Smart Cleaning School

 I sat down with cleaning industry legend Ed Selkow for a 2-hour interview. We covered so much ground that I had to break it into 2 parts. In this first part, you'll learn about Ed's 50 years in the cleaning industry which includes owning 4 janitorial companies and working as an employee for a few of the largest janitorial firms in the country. He weaves in great stories and lessons that make this episode well worth the listen. 

Oh, and then you have the other stories... Ed also shares what I called "Conspiracies in the Cleaning Industry" ranging from subcontracting for NY street guy "Joey Floors" to stolen equipment and being on the payroll of a Russian dog in Chicago to how cleaners were partially responsible for Watergate and causing a U.S. President to resign! Do not miss these stories as we build up for part 2 of this interview on the cleaning industry, past, present, and future.

Check out my interview with the T-Bag Company Founder, entitled "Respectful, Reliable, Responsible with Damon Washington". You can purchase any of the T-Bag products at a 10% discount through the Smart Cleaning School Resources Page. 

 There aren't many things that really get me angry anymore. I will share two. The first is when I have a comedy of errors, where one thing after another goes wrong and frustration builds up. The second one is if you challenge my integrity. The second one happened recently at a Honda service shop. It was my first time there after hearing great things about this particular shop. My initial experience after dropping the car off was very good. They gave me a loaner car that was beautiful. They took my inconvenience and made it convenient for me. A great initial customer service experience just like I heard about. The next morning something happened that threw off my day for a few hours. I got a call from the service technician. "Ken, you took some keys from the counter that weren't yours. We have you on camera. We checked it out and we know it's you. We need you to bring those back."  

Back up a few steps. I talked to Holly in the morning and she was so kind and helpful. When I was checking out from the table here's what happened. Ken, we won't have a loaner car for you for 45 minutes. Holly came over and said. No, I put one aside for him it's ready. She was holding keys and she put them down on the table in front of me along with some papers. Obviously I took that as those were my keys. When the technician finished getting me checked in he put other papers on top of those papers and I left holding the set of keys and all the papers. I got into my loaner car and there was another set of simple keys with the exact same key fob in the cup holder. I was confused and really should have gone back in to ask why I had the extra keys with the Wawa card on it. I had no idea that Holly had just checked out a customer. She was holding their paperwork and keys when she came to tell me that there was a car ready for me. She put those keys and papers down in front of me. I mistakenly took someone else's keys and paperwork and went to work for the day. This is a huge misunderstanding. I'm kind of a moron for not realizing that they weren't regular keys but I was kind of in a hurry and I didn't process that. My keen powers of observation were not working, so I do take some blame on my end. 

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I have a few stories to tell you and I won't take much of your time because your time is worth a lot! The first one is about a little boy who desperately wanted time with his Daddy. The second is about a Daddy who desperately wanted time with his little boy. This second story lead to the creation of a metric I've used in my business for a decade. It's called the Work Day Value (WDV). What are you earning for a day away from your family? Or what are you earning per hour working away from your family nights and weekends as a side hustle. It's okay to make $25 - $30 per hour as a beginner with a plan to grow. But if your still there after a year, you're losing time that you'll never get back. What is your work day value? What is your time worth because you are trading it for time with your little boy. Some of you will feel that question more than others.

 The third story happened when I was pumping gas at Wawa. There was a problem at the pump and one of the workers came out to help a customer. At the end of the exchange, the employee said to the customer. "Sorry it took too long to get to you. The customer. It's okay. Hey I'm getting paid." The customer was on company time and had an hourly mindset. It doesn't matter how long it takes to wait at the gas station because he's getting paid by the hour. This man was in his sixties and had a lifetime of job mentality. There's nothing wrong with this at all. But it's limiting and scarce. Here's what I mean. As he stands around doing nothing at the pump for his $30, $40, or $100 per hour, he's fully satisfied. What if he thought differently? What if he valued his hour at $500 or $5,000? There are plenty of people that make that kind of money. He would no longer be satisfied at the level of income he's earning in one hour now. If he was getting paid by the job he'd be very unsettled because he realized he be wasting time. He'd want the Wawa employee to get him filled up and out of there faster. If he was getting $250 to get a job done, he'd rather have it done in 1 hour versus 10. Standing at that gas pump would drive him crazy. The mindset is totally different.

How much do you value your time? How much is your day worth? I don't want to ever leave my family and exchange it for something that is not satisfactory for me. Some food for thought. This works for your compensation for your team and how you charge your customers. It applies to what you might do outside of cleaning. There's so many things you can offer others for other income. Don't ever settle and say you're getting paid as you're standing around doing nothing! Go make a difference and go add value to others and you'll get paid in direct proportion of the value that you serve other people. This was always the hardest part for me. I asked myself this question. How much is my family worth today? I didn't want to bring home peanuts when they were worth gold bars!

Would you like more information on CBF and the potential of growing your residential cleaning business beyond 7 figures? Check out my interview with the CBF Founder, entitled "A Buffalo Charges the Storm with Debbie Sardone". Debbie is offering free consultations to listeners of this show through the Smart Cleaning School Resources Page to see if CBF could be the right solution for you. 

 Teresa and I were struggling big time in September 2008. We had a 3 year old son and infant daughter. At the time, we lived in a rented house that took 40% of our income and we still had over $125,000 in debt. It wasn't pretty. I was working like crazy with 5 part time workers. I had no systems, no money, and no clue. I got on this coaching call with my Amway upline Herb Eplee desperate for a change. I was not happy about Herb's advice, but I was receptive. He told Teresa and I that we were top heavy. All of our profit was going to payroll. We needed to either grow our revenue really fast to make money. Herb told us this is what most business owners do when they are in trouble. They try to outgrow the problem. Some make it. Herb's advice was simple. Go back to working solo. Build up your profits. Then add more revenue incrementally and hire team members. This was solid advice and we took it. I never realized we'd stay solo for 13 more years! I can't complain. We did alright having built 2 very profitable solo companies, sold one for $80k, and built a course to teach others how to start and optimize a solo cleaning company.

This Best-Of episode needed to be re-released so I could say this to Herb. Hey Herb, we did it! We have that team of 5+ part timers again. However, this time we can afford them! 

 The first area that Josh and I touched on were our stories and how they intersected.  Josh and I were friends first. We had mutual respect and trust for each other. That's why I invited him onto the Smart Cleaning School Podcast in June 2021. That episode is called, "The Cleaning Road to Nineveh with Josh Melton". That episode was a mirror to me and I saw another guy with the same story. He had aspirations outside of cleaning. He tried to run away from cleaning like Jonah ran the opposite way of Nineveh. Once Josh turned his heart in obedience back to the cleaning business he was supposed to build in 2019, everything changed! I saw that and realized that it was true for me too. Within 2 weeks of that interview, I asked Josh Melton to come Coach Josh in my life. He accepted.  

Josh shifted gears to talk about the value of coaching. We made three cases why the free help available in cleaning groups can be dangerous.

1. The information is free. There is no investment involved by the advice giver and advice receiver. Josh says we all need skin in the game, spelled P-A-I-D.
2. Don't take advice from people without fruit on the tree. The fruit must be the fruit you want. How do you know an advice-giver has that fruit?
3. Advice-givers that don't know your specific situation can only give general advice even if they have fruit on the tree. Specific advice creates accountability and accomplishment.

My goal was to go to Florida in February 2022. We completed the "New Freedom Vision" and "The Fight was Worth It". 

May 24, 2021 Where we were when we recorded our first interview

Our cleaning business was a residential & commercial mix called Carfagno Cleaning, serving the Indian Valley of the Philly suburbs. I was already well networked and good at acquiring customers. I had no systems for scaling, no employees, no desire to grow. I was a 16 year solo cleaner. I cleaned 2 days per week for $70k profit. Our revenue split was $5,325/mo commercial and $2,025/mo residential. That’s $7,350/mo total cleaning with a 72/28 comm/res split. This split used to be 90/10 res/comm in my first NY business.  

May 23, 2022 This interivew, 1 year later

After FL, we lost 4 team members. Josh helped us add 2 more offices and hired 5 more team members to get our commercial business to 16 buildings, 7 team members, and $10,475/mo comm rev (97% increase, doubled in 5 months). 

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

 Dr. David Schwartz shares the 3 Failure Diseases in "The Magic of Thinking Big" that hold masses of people back from their dreams. These failure diseases are Excusitis, Detailitis, and Procrastination. I have addressed these failure diseases in various episodes of the Smart Cleaning School. One such topic is perfectionism. This is a form of Detailitis that causes people to spin their wheels. You see it most in writers who can never quite get that chapter to sound the way they want it. This is why over 97% of writers NEVER finish a book! It happens with cleaners too. They scrub and scrub and brush and brush, hoping to make an area look perfect to them. They can NEVER get there and it ultimately kills their business. Do you relate? Go back to part 3 of the perfectionism series entitled, "Perfection is the Enemy". This will help you overcome this failure disease.

In this episode, I want to address another form of Detailitis known as overthinking. I've done multiple episodes on this topic as it has plagued me my whole life. However, like many who are failing with this disease they don't know their overthinking is causing them to fail. What is overthinking? Simple. You analyze and process and think on everything. You don't make decisions easily or quickly. Why? They don't want to make the wrong decision. Contrast this to the entrepreneurs with courage who makes mistakes on a regular basis while in the action mode. The overthinker is constantly starting and stopping, making it near impossible to build the momentum of success.  Meanwhile, the action-taker who trusts their business instincts and makes quick decisions is constantly in motion. They are building the momentum for success as they steer through the failures toward success. Do you see the difference? Which do you do? I am an overthinker and I know it has held me back in my life. I've also learned that all 3 Failure Diseases are masking fear. We are afraid of failing or possibly succeeding. Over the years, I have learned to overcome my overthinking. It's not a total healing of this failure disease, but a definite work in progress. I have recently used a different term to help me make mental shifts and breakthroughs. I say this. "I just need some clarity around this." Here's the implication. I need clarity, so I can take action.

I went to St. Augustine, Florida in February for the Total Life Freedom Retreat to meet up with 20 other amazing entrepreneurs. We are all building businesses around the country and help each other with mindset, ideas, and accountability. I came to this retreat with a need for clarity around this podcast. I wasn't sure of the direction I was taking it as well as the direction of the groups I run associated with the Smart Cleaning School. I was searching in St. Augustine for clarity and I got it with a 10-minute conversation with Sha Sparks. She is a Jedi Master in the force ability to extract emotions and deliver coaching breakthroughs in 10 minutes or under. She does this for other entrepreneurs through her podcast, "The Power of Investing in People". In fact, Sha recently interviewed me for her podcast to share my breakthrough and tell my entrepreneur's story. It was a privilege to share. Thank you Sha for trusting me with your audience. Thank you for the breakthrough you gave me. Here's how the conversation went.  It was the end of the retreat.

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 This is an episode that has been on my podcast ideas list for over a year. It's funny to me that I was afraid in the beginning that I might run out of ideas to keep a viable podcast about cleaning. I was bad wrong as my list of ideas is over 200! I've been wanting to tell this story for a while and now is as good a time as any. In May 2019, I attended a conference called Growth Now hosted by my friend Justin Schenck. At this point, Justin's Growth Now Movement Podcast had over 2 million downloads. He built had a tight community that Justin brought together in Reading, Pennsylvania for a weekend. I found out about this conference from my friend Andy Storch. He lives in Orlando and said this. "Ken, I just interviewed this guy Justin for my podcast. Cool guy. He's having an event in Reading. You wanna go with me?" My response was this. "Reading! There's nothing in Reading except a Pagoda and outlets!" I yielded as the event was an hour from my house and Andy was flying in from Florida. I had no excuse not to drive 60 minutes if Andy was flying across the country! Not long after, Vincent Pugliese joined the fun and drove in from Pittsburgh. That turned Reading upside down with the 3 of us walking into this conference. I don't know what Justin was thinking inviting us! It was a fun event and it turned out that Reading was a much cooler town than I remembered. I'm only poking fun because my mom lived in the Reading area while I was in college. The 3 Amigos absolutely had a blast that weekend, plus we made the walk to the Pagoda for our epic selfie.  

Why am I telling this story? Something really cool happened during the conference. Vincent won a Tarantula for his son because he was the only one willing to go to the front and hold it. Yes, that happened. There's more. On Saturday morning of the conference, Andy Storch showed Vincent and I his phone. He had just sold his first ticket for his Talent Development Hotseat Event that was only 6 months away. Rewind... Andy has been a talent development product salesman for years. He moved from employed to self-employed in his niche and made major strides. In 2018, he started the Talent Development Hotseat Podcast with the strategy to use the podcast to pass the gatekeepers. People that were untouchable, unreachable to a sales pitch at large companies would bend over backwards to be interviewed for a show to showcase their expertise. This played on their ego and that is powerful. It was brilliant and the first time I'd ever seen anyone market a podcast like this. These interviews gave Andy great content and connections with other 100 influencers in talent development. Andy went all in at the start of 2019 and set a BHAG to have his own conference and selling tickets for $2,000 each. It was out there, but we rooted him on. When Andy showed us his first sale in May (5 months after announcing and planning the event), we were psyched for him. Andy then said. "That's 1. I just need to sell 49 more to cover the cost of the conference and 99 more to sell out and 6 months to do it."

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 I shared a clip from an expert call in our Smart Cleaning Tribe last episode. I have another clip to share. This one is important. I want you to stop what you're doing and ask yourself an important question. 

If something rocked my very existence tomorrow and I needed time to deal and heal, would I have the margin in my business to take that time? 

You're either in a crisis, coming out of a crisis, or heading toward one. Never get complacent. Thank you Kate Sloan for your willingness to let me share this clip. If you live in the Montgomery, MN area, make sure to check out Kate's company, Chicka Chicka Broom. They are an excellent company to hire and work for! I also want to give a special thanks to the other members who contributed in this conversation. Kesha Gossett of Your Clean Break in Atlanta, GA, Michelle Allegrezza of Sparkling Homes in Albertville, MN, Jenn Jubrey of Maid Spotless Cleaning in Sand Lake, NY, Carrie Cottrell of Cleaning by Carrie in Galion, OH, Hannah Brees of Shine & Sparkle Cleaning in Dallas, OR, Robert Pierce of This Guy Cleans House in Belleville, MI, and Bryan Morton of KAS Cleaning Services in Suffolk, VA. 

 I'll never forget a coaching call I did with a cleaning company owner doing $400k in revenue. I was an optimized solo cleaner and new in coaching. My view of the cleaning business landscapte was very narrow and I had a bit of pride to contend with. Here's the scenario. The co-owners, a husband and wife team, were both working 6 days per week in this $400k revenue company. They weren't cleaning, but lived in their office managing the business. That was foreign to me. Then I heard this part. "Ken, we are profiting $35,000 per year for the family." I clarified by asking how much owner's compensation they pulled. I was assuming they had a salary of $35k and then kept the bottom line profit as well. "$35,000 is our everything." I was floored. How could this possibly be? I responded with snark. "I'm a solo cleaner with 1/6 of your revenue. I work 1/3 as much as you and keep almost double what you do. Something is badly off with the math at your company." I was sharing truth and they knew it. Nevertheless, they didn't like my answer and we never talked again. In "A Buffalo Charges the Storm with Debbie Sardone", Debbie gives this a name. It's called the "Valley of Despair". I did not realize such a valley existed in my narrow view of cleaning business growth curves. I had read the "E-Myth Revisted" and "Clockwork", which are 2 amazing books on developing business systems to scale your company. Yet, I didn't know these valleys existed until an expert series I facilitated on my Smart Cleaning Tribe called "The 7-Figure Series". I interviewed 4 recent 7-figure cleaning business owners in 2021 with questions from the Tribe with the goal of deconstructing the million dollar cleaning company. Each of these experts have allowed me to share snippets of their calls on my podcast. Here are the episodes:  

Part 1 with Kevin Smith - "It's Grace for a Reason with Kevin Smith"

Part 2 with Juan Chaparro - "Million Dollar Milestones with Juan Chaparro"

Part 3 with Josh Melton - "The Cleaning Road to Nineveh with Josh Melton"

Part 4 with Molly Moran - "4 Scaling Struggles to 2 Million with Molly Moran"

This was totally unplanned, but it turns out that 3 of my 4 experts with new 7-figure businesses are all Cleaning Business Fundamentals students with Debbie Sardone. The 4th is my personal commercial cleaning coach, Josh Melton.  

I studied these 4 calls along with the wisdom I've collected from Josh Melton, Debbie Sardone, Ricky Regalado, Crystal Hamm, and others I've been fortunate to study along the way. I don't have these numbers down, nor is this an exact road map. However, I have noticed that the path to 7-figures and beyond is filled with many dead zones aka "Valleys of Despair" and sweet spots. Why do we start a cleaning company? Most of say that we want more time and money.  We want more freedom in our lives to make the choices we want to make when we want to make them. I have noticed many $2 million plus company owners living large in income and time to pursue their passions outside of cleaning. Their business becomes so large and systemitized that they are no longer needed. Many in our industry call this an absentee business. These cleaning company owners ha

 Teresa and I place a high value on our marriage and making sure to not only date each other, but to take annual honeymoons to connect. We have 5 kids and it's very difficult to get the 1-to-1 time we need as a couple. We have been doing these Annual Honeymoon Retreats for a decade. Each one is different and we've gone to different locations. This year we went to the Glasbern Inn in Fogelsville, PA. In fact, we love this place so much that we've made this our 3rd visit. They have a fancy restaurant on site that is included in the package we buy.  

 We were enjoying our second dinner where Teresa ordered the chicken and I ordered the duck, when we were distracted by the table next to us. There were two couples in their mid to late 60's dining together. One lady of the four was talking quite a bit. In fact, she rambled on and on to the point that Teresa and I considered switching tables. We couldn't believe that this woman didn't see what we saw. She wasn't "Reading the Room" as Vincent Pugliese shared in his recent interview with the Smart Cleaning School. This woman was highly educated and had articulate opinions on so many ranging topics in education, politics, and cooking. She held the other 3 guests at her table spellbound with her intelligence. Or did she? Teresa and I were observing this play out. We decided it was more fun to observe this foursome interact together, especially since Teresa and I were reading Vincent's book, "The Wealth of Connection".

The other 3 at the table just listened, nodded along, smiled, and mostly stared at her. There wasn't any opportunity for any of the others to talk. It was like she felt it was her job to entertain the dinner table. In that self-absorbed goal she was absolutely successful. Teresa's back was toward them and couldn't turn around. She asked me. "Are the others interested in what she was saying?" I couldn't tell as the other three were very quiet. They weren't fiddling around or doing other things. They were at the surface engaged in her conversation. But then she left to go to the bathroom and something amazing happened. While she was gone the other three all talked and shared the conversation evenly between them. Their body language came alive. Their level of engagement tripled. It was a real conversation with each of the three having input and giving reactions. It was a very balanced conversation. And then I told Teresa this. "Let's see how long it takes for that lady to come back and dominate again."

As she sat down, she took stock of the conversation at hand. I could tell that she was postulating her next doctoral dissertation. The other 3 were will still quite candid for 3 minutes. I timed it. Then she opened her mouth and the other 3 stopped. Their body language shrunk as they returned to listening or lecturer mode. It was very sad. This woman was elated to return to a lively table and then swiftly stole the energy to do what Lauryn Hill describes as "Killing Me Softly". The conversation had returned to the default position with total domination by one lady. Five years ago, I would have never noticed this. I'm thankful that I can now read the room. This was a fascinating study in sociology and human behaviour.


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