The Real Work Behind Franchise Freedom with Kim Brown

0:00Welcome to Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McRae with Action Coach Business Growth Partners. Every week, we sit down with business owners, founders, and leaders to uncover the real stories behind building a successful business. The wins, the setbacks, the lessons learned, and the strategies that help them grow. No scripts, no fluff, just honest conversations with entrepreneurs who are in the trenches every single day. Whether you are a business owner yourself, thinking about starting a business, or simply enjoy hearing how successful people think and operate, you are in the right place. Let's jump into today's episode, shall we?

0:58All right, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McRae with Action Coach Business Growth Partners, where we work with local business owners to turn big ideas into real scalable growth. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Kim Brown with the Merry Maids of Augusta. Kim, how are you doing today? I am doing very well. Thank you very much for asking. Yeah, yeah. And we're excited to have you here. So let's go ahead and jump right into things. So for those of you who may not know it yet, who are you? Who is Kim Brown and what is Mary Mays of Augusta? Well, Kim Brown is a lifelong Augusta resident.

1:34I now live in Applin, Georgia, since I was married 37 years ago. Husband and have two daughters. We have five granddaughters. And for the longest time, I was a stay-at-home mom and then a business owner with Mary Mays for the last 11 years. and Mary Maids is a residential and small business cleaning service here in the Augusta area. Nice, nice, nice. And you got a nice size team as well. I do. We have about 22 ladies that go out and clean every day. I have three support staff here in the office plus myself. So we have a little tight ship operation going on here. Okay, nice, nice. Now, and we're going to go ahead and get right into things, you know, what people really want to hear.

2:20So Kim, real talk, what's something about running a business that you would say people would think is amazing, but it's actually complete BS when you hear it? Well, one of the things that I always get is owning your own business must be really nice that you get to set your own schedule and you get to work the hours that you want to work. And I'm thinking, no, it's a lot more than that. They don't see the late hours, the after hours, things that go on, taking calls, checking emails. They don't see the stressing out over payroll. They don't see stressing out over your schedule when you have team members call in and you're overbooked for the day and you think, how are we going to get it done?

3:07Client and employee issues that we have to deal with. But on any given day, it's still a great business. And I love being a business owner because it also does give me freedom, especially being a grandma. If I need to take an afternoon off and go keep grandbabies, I can do that because I have a wonderful staff in my office here that still is great support and take care of things while I'm out. Nice, nice. That's awesome. So what would you say was the exact moment where you realized, you know, this, this, you know, getting this franchise could either really work or it could completely blow up in my face and I lose everything?

3:47That would be about year three. When we bought Mary Maids, I worked in it part-time. I was still actually working a little bit of part-time in my husband's office, and he's the CPA, which is how we actually wound up with Mary Maids. He had a client that started this franchise back in 1992. And when Bob decided to sell, he offered it to us. And initially, I told my husband he was crazy, that I did not know anything about running a franchise business, much less running my own business. But we decided to give it a try. And we kind of jumped in headfirst, not really having any major regrets at any time.

4:31but it took me about a year and a half to two years in when I thought I really need to be in it full-time and so once I got into it full-time really instead of working necessarily on my business but actually working in the business I began to settle into a really good rhythm not only with our team members but with our clientele and I gained confidence in what I was doing as an owner and the direction that we were going. And so I felt really good about that. I thought, no, this can really work. Okay. Love that answer. That's awesome. So what would you say was your most stressful moment you've had so far as a business owner?

5:10Like a, how am I going to get through this type of moment? There's a couple of things. One, COVID was a big one. COVID was definitely a moment. And I, but I feel like I really looked at COVID as an opportunity to make a difference. We were a cleaning company. And so that's what I really leaned into was we can take care of people and do it safely. And we can do it safely with our clients as well as our team members because we had all the proper equipment. We had all the proper disinfectants. I had done some research and I had a great disinfectant that was put out by 3M that had a short dwell time but took care of COVID and any kind of other coronavirus issues.

5:57So we really leaned into that and only had a few team members that kind of were scared enough that they kind of backed out and took some unemployment for that time period until we truly figured things out with COVID. But I had a great team that really leaned into that with me. And we stayed safe and we took care of our clients as well. The other second stressful thing that I really had was when we bought our second location about an hour and a half up the road. And I thought, what am I doing? I thought I finally got the first one under control and I'm at the second one. Yeah, no, that's awesome.

6:37As you say, it's an hour and a half away from you? It is. It's about an hour and a half up the road in Conyers, Georgia. But I have a great manager up there. It's a much smaller office. I try to go up there about once every month or so to check in with them, but we're in contact with them every day. So they're doing a great job up there. Awesome. Awesome. Now, have you ever thought about quitting your franchise? Well, not really. Even in the midst of really hard times, about a year after we bought our second location, that location was struggling so bad. And then the economy kind of fell out about two years ago, and we really dropped in revenue here.

7:21And I was really frustrated with some things. But at the same time, I knew we had a really strong base, and I knew that we had a really strong foundation in which to stand on. And so we just kind of worked our way out of it over the last year of getting back to a positive growth period. But I've never really wanted to quit. I've never really wanted to quit. No, never really. Okay. Okay. And we also, I'm sorry. We also have a really strong franchise system. We have a strong system of other franchise owners that we lean into. And also with our franchise support system with our home office is a really great support system.

8:04So it all kind of gels together for us. Nice. Nice. Nice. Now, what would you say is a mistake you made early on that cost you either serious money, time or reputation? Would you say? I would say not having or hiring the right team members. When you when you have team members that they might be great cleaners, but yet they call out a lot or maybe they're a little trauma field. we went through a time period where I kept a few team members way too long because they were good cleaners. And I kind of felt for their situation personally, but it doesn't work in my favor when I'm removing a lot of revenue because they're constantly calling out.

8:53So just making sure that we're overstaffed. We try to stay overstaffed and we try to hire that right team member that has that service-minded attitude, that has that attitude of, I need to be at work. I don't need to let small things stop me from showing up every day. Yeah. Yeah. Now I hear, I hear that a lot too, from, you know, the entrepreneurs that I talk to is that hiring is such a difficult thing because, you know, all you're, you're hiring somebody based off of words on a paper, right? The resume, right? So you don't know anybody's, you don't know their integrity. You don't know their honesty.

9:28You don't know what kind of work ethic they have. I mean, all that sounds great. They've been there somewhere for five years, But if they called out every every, you know, every week for those five years, you know, and those people kept them on, that's still not a great thing. But you won't know that based off of a piece of paper. That's exactly right. And it takes some time. Usually people will reveal themselves to you pretty quickly. And in my opinion, you're only good as the legs we stand on and the legs that we stand on are our team members, our day to day frontline team members. And that's the strength of our foundation of how we succeed in business.

10:00Yeah, no, I agree. I agree with that. Now, what would you say is something about you personally that had to change, like something in your personal life or something about your personality that had to change in order for your business to start to grow or scale? Well, the biggest thing for me is I take things personally. I feel like my company is my baby. It's my reputation. I grew up in this area. I feel like I'm the face of this business. And so when we do not perform at a five-star level for any reason, I take that personal because we should be performing at that. And when we have service failures, I've learned to not take those things personal but use them as retraining opportunities, as opportunities for growth in that team member and even in myself.

10:52And then I love the interactions with the clients. in order for them to see, you know, we really do care about how we treated their home. And if we didn't treat it well, then we need to do better. Thankfully, we don't have a lot of service failures right now. We've got a super great team in place. But that was one of the things that I had to really learn and lean into is it was going to happen. We're not perfect. My team members are not perfect. And then the other things that I had to be willing to do is to lean into some hard things and coaching my team members instead of really trying to boss them where I wanted them to go.

11:33I needed to coach and lead them where I wanted to go so that we were all headed in the right direction and to not be afraid to terminate when necessary. If I felt like an employee just could not get to where we needed them to be, to be that team player, to be, to have that service minded attitude, to be trainable, to be, to receive constructive criticism without attitude, then they were not the right fit for our office and our culture. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Now, you know, and this next question is hypothetical. Maybe it's not, Maybe you've already done this and you could talk about a personal experience.

12:14But let's say if someone shadowed you for a full day or let's say even a full week, what would surprise them the most about how you operate your franchise, would you say? I think what would surprise them is that the culture in our office, we truly try to operate like family. Genuinely care about my team. I care about their day. I care about what's going on in their personal lives. We, they might be surprised that I am not above changing my clothes and going out and cleaning with the team. I'm not above getting in a house if they find themselves over their heads and they need some help to go help them.

12:55That I'm not above that. They will see if I have an attitude of if I'm not willing to clean it myself, then I'm not going to ask you to clean it. And so my team trusts me. They trust our judge. and we really do try to see things from their perspective. And it's while we are a profit business, don't ever want to put profit over the well-being of my team members. Okay. I love that. I love that answer. So let's talk numbers without getting too specific, you know, since you've been in business for, you said, 11 years. What would you say, you know, I guess maybe this, you could be in months or it could be in years, but what year or month was it where you saw a turning point and things started to scale and you started to grow at a rapid rate, would you say?

13:48Again, it was that third year in when I came into it full time. We were getting some traction with some changes that I had made within our team in the way that we schedule. always wanted to be, number one, we always wanted to be overstaffed. And then we always wanted to be over scheduled to account for any skips that happened in our schedule, because people organically come off our schedule just about every day, either due to illness, a child being ill, maybe they've had a family emergency. Same with team members, things come up, children get sick, They get sick. They have car issues. So being overstaffed to where we can kind of spread some work around if we have a team member call out or being overscheduled that if we organically have our client come off, it kind of eases up that day.

14:41We might still have to change the schedule around a little bit. But coming out of COVID, we really grew exponentially the year before COVID. Then coming into COVID, we had a little bit of a down year. But then coming out of COVID for the next two years, we grew way beyond my expectations to the point that we were awarded what's called the Dallin Peterson Award, which means that we were we received the highest award that a franchisee can receive from Mary Maids out of all the franchise locations in the United States and so we were very proud of that award that took a really pushed my staff hard that couple years before that at coming out of COVID But just getting everybody on the same page, having my staff on the same page, because sometimes we look at the schedule and we think, how in the world is this going to work today?

15:42And we always think it'll get done and every time it gets done. So I'm proud of them. OK, OK. Now, what would you say actually moves the needle most in your business right now? Would it be leads, conversions, pricing, or your team performance? Or is it something else entirely? It's actually all of what you mentioned. Good leads lead to good conversions because we have great pricing. And then our team continues to sell our service with each and every five-star experience that they deliver. And so I always tell our team members, their salesmen, their salespeople within the home, because every time they deliver a five-star experience, they sell our service.

16:30And what that does is that gets them, our clients talking to their neighbors and their friends and their family. When people are looking for a cleaning service, hopefully we come first to mind with those people. And then, but it's really, it starts with good leads and then good team members keeping the customers that we have and then adding to that. Yeah, I love that. Love that. Now, what would you say is one thing you are doing today or your franchise is doing today that's giving you kind of an unfair advantage over your competitors? It's not like you got a great team and everything like that, but what would you say is giving you an unfair advantage over your competitors, your direct competitors?

17:14I think our dependability, the fact that we can service and I fight, I don't fight, but we have a lot of independence in our area and they can only handle so much. We can handle a larger volume. And if a client changes their day, 99 % of the time we can accommodate them on a different day or a different time. I feel like our corporate marketing opportunities that we have, our branding recognition, our website, we just had a new website refresh this year. I think the things that we're doing with YouTube streaming and then on Facebook with being able to market there through the Facebook marketplace.

17:59And I do a lot of grassroots as well out in the community doing a couple of trade shows a year. Try to at least I do one for sure a year. And then I do some truck or trade events just trying to keep our name out there because I really feel like people want to put a face. They think Merry Mates, sometimes they don't realize Merry Mates is a franchise. But then if they know it's a franchise, they think, oh, you're locally owned and operated. Absolutely. I am small business in this area. I'm in the office just most every day. And I'm here. So we would love the opportunity to earn your business. Yeah, no, I love that.

18:38I love that. Now, you know, what would you say is the fastest way? Well, you've kind of talked about this already, but I guess the fastest way somebody could lose their job, working for you would be to be dishonest, right? Absolutely. Dishonesty, drugs, theft, stirring up drama. We kind of had an incident last summer where I had a few team members that were just wanting to stir up drama. And I finally let all three of them go. And it just, things kind of leveled out and calmed down and everybody else was so happy with that. You know, not really having a great attitude about things, not being willing to learn, always thinking that their way is the right way instead of receiving instruction well.

19:20So, yeah, yeah. Now, have you ever had to, I mean, you kind of talked about this a little bit, but have you ever had to like, you know, deny a job or, or cut something off or, you know, maybe stop a job, maybe halfway through and ended up being the right move long-term? You mean in regards to a team member or the client itself? The client itself, like cleaning somebody. Yeah, because if we run into a situation, we used to do all in-home estimates before COVID. And then when COVID happened, we kind of minimized our footprint in the home. And so we stopped in-home estimates. We started doing everything by phone and email.

20:03So we don't always see a job ahead of time. And we've run into some situations where we get into some really bad situations as far as homes that I think, no, we cannot leave the team in there either. Either if there is a bug situation, maybe it's to the point where they're about to get evicted because of the condition of the home. There's just certain things that because of OSHA standards, I cannot leave my team in the house for their safety. Yeah, no, definitely. So we have had to we have had to pull some of that. And usually most people are understanding. They understand because they know the condition of their home.

20:46So. All right. All right. Well, I appreciate that. So we're going to head into what's called the quickfire round. So how this is I'm going to give you one word and then I just want you to tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear that word in regards to running your business. OK. And then kind of expand upon why you chose that in a couple of sentences after that. Does that make sense? That does. All right. Perfect. First, what is success? Leading. Leading in a way that others want to follow. And as I said earlier, I had to learn not to boss people. I had to learn how to coach them and lead them where I wanted them to go if we wanted to succeed.

21:29Failure. for most people they would think that is a reason to quit but for me it's another opportunity to improve and get it right i love that burnout too much at one time and so for burnout we try to mitigate too much at one time or over a short period and sometimes we enjoy those light days because sometimes we have really hard days, especially around Master's Week, where we work about 80 hours for the week. But then we try to have a light week afterwards so that the ladies kind of get some rest as far as burnout goes. Scaling. Scaling is growing at a sustainable rate for me. It is growing at a level that does not lead to our burnout or failure for sustainable growth.

22:30So we always want to be overstaffed. We always want to be growing and we never turn down business. Hiring. That unicorn. We're always looking for that unicorn team member, somebody who's service minded, dependable, trainable. happy attitude, someone who is always willing to go above and beyond. Competition. That's our, we have lots of it. So how do we stay set apart from our competition? How do we continue to be better than the competition? How do we continue to be more dependable than the competition and how do we deliver better service than the competition? And the last word is freedom. Freedom is, to me, freedom is adjustments.

23:27It's we make adjustments as needed in order to deliver great, consistent service. And my staff knows that they have that freedom. I always tell my staff members and my team members in the houses, you are free to make a judgment call. If you feel like you need to run that by one of us, feel free. But I hope that I've enabled them to make good decisions in homes with clients because we always want to say yes. And so they have that freedom to do so, so that we can continue to not only build loyal or satisfied customers, but loyal customers. Love that. Love that. Okay. Yeah. I appreciate you getting through that quickfire round now.

24:18So, you know, where do you think your industry is going, you know, with all this talk of AI and automation and robots and things of that nature, where do you see your industry going within the next 10 years? Well, the great thing is AI cannot physically clean the houses, but what I do think AI is definitely changing how we do marketing and how we sell. But thankfully, it cannot do the cleaning. There's still a lot of moving parts with that. And I don't want to get too tech forward that we lose sight of the people part of it. And I think that that's why I love the grassroots part is I love marketing to people through grassroots for them to actually put a face to our company name.

25:07But I do think that AI is making some great changes. And Marymates is really going along with those great changes through our corporate marketing strategies and how we're doing that. But thankfully, it cannot clean. Yeah, yeah. Now, what do you think your particular business franchise will be five years from now? Where do you see it? Oh, I really hope that we, I just opened a secondary office in Aiken because I have three counties in South Carolina as well that we service out of the Augusta office. And I'm really hoping to triple my customer base on the South Carolina side. And I have a revenue goal that I would like to, one, get back to where we were three years ago, but then even surpass that is what I would like to do.

26:03I feel like we're the number one in the area and I'd like to stay number one. I think there's enough love to spread around for cleaning, but I feel like merry maids here, we're going to still be moving strong here five years from now. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So I want you to be as candid and as honest as you can with the answer to this next question. But let's say if a small business owner, a small franchise owner is listening to the podcast episode with you today, Kim, and let's say they're feeling stuck or overwhelmed. They're just not having a great go at 2026. They're not profitable.

26:39They're thinking about just giving everything up and going back to a nine to five. What's a piece of advice you'd want them to hear from you today? So there's a couple of things because I was in that position a couple of years ago. When we came out of winning our award, we just, the economy just kind of took a bite out of us. And I was really frustrated because I felt like we were still doing all of the right things that I knew to do that got us to that growth period. But I felt like for every step that I took forward, I was taken two steps back. So I was very frustrated. I leaned more into my grassroots, which helped a lot.

27:18But last year, and I would say take a small bite, look at the overall problem, but take a small bite at a time. Try not to eat the whole elephant at one time. But one thing in particular for last year is I joined a local B &I group, which is a business network international group. And I would encourage other business owners to find another business network group to get into that will support you. And that was the I resisted joining. I was a part of another business referral group before that really was just a colossal waste of my time. And so I was really hesitant about joining BNI, but it was the best decision I ever made.

28:03I felt like I had 50 plus cheerleaders in my corner. I have a genuine network of people who want to see me grow and I want to see them grow as well. And so we're always looking for ways to support each other with referrals, with business growth. And I would just encourage anybody to find that network of support, either through their franchise network, which I also have, which I'm very thankful for. but also find that local business network group either through a local chamber which I'm not a part of and I considered but then I joined BNI and I'm very satisfied with our group there but I would say start to dismantle what you feel like that that problem is and and some things some things we tried and it just didn't work and I was very frustrated and we tried something else I don't ever look at failure as just a reason to quit.

29:01I look at what did I do wrong? Why? And what can I do different to make it good? And so I'm not a quitter. Like I said, I leaned into a little bit more grassroots and just getting into that local business referral network. I think it was a it was an absolute game changer for me. I love that. I love that. I appreciate that advice. So what's next for Mary Maids of Augusta? What should people be excited about coming up in the near future? Oh, my gosh. There's so much coming down the pipe. As far as the AI, I sit on our National Ad Council for Marymaids for the whole network. And so there's a lot of things coming for us with our website.

29:50And we're just beginning to engage that potential with how we interact with customers and the technology that's coming. But also just with us, even through social media, communication avenues are always changing and we try to stay up with it. But we're excited about some new products that are coming down the line that we're going to be using. And then we've also got some new uniforms coming out that we're excited about changing over to. But I'm just excited about Marymates in general and how we really strive to deliver that five star experience. And I think that really sets us apart from other companies out there.