I ended the November Freedom Report with peace. We had brought our plan to go to Florida to God and asked Him to show us the way. We had over 20 job applications come in with no new hires. I personally connected and made initial connection to 240 local office cleaning prospects and followed up with close to 100 phone calls to find out if they had a cleaner in house or outsourced and if they were happy. This lead to 7 interested prospects and 4 proposals sent. But the net result of all of this effort was 0 new team members and $0 in new revenue with 65 days left before Florida. Josh gave me a challenge. "1 & 1 and we're having fun." Can I add 1 new office and 1 new team member by the end of November. I recorded the November Freedom Report just prior to month end. Let me just say this. God answered our prayers and broke the dam loose! A lot has changed in 30 days!

2 exciting things happened on November 30th. Around lunchtime, I got a call from the HR manager from one of the 4 proposals I sent to an insurance agency. They accepted my proposal, signed the contract, and wanted to start service on January 1st! And get this! It was one customer and two buildings for a total of $950 per month. I interviewed a promising candidate named Joanne the day before. I talked it over with my wife and Coach Josh. We decided to send Joanne a job offer on Tuesday afternoon. She accepted. For the first time in months, things were looking up. That's 1 new customer and 1 new employee. We met Josh's challenge of "1 & 1 and we're having fun" with hours to go in the month.

We were ready for December... we thought. Let's do the bad first. I did a poor job with selecting Joanne. She worked with us one weekend. Her work was good, but something about the job wasn't a culture fit with Joanne. I can only speculate that she wanted complete autonomy sooner and that she didn't like the family business aspect. I had two of my kids working and helping me teach Joanne our cleaning system. Ultimately, I made a bad hire and this will happen a lot. I just need to keep working my hiring process to attract and repel for culture. Josh helped me work through so much of my hiring system in December. He helped me turn a bad into a good! The clip for this month's Freedom Report is an epic step-by-step on what Josh is looking for and how he attracts them. Here's a recap of the elements of my hiring system we added in December. Josh also issued a new challenge. "2 & 2... it's only a few."
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1. We added a 2nd job on Facebook and Indeed. The first was for "Weekend Side-Gig Office Cleaning". The second one we added was "Weeknight Side-Gig Office Cleaning". Josh predicted I'd get more applicants looking to do side work after their full-time job during the week. He was right. Our Indeed ads alone captured over 30 leads in December.
2. I set up multi-step process to get to an interview. I had 5 no-shows in a row in November, then 1 that showed up after setting up a few hoops. I offered her a job in late November but she ghosted me. I had 7 more interviews in December with only 1 no-show or 8 total booked. Each of these candidates completed a 15 minute questionnaire, 15 minute DISC assessment, and 30 minute podcast sharing my company's culture (mission, vision, and values). I wanted to hire each one of them.

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I recorded "A New Freedom Vision" in May, just 6 months ago. It was a bold proclamation. I could not go to Florida for a month, while scheduled to clean 2 days per week. I had to grow a team. I interviewed Josh Melton for my podcast in June ("The Cleaning Road to Nineveh with Josh Melton") and immediately asked him to coach me. I was ready for the challenge and I was ready to show you all that I could do it. Let me cut right to it. It's 6 months later and we have 0 new clients and 0 new employees. In fact, we have at least $1,000 per month less in cash flow because our expenses went up as we've been building to scale. There are 3 topics to discuss on this episode and unfortunately, I don't have a clip from Coach Josh. His best stuff was on the final coaching call before Thanksgiving and it wasn't recorded. His call-out was tough and I'll share that first.

Josh's Call Out!
I have set out from the beginning of this journey in 2021 to grow my commercial cleaning company in the niche and model I choose. I want weekly, small office clients that I can stack up and complete on weekends. I don't want office cleaning to think about during the week. This preference has held me back from going after bigger revenue accounts or recommending to offices a multi-day pricing option of two. This fully surfaced when Josh was helping me with a quote for a 10,000 square foot showroom with offices. They have a cleaner twice per week that they want to replace. It has 6 restrooms and I'm positioning the price options to sell the weekly option to fit into the perfect schedule I want. Josh hit me hard with this. "Ken, what do you want? Your dream of Florida or your preferred business model? Make it work. Get the revenue. Clean however it comes. Weekly, twice weekly, 5x per week. More people want to work weeknights over weekends. Get up the job ads. Get to work and be scrappy. Make it happen. Just because you choose this now, it doesn’t mean you need to keep it this way. Don’t choose your preferred business model over your dream. You need revenue. Your preferred business model is weekly offices on weekends. You don’t want to work or operate your business on weeknights. I get that. I was like that too. I realized that more nights per week equals more revenue. I'd rather have less clients and more revenue. You're playing too small all in the name of keeping your preferred business model." This is so true that it stung big time. It's me trying to optimize my business when I'm still an initializer. Why do I keep doing this. I just need to get revenue and team members in the door. This conversation convinced me to offer one of my recent proposals 2 out of 3 options as twice weekly. By the way, I never answered the question. I choose my dream! I told my wife and she agreed.

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In my last Freedom Report, I humbled myself with the reality of my situation. I'm striving for this New Freedom Vision, but two glaring blind spots were holding me back. Another month has gone by. How is it going? Short answer. Not good! I am going to share my update exactly as it happened and end with a clip from Coach Josh at the end of October with an encouraging word that helps me and will hopefully encourage you. We all need encouragement. I'm not above that because I happen to have a podcast and talk about cleaning. This scaling and building a team thing is new for me. I am bringing you my monthly results exactly as they've occurred to build you up and hopefully teach you something. Here's an outline of my month.

• I finally completed my Project 100 by my October 11th coaching call. The final tally looked like this. 239 total offices on my prospect list. 49 dental (21%), 69 medical (29%), 111 professional (46%), 10 industrial (4%). 99 are members of the Indian Valley Chamber of Commerce where I'm the only cleaner. Josh wanted me to commit to a deadline for introducing myself and my business to every one of these businesses. I chose November 15th, 2021. The strategy was simple from Josh. "Ken, I'm going to guess that 4% of the businesses on this list and any list is currently not happy with their cleaner or actively looking for a new one. These are low-hanging fruit. If you'll just reach out and introduce yourself with a heart of generosity while at the same time promoting your cleaning company, those 4% will request quotes. That's 9 - 10 quotes. You can close 5 and hit your goal for Florida." I have seen this first-hand over the years. I have acquired a few offices because I was at the right place at the right time. I need to strategically put myself there again. This fired me up!
• I honestly assessed my goals with my coaches and my wife. I need 5 new offices and 5 more part-time team members to delegate my full cleaning business and equal the cash flow we currently earn. This is the minimum we need for a month in Florida. I'm simplifying this goal as the 5/5 plan. The 10/10 plan is double and makes Florida a lot more comfortable with about $2,000 in monthly cash flow over and above all of our bills. This makes Josh's challenge to contact all 239 to find the low-hanging fruit vital and a top priority for November 15th.
• As of my last coaching call with Josh in October, I had 100 initial introductions made to my chamber list. 2 requested quotes now. 2 requested quotes in January. 15 are satisfied with their cleaners and will keep me in mind. This is a great start. Josh challenged me to close the month of October, which only had a few days left to send out another 100 and add more to my list. The strategy would include a mixture of emails, direct phone calls, and personal visits to introduce myself in areas where I already have clients. I also collected 2 more customer testimonials to assist in this local marketing approach. The goal is simple. Keep introducing myself. Keep adding new offices as there are at least 50 offices that were missed through my Google and chamber search methods. I fully expect to do initial introductions to 300 businesses by November 15th. This should lead to 12 quote requests and 5-6 new clients in November and December. But there are no guarantees and I have Coach Josh to direct me through each step without me overthinking everything. I need one thing working and that's ACTION!

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