Smart Cleaning School

 I have to come right out in the open and make a confession. I have been chronically late my whole life. I overslept and missed the school bus in middle and high school at least 20 times. I was late to my SAT exam. I was late to many of my college classes. I was late to my job at GE and it got worse the longer I was there. I have been late to cleaning appointments and estimates. I have been late just about every Sunday for church. Why am I always late? It's my mom's fault! You didn't see that one coming from the podcast host! All of the admissions of lateness were the ones in my control. Let's turn the clock back to elementary school. I missed the bus several times because my mom couldn't get out of the house in time as she had to drive me. Not only did I miss the bus, but my mom would follow the bus to the next stop to put me on. That was humiliating to have 15+ gawking kids waving and laughing at me from the back of the bus. My mom was RIGHT behind it! I was late to Kindergarten and this was double lateness. My mom dropped me off at my Aunt Donna's apartment on her way to work. Aunt Donna was supposed to take me to school an hour later. However, Aunt Donna liked to sleep and I got to watch a lot of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. That's when I knew I'd be really late to Kindergarten as it was only a half day. Then there were the days that I got to watch the Price is Right while Aunt Donna slept. Those were the days that we'd pull into school and my friends were being dismissed. I have no idea how I passed Kindergarten! I was late to every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other family get together with my mom's side. We'd typically show up 2-3 hours late. It got to the point that my grandfather (mom's dad) would tell his daughter (my mom) that the gathering was 2 hours earlier to get her there on time. He affectionately called this "Lynn Time" (my mom's first name). We'd still be an hour late. I was early once. The story is told that my mom gave birth to me in the hallway while my dad was getting his hospital gown on. 

As you can see, I have a long and rich track record of being late. I adopted this from my mom. I was joking that it's my mom's fault. At any point in my life I could have taken full responsibility and made the decision to be on time. The truth bears out. Being on time has not been a priority to me. My wife is the complete opposite. She hates being late and my history frustrates her, especially with church and family events. That all changed on November 22, 2020. My other grandfather (dad's dad), Ken Carfagno Sr passed away. He was my Pop-Pop. I've told this story many times on this podcast and honestly it's helped me tremendously with the grieving process. For the remainder of this podcast, my goal is to speak to the chronically late and see if I can't wake you up.

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 That article was funny for sure! My family got a few chuckles as I read it to them. Let's step back and think about it for a minute. Why was it funny? The answer will hit you like a ton of bricks. The author in each headline or instruction was trying to communicate a message. In some cases, they were trying to warn others of danger. Unfortunately, the authors didn't edit their own writing or have others review. Had they done some basic editing, they could have ensured their communication was delivered in the way it was meant. Instead, we are left with double meanings and funny emails. How are you doing this in your communication to others? How do you communicate with your spouse, your kids, your parents, siblings, relatives, friends? How do you communicate in the board rooms, conference rooms, and Zoom rooms to co-workers or your team? How do you communicate in your texts/IMs/emails to customers, team members, vendors? We live in a world of auto-correct, where we trust a computer to edit for us. This is dangerous. Be honest. How many times have you sent something that auto-corrected to something totally out there? What happened next? Shame, embarrassment, and a follow up text with the correction. Why do we get so lazy and allow ourselves to trust the editing of a computer?  

"Ken, you're going overboard. It's 2022 and everyone does it." Okay, you're excuse is that everyone is communicating with laziness and that makes it okay? What about standing out? What about being a person that means what he says and isnt' mean when he says it? What happened to the basic rules of grammar that our mothers taught us as kids? Does all of that go away because we have emojis and spell-checker? NO! I want to urge you to be careful with your words. Be careful with the words you speak as they could be misinterpreted. Be carefull with the words you write as they could be harming your relationships or brand. Is it really worth it? Can't you take an extra few minutes to edit every headline, every email, every blog,  every text, plan out a phone call or a presentation? I believe you will enjoy greater success in your relationships and business if you do.

Do you need someone to talk to about your words. I'm here. Email me at [email protected] or book a free coaching call on my website, Smart Cleaning School. 

 This is an unintentional third part to the Perfection Series. In the first episode, "Excellence Vs. Perfection", I share some stories from struggling solo cleaners as they clean. The takeaway is this. Perfection is selfish. You are trying to make something so clean to scratch the itch you have. You are doing it to please you, not the customer. Here's an example. If perfection represents a 10 in cleaning, excellence is around 8. You can get to an 8 quickly and efficiently. But taking an 8 to a 10 may add hours. These extra hours costs you money and inconvenience for the customer. The irony is that you'll never get to 10 anyway. Go for excellence, which is learning what makes the customer happy and accomplish it every time.  

Part two of the perfection series was a revisit of perfection from the mental health side. In "Accept the Uncertainty", I unpack a therapist's tool for helping OCD patient's break free from the perfection. Some of you that struggle with perfectionism also deal with OCD or other mental health. If you can treat your mental health and learn some tools like accepting the uncertainty, you will be able to clean at the excellence level and be okay with it.

In this third part, I'm taking another look at perfection. I'll even go as far as to say that perfection is the enemy! Craig Rochelle is a Christian pastor and leadership coach. He uses the term GETMO, which stands for Good Enough to Move On. We've already covered this in the first two podcasts for cleaning. GETMO is excellence. What is good enough? What is the level of cleaning and customization to each customer that makes them mostly happy. Figure this out, do it, and MOVE ON. That's GETMO. That's excellence. Do you GETMO it?

Let's move this concept of GETMO vs. perfection into the area of building a team. I'm way past perfection in cleaning, but team-building is a different story. I know the exact type of person, personality profile, professional status, and such that I'm looking for. I have designed filters an hoops in my hiring process to eliminate the wrong ones and attract the right ones. This is great and over time may yield the team I'm looking for. There are some problems. 

1. I haven't built a team, so how do I know for certain all of the variable I think I know?
2. I have a short time to delegate my entire business so I can take my family to Florida for a month. Can I get by with less than perfect team members?
3. Am I chasing away the right people with too many hoops? Is my process too tight?

Coach Josh has been pushing me on this. He wants me to move away from perfection and use discernment in hiring. In my world of systems and being an engineer, I want the right people to filter through my mechanical process like robots. But people are not robots and I may be losing great people because of the perfection that I'm after. Does this trigger anything for you? What is your next goal for your team? You may be like me where my next goal requires team A, but my longer term goal requires a entirely different team B. Why should I perfect my process for team B members when I just need GETMO team A to get 'er done? 

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 Nobody predicted 2020 or what would happen in the world. As I take a step back, I notice things particularly in the working world. First, let me go back 20 years! I started my career in 2000 as an engineer for a large corporation. I had to wake up at 6am, get ready, and be in a cubicle by 8am. I would stay in my cubicle farm until 5pm and do it 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year. I had 2 weeks off, which I would typically reserve for the Christmas break. I would dream of owning my own business and not being stuck in this cubicle. That's when I saw the Amway business and jumped at the opportunity to earn my freedom from the corporate world. I learned about this new way of commerce called e-commerce and the Law of the Power Curve. This law plots all major technologies on X-Y axes of time and market penetration. Here's how it works. Any new technology has early adopters who try it out. It takes a long time for a new technology to gain momentum as it steadily climbs to 10% market penetration. In other words, 10% of the market has or is using this technology. This is called Critical Mass because it takes the same amount of time to get from 10 - 90% market penetration as it took to get from 0 - 10%. Then the curve levels off again as it takes just as long to get from 90 - 100% and in theory, never gets to 100%. The curve from start to finish looks like a "S", hence the name of S-Curve Economics. This was mind-blowing to me when I learned about it in 2002. I then studied the major technologies like the phonograph, the telephone, the TV, the PC, the internet, etc. They all followed this curve exactly, except for one difference. Each successive technology was building on the last, so the duration from 0 - 10% was getting shorter and shorter. This gave me the confidence that e-Commerce would be the next Power Curve even though I couldn't in my wildest dreams imagine a world where I would not be shopping in stores. I heard these visionary future thinkers that came to Amway events talking about this new thing called e-commerce. They said stuff like this. There's this new company called Amazon and they're losing a ton of money right now because they are spending way more than they are making to get people to shop there. I heard this. "In 10 years, people won't be shopping in malls or stores anymore. They'll be buying everything on the internet." This was preposterous. When you needed things, you go to a store for it. I went to the bank in person, the pharmacy for odds and ends, Walmart was huge. Auto parts store, electronic store, malls because they had tons of stores. You went to stores to get things you need. An entire industry had built around the need for people to go places in person for over 100 years. I believed the S-Curve would happen because history repeats and good technologies follows this curve. Therefore,  I didn't totally reject the idea. I simply believed that internet shopping would increase and it would be good to own an e-Commerce site. That was what Amway was to me in 2002. 

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 In the last episode, I shared 2 new blind spots that hold me back. Here's a direct quote from "Counting Your Chickens Before they Hatch". "These 2 new blind spots explain why I take my foot off the gas pedal. It's why my pipeline of marketing prospects has run out time and time again over my 20-year entrepreneurial journey. I'm not consistent and it's not because I'm afraid of doing the work. I am a hard worker. I simply get in my own way and stunt my own growth." 

Coach Josh found 2 blind spots. Then TLF uncovered 2 more as I stated above. I brought these back to Coach Josh and entered the Easter Egg Hunt again. Josh simply listened and said. "Is it fear?" Josh said it a few times on recent coaching calls and Marco Polos. I heard it, but I didn't listen. Here's a direct quote about another weakness, although I know about this one so it's not a blind spot! "Overthinking causes a lack of action. This is fully masked in fear. Ken, is it fear of failure? Or is it failure of success? Either way, the only way to cure fear is to take action. The majority of men are masses of beginnings." This is a new concept to unpack. Is it fear? Am I getting in my own way and stunting my growth because I'm afraid? If so, what am I afraid of? Am I afraid of failing? As I asked myself this question over and over, I concluded the answer was 'no'. I have failed a ton over the years, so it's nothing new. Eliminating one forced me to ask the second question. "Am I afraid of success?"

This is a preposperous question. Why would anyone be afraid to succeed? That's easy. If you've never succeeded at a high level, it's fear of the unknown. I've never built a $500,000 cleaning company with management and cleaning teams. The steps I'm taking will form that up over time. That's a fact. But am I subconsciously sabotaging my own ability to succeed because I'm afraid of succeeding? I could NOT answer 'no'. By default, if I can't answer 'no', I must answer 'yes'. I do not like this at all. I want to succeed. I pray to succeed. I set goals to succeed and then take the action to succeed. But then I veer off course through my many blind spots and weaknesses. I count my chickens before they hatch. I allow my busyness to be an excuse for not getting required business action steps from becoming consistent. I faked myself out about my pricing for commercial cleaning prospects. And so on.

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 This podcast episode is a follow up of "We All Need a Coach". I shared in a recent Freedom report how Josh revealed two blind spots to me. One was that I took my hand off building my pipeline and it dried up. I was living off past work. The other blind spot was that my prices were too high. But they weren't too high as a solo optimizer. They were too high as a team building initializer. These two blind spot recognitions by Josh literally saved me 3 to 6 months of pain. Both of these blind spots were killing my sales funnel. I'm so thankful for great coaches in my life.  Wait, did I say I'm thankful? On a mastermind call in Total Life Freedom in October, the guys found two more blind spots. I'm collecting blind spots like my kids collect Easter eggs. The only difference is that I'm carrying a basket and my coaches are putting more eggs in it. I don't mind. I have realized that I need to know these things about myself that I don't see and others do. It is painful, but it makes me stronger. How about you? Would your pride or ego be hurt by knowing your blind spots? Don't say yes unless you mean it. 

New Blind Spot #1

The first was simple. Am I putting my whole heart into growing my cleaning business? Am I all in? I have built-in excuses because my health has been a major challenge. I was in a position to step up at my Royal Rangers Outpost and take leadership which has been a lot of work. If I didn't step up my boys would have lost out and I wasn't willing for that to happen. This takes a lot of time to lead Royal Rangers. Just listen to "Play the Background" to hear a recent ceremony that took 3 hard months to plan!  I'm also still dealing with my grandparents estate and the complications and dynamics of the family going on. I also have a wife and five children that want time with me. Oh, and I still clean all day Saturday and Thursday and Friday every other week. I have built-in reasons why it's hard for me to get to growing the business. The blind spot was this. Am I allowing those reasons to be my excuse? A winner would fight through those reasons and take action and get everything done. I admitted that I was. I wasn't pouring my whole heart and going the extra mile to get everything done  . This blind spot hurt because I was holding back from my potential and allowing real reasons to be excuses. I wasn't acting like my Pop-Pop taught me in "Quitters Never Win".

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 I have talked about my involvement in my local Indian Valley Chamber of Commerce at nauseum in this podcast over the past 2 years. I am a HUGE believer in membership at your chamber, no matter what size your cleaning business. Check out this clip from a recent call in the Smart Cleaning Tribe that I facilitate, where we highlighted best practices and tips on effectively utilizing our chamber. This was in response to a question of newer member, Sunny, who wanted to know if she should join her chamber. 

Would you like to discuss a chamber strategy or see if it's right for you? 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! 

 I used to go shopping at Aldi for Teresa after work during the pandemic. Aldi is a small store, but that didn't help me find anything. I would have a texted list. Inevitably, I'd spend 15 minutes finding the first item and then call my wife. She would literally help me find everything else on the list from memory. I was the arms, legs, and eyes. She was the brains. Men, do you relate? Ladies, do you do this for your men? Here's where it gets better. A few times, I went to Aldi with my oldest son. We were like Tweetle-Dee and Tweetle-Dumb. I would never want to see the surveillance tapes of us wandering the isles. 

Teresa and I were on our way to our annual honeymoon retreat and stopped at a grocery store on the way there. We had breakfast and dinners cooked for us, but needed lunches. I am not a grocery shopper. I rather dislike it. The only thing worse than going grocery shopping is clothes shopping for me. However, my wife it's an excellent grocery shopper and an excellent clothes shopper. One of the last items that we were looking for on this grocery trip was flavored water. These are the drops that you can put in your water to make them taste like fruit. They're pretty good actually. We were somewhere in the back of the store when she thought of buying the flavored water drops. I had no idea where it would be as the grocery story may as well be the Amazon rainforest to me. I'm clueless where to find anything. I know there are signs, but they are not helpful. Anyway, Teresa guided us to the flavored water in less than a minute in a grocery store she was never in. She picked it up, put it in the cart, and was ready for the next thing. 

My initial comment was, "Wow, how did you find that so fast?!", but playing it off more as a joke. Then I thought about it. If I was given flavored water on a shopping list from my wife and I walked into the store I would have been there for 15 minutes walking every aisle until I found it. The more likely scenario is I would have walked down every isle and not found it after 30 minutes and then asked someone for help. I could have asked someone for help in the beginning but I'm a guy and I don't do that. I would have wandered aimlessly and eventually found that item on my list, been frustrated about it, wasted time, and would have even disliked shopping even more. I am highly inefficient in a grocery store because I don't like grocery stores and avoid them as much as possible. I don't know where things are. Teresa is completely different as she shops for our family on a regular basis. She shops in multiple grocery stores and understands the basic layout of a grocery store. Apparently, there's a system involved where certain types of foods are always grouped together. Instinctively, Teresa knew it would be with the water bottles or with the soft drinks or juices. This is common sense, but apparently it's not common to me. Because she knows the grocery stores so well, she can go into any store and quickly identify, find, pay, and get out efficiently. I am building a case. Are you tracking where I'm going, solo cleaners?

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I recorded "A New Freedom Vision" in May, just 6 months ago. It was a bold proclamation. I could not go to Florida for a month, while scheduled to clean 2 days per week. I had to grow a team. I interviewed Josh Melton for my podcast in June ("The Cleaning Road to Nineveh with Josh Melton") and immediately asked him to coach me. I was ready for the challenge and I was ready to show you all that I could do it. Let me cut right to it. It's 6 months later and we have 0 new clients and 0 new employees. In fact, we have at least $1,000 per month less in cash flow because our expenses went up as we've been building to scale. There are 3 topics to discuss on this episode and unfortunately, I don't have a clip from Coach Josh. His best stuff was on the final coaching call before Thanksgiving and it wasn't recorded. His call-out was tough and I'll share that first. 


Josh's Call Out!

I have set out from the beginning of this journey in 2021 to grow my commercial cleaning company in the niche and model I choose. I want weekly, small office clients that I can stack up and complete on weekends. I don't want office cleaning to think about during the week. This preference has held me back from going after bigger revenue accounts or recommending to offices a multi-day pricing option of two. This fully surfaced when Josh was helping me with a quote for a 10,000 square foot showroom with offices. They have a cleaner twice per week that they want to replace. It has 6 restrooms and I'm positioning the price options to sell the weekly option to fit into the perfect schedule I want. Josh hit me hard with this. "Ken, what do you want? Your dream of Florida or your preferred business model? Make it work. Get the revenue. Clean however it comes. Weekly, twice weekly, 5x per week. More people want to work weeknights over weekends. Get up the job ads. Get to work and be scrappy. Make it happen. Just because you choose this now, it doesn’t mean you need to keep it this way.  Don’t choose your preferred business model over your dream. You need revenue. Your preferred business model is weekly offices on weekends. You don’t want to work or operate your business on weeknights. I get that. I was like that too. I realized that more nights per week equals more revenue. I'd rather have less clients and more revenue. You're playing too small all in the name of keeping your preferred business model." This is so true that it stung big time. It's me trying to optimize my business when I'm still an initializer. Why do I keep doing this. I just need to get revenue and team members in the door. This conversation convinced me to offer one of my recent proposals 2 out of 3 options as twice weekly.  By the way, I never answered the question. I choose my dream! I told my wife and she agreed.

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 In this 'Best Of' episode, I share an opening story of a landscaper who didn't care how they drove. They didn't consider their actions behind the wheel to matter toward their job. In the recent episode, "Get Out of the Car", I share a chilling story of my conduct behind the wheel of my car in between cleaning jobs. I encourage you to listen to both of these episodes and them them challenge your ego. Are you potentially harming your business reputation or worse, putting your safety in harm's way?