The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Make Millions with a Home Cleaning Business. Ep #069

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

I sat down with Johnny Robinson, who built a successful window washing business in Orange County that's still ranked #1 in the map pack. Now, Johnny helps others start home cleaning businesses with little to no upfront investment. In this episode, he gets into the tough realities of the industry, like vetting cleaners, but also explains why it’s a solid business to be in. We also talked about other opportunities, like the growing epoxy flooring industry, for those looking at tangential markets. Follow Johnny on Twitter for more: https://x.com/SqueegeeGod Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Introduction to the Episode00:22 Meet Johnny Robinson01:55 Johnny's Journey in Window Cleaning02:15 Transition to Home Cleaning Business09:38 Challenges in the Cleaning Business11:15 The Importance of Hiring and Screening19:41 Client Perks and Test Cleans20:15 Nightmare Stories in the Cleaning Business21:51 Effective Job Acquisition Strategies24:23 Scaling Your Business with Multiple Channels27:20 The Importance of Customer Service29:29 Innovative Business Ideas and Tools31:04 High-Ticket Programs and Backend Strategies36:08 Opportunities in Home Services38:17 Conclusion and Where to Find More

The pessimistic way of looking of that is like, don't go into those industries. It's too hard. It's too hard to do a good job. The optimistic way is there's always going to be a revolving door of customers in those industries. There's always going to be someone looking for someone to do a good job. So if you're confident in yourself and if you're going to go all in on this, you could really, really stand out.

Welcome to the Kerner office. I had a friend named Johnny Robinson on the pod today. Johnny is known for starting a window washing company in Orange County that did super well. to this day, it ranks number one in the map pack for window washing in Orange County. He's sold it years ago. Now he's known for teaching people how to start a home cleaning business with little to no money. He's really good at it. He might be one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to starting a home cleaning business. So I think you'll like this episode. He didn't pull any punches. He talked about all the hard and nasty and ugly parts of the business. And then

he talked about the good parts of the business and why it's a pretty good business to be. In his opinion, you can decide for yourself. He told some really interesting. stories about how they vet cleaners because that's the hardest part of this business is finding a good cleaner because if you find a good cleaner, then you've got a good business. And the opposite is also true. He's got some growth hacks for that. He also talked about opportunities he's seeing tangential to the industry that you could capitalize on if you don't want to start a cleaning business. Poxy flooring, for instance, he says is booming right now. And I think you'll be able to learn from this. This is a business that anyone could start. It's a huge industry. Lots of room for

all competition. I hope you enjoy this episode. And please like and subscribe and leave me a review. If you like it, don't leave me review if you don't. Just kidding. Seriously, love you by. Okay, well, Johnny, thanks for joining. Why don't you tell us who you are and what you do? Yeah, so my name's Johnny. I run a company called Home Service Academy.

We teach people how to start house cleaning businesses and run them remotely. So a lot of your listeners have probably seen all the cleaning bros. I'd imagine a lot around Twitter. So I'd like to think that I started the wave of cleaning businesses. I'm kind of the unc of cleaning Twitter, the uncle of cleaning Twitter. And yeah, I got my start when I was 19 years old. I'm 26 now. I started the largest window cleaning company in Orange County.

It's still number one ranked on the mat pack on the first page of Google, even over Yelp. Built that up. Still own it today? I don't own it. I sold it. I built it up to about nine full-time employees before I switched to contractors and developed this whole remote cleaning model. Then I started that same business for my mom. She's a single mom raised me on her own.

She was driving Uber in Orange County with $3,200 a month rent. And I was like, okay, well, the window cleaning business is doing all right, but it's not doing good enough to be like, here, mom. here's 10 grand a month. She's 64 years old or 63 at the time and go retire. You don't have to work anymore. I was like, but I can use my skill set that I've learned building this window cleaning business to do it in-house cleaning. In house cleaning, my kind of hypothesis was, well, house cleaning is going to be much easier because the availability of contractors in labor is far greater than window cleaning because you don't need the water fed poles and the deionized water tanks and the trucks and the ladders. So me and my business partner, Sergio, we took out a new

AMX Gold Card, and we said, let's try to replace my mom's income and tweet about it. Real quick, was that the whole plan all along? Let's build this in public. Let's document it. This is going to be a great story. Worst case, best case. We've got a great business. The whole plan was knock out two birds with one stone.

Number one, get my mom out of driving Uber. And number two, make content about it. Because I know if I made content about it, people would eat it up. And people were already asking me all over Twitter, how can I? Because I was tweeting about growing my following about how I was running the window cleaning business. And people were like, how can I do it? But it didn't feel right to teach them how to do it because I like to think Orange Window Clean was a little anomaly given the market.

And if I was going to sell something like that, I wanted it to be mass market and be able to start in any city and any metro. And Window Cleaning, you just couldn't do it. Can we dive into that for a minute? Like, why was it an anomaly in Orange County? Just because the contractor availability, if you really wanted to grow the business, you were going to be capped and you'd have to eventually go back to employees, right? And so with Orange County, there's 3.2 million people that live there. window cleaning is very in demand. There's a ton out there. There's a ton that don't market. They don't know how to sell. There's a ton of contractors you can hire for a window cleaning business. Sure, there's a lot of big metros, but there's also a lot of smaller ones. And so when people are asking me, hey, how can I do this? How can I do this? I wasn't confident given their locations that they would see success. And so because of that, I was like, okay, well, I need to build credibility with this model in general by doing it again in house cleaning. Then I was like, okay, well, if we're going to, people are going to ask me, let me prove it in house cleaning. And I can knock, I can do the two birds with one stone thing and help my mom out while growing my following.

Okay. So basically, if I'm understanding this correctly, you didn't feel comfortable teaching people how to wash windows in their own markets because you thought that Orange County was an outlier because it was so big. There's a lot of people, a lot going on, unsophisticated operators. Whereas if you're in, let's say you're in Huntsville, Alabama, 200,000 people, couldn't the argument against that be, yeah, you're going to have a hard time finding contractors, but there's also going to be a proportional same amount of business out there.

It's a wash, or is that not the case? A lot of problems with home service companies and why they can't grow is not so is never demand because people are always going to need their windows clean their house clean. Refrigerators repair or not refrigerators, but air conditioner units, stuff like that. Problem with home service companies is always staffing. And a lot of times with the window cleaners, too, is you're investing into the waterfed poles, the trucks, maybe you're getting your truck wrapped. If you're doing all that stuff, you're not going to be willing to take the 50% or 40% that

this referral agency, it's the official term of these businesses, is going to give you. And so paired with that and just kind of my hunch of like, I just don't really feel comfortable. I think it's going to be a real challenge for you to find contractors in labor. And I don't want you getting stuck in the field, clean the windows yourself or having to feel like you need to go buy the equipment to do it because you're getting these leads. I could be totally wrong. I never actually tested it. It was just let me go do house cleaning instead. It sounds logical to me. I'm just trying to take the contrarian side of it because we're in Dallas and there's eight million people here. We don't really have that hard of the time finding contractors. I think what you're saying is just a

bigger pool to draw from, right? Like they might have to drive from further away because Orange County is pretty spread out. But you just have more options. And like let's say there's a hundred contractors and a thousand businesses. If you're top five percent of those businesses based on how you treat your contractors and how you pay them, then you're in a better spot with more population because you're going to be more likely to be able to recruit them. Whereas if there's less people, it doesn't matter how good you are. There's just not enough people to recruit. Yeah. Well, also, too, for my experience of hiring window cleaning contractors, you need to check for the equipment and the ladders and the waterford, pull stuff like that. With cleaning,

I mean, anybody can go to Home Depot and pick up some cleaning supplies and go clean a house. I can throw an Indeed posting and have applicants flooded onto my Indeed profile with tons of potential labor. Okay. And so my thing was like, okay, well, the hiring bottleneck is going to be solved the way easier and cleaning than it would for window cleaning because you're probably doing a lot more manual outreach, trying to get these people on board to take jobs, which is kind of a sales process in a way. If you can utilize indeed, then it flips the frame of, hey, now you have people coming to you and wanting to work for your company. So that was my also. My second thought process was it just be easier to hire on top of that. Okay. So how did you wrap up the window cleaning business?

Like how big did you grow it? What did you sell it for? And how long did that whole process take? This was during the time where we had launched the cleaning business. We got my mom out of driving Uber. Then we pre-sold $50,000 of Home Service Academy programs. So we sold 15 programs at $4,200. And for the first three months, this all ties in.

So for the first three months, we said, let's just take this money and let's sit on it. Let's not do anything with it. And let's make sure we can get results and not sell anymore. So for the first three months, that's what we did. We got results. Crush it for these people. In April, we started selling again. And in April, we started the run-up from considering, I consider April zero.

I consider like the 50Ks like, that was like our seed money. So from zero in April to December, we did $2.8 million of revenue with $1.5 of a profit. About midway through that point, I was like, I've never seen this before. This is like, this is it. We got to go all in. Let's fire sale. orange window cleaning. I don't want anything to do with it anymore. And we had one of our contractors who used to be an employee for us, but switched to contractors. He stayed on, had his own truck,

his own equipment, stuff like that. He's like, dude, I really want to buy it, really want to buy it. And so we're like, okay, well, we want to get this done quick. So we sold it for a little over $100,000. He put about $50 down and then seller noted the, or financed the rest over 12 months. That was it. And then we went all in on. And he's still doing great. He's still doing it. Oh, dude, he's crushing. Orange window cleaning does over, uh, we got to 65, K a month or best month was 70, but consistently about 65. And he's gotten it to over a million dollars year. Wow. That just sounds like the perfect win to me because you kind of did fire sale it. But you had this shinier object. And that played into your decision making, right, which benefited him.

But you're fine because you're moving on to something else. He's thrilled because he gets to seller finance half of this business. And he knows the business. He's de-risked. It just seems like the perfect wind to me. Yeah. I mean, we still talk. We're still really great friends. And he'll call me here and there and we'll chop it up about how he's doing. And if you look up window cleaning in Orange County, orange window cleaning still shows up number one. So I take a lot of pride in that. Yeah.

I mean, that's amazing. It's such a huge market, probably insanely competitive too. So, all right. So you got your mom out of Uber. You made a little cash. You launched your Home Service Academy. You made a lot of cash from that. And then you started scaling that.

I'm curious what like, from the perspective of a house cleaning, remote business owner, what are like the headaches that they don't foresee going into it? Because on Twitter, on the surface, it looks really sexy, passive, right? I'm sure you're not telling people that, but what are the unknowns of this industry? No, we never say passive. It's far from passive. That's a four-letter word in my book. Yeah, it's anyone selling you passive stuff, saying passive automated, it's a scam.

It doesn't exist, at least in my experience. If you want to show me something that's passive and it's real, hey, I'm open, but I've never seen it. But yeah, headaches, hiring. It's a staffing business. That's all it is. It's just a recruiting and staffing business. If you can do, like, if you can just be good at that, it solves the rest of your problems. 80-20.

Yeah, because your cleaners are your product, right? Your service-based business, your cleaners are customer-facing. If you do a good job at hiring the cleaners and you set good expectations and they show up to your customer's house, they're going to do a better job. You're going to get more five-star reviews, which helps you rank higher on the map pack and hopefully get you to the first page of Google. You'll get more referrals and you'll get more customers that can, convert to recurring clients, which is where you actually make your profit to the weeklies by weeklies, monthlies. And so the headache is if you've never recruited, well, it can be a pain in the ass, especially

when you're talking to a bunch of house cleaners all the time and you build up your first big team of cleaners. And then all of a sudden, some of them are coming to you and they're going, oh, I want more money. Or I don't want to take that job. I want this job. I only want these jobs and get real picky. And you can feel like you're held hostage a little bit by our cleaners because you need

them to go do the work. You don't want to go do the work. And so I see a lot of that. And the way you solve that is you just have to screen cleaners constantly. It's a hiring game. And it's why most house cleaning businesses get stuck. And it's why you can go and build a million to $2 million house cleaning business in any market. Because no cleaning company, your competition can't staff quick enough to service all that demand.

So I would say that's the biggest one. And then obviously it's a service business. So you have customers complaining about the littlest things. You're going to get customers who complain about, oh my gosh this one little there's a dust particle on my baseboard one dust particle come back or I want a refund or I want money off typical service business stuff okay so I want to talk about this because I started a cleaning business a remote cleaning business like you know what I listen to your podcast of your say you're listening to all the businesses and I heard you

start that one and you're like don't recommend I see people talk about I don't recommend it I wanted yeah well I did it the wrong way clearly it works for lots of people but his name was rohoon I think, have you heard of him? Rohan Gilks. That was the system. Anyway, like, I didn't do it right. Like, I was probably doing four other businesses at the time, but it was, I talk about binary outcomes.

And this is my example. Like, if you have a tree removal business, it's like, you show up, you remove the tree. You get it out and you get a five-star review. It's like very binary. You win. Pass fail, right? Whereas with this business, in my experience, it was there's a hair of my toilet. Like this.

Like, they were late. They stayed too long. like, oh, there were, like, there were so many little ticky-tacky things that you could screw up. And they were all small. When you have other things going on, it's like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Yeah. Right.

What am I doing here? And so you abandon it. But if it was your only thing, you push through and you figure out those stupid little things that really every business has. Yeah, I was going to say, it's like any business has its kind of pains in the ass. I can talk about going back. You said, oh, well, your shiny object kind of created this win. Well, my shiny object also created a whole hell of a lot of other problems.

because I got punched in the mouth in year two trying to grow a course business. If you make anything your main focus, you can make it work. And every business kind of has its tradeoffs. And don't get me wrong, the cleaning's no different. It does suck at times. But I will say, too, when you're in the trenches and you're answering the phone calls and you're dealing with the customer complaints, like that goes away as you grow and as you scale because you start to get your team to take all that stuff for you. For us, it really did come down to the cleaners, period. I could say it revolved around really annoying customers, but they were just annoyed at the cleaners.

So if we would have pushed through and found better cleaners, it probably would have been great. Is Indeed like the 80, 20 for recruiting for you? Like, that's what? 100%. It's just the quickest way. If somebody comes in and they've never built a business, I'm like, yeah, they're like, oh, I'm checking out these like Facebook groups for cleaners or I'm checking out next door. I just tell them, just go to Indeed.

You'll make one post. We've got the templates. Just post the print these word on Indeed. and you'll get applicants. And then your job is to just 80, 20, 20, that, which is 80% of the applicants are going to suck and 20% will be good. Yeah. Is it a game of just like higher three to fire two, higher three to fire two? And you're just like, you're always filtering for the best people.

Basically, yeah. And the ones that pass the screening, they've got a year of cleaning experience, they've got their own transportation. They have their own cleaning equipment. You're going to want to background check them and you're going to want to send them to do a test clean. Have you seen what the test clean is on Twitter? So test clean, it's a good way because, You're hiring contractors. And the risk there is that, or at least a lot of people coming into the business is, well, what if they take my customers?

So the way to prevent that and the way to test character is to do what's called the test clean. What the test clean does is the people you interview, the ones that you want to hire, you send them to a friend or family member's house. And this friend or family member knows it's a test clean. They're getting it for free. You say, I'll clean your house for free. Just I need you to ask one question. And to the cleaner, this is a real job. They don't know it's a test clean.

Oh, okay. Like secret shopper. Yeah, exactly. And so the friend or family member asks, how can I book again? And so when they ask, how can I book again? It shows you one of two things. Either they're going to say, hey, I'm cheaper. Here's my card.

Call me. I'll do it for cheaper. Or they're going to say, here, call Chris's office and he'll get you rebooked. Now, if they say that, really good green flag pass. They're probably good to send out to jobs. That's assuming they did a good job on the clean as well, right? Right. One, do they show up?

Two, do they do a good job? And three is ask the question. So then obviously, if they say, here's my car, I'll do it for cheaper. Cut them, get rid of them. They're going to try to seal your business. That's amazing. That's amazing. You remember seeing those cash for gold stores? Yeah. I think I still see them in Vegas. They're still around, but like, it's like 2017, 2016, the price of gold was crazy. And that was a whole industry that came and then left in like three years. And so I had a friend that owned a dozen cash for gold stores around like rural Texas in Oklahoma. And he said theft was a part of the job. Like he just worked it into his numbers. And he would send in friends to be like secret shoppers with these gold necklaces and then compare that

against, because it was a 70% cash business. So you could have cameras. You can do this. You can do that. But he would always experience theft. And it's a much part of a broader framework for me of the fact that like if you put an employee in a tempting position, they could be the most honest person ever. But if they're hungry and poor, like you can incite them to steal from you. Is it your fault? No, they're making that choice. But like, you have to put them in an opportunity to succeed or else you're just going to be setting yourself up for failure. And so I thought that was fascinating. He would send people in to do tests just like you did with their gold. That's smart. Yeah. Smart.

Because sometimes, like, also determining the percentage of the gold is kind of, like, you use a tool, but you could be like, oh, yeah, this is only 30%. So we can only pay you this. Okay. And it's really like 90%. So he would go in and check after they clocked out if it was actual. And then they would pocket the difference sometimes. So slimy, a lot of shady things. Yeah.

Anyway, that. Yeah, it's like a mechanic. Yes. They're like, oh, they got all this stuff wrong. It's going to be two grand. And you don't, someone who doesn't know cars, going to get swindled. Yeah. Every time I go to the mechanic, they charge me 200 bucks.

When my wife goes, they charge her 2,000. I don't know what it is. They do try to take advantage of my wife, though. Anyway, so that's an amazing story. So if they do a good job cleaning and they show up and they don't try to steal from you, is that like an automatic hire? And they pass the background check. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you'd be surprised. So we had one of the first people to come through Home Service Academy. He's named Cody. He runs a company called Broome Bros in San Diego. and he was like, I don't want to do test clean. I need the service his job. Background check hasn't come back yet.

So I'm just going to send them, right? Sends a, it's like a boyfriend, girlfriend, duo. And they show up to the job. And it gets time to do the vacuuming on the carpet. And they didn't have a vacuum. So they didn't want to ask the customer because they didn't want to look bad. So what they did was they took out a broom, their broom, and they started sweeping the carpet. That's something had a makeshift vacuum.

And the customer was there? The customer was there. They're like, and the customer is texting Cody and his team. And they're like, hey, they're sweeping the carpet. Obviously, that's really embarrassing. And then come to find out one of them had a criminal background. So it's like a good litmus test. A test clean is a non-negotiable then.

Yes, 100%. Do you have any numbers or percentages of how many try to swindle you on that test clean? I would probably say it's honestly around 50, 50. Wow. Yeah. Because they have no loyalty to you yet. They just met you. Right?

They just met you. Yeah. Which is the perfect time to do this test. 50% try to go around you. That's crazy. When I moved here to this apartment complex, there's a built-in valet. Right. So you get your car valet and then you walk to your apartment, whatever.

I come in, it's my second day living here. I just moved and have a booking quality shirt on, which is the software all of our clients used to run their cleaning companies. And so I have this booking quality shirt on. I'm sitting waiting for my car to be pulled up and I see this guy looking at me. I'm like, dude, what is this guy looking at? And I'm like, what's up, man? And he's like, dude, are you Johnny?

I'm like, yeah, I'm Johnny. Like, how do you know my name? He goes, dude, I just joined Home Service Academy three days ago. I said, no freaking way, man. And so now I was, anytime you need test cleans, I'll actually pay for him. You're my client. So you get the luck of I'll pay for my own test claims. You don't have to come out of pocket for it.

So just send me all your test cleans. Dude, some of these people that show up, it's like they, they don't care they do not care so you have him doing test cleans at your place yes oh man do you just love it when they try to go around you yeah my god you should be so fun you shouldn't have said that yeah like okay do you say anything to him no oh geez oh that's so funny any other like nightmare horror stories that you've come across in this business i can tell you a personal one i mean we see them all the time dude like i just saw a screenshot like two days ago in our Mastermind chat where one of their cleaners somehow stepped through the sink and the

whole sink detached their cleaner stepped through the sink and the whole sink detached and fell into the floor so and there's a you see it all the time but my personal and I have a ton but this is by far the worst so we had a crew of it was when we had employees actually not contractors and we had these two guys that we were already kind of questioning whether or not we should keep them but we were kind of in busy season and so we kind of got stuck in that stupid frame of mind if like well let's just keep them and not fire up because we need them, which by the way, we'll always screw you, I promise. Always 100%.

And so we're like, let's just keep on whatever. And this is probably 2019. And I get a call around 5 p.m. from our admin girl who was actually in the U.S. we weren't doing overseas yet. She goes, hey, those two guys, they're done, but the customer's not happy. And I was going, okay, we'll just send them back. Just go fix whatever they're not happy about. And she's like, oh, no, they don't want them back.

And I go, well, why not? she goes, they caught those two guys doing Coke in the customer's bathroom of their like seven-year-old daughter's bathroom when they're inside cleaning the windows doing Coke. And then he sent me a picture of this little tray they were using and had all the residue. So. I mean, when you're in a people business, like you just have stories like these for days. 100%. Yeah. Like I said, it's the service business, man.

All right. So if Indeed is the 80, 20 of hiring, what's the 80, 20 of finding jobs? Like, I know, like, once you get traction, you're going to get referrals, word them out, but like you got to drum up a bunch of jobs really fast. What do you do? Yeah, I go into any Facebook group, mom groups, buy and sell groups, community groups, on Facebook or next door. This is what Mary and a mom's business does. This is what we did with orange window cleaning. We had almost zero cack because what we would do is we'd go into these groups. We'd make a post introducing ourselves. Hey, I'm Johnny. I live here in Orange or if I joined a different city nearby, I'd say, I live in your Belinda, my favorite restaurant's

this, I enjoy running at this park, whatever. I'm local. I'm a local. I'm one of you. I'm one of you. I'm one of you. Introduce myself, a picture of myself. Good night. Nice photo. Here's my baby. Pull from Google images. Yep. I don't know about that one, but if you do have a baby. Born prematurely. If you have a baby or a nice husband and wife or boyfriend, girlfriend, like a professional photo, it'll rip. And so what you do is you go in, you make this introduction post. And depending on the vibe of the group, you either go to straight introduction

and subtly mention you own the whatever company, cleaning business, window cleaning, whatever you do. And then you can either comment and say, just as a welcome to the community, I'm offering $50 off anybody who comments clean or spring or whatever it is, right? You can do that. It's a little risky you might get banned or you just don't do that part and you just introduce yourself and subtly mentioned, hey, I own this cleaning company. Then anybody that engages with that post, You take 10 to 20 of them and you message them real soft and you say, hey, I appreciate you engaging with my post. Even if they just like it, you DM them. Yep, yep.

It's a warmly. Yeah, yeah. And so your job in this group to get this going really quickly is to just get one customer. Because once you get that customer, your job is to just do a really good job for them. And then as soon as you're done, you ask them for a review back inside the group they found you in. I call it like they keep up with the Jones's effect because then when you see the neighbors, you see the neighbors using a service, all the other neighbors want to use it.

Even if they don't want to use it, when they need it, they're going to think about you. And then you just repeat that in every group across every group you could possibly join. Before you know it, you're going to search up whatever your service is in the group search bar,

and you're going to see nothing but testimonials for your company. And you don't have to pay a damn thing. That's amazing. It's the Facebook group version of what the door-to-door salesmen do. Like, hey, the Johnson's, they actually just signed up. We're already here, right? So you're going to get a 30-book. percent is because we're in the johnsons are great yeah you're just doing that 100 percent so does that

scale like what do you do on year two like how do you get to a five million dollar business there's other acquisition channels right that's just one i always say pair that with some type of paid ads google local service ads do you do it for the tree trimming business yeah it's it's easy money because you're getting super high intent leads who are ready to buy their searching for your service and yeah people are like oh well google local service ads is getting more expensive Well, that's why you blend it with some organic, so you drive down your cost per lead, your cost to acquire a customer. So pair those two together when starting out, but then you can open up so much other things. Like you've got cold email and cold outreach to build relationships

with people like real estate agents, real estate brokers, property managers, apartment complexes, schools, custom home builders are big because they're going to send you the high ticket construction cleanup jobs where you're charging two, three, four, five grand. You've got Airbnb and all the people who own a massive amount of Airbnb's because those are turning over all the time, right? So you land one good Airbnb client. I mean, I talked to a guy actually who is he was interested in joining accelerator. And he's telling me how he was at 100K a month because he landed one whale short-term rental owner who had a bunch of, a bunch of short-term rentals. And then they fired him. He went from 100K down to 10K a month. So. Oh, yeah. Why did they fire him?

He grew too fast, did a crappy job? Probably. I don't remember what his reasoning was, but he's like, I just need more like sustainability. Anyhow, you've got short-term rentals as another channel. Then you've got the big facilities where you need the overnight staff. So there's a lot of different acquisition channels you can use. There's door. Direct mail works really well once you've been in business for a year or two because then you can look at the heat map and see where your best paying customers are at. And then you just spam that radius with direct mail and offers. So there's a lot of different ways you can do to get the customers. What would you rank your top four acquisition channels in order of like ROI?

Organic. Paid. So LSA, if you're in California, Big fan of Yelp, big fan of Yelp, because it's just a great bottom of the funnel acquisition channel. People are searching for it. And it's a big search engine. Then I'm going organic, paid. Then I'm going cold outreach because all you need is one relationship. And it's not necessarily recurring revenue, but it's reoccurring because if they're building three, four homes a month, let's say, home builder, well, you're going to get three, four construction cleans a month. Like, as an example, my mom has a relationship with Terrick from Flip and Flop.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Al Musa, right? Yeah, my mom handles all the construction cleans in Southern California for him. My wife and I used to watch that, but then she's like, no more, you're looking at Christina too much. Okay, yes, ma'am. Yeah, every time it's on, she's like, I cleaned that house, I cleaned it. Nice, mom, nice.

Okay, so that'd be my number. Sorry to interrupt. Cold outreach. So like organic paid cold outreach in that order? Yes, but I always recommend you do organic and paid in tandem. Never just rely on one because they're two. They're not hard to get started, both of them together. I just have this, I'm like building this framework as you're talking, thinking about,

we were talking about binary outcomes. And there's like this beautiful push pull that happens in small business or big business where you have an industry that's really hard to do well. Let's take custom home building, right? Nobody likes their custom home builder. I had a custom home builder for this house. He was like the best in the area. I didn't like him.

Sorry, Cleve. You were really hard to work with. Nobody likes their custom home builder. their house cleaner, their third-party logistics provider, you name it. Which means, so like the pessimistic way of looking of that is like, don't go into those industries. It's too hard to do a good job. The optimistic way is there's always going to be a revolving door of customers in those

industries. There's always going to be someone looking for someone to do a good job. So if you're confident in yourself and if you're going to go all in on this, you could really stand out. Would you agree with that? I would 100% agree with that. And I think that's true across most industries, even in, even in education and course selling.

The amount of people that you compete with that just don't care about their customers and who just know how to sales and market or market and sell is insane. And it's the same thing in home services. Most people call 10 cleaners. I tell everybody, I'm like, dude, go call 10 cleaners in your area. I promise you, I'll put my bank account that eight of them will not answer their phone. And it's still to this day, despite all the new content that's being made about home services and about how to grow your home service business, it's like the barrier is so low to succeed.

And I've realized it's like that in most industries. It's not even just home services. Marketing agencies, people who sell info. I mean, you name it. Software. Yeah. We had the exact same percentage. You said eight out of ten won't answer.

We called a thousand tree trimming businesses to test a stump grinding idea. And 80% never answered the phone. 80%. It's crazy. I'm telling you, man. The barrier is just so low. So yeah, I agree with you because the pessimistic way is like, oh, I would never get into that business.

But again, the optimistic and really the realistic way of looking at it is, well, if you do go into this industry, are you going to take it serious? Because even if you take it a little bit serious, you're going to do better. Just answer your phone. Yeah. Start there. Yeah. So let's talk ideas, business ideas. You said you had an interesting one. I want to hear it. You just bringing that up reminded me of, I haven't dropped this yet, but I have a podcast coming out with a guy named Mike Andes. You know who Mike Andy's is? He runs a Gustle-Long care? Nope, but I'm going to Google it right now. Okay, Gus to Lawncare. He has a really unique way of franchise. Oh, I know Augusta. I know Augusta. So he owns that. A long care, yeah. Okay. And so this podcast is not yet, but he has an idea that I think that can crush it. And I think that he's going to have a lot of competition for it because it's only internal right now. He doesn't sell it. But his guarantee in his landscaping business is that if I don't answer the phone, you get free service. How does he do it? He has AI answering the phone at all times and booking the jobs. 24-7. You can call them. It's possible now.

Yeah. I thought that was so cool. So that's a quick one. That's like his offer. It's like his offer, but it's an internal tool that he spent a lot of time building. You know what that reminds me? Have you ever seen real estate agents that promise, like, I guarantee you will sell your home? Like, have you ever seen that? Yeah. It's like the whole schick behind that is they just have investors that will buy it for like a 30% discount if the realtor can't sell it on the market. Like that's the fine print.

And it's like, I guarantee I'll sell your home or an investor will at a loss. I really like that a lot. Geez, why isn't everyone doing that? I mean, because it's brand new. Yeah, yeah. It's brand new. And I think it's an internal tool. So I thought that was really cool.

I don't feel bad about saying that because we're going to drop that podcast where we go really deep on that. So I think that's a cool idea for one. My idea, though, that I thought of when we were talking before we started, hit record. So there's a major problem that a lot of people who sell courses and specifically higher ticket program. So anything, I would say $2,000 and above where in order to charge those prices, you need to have some type of one-on-one support or anything lower than that. It's typically just like maybe you got a couple group coaching calls and in a course. CSM? Yeah, you need a account

manager or a CSM to guide them through the whole customer journey. What most people can't do, and I've realized this because I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on going to these masterminds and meeting all these people in the info space who sell these high ticket programs, what most people can't do is build a back end. Meaning they can't, most core sellers and high ticket course sellers specifically are reliant on selling more programs to cover their costs. And if something happens, their ad account gets disabled, their creatives aren't working,

RoAS starts to drop. It puts you in a very risky position. It's very stressful. Now I've been there. And so what most people can't do is they can't extend the lifetime value of their customers. And the way you do it, I've only seen a few companies do this,

but have, the way to do is by building a back end, some type of year-long mastermind or extended coaching program. And I see everybody who does, it's a niche. It's called coaching coaches. Everybody's like, let me show you how to scale your coaching business. Like the coaches. Life coach. Right. Yep. But I don't see anybody that goes and teaches these info people how to build a proper backend and ascension system and build out an actual true client journey, provide a good service their people and then take them from maybe a 5k on the front end to a 20k on the back end. It's why a company like gym launch, we compare gym launch to all the other people who were selling

gym coaching. Alex Ramozy had a $47,000 LTV where everyone else was like $4,000, 4,000. So you could just outmarket everybody. And so that's kind of, what did he do differently? He had the, I don't know what it was called, but he would send people into, he would call them like Jim Lords and you go from, I forget what he was charging. Like 50 grand a year or something? Yeah, 50 grand, something ridiculous, 45 grand a year.

And so I think there's a massive opportunity. I know there's a massive opportunity. If you're good, especially if you're like a software, CSM and you can build out, because that's who we learn this stuff from. If you're someone in software who's good at building out customer journeys, I think you can charge a lot of money and coaches would pay you a lot of money to help them build their backends. Is there a world where you could be like a consultant and you could just say,

hey, send me your customer list and I'm going to help ascend these guys and you give me 20% of everything I ascend. Yeah, that's like a pay by performance. Like a fractional sales rep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you could do that. I think it's challenging though because you have to think if you're selling me, hey, I'll teach you how to buy RV parks.

I'm like, okay, cool. I pay you five grand for 16 weeks and you tell me I'm going to put at least one RV park under contract. Let's say I get through the whole thing and that I haven't gotten my RV park yet, but I'm really close, but you told me in 16 weeks. And maybe I'm getting in week 17, but you still told me 16 weeks.

I've lost all trust with you. So there's no way in hell I'm going to ascend to whatever backend program you have, right? And so it's important that you have the activation points along the whole way. And so I do think there's a big opportunity for someone to come in, map that out for all these different companies, allow them to actually provide a better service than they already are,

and then to extend the LTV on their customers. And you're going to make them so much more money so you can charge a lot. You're basically taking the funnel. Like they come top of funnel, they get to the bottom of the funnel. They buy in their customers now. That person is just extending the funnel.

Yeah. And you've got different service providers for every step, right? You've got your conversion rate optimization guys. You've got your copywriting agencies. You've got your email marketing agencies. You've got the media buyers. But there's no one for backends. Everybody's so focused on like, hey, let's sell more.

But that's not how you build a sustainable business. Which, of course, they are because that's the whole name of 90% of these guys. is just get them in the door and then forget about them. Right. Interesting. I like that a lot. It's crazy how much people pay to be in these masterminds. 50 grand a year, 100 grand a year.

My most was 54. I paid 54. I'm guilty. What was that for? What was it for? It was Cole Gordon's, you know who that is? Cole Gordon. He runs a company called closers.io.

I know closers. com. Yeah, yeah. It's closers. dot I. That's their mastermind. It's called eight-figure boardroom. And that was fun mostly because I think it was my first time.

doing like a info mastermind and I got to meet all the big guys in the space that I've seen on the ads. I'm like, oh man, I'm in the same room as them now. That's cool. I got to meet them. And I got to learn a lot, not so much from the content there because it was always just so much at once. And it's very distracting over because we kind of had our plans on how we wanted to grow in scale. So it's just always very distracting. But where I got a lot of value from was just making friends and building relationships with people in the industry that are doing the same thing is me because then I can call any of them and be like, hey dude, how is this working for you? How is this working for you?

So that's the most value I got out of it. I didn't eventually renew. But it was cool for a year. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to put a price on those connections, right? What are you seeing in the home services space that like you're jealous of? Like, if you talk to anyone in the industry and they're doing your landscaping or whatever, like something random and you're like, ah, geez, we need to roll that into what we're doing. Or if I would have chased that, I would done a little better.

What are you seeing or hearing out there? All the different home services are kind of just crushing it. I think you can really pick anyone and just run up a really big business. There's private equity backed everything now at this point, fencing companies, garage door insulation, like Tommy Mello just sold his business for like 500 million. And it was only half of it. Then he's rolling it into the next to get the second bite of the apple. Or any other opportunities, like a software that you could build within a home service niche that's in demand or in the cleaning business even? I think there's a lot, for us specifically, I think there's a big opportunity for us to build our own software, for sure, because we have the distribution already. But again, that's a whole other than tools and stuff like that. I can't think of any off the top other than the one I first talked about the whole like 24-7 answering. I think that's applicable across all home services. I just talked with Aaron Harper, who is doing on the podcast. He's got the fastest growing pressure washing franchise. And I asked him a similar question. I said, if you were to restart, start and build a whole new franchise. What would it be? And he said he would, I forgot what he said

he would do. I want to say it was like insulation or something. And I'm seeing a couple new insulation companies. Or no, maybe it was epoxy flooring. That's a big one too. That's kitchen. A lot of seam is the garage epoxy flooring. Yeah. Gards so much money. I think four grand. Yeah. I talked to this guy named Forever Self-employed actually. He does like the pressure washing videos where he does the voiceovers. Instead, he ran 10 grand of Google ads and return. turned 100 grand epoxy flooring sales. So he says, holy cow.

I think it rang true across multiple people I talked to that. Epoxy flooring was something that's really hot that I don't see a lot of people talking about. I worry about that with a recession, though, just because it's not a half to have. Yeah. And there's no recurring revenue,

really. Right, right. You sell, you're always in sales mode. And I'm not a big fan of businesses like that. Yeah. Same.

Well, Johnny, I'm out of questions. I think this was super good. High value. Appreciate your time. Of course. Where can we find you?

Twitter or X.com slash squeegee god. Squeegee god on Twitter X. You can find my YouTube channel, Johnny and Sergio. I talk all about, I'll do like little list of goals like seven low cost, home service business ideas or I'll do a lot of content on cleaning. Obviously, this is what we talk about. And then you can find me on Instagram or TikTok at Johnny and Sergio. Okay.

Thanks, man. Cool. Thank you. Okay. That was Johnny. You can find him on Twitter, Johnny Robinson. Let me know if you have him back on and we'll see you next time. on the Kerner office.