When I started this podcast, I predicted certain themes would come up often like pricing, people skills, leadership, business owner mindset, and cleaning efficiency. But I never saw the theme of overcoming fear emerging so often. In "Yeah, That's Fear", we explored the 3 Failure Diseases of Excusitis, Detailitis, and Procrastination. Go back and listen to that episode to refresh. Fear disguises itself in so many ways. Fear causes us to stop taking action or never start. I want to share a story in this episode from my friend James Hardy of the Carpet Guys. He is such an expert in floor cleaning and carpet & upholstery restoration that it's preventing him from scaling his business to the next level. This was me for years as a solo cleaner. First I'll share the story and then we'll unpack it. This will become part 4 of the Perfection Series, which includes "Excellence Vs. Perfection", "Accept the Uncertainty", and "Perfection is the Enemy". Each episode has covered different angles of how perfection crushes our productivity and growth.  I encourage you to go back and re-listen to the previous 3 episodes as you have the opportunity.  

Here's my James Hardy story! Jim apprenticed as a carpet cleaner at 17-years-old and moved into his own business soon after. We are the same age, so that's over 25 years in the trade. Malcolm Gladwell penned mastery of a skill after 10,000 hours of hands-on training in his book "Outliers". By that measure, Jim is far beyond at 50,000 hours of carpet, upholstery, and floor cleaning. Jim knows the science of floor cleaning better than anyone I know. He has a reputation in our area as the Cadillac of carpet, upholstery, and floor cleaning services. In fact, Jim does restoration cleaning which "restores" the carpet to its original condition. I've seen him work and he's truly an artist. A couple weeks ago, Jim asked me to breakfast at Sammy's Bullfrog Cafe. Backstory... In early 2020, I released "Apologize with Action". I was submitting a cleaning proposal to Sammy's at this time and also made an introduction to James Hardy. Sammy never hired our cleaning service, but he did hire Jim for carpet cleaning of the cafe every 6 months. I said yes to breakfast and asked him why the sudden invite. "I was out at Sammy's on Monday night and I just wanted to see how the carpets turned out. Would you come with me?"

I had to make a pit stop at the vacuum cleaner store and met Jim after. He was already surveying the carpets and shared this. "I moved all the tables off the carpet and cleaned it once like normal. But it was really dirty and I wasn't satisfied. So I ran the machine a second time. It looked good, but I know that the final presentation of the cleaned carpet doesn't set for 24 hours. I usually get out to as many jobs as possible the next day to do an inspection. I didn't really feel that good about this job Monday night going home and wanted to see it this morning. I felt weird coming here alone. Thanks for coming."

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