If We Don't Leave We Can't Come Back

Are you new to the Smart Cleaning School Podcast? If not, please bare with me. I started as a solo apartment cleaner in 2005 and moved into real estate presentation cleaning in 2006. This opened up the doors for solo house and small office cleaning in late 2006. I grew and optimized my first solo cleaning business through 2017 to a 2-day per week cleaning job earning over $50,000 per year in profit. I loved having 5-day weekends to spend time with my family.  Check out the introduction episode to hear more of my story. We sold that business in 2018 for $80,000 so our family could move back to our hometown closer to family. I have fully detailed my selling process in the double episode, "How I Sold My Cleaning Business I & 2". We started and grew a new business in the Indian Valley of PA from 2018 to another optimized solo business working 2 days per week and earning $70,000 per year in profit by early 2021. This podcast documents that entire process if you'd like to learn how to do it yourself.  Everything changed when we got our "New Freedom Vision", which was followed by numerous monthly calls with Coach Josh, and culiminating with the victory episode called "The Fight was Worth It". Here's the short version. We desired as a family to take the ultimate trip. We wanted to go to Florida for a month in the middle of the Pennsylvania winter. It was a fight, but it was worth it. I encourage you to to back and listen to the episodes I've mentioned. I believe it's important to walk beside me as we scraped and struggled to build the team that would allow us a month away. In this episode, I want to hone in on one statement my wife Teresa said to me as we were packing up on the last day in Florida. 

​"Do we have to leave?"

My immediate and unrehearsed answer was this. "If we don't leave, we can't come back."

We both stopped, nodded our heads, and had a mutual understanding of how profound that was. Neither of us wanted to leave. That's obvious! We had worked like crazy to earn 30 days in Florida with our family. It was an incredible level of freedom that very few ever experience unfortunately. But both Teresa and I knew that we hadn't built something that could earn us 60 days or 90 days yet. We certainly hadn't built something that could allow us to leave for Florida for a year or permanently. We set the goal of 30 days and Coach Josh helped us achieve it. Teresa and I talked it out for a few minutes, playing out the scenario.

"Well, we could stay. But we'd run out of money, go broke, and lose our business as it erodes with us gone." It was funny, but bluntly honest. We both wanted to stay in Florida, but we knew we could not. The only way to stay in Florida was to come back and for us to come back, we had to leave. That's where Teresa's simple comment came full circle. We got excited with the possibility of coming back to Florida with a stronger business. What if we could set new goals on the way home and go crush them over the next 11 months? If we did that, we'd enjoy another month in paradise. This energized us because Florida in February is what our family wants. We both moved from sad to leave to excited to come back. I think everyone needs to hear that. Have you ever been on a vacation or maybe just experiencing a time of complete bliss with your family and you didn't want to leave? Reframe your mind on the last day like we did. If you don't leave that bliss, you can not re-experience it.

Now that we're back, my perspective is so amazingly different. In my solo cleaning days, we'd leave for a multi-day trip and return to the same business where I did all of the work. I would wait until I had time off before we went somewhere again. This time was completely different. I had worked so hard building systems and training amazing people that I wasn't returning to the solo business I used to have. I returned to a business with great team members and systems. It was amazing. I didn't have to start all over again. We simply took inventory of who was staying and who was leaving to know who we needed to hire. We checked the quality of the work over the past month and made sure our customers were happy... and they were. We updated our systems from lessons we learned while away. We set new goals with Coach Josh. We went to work.

You'll hear about our new goals and will hopefully enjoy this podcast enough to join us on our journey. Thank you so much for listening and please share this podcast with a friend that you believe it will help and encourage.