Recently I had a Facebook Live event where I discussed 5 things you can do to improve your business in 5 days, and I wanted to share it here. I’m constantly hearing from people who tell me they want to take my Cleaning Business Fundamentals course but they can’t afford to invest in themselves right now. But if not now, when? The most important time to invest in yourself is NOW. You have to fix the lingering issues with your business. If you haven’t figured out how to make your business work well by now, you’re not going to guess your way into magically fixing things in the next year or two. The five things that you’ll learn here will improve your business and essentially cover the cost of my CBF course!
If you take the Cleaning Business Fundamentals course and follow the steps I outline to grow your seven-figure freedom-based business, you would have to ignore everything I tell you in order to not to triple your investment within a matter of months.
Fact: I would not be where I am today if I didn’t hire mentors. I’d still be trying to figure it out myself, making half of what I make now, because almost nobody guesses their way to extreme success. Anybody can guess their way to average— you don’t need me for that. Almost every highly successful entrepreneur (like Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Tony Robbins) says that hiring and working with a mentor was critical to their success. They needed somebody to help them see all the things they couldn’t see in order to take their businesses to the next level.
Think about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars you are not going to make in the next 5 to 10 years because you wanted to save yourself a few thousand dollars by not investing in your business.
That said, here are 5 ways you can improve your business in 5 days:
- Post online in Facebook groups, Nextdoor, or other local sites every day for the next 5 days until you get one additional recurring client.
- Raise prices on one of your existing weekly cleaning clients.
- Improve production time by one hour a day for one employee, and bill those 5 extra hours.
- Give your top 5 clients a phone call to thank them and send them a gift.
- Donate a free cleaning.
Let’s look at these in more detail.
- Post online in Facebook groups, Nextdoor, or other local sites every day for the next 5 days until you get one additional recurring client. You’ve got to increase your marketing efforts. To snag one additional new client, post more online. You HAVE not because you ASK not. You’re so busy doing all the trivial and menial things in this business (or maybe you’re still out cleaning) instead of growing your business. You can get one new client by posting on Nextdoor, or searching for local Facebook groups, mom groups, entrepreneur groups, community groups. Search those groups for terms like “referral maid service” or “looking for house cleaning.” When you find someone who’s asking for your services, you can tag your own cleaning business. If you win a recurring client in the next five days, that’s an average of $3,000 in new revenue for the year.
- Raise prices on one of your existing weekly cleaning clients. The second thing you can do is to raise your prices on one existing client by 15%. Go pick one. Take a look through your client list and figure out which one is due for a price increase, and then do it. Just look at your list of clients and find the worst underpaying client that you’re not charging enough and who you know you should be charging more, then go increase their price by 15%.
- Improve production time by one hour a day for one employee. Get your staff trained to be more efficient so they can take on additional work. When you improve the productivity of just one employee by one billable hour a day, you’ll start adding to your bottom line. Pick one of your employees and improve their production rates by an hour a day. You’ll move them from billing out 6 billable hours a day to 7 billable hours a day, which is an additional 5 billable hours a week. If your pricing is around $45 per hour, that’s an extra $225 in revenue each week that you gain just by squeezing out one more billable hour per day in the next five days. This is completely possible if your team is trained on the speed cleaning training system.
- Give your top 5 clients a phone call to thank them and send them a gift. Not only is this a good thing to do, but it drives an increase in word of mouth referrals.
- Donate a free cleaning, just because. If you want to have more, you need to give more. The increased having I have is a direct result of the increased giving I’ve done. If you’re looking for an organization to join that can facilitate you donating free cleanings to women undergoing cancer treatments, I recommend Cleaning For A Reason, the non-profit I started in 2006.
