AI Social Media Strategy for Cleaning Businesses

A carpet cleaning business should do some form of social activity every day if possible, provided the activity serves the audience’s interests. The training recommends mixing recreational, educational, conversational, inspirational, review, promotional, and behind-the-scenes content rather than posting carpet photographs repeatedly.

JOHN CLENDENNING
0:05

Yeah! So, Chris, you got your cheers back. Everybody else, you can say, who the hell is this Chris guy John keeps talking to? Anyways, so Chris texted me and said, nope, we need the cheers back. We got the cheers back. So thank you guys for showing up, or if you’re watching this on replay, listening to this on the podcast, whatever. Um, awesome. Thanks for showing up again. Every month we do these deep dive masterclasses on how to build these crazy home service businesses, run them, market them properly, how to be the marketer of cleaning services, not the doer, not the— like, understand that when you’re growing a business, the most successful businesses, and there’s very few of them, By contrast, by a lot, 86% of solopreneurs stay solopreneurs their entire life. 85% of carpet cleaners stay solopreneurs, never get out of the truck.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:02

Like, you know, matches those numbers with other industries. Most businesses don’t survive 10 years. Most, only 2% of carpet cleaners sell their business for more than the price of the truck. And only half a percent or less ever make it to sort of scale where they’re over 7 figures. They’re running a machine. They can grow, they can grow to $10 million, sell to private equity and walk away with $20, $30 million. Or they can run it remotely, like with a team and not be involved in the day-to-day and grow that $2, $3, $5 million, start buying other businesses. What do they know? Most of them don’t have a university degree.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:45

I didn’t even finish high school. I got a job, a chance to play Ron Wood in a Rolling Stones cover band and skipped the last from May to the end of the year. Didn’t finish my final exams. John didn’t graduate. Always planned to go back. Never did. Built a million-dollar cleaning business instead, right? After we came off the road and all that fun stuff. So what do they know that maybe you’re learning here? You understand I talk about that it’s not from me.

JOHN CLENDENNING
2:11

It’s from— listen to Tommy Mello, Home Service Millionaire. Listen to, um, Michael Gerber, E-Myth, E-Myth Revisited. We know the learnings. We listen to Dan or Alex Hormozi, if you want one of the newer gurus who learned from Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson, who learned from Edward Bernays and Gary Halbert and John Carlton. And this— there is a path to success. a proven path and everybody else walks out into the woods, goes this way, goes that way. No, I know better. I know better.

JOHN CLENDENNING
2:40

I know better. And they skip the path. It’s a human condition. It’s not your fault. Your brain believes, as you know less and less information about something, that you are more right and certain than you ever should be. And we should always be challenging this. In psychology, it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? So We are, we don’t know enough information that we are naively confident. It’s just super easy.

JOHN CLENDENNING
3:06

What we’re trying to say is that if you’re the marketer of your services, you generate sales conversations. You get good at sales conversations, you generate jobs. You get good at jobs, doing right, delivering a client experience, doing good follow-up, doing good marketing to keep the job before you show up, do good marketing after it, do marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing from job number 1. From customer number 1, not someday. At the beginning, right? Then you now create retention and referral. We are in a retention and referral industry. We don’t make $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 profit on a job like a roofer does. So they need that customer once and they make the lifetime value once, maybe twice sometimes.

JOHN CLENDENNING
3:44

We need to get to that $5,000, $10,000 lifetime value by locking the customer down, finding the right people and locking it down. If you’re running a lead business, I need more leads, I need more leads. That literally has never worked. You can add leads to a great machine, but without the great machine, leads will actually run you outta business like it does everybody else, right? So you might get lucky, get some more leads, and then build a machine because you found a, a loophole for a short period of time until you built 20 poles in the water, 30 poles in the water, 40 poles in the water to generate each one of ’em generating 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 inquiries a month. You, you get good at booking. You know your booking percentage is not 20%, it’s actually 40% or 50%. You actually know it. You monitor it.

JOHN CLENDENNING
4:30

You know when it’s slipping and you bring it back. That’s running a good business. And now you generate every, every inquiry from the right source. You know half of them are going to become $10,000 lifetime clients. The other half are never going to see you again because they were moving out of the area, something else was going on. That’s your goal because you market the crap out of that database. every single month, right? So, that’s the business we’re in. Welcome to the Carpet Cleaner Success Podcast, a show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owners to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business.

JOHN CLENDENNING
5:04

Your host, Jon Clendenning, has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple 6 figures over his 30-year career and is the founder of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, a digital agency that turns your online marketing into a lead generation machine. Tune in as Jon shares proven tips, Strategies, and expert interviews to help fast-track your success in the carpet cleaning industry. What are we going to talk about today? Today, we’re actually talking about being the best known to get chosen in the realm of social and how to use social media to help do that. The best-known cleaners get chosen 60% of the time or more, everybody else is picking up the scraps in the marketplace. If your phones have slowed down, you’re not best known. If the economy is tightening, people are getting worried. 89,000 jobs were lost in the United States in the last 3 months, according to some recent reports, to AI, never to come back again. That causes some problems, but it causes some psychological problems to people saying, I don’t need our upholstery cleaned again a second time this year, or we’ll wait, wait till next year.

JOHN CLENDENNING
6:19

We’ll see if the honey— we’ll see if we you keep the, you know, if you keep your job, if I keep my job, see what we’re doing. Like the price of gas is too much and interest rates and blah, blah, blah. We don’t know where anything’s going. That recessionary feeling that happened 20 years ago, 2008, that feeling was the problem, not the job losses that, which were pretty small at the time. It was the feeling that cascaded through the economy, right? Quantitative easing was necessary to fix it. We had COVID, then they 10x that, all that kind of stuff. Like the story writes itself. So what we’re going to talk about today is how do you become the best known? How do you become chosen? Right.

JOHN CLENDENNING
6:56

In the new social media, using social media in the new era, right? It’s one of the poles in the water. It’s one of the things that you can tap into. It’s not the only thing, but I’m going to show you some folks that have used it insanely, insanely, insanely well. So, okay. Well, that’s in mind. Let’s switch over the screen. Hey, up in the top corner here. Hope you guys can see me.

JOHN CLENDENNING
7:18

Make sure you, uh, chime in and tell me that you can see me. That’s helpful. Um, and a quick second. So, um, hey, sorry, just sending a message to Sarika. Um, I think she, she had to chime out for a second, so if anybody chats in the background, um, I won’t be able to see you. Anyways, want to send the message. So we’re going to be talking about this. Right.

JOHN CLENDENNING
7:43

This is social media can make or break or can not break, can make your business grow faster, better, create an awareness that we’re going to talk about that allows everything else to work better. It’s just one of those things that can do a really, really, really, really powerful lift with a little bit of effort. Right. So how do you put it in place and why does it even matter? What’s AI doing in this whole market? So let’s talk about that. So Turn your cell phones off, turn Facebook off. Cleaning home service business, you’re gonna get some value out of this. So let’s go down that rabbit hole. Um, next 60 minutes, you know, right? It’s gonna be about 75, 80 minutes, probably.

JOHN CLENDENNING
8:22

We’ll see where this, this lands this time, but we’re gonna, we’re gonna cover why be known, being known matters, and how social media can help. The AI era, how customers discover and evaluate your business. It ain’t Google anymore, guys. You know, this ain’t Kansas anymore, people, right? So, um, from random posts to strategic content, what’s the difference? Most people go, oh, I post a little bit. I post before and after pictures of my carpets. That’s what every carpet cleaner does. That’s called marketing incest. If you look at what everybody else does and go, that must be right.

JOHN CLENDENNING
8:57

Do you have a strategy? Do you know why it’s right? The very best companies don’t do that at all. The very best companies, strategic, Hire good social media companies or learn the depth of social media. Again, Dunning-Kruger. They don’t go, oh, I think I know. I think I— nope. I— oh crap. The more I learn, I know nothing. It’s called the pit of despair.

JOHN CLENDENNING
9:17

Wow. This is actually hard. Okay. I’ve learned enough. I’m— now you’re a lifelong learner because you realize it’s actually hard. That’s everything, right? The worst case scenario is when you get lucky at something, make it, make it feel super easy because that’s, again, that’s, that’s even, you know, lottery winners, right? You’ve got lottery winners who, you know, the, the stats are millions of dollars and how quickly they’re broke versus a self-made wealthy person, millionaire, whatever, multimillionaire. They know how to build it back. Henry Ford was once asked, once asked, what would happen if you, um, lost all your money today? I would make it back in a year or two.

JOHN CLENDENNING
10:07

It wasn’t a thought. It wasn’t because there’s a process. There’s, there’s, there’s knowledge. There was trial and error. There was depth. So if a hiccup happened, got in your way, you knew the plan to fix it. If you get lucky, you think it’s easy, right? So AI and authenticity, the new content advantage. We’re gonna talk about, right? So who am I? Why you should even listen to me? You already know.

JOHN CLENDENNING
10:33

Um, been in business since 1990, last year of high school. Um, I’ve owned multiple cleaning businesses, started in a town of 30,000 people, built a multi-million dollar cleaning company, sold pieces off all the way through to a number of years ago. Um, got down to working about 5 hours a week. On my business, not in it, and started consulting and coaching and being flown around the world teaching those 3-day elite retreats and stuff like that to the cleaning industry and franchise networks and you name it. I wrote the book on the Complete Guide to Internet Marketing. I run the Carpet Cleaning Success Podcast. All I do is say, hey, I know this industry inside out backwards. I’m one of you.

JOHN CLENDENNING
11:13

I’ve been in the cleaning industry and home service industry my entire life. I’ve coached for 20 years to help businesses grow. Scale, expand, understand where they need to put their focus, what comes first, what comes second, right? More leads is actually way down the list, just so you know. Without the right engine, generating more inquiries and more leads is actually going to break your business. So that’s what I do. Oops. Obviously, Industry Leader of the Year, Cleanfax. I’m on Cleanfax every single month.

JOHN CLENDENNING
11:46

hang out with the people we know, Howard Partridges and Dusty Roberts and Mark Sagers, and you name it in the industry, right? That’s, that’s my connection to the industry. More importantly, we help our clients grow, right? That’s what we do. We’ve got tons of case studies. Call us, ask for case studies. We get tons of case studies, pay-per-click, that is generating 3, 4, 5-to-1 ROIs. One pay-per-click campaign we’re talking about, the lifetime was $66,000 in pay-per-click ad spend to Google over a number of years. $1.3 million book of business came out of it in carpet cleaning. It’s not a bad return on investment, right? Direct, the first-time cleaning, $200,000 lifetime value of that because of the lifetime value engine in that company.

JOHN CLENDENNING
12:40

Know them well, know them for years, worked with them forever. The value is over $1 million from a $66,000 investment in paid ad budget over a couple years. They’re only a 1-2 truck operation, right? So we help make our clients the top cleaning brand in their local marketplace so they can attract the best clients, which are the only ones who are going to be left with money during this whole shakeout, by the way. You can’t quietly lose 89,000 jobs in 3 months. A year ago, it was like 80,000 in the first, in, in 2025, they, they believe were sort of lost permanently to AI. It’s 89,000 in the last 3 months, right? You can’t do that and stay in business and have every carpet cleaner have work, every home service, every hairdresser, you name it. Everybody’s going to cut back on stuff. We did in the recession.

JOHN CLENDENNING
13:32

We all know it if you’ve been around long enough. But the best clients on Golf Course Road, they made a ton of money with their SpaceX stock. They made a ton of money. They understand wealth, so they still clean, they still do stuff because that’s the K-shaped economy we are in. The haves know how to have more. The average don’t have the resources to play that game and are just, The victims of the commodity mentality, right? We can’t be that. We are not 3 rooms in a hall for $99. An $89 guy shows up and $79 guys show up.

JOHN CLENDENNING
14:08

All of them have rusty vans. Give them 5 years if they’re brand new van today, right? The $300, $400, $500, $600, $800 average residential job client carpet cleaning companies are growing right now. That’s interesting, right? So you want to be top rates. That’s what we just talked about and booked out weeks in advance. Right? We had our clients book a year in advance into our schedule. It’s not a bad thing to do. So, quick second. Hey, good.

JOHN CLENDENNING
14:36

Thank you, Poppy. You can see and hear me. Good. I did actually see that little note and checked. That’s weird of me, but okay. So, how do we do this? 3 principles of omnipresence. If you are the best-known cleaner, if you’re omnipresent in your marketplace, That means they know you. Think of the very best personal injury lawyer.

JOHN CLENDENNING
14:57

Think of the very best real estate agent, one or two of them in your town. Think of the very best plumbing company. They’re on billboards, on the back of buses. They’re in your flyer. They’re in your mailbox. If you’ve ever hired them before, they’re sending you seasonal information, not deals, not discounts, not necessarily. They’re sending you packages and programs and ideas and helpful tips and how to prepare if you’re in the Northeast or the North, how to prepare your you know, for winter and stuff like that, right? You got to stay omnipresent so that when they do need a cleaner and they do go to AI, when they do need a cleaner and they do go to Google, less and less are going there, by the way. Um, when they do need a cleaner and they ask their friends or neighbors or colleagues and your name comes up, they go, oh crap, I know those guys.

JOHN CLENDENNING
15:45

All of a sudden your pay-per-click campaign works twice as good. 3, your ROI, your return on investment is 2 or 3 times higher. The campaign didn’t do better. A well-run campaign should do good, but your omnipresence is what created the profit and the wealth. Never put that in place, you never get there. Put it in place starting day 1, you’re in the right spot. So you maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified lead. You pick who your ideal customer is.

JOHN CLENDENNING
16:15

Are they on Golf Course Road commercially? Are they the high-end hotels? Are they the high-end property management? that have condos that every bougie rich 55-year-old plus lives in? Is that your qualified? Or are you looking for rental apartments to clean baby puke and cat pee out of the carpets between tenants for like $50, $100 because the last guy did it for $125 and you took $25 off the price, right? Who do you consider a qualified inquiry? That could build your company, come back year after year after year. If you realize you’re in a retention, repeat and retention business and marketing to people, ’cause they don’t remember you, they will forget. Are you getting 60% of your database coming back or 10? Do you even know? Do you even track it? Right? So you maximize your opportunity to generate a qualified lead. You maximize your brand impressions is what we’re gonna talk about today. How do people know about you before they need you? Not when they need you, before, so that when they need you, you are on the top of their, their list. There are, you’re already in their mind. And how do you maximize your conversions? What the hell does that even mean? Well, there’s a lot of people that get inquiries. We have clients that start with us.

JOHN CLENDENNING
17:36

They’ll get a lot of, lot of inquiries. We start our clients off with local service ads in the mix of sort of SEO and pay-per-click and stuff like that. Like that core engine, we build a lot of services around that to make that core engine stronger. Very uniquely we do that, but that core engine is SEO, AI recommendations, organic in Google Maps, and paid ads online, offline, every door mails, yard signs, door hangers, chambers, like all that kind of stuff. There’s a whole Core Forever engine that we talk about. Cool. But that’s great. You generate inquiries.

JOHN CLENDENNING
18:08

Are you answering them in 1 to 2 rings? Are you getting back to emails and text messages in, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, not next day. And do you know what to say? Do you have a psychological, psychologically influenced script messaging? Sell by text, get them on the phone, influence them well. Just a good conversation that gets rid of their limiting beliefs and lets them know why paying more is to their benefit. You don’t. Everybody’s a price shopper and nobody— I can’t raise my prices. Everybody mocks at my prices. That’s a scripting problem. It’s a scripting problem, not, not a pricing problem, right? Maximize your conversion.

JOHN CLENDENNING
18:56

You understand what I just said? And then anybody who says maybe, you follow up with for years, days, weeks, months, years until they buy or die. Your lead database, right? Because you might not convert them right now, but what if you stayed in touch with them, shared happy customer stories, told them all the stuff we’re gonna talk about in social media here, and that you’re still in their world all the time? Your customers, you should be in front of them 2 or 3 times a month forever. Your ideal customers, your leads, at least once or twice a month forever until they buy or die or unsubscribe, which you’ll find out they won’t. If you do it right, if you send them, become a welcome guest, not an annoying pest. Now you’re maximizing conversions. Now you might generate 10 phone calls, get 4 bookings. You’re at 40% cold, right? That’s not bad. Not terrible.

JOHN CLENDENNING
19:46

There’s most— the average carpet cleaner is 1 or 2 out of 10. If you actually ran your numbers, sat with a tracking sheet, unless your prices are so low that everybody just says yes, you try and get your minimum job $250 and your average carpet cleaning customer, $500 job and still book at 40%. You can, we have lots of clients that do it, but it’s a different strategy. You now are running a company. You can hand that off to somebody, get them to answer the phones. You’re out meeting and greeting and growing the business. Maximize conversions means that instead of 2 out of 10, you might get 4 out of 10 on the front end and another 3. Over the next coming weeks or months.

JOHN CLENDENNING
20:26

Now you got 7 out of 10. So 2 out of 10 and your average job is $200. You made $400. 7 out of 10 and your average job is $500 because you know how to upsell, you know how to package sell, you know how to do all that stuff. And now you made $3,500. Same 10 phone calls, one guy at $400, another guy or gal at $3,500. You got to decide which lane you want to be in. The difference wasn’t the leads.

JOHN CLENDENNING
20:51

So, being seen isn’t the same as being known. You can be seen. Are you known? Figure out what that means. Imagine 3 companies show up when a homeowner searches. We just talked about this. You’ve got Company A, great branding. I’ve seen them before. I know them.

JOHN CLENDENNING
21:12

I’ve heard of them. I’ve seen their social media. I’ve heard happy customer stories. I’ve heard about these guys. Right. I know these guys show up in pay-per-click. They show up in every door mailed, like wherever, right? Homeowner searching finds another company. Wow.

JOHN CLENDENNING
21:30

They look familiar. Hmm. Think I’ve heard of them. Honey, is that AAA Carpet Cleaning or AAA Door, uh, Garage Door that, that we know? Company C. Who are these guys? That’s a crappy website. That looks like homemade. That’s like, who are these guys? Which one do you think gets the calls? Most of the calls I hear all day. Oh yeah, well, you know, I just need more leads.

JOHN CLENDENNING
21:57

I need more leads. I’ll worry about the rest of the stuff later. Nope. The rest of the stuff later is the stuff you need to do first. You don’t drive around in a white van with no uniform on, jeans and a t-shirt showing up at people’s homes with old Gobby looking equipment. You have a website that looks like your, your 12-year-old kid made it. You have zero social media presence, or if you do have a social media presence, you’ve got a picture of carpets in the header graphic, the big billboard at the top of Facebook and everywhere. You decide to put a piece of a picture of a carpet up there because I’m a carpet cleaner.

JOHN CLENDENNING
22:28

That’s what other guys do. No, that’s not what the best guys do. Not even close. And you show pictures of really dirty carpets looking really clean. Stairs, hallways. Look at me. I’m amazing. That’s not a strategy.

JOHN CLENDENNING
22:41

That’s not going to be seen. They’re not going to know who you are when they go look you up. They’re not going to be impressed. And I’ll tell you why, because your best clients don’t have really dirty carpets. Your best clients are maintaining high-end upholstery, tile floors, and they’re willing to pay when they get slightly smudged, slightly traffic-laned. If that’s who you’re targeting, we have no issues with the Change in the economy. So who gets the call? We know who gets the call. So we’re going to talk about the social dilemma.

JOHN CLENDENNING
23:16

If you post inconsistently, right, it’s a problem. Creativity takes a whole long time. I don’t know what to post, John. This is ridiculous. I can’t hire somebody. They cost— a social media manager costs $1,500 to $2,500, $3,000 a month. That’s the, you know, the kid with the camera used to be a photographer, now is a social media manager in every town. Whatever, right? I don’t have time to learn it.

JOHN CLENDENNING
23:38

I don’t understand it. I do a little bit, then I stop. I do a little bit, then I stop. We got to get better at our social media. Hear that every single day. Creativity takes ages. I’m going to prove to you it doesn’t. Oh, and it doesn’t pull.

JOHN CLENDENNING
23:52

I, I’ve posted on social media for like 3 months in a row. I didn’t get any jobs from it. Are you looking for direct response marketing? Or are you looking for brand awareness that generates better positioning for your brand everywhere else? Do you understand that most people don’t find your social media and they’re definitely not looking at your dirty carpet, clean carpet side by side? That is, there is absolutely zero interest in that, right? The septic tank cleanout guy could take pictures of crap all day long. Could post them onto social media. Guaranteed that’s not going to draw a crowd. The insurance agent could post actuary tables and the latest news in insurance all day long. Guaranteed nobody’s going to the insurance agent’s page or social media. Insurance agent can do entirely different things and have everybody in town show up.

JOHN CLENDENNING
24:53

And the smart ones, the rare few, understand what I just said. So the fail: low authority, low positioning, low organic movement doesn’t seem to work. I don’t want to do social media. That’s where everybody gets that doesn’t understand what we’re about to talk about over the next 30, 40 minutes. You become known, you get chosen. The goal is not to post more. Not to post more. The goal is to become the business people recognize, remember, and trust.

JOHN CLENDENNING
25:25

Right? Do you stand out like these guys? Be the business that the market thinks of first. There is one, maybe a max in big markets, 2 market leaders. Everybody else picks up the scraps. And as the market gets tight, the market leaders are buying the other guys out right now. It’s happening right now like crazy, right? If you’ve got a carpet cleaning company you want to sell, For your, you know, get some of your equipment paid back, maybe a little bit of database money. You haven’t really built systems. You don’t really have like a nurtured database, whatever. There are guys who’ll buy you right now.

JOHN CLENDENNING
25:59

Call me up. I can help broker the deal for you. I’ve got hundreds of people I know are buying cleaning companies up right now if they’re structured well, that fit into their purview, because done well, they can take on your database. And grow where you couldn’t, right? You want to be seen, show up consistently, not shotgun, be recognized. The van goes by, those are my guys, right? Oh, I’ve heard of those guys. Oh, did you see their TikTok? Right, Tony, I don’t know if you’re on the call, walks around town, people go, oh my God, haha, you’re funny, love you, love your social media. Right, Donnie? Right? They know you. You don’t have a clue who they are.

JOHN CLENDENNING
26:49

Top of mind. Be trusted. Build credibility through value and authenticity. No games. There isn’t a scam here. All the black hat, gray hat crap that, that, that, oh, I just need, I just need somebody to post for me. I just, I, I just want to put, you know, put a pin in that. Yeah, that’s mediocre.

JOHN CLENDENNING
27:13

Are you going to level up or are you going to play small? You got to decide, right? Are you going to learn what you need to know and you’re going to stay accountable, have an accountability buddy, partner, whatever? Because we all have great ideas. There’s no shortage of ideas. You’re going to have a ton of ideas at the end of this call. What are you going to do to put them in place? Do you have a plan? Think about that. You want to be remembered. You want to be that business. That seems to be solving everybody’s problems. And then when they call and they go, holy crap, wow, I called a couple other guys and they were like $99, $169 to do that.

JOHN CLENDENNING
27:46

You’re saying it’s gonna be like between $350 and $500? Yep. Hmm. And you guys are like more known than anybody else. Like most people choose you, right? Yep. Yeah, that’s true too. Hmm. What am I missing here? Like, why are those other guys so cheap? They know what they’re worth. It’s always a great answer right there, right? You want to get chosen not because you’re the discount guy.

JOHN CLENDENNING
28:11

You want to get chosen because you’re the best, you’re trusted. And the better that brand gets, the more you can charge. The better you get at selling and servicing and delivering a great client experience that wows the crap out of them, Costs you $20 more per job, but generates $200 more per revenue. All of that other $180 is profit. Same job, more money because you’re so well known and you deliver a great client experience unique to you. Compelling sales proposition. So the customer journey has changed massively. And it’s continuing to change.

JOHN CLENDENNING
28:56

More people are onboarding into systems now in August of 2026, when this is being recorded, end of August, than a month ago, than 3 months ago, than 9 months ago. The AI is becoming how everybody answers questions, has conversations, and we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. It’s scary where this is going. I run the AI Marketing Experts Podcast. Go look it up on YouTube and Spotify. Join. We’ve got a community in the back end of that. Learn AI for businesses and stuff like that.

JOHN CLENDENNING
29:30

AI Marketing Experts Podcast, group of 5 of us. Really cool. I’ve been in AI for 5 years, way before ChatGPT. I have agents. I have 7 agents running right now doing different triage and work and research and stuff like that for me across Variable things in my life, right? I know the customer journey is changing. I’m not the average customer. I’m like, I get it. I get it.

JOHN CLENDENNING
29:57

I go way too deep down rabbit holes, but the average customer isn’t just going to Google and finding the person with the most reviews and that’s who I’m going to choose. It’s not how it works anymore. The AI era has changed. This is what it used to be. We searched on Google. We visited the website. We called the business. We booked the service.

JOHN CLENDENNING
30:21

We got the job complete. That was a lot of, hey, everything’s got to be on Google. Go, go, go, go, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, right? I need more reviews on Google. I need Google. I need Google. No. Even then, it should only be one pole in the water. Now, The search might start on Google.

JOHN CLENDENNING
30:42

It might not even, it might start on ChatGPT. It might start on Perplexity, right? They see you on social media. They’ve seen your reels. They’ve seen your posts. They’ve laughed at some of your fun stuff. I’m gonna show you some of these really cool things, right? They’ve gone and had AI go out and find reviews on you. They’ve watched some YouTube by this point. They’ve asked or searched as we talk about, right? Bouncing back and forth.

JOHN CLENDENNING
31:06

This isn’t a linear path. It’s like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right? They’re saying it’s about 21 touches. Google’s ZMOT, Zero Moment of Truth. 21 touches of a brand before people feel they can trust them enough to use them. Then they might visit your website. It better be telling a great story. It better not look like white on rice Sephora, you know, whatever it, you know, or some sort of Weebly Wix free or ChatGPT. I chat, built me my website.

JOHN CLENDENNING
31:36

Cool. Does it have psychological positioning? Does it have a story brand? Does it have schema? Does it have enough content depth, H1s, H2s, H3s to get ranked? Does it have, you know, interlinking between it and authority page? You know what I even just said? Your website’s not ready. Right. Call or message, right? More people want to message. We talked about that in other calls. They want to message more. You want to get them off of message or learn how to sell by chat really, really good. Kind of hard.

JOHN CLENDENNING
32:03

You want to get them off of message and on the phone. Do you know the script for that? Do you know how to sell by chat and move them to a phone conversation if you can, where you can influence them with your voice? You want to book the service? Some people want to book themselves. Do not put a self-booking widget on your website at all. At all. If you’re— unless you’re trying to commoditize your price. Yep, we’re $99 as well. Choose us. Book yourself.

JOHN CLENDENNING
32:29

I want to go home and eat. Cheetos or watch Netflix and just have my schedule fill up. Never worked. I don’t care what the forum flexers say on the forums. Most of the guys that are successful have long since left the forums. It does not work. You have to be able to sell your services. Can you walk them through a pricing window calculator? Oh, for gosh sakes, yes, you should.

JOHN CLENDENNING
32:54

Should you have pages on your website about pricing that aren’t quotes? You’re not giving an exact price. You’re giving the range in the marketplace, what the discount guys do, what the middle of the road do, what the premium do, and here’s where you fit in and what they can expect and how to have those conversations. If they’re a discount client, don’t try and sell them. Just be a premium provider. That’s an option. It’s a great option, right? At the very least, be middle of the road and don’t let somebody else deal with the discount clients. They’re the biggest headache, the biggest pain in the ass, and the least profitable. Don’t even aim at them because you’ll also ruin a whole bunch of your business trying to get their money.

JOHN CLENDENNING
33:30

You will ruin your referral partner relationships. You’ll ruin your outreach. You’ll be so busy making pennies that you can’t spend the time to make $1,000, $10,000, $20,000 in a month with good outreach because you’re too busy doing a $150 job, 5 of them today. I’d rather you do one $500 job a day. Right? 22 workdays in a year. You’re sitting on a $10,000, $12,000 a month cleaning business with one job a day. And the other half of the day, you’re building the business to put the next $10,000, $20,000 revenue per month in with commercial jobs and referral partners and outreach. Or you spend all day doing $500 or $600 from 8 o’clock in the morning To 6 o’clock at night, 5 o’clock at night, $150 crappy-ass jobs all day long.

JOHN CLENDENNING
34:23

You’ll never grow there. So, right? That’s the new era. They’re bouncing back and forth and around. Are you in all of these places with the right message? Your compelling sales proposition, your risk reversal guarantee, your founder’s story as the hero or as the, uh, as a guide to them as the hero, the hero. They want a clean, healthy, safe house for their family, their friends, their guests, their whatever. You’re the guide to get them there. That’s the story. That’s how we work.

JOHN CLENDENNING
34:49

That’s how the Bible is written. That’s how every hero’s journey story arc is written. That’s how Hail Mary movie, Ryan Gosling, great. That’s the entire thing as well. We know how to influence people and make them lean towards us. That’s just learning marketing, right? Again, didn’t graduate high school, had to learn it, had to learn it all. Sat in every room, read every book, joined every course. Figured it out to write better ads for carpet cleaning, my own carpet cleaning business.

JOHN CLENDENNING
35:18

Why? Because I was out of the truck in the first year and a half in 1995. Grew a 7-figure business from a town of 30,000 people. Bought other companies out, started a coaching program. The whole story we talked about at the beginning, right? That all comes from deciding, hey, I don’t know shit. Let’s figure this out. Right? AI looks at— this is the other— when AI is choosing, right? AI looks at what you posted. Is it fresh, helpful, and engaging? What others are saying, are they engaging with it? Do you have reviews? Not just on Google. In fact, harder and harder and harder for AI to see your Google reviews.

JOHN CLENDENNING
35:57

Google’s kind of trying to keep that in their own ecosphere and blocking a little bit. Stories are being sold or being told about that. Have they watched you on TikTok and Reels? I’m going to show you some really cool examples of this. Who you help, your niche, your local relevance, your expertise. Are you telling AI and stories in the world about this? How trustworthy are you? Right? Are you sharing your reputation? Do you leave your Google reviews to die on Google, assuming everybody goes to Google? Not true at all. It’s about I can get you down to about 20%, 20 to 25% of new customers will make it to Google. And I can prove it to you if you want to have that conversation someday. Right? But even if you think it’s 60, even if you really still think it’s 60% of people, new customers go to Google, right? Are you syndicating your feedback from customers, your reviews from all over the web into your social so that they know other people are talking about you? Does AI see that, right? Strong signal equals more trust.

JOHN CLENDENNING
37:00

The customer doesn’t necessarily discover you in one place anymore. We know that. And it’s not just being on Google. They may see you on Facebook today, see a funny reel tomorrow, read a review next week, ask Google or an AI tool who should they call. Pardon me. Got a frog in my throat. So, your social media is part of your digital reputation. Content, expertise, proof, people, reviews, personality.

JOHN CLENDENNING
37:31

This is why we’re not talking about social media simply as posting 3 times a week. I just guess I need content. Oh, what content is— you got content? I need content, right? Any social influencer who has grown their YouTube channel didn’t get lucky. They learned. They did it wrong. They tried harder. They did it more consistently. They watched their data.

JOHN CLENDENNING
37:52

They found which videos worked well, which ones didn’t. They doubled down. They learned more. They hired consultants as they grew, and they became influencers. MrBeast or whoever you follow, right? So it isn’t just about posting to check that off the list. We’re talking about creating evidence. That your business is real, that your business is experienced, that your business is trusted, and it becomes known in the marketplace because of that, right? Imagine a homeowner asking, who’s the best carpet cleaner near me? Your competitor has 300 reviews, videos showing their technicians actually in the field talking to customers, doing work. They— you’ve got happy customer stories.

JOHN CLENDENNING
38:42

Projects that you’ve been able to solve. We got called in, their 3-year-old child got into the nail polish. Oh my gosh. Here’s us working on it. Here’s the after. The story, not just pictures. Educational videos. Answer common questions.

JOHN CLENDENNING
39:02

We all get asked the same questions all day long. Those questions are— people are asking to AI as well. If you are the answer for that, Marcus Sheridan, They Ask, You Answer, built an entire entire industry and he turned him into, from a guy that installed, or a company that installed vinyl pools and almost went bankrupt. Story of Marcus Sheridan, They Ask, You Answer. Great book to, another big, great book to read or listen to, right? He now is an influencer. He’s one of the best speakers I’ve ever, I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of the top speakers. Marcus Sheridan’s the best speaker from stage I’ve ever, I’ve ever, I’ve ever heard. He’s a kid that worked at a pool store for his parents, turned it into a conglomerate by solving that problem, answering the questions that they got asked, and using that as their main marketing approach.

JOHN CLENDENNING
39:55

Online, offline, everywhere. An active social presence. You’ve got to be active. Doesn’t mean people— Facebook is going to direct people to your page even if they like and subscribe. Still means you need to be push, not necessarily pull, but that’s okay. And recognize a recognized owner and a team. Oh, I’ve heard of those guys. I’ve seen that guy.

JOHN CLENDENNING
40:18

Wow. Yeah. I heard that guy talk at the last, you know, trade show. I went to the Home and Garden Show. Yeah. There’s only one carpet cleaner there. Guess who it was? Guess who did Home and Garden Shows every single year in every single small town around us? Right. Done well.

JOHN CLENDENNING
40:32

Not just stand at a booth, shamwow the shit out of that booth. Have people standing around watching demonstrations, right? All of it. Having people entering contests, spinning wheels, doing all kinds of stuff. Like the, the, like we called it the Wheel of Savings. It’s just like going to a stag and doe, right? You won prizes, but you had to enter the contest first. Whole home of cleaning. We would make $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 out of a town of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people on home shows. I tried to get in many of those as I possibly can.

JOHN CLENDENNING
40:59

We were recognized For all of this. Then we’d social media-ize the crap out of the winner. On the Monday afterwards, we’d pull the winner. We’d show up at their doorstep as quickly as we can Tuesday or Wednesday, put it in the newspaper, put it all over social media with the big giant check that I still have in the corrugated plastic board in the back of the shop. Right? Long since sold the business. Still have it hanging on the wall. Right? That was the big check so that we could get the big check. They got $500 worth of free cleaning in their home.

JOHN CLENDENNING
41:28

And there was a winner and there’s a picture within a couple days. Everybody else got mailings, not an email. I hope they open it. Mailings. We spent money, got in their mailbox. We would generate $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 first-time cleanings and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime cleanings because we knew how to market our database. added to our company legacy every year. Did the home shows, made $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, made hundreds of thousands of dollars lifetime in the business.

JOHN CLENDENNING
42:00

Rinse and repeat. Do it next year. One of the many poles in the water. Or you don’t do that at all. Man, I wonder why we’re not growing. Wow. We’re slow, right? You have a website, sort of. You have 15 reviews, sort of.

JOHN CLENDENNING
42:15

You have a Facebook page. Haven’t really posted in a while. 4 months ago. Which business gives you more reason to trust them? This guy can charge $400 for 3 rooms and a hall. This guy’s lucky to get $150. They do the exact same cleaning. They both got butlers. They both use the zipper.

JOHN CLENDENNING
42:36

They CRB everything, right? Well, I’m the best. Yeah, this guy’s pretty good. He’s just beating your pants off, making more money. Growing a business. AI changes discovery. Your digital presence needs, needs to keep up. Customers don’t just see your business where they search you, they watch you, they read you, they hear you, they ask, they evaluate all over the place. Your job, give them enough evidence to know, trust you.

JOHN CLENDENNING
43:05

AI ingests all of this now too. AI is trying to be as real and authentic as it possibly can, and every single month it’s getting so much better that it’s becoming real and authentic. It’s going to become AGI, artificial general intelligence, then superintelligence in our lifetimes. That’s, that’s, you know, go listen to the, you know, the founders of AI, right? Go listen to, um, Geoffrey Hinton. Go listen to Ilya. Go listen to, um, Roman Yabolsky, um, head of cybersecurity. Go listen to Demis Hasselbaum. Go listen, like I could give you the list.

JOHN CLENDENNING
43:40

AI is getting smarter every single month and taking over more and more. It’s trying to be as authentic and real as possible. It’s trying to find, when you ask AI to go find answers, it’s trying to find the best answers for you as a real person would, not being gamed, right? Social media reviews, content expertise, SEO, all a stronger digital presence. Throw some paid ads in there, kind of a rental property. You run them, you pay for it, you get to use it. As soon as you stop paying, goes away, right? But you can build some brand equity this way as well. So random posting trap without posting without a plan leads to inconsistent results. Hey, happy Monday.

JOHN CLENDENNING
44:21

Hmm. We got nice mountains on Wednesday. You should call us. You need your, you should get some cleaning done. We, we do cleaning. Nothing for a week or two. That didn’t really work. How many of you have ever opened Facebook and thought, I know I need to post something, but what the heck do I post? The problem isn’t that you don’t have enough content.

JOHN CLENDENNING
44:44

The problem is you’re looking at content as something you have to constantly reinvent. That’s what we’re going to dispel right here today. We’re going to take you from random posts to a strategic content engine. Everything in your business needs to be an engine. I teach in our coaching program something called the framework. Think of Granny and her recipe. You might love Granny’s apple pie. You might like, love your Granny’s chili, curry, whatever, right? Guaranteed when Granny was in her 20s, the first time she cooked that, people were spitting it out and throwing it in the garbage.

JOHN CLENDENNING
45:22

She got better and better, got it acceptable, minimum viable, monitored it. Measured it, learned a little bit more, tried some. Oh, that’s really good. What do you put in yours? Oh my God. Oh, you put sage in your— oh my gosh, I never tried to. Right now Granny is like, pinch of this, dash of that. My God. Oh my God, it’s the most amazing I’ve ever had.

JOHN CLENDENNING
45:40

Yep. It’s really good. You should patent that. You should sell that. That’s incredible. Right? Minimum viable. Then you measure, you monitor, you measure. Eventually you keep iterating.

JOHN CLENDENNING
45:56

Turn it into a machine. Turn it into an engine that works for you. You’re going to educate, prove personality. Look, there’s a, there’s actually a formula to this, right? Again, Dunning-Kruger. You go, oh, I post, it doesn’t work. I, that’s all anybody does. I know everything about it. I am, I am brilliant.

JOHN CLENDENNING
46:16

You learn a whole bunch. Like even today you might go, holy crap, there’s more to this than I thought. Wow, I can’t do that. That’s the next part of the Dunning-Kruger pit of despair. You start learning a little bit more by the end of this call. Wow, there’s a lot here, but I can get started. That’s where I want to get you to. What to post daily.

JOHN CLENDENNING
46:37

You should be posting some form of social activity, right? Every single day you should be doing something to keep your social account active. That is in the interests of your audience. Your audience has more interest than cat pee on the carpet. That might be what you are interested in and do and trying to sell. They are interested in a healthy home, children, pets, green living, indoor air quality. As like your ideal client has some very— pets. Yeah. As we talked about, I think I already said pets, like has some very specific lanes that your— I, if you know who your ideal inquiry is, who your ideal customer is, what can you talk to them about? If you go to a dentist’s office, is every single one of the magazines Gingivitis Today? Um, Dentists R Us, Retainer Weekly.

JOHN CLENDENNING
47:36

Pictures of mouths with gum disease? Nope. That’s what the dentist is interested in. That’s the magazines he has at home, in his office. It’s not for you. You’re the audience. Who are you? What are you interested in? People magazine, Home and Garden magazine, Popular Mechanics magazine, Reader’s Digest. Why do you think they order all of those? Because in the— for the audience, That’s what you’re interested in. That delivers a better experience.

JOHN CLENDENNING
48:08

Think of that in your social media. If you have a mix, and I’ll show you the right mix of personalized content and curated content that educates, that informs, that makes them laugh in the lane that you are in. What is the lane? It’s not cleaning. It’s a healthy home, a healthy office, a clean and healthy office. That’s your lane, right? Healthier lifestyle. Go a little bit broader. So here’s the recipe. Take a screenshot, write it down.

JOHN CLENDENNING
48:49

You want to keep it fun and recreational. You can curate these. You can have these planned and they just come out. Every year. Nobody’s scrolling back a year to say, oh, I saw that already before. People scroll maybe a couple days, right? You can go every 90 days and re— regroup, redo this if you want. Nobody’s really gonna notice, but curate the content, right? You want to educate. So for every 6 recreational posts you put out, you want to put out 5 educational posts.

JOHN CLENDENNING
49:23

This is how you mix it up over the month, over the week, over like whatever posting frequency you want. Facts and trivia, tips and tricks, again, around what they’re interested in. Not cleaning. You’re interested in cleaning. They’re interested in the results that cleaning provides. A healthy, safe environment and home for their family. A spot-free living, pride in their home when guests come over for, you know, Friday night barbecue and Poker, euchre, whatever, right? So you’re going to have surveys and polls, fill in the blanks, this or that, advice questions, right? A little bit of conversation stuff. You don’t have a big audience.

JOHN CLENDENNING
50:01

It’s going to sit with crickets. That’s fine. But you put it in there, right? You just, hey, what do you guys think of this? Got a poll about that. Recreation, education, conversation. Nothing about carpet cleaning here yet. It’s about what they’re interested in. Inspirational, right? Now we support a little bit of before and after, right? But you can even do before and after interior design. That’s not a bad post.

JOHN CLENDENNING
50:24

You become a resource that they’re interested in around the thing that you do— help them live a better, cleaner, healthier life in their home or office. Now you get the license to promote. So you had 6 recreational posts, not all in a row, mix them up. 5 educational posts, 4 conversational posts, 3 inspirational posts. These can all be curated. Now you’re ready to do offers. I don’t like discounts. I do promotions.

JOHN CLENDENNING
50:55

Father’s Day, book your Father’s Day right now and get a free barbecue set worth $97 or to give to father or keep for yourself, whatever. You can get a whole bunch of those at Alibaba for about $10. Make it a each, $5 each, right? Make it a, you know, they’ll have come with a sticker right on it that sold for, you know, $69.99, $79.99, $99.99, whatever, depending on the quality. You could have that as an offer. Mother’s Day, you can think about back to school. Like, I can think of 12, 14 of these right now off the top of my head if you wanted to, that you could run on your social media if you really wanted to try that, right? Um, customer reviews, you definitely want to be sharing those feedback and reviews shared from all other platforms as great images and stuff like that. Live events and demos, webinars and trainings, education pieces, pod— or, um, your, your, your, your SEO, your ongoing content on your website. You need to be adding a couple pieces of content to your website every single week, at least once, to generate some topical authority called topical content.

JOHN CLENDENNING
51:59

Copy topic authority cluster. You’re creating, becoming a topic, an authority in the topic because you’re constantly speaking about it. AI looks for freshness. AI loves press releases because they decay really quickly and fall off the platform. AI actually looks for what’s new now. Google Maps and things like that look for trends. SEO, you’re building the house from the foundation up, takes a lot longer, but it’s looking for consistency. And breadth, depth of thought, right? So it looks at all of your footprint and how that expands.

JOHN CLENDENNING
52:35

AI is going, yeah, what do you got right now for me? Right now, right now. I need right now, right now. So you need ongoing updates, right? And then entrepreneur behind the scenes, employees, you know, it’s okay to walk out of the office and say, hey, you guys loading the van? Taking a video right now. Go live if you want, right? If you don’t, don’t trust your guys not to swear and be all whatever dumb on camera, record it, run it through a quick tool, use tool like BigVu or, um, Caption, really good little apps. Record, put the captions on it, just set it up to social, tell some stories behind the scenes, personal life, stuff like that. That’s your recipe. This is your activity-based content. This is your personalized content.

JOHN CLENDENNING
53:19

That’s it. It’s just a recipe, right? So your business is already creating content every day. You just don’t know it, right? Every day you’re taking spots and stains out. Every day you’re having conversations, the exact same conversations a lot of times with homeowners. Oh, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know this. What does protector do? Blah. Like, you’re having them, right? You don’t need to manufacture content.

JOHN CLENDENNING
53:43

Your business is already producing it every single day. You just need to capture it. There’s the big light bulb moment. How can we capture more of what we’re already doing? How can we take a video of Nancy in the front office on the phone answering 3 or 4 phone calls, turn that into a, here’s how friendly it is to hire us video, right? Have a really deep question about pet urine and how to get it out and it’s in the baseboards and it’s in the underpad and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think you need to talk to John in the office. He’s the owner and he knows all about that. Let me patch you through to him. John, somebody wants to know really, really deeply about this one specific issue in their specific concern.

JOHN CLENDENNING
54:27

Oh, let me take that call. Film that. Customer questions, problems you solve, jobs you’ve completed. Right? Mark Sager, if you’re on the call, love you, Mark. Get a tripod. They’re like $10 from Amazon. Film yourself cleaning. Like, I think Mark only, only films, only cleans when he’s filming, right? The boys do all the cleaning.

JOHN CLENDENNING
54:50

Mark goes out and does some cleaning so he can chat to the camera for next, for an hour as he’s cleaning a restaurant or a church or whatever, right? Fucking brilliant. Brilliant. Customer stories, reviews. Talk about a review. How hard is that? Hey, we just got this review and I want to talk about it a bit. Really love getting these reviews, but I want to tell you, this is actually a new review. Because the first review you got with it from this customer was 1 star. Did you just lean in? Your customers will.

JOHN CLENDENNING
55:19

Let me tell you what happened, what we did about it, and why the customer was able— Mrs. Jones gave us a 5 star on the backend because of that. Already happened. Talk about it. Team moments. Go clean up the beach. Go flip hamburgers and pancakes at the charity auctions with your team, with shirts on. You know, do some team building stuff.

JOHN CLENDENNING
55:48

Go play volleyball or mini golf. Just film some of it. Take some pictures. That’s all. 5 ingredients of your content engine. You want to educate. Talked about on the other screen. You want to prove.

JOHN CLENDENNING
56:04

Again, I don’t necessarily— this picture is lovely. If your ideal customer does not drive a motorcycle down their hallway, do not show pictures of driving. If your idea— if you want a customer that lives on Golf Course Road, you show pictures of Golf Course Road houses being cleaned. They do not have black carpet. I don’t care how good you are at getting stains out. You’re not targeting that customer. If you’re targeting a property manager or something like that, or a hotel that has some specific stains, you can take pictures of specific and you send that to them in a kit. Separately, cool.

JOHN CLENDENNING
56:35

You have a page on your website all about that, cool. But if you’re trying to target high-end people, they’re cleaning because it looks slightly dusty. You’re cleaning clean stuff. Thank you, Dr. John Harvey, for teaching that to me back in 1998, ’99. Yeah, I don’t clean for dirty customers. I only clean for people with clean stuff. Remember the day he said it to me, right? You want to put your personality Your local expertise.

JOHN CLENDENNING
57:04

Talk about your community, your homes and neighborhoods, right? Local problems. You talk about that. They’re going, this guy knows me. They’re not some out-of-towner. And real customer stories. Now, instead of asking, what should I post today? You’re going to ask, which ingredient do I post today? You have your activity posts going out like a heartbeat, and then you drop in your personality posts, your education posts, your local expertise posts. You just drop them in. One job can equal weeks of content.

JOHN CLENDENNING
57:47

Imagine cleaning a heavily stained carpet, right? If this was in a super high-end home, family came home, kids had a keg party. So right client, fringe case. That’s a content engine. You’re not creating 7 different things. You’re taking one real thing that happened and finding 7 different ways to make it useful. You film. Before, during, and after. Do a little bit of film, set up a tripod, whatever, right? You can ask the client.

JOHN CLENDENNING
58:22

Maybe the client’s not there. Don’t show personal shit. That’s all, right? Be respectful. Can this carpet actually be saved? The before and the after transformation, right? Educational post. What caused this type of carpet staining, right? We were able to remove it because we’d cleaned this carpet. A year ago, 6 months ago, and applied protector. If this carpet was 2 or 3 years old and the protection had waned in the traffic lanes, a lot of this might’ve been less removable. We guarantee to remove it more than anybody else, up to the limits of science and physics.

JOHN CLENDENNING
58:58

We absolutely guarantee that. If we can’t get a stain out, you find anybody else that can, we’ll pay them to do that for you. Lovely guarantee, by the way. But here’s why this worked out so well. How often should you professionally clean your carpets. Well, these guys got lucky because they clean every 6 months. Therefore, the protection was nice and strong. And this mishap, by the way, the children have been scolded.

JOHN CLENDENNING
59:19

They’ve got their phones taken away from them, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, there’s your little story. Carpet also came up, came back to new. And they appreciated the fact that we had recommended our stain fighter package and not the basic cleaning. that they thought they were going to go with, right? You just sold more protection because of that. They just learned you have packages, not à la carte pricing. You got a personality video, right? You could just have pictures of the job and record sitting at your desk, flapping through the pictures, coming back to you standing in front of your van, right? You can make it as simple or as fancy as you want. Turn this story into additional captions, hooks, Scripts, FAQs.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:00:04

I’m actually gonna give you a prompt where you can actually take this stuff and figure out a calendar properly, how you can tear this apart, how you can use AI, right? You want to bring AI into it, and this is where AI becomes incredibly useful. AI doesn’t have to invent your content. You provide the customer, the job, the story. The expertise, the personality. AI helps you provide, organize it, repurpose it. How can I use this across multiple platforms? Create the hook, write the variations, turn it into different formats. You provided the story, the context, the education, the piece. AI helped you tidy it up.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:00:53

Real business, real customers, real jobs. AI in the middle, more content. That’s all. That’s it. Stop asking, what should I post? Start asking, what happened in my business today that would help prove or connect with my ideal customer? Just ask that question every day. What happened in my business today that would help my ideal customer, prove something to my ideal customer? Connect with my ideal customer, capture it, organize it, repurpose it, publish it. There’s your engine. Here’s an example of a monthly plan.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:01:34

Before and after recent project. Tell your origin story. When to clean your carpets before or after the holidays. Coming up to, say, coming up to holidays, back to school, before the kids go to school, after they go to school, right? Whatever. Right? Build, create a little bit of a content plan. Now, you know, ahead of time, what kind of story. So you’ve got your activity-based posts and maybe you don’t want to do it every day. You say, well, you know what, John, I’m going to do it every 3 days, every day.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:02:04

Cool. Your activity-based posts, your reputation posts, syndicating reviews from all that kind of stuff. The posts from your blog post every single week coming in as an education piece. Hey, look at this blog post I just wrote. on this really cool topic that helps you rank in SEO, but also gets the word out and helps to educate. That does that for you, keeps you active. And we even have a package or a program that helps you film better and, and, and, and do all that kind of stuff, right? So AI plus authenticity, your new content advantage. You want to start with the problem.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:02:37

How many of you are already using AI in any form of marketing? You think that you can write 10 blogs a day with AI and that’s going to work? By the way, Google’s just killed that, but It’s a topic for another day. Um, that’s great, but there’s a danger if you ask AI to create everything from scratch. Your content, content starting sounding like everybody else. AI knows so much that everything regresses to the mean. Go look it up if you don’t know what that means. Regresses to the mean, which means it’s garbage. The best stay up here. The worst are down here.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:03:06

The mean is a mess. That’s why AI gives dumb answers, because you didn’t give it context. You didn’t put it in a lane. You didn’t tighten it right up and say, based on all of this, what can you do? Oh, now I can do a lot more. That’s how you use AI better. AI-generated is generic. ABC Carpet Cleaning, we are committed to provide exceptional service and exceed customer expectations because our competitors don’t provide exceptional service and they don’t want to exceed customer expectations. No, everybody says that.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:03:40

We almost told this homeowner the stain couldn’t come out. Then our technician tried one more process. Which one feels more authentic as a story, as a post? The problem— AI can create content, but if it’s not your story, it is ignored. Content is not the goal. Attention is the goal. Explain the new role of AI. Your AI is an assistant. You are the source.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:04:12

You are the director. AI multiplies your content. You are the source of the content. You create more impact. The mistake is asking AI to invent your business, to do the thing you don’t know anything about. The opportunity is giving AI the raw material from your business. And letting it multiply that with training and context, with skills, with knowledge. You provide the customer stories, AI turns them into captions.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:04:45

Real experience, it finds the best hook. Will it always be the best hook? Nope, not at all. Marketing is all about split testing. You test it, you test it, you test it. You find the one that works. You try it. What was about that one? Hey, hey, Chat. So we did about 20, 30 posts recently.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:05:01

This one kind of went nuts. What do we think it is? Oh, let me go look at the last 20, 30 posts. And yeah, you’re right. The stats are pretty average for the rest. And this one, hmm, could be a couple of these things. Let’s test that on another couple posts. Hey, I think we’ve dialed this in, but you can’t hit the same key all the time. So let’s mix it up.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:05:22

Let’s try and get one of these viral posts every couple weeks. I’m going to show you what that looks like in a second as well. Um, videos and photos— can you create variations? Can you take a long-form video like this one, chop it up into little 30-second, 1-minute Shorts and Reels? Can you take a conversation? Can you go speak at a chamber about maintaining a clean and healthy home or whatever? At a— maybe you’re going to speak at, um, the, um, like I used to do at the real estate offices and stuff like that, the Monday morning meetings about How a real estate agent could know if a carpet should be replaced or can be cleaned to sell the house, to save a carpet credit request, right? I would teach on that. I could take that video in today’s day and age and grab out of that 10 minutes, 3, 4, 5 short little segments. Didn’t have to rerecord it. Just had to trim it. And there’s tools that do that. CapCut, BigVu, Captions, lots of tools that do that.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:06:28

Your expertise, turn it into education. Have somebody on your team ask that question. Hey, you just gave a great answer. Can I ask you that question and film it? Sure. Stand in front of your van, stand in front of the wall, whatever. Hey, so I’m here with, uh, I’m Nancy, the office manager here at ABC Carpet Cleaning. I’m here with our owner, Joe. Um, just asked Joe a great question.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:06:45

He gave me an amazing answer. So I just thought I’d Record this. So Joe, what I asked you was this. What, what is your opinion of that? Turn the camera around. Yeah. Yeah, actually. That’s pretty fun, right? Your personality. I’m going to show somebody who does a really good job at putting their personality in the marketing.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:07:03

Not a carpet cleaner. A lot of carpet cleaners that do that too, but I’m going to show you something, right? Customer reviews, repurpose them into content, read them, talk about them, share them, all kinds of cool stuff, right? Carpet cleaning examples. A technician gets a difficult stain on the carpet. You capture the photo, before photo, after photo, technician actually doing it, photo or video, customer reaction, if you can, what caused the stain, how you solved it. Right? Could you do that? Before and after, before photo. Oh, that looks like crap. After photo. Wow.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:07:34

We did a great job. Technician doing the video. Mark Sager. Thank you, buddy. Right? Tony Pero, good job. Customer reaction. Hey, I just wanted to— you okay to be on camera, ma’am? Cool. I wanted to show you what the stain looked like.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:07:47

I’d love, I’d love to film your reaction. Everybody loves reaction videos these days. Show it, right? Have them walk into the room. Don’t have to, it’s just an idea. Here’s what we did to solve it. Just talk back into the camera, whatever, right? That’s an option. AI turns that into reels. Short, engaging videos, social posts, before and after, telling the story, educational tips, FAQs, a happy customer story blog post on your website of 1,000, 2,000 words telling a story in a narrative.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:08:18

Emails puts it into the email sequence. Can you imagine you’ve got prospects that are interested? They called, they didn’t book. That’s at least half of the people. You are not that special. You don’t, don’t book it above 50% on cold new inquiries. If you do, your prices are too low, straight up. But you can add, you can drip. We talked about that conversion.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:08:37

You can drip. Well, what if you dripped happy customer stories in the mix? Why I started my business would be one email. Keep an eye out for my next email. Let me tell you why, um, a customer had a similar problem to yours and how we solved it, right? AI will help write that email for you. Website content. We just talked about that happy customer story turned into website. AI didn’t create the story at all. Your business created the story.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:09:04

AI just helped you get more mileage out of it. AI content and AI enhanced content. AI create, you publish. Kind of bad. Start with AI generic, easy to replace ABC. We’re committed, blah, blah, blah. The problem. It could have been written for any carpet cleaner anywhere.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:09:27

AI enhanced content. Your experience. Real moments. AI amplifies it. You publish it. Start with you. Authentic. Impossible to copy.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:09:44

Real script. Social post. Educational tip. FAQs. Customer story, emails, website content. We just talked about that. All of that from Enhance. The question isn’t how do I use AI to create more posts? The question is how do I capture more of what is already happening in my business and use AI to turn those into real moments, those real moments into content people can learn to trust, remember, and act on, become known and get chosen.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:10:14

Your goal isn’t, isn’t to post more. The goal is to become known. AI helps you scale your visibility. More content, more places, more people see it. Authenticity gives you the reason to be trusted, not AI, not volume. Real stories, real results, real people. Consistency keeps you top of mind. Show up more.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:10:41

I want to show you an example of this. I hope— I have no way of knowing if the audio is going to come through or not. I don’t even know how to— no idea. Anyways, so I’m in a small town right next to a large city. This town is 11,000 people and half of them dress like Little House on the Prairie Laura Ingalls. We are literally in a Mennonite town. We have horse and buggies going by every day, all day long. They are bonnets and, um, flowery dresses, men in round hats, suspenders.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:11:23

Girl behind the counter at my dentist’s office has a bonnet, right? Half the town, Mennonite. The whole entire countryside, Mennonite, right? That’s the town I’m in. We have a butcher shop in town. Been here as long as I’ve been here, 20 years. Butcher shop’s been here 50, 40 years. I don’t know, longer than I’ve been here. Every— that’s the only one in town. Everybody knows it, right? Elmira Meat Markets, right? A new guy showed up called Homestretch.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:11:53

Interestingly, he’s An immigrant of some, some description, right? Nothing wrong with that. I just know our town. That’s it. Lots, lots of German Mennonites, right? Um, he’s only been in business for, I think, 4 months, 6 months. They literally, in our small little town, one-stoplight town, line up around the corner to get into the butcher shop. Why? I asked the question. Holy crap, what the heck is going on here? Why is he— why is— why is that such a thing? Because of his social media. I’m going to show you.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:12:40

He does it in a lot of places, but I’m going to show you his TikTok. Hopefully this works. I’m not sure you’re gonna hear it. I’m gonna have to narrate if you can’t, right? I’m gonna show you one of his videos. So whether he did this on purpose or not, I do not know, but he tapped into the biggest fear of going to a butcher shop. I don’t know how much they’re gonna spend. I don’t know anything about meat. I’m just gonna go to the grocery store and if it says grilling steak, I’m gonna buy grilling steak.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:13:13

If it says, you know, you know, Pot roast or, um, slow cooker, whatever steak, or, you know, whatever I’m gonna buy that one for if I’m doing that, whatever, right? I don’t know crap about meats, right? So the average person never goes to a butcher shop, number one. Number 2, personality, right? Hopefully the audio comes through because this is him just filming a customer Obviously set up a little bit, right? Ask them if it’s okay to create the film. I’m going to show you this, right? But this is why he’s blowing up. Again, website, good stuff, good, good marketing. This is one of the pieces, not the only piece. They drove 6 and a half hours to come and see this guy for meat. So very short video, it’s just about to end. Let me go to his channel.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:15:14

Do you think he’s figured something out? He is representing his personality, his expertise, his education, makes it easy for people to buy. What’s it gonna look like to come into my shop? He’s become a little bit viral. He’s just using an app. Like, it’s a really simple— one of his other staff is just filming this. There’s nothing hard about this at all. This is like, again, the app creates the Alex Hormozi style captions, right? Here’s another one. $200 budget, right? Feed the whole crew for $10. He’s tapping into the money mindset.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:15:58

He’s tapping into how to buy at a butcher shop, how he’s going to be able to help you, how you don’t need to know anything, how friendly he is. And people are driving 6 and a half hours instead of going to the butcher shop around the corner from their own house. And he is lined up around the corner, one block away. Is the comp— the, the, the, the butcher that everybody’s known for decades with one or nobody, one person or nobody in the store. He’s consistent, top of mind, understands what he’s doing. That content is cross-posted on other platforms, all kinds of stuff, right? Not hard at all. And has blown up his business because of a brand new business. Sounds kind of cool.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:16:45

AI doesn’t replace authenticity. Done right, it amplifies it. AI is not the enemy of authentic marketing. AI actually makes authentic marketing easier. Authenticity is where we need to be. You can’t hide behind fake ads, fake, I built my website this weekend, like anything. Tell real stories about your real company. On your website in the right psychological way, on the phones, in your emails, in your socials, in your ads, all of it.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:17:19

And you will stand out like a sore thumb, like my buddy at Homestretch does in the marketplace. Before AI, creating enough content was a problem. Now AI helps us solve the time problem. That’s amazing. But here’s what AI can’t give you: your customers, your jobs, your experience, your team, your personality, your stories. So don’t ask AI to pretend to be your business. Give AI real— your real business, real stories, and let it help you tell the story. That’s the advantage.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:17:50

Your final takeaway. Let’s show our little robot guy. There’s a robot guy. Anyways, I’m gonna put myself right there. Capture it, organize it, repurpose it, publish it. Become known, get chosen. So if AI gives us the ability to create and distribute more content, and authenticity gives the content meaning, your question becomes, are you actually capturing the real things that are happening inside your business? If you would like some prompts, AI-powered social media planner, there’s another prompt on the other page. There’s 2 pages on this.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:18:23

Scan this QR code. I’ll hold this for a second. I’ll move myself out of the way. Um, I’ll put the link in the show notes if you’re watching this afterwards, but pause for a second, scan that, go download this. It’s a good starting point. Go grab it. It’s no opt-in. It’s just a Google Doc.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:18:38

Just gonna get it, right? I have no way of knowing who you are. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not trying to capture you. This is just for you, right? Help you out a little bit. If you have any questions, reach out to us. We can help. Being known matters more and how social media can help you. Did we cover that? Yep. The AI era, how customers discovering and evaluating your business.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:19:00

Did we cover that? Yep. From random posts to strategic, strategic content engine. Did we cover that? I think so in spades. AI plus authenticity is your new advantage. Did my homestretch example prove that to you? I hope so. I’ve got carpet cleaning examples too. I just thought that was It’s in my town. The guy has just literally created a wealth business.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:19:25

Doesn’t mean 20 years from now he’s still got it figured out. Well, here’s hoping he’s got off to a great start and he understands how to tap into modern psychology on a modern platform as part of the mix of everything he’s doing well. That ain’t the only thing he’s doing well, and ain’t the only thing he’s doing to market the business. It’s just one of his engines, but it’s the one that generates so much attention that when they do see the flyer, when they do see the, you know, whatever, see him at the Elmira Maple Syrup Festival and he’s got a booth or he’s got his store open and blah, blah, blah. Yep. Oh, I know you. I’ve seen you. So what are your takeaways? Hopefully you’ve got some.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:20:09

The biggest issue is there’s not There is never a shortage of ideas. Never a shortage of ideas. Are you planning to implement them? Do you know how to implement them? Do you have an accountability team? Do you have an accountability partner? We don’t work, do well solo. I mean, we humans, we don’t do well. We have accountability. We join groups, right? We have one-on-one psychology, like psych— psychologists and therapists and coaches, and we have group coachings and we have Like, there’s a reason why AA exists, right? If you could just quit drinking on your own, everybody would do it, right? You need to know that you have a way to implement this stuff. Keep learning, put it in the right order. When is the right time for this versus that? Do you have your foundation right? Does this fit in now? Can I get started, do good, then get better, then get best? Minimum viable, monitor, measure, turn it into a machine.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:21:08

Right? Do it. Pick 3 things that you learned here today that you aren’t doing and make it a machine, not an idea for a week. AI is now the great equalizer. We’ve been talking about this since this slide was made February of 2025. AI commoditizes businesses that fail to differentiate. Do you see how we proved that? If you don’t stand for something different and compelling, AI will blur you with the competition. If everybody’s the same, the competition’s getting easier and easier and easier to be you. The winner will be authentic, trusted, and nurturing real human relationships.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:21:55

Do you know how to do that? Do you do that every single day? Do you have an accountability checklist? To do that every single day? Are you working in your business as the technician or on your business as the growth officer? If you’re in the truck, you got to do both to get out of the truck. If you’re out of the truck, are you spending your time in the office behind the computer thinking that’s useful time? Not at all. The best known cleaner wins over having discounts. A strong offer helps convert leads, but an omnipresent brand gets the call first. You have a great offer that doesn’t have to be a discount. A great offer that doesn’t have to be a discount. That guy didn’t discount his meat. He had a great offer.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:22:47

What can I do for $200? What can I do for $500? What are you looking for? Let me, let me, let me put that together for you. I know meat so well? He didn’t discount his prices. He’s not the cheapest meat market. Nothing about that. He’s just the busiest. People are driving 6.5 hours, not because he’s got better cows or buys from people that have better cows. That’s never part of the story. If no one knows who you are, a great offer don’t matter.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:23:17

Customers don’t buy based on price alone. They buy on brands they know, trust, and respect. The better your customer is, The more they care about know, trust, and respect than they care about price. Jeremy Bieber, Justin Bieber’s dad, never cared that we charged $1,800 to clean his rec room with the dog pee and stuff like that and did it 3, 4, 5 times a year. Why? Because we were trusted. It wasn’t about price. So, are you targeting the people that come back again and again, are loyal, love you, and you can go the extra mile because you can charge the right dollar? And you can put out, wear the booties, roll out the red carpet, lay the mats down the hallways, put the corner guards on, use the CRB. You can deliver a high-end service and have that as one of your packages.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:24:04

Or are you discount clean only in and out? I need 5 jobs a day to make money. I need 1 job a day to make money per truck. I need 5 jobs a day to make money. This guy gets out of the truck in a month or 2. Building a great business with good outreach. This guy is still in the truck targeting this crowd 20 years from now and still on the forums talking about the last $2,000 check they got. This person’s getting one every day. Which one does your marketing attract? Do you have marketing that attracts? Do you even know what that means? Is it structured and systemized? Did you learn enough to know what I just said there? Not from me today, but all the books, all the education.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:24:53

You’re behind a windshield if you’re out driving for cleaning. You’re behind a windshield if you’re out driving to build the business. You’re one of those two. If you’re not one of those two, we got a big problem to start with, right? But you’ve got tons of university time when you’re in front of a windscreen. Are you listening to Country music and death metal or whatever you’re into? Or are you listening to knowledge, writing it down, getting excited and going, crap, how do I start implementing more of these ideas? Now I’ve got too many. How do I create a system to put them in place? That’s a strategic business owner. There’s a blueprint for this whole thing called Blueprint for Success. I developed it 20 years ago, part of our VIP consulting group.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:25:42

Got hired by franchise networks, got hired by startups, got hired. Sean and I— partner ran a beautiful company himself as well— became consultants because we were needed in our business 5, 10 hours a week at the most by that point, right? About a year or 10 years into the business or less. Freed up so much time, ran a great company, created a consultancy, not just for carpet cleaners. In fact, it wasn’t for carpet cleaners originally, but the Blueprint for Success is how you run a home service business that continues to scale. You turn it into a machine that you can walk, automate, monitor, manage, but don’t have to be. Or do. 2026, huge shift. We saw it at the beginning of the year.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:26:36

We’re feeling it. 2027 is going to be insane. Lots of reports on it. Go read them. The way people buy, work, and experience life has changed already. We are in a whole new paradigm of human existence, and it’s right in front of our face. If you don’t believe me, just keep watching. If you do believe me, say, holy shit, what do I do about it? We do have the Blueprint for Success coaching group, very private coaching group.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:27:03

One of our members just talked last, like every Thursday night, one of our members just talked, uh, um, last week about how on the call, the accountability part of the call, that they had added $5,000, one truck operation, $5,000 the week before from some of the outreach. that we’d been teaching and gave them the motivation to do properly in the right order. 20-year, 25-year business, found money. Rest of the business still running, just $5,000 more in a week. Right? We’ve got other members that have, have, have grown massive businesses by implementing and doing the work. All right? Understanding what that work is, what a Core Forever Engine is. So better clients, predictable growth, real scale. How to do all of this? We provide AI agents, we provide AI training, how to use AI properly.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:27:58

We do prompts every single week. We create, you know, how, how, how to do all of that. So we’re training on that. We’re training on, on, on core parts of running one of these businesses, how to implement it while you’re in the truck, how to do it if you’re already outta the truck, how to scale, how it can generate a million-dollar business in 24 months done well. Even if you got, uh, $250,000, you’re not needed in the truck and you make an income and can grow to $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, right? You think of it anyways, limited spots by invite only. You can reach out to us if you’re interested at all. blueprintforsuccesscoaching.com. Go there.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:28:41

It’s a bit of a free guide. This is, this is the backend of the membership site. This is where we, that we have all the replays and community winter database reactivation trainings. Um, all kinds of stuff. Like every week, every week there’s a piece, parts of, of, of a, a kit and a program being grown for each month. Each one’s standalone part, part of the whole blueprint where it sits before the sale, during the sale, after the sale, how to create that money machine so you get more money more often, then add more customers to that machine. You can double your average job. You have a $200,000 a year business and you can double your average job.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:29:14

You have a $400,000 a year business and nothing else changed. You can have your customers come back, turn into clients and come back twice as often. You now have an $800,000 business and you didn’t add more customers, more leads yet. Then you add a lead engine for those ideal people to put it into your retention engine. Now you can double the business again. Now you’re at $1.5 million. That’s how you get there. Everybody else chases more leads and wonder why it’s just a churn.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:29:48

It feels like a hamster wheel. You build the right machine, it feels easy. Takes time, takes effort, but there’s a plan. Blueprint for Success Coaching, number 4, blueprintforsuccesscoaching.com. You want to jump on a call with me? CarpetCleaningMarketingMasters.com/schedule. Love to have a chat with you. I don’t mind tearing apart your current marketing, good, bad, or ugly, giving you some ideas, some tips, a growth plan and a direction. I charge for private consulting a lot.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:30:25

You qualify, you jump on one of those calls with me for free for an hour. Might be a good hour to spend. Up to you, your decision. But if you’d like help creating a larger-than-life appearance online, offline, and understand How this is just one of 47 actual poles in the water I recommend that you eventually grow into so that you can be running your company while on vacation with other people doing it because you’ve grown an actual growth machine. You can buy other companies and just plug them in the machine. You figured out what I just said. Or if you don’t want to do anything, any of that at all, but you want to have A highly profitable, high-end business. You do one job a day, go home, and it pays all the mortgages.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:31:11

Do a little bit of outbound calling and stuff like that. You have a 5, 6-hour day and you have a machine in place that you’re, you and your vendors, marketing providers, growth partners are running together. Done together marketing. Thought to path to. So anyways, interested in any of that? carpetcleaningmarketingmasters.com/schedule. We made it 90 minutes, not bad. Um, let us know in the comments of wherever this is posted, whatever, um, if you have any questions, anything you’re interested in, um, anything we can help you with. Would love to jump on a call with you.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:31:50

Reach out to the team. Yep, we’re in a huge transition right now. I’ve been talking about it every single month for Since February, a year and a half ago, almost 2, almost, well, yeah, a year and a half ago, right? I’ve been harping about it. I’ve been talking about it longer than that. I’ve been harping about it to the industry. Most cleaners are announcing that their phones seem slower. Not everybody, a lot. Less calls.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:32:15

Customers are willing to spend less money. I told you why that is. We know where that is. We even know how to fix it. Most people won’t. If you’re one of the few that want to, let’s have a conversation. CarpetCleaningMarketingMaster.com/schedule. And until next time, I shall let you go.

JOHN CLENDENNING
1:32:29

Peace out, everybody.