Are you new to the Smart Cleaning School Podcast? If not, please bare with me. I started as a solo apartment cleaner in 2005 and moved into real estate presentation cleaning in 2006. This opened up the doors for solo house and small office cleaning in late 2006. I grew and optimized my first solo cleaning business through 2017 to a 2-day per week cleaning job earning over $50,000 per year in profit. I loved having 5-day weekends to spend time with my family.  Check out the introduction episode to hear more of my story. We sold that business in 2018 for $80,000 so our family could move back to our hometown closer to family. I have fully detailed my selling process in the double episode, "How I Sold My Cleaning Business I & 2". We started and grew a new business in the Indian Valley of PA from 2018 to another optimized solo business working 2 days per week and earning $70,000 per year in profit by early 2021. This podcast documents that entire process if you'd like to learn how to do it yourself.  Everything changed when we got our "New Freedom Vision", which was followed by numerous monthly calls with Coach Josh, and culiminating with the victory episode called "The Fight was Worth It". Here's the short version. We desired as a family to take the ultimate trip. We wanted to go to Florida for a month in the middle of the Pennsylvania winter. It was a fight, but it was worth it. I encourage you to to back and listen to the episodes I've mentioned. I believe it's important to walk beside me as we scraped and struggled to build the team that would allow us a month away. In this episode, I want to hone in on one statement my wife Teresa said to me as we were packing up on the last day in Florida. 

"Do we have to leave?"

My immediate and unrehearsed answer was this. "If we don't leave, we can't come back."

We both stopped, nodded our heads, and had a mutual understanding of how profound that was. Neither of us wanted to leave. That's obvious! We had worked like crazy to earn 30 days in Florida with our family. It was an incredible level of freedom that very few ever experience unfortunately. But both Teresa and I knew that we hadn't built something that could earn us 60 days or 90 days yet. We certainly hadn't built something that could allow us to leave for Florida for a year or permanently. We set the goal of 30 days and Coach Josh helped us achieve it. Teresa and I talked it out for a few minutes, playing out the scenario. 

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