Earn Your ISO Model Black Belt

03/05/22 • 16 min

About a year ago, I had a conversation with Carrie Miyazono. She is the owner of Kaizen Cleaning in Chanhassen, MN and a Black Belt in taekwondo. Her solo cleaning business is highly niched to clean martial arts dojos. These schools have students sweating up the mats every day of the week. In many cases, the owners are either cleaning themselves or have a staff member do it. Therefore, Carrie found a niche that she could serve with excellence. It was so much fun guiding her to pick up her first gym for $400 per month. But she got discouraged after that as no one new was hiring her service. Carrie was working an overnight job at the time that she desperately wanted to quit to have better pay and hours with her new solo cleaning business.
I helped her mindset with an example she knew well. I asked. "What's the difference between a white belt and a black belt?" She answered. "Time, commitment, repetitions, and a willingness to suck." I asked her about confidence and technique and she told me that those two are byproducts of the first four. Then she summed it all up. "The difference between the black belt and the white belt is the use of those four things. More time leads to more commitment. More commitment leads to more repetitions. More repetitions leads to a greater willingness to suck. The cycle self-perpetuates and your technique, form, and confidence increase and so do your belts. Eventually you make black belt."
I thought about the sports greats of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and their legendary pursuit of practice. When you take 5 shots, you're upset to miss one and may not take too many more. When you take 500 shots, missing 50 or 100 is no big deal because you'll keep shooting. This is what Carrie is talking about. It's the pursuit of becoming highly skilled at your craft. For Michael and Tiger, it was basketball and golf. For Carrie, it was taekwondo.
I related to her growing your solo cleaning business through the ISO Model is the exact same way. This first gym that she got is like earning her white belt. It was really hard to get. She was sloppy. Her technique sucked, but she got the job anyway. She didn't get the best price. However she achieved the first belt and now she's ready for the yellow. The yellow is getting another gym to prove she can do it again. Carrie will need to apply the same fundamentals to her cleaning business and she'll eventually become an Optimizer and a black belt in my system. Solo cleaners out there, think about your business like this. Don't expect to start as a black belt. If you like the business and lifestyle that I had as an optimized solo cleaner has, be willing to put in the time, commitment, reps, and willingness to suck that I did in two different states over 16 years. Fortunately for you, the ISO Model Black Belt can be achieved in 2 years with my system. If you don't want to put in the time or commitment or reps, go do something else. But if you are willing jump into the ISO Model through the Solo Cleaning School Elite, you can absolutely earn all of your belts.
To those that would like to go beyond my black belt system and become a 5th degree master black belt and scale to a 7-figure company with great income and freedom, check out my interview with the CBF Founder, entitled "A Buffalo Charges the Storm with Debbie Sardone ". Debbie is offering free consultations to listeners of this show through the Smart Cleaning School Resources Page to see if CBF could be the right solution for you.

Previous Episode

Spreadshot Versus Laser

There is only one true video game console. It's called NES or Nintendo! And within the NES world, there is only a few real games. They are everything Super Mario, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, and Contra! Where are all my Gen X'ers? And yes, Gen Y'ers too? Let's talk the brilliance of the game Contra in this episode. No. It's not going to be this. "Ken, it's up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start." That's a different podcast!

The game of Contra had several missions where you had to navigate through a constantly scrolling screen left to right and bottom to top to reach the bad guy at the end of each level. The game was near impossible to beat without the above cheat code for 30 extra lives. If you're listening to this and you beat Contra with the non-cheat 4 lives... please email me so I can give you a shout out on this show! Anyway, let's get back on track. There were several choices of weapons you could get. You start with a single-shot semi-automatic rifle. It's not a great weapon. Then there's a few others that are better like the wave gun, where it shoots a single shot that propels in a sweeping wave form. The wave is better than the first weapon. There's the machine gun, which shoots several bullets at a time straight. This is efficient especially for destroying the fortress shields, but it's hard to win a level with the basic rifle, wave, or machine gun. You need the big guns. They are simply known in the Contra Universe as "S" and "L" for spreadshot and laser.

The laser beam sends a long powerful blast that wipes out multiple guys and opens up force field shields in one shot. It has the equivalent power of at least 10 machine gun rounds. It's highly focused, accurate, and powerful. Many Contra junkies can win with the laser and swear it's the best. But the laser camp is much smaller in size than what I and many others believe. There is but one ultimate weapon in Contra. It's called the spreadshot. This gun shoots 10 rounds at once in a spread of 30 degrees. It eliminates everything in it's path from a distance. Plus, you can get close to any shield and the combined power of all 10 shots equals one laser blast. You can see why the spreadshot is the best. Yes, I'm biased.

I'm going to relate this to a conversation. Coach Josh has a business partner Chad Brown and they run the Stronger Business Podcast. They're also partners in the Athens Cleaning Company. Chad is crushing it. Josh is crushing it too but not quite to the level that Chad is, so I asked Josh the difference. Josh said he is super focused and goes after things, but Chad just implements faster and tries more things out. Chad fails at more things. I remember Josh telling me months ago a quote he heard. The difference between a seven figure earner and an eight-figure earner or a six and seven-figure earner is their speed of implementation. People that take more action, fail more. They also succeed much faster. I told Josh this. I think that you have chosen the laser beam and Chad has the spreadshot from Contra. And I probably have that wave gun or machine gun! He liked the analogy and we laughed it off, but it's so relevant.

There are two takeaways you should get from this episode. One is simple. You can win with any weapon, but why not choose the best one. The second is even more obvious. Nintendo is still the greatest gaming system of all time!

What gun are you aiming at your business? Would you like help in helping you see what you may not even see yourself? Make sure to check out the many free & paid resources available at the Smart Cleaning School website. Also, do you have questions for me? Book a free coaching call on my website!

Next Episode

So Close But So Far

Over the past several months, you have seen a tremendous shift in my personal cleaning brand as it moved from Carfagno Cleaning (50% house cleaning / 50% office cleaning) to Carfagno Commercial Cleaning and the C3 Experience (90% office cleaning). When I cleaned houses in my first solo cleaning business, I had a certain type of house and customer that I wanted. This is what made me so successful as a solo cleaner. The only aspect that I didn't master was geographic optimization as I was still traveling on my cleaning days up to an hour each way. I sought to change that in my second solo business in PA and was on the right track. I took on houses and offices in a tighter geographic window that I did in NY. However, I wasn't getting the most optimized customers. Some were low profit. Some were high drama. In fact, I made a hard decision in early 2021 to fire a customer because they were not a good fit for my company. I explain this process in "Why I Fired My First Client"The people were very kind and the mission of the organization was awesome. However, we were spending 2 hours there for $500 per month when I had other offices earning $600 per month for 1 hour of work. As a side note, I was working with my oldest 2 kids as my helpers. I knew it was a process. Therefore, I was willing to work through my ISO Model until total optimization was achieved per my goals. "A New Freedom Vision" interrupted this.

I hired Coach Josh to help build a company that I could leave in PA while my family traveled to FL. This was an ultimate test. What would it take? I've answered this in so many other episodes and Freedom Reports. In this episode, I want to focus on one specific aspect. Defining your ideal customer. Josh helped me do this over the summer. I had cleaned all sorts of commercial buildings over the years. My favorites were the low drama, high professional, high profit ones that I noticed fell into these niches. Small professional, dental, and small medical offices. These 3 niches were the ones I decided to hone in as I built my Project 100, which turned into a Project 250 last fall. Ultimately, my new business is loaded with the exact offices I wanted because I chose them, targeted them, and executed the right work to get them.

We just onboarded 5 new buildings in December and January. One of these buildings is 10,000 square feet with beautiful offices and executive areas and marble floors in several rooms. We visit this building twice per week for $1,375 per month. It's a super easy building to clean and it's the closest of all of my customers to my house. To say this is an ideal customer would be an understatement. As I was packing up my things during the initial cleaning, an interesting thought occurred to me. I stared across the parking lot into the school next door. Inside that school was the customer that we fired a year ago. That school was a gift for a short time when we needed it, but it was the wrong customer for our business model in many ways. It was low profit and high drama. However, the location was an A+. I thought this. 'So close, but yet so far.' Here are two buildings, basically next to each other. One was our starting 2021 client and another was our starting 2022 client. They were so close geographically, yet so far in how ideal they are to the C3 business model. I packed up and drove away feeling so grateful for the types of customers we now on-board in our commercial cleaning business. And it's not by accident.