Cleaning Company Bidding Tips for 2021
[Music] grow my cleaning company teaches owners of cleaning companies just like you how to grow your company make more money and finally take charge of your financial future and your life this podcast is about automating and creating systems that give you time and money freedom so you can grow like crazy without losing control since this is totally free if you're getting tons of value want to support us and make sure that you get more of the good stuff subscribe rate and review to this podcast today now onto the show hey cleaning nation mike campion here with cleaning company bidding tips for 2021. i'm recording this uh december 28th so i'm hoping these will still work three days from now when it actually becomes 20 21. um abso freaking lutely this is a big deal um just so you guys kind of know a little backstory about how i've kind of discovered all this stuff and why it's so important um i had a construction company for many years and man i made so many mistakes there that i've learned from and that's a lot of what we use to teach you guys how to build successful profitable companies um the problem one of the big things i would do wrong is i would bid low to win right i'm doing the for those of you that aren't joining uh you know online to win a loser right and probably one of the righteous the best things i've ever heard if you're writing stuff down was a great writer downer it's better to lose a winner than win a loser um certainly that works in construction absolutely works in the cleaning business because one of the beautiful things about the cleaning business is we get to recurring revenue right we get to sign a client up once and we get if we're doing it right we've got the right customers we get paid every month and definitely until we lose that account which is amazing when you're bidding right but really is a kick in the soft bits when you get it wrong right because you lose you win that loser and make any money on and you do it month after month after month right so i would um bid low to hopefully win the bid but i didn't really make the distinction between bidding right and just getting the bid right it's easy to sell 20 bills for 10 bucks we can do that all day and a lot of times we do that with cleaning right we just don't know how to bid on top of that i would bid jobs to do the work now and have to process payroll and effectively be giving my clients a loan when i never put them i'm not a bank i didn't put them through any credit check or anything like that right so anytime not only would i bid thin right so i would either lose money and not make money on it um i financed the whole thing so i basically loaned them thousands of dollars in payroll um to hope to get some of it back later it was just it was a bad deal and it got so bad i actually had a because i didn't understand the stuff that we're going to talk about today i had a year where i i technically made five hundred thousand dollars in profit on my p l said hey five hundred thousand at the bottom of the profit and loss i'd have a nickel right and i was i what the heck happened right well the problem is we were growing really fast and i didn't understand how cash worked and we made 500 000 in profit but our receivables as a construction company we kept doing all this work and our receivables um went up by the same half a million dollars we made so we had this big paper profit but who cares i can't pay payroll or buy anything with with paper profit right or with a receivable you need cash right so that was how the very painful way discovered the difference between cash and profit so today we're going to talk about how to bid properly so you get paid um on time how you can actually make money and how you can set yourself up for success this one thing can really make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business so i don't know about you but i was so committed to growing my business right i was so excited about the top line growth we were growing really fast as a company and i was like we feel good everyone you know it just the company every growth feels amazing the problem is if you don't do it profitably and you overlook just the basic principles of math and cash flow and profit you can grow really fast and make the same money or less money or make more money but less cash which can put you out of business businesses don't go out of business for a lack of profit generally they go to business for lack of cash so uh not only will bidding wrong kill your ability to make money and profit it made me question my own ability as an entrepreneur as an owner right i don't know if you guys get that way you're like how on god's green earth am i working so freaking hard and not making any more money right and it's because typically we're missing just a couple big chunks and if our financial foundation isn't set up properly you can work as hard as you want you'll just never make any money right so i don't know about you but i would because i didn't understand what was actually happening or how the the kind of business realities of my uh of my business i would try everything right i'd take leadership training or maybe a sales or marketing or um accounting you know i tried everything but because i was violating continually the basic rules of being profitable and bidding properly nothing worked right and it started to feel hopeless and really i kind of shake my fist at the world because it felt unfair that i was working so hard to get such poultry results right and i constantly was having to battle paying bills and not understanding why we kept growing and it seemed like everything was great but i couldn't pay bills right so maybe some of you guys are in this this position almost always 80 plus percent of the time you're having cash flow problems it's because we don't know how to bid and build properly so that's what we're going to talk about how to do that properly for 2021 and beyond um the funny thing is i didn't even see this until i started coaching other people i saw it i kind of got it but i didn't really own it until i started coaching you guys and i started discovering holy crap um one of my clients daisy just said get a coach of the chat she's hilarious um and i trust me i've had coaches i needed a better coach i think um so it's funny how clear and i see this in our mastermind groups that we do when i'll be coaching somebody and everybody in the room gets what i'm trying to communicate except for the guy getting or gal getting coached right so it's crazy how when it's our own thing we can get confused and when it's someone else's thing it's clear so that's one of the benefits by the way side benefit of being a mastermind group group or having coaching is you can get someone with outside perspective to kind of see things clearly it's that's very very common by the way every mastermind group i've been in when i'm helping look at other people's businesses it seems really clear and then when some people give me coaching on my own business it gets fuzzy right so we kind of need to be okay with that getting perspective from outside people that get stuff uh that we just don't get all right so the problem is i thought what i thought the problem was and that that's what i'll kill you by the way when you think the problem is this and it's absolutely in something different that's what we're running a problem so i thought the problem was that my clients couldn't or wouldn't pay more so let me say that again it's not that the problem was that my clients couldn't or wouldn't pay more it's that i thought and i believed my clients couldn't or wouldn't pay more and so many people when looking at their business we feel you don't understand mike my business is different um you know i it's not i promise you i've done this over and over and over again so if you have the belief that your clients couldn't or wouldn't pay more that will just basically kill your ability to be profitable because if you can't charge enough money to provide the service and make a profit and serve your clients and and have employees and insurance and all the cool stuff that we need you're just there's nothing you can do right um so i thought the problem was that my clients couldn't or wouldn't pay more the problem actually was i did not have a clear understanding or belief of what the real value i was bringing the world was right so i under personally undervalued the service and the transformation and the the benefit i brought to the world and because i didn't understand it my clients had no chance of understanding it and since my clients didn't understand my value and i didn't understand my value of course they wouldn't pay more right if i couldn't articulate how their lives were going to be specifically better by giving me money right we all know how lives are how our lives are gonna be money worse by giving people money we we're out of money right so it wasn't that my clients couldn't or wouldn't pay more it's that i didn't understand the value that i was truly bringing and because i didn't understand it i certainly couldn't help any of my clients understand it and that's why they wouldn't pay money so that's that's a big concept guys and gals hopefully you guys are getting it's not as much what your clients believe you're worth it's what you believe you're worth and then then you'll be able to help understand and communicate to your clients what you're worth and that has nothing to do with if you're in california or the uk and you've got good taxes or bad taxes or high workers comp or low workers comp none of that has the thing so once i finally got clear on this and started charging what i should based on the value i brought people and what i wanted out of my life and my business right at first i thought i just wanted a big business then i realized i want freedom i want impact i want profit i want things that i couldn't get done without charging proper prices um i started realizing no matter how good of a business owner i was no matter how many books i read no matter how smart i got or how hard i worked i could never and you can never overcome bad math right if we are bidding our jobs wrong we can't outwork it right like it's the old saying of like oh i know we're losing money but we'll make it up in volume right that's a gevern gets the joke of course if you're losing a dollar a sale more sales ain't gonna fix it you'll just lose money faster so if we can't overcome the reality of the math of how our business works um we're never never never gonna fix it could be nothing's gonna fix it right so i literally having coached thousands of owners of cleaning companies i'll take the least capable person in a good financial business than a super capable um person who's got their business set up in a way that they can't fail pricing is that important the good news is because you're here i've i've had a cleaning business manufacturing business car dealership obviously a coaching business construction company had lots of different companies and the reason i one of the big reasons i chose to coach owners of cleaning companies we have a great business model it's phenomenal the recurring income is good it's not sexy so um there's opportunity um it's low bear to injure there's so many amazing things about our business but if we don't charge right they're all negated the good news is when you get this right and you charge properly in this business it's really i don't say it's hard to fail but it's easy to succeed it really really is um so bad news is if you don't get this right if you're not willing to have these conversations with your customers and change your beliefs about what you're worth and you're not willing to charge the proper amount nothing we can do to help you just nothing before we even accept a client one of the things we ask them is are you willing to charge premium pricing if the answer is no we don't take them as a client it's that big of a deal the good news is once you get this right and you're in the cleaning business holy crap the whole thing gets easy start going i can't believe i made that one small shift and it made that big of a difference honest to goodness other than getting out of cleaning so if you're still in cleaning we gotta get you out of cleaning and even then you can't get out of cleaning if you're not charging right right a lot of times people charge what they think is profitable when they're doing the cleaning themselves and then when they want to get out they realize they're not charging enough but other than getting people out of cleaning and moving from owning a job to a business probably the most important thing that we do for everybody because some people are already out and they're they're not in that stage for everybody's helping them understand the the the financial dynamics of how to charge their clients and when to bid bill and all that good stuff um all right like i said coaching allowed me to see this clearly here's the big aha if you guys are writing stuff down here's the writer downer there is no inherent value right we people come to me with and they say crazy things like i can't charge that much it's not fair and i'm doing huge air quotes it's quote unquote too much there is no such thing as fair too much unfair is fair is being honest right if you tell someone i will do a b and c for d amount of dollars there is no such thing as unfair there is no such thing as too much right um the problem is we think we're in a commodity i'm selling cleaning that guy's selling cleaning if you're doing that you kind of got to sell to the lowest common denominator but you can move out of technically i sell talking to people well guess what teachers talk to people and god bless them that's a tough job they might make 30 40 50 grand a year depending on where they're at um some coaches talk to people and they'll get paid 20 bucks an hour we get paid substantially more than that actors might talk to people and get paid millions of dollars right so it's the same thing right if you're like well talking is a commodity some people talk and don't get paid anything some people get my wife jokes you pay me to shut up sometimes right so if i thought the value i brought was talking depending on what i thought that talking was worth i could charge commensurately right if you think the value that you're bringing is cleaning it's a completely different thing and let me prove it to you for those of you guys who go come on you understand my people wouldn't pay that let's take car washes right if you think cleaning a janitorial company or someone's home is a commodity let's take a car just a literal car wash that's pretty commoditized right like it's hard to how much price flexibility could there be in a car wash well let's talk about it i can go down right now i'm looking out my window i can't see a car wash but there's one out there i could drive in and put in some quarters a dollar two worth of quarters and spray the thing off and for two bucks i can get a clean car um i can drive through one of those car washes that have like even they're like well the basic one's five bucks and then the decent one is 10 bucks and then for 20 bucks you get the the fancy one where you spray wax on it or whatever so that'd be now we went from two bucks to five bucks to 20 bucks on time now i could go oh you know i want to pay someone to wash it for me do the whole thing that might be like 50 then i might go i want a detail i want something really clean that might be three or four hundred dollars depending on where you go i've seen places that clean high-end cars for twenty-five thousand dollars okay so if cleaning is a commodity um then how can people be charging two dollars for one level of clean and twenty five thousand dollars for another level of clean depends on the service and depends on the customer and if we're being honest at the end of the day it is your ability to make someone feel special the guy spending twenty five thousand dollars to have is probably classic car or multi hundred thousand dollar car clean is getting twenty five thousand dollars of value that makes him feel twenty five thousand dollars better about life right um and you go well that's not fair our people have you know we don't have people with it but yeah they do i promise you residential cleaners there are people in your area that have multi-million dollar homes and they will pay to feel good about their home commercial almost all of you guys are cleaning multi-million dollar facilities right so there are people that have bigger and and more real needs okay and it has everything to do with again the cleaning is not isn't changing so it's just how people look at it right there's no money and price and value isn't real there's only what you believe in your mind and what your customer believes in their mind right and we're not trying to trick people we want the i guarantee the guy that pays 25 000 for his car wash probably has a lot more pride and feels much better about his investment than the guy that spends two bucks out there you know doing it himself right so if you're writing stuff down money's not real it's all about how you make people feel not what it costs versus what you charge right the 5.25 250 25 000
car washes um the cost of their thing doesn't go up that much right it's just the guys that charge more make more margin that's all there is to it so the big aha the big takeaways we got to get out of the cleaning business and into problem-solving pain-killing pleasure-bringing business that's where you get paid cleaning dirty crap is low wage making people feel great about life giving them time back making them feel good about themselves and safe and secure that is high wage i gary i promise you the guy that does a 25 000 detail doesn't cost them anywhere near 25 000 probably cost him a thousand dollars or so to do a bang-up job but he or she understands that he's in the value of bringing pleasure making people feel amazing so let's talk about the framework of how to actually do this right um to do it for you in your life today for 2021 because again if you don't get this foundation right there's just nothing you can do to build a successful cleaning company the good news is when you do get this right you can um it just you're kind of putting up the bumper rails and bowling right it just makes it super super easy for you so it makes it very very hard to fail when you have customers that pay the right amount at the right time so step one is get clear on your why right so for me i had to realize i'm not into business to have a big bit i always want to know if i had a 5 million business or a 10 million dollar business or you know the bigger the business the better then i realized i didn't want that i wanted freedom and i wanted profit and i wanted to be able to have impact on my community with my employees and all that and once i realized that i was like well shoot if i'm if i have these clients that are just making money for the top line but they're not making any profit or and improving my my life or my employee's life or giving me freedom i don't want them and here's spoiler alert the guys and gals that are that pay the most are your best clients they're the happiest you love working with them they're amazing and you make the most the biggest pain in the butt clients they might be your largest clients but they're almost always your least profitable right so the beautiful thing is two birds one stone it's not like oh i love this client they're my favorite but they pay the least it's almost always your favorite client pays the most and your least favorite client pays the lease and guess what the guy that pays the most you're not screwing him he or she gets a better experience almost always than the guy paying the least right the guy that buys a hyundai typically he's not as happy with his purchase than the guy that paid the bought the mercedes right i've had cheap cars and i've had nice cars i'm much more pleased with my expensive cars that i paid a crap ton more for right so you've got to get clear on your why right is it profit is it revenue is it impact then you've got to make sure that your your actions building your business are in line right and you've got to believe that they're only customers if they bring profit right this is a writer downer they're just because they give you money doesn't mean they're a customer they have to actually make profit right if you have a job cleaning something for 500 bucks a month and cost 500 bucks a month that guy's not a cos a customer you are basically giving him your life for free that's slavery right he's you're he's getting your benefit in your the the benefits of your labor you're not making any money right um that's selling 10 bills for 10 bills there's that's not a customer that's just a money changer guy right all right know that your unique value is not your um ability to clean crap it has nothing to do with that it your unique value is your ability to understand your perfect prospects and communicate their their pain it is not cleaning i know we're in the cleaning industry and business that's if you want to try and compete on who can clean the best which a lot of you guys do oh my especially on the residential side we clean better than anybody that's not what your people want if you really understood they want to feel good they want time they want freedom they want uh to grow their businesses they have their own hopes and dreams and very little that has to do with dirty toilets okay so your unique values your ability to understand and communicate your perfect prospects pain not to clean crap and you need to do it better than your competitors when you can do that price goes out the window right second you need to charge based on the value you bring not what it costs right the reason we charge a lot for our training is because we get transformational results right if i just talked it doesn't matter how long i talk or what i do they people our clients need to get transformation they need to have more time freedom and more money free to have the success that they want because we do that we can charge a lot of money right if it's just me talking on the phone or in a call or a zoom or videos or whatever there's just not that much value all right so charge based on the value that you bring in your playground your rules right so charge premium pricing at least 50 gross profit you can always charge more but if you're not making at least 50 gross profit you need to raise prices today so 50 gross profit means whatever it costs you to clean that thing you need double so if it costs your cleaners with workers compensation and their time and payroll taxes and all that crap cost 300 bucks a month to clean it you better be charging at least 600 bucks right so this is your playground your rules you do not need customers you need or you don't need people you don't need people to give you money you need people that add to your goal and if you're not charging premium pricing at least 50 gross profit there's not enough money because really 50 goes to provide the service 30 for overhead right you've got to have uniforms and professional development and marketing and offices and phones and internet and websites and all you guys know all the expenses that only leaves you with a 20 profit right and again this is without you doing any cleaning of course charge in advance charge in advance charge in advance when you don't charge in advance and people go oh we paying at 3960 and it's a big client they try and bully you and make you feel overwhelmed what they're really saying is hey little tiny company without a lot of financial resources we want a 30 to 60 day loan i want you to do the work and pay your payroll and then beg beg me later for the money which maybe we'll pay or maybe we won't so charge in advance and charge everybody right we don't have anybody that's like oh but they've been with me forever if i was going to put up my i don't have brothers i do have brother-in-law's if they wanted to come through my program i charge you the exact same thing everybody else pays because those who pay pay attention not for my benefit because i want their money for their benefit right the people that pay have the experience it was so funny when i had a car dealership um we didn't do a lot of negotiating um the peop but the people that come in and ground and just try to get the best deal and just beat us down they were always the least happy with their own purchase the people that came in and we didn't we charge a fair amount right we gave good value um they were always so happy right so you charge everybody for their benefit not for your sorry all of a sudden got blown out my camera just uh i don't know what happened but sorry we'll have to deal with it um in charge everybody so there's no friend discount you're not helping your friends by charging them uh less i promise you all right um so that's really the strategy just get clear on your why is it to just grow trade money or does it actually make profit and impact believe that they're only customers if they bring profit just because they give you money doesn't mean anything know that your unique value value has to do with um understanding and communicating their pain understanding communicate their pain to them better than anyone else it's your playground your rules do you charge premium prices at least 50 gross profit you do it in advance you charge everyone because you know that those who pay pay attention all right that's that we've done that over the years i've changed i've raised and raised and raised prices and i found the more that i raised prices it had nothing the more i charge the better experience people get and obviously we make a ton more money the more money i make the more resources i can put into hiring amazing people having a good time and the more committed i am right so it's absolutely done well for us but um and again just like i talked about there's guys there's coaches out there that will charge you 20 bucks an hour and you're not gonna get your business transformed right and there's anthony robbins people that charge a million dollars to work with them um we're somewhere in the middle but i'm a crap ton more than i was and my people get more value the more i charge the happier customers i have the happier i am right how that works for you is um we've helped the hundreds of owners change client and it's funny because they we don't notice it because we've been dealing with it for so long so as we have these bad prices we don't realize how handicapped we are and we're just afraid we don't realize what a big deal is once we coach people to go through it every single time people you don't understand mike this guy's never going to pay more it won't work it's not and every time they come back after they've done it go oh my god i couldn't believe it 10 of the people were like i was wondering we're gonna charge more this is ridiculous but people always get a far better response than they get and they have no idea that you raise your prices but we go through this on a program you raise your prices by 20 often that can double your profit you think oh if i raise my prices by 20 my profit will go up by 20 when you raise prices your expenses don't go up it's all profit it's amazing so you can transform your business with proper pricing and for 2021 make that your commitment to do it all right that said if you're like holy first of all if you love it subscribe rate review uh tell a friend we we put all the time and money in this podcast based on your support and your commitment to going hey we're getting value out of this right um if you're like yeah i need that mic and i love this and i'm fired up now but my fear is i'm gonna put it off for 10 seconds and it's not gonna happen i need help doing it uh we know that we know that about you guys so we are doing our second event that we've kind of had to open to to cleaning nation uh first one was in october it was mind-blowingly good we have so many uh we just we've had it was so fun we had the team go back and kind of pull out people just talking about their transformational uh experience um so we're doing another one january if you want my personal help we're gonna do this live event me and our coach tracy um here in just a couple weeks go to growingcleaningcompany.com forward slash grow event growmycleaningcompany.com forward slash grow event we're going to take two days to walk through all the foundational stuff we're going to do this stuff together we're going to give you the support and encouragement that you need to actually make this happen uh i am so freaking committed to make this happen we're not even charging at the beginning just to make sure that you guys don't use money as an excuse not to come it's 200 bucks for the thing all you have to do is put your credit card in we're gonna do the event and then two days after the event um you have two days the email go that wasn't worth it i didn't like you know what but fine we won't charge it nickel be free i'm just trusting you guys to to know that we're going to bring the heat so if you would like help making 2021 the year that you make money you change lives you have freedom the business is what you want join us for the two days like i said it's a couple hundred bucks if you get massive value you don't have to pay until afterwards um so there's really just no excuse other than commitment level so i will tell you i have no magic button right you'll come we'll have a great time you're going to love it you'll laugh people love the events that said for those of you that aren't committed it's not going to really do any good for those of you that are like all in this is the year this event will be a life-changing deal i'm going to do it live we're going to be on zoom i'll see you you'll see me we're going to role play i'll pull people up we're going to talk i'm going to try and interact last time we had like 150 people there i'm going to try and interact with every single person it's going to be transformational and a ton of fun growingcleaningcompany.comgrowevent as much as i love doing these broadcasts it's one to many right i can kind of see in the chat for those of the very small percentage that join us live um but i can't answer questions i can't get your story we can't change transformation doesn't happen right so for those of you who are like yes i need more help and i want mike to help me but i don't want to spend a bunch of money this is about the only time like i said we're pretty premier pricing for us to work with you these two day events are the only time we ever kind of open it up to the public and do them um where everybody can afford it without even thinking about it so if you want to grow my cleaning company.com forward slash grow event tracy and i will be there live we're going to have a blast can't wait to see there thanks for tuning in to today's show if you're fired up ready to grow and want to see if you have what it takes to work with us at grow my cleaning company here's what i want you to do right now go to growmycleaningcompany.com
forward slash talk that's growmycleaningcompany.comtalk to book an appointment to speak with me personally i'm going to jump on the phone with you to get you crystal clear on where you are now where you want to be and how to get you there don't walk around in the dark any longer if you are serious about growing your cleaning company it's time to finally get the systems in place that you need to grow we've helped hundreds of owners and cleaning companies not only grow their business and their personal freedom but give back to their community as well if that's what you're looking for head over to grow my growmycleaningcompany.com forward slash talk and book a time to talk with me personally i can't wait to get to know you and your business
2021-01-04 19:16
