimately, I made a bad hire and this will happen a lot. I just need to keep working my hiring process to attract and repel for culture. Josh helped me work through so much of my hiring system in December.  He helped me turn a bad into a good! The clip for this month's Freedom Report is an epic step-by-step on what Josh is looking for and how he attracts them. Here's a recap of the elements of my hiring system we added in December. Josh also issued a new challenge. "2 & 2... it's only a few."
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1. We added a 2nd job on Facebook and Indeed. The first was for "Weekend Side-Gig Office Cleaning". The second one we added was "Weeknight Side-Gig Office Cleaning". Josh predicted I'd get more applicants looking to do side work after their full-time job during the week. He was right. Our Indeed ads alone captured over 30 leads in December.
2. I set up multi-step process to get to an interview. I had 5 no-shows in a row in November, then 1 that showed up after setting up a few hoops. I offered her a job in late November but she ghosted me. I had 7 more interviews in December with only 1 no-show or 8 total booked. Each of these candidates completed a 15 minute questionnaire, 15 minute DISC assessment, and 30 minute podcast sharing my company's culture (mission, vision, and values). I wanted to hire each one of them.

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website