Best Of - August 2021 Freedom Report with Coach Josh

02/10/25 • 32 min

There is so much to dig into for this month's update of my personal cleaning company. If you're new to this show, here's the quick version. I've been a solo house and office cleaner for most of my 16 years in business. I have a system that initializes, stabilizes, and optimizes solo cleaning companies to create over $50k profit per year on a few days per week. In fact, I've done it twice. My first solo cleaning business was in Upstate New York from 2005 - 2018. I optimized this company to create $55k profit per year on 2 cleaning days per week without employees. The company was 90% residential and 10% commercial. I sold this company in 2018 for $80k and moved back home to Montgomery County, PA. We have since built a second solo cleaning business to $70k profit per year on 2 cleaning days per week. This new company is 75% commercial and 25% residential. As amazing as this sounds and it has been, our family wanted more. Our coaches and mentors challenged us to follow our dream as a homeschooling family. We had a New Freedom Vision and booked a house on the Gulf Coast of Florida for a month next winter! We wanted to go from $70k profit on 2 days per week to 0 days! This requires a team and systems. As an engineer, I love systems. But I've resisted them as a solo as I viewed them as tedious. Thankfully, I've hired Coach Josh to walk me into our dream. Josh is a co-owner at Athens Cleaning in Athens, GA. He is a fast-growing commercial cleaning company serving small, professional offices with professional workers. This podcast feature is a monthly peak into my own company, Carfagno Commercial Cleaning, as we build our business with systems and team members in order to start living our dream.

August Update:

The first week of August was my trip to Nashville for Podcast Movement 2021. This was a great trip for me personally and professionally. I had lots of down time to think, plus numerous opportunities to meet new people and build better relationships with podcasters I already knew. The biggest takeaway had nothing to do with my podcast. On Thursday night, my buddy Vincent and I figured out a way to map out our businesses on a simple 3 x 3 grid. We started with the basic 2 x 2 grid of drama vs profit from Why I Fired My First Client. All we did was add a middle scaling option. The analysis revealed so much to me as it confirmed what I was already feeling. My goal is to simplify every area of my life, so that I can create more memories with my family and art for my community and disciple my family. I needed simple. Of the various income-producing efforts I am involved in, a few emerged as most profitable with least time and drama. All house cleaning is OUT and all small, professional office cleaning is IN! This was a vitally reflective process that will allow me to hyper niche with my coach and go crush it in small, professional, essential offices in my area. If you'd like to learn how to do this with your business, reach out to me on my website and request a free call.
Now that I had my niche, I could go to work on completing my Project 100. This is a specific list of companies that I'd like to clean for. Coach Josh has already taught me that I can earn my freedom with only 20% of this list! Think about it. 20 new offices averaging $800/month equals $192,000 in additional revenue. This would increase my total revenue in office cleaning to $280,000. At 35-40% profitability, my family would earn between $100k - $115k per year and I wouldn't have to clean anymore! I had a lot going on in our family in August with summer kids activities and trai

August Update:

The first week of August was my trip to Nashville for Podcast Movement 2021. This was a great trip for me personally and professionally. I had lots of down time to think, plus numerous opportunities to meet new people and build better relationships with podcasters I already knew. The biggest takeaway had nothing to do with my podcast. On Thursday night, my buddy Vincent and I figured out a way to map out our businesses on a simple 3 x 3 grid. We started with the basic 2 x 2 grid of drama vs profit from Why I Fired My First Client. All we did was add a middle scaling option. The analysis revealed so much to me as it confirmed what I was already feeling. My goal is to simplify every area of my life, so that I can create more memories with my family and art for my community and disciple my family. I needed simple. Of the various income-producing efforts I am involved in, a few emerged as most profitable with least time and drama. All house cleaning is OUT and all small, professional office cleaning is IN! This was a vitally reflective process that will allow me to hyper niche with my coach and go crush it in small, professional, essential offices in my area. If you'd like to learn how to do this with your business, reach out to me on my website and request a free call.
Now that I had my niche, I could go to work on completing my Project 100. This is a specific list of companies that I'd like to clean for. Coach Josh has already taught me that I can earn my freedom with only 20% of this list! Think about it. 20 new offices averaging $800/month equals $192,000 in additional revenue. This would increase my total revenue in office cleaning to $280,000. At 35-40% profitability, my family would earn between $100k - $115k per year and I wouldn't have to clean anymore! I had a lot going on in our family in August with summer kids activities and trai

Previous Episode

Best Of - July 2021 Freedom Report with Coach Josh

July was a crazy month. As a family, we had a ton going on. We had Kid's Camp and Youth Camp at retreat camp centers for 4 of our 5 kids for 5 days each. During one of those camps, Teresa and I slipped away for 4 days to the beach. I had a 5-day father / son camping trip with my son to the Adirondacks that I do with each son. This was with my 8-year-old Kye. It was glorious being off the grid for 5 days with no phone or social media! We just connected, camped, swam, boated, ate, heard campfire stories, songs, and devotions, and did shooting sports and hiking! Awesomeness! Coach Josh was also away in Florida for 2 weeks, so we had to move our coaching to Marco Polo and email. Even with all of this going on, I had BIG goals!

The first step in this process was putting our money where our mouth was. On July 7th, we booked it! Booked what? We booked a rental house on the Gulf Coast for a whole month next winter! The house is awesome with 7 beds, a porch, and a short 8 minute ride to the beach. There's a pool table too. Our kids are so excited and so are we! We've never done anything like this before. July had to be a big month to get this "Freedom Vision "cranking.
Before I go into the details of our month and share tidbits from coaching, let me give you the end results. We started the month with no employees, no payroll, no systems, a new accounting firm client for $3,000 per month that we had to staff, and no clue! The month ended with no new clients, which is the sad news. But we fully outsourced and completed our Quickbooks migration from desktop to online and have an accountant walking us through whatever we need for a year. Our financial system is now automated! I can't believe it! We hired a payroll service and a background check company. I built out a basic onboarding system, job description, and training system. Teresa and I were trained how to use the online payroll dashboard to submit employee hours. I found out that I wasn't submitting payroll correctly for the state and local taxes. Thankfully, my new payroll company fixed it for me and I'm paying a penalty for the remainder of the year. That's a relief. I hired my first employee. Leah works full time at a daycare and is a college grad. She wanted a part-time job to make $500 per month and found me through a referral. It works out perfectly. She started training on July 29th! It's crazy! I also was privy to systems used by my coach. I am so grateful for this. At the end of the month, Josh introduced me to his HR & Finance Manager. We talked for over an hour. I helped him by teaching him the ISO Model to increase revenues in their company. He taught me their onboarding process and is sending the documents, videos, and other forms & ads I need to start a strategic hiring process. I also completed a branding change from Carfagno Cleaning to Carfagno Commercial Cleaning and my C3 Experience. My friend Billy designed a new logo and I upgraded my proposal to new offices prospects with my new branding. As I even share this, I'm dumbfounded at how much I got done this month when at times it felt like nothing was happening! Last but not least, I added a key member to my team. For the first time in 16 years, my wife Teresa is stepping up to help the family company. She is a busy homeschooling mom of 5, so I NEVER asked her involvement. I am grateful that she is helping with admin and is taking over the QBO and payroll components from me! I am working hard to delegate as much as possible to focus on growth of new clients and new team members!

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

Next Episode

Best Of - September 2021 Freedom Report with Coach Josh

September is in the books. It's time for another business update. Afterward, I'll share a clip from our final coaching call from September to close out the summer. Now that October is here, it's time to crank it down! I have 4 months left to build and delegate my cleaning company before my self-imposed deadline of February 1, 2022.

I'm going to come right out and admit. I did NOT hit my goal for September and I know why. I got lazy. If you've followed this podcast since the beginning, I've been building my marketing machine using Google My Business, Facebook, and local networking. It's worked very well to the tune of $60,000 in increased revenues solo in 2020. I was working my marketing hard. My pipeline grew and I reaped the benefit in 2021. I hit my optimizer goal as a solo cleaner by January 2021 earning $70,000 profit on 2 days cleaning per week. I stopped marketing and simply helped anyone that found me through my marketing machine. This generated more house and office leads that I really didn't care if I got or not. Then June happened and I got A New Freedom Vision. I hired Coach Josh and it was time to scale my business with a team. I have shared with you that I built out a few systems over the summer including a hiring and payroll system, a financial system using Quickbooks Online, and a simple office cleaning training system. I also built my foundation with mission, vision, and values (see "Introducing the C3 Experience"). My cleaning business was now ready to grow with a solid foundation and the beginning of the systems that I'll need to support a $300,000 revenue business.
I had offices and house inquiries coming in, so I'd answer them and select which I wanted to bid on. I mentioned to friends personally and in network meetings that I was hiring and was referred a few people. I hired one of them. I was growing today off of yesterday's work. But I wasn't doing today's work by building my pipeline for tomorrow. We as entrepreneurs allow this to happen and don't realize it until your leads dry up. This happened to me in September. I realized it on my own and shared it with Coach Josh. By the way, I was supposed to complete his coaching homework to create a Project 100 in a week back in July. It took me 6 weeks to make this list of 100 offices I'd like to clean. Why did it take so long? I was arrogant thinking that I had a pipeline that I didn't see was drying up. This was my first major blind spot in September.

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website