This month's Freedom Report starts with a clip from a call with Coach Josh. I had accomplished a lot in December as you heard in the last report, adding 5 new buildings and 1 new team member. The 5 buildings added $3,800 per month of new revenue and brought us to 13 buildings and 5 houses to delegate. The new team member would take 3 of the buildings, leaving a lot more still to delegate. I felt confident at the end of December that I could shift focus from marketing & sales to hiring. The #1 priority had to be working my way out of a job!

This episode of the original Solo Cleaning School is one of my most downloaded ones to date. I have personally heard several stories how this episode along with a few others helped someone start a solo cleaning business as a side hustle. I can't tell you how exciting that makes me! I wanted to make one update to this episode based on where I am in my personal business in 2022. If you've followed this show at all in 2021, you'd know that I made the decision after 15 years of solo cleaning to scale my business. In fact, if you'd like to learn how to scale your cleaning business, you can follow this podcast and watch me do it!

I brought Molly Moran onto the Smart Cleaning Tribe in December 2021 as the 4th expert in the 7-Figure Series. Molly started Green Sweep NM in 2009. She lives in Albuquerque, NM. She grew her business to $600k in 6 years with basic systems and a split of 50/50 commercial & residential. Molly decided to sell the commercial side of her company to focus on houses. After 2 more years, she built the residential only portion back to $450k, but she was burnt out! Her business was unsustainable because she had few systems. She was working like crazy and the thought of this business at $1M revenue made her sick as she’d have no life. Molly was scrolling late night on Indeed and Facebook when she stumbled upon Debbie Sardone and CBF. She joined Debbie's coaching program in 2017 as a last-stitch effort to salvage her company and regain her peace of mind. CBF usually helps businesses with $100-$300k businesses get to $1M. Molly was way past that, but needed help. She implemented the necessary systems in a year and turned it around.  Molly grew from $450k to $1.2M in 4 years and closed 2021 closing in on $2M in annualized revenue. Molly has opted to be more top-heavy in admin, to sacrifice profit for time. Others opt to be more involved in the business (less admin) and more profit to the owner. This investment allowed Molly to step away more from her business and today she is a certified CBF Coach and helping others turn their residential cleaning companies around and on-track toward a 7-figure absentee business. 

The FAA requires a runway length of 7,500 feet for a 747 airplane to take-off and land. This length adds on considerable margin for slippery surfaces from poor weather or possibly malfunction. Have you ever noticed how exact air traffic control and schedules are? Your plane has an exact take-off time. It takes a few minutes to depart from the gate and taxi to the assigned runway strip. Then it stops, awaits permission from control, and then barrels down the runway lifting off into the great blue. There are so many great analogies and metaphors that speakers and writers have used over the years to compare this airplane take-off process to some process in our lives or businesses.  I was on a coaching call with Josh Melton in early November 2021 and he said this. "Ken, you need to learn how to clear the runway."

I have shared highlights and interactions from the Smart Cleaning Tribe that I facilitate every Monday. This past week's call was wide-ranging in topics, but one issue spoke to many in the Tribe. Communication. When you run a solo business under $100k, it's fairly easy to maintain all communication of email, texts, and online messages with your customers. For the most part, solos have under 30 customers and they don't have many emails to address. It does get much harder to be responsive and accountable to ALL communication as your revenue grows. In this episode, this issue comes up big time in 2021 to bite Mark's business. He doesn't ignore his emails. Mark runs a very successful janitorial company over $1 million in revenue and gets up to 50 emails per day from customers, employees, and vendors. This is not a task that Mark could or should do on his own. He has tried and it cost him 2 customers in 2021. Here's the irony. Mark (like others in the Tribe including me) are guilty of procrastinating on their communication. They respond quickly to the email, but not fully. This buys us time to come back to the email when we have time. The problem as you may have guessed it. We don't have the time to come back to it. Therefore, we drop the ball and the communication procrastination hurts our reputations and bank accounts. 

We discuss a wide array of topics in this podcast episode anchored on our belief system. What is the underlying characteristic that has helped Debbie Sardone succeed in each of her businesses? It's her belief and conviction that what she is doing is right and is helping people. This conviction creates the self-confidence to take massive action and the massive  action leads to massive results. It's this simple. You hear this woven all through Debbie's entrepreneurial journey that spans multiple decades. You hear this conviction rise up during the pandemic in the metaphor of the cow and buffalo and in helping cleaning company owners through the Valley of Despair. Here are some quotes from the episode

It's time for another Tim Ferriss Podcast reference. Oh my. David Blaine the magician was such an entertaining 55 minutes!  There were so many actionable words of wisdom. The one that got me to stop and listen again was this one. David told the story when he was a young magician doing street magic. He was in an airport and he got some bags mixed up because they all look the same. He said I think you've got my bag to a nearby traveler. One of the guys in a business suit said, "No I think that guy over there in the in the white limo has your bag." David had no family left after his single mom passed away. He had nothing to lose, walked over to the white limousine, and knocked on the window. The window rolled down. It was Iron Mike Tyson holding up his fist in the prime of the Tyson era! Iron Mike said, "Hey man, what do you want?" Mike Tyson ended up letting David into the limo and they went back to Mike's hotel where David did a bunch of cool magic tricks. Mike was thoroughly entertained and gave him some life-changing advice. He said. "You know I wasn't supposed to be the heavyweight champion of the world. I was too short. My reach was too short as well. But you know... when you have nothing else to lose, you have everything to gain."

Welcome to the next Solo Saturday! I'm here for you solo cleaners. Have you enjoyed these bonus episodes just for you? We're just coming off the Christmas Season, New Year's, and now we're hard at work setting 2022 goals. I want to share a scene from one of my favorite movies, "It's a Wonderful Life". This scene is a turning point in George Bailey's life as he decides to follow his calling into the great unknown to help people rather than bowing to the almighty dollar that Mr. Potter was offering. See if you recognize this scene. I'll act it out!

After a networking meeting, I was out in the parking lot chatting with my friend Gary Volpe as we were both making our way to our vehicles. The topic of telling our story came up and Gary lit up!