The Sandbox Parable of Retirement Planning

I'm excited to take you backstage again into my own solo cleaning business as I work to achieve my 2020 SMART goals! Now that the school year was back for my family and for my clients, I made a shift to my new schedule. I shuffled my biweekly Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday houses to Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. My goal was to reduce driving. When you're adding new clients like I've been, it's hard to optimize for location as you go. I tend to put new ones where I have the time to do an amazing 3-part initial cleaning. Once I speed up and lock in new clients, I begin to play calendar Tetris. As a practice, I try to move clients infrequently like once per year or less. Once I had the new schedule decided, I connected via email and text with each client to let them know. They all happily agreed.

During one of my house cleanings, I connected with my friend Ed Weidman. He helps companies attract their ideal clients through SEO, Facebook & Google Ads. After hearing several success stories on other cleaning companies running successful Facebook Ad campaigns, I decided to give it a try. I only need 4 more houses to hit my 2020 goal. I know that my prospect filtering process is highly effective and it will probably take 30 leads to generate the right 4 clients. Ed was very confident of this. He gave me the outline of what I need to do and I will keep you up to date on how this works out for me!

I've mentioned my cousin Seth Bryan in the podcast. He was on the good and bad end of a podcast. I shared his impressive story of how he finds potential houses to buy on "Finding Opportunities" and another story of how he cracked open his chin on Thanksgiving morning. Seth is like a brother. His wife Abby is part owner in a family business of a historic site for wedding venues and she asked me to come over for a cleaning estimate. We arranged to meet up early with the whole family before we went to a playground and saw a dinosaur show at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. During this estimate, Abby shared how unhappy she was with the current cleaner as well as the scope and frequency of the work. I took detailed notes of the facility and gave Abby much to consider. It's a lot of money, but the hours aren't ideal for me as she needs upward of 2 visits per week with one after 11pm on Saturday night. I promised to get the proposal out to her and go from there.

My integrity was challenged on Saturday morning. As I approached the door to office #2, I noticed a flyer stuck inside. I had to remove it to open the door. It was a business flyer for another cleaning company. Ooh, what to do... what to do? What would you do? Many would take the flyer and throw it away. That's logical. Remove the competition. That's one way to become the tallest building. You can knock the others down. I did something different to align with my integrity. I took the flyer inside, placed it on the receptionist's desk, and wrote a note. "I found this in the door. Have a great week!" This is the other way to become the tallest building is to build your building taller. This comes from a quote from Jim Rohn. Not only did I feel good about myself, but my kids saw me do it. I am confident in my cleaning and this was my way of building my building taller by building more trust with the owners. Remember, "Trust is Everything with Beth Lane"!

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