237. How a Burnt-Out Teacher Built a $1.7M Cleaning Business in 3 Years

12:23Victoria Westcott:Absolutely. Calling those 10 cleaning companies in your city is so helpful. And then the other piece of advice, and it's the scariest thing, like especially for millennials, like you, you know, you guys don't pick up the phone, like you're so scared of picking up the phone, but your first clients are going to be calling you. So you kind of have to just get over that and pick up the phone and make the call. They're probably not going to answer anyway. So if they do answer, just pretend to be a client. And then the next piece of that is write down the prices. If they have online booking, amazing.

12:53Victoria Westcott:Now we can use AI and we can do deep research. I love AI. Well, it's a love-hate relationship. I love AI, this stuff. And you can do deep research on the market prices in your city. So if you are truly petrified and cannot answer the phone and cannot pick up the phone, then use AI, do the deep research and ask it, what are the most common rates in my city?

13:14UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Let's talk about that workflow. What does that workflow look like for the audience?

13:18Victoria Westcott:For the audience? So depending on if you're using, I mean, it doesn't really matter if you're using ChatGPT or you're using Claude, there's always a deep research button and you press that and you ask it, do market research on my city. I'm looking at starting a cleaning company. We focus on residential instead of office cleaning. And I can speak to that as well as to why. But our market is very much the residential market. So we would define that. I would also define who your ideal client is. And I'll tell you who mine is. We've named them Jordan. My AI named it that. And Jordan is very busy, a working professional, earns between$130 ,000 and 200 grand a year, combined income or solo income, has kids and maybe a dog.

14:03Victoria Westcott:They work full time, they have busy social lives, and they do not want to be cleaning. All of those things matter. Why? Because we don't want micromanagers. Jordan doesn't have time, nor does Jordan want to micromanage their cleaners. They just want the answer to their problem, which is they don't want to be cleaning in their free time. So Jordan books online. Jordan values cleaners that get it done. Jordan doesn't want to be having to give them a list every time. They just don't have time for that. Whereas Nancy is our opposite persona. Nancy is high maintenance, low reward. Poor Nancy's out there.

14:36Victoria Westcott:I apologize to them if they're listening. It's like Karen.

14:40UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Yeah, that's what I thought of.

14:42Victoria Westcott:She's not necessarily a Karen, but here's the thing with Nancy. Nancy is usually retired or semi-retired, bought her house 20-30 years ago for pennies house rich cash poor has all the time in the world and has been cleaning the house herself her entire life for free and so she resents having to pay someone else to do it and then resents that they don't do it the way she wants them to Nancy is high maintenance extremely low reward she's the one that your millennial cleaners because they're mostly millennial and Gen Z, right? Generations matter here. So millennial and Gen Zs, they don't want to be going into Nancy's home because Nancy and them, they're going to fight.

15:23Victoria Westcott:They just won't see the world in the same way. Now, here's the thing. So I don't want to sound like I'm just like an ageist, horrible person that's against retirees. That's not it. All of the other cleaning

15:32UpFlip Podcast Hosts:businesses are built for Nancy.

15:35Victoria Westcott:Every single cleaning business in our city tailors their model for Nancy. So Nancy likes hourly payments. She wants to pay by the hour and she wants to track what they're doing in that time. She sees herself as the manager of the cleaner. Whereas Jordan books by the job, which means she pays her set price. She doesn't care how long it takes. Like, just do your job. Great. Get out of my hair. Just do it. So we have by the job pricing.

16:02UpFlip Podcast Hosts:I love the ICP and listeners, you guys should actually go back because that's actually like not a takeaway we have a lot on the upper podcast is like build out an ICP of like what you want. And it sounds so like intuitive, but that is great. I want to ask specifically about Jordan and the specific metric I guess I want to ask about is his or her income,$130K to$200K. Why is it specifically that? I get the$130K, but why is it capped at$200K is more my question.

16:28Victoria Westcott:Great question. So it was actually my AI that defined that. So I am taking a guess here, but I will tell you, we have billionaires that we have worked with before in our city and they're great. When we work with billionaires, it tends to be a post-construction project and it's, you know, a summer project. So they're building a second or third or fourth house, which is great. We don't clean on a weekly or biweekly basis with billionaires. Why not? Because they have in-house staff. And that's not our model, right? We could do it, but we'd be changing the model. And the other thing that I'm always coaching people now is don't change your business model for one client nor for one cleaner, okay?

17:07Victoria Westcott:And we had that. We had an amazing billionaire that lives in our city. Great guy. He's very well known. There's only so many on this planet. And he hired us for, I think it was three times a week for a summer. And by September, he had let us go because he wanted a non-English speaking cleaner because he was worried about his IP. And that's fair.

17:29UpFlip Podcast Hosts:No way.

17:29Victoria Westcott:And it's a small city. We live in a city. There's only 400 ,000 people, 500 ,000 in the summer. And he was like, everybody talks. And I'm like, actually, it's true. I know a lot about his personal life just because of what the cleaners told me. So I'm like, yep, you're right. We sign NDAs like we did all of it, but they're human. They gossip. They just do. So it's totally fair.

17:48UpFlip Podcast Hosts:That's interesting. Okay, so I love building out like the ICP. And so you identified like the Jordans like you wanna go after. You're not gonna go after the Nancys. How do you then get clients like the Jordans? How are you guys like acquiring clients today? And what advice would you give?

18:03Victoria Westcott:I love that. So in the beginning, I told you we went for Realtors first. We filled out our Yelp profile. We also filled out our Google My Business profile. And the first year we invested heavily into Google Ads. At the same time, we followed a guy on YouTube called Hey Tony. His actual name is Matt, but Hey Tony is his channel. And he teaches local service businesses. It's because it's his marketing agency. He teaches local service businesses how to use SEO to get found on Google. So now I teach other people how to do that. And the reason is Jordan is smart. Jordan's like you and me. They skim over the ads.

18:40Victoria Westcott:Like when was the last time you actually clicked the first ad that showed up?

18:44UpFlip Podcast Hosts:It's probably been a while. I will say I do love ads. I love looking at ads, but I get what you're saying. For the sake of this, never. I can't remember the last time I did.

18:50Victoria Westcott:You wouldn't, right? You would look for the best. And by looking for the best, you're looking at their reviews. You're looking at, you know, that's just how we're like wired, especially our age groups, you know, that have grown up with the internet. We know how to skip over the blue ads. But in the first year, we did advertise. We did both Google pay-per-click and we did Google local services. Both are great. Both are fine. But it's a lot of filtering for Nancy. Nancy definitely clicks on the ads, whereas Jordan doesn't. And so now we're all in on SEO. We spend zero on marketing. Well, I shouldn't say zero.

19:22Victoria Westcott:We give our cleaners a$25 bonus every time they get a five star review. The client doesn't need to mention their name. I just track it. I go, oh, hey, you just got a five star review. Amazing. Here's 25 bucks. I'd rather invest in the cleaners than into Google at this stage.

19:37UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Oh, that's really interesting. So all that's coming through SEO. So do you guys have like an SEO agency? And you don't have to spell the name, obviously. Like, how are you like dominating SEO then?

19:46Victoria Westcott:Okay, so I'm going to give you my magic formula for naming your company. So it starts with naming.

19:51UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Okay.

19:51Victoria Westcott:Our company name is Oak Bay Clean. Oak Bay is the bougie part of our city. Anybody who lives in the city knows that's the bougie part of the city. Outside of the city, you'd have no idea. But it sounds bougie. Then if you look at our website, our branding and marketing is very clean. It is designed from the get-go for Jordan. The Oak Bay clean part, here's the formula. Location plus keywords equals your name. So this is like when I grew up in the yellow pages, you would call your business AA cleaning. Because you would show up first, right? In the cleaning industry, you will be shocked how many cleaning companies have names like Sparkle Cleaning Solutions with this cleaning is spelled with a K.

20:40Victoria Westcott:And you're like, that's really dumb. And so we've started coaching other people how to do this. And the ones that use this formula show up on Google so much faster than everyone else. The bar is so low in this space. That's why I love this industry.

20:55UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Yeah, it's so great. So you guys aren't doing blogs or like anything that's too optimized for. Or it's really just like this for me, like maybe a little bit, but.

21:01Victoria Westcott:A little bit. We did blogs probably year two and three we were blogging. But here's the thing. Jordan doesn't read blogs. And so it was just for SEO. So we kind of hit it, you know, down at the bottom of the page. Like we didn't really want people to actually read it because the worst thing is somebody who reads like how they clean, like, and so we did everything just about how to book a cleaner in your city. And then the next thing is we use an app called Nice Job, which integrates with ConvertLabs, our software. And every single time I hit charge card, that triggers the routine where the client then gets asked seven times in seven different ways if they'd leave a review.

21:40Victoria Westcott:So everything is about getting the reviews. Right. Google learns about reviews.

21:45UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Yeah. I mean, when I Google, you have 246 Google reviews and 4.9, which is just an incredible testimony to like providing a great service.

21:53Victoria Westcott:And they're real. And here's why they're real. Because I know people go out and they're like, I'll just get 100 friends. Well, first off, Google will shut down your account faster than you can blink. And the second thing in that is that Jordan, your ideal client, can tell. And we live in a small enough city that Jordan actually knows people. They see their friends, you know, and so they're like, oh, that's my friend. And then they book. And those realtors that we first contacted, they're all in there. The realtors all know each other. So the reviews are number one in our strategy. And then because of, you know, we get backlinks and everything's organic.

22:27Victoria Westcott:Like it's not none of it's fake. you know, I can't stand the fake stuff because I can spot it a mile away, you know, so I'm just going to assume my client's smart too. Yeah.

22:35UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Oh, for sure. And like it does speak to like the Jordan, especially if they're making, I mean, I don't want to generalize, but if you're making 130, 200K, you're, you'll be able to identify that. That's right.

22:43Victoria Westcott:You can identify it. You can spot BS a mile away. And it's not to say that all of this is easy. It's not like our first year, we spent$14 ,000 on lead generation, but by year two, we were able to say, okay, we're going to go all in on SEO. And we were scared, you know, as anybody would be like, you don't know, is this going to work or not? But what we found was we were getting better quality leads, like much better quality leads by focusing on reviews, getting the right cleaners. That was it.

23:12UpFlip Podcast Hosts:That's what I think speaks to entrepreneurship, though, is like a lot of times you do stuff and like you really have no idea if it's going to work out. You're just kind of like going against, you know, you like you have really no idea. But like, as you said, you're able to identify your illustrating like quality at least, but like that truly is the entrepreneurial mindset. Like a lot of times you'll do something and it's like, I really don't know if this is going to work out, but like, oh, geez, I sure hope it does.

23:33Victoria Westcott:And if it doesn't, I mean, you know, in our case, it was 200 bucks, like whatever, right? Like it wasn't, you know, that first month anyway. And then when I say we spent 14 grand in a year, that wasn't all in one go. We didn't have 14 grand, right? So we invested maybe 200 in Google ads our first month when we had 200 to spend. So I do want to be clear there because anyone can start these businesses. That's why I love them so much. Whether you have a full-time job, whether you have kids, whether you're in the middle of a messy divorce, all of those things, you can absolutely start one of these on the side.

24:07Victoria Westcott:The key is to do it the smart way. And that's why we teach the naming convention, the online booking, transparent pricing. And then let's talk about the cleaner. So the reason we pay 60%, first off, transparency is a game changer. So if you think about the last time you applied for a job, have you applied for jobs, Ryan? Or have you always been an entrepreneur?

24:28UpFlip Podcast Hosts:I basically have always been an entrepreneur, but the past like four years I have been, but I know what you're going for.

24:33Victoria Westcott:You know what I'm going to say, right? There'll be like a pay range, maybe. Yeah, that's the worst. It's the worst. And in Canada, in Ontario, they've recently changed the laws that you cannot post a job ad without an actual pay range. And it has to be a true pay range. And the reason for this has to do with gender. And I find this fascinating. So, you know, women get paid traditionally less than men and everybody's like, what? How does that still happen? Well, it happens from the interview because women don't advocate for themselves and argue I deserve more pay. That's really uncomfortable for us.

25:09Victoria Westcott:The solution is this is what it pays. So I love 60 % pay just from that gender piece. But then we add on, you know, Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, add all of those things on. And now we have a truly equitable, like equal. Equal, is that the word? Whatever the word is. It's the right thing to do. From a cleaning point of view, they've never had this before. They're traditionally underpaid, undervalued, not respected. They get the average rate of pay in our city is$20 to$24 an hour.

25:42UpFlip Podcast Hosts:$20 to$24 an hour to spend your time cleaning someone's toilet.

25:46Victoria Westcott:Like, that is awful. And when I run the math, because we pay 60%, we do buy-the-job pricing, our average hourly rate is$45 an hour.

25:56UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Wow. Oh, my gosh.

25:58Victoria Westcott:Now that's actually changing lives. So, you know, I told you about our first cleaner who's still with us with seven kids. She can feed her kids. She can clothe her kids. She can, you know, get them to school. She just texted me an hour ago to say, hey, one of my kids has a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning. Like, no problem. I replaced her. She's an independent contractor, so she is paying her own taxes, but she's earning so much more than she would if she was out there on her own.

26:25UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Yeah. I mean,$40 an hour equates to about 80K a year, which is a very good salary for cleaning. Obviously, it's not perfect math there, but it's a rough range, which is obviously insane. So 60-40, I mean, obviously, I'm hearing, you know, you guys almost pay 100 % more than what other companies pay.

26:44Victoria Westcott:But you can see it in our reviews.

26:46UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Yeah, but it's like, has that ever put you in like a financial crunch is what I'm asking? I mean, you shared your margins early on. But like when I hear that, it's like some of these cleaning companies have to be at crazy margins.

26:57Victoria Westcott:I'm so happy you asked that. So I mentioned before we focus on residential. And the reason is that I don't love commercial cleaning as an industry right now because it is stuck in the 90s. It is still invoicing and then net 30 days. And what that means for cleaning is so today is April 20th. I could have a commercial client where I've had them since April 1st and I bill them April 30th. Well, we don't get paid until May 31st, which means my cleaners have to wait almost two months from their first day to get paid.

27:33UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Or we have to eat it and pay them.

27:35Victoria Westcott:Now, with residential cleaning, we use Stripe, so it's online payments. They put down their Visa, MasterCard, or Amex, and a hold goes on their card the day before. So we make sure that their funds are actually going to clear. The cleaner checks in, does the job, checks out. I hit charge card. Now, three days later, that money appears in our bank account. I don't wait those three days. I pay the cleaner today. So we pay daily. That's another thing for the cleaners. They love getting paid every day. So I'm not waiting 60 days to pay that cleaner. Like, that's the worst. Commercial cleaning tends to have, you know, these huge contracts.

28:13Victoria Westcott:And so it looks like really good money, but the margins are much, much less, whereas our margins are so much better.

28:19UpFlip Podcast Hosts:I want to ask, as we kind of wind down this podcast, an important question that I need to be asked, I should ask earlier is like, where do you find this talent? Is it still Indeed? And then you're posting 60, 40 pricing. Where are you like actually sourcing your talent from?

28:32Victoria Westcott:Yeah, that's great. So we hire. OK, so our again, magic form. I have so many magic formulas. So a lot of magic formulas. I love our magic formula. So our sweet spot is to take two to three bookings a day. And that's the average. Some days we'll get like 10 bookings. Some days we'll get no bookings.

28:48UpFlip Podcast Hosts:But two to three a day averages is the sweet spot for my own sanity.

28:54Victoria Westcott:And then for hiring, we hire one to two cleaners a month. we could hire a lot more we could accept a lot more bookings at this stage but i like life work balance i only work on this business about an hour or two a day so yeah i know wow i know i know that's why i want everybody to do it because i'm like man like i can't believe i was teaching full time at a cap salary putting everything into it and now i go to the gym in the middle of the day i work on my other projects and i genuinely i can do these podcasts it's so fun for me nothing's happening. Like my phone's beside me. Cleaners are out. It's fine.

29:29Victoria Westcott:So for cleaners, I only add one to two a month because they need a lot of hand holding the first few months. And I just don't have capacity to hold their hand all the time to get them comfortable. Instead, what I do is I try to partner them with other cleaners in the beginning so that those other cleaners can help them feel more comfortable. We do a lot of onboarding. We do a lot of support because they do need, they're human. You're always nervous your first few weeks on a job. We want to make them feel good. But I can't do much more than that. My process is I post on Indeed, always on a Monday morning, always for 9 a.m.

30:05Victoria Westcott:And the thinking for that is serious people have had a weekend and now they're ready to work. So by Monday morning, first thing they do, they start job hunting. So my best quality cleaners always come on a Monday. I shut down the ad by the time I get about 20 applications, which for me and my location that can cost between 100 and 200 dollars then i go through all the applications 90 of them aren't the right fit they don't have cleaning experience they just think oh i could be a cleaner you know whatever and i don't publish the 60 ratio there because that's too confusing for them so i'll do the range and i'll say 28 to 45 an hour or 28 to 35 an hour And the reason I say 28, they'd have to be really slow to only earn 28.

30:54Victoria Westcott:I still put that in there because I know they're cynical and I know they're like me. And they're like, there's no way you're paying that much if everybody else is paying 22. So I still, it's a little bit more to make them be like, oh, that's better than the other ones. And then I text them and I write, hey, it's Victoria from Oak Bay Clean. Do you have 10 minutes today to talk about what you're looking for? And if you take nothing else from this podcast, what you're looking for is the most important piece of that. And then when I get them on the phone, I say, hey, I'd love to know more about what you're looking for.

31:28Victoria Westcott:And they've never been asked that before. Like, isn't that wild? They never get asked that. It's all about me. What do I want as the employer? And I flip that by saying, what do you want? And then they answer. And then they usually tell me about their last terrible company they worked for. And it's not that I'm looking for negative. I'm looking for honesty. Do you have kids? Are you having to work around their schedule? Great. We love that. You know, and so we just guide them through that conversation so I can get to what's going to make this person great at their job.

31:59UpFlip Podcast Hosts:So crazy. It's so interesting. Yeah, like this has been like such a good podcast. This is Victoria. This has been like phenomenal. I unfortunately do have to cut us off here on the 35 minute mark, but this has been so, so good. Yeah, this has been like incredible. Let's dive into our Fan Blitz questions. And these are questions submitted from our community. If you want to join in on world-class conversations like these, email us at podcast.upflip.com and we'll get to your questions in a minute there. Tori, ready for our last five here? Go for it. What's a task that you do every week that most business owners would be embarrassed to admit they skip?

32:29Victoria Westcott:The gym, every day.

32:30UpFlip Podcast Hosts:I like it. Cleaners or clients, if you could only keep one, who are you choosing and why?

32:35Victoria Westcott:Cleaners, hands down. And why? Because they're harder to get than clients.

32:39UpFlip Podcast Hosts:I like it. What's the one piece of advice you give to your sister, Jen, if she were us starting from scratch tomorrow?

32:44Victoria Westcott:Calm down. Just do it.

32:49UpFlip Podcast Hosts:I like it. Fill in the blank. If you're not willing to blank, you have no business starting a business.

32:55Victoria Westcott:Get uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable.

32:58UpFlip Podcast Hosts:It is uncomfortable. I will double down on that. Last one. You're big The War of Art fan, the book. What's a book that everyone should read besides that one?

33:10Victoria Westcott:Indistractable or Hooked by Nir Eyal. Those are both books, same author, and I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, taught me how to time block. So I time block my day, which is how I can do so many different things in a short amount of time.

33:23UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Victoria, this has been amazing. I want to thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. If someone's like, oh my gosh, I need to learn from Victoria, check her out. Where can they connect with you?

33:33Victoria Westcott:Cleaning Company Blueprint is the best spot. So we have a YouTube channel of that same name, Cleaning Company Blueprint. And you can also book a discovery call with me, cleaningcompanyblueprint.com.

33:42UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Everyone, that was an amazing episode with Victoria. Three quick takeaways for you. Number one, get pricing through the competition. Just simply call them and ask what their rates are. And then once you have it, deduct 20 % from that. And that is your starting price. Number two, one of my favorite takeaways we've had on this podcast is build out the ICP. She had a super detailed ICP for Jason. And she also built it out what it looks like for Nancy and you want to avoid Nancy. That was one of like my absolute favorite takeaways of that. Then the SEO play, location plus keyword. That is what you're going for for easy SEO results.

34:16UpFlip Podcast Hosts:Really great episode here. If you guys are enjoying this podcast, please give us a five-star rating wherever you get your podcast. Help to get more amazing entrepreneurs like Victoria onto the show. And we will see you next Monday. Thank you. You're the best, Victoria.

34:27Victoria Westcott:Thanks, Ryan. I'm