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.