645: The $60k/mo Remote Cleaning Side Hustle

21:38And so I've built that brand for years, whereas they can just show up today and get jobs. So with that being said, it's anywhere from 40 % to the cleaner to 60%. And I really don't want to pay my cleaner much less than about$70 per visit, generally, just because of the time, the gas, and all that. The way the world is today, if you pay somebody$40,$50 to go spend an hour and a half, it's tough, I think. Yeah, that's helpful, and that's interesting to hear. Like, okay, starting out, I'm willing to accept a lower margin again, because I still got the day job, right? I'm building this brand. And then as that reputation and branding improves, then kind of like Nike or like North Face or these like elite brands or high prestige brands, there's definitely going to be some more margin built in.

22:26Yeah, I would try and do that. But also with that being said, there's more margin potentially on some of these jobs, but there's less margin because now I've got to update my CRM. So that's going to cost me more money. I've also helped people out with supplies. If they're going to be there all the time, then I'll let them loan. I'll loan something to them. And then I've had to hire more people. There's more helpers now. Like I don't have, I'm hiring more people to help in the office. So they have to pay them as well. And then also with residential compared to commercial, it's going to be a different margin.

22:56A lot of times commercial is, it's a tricky one. Sometimes you can only get like 20, 30 % margins when you're competing with the ABMs of the world because they hire employees and they'll hire employees for minimum wage at$14,$15 an hour and they're willing to take a 30, 40 % margin and just keep on stacking as many accounts as they can. Whereas I would do more quality than quantity. Where you could be 40 to 60 % on residential? Yeah. I won't just go 40 to 60 % on a commercial job. I'll never win that. I might only be able to say if it's$150 job, I might only be able to tack on 30 % of that, which is 30, 40 bucks.

23:29I might only make 30,$40 a day on it. So I'm willing to do that if I'm able to get more quantity, but it just has to be for the right value. Sure. Yeah, higher volume instead of coming back every two or three weeks, it's coming back every night. Okay, now that makes, and this is super interesting stuff. Do you have a picture of the pie chart between residential and commercial as it stands today? I don't have an exact picture because it's kind of ever-changing. That's the thing with this too is like the churn, right? So there's always churn and what I like to look at, I just made up this stat on my own but we used to have, I used to always track new recurring revenue every month And I want, and I, you know, in my personal opinion, I like to get over 2 ,500 per month, new recurring revenue, but that doesn't track the churn, which in cleaning it's finicky.

24:13And so people are going to naturally churn. You want to keep it as low as you can. But so if we lose a couple, if we lose a weekly customer, it's$300 a week. I just lost over$1 ,200 a month, you know? And so I track now net recurring new revenue, net new recurring revenue, which is take my churn, take my new recurring revenue minus my churn, average it out. and that's our new growth. I've been at like$600 a month on that over the past six, seven months. It's kind of a new thing I'm tracking, which seems to be okay. Not as much of a growth as I thought, but you know what? People are finicky. They're going to naturally churn.

24:46You just have to try and keep it to as much to a minimum as I can. Okay. This is like I added three new clients, but I lost one, right? It's like as long as the number stays positive, the business is growing. Exactly. Now, the only thing is, is I don't even care as much about how many customers I add, because if that one customer was a weekly customer and they were paying 300 a visit, I lost 1 ,200 revenue. But if I only get three more new recurring customers and they're once a month at 300 a month, I still lose because I only gained$900 that month, but I lost 1 ,200 because that customer was so valuable.

25:17Yeah, and there's more logistical complexity and dealing with more people rather than less. Exactly, yeah. It is a good business from the standpoint of there is this recurring revenue component where stuff is going to keep getting dirty. You're going to want to keep coming back. What reasons do you find people say, ah, you know, I got to put a pause on this service. I, you know, I'm going to try somebody cheaper. I'm going to bring it in house. Like what, what do you see reasons for that churn? Obviously price is always going to be a big one. Hey, we've got stuff going on or maybe, Hey, we're, we're going to be going to Florida for the winter.

25:48So we're going to be gone, but price or we're moving. That's, that's always it. But then if you want to dig deeper, which I always want to find out like, okay, well, this price has been working for you for four months. So what's going on? and sometimes I'll just go radio silent or they'll tell me a number. And if they tell me a number and I can work with it, I say, let's try this or we can negotiate, right? Or if they're just at this crazy number that doesn't even make sense, we have to let them go. But sometimes it's price, right? But other times it's, I don't even, they don't even really want to respond to me.

26:15And so I've had, that's the other thing I have to guard against is poaching for my current cleaners. Yeah. Because it can happen. Okay, okay. Yeah, they're like, why are we paying 50 % over here to Skylar? or we could just do this deal direct? They try to, they'll try to. And so the customers will try and get, we don't, we try and keep the limitation of how much my cleaner has their phone number, but you can't always, they might, you know, my cleaner might go there and they might exchange phone numbers. Or if your cleaner doesn't getting a lot, a lot of work from you, they, you just don't know.

26:44They might say something. And I bet they have, because I've gotten customers telling me, hey, they're trying to, they're trying to like cut you out just so you know, they try to get me. I've gone over to people's houses and asked them personally because they just out of the blue quit. Anything you do to prevent that? I try and put them on the stand with me and we just talk and say, you know, did you say something? And did you by chance talk about doing this cheaper? Did you guys talk about money? But then they always answer the right questions. So then the other thing I've done is like, okay, screw this.

27:12My sister, she lives not too far away. We'll send her to her house and I'll see if the cleaner is going to try and leave a business card or leave a phone number. you got like a spy on the inside yeah i got a spy she's an inside spy so you know my sister she gets a she gets a free clean so she's happy yeah and she needs to report to me if i got a poacher oh funny oh that's great so that's kind of how that works there and then i mean obviously if they're poaching i i've we've already set clear expectations that's a no-no and so you know i let them go then okay anything else on the inbound customer lead flow side especially in the early days?

27:50The cleaning business has really changed. It's just like buying businesses right now. Buying businesses is super duper hot, I feel like, especially on Twitter. And what it was like a year or two ago was cleaning businesses. And what I'll say right now is that I joined a cleaning academy as well. And I joined it with Johnny Robinson and Sergio with HSA. And those guys are awesome. They're very awesome. And so doing coaching through them and doing lessons, HSA and Johnny and Sergio and Trevor at getting people off on the right foot and really getting them results. Anything specific that they helped you with on the marketing side?

28:25Yeah, for the marketing is like Google pay-per-click ads. I didn't really do a whole lot of, but local service ads, people use Google local service ads. So I'd use that. And we had just a lot of word of mouth, like passing out business cards, going to Realtor's house, trying to meet with people, like meet with Realtors as well, and just going to an open house. So they give me tips and tricks to do that. Facebook posting, posting in mom groups, stuff like that. So those guys would always be like, hey, try this, try this, try this. And it works. It works. Yeah. Start to give, you know, cast a presence online and in person.

28:59I like the realtor angle of, you know, what are the potential lead fountains where it's like, instead of this one-to-one hand-to-hand, you know, okay, I got somebody. It's like, well, who knows lots of potential customers or they need this house staged and cleaned and, or, you know, they're just in and out of a lot. They know lots of different people in town. That's a good way to go and these different mom groups on Facebook. One thing that I just think is interesting about the cleaning business in general, like I think back to like my childhood and my neighborhood growing up. I don't know if anybody had to clean it or is this just something we didn't talk about?

29:28Like, I don't know. But like now it's super, super common. Like for our neighbors, you see the car, you see the little maid car pull up and stuff. It's like become a thing. Like, so the point I'm trying to make is like the pie has gotten a lot bigger and obviously there's more competition, but it's still super fragmented. There's not any one national company or brand that has a commanding market share here. It's still super localized, super mom and pop, super fragmented. And so that's where the opportunity lies to come in and build something like a Nebraska Elite Cleaning with almost 300 reviews on Google now.

30:02So there's something going on there. I do want to talk about how you have generated that volume of positive feedback. how Skyler is collecting those Google reviews, the other tools and tech he's using to manage the business, and how he's running this thing on the side from his day job right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what-if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot. They phased down those what-ifs and they got their answers through taking action.

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32:30Yeah, well, we've had a lot of customers. And so we all, I mean, I have a couple of assistants as well. And it's just important for us that I want to do quality, quality control is kind of as soon as we can after the clean, like quality control to me just means let's talk with the customer. Let's make sure they're happy. And the other thing is I always want my cleaner to do a walkthrough, make sure that the customer is happy and we're done. And so, I mean, obviously, not always, but almost obviously, almost always we have good feedback. And so when that happens, hey, would you guys help us out?

32:59We're a small local business and we could really appreciate a Google review. And just by simply asking and especially trying to strike the fire while the iron's hot right after the clean and getting that done, people will more often than not do it. Yeah. The next closest competitor that shows up for me when I Google Omaha cleaners has eight. So it's like, really? Oh, gosh. 293 for Nebraska Elite Cleaning, next guy, eight. So it's just like, oh, clearly these people who are serious about the business, this is the one they got to hire. And you might find that, you know, whatever, you know, your niche plus locality is like, it might not take, I mean, if you can hit double digits, right?

33:34It's, you know, I was always trying to get to double digits on like book launch reviews. It's like, there's certain, you know, it might not take very much to really stand out against the competition. So it's an interesting way. Anything tools and tech wise that you're using either for that review collection, or if that's just hand to hand, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you know, thanks so much for having us over today. Let's take a look around. Anything that we missed, you want to make sure you're happy. Would you mind helping us out? If you are happy, here's the, you know, QR code, like here's the link to the Google review or whatever.

34:01But anything else that helps run the business from tools and tech and scheduling and phone management, like all the different pieces here? There's a few different softwares And I use one as well that will automatically, when a job is completed, send over a text message to the customer that they can give us a review. Which one is that? It's called Nice Job. I think it's about$75 a month. But what it does is it sends a review right to the customer and then it follows up like a day or a couple days later and then a couple days later again and with an email. So it'll continuously kind of hit the customer.

34:36And if they had a good experience along with us potentially texting them and saying, hey, you know, did you have a good experience? Okay, well, you leave us that review. Then maybe they say they will on a Tuesday and then they forget on Tuesday and then they get their automated text from Nice Job on a Thursday. Then they maybe do it, you know. So that helps to get those as well along with just the personal part of it. We try and give them a call and ask for one as well if they had a good experience. Got it. Cool. How about on the scheduling and team management side? Yeah. So on the scheduling and team management side, I would say, well, it's gotten bigger.

35:06And so having a day job, I couldn't do it all. So it was hard to let go because as a business owner, you think you're the best and you're the only one that can do it. So it took like the 80-20 rule. If you let 80 % of the job can be done by somebody else at a good level and not to do too much micromanaging. So I got a couple assistants. I actually have four now. They help with all the scheduling. They do all the inbounds for me, take our inbound calls, and they deal with most all customer interaction except the stuff that I do in person and do the scheduling and do the customers and also deal with my cleaners.

35:39So we keep those guys pretty busy generally. Is there a phone system or a scheduling app software that they're using to say which people need to go where at what time? So Booking Koala is what I use for the CRM, Booking Koala. And it's pretty nice. And a lot of home services, I believe, use it. I think it can be used for like lawn care, handyman, probably like carpet shampooing companies. So it's pretty handy there. That's a new one. Booking Koala. Like we've had people mention Jobber in the past, but I never heard of Booking Koala. Yeah. Booking Koala. That company is doing pretty darn well. So I think it's$57 a month.

36:15or you can go, if you have like more than 50 providers, then it goes up to like 157, but it's relatively cheap,$57 a month. I use Book and Quala. I use Open Phone for my phone system. And that way, everybody, I can always see who's responding to texts and calls and who's on a call. So that makes it pretty easy as well. And then we use Slack. I communicate with my assistants via Slack so we can just, you know, have good communication and a plan. I want to commend you for plugging all our sponsors in this episode. I know, right? I didn't mean, I didn't know if this, you know, if it was a sponsor episode, but yeah, absolutely.

36:51Yeah. Indeed has been great as a sponsor. Open phone has been great as a sponsor. There's, you know, maybe, maybe as we keep going, we'll, we'll check off a couple more here. Yeah, exactly. Right. No, you're doing, you're doing awesome. But yeah, no, we use a lot of different tech and just try and automate what can be automated and keep the personal touch alive as well. Yeah. One thing I forgot to clarify on the, on the cleaners themselves, you mentioned, hey, sometimes it's better to have them as a W-2 and maybe under the eyes of the law, they are if they're working for you, communicating with you every day.

37:19Do you have that structured as contractors or they're W-2 people under your brand? Yeah, they're structured as subcontractors and we have them sign a subcontractor cleaner agreement as well. So they know they're a subcontractor. And before I kind of even get them onboarded to do cleans, I have them fill out a 1099 form and sign my cleaners agreement and get insurance. I have insurance, but I also want them to have insurance as well. So everybody's insured in case anything happens and absolutely things break. Yeah. And if they were already doing, you know, freelance cleaning gigs, it's something they probably already had.

37:53You know, they should have it, but I would say probably like 20 % of them only have it, maybe less, like not very many have as many as you think, but yeah, they should. Like just a general liability policy for, you know, you're in somebody's house and you break something. Exactly. Like up to, I think up to a million is what it is kind of the standard there. So like a million dollars and it's probably about$50 a month, right around 50 a month for both parties. And yeah, we just structured as a subcontractor. Why? Because there's payroll taxes, there's workers comp, there's a lot of other things that come into play.

38:24And then when you have them as a W-2. So it's a little bit cleaner as a subcontractor, but you also have a little bit less control. I can't really tell them what to do, how to do it. They can still, you know, not take jobs. yeah, they can kind of work on their own schedule and I can't really tell them how to do their work. And they can work for another company too. They can work for me and three other companies. Sure. And you kind of get the impression that that is how somebody is going to fill out their schedule as like a free agent almost. Well, yeah, I'll do some work over here. I'll do some work on my own and fill in the blank with something else.

38:56Maybe it's cleaning, maybe it's not, but I'm going to piece together this income from a few different sources. So you got the day job, you got the cleaning business, you're starting all this other stuff. Talk to me about a day in the life. How do you juggle all of this stuff? It sounds like you got a great team of assistants that are handling the day-to-day bookings, but there's still going to be fires to put out. There's still other things. Walk me through a typical day if there is such a thing. There's so many fires to put out. And that's what I am, being a business owner and everybody knows it, but I'm a professional firefighter.

39:28Like every day, you know, what keeps me sane, I try and always get myself a lift in just to like say, at least I invested in myself today in some capacity. So I try and be as healthy as I can, get a lift in if I can, and then try and eat healthy, but a day in the life. So when I first started this business, it take the advantage I had or have or had was I'm single. I'm single. I had a girlfriend, but I didn't have kids. And I also worked a job or do still work a job that's in sales. So there's a little bit of flexibility as long as you're hitting your numbers. And so I always hit my numbers. And so there was flexibility.

39:59And so I was able to kind of move around, but it wasn't uncommon for me to work from nine or 10 PM till three. And so it first started just being, okay, I'm gonna quit at two. Then it started being, I'm gonna quit at three. Then I'm gonna quit at four. And so like, I've got to continue to be better about sleep and being more healthy. And then that way, because right now my health is probably not great, but it takes so much work, especially to get things going. What are you doing during that time? Like nobody is available to talk to you at 2am. No, nobody's available to talk to, but I've got a list like of things I need to do.

40:30We, we, I want to get like shirt shirts that, um, for us to wear that people are, my cleaners can wear if they so desire. Um, we'll pay them more, but it's better for my brand, my books too. Like, so the finances part of it, I've got to continue to keep up with that and who, who still owes me money. Right. And so people that we usually do credit card payment prior to because I don't want to mess around. If you don't pay me, we have problems. Sure. Okay. Fair enough. I do appreciate you sharing like, look, this was a lot of late nights trying to get this thing off the ground and those hours have got to come somewhere.

41:02There's a way to structure it in a way that doesn't require you a ton like during the nine to five, during the day to day, but there's still like some heavy lifting. Just something doing the volume that you're doing doesn't happen without effort. And it's good to hear that like, no, no, no, no. There were some sacrifices made. Yeah. Just to kind of keep up with everything because your cleaners are constantly kind of need to paid. So I'm kind of like a piggy bank in some ways because they won't pay and they won't pay today. And it's not uncommon. Like we had 22 cleans in a day and, um, that's a lot of moving parts, a lot of moving parts.

41:34And if somebody doesn't show up, I need to have a backup and so on and so forth. Is there any tool or system that you can, can use? Cause yeah, you're collecting revenue from the customer and then you got to pay 40 to 60 % of it out to the cleaner? Like, is there some way to automate that? Or do you have to like go schedule 22 transactions, you know, each day? Yeah. So the booking koala integrates with Stripe and, you know, so free plug to Stripe there again. But anyways, that integrates and it holds a card. And so if it's a recurring clean, it'll just charge as soon as our cleaner clocks out.

42:06So the card's charged once they clocked out and that collects the payment. Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out because it's a lot to keep track of mentally. And so it sounds like the booking koala is helping. It's okay. This person logged this job or this many hours. So they are owed this much and we collect it. Like it's tied to that card swipe from the customer and then make it more seamless, I guess. Yeah, it's a little seamless. But the thing is when you get commercial jobs too, that can be somewhat difficult because they usually don't pay. It's usually a net 15 or net 30. And if it's thousands of dollars, I've got to front that to labor, you know, and I won't get that check.

42:38It's going to be a check payment too. It's going to be a couple of weeks later. So that's just one of the small, it's a small challenge, but it's okay. It's worth it. Right. So you got to have some cashflow to be able to make that float. Exactly. You have to have a little bit more cashflow to make that work. Yep. What's surprised you the most over the last couple of years of building this? You can make money doing anything. Like if you want to cut trees down, I guarantee you can make money. As an entrepreneur, there's always ways to make money. Just think of something that people pay for and you can do it yourself.

43:04I don't want to have self-limiting beliefs too, because like when people say you can't do that, why not? Why not? So self-limiting beliefs is one thing that you can make money in two things. And the other thing is like, we literally, in my opinion, I think you can accomplish anything you want to do. It's just about what you'll sacrifice. Because I've seen it every time. Like if I want to continue to coach, I could just want to sacrifice a little bit longer for a little bit more. And I could have done what I wanted to do. Same thing with this business. Like we can probably continue to grow this as far as we want to go.

43:33It's just about what you'll sacrifice. How many more fires do I want to put out, right? Because there's more, more money equals more fires, but truly like you can make so much money through this, through, through being an entrepreneur, if you are willing to withstand a lot of pain. And some pain, I'm not going to say it's all pain, but like I was talking with the person I built the business from yesterday and she goes, that's a business owner, right? Like it sucks most of the time until we go cash that check, right? That's like usually the best time. And so being a business owner, small business owner, like a lot falls on our shoulders, but I enjoy the, I enjoy the daily adventure, truly, like the roller coaster and like winning, winning or like, hey, we did a great job.

44:08Let's keep on pushing forward. Like I actually enjoy that. And I don't really think of it as work. Like to me, it's, it's actually pretty fun. Yeah. If you can turn it into a game, if you can have fun doing it, recognize that, you know, you're privileged to be able to play it and, you know, try and play it at a competitive and high level and get better every day. The advantage is like no two days are the same, which is kind of exciting. Yeah, exactly. And I've been grateful to have a lot of job where like, you know, at least my one corporate job was like that, where it's like, you're driving around, you're talking to different people.

44:36There wasn't a whole lot of monotony to it, which I think helped. Yeah. But, and then as a business owner, right, it's just professional firefighters. What's going to happen today? And then trying to build systems and processes around like, okay, I can squash out this fire, but how do I make sure it doesn't flare up again and getting better about that? Yeah, exactly. And so, and my assistants are huge for me, you know, having them and just, I guess I spend a lot of time with them. So I don't talk to the customer a whole lot anymore, but I spend hours with them, giving them direction on, hey, here's what I need you to tell this customer, tell this cleaner, here's what we're going to do there.

45:10And just giving them a general plan, but kind of having them execute it. Yeah, having them execute it. So they've been huge. Are you going to expand geographically if you want to keep putting out more and more of fires as the revenue grows or you know franchise this thing nationally what's what's next for you you're gonna sell it yeah yeah yeah yeah so great question i mean do i want to franchise i never thought i wanted to own a cleaning business so you know who knows but right now that's not necessarily something i want to do do i want to eventually sell it yeah and probably just continue to grow i guess but eventually sell it but do i want to go a different area like i said before i kind of tried that.

45:47And I did it in Texas and it worked. I mean, we've in a year, I don't know if I've even done, I don't even think I've done a hundred thousand dollars in sales, which would be 12 times eight. That's not even probably 10 ,000 a month, you know? So that's not real. That's not really, really that big. It's actually probably really small, maybe, maybe less than a hundred thousand. So to think that you can scale it. I don't know. I pause you there. I imagine a lot of people listening be like, dang, we can't use the word only in front of 10 grand a month. that's still pretty significant from something, you know, to wheel something into existence from zero to one.

46:19It's pretty big deal. Yeah, you're so right. Yeah, great point. It's small and it's hard to keep up and I'm not pushing as much effort into it. Like I could probably hire somebody to cold call companies and, you know, push more reviews there and also push more up, you know, SEO or online stuff there, but I'm not. So do I want to grow one another place? Only over acquisition, probably not starting from the ground up again. Would I sell this one someday? Yeah, I would sell it. And not because I don't want to do it. I like doing it. I like what I've built, but I always kind of want to keep leveling up, whatever that may be.

46:52Growth through acquisition. Now you're getting into different niches kind of in the home services and kind of you follow the same playbook. You think the same playbook is going to apply across different verticals? I think there's some similarities, but there's definitely differences too. The good thing about cleaning is that it's recurring. Okay. That's your best thing about it. It's pretty low ticket. We could be doing$150 jobs. And, you know, by the time if I'm a lot of times a business owner, maybe, maybe makes 15 to 30 % of their gross sales, 15 to 30%. If you're on the high side, like you're doing awesome.

47:23Yeah. After, after playing for the cleaners and all the other overhead and marketing and stuff like that. Yeah. Exactly. Cause there's just always more, more fees. And so if I make 25 % of one 50, that ends up being like 40 bucks, something like that, right? Yeah. So very much a volume game, right? Like how do we keep stacking up these recurring clients? Exactly. So recurring is good in it. The low jobs are not so good. And then you get the customers who can be difficult because they have expectations that their grandma used to pay somebody 20 bucks an hour. So now that's the difference in it.

47:51But like, whereas the other trades we talked about painting is a much higher ticket average. Average ticket for that is a couple thousand. So when your ticket's higher, I think you can market differently where like door knocking, I think can be more valuable with those other ones, with those other trades, potentially not as much as with cleaning. You don't need to go knock people's doors. There's not going to be an ROI. I think the marketing is going to be a little bit different. That'd be the biggest thing. That was, that was the, you know, my experience, you know, knock on doors, try and sell some paint jobs.

48:19Hey, can I come back this weekend and give you an estimate and allow the rinse repeat? Yeah. Great point. That's the thing about that. Like painting is very, very in person. I mean, I've got it. I've got to go to their house. I've got to do an estimate. I've got to spend a couple hours with them just to hope I get a shot, right? And whereas cleaning, I've got it pretty much automated. I don't have to go there unless it's going to be a commercial clean. Then they want me to meet with them. So that's the flip on those two. Yeah. Well, this has been fascinating. I've been taking a ton of notes. I think it's really an interesting niche.

48:50It's a really interesting illustration of something that you could do across any number of different niches. Again, NebraskaEliteCleaning.com is where you can find Skylar. We've mentioned Home Services Academy. This was Johnny Robinson. Johnny was on the show a couple of years ago talking about his window washing business at Squeegee God. Follow along with Johnny over there. Always interesting stuff. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. I just think if you stick with something long enough and you're willing to get your teeth kicked in long enough, you'll succeed.

49:18Like truly. If you stick with it long enough and you're willing to get your teeth kicked in, you can do it. I've always said too, life is like, you can get anything you want done just about what you'll sacrifice. If you want to sacrifice, you know, a Saturday here and there for 30 minutes, being on the phone with a customer and you're willing to do that, you can make it. You know, there's different things like that, but at least to start. But my number one tip is just like stick with it and give something a good shot. If you want to try something, it can work. Yeah, that's an interesting reframe about sacrifices.

49:45Obviously, sticking with it, persistence, grit, all that. Like I'm on board with that. But then this idea of what are you going to sacrifice? And you can think about in the pie chart of your day. Hey, look, we're all dealt 24 hours in a day. if I want to build something, I'm going to have to read, invest some of these hours somewhere else, somewhere that they're not currently being used for. And that might feel like a sacrifice. What are we going to do? It's like, if somebody always talks about, you know, the word decide is like from Latin, like to cut and say, well, what are you going to cut?

50:09Right. And then it's like, well, now I'm going this way because I cut off that other thing with my decision. And it's like, I guess it's maybe from incision, probably the same route, but that's interesting. Yeah. What are you going to sacrifice? Yeah, it's so true. My sacrifice has been, Hey, we have a new cleaner. I got to go see, I want to see how she did. I know this is a vacant house. I'm going to go drive there tonight. But for me, it's kind of fun. Like I'm going to go drive there. I'm going to go test her out and see how she did. But it also can be seen as a sacrifice. I think those are probably the two biggest things, right?

50:32It's like, I'm either giving it my time or I'm giving it a headache and I'm trying to put out a fire and deal with a mess. Yeah. I'm reminded of that line that, you know, an entrepreneur is someone who's willing to live a few years like others won't, so they can live a lot of years like others can't. And that's definitely something that has stood out in this conversation, along with the idea of being able to have a longer time horizon, being able to say like, look, you know, the day job's okay. I don't need to, I don't need to make rent tomorrow. Like if it takes a little bit longer, like that's totally fine.

51:01Building the team, building the reputation, building the, you know, that incredible online reputation for the brand such that when you show up in person, there's like this preconceived notion of what that experience is going to be like based on the online presentation. It's that branding, that positioning. I think Nebraska Elite Cleaning has done an awesome job with all that. So kudos to you on everything that you built and everything that you'll continue to build. We've been talking cleaning today, but that's not the only service that you could apply these tactics to. To get your creative juices flowing, make sure to grab your free listener bonus for this episode.

51:33It's my list of 101 service business ideas. Just head over to the show notes for this episode at sidehustlenation.com slash Skyler, S-K-Y-L-E-R, or follow the link in the episode description. I'll get you right over there. Again, that's 101 Service Business Ideas that you might be able to apply some of Skyler's marketing playbook to and a little bit of fulfillment playbook to. But big thanks to Skyler for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

52:04Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Hey, check this out. We could totally do this. Look at what this guy's built. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.