Smart Cleaning School

 I was so honored when Kevin called me after crossing the one million dollar mark. That conversation lead to an expert call on the Smart Cleaning Tribe and a podcast interview with Kevin. I took clips of both and created this "best-of" episode. After hearing Kevin's take on stewardship, I completely changed my pronouns as well. It's not MY business. It's HIS business and I'm the steward or manager. That is the major heart shift that propelled Kevin's rise and it's been a major one for us as well. Enjoy this 2-part conversation replay with Kevin Smith of Grace Home Cleaning in Omaha, NE. 

As I mentioned in the episode, Kevin is a student of Cleaning Business Fundamentals. Would you like  to scale HIS 7-figure company for great income and freedom, 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. 

 I met a new friend recently from Newcastle, South Wales, AU. Dave Reeks is the owner of The Finest Clean in that area and is a new Solo Elite member. Dave has a ministry background and recently moved. He found the cleaning industry and got super excited about the potential of having his own house cleaning business. We were able to connect on Zoom with the goal for me to help him. But really Dave... you helped me.  

I met a new friend recently from Newcastle, South Wales, AU. Dave Reeks is the owner of The Finest Clean in that area and is a new Solo Elite member. Dave has a ministry background and recently moved. He found the cleaning industry and got super excited about the potential of having his own house cleaning business. We were able to connect on Zoom with the goal for me to help him. But really Dave... you helped me. 

There are tens of thousands of new cleaning business owners entering the industry every year. I'm an old-timer with a desire to keep this podcast focused on helping beginners in business owner mindset, leadership, and introducing them to amazing leaders around the industry.  Dave's questions helped me think like a new person with the benefit of my almost two decades of experience. I want to keep this episode short and sweet because the lesson I learned through Dave is simple. I believe that every business goes through three phases. I have labeled them the ISO Model for solo cleaners. I've explained this many times on this podcast already. In this episode, I want to focus on the Initializer phase.

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

 In "Building My New Cleaning Network I", I shared my marketing strategy from the summer of 2018 after moving back to the Philadelphia Area. I was scrappy and willing to knock on doors to say, "Hi, my name is Ken Carfagno." My friend Kevin Lacombe did the same thing in his new solo cleaning business when I was coaching him in late 2018. I knocked on 13 doors in the same town where my first new office was located. It worked! I had a few interested companies and one hired me! We then moved our family to another part of the suburbs and wanted to attract new clients. I followed the same strategy of knocking on doors, except I added a personalized piece to my information drop-offs and follow up process that I got from my friend Gustavo Fernandez. He showed me a few ways to stand out and I implemented them. In the month of May 2019, I knocked on 25 doors and generated a few interested prospects. Again, one hired me.  I would have continued this guerilla marketing approach each month to add one new customer each month. But it didn't sit right with me. I realized that I needed to serve the community and create a name for myself. Thus, I poured into my newest customer and became friends with his family. We started meeting for breakfast to connect, pray, and mastermind together. That's Mr. Dennis Gehman of Gehman Design Remodeling in Harleysville, PA. I've mentioned his name a dozen times on this podcast because he was that much of a help to me! We still meet for breakfast to connect, pray, and mastermind. This process taught me a huge lesson. I wanted to change my approach from cold door-knocking to attracting warm leads. The only way to do that was through service.  

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

 In "Building My New Cleaning Network I", I shared the mindset of how building your network is similar to building a water well. You can't just turn on the faucet to get water. Here is the conclusion to this October 2019 episode. 

 This episode was recorded in October 2019 as I launched my new cleaning business in the Philadelphia Area. We are so accustomed to turning on the faucet and immediately getting water. But that's not how it worked for our early settlers. They had to dig water wells and later, water pumps. They had to put in the work first to build the system for obtaining water. That's what this Best-Of illustrates. I had to prime the pump or dig the well. It's called building your network. Your network is your net worth. This episode and the next are meant to bring you back to the foundation of my current 6-figure commercial cleaning business that just allowed my family to go to Florida for a month! Pay attention to the seeds and small decisions I made to dig my water well.

After these two Best-Of episodes, I'll share an update episode to show how the seeds from this 2019 work turned into a harvest in 2020 and 2021. 

 I have been fortunate to interview several visionaries in our industry over the past year. This interview with Ricky Regalado was different. He is such a visionary that he inspired me to do greater things in this amazing industry. Take the time to listen to this one all the way through and then listen again. You will not be disappointed.  

The first portion of the interview covers Ricky's upbringing and deep family ties. This is where you start to feel the deep sense of connection that he has to the blue collar workforce in America. In the second portion of the interview, we shift gears and talk about the cleaning industry and where it's going. We covered the integral values of  hard work, grit, and perseverance that founded our country and is not being taught like it used to. In the final portion of the interview, Ricky shares his vision for the cleaning industry and how we can be a part of rebuilding America. 

Here are a few notes and quotes that stand out from this interview.

"If we were going to make this work, there wasn't enough time to have a social life because we had a vision. At some point, we'll be working on this business and not in it."

"Love it or hate it, you don't get a 10x return on a blue collar business. You get a 10x on a technology company or an invention."

"A trend isn't a short amount of time. That's a risk, a high risk and can turn around on you as fast as it went up."

Where does this generation learn grit and develop a backbone? We learned it from our baby-boomer parents and grandparents, who watched their parents and grandparents survive the Great Depression. We learned it from our immigrant parents who scrapped for everything they had. We learned it from our single moms who had no other way but up.

This industry is so poised to keep growing. We're foolish not to capitalize. Ricky is getting letters from private equity firms all the time offering to buy his company. These firms see the marketplace and see commercial cleaning as recession proof and pandemic proof. For the first 5 years, Ricky didn't like being known as a cleaning service owner. It wasn't glamorous. Now, he shouts his business with confidence and excitement. It generates responses like. "Ooh, I need a cleaning company."

There have been 30,000 new cleaning companies formed from 2006 to 2018. That number nearly doubled in 2020 to 52,000 and 2021 is likely more than 2020.

"I feel like they need to know what it is to walk in the shoes of a cleaning technician before any other thing cause then they'll get that humility." Ricky requires every employee of the company at every level must spend their first 30 days in the field cleaning. "The greatest generals started with basic training."

Ricky's Business Growth (Year to Year)

2012 $80k Coverall

2013 $250k Coverall

2014 $600k Coverall

2015 $800k Coverall Sold, $0 Rozalado

2016 $1.8M Rozalado

2017 $2.4M Rozalado

2018 $4.8M Rozalado

2019 $6M Rozalado

2020 $9M Rozalado

2021 $10M++ Rozalado

Ricky's Vision for our Industry

Rozalado is currently at the top 1% in our industry. 9% of the general labor (blue collar) workforce comes from cleaning & maintenance industry! Think of it this way. 9 of every 100 blue collar workers in the US are working for cleaning & maintenance companies. That is mind-blowing. Ricky believes very deeply that he can make a sizeable impact on the American labor force by strengthening cleaning companies. It goes back to the way of life he grew up in. All Ricky knew was blue collar and now he is able to raise the standard of living for the very people he represents through the most unlikely of businesses. 

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 Over the past several months, you have seen a tremendous shift in my personal cleaning brand as it moved from Carfagno Cleaning (50% house cleaning / 50% office cleaning) to Carfagno Commercial Cleaning and the C3 Experience (90% office cleaning). When I cleaned houses in my first solo cleaning business, I had a certain type of house and customer that I wanted. This is what made me so successful as a solo cleaner. The only aspect that I didn't master was geographic optimization as I was still traveling on my cleaning days up to an hour each way. I sought to change that in my second solo business in PA and was on the right track. I took on houses and offices in a tighter geographic window that I did in NY. However, I wasn't getting the most optimized customers. Some were low profit. Some were high drama. In fact, I made a hard decision in early 2021 to fire a customer because they were not a good fit for my company. I explain this process in "Why I Fired My First Client"The people were very kind and the mission of the organization was awesome. However, we were spending 2 hours there for $500 per month when I had other offices earning $600 per month for 1 hour of work. As a side note, I was working with my oldest 2 kids as my helpers. I knew it was a process. Therefore, I was willing to work through my ISO Model until total optimization was achieved per my goals.  "A New Freedom Vision" interrupted this.  

I hired Coach Josh to help build a company that I could leave in PA while my family traveled to FL. This was an ultimate test. What would it take? I've answered this in so many other episodes and Freedom Reports. In this episode, I want to focus on one specific aspect. Defining your ideal customer. Josh helped me do this over the summer. I had cleaned all sorts of commercial buildings over the years. My favorites were the low drama, high professional, high profit ones that I noticed fell into these niches. Small professional, dental, and small medical offices. These 3 niches were the ones I decided to hone in as I built my Project 100, which turned into a Project 250 last fall. Ultimately, my new business is loaded with the exact offices I wanted because I chose them, targeted them, and executed the right work to get them. 

We just onboarded 5 new buildings in December and January. One of these buildings is 10,000 square feet with beautiful offices and executive areas and marble floors in several rooms. We visit this building twice per week for $1,375 per month. It's a super easy building to clean and it's the closest of all of my customers to my house. To say this is an ideal customer would be an understatement. As I was packing up my things during the initial cleaning, an interesting thought occurred to me. I stared across the parking lot into the school next door. Inside that school was the customer that we fired a year ago. That school was a gift for a short time when we needed it, but it was the wrong customer for our business model in many ways. It was low profit and high drama. However, the location was an A+. I thought this. 'So close, but yet so far.' Here are two buildings, basically next to each other. One was our starting 2021 client and another was our starting 2022 client. They were so close geographically, yet so far in how ideal they are to the C3 business model. I packed up and drove away feeling so grateful for the types of customers we now on-board in our commercial cleaning business. And it's not by accident. 

 About a year ago, I had a conversation with Carrie Miyazono. She is the owner of Kaizen Cleaning in Chanhassen, MN and a Black Belt in taekwondo. Her solo cleaning business is highly niched to clean martial arts dojos. These schools have students sweating up the mats every day of the week. In many cases, the owners are either cleaning themselves or have a staff member do it. Therefore, Carrie found a niche that she could serve with excellence. It was so much fun guiding her to pick up her first gym for $400 per month. But she got discouraged after that as no one new was hiring her service. Carrie was working an overnight job at the time that she desperately wanted to quit to have better pay and hours with her new solo cleaning business.

 I helped her mindset with an example she knew well.  I asked. "What's the difference between a white belt and a black belt?" She answered. "Time, commitment, repetitions, and a willingness to suck." I asked her about confidence and technique and she told me that those two are byproducts of the first four. Then she summed it all up. "The difference between the black belt and the white belt is the use of those four things. More time leads to more commitment. More commitment leads to more repetitions. More repetitions leads to  a greater willingness to suck. The cycle self-perpetuates and your technique, form, and confidence increase and so do your belts. Eventually you make black belt."

I thought about the sports greats of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and their legendary pursuit of practice. When you take 5 shots, you're upset to miss one and may not take too many more. When you take 500 shots, missing 50 or 100 is no big deal because you'll keep shooting. This is what Carrie is talking about. It's the pursuit of becoming highly skilled at your craft. For Michael and Tiger, it was basketball and golf. For Carrie, it was taekwondo.

I related to her growing your solo cleaning business through the ISO Model is the exact same way. This first gym that she got is like earning her white belt. It was really hard to get. She was sloppy. Her technique sucked, but she got the job anyway. She didn't get the best price. However she achieved the first belt and now she's ready for the yellow. The yellow is getting another gym to prove she can do it again. Carrie will need to apply the same fundamentals to her cleaning business and she'll eventually become an Optimizer and a black belt in my system. Solo cleaners out there, think about your business like this. Don't expect to start as a black belt. If you like the business and lifestyle that I had as an optimized solo cleaner has, be willing to put in the time, commitment, reps, and willingness to suck that I did in two different states over 16 years. Fortunately for you, the ISO Model Black Belt can be achieved in 2 years with my system. If you don't want to put in the time or commitment or reps, go do something else. But if you are willing jump into the ISO Model through the Solo Cleaning School Elite, you can absolutely earn all of your belts.

To those that would like to go beyond my black belt system and become a 5th degree master black belt and scale to a 7-figure company with great income and freedom, 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. 

 There is only one true video game console. It's called NES or Nintendo! And within the NES world, there is only a few real games. They are everything Super Mario, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, and Contra! Where are all my Gen X'ers? And yes, Gen Y'ers too? Let's talk the brilliance of the game Contra in this episode. No. It's  not going to be this. "Ken, it's up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start." That's a different podcast!  

The game of Contra had several missions where you had to navigate through a constantly scrolling screen left to right and bottom to top to reach the bad guy at the end of each level. The game was near impossible to beat without the above cheat code for 30 extra lives. If you're listening to this and you beat Contra with the non-cheat 4 lives... please email me so I can give you a shout out on this show! Anyway, let's get back on track. There were several choices of weapons you could get. You start with a single-shot semi-automatic rifle. It's not a great weapon. Then there's a few others that are better like the wave gun, where it shoots a single shot that propels in a sweeping wave form. The wave is better than the first weapon. There's the machine gun, which shoots several bullets at a time straight. This is efficient especially for destroying the fortress shields, but it's hard to win a level with the basic rifle, wave, or machine gun. You need the big guns. They are simply known in the Contra Universe as "S" and "L" for spreadshot and laser.

The laser beam sends a long powerful blast that wipes out multiple guys and opens up force field shields in one shot. It has the equivalent power of at least 10 machine gun rounds. It's highly focused, accurate, and powerful. Many Contra junkies can win with the laser and swear it's the best. But the laser camp is much smaller in size than what I and many others believe. There is but one ultimate weapon in Contra. It's called the spreadshot. This gun shoots 10 rounds at once in a spread of 30 degrees. It eliminates everything in it's path from a distance. Plus, you can get close to any shield and the combined power of all 10 shots equals one laser blast. You can see why the spreadshot is the best. Yes, I'm biased.

I'm going to relate this to a conversation. Coach Josh has a business partner Chad Brown and they run the Stronger Business Podcast. They're also partners in the Athens Cleaning Company. Chad is crushing it. Josh is crushing it too but not quite to the level that Chad is, so I asked Josh the difference. Josh said he is super focused and goes after things, but Chad just implements faster and tries more things out. Chad fails at more things. I remember Josh telling me months ago a quote he heard. The difference between a seven figure earner and an eight-figure earner or a six and seven-figure earner is their speed of implementation. People that take more action, fail more. They also succeed much faster. I told Josh this. I think that you have chosen the laser beam and Chad has the spreadshot from Contra. And I probably have that wave gun or machine gun! He liked the analogy and we laughed it off, but it's so relevant. 

There are two takeaways you should get from this episode. One is simple. You can win with any weapon, but why not choose the best one. The second is even more obvious. Nintendo is still the greatest gaming system of all time! 

What gun are you aiming at your business? Would you like help in helping you see what you may not even see yourself? Make sure to check out the many free & paid resources available at the Smart Cleaning School website. Also, do you have questions for me? Book a free coaching call on my website! 

 This month's Freedom Report starts with a clip from a call with Coach Josh. I had accomplished a lot in December as you heard in the last report, adding 5 new buildings and 1 new team member. The 5 buildings added $3,800 per month of new revenue and brought us to 13 buildings and 5 houses to delegate. The new team member would take 3 of the buildings, leaving a lot more still to delegate. I felt confident at the end of December that I could shift focus from marketing & sales to hiring. The #1 priority had to be working my way out of a job!  

In this clip, there are a few great quotes from Josh. 

"We'll always be leaving money on the table. If we're so focused on getting all the money on the table, we'll never be the greatest at any one thing."

"I have to choose the sanity of my team over the expansion of my business." 

"Just because you could pick up these clients doesn't mean you should."

"You're eliminating margin when I don't think you have to."

This conversation has been the hardest one for me in coaching. I'm amazed. The calls where we needed revenue and team members challenged me, but they were all answers that ended in 'yes'. This answer has to end in 'no'. I did focus on the team-building, training, and systems in January. That was how we'd get to Florida. Before I go there, let me share more about margin as that was such a vital lesson from this coaching call. I have made promises to my current 5 houses, 13 buildings, and 5 team members. My number one priority is to honor all those promises. I could do this with the time window, but we'd have little margin. Therefore, I made some key decisions in January. 

1. Decision 1 - I don't know what I'm going to do with house cleaning, but I decided to create some margin as I'm away in Florida by canceling my house cleaning while I'm gone. I will lose $800 in profit. I talked to each of my customers and 4 of the 5 are okay with it. The 5th house wanted a referral to another company that could fill in while I'm gone. I fully accept that I may lose this customer as a result. I am okay with it as I am going away from house cleaning and it's my least profitable house of 5. Removing 5 houses from my calendar for a month adds a lot of margin. In other words, it's less for me to think about while I'm gone.
2. Decision 2 - I have three buildings that are monthly. I will not delegate those yet. I completed them at month-end and will clean them again with my kids after I get back. I just had to shift them back one week. This adds more margin as my 13 buildings and 5 houses is down to just 10 buildings. I actually gain about $300 profit as I don't have to delegate this work.

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