Secret #1: Create the right mindset around money and time
Very few cleaning business owners have figured out how to have both prosperity and freedom. Most have one OR the other, or neither. 99% of the people I talk to either don’t make enough, work too hard, or both of those things together. It’s an actual myth that to be successful you have to work day and night.
Three key things
You might dismiss this as too simple, that it’s not complicated enough. But guess what? Doing the right things in business is easy to do but also easy not to do. That’s why so many people don’t do the right things—it’s easy not to!
Once I mastered these three things, I realized I could create a cleaning business that runs without me and pays me very well.
- The right mindset
- The right systems
- The right team
I’m going to break that down over multiple articles, and today I’m focusing on having the right mindset.
The right mindset about money
In order to create a successful self-running cleaning business, you have to have the right mindset about money and time. There’s a Jim Rohn quote that I love: “Rich people have big libraries; poor people have big TVs.” Wealthy people invest in knowledge while poor people invest in stuff.
Here’s the thing: You can always make more money, but you cannot make more time. So let’s talk briefly about your mindset around money. You have to fix your mindset about money before you can succeed with the right systems and team.
If you are afraid to spend your money, it’s because you believe you can’t make more. This scarcity mindset, that there’s never going to be enough, holds you back, keeps you from spending it, or keeps you in the trap of always spending everything you have, because you’re afraid you won’t have more later for what you want. With a scarcity mindset, you’ll find yourself always focusing on never having enough.
So, how do we shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset? An abundance mindset can see every possible positive outcome, whereas a scarcity mindset can only see all the possible negative outcomes around money.
An abundance mindset would think of the best possible outcome, like “This program will save me so much time and money, I’ll have more time for sales and marketing! Or I can stop losing jobs because my schedules are so disorganized.” Whatever money you might save by doing things yourself is actually lost somewhere else, especially if you value your time.
You can always make more money but you cannot make more time.
The right mindset about time
It’s the opposite of mindset about money— too many of us think time is a commodity that there’s plenty of, and it’s not.
We actually need a scarcity mindset around time! It’s not renewable. Bill Gates only gets 24 hours a day. Richard Branson, and Warren Buffet only have 24 hours a day. They figured out that they can make money, but they cannot make time. And neither can you. You may think you don’t have a “time mindset” problem, but make sure you are being honest with yourself.
The proof is in how you value your own time. What is your time worth? If you are doing $10-an-hour work, or $20-an-hour work, that is how you value your time. Would you skip your kid’s graduation if I offered you $60? Of course you wouldn’t. What if I offered you $1000? $10,000? $100,000? What is your time worth? Most of us would say, it’s priceless when it comes to family, but then we sell our time for $20-$30 per hour while we’re out cleaning houses or spending hours on low level tasks, robbing our family of time we can never make back.
Instead, we work cheap all day, then show up at home late and stressed out. We say hello then go back to work by checking emails, working on the computer, answering text messages. We might physically be there, but our family knows we aren’t really there if we’re working. Once you change your mindset about time, you’ll determine your time is priceless and you’ll quit selling it so cheaply.
We have it backwards. We value our money, so much so we won’t use it to buy time. We can always make the money back, but we can never make back the lost time.
Getting the right mindset around money and time is one the hardest thing I have to help people overcome before they can build a self-running business.
That’s it. Secret #1 about how to create a million dollar cleaning business that runs itself is to get the right mindset about time and money. If you get it backwards, you cannot move forward in your business.
Next step: find a mentor! Whether you work with me or with someone else, find someone to mentor you. Read great books. Learn, learn, learn. Are you ready to grow your business and get out of the field? Do you want to join my mop-free millionaires club? Join my Cleaning Business Fundamentals group and take the first steps towards freedom.
