Carpet Cleaning Business Ai Survival Strategy: Critical Decisions To Prepare For 2026

Experts suggest 15%–20% of your gross revenue should be allocated to consistent, omnichannel marketing—splitting the budget across digital, offline, and customer database efforts.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:

We are jumping in hot and heavy today. We got a lot to cover. I hear from a lot of carpet cleaners, some of them are clients jumping on the call. Appreciate you guys. Say hi in the chat. Talk to Sarika, say hi to me. I probably won’t scan over there. And we’ll try not to have a live glitch with, you know, some weird icon showing up halfway through the presentation.

John Clendenning [00:00:19]:

The replay is out from last month. Very important without that. But just say you can hear me fine. Everything’s okay. You can hear me, Sirica. Just give me a thumbs up or a hey or yes or something. You can see me, hear me. All that’s good.

John Clendenning [00:00:32]:

Perfect. Okay, cool. So we got a lot to cover. I talk to a lot of carpet cleaners and cleaning business owners all the time. I’ve been in this industry for 30 years. We know that, and I’ve been coaching for 20 of it. And there is a huge, vast disconnect in general in the cleaning industry that a lot of people got away with for years. And we’re gonna talk about that at the beginning and we’re gonna go back and recap some of the stuff, some of the scary stuff, because I really want you to be scared.

John Clendenning [00:01:02]:

I’m again, I’m not trying to create false fear. It’s real. We can feel it. We know it in our bones. We might not be able to put a label or name on it. And I really want you to kind of understand you fit into one of two groups and we’re going to figure out which group that is and what you can do about this. Right. So if that’s with that in mind, I’m going to jump over into the presentation and I really want to drive home some of these points.

John Clendenning [00:01:30]:

So hopefully we get there, you know, and get this, this figured out because there is a huge opportunity in front of us because there’s a huge threat in front of us that we’ve never seen before. We talked about last month how I don’t believe. And not just me, I mean, some of the world’s greatest pundits don’t believe that every business, most businesses, whatever wording you want to put on it, are prepared to survive the next 24 months. We went through this in 2008, nine, 10, if anybody. Have you been around through the, the, the market crash and collapse.

John Clendenning [00:02:53]:

It was painful. It was absolutely painful. Not only did businesses go back down by 50, 40, 50, 60% in a day like from October on kind of idea 2008 when the crash hit the markets and then the slow rolling down the what it meant to the economy and, and job losses and then inflation and stagflations and all that and how long it took to get out of it. But we also knew that as people got laid off, they needed work. And we’re in an industry where people jump in like crazy, they jump back out again and they suck. But the odd one might be good and they might take over market position, they might buy a franchise, they might whatever, right? In that world the jobs were going to be coming back. In this world we’re talking robotics and AI, right? So the jobs have nowhere to come back to. The replacement is the great replacement, right? So again, take that where you want to listen to the news, tap into your resources, kind of go a little down the rabbit hole a little bit, listen to what some of the, the, the big players are saying in the background.

John Clendenning [00:03:59]:

Why are they talking about universal basic incomes? Why are they talking about different things going on and kind of try and connect some of the dots? Because it’s right in front of our faces. We just have to understand and believe that it’s right in front of our faces. Hopefully that makes sense. So I’m going to make a case for that. So let me move myself back up. I don’t need my face on my face. Let’s put myself over the logo. There we go, we’re up in top corner so you can see me.

John Clendenning [00:04:22]:

So turn off your cell phones, do all that kind of crazy stuff that we talk about because I think this is going to be one of the most important, important part twos in a long time in a while in your business. Last year in March, my good friend Jeff Cross and I did a two day great reckoning intensive for the cleaning industry. It was $297 to jump in and we invited a few guests in and stuff like that was 297 and the room filled up. People started like it was 120, 130 people that showed up for those two days and, and I was the host, Jeff was the co host and we were teaching the Cleaning industry. The oh shit moment. That was March, that’s almost a year ago. What has happened in the last year is mind numbing. You know it, but you’re also probably feeling it.

John Clendenning [00:05:14]:

The visibility of every business, yours included, is shrinking. Even if you’re doing everything the same way, you’re doing everything right as you think you’re doing a great service, you’re, you know, you’re charging reasonably low prices so everybody should be coming to you or, or, or whatever. You’re, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re running your ads on Facebook still or maybe you’ve stopped them on Facebook and you’re running your ads on Google. Or maybe you’re, you know, maybe you’re like Michael that talked to one of our newest clients who built a couple of couple hundred thousand dollars a year business and never had a ads running or a website because he was just that charismatic and went out and chatted to people. So whatever your thing is, your word of mouth is working, right? Whatever that is. I’m getting calls every single day going from people I talk to. Clients of ours, but also like that are sort of like junior clients that now realize they need to step up. People that have kind of been quiet, people I’ve known for a decade or two people, people that I’ve had conversations with who went, yeah, I don’t really know, John.

John Clendenning [00:06:19]:

Yeah, I think I just need one ad running. I think I need more leads, right? Had those conversations and they’re now calling back going, okay, wait a minute, what was all that stuff we talked about? It’s different. I’m feeling it, I know it. I think you’re feeling it too. If you’re not, you know, hey, good on you. It’s like great. There are some pockets that you might be coasting right now. I’m still going to put a word of warning in, in front of you because it’s crazy out there.

John Clendenning [00:06:46]:

Customers are deciding who to call before they even visit your website or your marketing. The critical decision owners must make now before the market makes it for you. And now, I would say probably six months ago, three to six months ago, but now, now, do the now now. If not the now, then now, right? But what the survivors are doing differently right now, the people that are surviving and planning to thrive in the chaos and the confusion and the change, right? There is something to think about. There is knowledge you need to have about your marketplace, right? So we’re going to, we’re going to cut through all of that clutter so we’re Going to get past me really quickly. Been in the industry 30 years, we know that. Started as a shy kid, didn’t even finish high school. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you guys that or not.

John Clendenning [00:07:35]:

I kind of left early to join a band final year of high school. I kind of finished the year up. It didn’t pass one or two of the last courses. I was a good, solid D.C. student all the way through. Started businesses to challenge myself. Tony Robbins thinking, you know, awake the Power within or the Giant within or whatever and think and grow rich and all that kind of stuff. Stopped hanging around my friends.

John Clendenning [00:07:57]:

Love them to death, but they weren’t going where I wanted to go and put myself in a place to grow and did that. I didn’t realize it was weird, a year and a year and a half into the business to never be in the truck again. In 1995, 96, starting in a town of 30,000 people. As a shy kid that had never owned a carpet cleaning company before, I didn’t know it was weird to buy competitors out by the next year. I didn’t know it was years weird to grow a million dollar business by the mid 2000s and scale it through. Didn’t, didn’t know that that was an oddity. What I did, I’ve realized since is that less than half a percent of businesses, they get to that level and then they grow from there. Right? If you figure it out, you are a business owner that just happens to own cleaning businesses.

John Clendenning [00:08:44]:

If you never figured it out, you’re a carpet cleaner that just happens to own a business. My carpet cleaners, my technicians made 60, 70, $80,000 20 years ago as technicians in the truck. So I mean, as an owner, you better be making and taking home $150,000 and still investing in your business for growth. So you can get out of the truck. Or if you want to be the guy in the truck, you’re building something you can sell to somebody else. Not the truck, the business for multiples. But if you make it to half a million, that small 15% of the marketplace that makes it to half a million, you got a little bit more leverage. You’re out of the truck now you can probably sell it somebody else who’s cashing in their 401k if you want to get out that way.

John Clendenning [00:09:24]:

Or you can, you know, hire somebody to kind of run it a little bit for you and semi retire and golf a little bit more as you get older. If you make it to a million and two and buy out competitors and really get the machine figured out. That’s unique, that’s different. There’s a path to that, but that’s unique. And you do that. Now you can sell for multiples. Now you can be the, you know, last man standing. Now you can dominate marketplaces.

John Clendenning [00:09:48]:

Right. So, you know, shout out to Robert Yokel there in Colorado Springs, man after my own heart. It’s what he’s done as a gal. Go listen to the podcast. We did interview with him and we’ve got other clients as well. Go. Like there’s George and Mia and there’s, there’s Chris Sutton and there’s all others that are that very small contingent. Very small.

John Clendenning [00:10:10]:

They’re not on the forums. They’re not in. You know, again, it’s an honorable business to be a cleaning service business owner and a guy in the truck. Are you setting your family and yourself up for a future when you can’t clean? Do you know what you’re going to do if you sprain your ankle or, you know, or your, your, your, your, your parents get sick and somebody has to take care of them for the next three, six months or, you know, or, or, or can you do that and still have bread and butter coming in? Right. That’s where I think of with our clients. That’s what keeps me awake at night. Right. So again, voice of the industry, if you care, wrote the book on the subject, run the podcast on the magazines.

John Clendenning [00:10:52]:

Cool. More importantly, what we do is we help our clients that lean in, do the right things the right way. And it’s an uphill battle sometimes to help our clients lean in. Right. Science. Go back to that. Because when we help our clients become the top cleaning brand in the marketplace so they can attract the best clients, I’m going to tell you now, required so they can top the chop, charge the top rates. If your average job isn’t north of 500 bucks residentially, I can tell you you’re targeting the wrong market.

John Clendenning [00:11:27]:

I can show you where the right market is and they will not look at your three rooms in a hall for 189, 299 ads and the transition from what you’re currently doing and looking like and how they feel about that and who they are hiring right now and why is the gap. You need to understand, and you may never have considered it if you’re already there, you know who exactly what I’m talking about going on. John, I know that, you know, we deliver a client experience. We put the booty on. We do that like we do all of this stuff. We have tiered pricing, we have VIP clubs, we have, have, have, have. Because you are the marketer of your cleaning services and you’ve built that out. And you built it out intentionally.

John Clendenning [00:12:10]:

Even if you were the guy in the truck, there’s not a future date that you arrive at where once I get busy enough, once I get successful, then I’ll do all of that. It’s unfortunately backwards. You will never get there unless you start. Right. So we’re going to talk about that. Because you want to be booked out for weeks in advance. We had our clients book a year in advance into our schedule. Just one of the many marketing things that we had.

John Clendenning [00:12:31]:

Right. So we could tell our are on the phone. Yeah, we’re one of the most in demand. In fact, our regular clients book a year in advance in our schedule. We’re taking appointments for later next week or the following week. Does a Tuesday or Thursday work best for you? Oh my God. You’re not like available this afternoon? No, no. If you’re calling around and people are available today, I’d be a little suspect about that.

John Clendenning [00:12:51]:

Why doesn’t anybody else want them? And we got to say that on every phone call. Holy. And you’re twice the price of everybody else that I’ve called. Yep. Okay, well, we can come out ahead of time and do a healthy home audit for you, a quote. And not only is that free, we’ll pay you for it as a, as a courtesy, but we can get you scheduled in now and come out and do that estimate. Or we can just come out and do the estimate and go from there and it will still be another couple weeks out. Changes the conversation.

John Clendenning [00:13:21]:

And the ideal best customers love that because they also plan ahead. And if you need them in emergency, they will pay the 20, 30% surcharge to have you come out tonight because the dog crapped all over the carpet tonight and your technician gets most of that and he’s happy to go up for 50, $60 an hour to do one or two hours of cleaning at 5 o’, clock, get home by 7 and make a couple hundred bucks and still show up for work the next day at 8 o’ clock in the morning. How do I know? Because we screwed it up so many times till we got it right. So how do you do this omnipresence? You have to be everywhere. Everybody’s looking. The ideal customer. If you don’t know if everybody is your customer, nobody’s your customer. So you want to be.

John Clendenning [00:14:02]:

Maximize your opportunities. Maximize your opportunities to generate A qualified inquiry. That doesn’t mean maximize your Google Ads. That doesn’t mean oh, I maximize my Facebook. That’s an and and an and. That doesn’t mean I maximize my word of mouth. That’s an and maximize all of your opportunities so that you have many, many, many poles in the water. One at a time, one at a time, one at a time.

John Clendenning [00:14:28]:

Then you grow. We’re going to talk about that today because we primed that last time. We’re going to talk about it. You want to maximize your brand impressions. If people need to see you five, seven times the old days before they even know your name or oh my gosh, I just saw this guy for the first time. Yeah, that’s the 10 thing we’ve had in front of you. Well, Google talks about zero moment of truth. Why you call a company or pick a box off a shelf and that brand awareness is used to be 11, it’s now north of 20 interactions with a brand.

John Clendenning [00:14:58]:

So can you start dripping on them now so that they see your van? If you’ve got a van with a white sticker on the door, you haven’t tried yet. If you’ve got technicians going in jeans and T shirts, you haven’t tried yet. The wealthy people, the affluent, the you know, 27 foot sectional around the 200 inch big screen movie theater in the, in the, in the media room, people around the golf course as an example, they’ll pay 800,000, 1500 to get that clean because the kids had a party and spilled pop and, and, and, and, and popcorn all over the place, right? How do you find those people? You don’t need a lot of them. Million dollar business is a thousand customers paying you a thousand dollars a year. So if you maximize your brand impressions in the right market, the right place, you, you are now the marketer of cleaning services and you get the right people and you want to maximize your conversions because when people show up, pop their head up and look, kind of test the waters a little bit, think maybe whatever, are you indoctrinating them? Not giving them deals and discounts, but psychologically dripping on them, right? To love you more, let you, let them know that other people love you more than the competitors and therefore you become price elastic. There’s a lot to do here, right? Or you’re the, if you’re a carpet cleaner that just happens to own a business, you need a bit of help getting some of that done for you if that’s where you want to stay. If you want, which is fine. If you want to jump to the other side.

John Clendenning [00:16:30]:

You have to also you have to learn this and put more and more in place faster. It’s just a process of where you’re wanting to learn. The downside is we have the great divide right now. 2026 is going to be the year of reckoning. The way people work by and experience even life has already changed forever. How do I know? I am also the co host of the AI Marketing Experts Podcast. We’re on episode 36, 37, 38, whatever. This is what we, this is what I live and breathe and do.

John Clendenning [00:17:08]:

I know what’s coming down the pike two, three months from now. I know what’s already being built in the background. I understood in the middle of 2025 when AI was challenging and you couldn’t get a decent answer out of your chat GPT, that that was the inflection moment that was supposed to be there because they was trying so hard that it just needed to get over the hump. It just needed to learn more context. It’s like full self driving. It just needed like it needed enough input to then get dangerously good. It’s dangerously good now. Right.

John Clendenning [00:17:42]:

So you may be asking why does my visibility feel like it’s quiet, quietly shrinking while I’m still doing everything right or everything the same way? Good question to ask right now. Before you posted more, you got seen more, more Google posts, more this. You run ads, you get more impressions, you rank once. Oh yeah, I rank good. Yeah, I ran good. We did SEO a while ago. Yeah, we did Google Maps. I’m good right now.

John Clendenning [00:18:11]:

Google Meta, YouTube Maps recommend fewer businesses and will be recommending fewer, more because AI is the recommendation engine and AI is being used to sift sort and screen ads, compete in tighter and tighter auctions, smaller and smaller territories. You’ll notice that with local service ads you can’t just say oh by the way, I service like 40 miles, 50 miles that way they’re going, that’s nice. We’re not going to show you there. You’re not going to get very many calls from up there, I can tell you that. But the guy that’s up there, who has great reputation, does everything right, answers the phone in one to two wings rings. He’s getting 10 calls a day and you get one a week if you’re lucky, if they even throw you in there. Organic reach is being thrown throttled so you’re not missing something. Visibility is now earned, not generated.

John Clendenning [00:18:58]:

We, we had this 40 year interesting bubble of cheap this, cheap that, and we’ll talk about that and it’s over. Right. So consumers aren’t searching anymore. They’re asking their AI buddy. So if you say, well, John, my business is word of mouth. Heard that all the time for years. Word of mouth is now AI. AI is not a game you play.

John Clendenning [00:19:20]:

AI is how do you authentically look in the marketplace so that it can authentically find you. That’s AI now. So we’ve got to make sure that you don’t lose. If that was the one bastion of work that you’re going to have left, if that’s that one place. Well, I’m, I’m a word of mouth business. Everybody just knows me and recommends me. Interesting, because now they talk to their AI. 1% of search was on a, was on AI and chat GPTs and Google Geminis and stuff like that at the beginning of 2025.

John Clendenning [00:19:49]:

Over 30% by the end of 2025. Fastest growing technology in human history. I dare say it’s even higher than that. But they’re expecting by this time next year between 80 and 90%. I like my friend. I trust my AI more. I trust my chat TPT friend. It’s gotten that good.

John Clendenning [00:20:11]:

I trust it knows me better. So who should I get to clean my carpets? Is not a conversation that they ask friends anymore if they have any questions. And you know, the last guy I didn’t mind, but is there anybody better? And they have that conversation with their chat now. Right. What I need to, I need a little bit more. So you need to be a brand offline they know and a brand online that AI knows. So buyer behavior is evolving, not disappearing. Decisions are being influenced before the customer even searches and trust, familiarity and recommendation signals now lead the choice.

John Clendenning [00:20:45]:

And my head is buried behind Jim Carrey. That’s all right. So the market is officially split into two. What does this mean? Most cleaners are still targeting the wrong side of the equation. We talked about this last week as well. So where the middle class is getting squeezed, inflation is bothering them. Everything being done is, you know, do we, do we print more money, do we lower the interest rates, do we raise the interest rates, do we prevent, you know, a rebound inflation? Is it, is it going to go up, is it going to go down? All this kind of stuff that affects half or 80% of the marketplace, 80% of our ideal or our former customers. They’re also getting displaced at work because AI can do in an office setting, can now do all the reporting.

John Clendenning [00:21:33]:

It can now do all of the, you know, all of the stuff that middle management was Doing so now that’s a problem that, you know, in 2025, 6% of AI implementations actually worked. The other 94%, meh, didn’t really have an impact, kind of failed. Right. As this thing has evolved, they’re expecting that to jump to 60%. Well, in 2025, about 300,000 jobs were replaced by AI and robotics. And at only a 6% implementation, I have no clue what 60% is going to look like. So. But we do know that as that happens, stocks are going up, certain companies are going up, people on golf course road are getting wealthier.

John Clendenning [00:22:20]:

There is a wealth engine on one side of the ledger and they shop differently. So you need to be thinking of hedging against. Right? Also, this 40 year experiment we talked about cheap money and constant consumer growth was the only economy most of us knows. If you go back again, I’m solid C student in high school, learn none of it there. I am just a student of the world now and just love learning all of the garbage that’s going on and where it came from and how it happened. And you know, neoliberalism versus the Breton Creek Accords and, and, and, and, and, and the Hamiltonian philosophy versus the, the, the British imperialism and all of the kind of stuff that’s happening right now in front of our faces. Crazy stuff, right? That’s how I entertain myself. I prefer that than watching, you know, a, you know, I don’t know csi.

John Clendenning [00:23:15]:

Is that still on? I don’t know. Anyways, but what we found was globalization, offshoring, unprecedented boring and asset holders and, and, and homeowners and all that kind of stuff. It made cheap money, made growth inevitable, right? All of that is back to what it was 40 years ago. Because cheap money also made cheap clicks on the Internet before they became expensive. Cheap backlinks before they became expensive, Cheap ads before they became expensive. Why did they become expensive? Because then they got saturated. Then people jumped in, right? People jumped in. People jumped in.

John Clendenning [00:23:53]:

What used to happen before that is you knew the butcher shop downtown was good because you knew the butcher, right? He threw something on, in the, in, in the mailbox, you know. Yeah, I’ll go see Brian’s Meats because I like Brian and Brian’s Meats and I like the company and whatever, right? And it, it, it was authentic. So that exception, that 40 year exception is waning, right? So we gotta, we got, we gotta kind of deal with that. So what it does mean is, are you targeting price shoppers who question your price? Everybody’s a cheap shopper. John, everybody. Yep, 80% are. But the other, there’s a middle ground and then the top 10% and they pay more for trust and value and how it looks and feels to hire you. Why do some people go back to Disney two and three and four times a year? Walt Disney knew this.

John Clendenning [00:24:49]:

He built a theme park that can extract as much money out of you as possible because he delivered an experience that was different than anybody else. And it’s so baked into their core, it still happens to this day. Dan Kennedy, godfather of persuasion, marketing, magnetic marketing, all of that kind of stuff. One of my mentors, one of the people I learned from, one of the first people I spent a weekend at Disney with with him and Bill Glaser and Yannick Silver as a runner up to marketer of the year. And part of that, the three or four of us that kind of got into the, you know, that first, second, third, so market of the year. I learned from him as well. What people will pay for, for luxury and experience and peace of mind is way more than people will pay for for clean. And they, they don’t question as much either.

John Clendenning [00:25:44]:

You’re not cleaning dirty carpets, right? So if you got a website that’s got a black carpet being cleaned with your wand to clean, that looks amazing to the guy that just parked his motorcycle in his living room. That doesn’t mean anything to a high end customer. It doesn’t even look like my house. These guys don’t clean for people like me. Next, right? So marketing is inception of mindset. So which one does your marketing attract now? Because you say, well, I don’t get any of these people. I don’t think they’re around because you don’t attract them. They’re there.

John Clendenning [00:26:12]:

You don’t attract them. So what’s the hardest part about marketing your carpet cleaning business? A lot of choices. What am I supposed to do? Where do I invest? And is that a, is that a word you even understand? Is that do I invest my budget or is marketing considered an expense that I want to minimize? Right? That’s a blind spot in some people. Is that marketing is this expense that I want to keep the number down as low as possible? It’s not an investment to scale. The other side of it, business owners who just happen to own cleaning businesses and grow to half a million, a million, 2 million, 5 million. Marketing is an investment to scale. It’s a percentage of sales. It is a growth engine.

John Clendenning [00:26:50]:

It’s the only growth engine you market to get better your ideal client. And then you market to Keep them. Right. So it’s a mindset, it’s an identity, it’s the way we think. Right? More poles in the water is better if you’re growing, if you got a growth mind switching poles in the water. Oh, I tried that lure, I tried that one. Let me try another lure. Oh, I tried that lure and eventually at the end of the day, you caught a fish, other guy beside you in his boat puts one cast out with a lure on it, puts another cast out, another pole with a lure on it, puts another cat and 20, 30 minutes later he’s caught 20 fish and putts back to the shore.

John Clendenning [00:27:25]:

He’s caught his quota. Right? So you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta make sure you’re, you’re targeting the right thing. And that’s what we’re going to share here. So is investing in more marketing even worth it? Is a question that some people ask because don’t even know what’s working and I don’t have much to show for it. Are you tracking your roi? Do you know each individual amount? Do you know, do you know what your conversion rates are on phone calls and emails and text messages to quotes and customers from cold sources? Of course, Repeat should be 100%, referral should be 95%. But on everything else, do you know how you’re collecting a brand new great person to put a lifetime value into? Do you even know what a lifetime value customer looks like and how much it can impact your business? If you don’t, you’re always chasing the next job. If you do, you’re chasing the right job and the right people that can get you in front of the right customer. It’s a different mindset.

John Clendenning [00:28:24]:

So fail if you don’t have a clear path and you overspend or worse under invest and you start to stagnate. Everybody who I talked to that gets this way, they got to a point. 2500-003000-00150,000 on a low end, 500, 600,000. And then they stagnate because they got to a point but they still thought marketing was this thing they needed to trim back. They didn’t understand how you can invest, how it ties together, how what you do over here impacts over here impacts here, how offline impacts online. And now it all matters because AI does get all of that. So that’s the opportunity. That’s a threat, but it’s the opportunity.

John Clendenning [00:29:06]:

So we can go get the workbook. Carpet cleanermarketingmasters.com 2026workbook just somewhere you can fill Stuff out, kind of good information there just to track along. But what we’re talking about is last month was about what has changed. So about 30 minutes in and we’ve, we’ve set the stage again. We’ve reframed, reframed the thought. Are you believing me at this point? Do you have a false belief that John’s full of it? That’s fine. I’ve talked to people all day long. I’ve Talked to people 20 years ago that have come back now going, okay, I now get it.

John Clendenning [00:29:42]:

They had a word of mouth business that paid the mortgage, you know, did whatever 5, 10, 20 years and they coasted because they’re in the middle of that, that cheap money, people buying houses, people getting bigger and bigger houses and, and raises, raises and jobs going up and, and, and, and, and they’re now seeing what happened before that in the 70s and the 60s and the 50s and, and, and right, so last month we talked about that. This month we’re gonna, what you’re gonna do about it. Who are you actually trying to attract? We need to think about that. Are you competing on price or trust? Are you waiting for calls or creating demand? Are platforms running your business? Are you fixing lead flow? I need more leads. I need more leads. Or are you fixing the system that causes growth? Lead flow does not cause growth. Lead flow in a leaky bucket does not cause growth. You better actually stop getting leads and fix the leaky bucket.

John Clendenning [00:30:55]:

Clear path with goals, targets and KPIs, right? That’s what you need. You need a clear path, right? If you don’t make these decisions, prices get forced down. You’re part of the ones that are in where all the new cleaners are jumping in. But I have talked to a few people recently. For example, one, one gentleman up in, in Toronto, Canada. He started his cleaning business two years ago and it was made in janitorial and stuff like that. But again, lots of competitors, lots of problems in the marketplace. Fifteen crews, 60 employees and looking to scale.

John Clendenning [00:31:31]:

He’s at a couple million looking to scale now. Holy crap. Two years. Well done. How did you do that? Well, I’ve been in business all my life. I, I set it up as a business. I had, I, I went out and did sales. I, I knew who I wanted to target and I went after them.

John Clendenning [00:31:47]:

He was in business and business sales all his life for 20, 20 some odd years and decided to start a cleaning company. Now he’s looking to buy more. That was just, he just knew more, that’s all. Wasn’t luck Right. So his prices aren’t getting forced down, they’re going up. He’s getting referred at prices higher than the competition because they do a great job. But they also have great systems to help collect those testimonials, not just reviews, testimonials. And use those to sell the next person.

John Clendenning [00:32:17]:

Right. If your visibility is dropping, you’re not getting into people’s minds before you show up at the doorstep. Right. Hey, I sent out a postcard. Every door mail. Cool. 10, 20, like to the same neighborhood, no one. How’d that work for you? Yeah, I didn’t get any calls from it.

John Clendenning [00:32:34]:

Gee, I wonder why. They don’t even know who you are. So the only way you’re going to attract them is, oh, we’re the cheapest. Okay. Well, Groupon did that. You could end up with 2 and 300 jobs out of a Groupon ad because it was half price and then Groupon kept the other half of it. You made 25%. Hopefully you get the customer again.

John Clendenning [00:32:52]:

You never got the customer again. Companies went bankrupt using Groupon in our industry. Right. So strong competitors are passing you. Growth stalls quietly and then drops off a cliff. And by the time it’s obvious, it’s harder and more expensive to fix, if at all. So make it obvious. Right now you got to generate enough leads to hit your growth and your goals and your.

John Clendenning [00:33:17]:

And to grow your business. You need enough inquiries coming in and it’s less than you think. If you have don’t have a leaky bucket, it’s a lot less than you think. Now we shift from decision to execution. Where do you focus? What are you going to stop doing? How do you turn visibility into consistency? How many systems and AI support this, not replace you? Understanding this problem is step one. Understanding it, fixing it is step two. As GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle. I think if I remember that right from my childhood, the other half of the battle is doing something about it.

John Clendenning [00:34:01]:

Have a great return on your investment. Understand what ROI is and how many factors factor into it. Did you know that you could run, you could tell people your ideal customer avatar, your ideal person on Facebook, through ads and through outreach about happy customers without trying to sell them anything. And the next time you end up with a door hanger on, on their door, your van is in the neighborhood, they go looking for a carpet cleaner and see a pay per click ad or AI recommends two or three top cleaners and you happen to be one of them because you’ve got all of this great sentiment in the marketplace that Allows you to be one of the dimensions. And they go, oh, yeah, call those guys. Yeah, I’m going to call those guys. Thanks. Could have been because they saw you on Facebook just talking about your business and happy customer stories, not trying to sell them anything for five or ten weeks.

John Clendenning [00:34:55]:

If you didn’t do that, you didn’t get the call. You didn’t even know, right? ROI comes from multi things. So stop reacting and start and decide early before the market forces this direction. Stay visible before customers need your help, not after it slows down. Right? It’s winter right now. And in, in the northeast and the north, it’s. It’s a cold, brutal winter. We got a bad one.

John Clendenning [00:35:18]:

We got ones like, I remember when I was a kid, like we got snow banks right now. You know, I think I had four feet of snow in the last week. We have snowbanks now that you could build forts in again, I wish I was a kid, right? Because yeah, we used to build forts and hang out in those all day long and, you know, try not to lick the yellow snow and all that kind of stuff, right? We got a winter like that. What does that mean for the cleaning industry? Oh, my God. It gets brutally quiet. So have you started your winter marketing outreach? You have a plan to go after commercial, to go after your residential customers, to bring to do phone calls and mailings and stuff like that? Because the ads are going to be quiet. Why are the ads going to be quiet? Because, hey, people ain’t looking. Right? If you started your ads six months ago and it takes Google 5000 impressions to ramp up an ad campaign before it even hits the algorithm.

John Clendenning [00:36:07]:

It takes 50 full conversions in Facebook before it even ranks. It ramped up the, like full conversions before it ramps up the algorithm. Then if you started that in December, you got till March in most marketplaces before you even hit algorithm, you’re just warming up. That’s not a lead source. That is a pole in the water that is slowly starting to, you know, perfect its bait. If our, our poles in the water analogy is going down, that. So in the meantime, your database is where all your money is. You are in a database business and we’ll prove that.

John Clendenning [00:36:40]:

So you want to build the trust before price ever comes up. Reviews, reputation, familiarity, happy customer stories. If you do not have those out in the marketplace, you don’t even know what that is. Your price is only thing you can compete on if you understand what that is. Your uniqueness, your unique compelling sales proposition, your risk reversal guarantees your impactful branding and your Founder’s story, right? Your story brand, as Donald Miller calls it, precede you now you’ve built an island of one and you can become the best known. So you want to use systems and AI to stay consistent so nothing gets missed. The people that survive and thrive don’t react. They are prepared ahead of time.

John Clendenning [00:37:24]:

And there’s a master plan for this blueprint for success. There’s a coaching program I started in 2007 on the advice of Dan Kennedy and the rest of them and helped cleaners get through the mud in their head. Get rid of the false belief, that’s 90% of it and then start putting the plan in place, right? I was a shy kid. I didn’t want to walk in the door of every single shop in, in Stratford when I didn’t even like, I literally, I moved to Stratford so I wouldn’t know anybody, but I listened to a couple Tony Robbins tapes at night and in the morning again and you know, whatever as a 23 year old, 24 year old kid and just showed up red faced until I didn’t care anymore. And it took me longer than it takes other people. So that’s fine, right? So there is a, there’s a way to do all of this and it’s sequential, right? There’s a master plan for running a business. You want to see what it looks like, looks like that every single one of these things is necessary. Every single one of these things has a marketing moment in it, right? 99% of this is marketing, not operations.

John Clendenning [00:38:24]:

You market so well, you create an operations problem and then you have to learn, you have to grow up and learn and figure out how to make sure that the technicians don’t come to work hungover and drunk, how they, you know, don’t crash the vans or let the tires run flat until the tire falls off. All of these things I’ve had like this isn’t me going, oh, these are weird ideas. No, everything. You don’t have to have your office gal that you think is great get led out of the office in handcuffs by the cops because you found out that they’ve been stealing money. Even with systems in place and, and you know, bonuses and rewards and all that, still find out that you had to call the cops and have them show up one day and just escort them out to solve a problem. Right? You build a great marketing machine. You have to learn how to solve operations problems. You solve operations problems, keep the marketing growing and the operations you can now scale, now you can buy competitors.

John Clendenning [00:39:21]:

Everybody I know who has made it over a million dollars, has bought 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 other businesses. Again, didn’t know it was a weird thing for a 20 some year old kid a year into his carpet cleaning business. Go back to the bank and go, yeah, I was talking to this guy a couple times. He’s him and the brother, they’re fighting, they’re selling the bill, I want to buy it. What do we do? Right? I’ve got this business plan I’d figured out because I read a book before the days of the Internet. Read a book, wrote a business plan. He went, holy crap. Nobody comes in here with a business plan.

John Clendenning [00:39:46]:

Let me walk you down to the business development bank. Let’s have a conversation. Got the money? My first business I bought in 1997 was 120,000 bucks in 1997. I just started my cleaning business less than two years ago. I didn’t know that wasn’t a thing. I didn’t know. I probably that seemed scary. No, I wanted next level.

John Clendenning [00:40:06]:

I wanted to grow, I wanted to go to that town, right? So anyways, there is a, there’s a blueprint. I learned the pieces, I develop the pieces, I’ve trained on the pieces, I coach on the pieces. I get called out for $5,000 a day, one to two days into high, high end companies once or twice a year at the most. To walk through all of this, to go through an audit ahead of time, come in and set, don’t do it. Just, just consult, set the plans in place. Right. Including food, flight and accommodations. Right.

John Clendenning [00:40:37]:

So I’ve run coaching programs, I’ve done, I’ve, I’ve trained on this because I had to figure it out as a dumb kid that didn’t finish high school. So you want to set clear goals. That’s one step without direction, you’re dead in the water. So what are your goals? Do you know what your revenue target is? How much is that monthly? Have you just divided it by 12 again? We know some months are lower than others. Do you know if winter is your average January in the north? Is that down 50%? Only 30%. What’s the average February? Does that drop off a cliff to 20%? What can you do in February to keep the trucks running and not have to lay the technicians off or not have to sit at home all day long and catch up on, you know, binge watch the latest. I don’t even know because I don’t watch any of them, but whatever. On Netflix, right? Game of Thrones, is that still around? Don’t know.

John Clendenning [00:41:27]:

Anyways, how many jobs will that require? How many jobs do you require to hit that target? Do you know the actual dollar amount? And you’re tracking it every month, like their actual job amount? Sorry. And tracking it, you know, hey, we need 220 jobs to hit this total. And we only got 120 and it’s already the 21st of the month. What are we going to do? Right? Once you get big numbers, become your friend. When you’re small, they’re easy to do and you just get used to them. What’s your average job value? That shouldn’t be, I don’t know. Last February, the average job was 200 or $396. This February, the average job is sitting at 420 because we’ve done this and this and this.

John Clendenning [00:42:03]:

So that’s going to add a little bit to, to our bottom line, right? As long as we can maintain the number, we might have to adjust. I got 20, 30 poles in the water. This one’s not working as well right now. I got that. So I’m going to try. I’m going to hit harder on that one. That’s not sitting behind the computer and doing something that might be knocking on doors, that might be meeting more people, that might be giving more donuts out at the flooring store and the real estate offices and all the great stuff we learned from Howard Partridge and all those people that can scale a great business. Right.

John Clendenning [00:42:33]:

All of it counts. All of it counts, right. So what’s the average conversion rate from inquiry to booking by source? I would even suggest. But even just raw, if it’s if again, Repeat, should be 100. If they call, you should be booking them. There should be no reason why they leave. Referrals should be about 90, 95%. There’s the odd one that just me, I’m just thinking, right, New traffic at prices much higher than your competition.

John Clendenning [00:43:06]:

Are you booking at 30%, 40%, 50%? If you’re saying, Ah, 75%, I book 75% all the time. You’re cheaper than everybody else or you’re just absolutely that amazing on the phone that your whole day should be on the phone and hire somebody else to go clean because you’re that amazing in scripting, you have that much influence on people that 75% of the people who call brand new want you at twice the price of your competitors. If you’re that good, only answer the phones, maybe go out and do the quotes and double sell them. So your technician just has to go and clean. You have millions sitting in that, in that, in that uniqueness that’s rare. I haven’t met that person yet, but if that’s you, call me. We. We should have a talk, right? Are you tracking the divide your job inquiry target per month by your conversion rate? So I said last month I was going to build a calculator for this.

John Clendenning [00:44:03]:

Guess what? I did. I built a calculator for this, right. I built an app. I built a couple of apps actually. So we’re going to look at this app, right? So you guys can go to carpet cleaner, marketingmasters.com budget planner. Not now. Just bookmark it. I’m going to show you how to use it.

John Clendenning [00:44:17]:

Right. This is something I do. The other one that we used to do on the spreadsheet, this is just a app version of it right on the Internet sitting there. What I want to show you is how much it actually costs if all of your customers come from paid lead sources. Right. And how much it actually costs to retain a customer. So if you’re running and how much you should invest in your business and how much you need to do offline and grassroots. There is no business that can just sit and rely on digital marketing or flyers.

John Clendenning [00:44:56]:

It’s a mix of stuff and we’re gonna talk about what that mix of stuff is. But say for example, Your business is $250,000. Your average price ticket is 275. Talk to these people all day long, right? So you need. That’s your $20,000 a year business, right? That’s one guy in a truck. It should not be two or three. There’s not enough money in that for two or three. Right.

John Clendenning [00:45:13]:

You’re out doing that yourself. You need 76 calls a month, right. If it’s average. Two hundred and seventy five. 76 or 22 working days in a month. Was that three? Three some odd jobs a day. You might have to work Saturdays. But you made your 20,000.

John Clendenning [00:45:27]:

Right. But you have to get 76. What if your conversion rate is only 30%? You need 253 inquiries that you talk to. Are you cleaning and talking to 253 people? That’s 10, 15 calls a day. No, you’re going to miss most of those. They’re going to go somewhere else. Right. And how much do you need to spend? Well, it costs.

John Clendenning [00:45:48]:

I’m going to show you. I’m going to prove to you cost about $36 to $40 to generate. Sometimes higher on different platforms, but blended out, including your customers calling you back if you market to them. Well, cost in that range to generate an inquiry to book from. So to do that you would have to spend almost half of it on marketing because that’s how much it costs to get a phone call to come in. Let me prove it to you, right? Pay per click, 40 to $70. We can even say that, hey, let’s say on a low end, 35 on a high end, 60 cost so $48 to generate an inquiry. I’m going to prove that to you in another calculator I built in a minute I’m to going but pretty close, probably even a little bit higher, right? 55, right.

John Clendenning [00:46:38]:

Google Local service ads. In some markets they’re as low as 30. Other markets they’re as high as 50, 60, 70. They’re still profitable if you know what, you know your numbers but let’s say the average about 43 Facebook ads. Say you’re again, you get, it’s a lot cheaper but you need a lot more inquiries before you land them. But it might only be $25 to get somebody to call you to somebody to reach out to start that conversation, right? If you’re the cheapest, you might land a lot of them and very low profits. If you’re the most expensive, you might land the right ones that will give you 10, 20, $30,000 over their lifetime. But again, SEO, AI, SEO, Google Maps, how much are you investing? And that takes long time to grow but eventually it’s one of your least expensive inquiry sources and then you’ve got repeats referrals.

John Clendenning [00:47:24]:

You can add anything else in here and it adds it all up, gives an average, right? So say for example you decide to mail your, your database five times a year or five times a month, four times a month, right? It’s going to cost you twice a month, three times a month, right? About a dollar a mailing, right. Actually in their mailbox if you really wanted to, it raises that to $38. Come back over here and now all of a sudden you even have to invest more, right? So say you go okay, cool, that sucks. How do I not do this? Well, there’s stuff you’ve, you’ve got to go do some shoe leather to payment. The first thing you’re going to want to do is actually up your prices and learn how to package, sell and learn how to get higher end people so that your average job sits about maybe 425. The next thing you’re going to want to learn to do is how to land at about 45% of Nuke with better scripts, better offers, better value, better Referrals, sorts of things that you can strip on them. Even if they say no today, you can drip on them till they come back. Because you’re way better Now.

John Clendenning [00:48:31]:

You’re only $4,000 in marketing because you need a lot less customer. You only need 100 people to inquire and you only need 50. You need two a day and take the weekends off. And you just built the same $250,000 year business because you solved the biggest problems. Your average ticket in the home, targeting the right people, having the right scripts, understanding that that’s why that’s really big. And you’ve got your, you know, your conversion rate. So you solve for that. Now you say, cool.

John Clendenning [00:49:06]:

So next year I want to take the business to 400,000. I want to add $150,000. I’ve got this dialed in now I want to look at, I want to add $150,000 this year, two trucks on the road and start getting out of the truck. Right now you have your monthly budget. You need about $6,000 a month to invest about 20%. We’re going to go here and see where you put it. So, right, 20% works out to exactly 80. I like the 20.

John Clendenning [00:49:31]:

It’s a nice round number. You’re going to put 70% of it in online. 40, $600 a month. Some people actually create their stretch goal and invest towards it because they have room in their in. You know, they’re not using every single dollar to feed the family and, and all that kind of stuff. They’re prudent with their money. They’re not buying the brand new van and the brand new truck mount. They’re actually, you know, maybe buy an off lease van and put a nice truck mount in.

John Clendenning [00:49:57]:

You just saved 3, 4, $500 a month, $600 a month. They have some room and they put all of that back into the marketing to grow faster, not to take it home, not to buy an RV to grow faster. Right. And then you got your offline, which should be about 20% and you got your repeat business, your database, right? Now we know the breakdown, we know 70 should go to digital marketing, 20% to offline marketing. That’s that brand awareness we talked about. Back of buses, door hangers, yard signs, taking the real estate agent out for lunch and you know, and in it like all that kind of stuff, we got lots of training on what, what that should be and then your repeat business. You got to stay in touch with your best clients at least once to twice a month, not once to Twice a year. And that isn’t text messaging them every single time either.

John Clendenning [00:50:38]:

They will hit stop within the third or fourth text message. There is an actual pattern that makes them want you to stay in touch with them. It’s just psychology. It’s been done by the very few properly for years, decades. I just happened to learn it and taught it to other people. So online. So we take this $56,000, the digital marketing. Where should that go? Well, you should put about 30% of it, 16 grand a year into SEO, AI, SEO or you will never rank.

John Clendenning [00:51:09]:

And that will, that doesn’t mean that you put $1300 in this month and you get, oh, I got, I need 20 jobs from that. No, that means you put $1300 in. $1300 in. And you started to show up a little bit better in Google Maps. A little bit wider, a little bit more in Google AI or in the AI search a little bit more. A little bit more. A little bit more. Right.

John Clendenning [00:51:26]:

And then you put 65% of it in pay per click. You have a $3,000 a month budget for pay per click to run, minimum to run a $400,000 your business. Not just paper click. That could be local service ads, that could be LS like local service ads, pay per click, Facebook ads for some of the awareness and even next door ads and like that. And then again, you put about a couple hundred bucks in what we call display or brand awareness right out in the marketplace. You just want to, you keep that. You know, if you sponsor a little league team and they charge you $500, that’s two months worth, you still got a lot of money left. You know, you got about $2,800 a year that you’re going to put towards sort of omnipresence in the right marketplace.

John Clendenning [00:52:11]:

That’s your digital, that’s your offline, that’s your repeat. Right. So now you exactly know where to do it. Cool. Then you can say, hey, what does it mean when I’m at 700,000, I want to go to 700,000. What if my average job is closer to 500? Right. Keep the 45 booking percentage. Now you need 9.

John Clendenning [00:52:32]:

I suggest you don’t drop below 15%. I do. Like if you’re in growth mode, you keep it at 20%. If you’re in profit mode because you’re trying to sell, you might take it down to 16, 17, maximize your profits. As long as you’re growth doesn’t stall. Because growth is the most important to somebody buying. Right? Trust me, I know. I’VE sold businesses.

John Clendenning [00:52:50]:

All of my businesses have been sold off with this exact mindset in place. How did you learn this? How did I learn this? I hired consultants I like. I mean, coaches that coached me. I learned it slowly, right. I read books. Terrible reader. So I listened to audiobooks, right? Figured it out. Ran some math, right? Figured out how to use Excel.

John Clendenning [00:53:08]:

Ran some math, right? Figured out a pen and a paper. Ransom math. But here’s where you invest your money now. You know, as you grow, you need more investment in SEO because you need to rank better, faster for more terms. That first amount might get you ranking in one or two for carpet cleaning and upholstery cleaning. This might get you carpet upholstery and duct cleaning and tile. Right. Because you need to invest more to get more.

John Clendenning [00:53:29]:

Paid ads is now about 5,000amonth and. Right. So just the whole idea behind what we’re getting here is know your numbers. If you don’t know your numbers, consult with somebody to know your numbers. Right. I take consulting every now and then. There’s a couple ways that, you know, we can engage, maybe in a group setting or whatever, but, you know, if you’re not getting enough inquiries now, where will they all come from? We now know how many people we need. We now know we need up our prices.

John Clendenning [00:53:55]:

And we now need, we need to target the right people. Now let’s make a plan to fill in the gaps, right? Maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified lead online. All that stuff I talked about, organic SEO, AI SEO, local service, ads. Yeah. Even offline direct mails. Your website should be converting. Do you know the conversion rate and the bounce rate of your website? A website done properly will get, you know, 5% more people. The average website, 97 to 98% of all traffic bounces.

John Clendenning [00:54:26]:

They show up, they leave, and you don’t know why. They didn’t fill anything out. You don’t even know who they are. A great website, 10%, 15%. Reach out for some, for something. The rest of them are just looky loos and lurkers anyways. But can you capture some information about them and be able to send them a postcard? Yeah, you can not. Not when you’re at 200,000 a year.

John Clendenning [00:54:47]:

But when you’re at 700,000 a year, 800,000 a year, there are tools in place where you can pay 50 cents to a dollar, you know, to know who landed on your website. And if they’re in this zip code, I’m going to send them a postcard. They’ll be arriving There by in two days. Right. If they’re in the right neighborhood, by all means, the more you have money you have, the more that 20% of revenue can invest in massive amounts of growth. And you should still be out knocking on doors and bringing over donuts and all that kind of stuff. But it allows you to have inquiries. Say you said, oh, I only, I only worry about, you know, Google business profile.

John Clendenning [00:55:18]:

Cool. In this scenario, you would get about 98 calls a month. And then you got to try and book some of them. If you had Facebook ads running, you might get another 37. Right. If you had Google AdWords running or you turn the Facebook off to get Google Ads going. Yeah, right. And, and, and right.

John Clendenning [00:55:35]:

If you want all 286 inquiries to meet our number we just talked about on the front end, you need to do a lot more. And not just online. That’s this. You need to do neighborhood mailing. You got to get in their faces. You need to have partners. You need to be on social media, telling happy stories, not selling stuff. You need to be on radio.

John Clendenning [00:55:54]:

When you get over about half a million or more, 5, $600,000, that 20% of revenue gives you drive time radio. That’s why the biggest plumbing company in town, the biggest H vac company in town, the biggest personal injury lawyer in town, is on the back of every bus. And they’re on the radio because they have a budget. They invested, grew, invested more, grew, invested more because it’s still the same percentage of revenue. They still took home more money and made more profits. In dollars, real dollar terms, it’s just a percentage of revenue. Right. If your profit margin is after everything is paid is 15 of total revenue.

John Clendenning [00:56:28]:

At a million, that’s $150,000 profit. At a hundred thousand, that’s $15,000 profit. You probably spent it because at a hundred thousand, you don’t have any profit margin. Right. So it’s still the same percentage. It’s just bigger numbers because you grew into it without the idea, you’ll never grow into it. Right. So you need to be in all those places.

John Clendenning [00:56:49]:

This is actually where it looks like most cleaners need a checkbox in every one of these. And under them there’s, there’s, there’s. But you need about. These are the poles in the water. There’s about 40 of them there. And all of that just gets people to know about you. All of this is just to get people. At the very beginning, they’re aware of you now, they want to figure out if they can trust you.

John Clendenning [00:57:16]:

Then they want to figure out what services you do. And that’s where your unique sales proposition, risk reversal, guarantee and all of your influence, your I call it the Inception moment. Think of the movie Inception. Now you get to build reality, a new reality for them. You get to break their false beliefs that carpet cleaning should be a commodity and cheap. And you get to build a new reality. And then they’ll reach out. And they got to reach out in a whole bunch of different ways.

John Clendenning [00:57:37]:

Nobody picks up the phone anymore. So you better give them the ability to have a chance chat. You better give them the ability to DM you&, and, and because they want to start having a conversation and you better be answering that within one to two, like one to two minutes on, on digital and one to two rings on the phone or you turn off your local service ads because that’s one of the ranking factors. They’ll push you down and suppress you anyways because the guys they like more than you answer on one to two rings, get more reviews and have seem to be happier in the system. And Google guarantees them better than they guarantee you. Right? There’s no. You don’t just jump ahead again, as I said, everything’s being throttled. You’re getting awarded now.

John Clendenning [00:58:12]:

You’re getting awarded now not for just being in and willing to pay. You’re getting awarded based on your actual reputation and all that stuff. The cool thing about that is AI does this now too. AI is not a keyword machine. AI goes when, when somebody goes to their chat GPT or just type to the top of Google and gets an AI response. AI’s going, huh? Well let me go see what people are saying about them on Reddit and Facebook and this and that. Let me go check about their services. Let go check their website.

John Clendenning [00:58:42]:

Let me go check this. I’ll go check out, oh, let’s see who’s talking about the blah blah, blah. And then we’ll recommend you and a couple others if all of that’s done well, like managed, not. Oh, hope and pray. Hope and pray is not a marketing strategy. So how customers deciding who to call before they ever visit your website. Right. Customer needs to see your brand five to seven times before they even trust or consider calling you.

John Clendenning [00:59:08]:

If they can see your brand before AI recommends it, they’ll tell AI. That’s the one I want. Thank you so much. That was on my list in my head. Oh, I remember them now. It’s called your Dunbar numbers. It gets into your head and now all of a sudden you’re still so that could be the yard sign you put in the neighbor’s driveway when you’ve done the job and leave it there with a QR code on the side of it saying, you know, want a clean and healthy home? Scan me on the side of your van on, on, on door hangers that aren’t about price, they’re about quality. Right? When you walk into the door of a commercial place in the winter to, to, to just get your name out, you could hit 100 or 200 or 300 businesses to learn about you.

John Clendenning [00:59:47]:

In the month of January alone, the month of February alone, just one guy and foot, you get a couple jobs for sure that keeps the lights on. But you’re going to get if you follow up with in a cadence, hey, thanks so much I stopped by, I’d love to give you a quote. And you drip on them happy customer stories of other places you’ve cleaned. And you take something and you just keep staying in touch and you give them some spotting advice and every so often you pop back in and take out some free spots. You’re going to become their carpet cleaner because nobody else is doing that. And that’s how we used to grow 40 years ago and 30 years ago and 20 years ago, and that’s how we can grow now. And it all complements your digital marketing in the background. And now they’ve seen you, they’ve seen you at the.

John Clendenning [01:00:26]:

When you go and go and stop into one of your commercial jobs that you’ve cleaned for every three months just to check in, take some free spots out and just check around. So you want to keep them as a client, not, oh, I hope they call me back someday. Hope and pray is not a marketing strategy. You are the marketer of cleaning services. So when you go and do that, visit all the neighbors and tell them that that’s one of your clients over there. And you just want to come and do a complimentary spotting because you’re at one of your clients over there. You want the scripts, I can give you the scripts. You do it once, you do it twice, you do it five times, you do it 10 times, you become confident, then you now you’re accountable and you do it again.

John Clendenning [01:00:58]:

You need accountability partners and accountability groups and stuff like that to be able to do this because otherwise you’re on an island of one and it sucks again. Another thing I didn’t realize was unique is I joined coaching programs early on because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I had coaches and I joined groups to Learn and stay together and connect with other people who are on the same journey as me. Didn’t know that was a weird thing to do. Anyways, maximize your brand impressions. People need to see you everywhere, online, offline, everywhere they go again, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, business groups, anywhere. That brand impression as the best, highest end. Like, you know, take your bet.

John Clendenning [01:01:36]:

Get testimonials from your customers and feedback, not reviews first. You will get a lot more feedback than you’ll ever get reviews. Reviews are great for Google and they sit there, feedback. You can market everywhere. Put on your website, put on your flyers and your brochures and in, in, in, in, you can get testimonial letters from happy customers, commercial customers. Get testimonial letters that you share out with everybody else. I got so good at getting testimonial letters that I started getting like I would go to a chiropractor and in my quote package would be three or four testimonial letters from other chiropractors in the marketplace. Not just other businesses, just chiropractors.

John Clendenning [01:02:11]:

I would go to a car dealership and I’d have testimony letters from five other car dealerships in my area as happy customers of ours. So our prices are higher than everybody else. And they go, geez, Tom over there at Mercedes uses him and Bill over at Toyota uses him. They know each other, right? So you start with some, but you have a strategy and a plan, right? Lots of good little marketing tips being dripped in here, by the way. Hopefully you’re catching some of those. Set a realistic budget. So again, we talked about the budget planner. The Sweet spot is 15 to 20%.

John Clendenning [01:02:45]:

15. If you’re trying to maximize profit. Profit first. Great book to listen to or read if you read 20%. If you’re in growth mode, know where you’re at. Are you at the level you want? And you just want to kind of hopefully tread water. Sometimes treading water is bad, but. Or do you want to continue to grow, buy other businesses, grow, scale, Right.

John Clendenning [01:03:06]:

Growth mode is there. Another example is understanding some of your poles in the water. And we just showed it a little bit. I’m going to take a few minutes here. I know, I know. We’re going to wrap up on time. We’ll wrap it up in about 20 minutes. What I want to do is I want to show another one.

John Clendenning [01:03:22]:

So we get a lot of questions about pay per click, right? Some of our clients, the average cost per click In Chicago is 15, 16 bucks a click. Did you know it takes at least five clicks, five clicks to get one person to reach out to you, right. And so if you’re trying to get one inquiry a day, one or one person to reach out a day, you have about a fifteen hundred dollar budget in a month most places. Some places you can get them down a little bit less. But across all your major terms, right. You’re probably sitting roughly in the ballpark of about $8 a click. We find across, across the board, right. Google’s algorithm dials in at about $50 a day.

John Clendenning [01:04:07]:

Anything less than that if you’re using a pay per click provider. Anybody doing paper? Oh, I blend it with pay per click and local service ads and I told them not to spend more than $800. Turn it off. You have not even triggered. Don’t believe me Actually go to Google and say what? How many impressions are necessary before Google’s algorithm kicks in? Especially in the winter and the off season for a home cleaning service business. Google’s answer is 5,000 impressions before the algorithm even even shows up. The algorithm dials in. Oh, you should be actually more people over here, like better than here.

John Clendenning [01:04:39]:

And you know, you don’t want to be in the low income area of town. And like part of it is good targeting but part of it is also teaching the algorithm. And every time time you get somebody who clicks and goes to your landing page, not your website, never send leads to your website from, from pay per click. It’s a split. Tested landing pages, test headlines to offers, dial it and get better and better and better. When it goes to your landing page, you better tell Google by the way, I got one here. When they fill out a form or pick up the phone and call, you better have call tracking on that and tell Google by the way, they just called me. Oh they got there.

John Clendenning [01:05:08]:

That’s good. They called you. I know who those people are. Even better. And if you can go all the way saying that they bought, oh my God, I’m golden. I’ll give you more of those. The algorithm doesn’t do by ones and twosies. It does it by 5,000 impressions.

John Clendenning [01:05:22]:

You’ve got to get to that. So it’s about 50 bucks a day, right? If nobody told you that before, good lesson right there. Right. So if your website landing page is converting about 15%, the average is between 10 and 20%. 20% is like oh, you know, great mode. Everything’s just really dialed in. Everybody knows you. All your other offline marketing is so good that when, oh I know those guys because it all ties together.

John Clendenning [01:05:46]:

If it’s sitting on an island of one, it’s probably down there. So we’ll put it about 15%. Right? Lots of things a factor. If your average booking percentage is 35%, which is what we hear, and your Average job is 325, I am going to say do not run pay per click ads. For every dollar you invest, you only get $2 back. That’s a you problem. This you can’t change. This is running well.

John Clendenning [01:06:17]:

This budget’s good. You got 210 clicks, 32 of them reached out to you. That’s not bad. It cost you $53.33 for that phone call. Because that’s the math. You can’t unmath the math if you never knew this before. Your pay per click provider sucks. Estimated book.

John Clendenning [01:06:36]:

Book jobs. 11. Estimated cost to buy a customer, $152. You invested 1600. You made 3500 in revenue. You made about $1900 in profit in the month. You know, John, that’s not good. No, no, that’s not good at all.

John Clendenning [01:06:55]:

That’s why we start our clients with local service ads and we want to listen to them on the phone. We wanted. We diagnose their, their average booking percentage and their average job. If we can get their booking percentage up to 45%, we’re starting to get close. Three to one is the number we’re trying to get to. And we get their average job up to say 425. Let’s go. 375.

John Clendenning [01:07:16]:

Boom, we’re in. How do we do that? Package selling, having an upsell script targeting better clients with all of your marketing, all that kind of stuff. Right. 45%. That’s just again, better scripts and a nurture process. If they don’t book today, are you calling them tomorrow? Are they getting some information about you within the next two weeks? Will they come back? Because they. You dripped on them. Automation, you do that, right? 55%.

John Clendenning [01:07:39]:

Sort of the really high watermark, right? We’ve got some clients are sitting at 55% and their average job is sitting at 4, 50 or 550. For every dollar they put into Google Ads, they’re getting five. $5.70 back. That’s rare, but it exists. But let’s say we go back to reasonable, right? Back to reasonable. Three to one ROI. You invested 1600, you made 5000. You, you took home $3600.

John Clendenning [01:08:07]:

You say, John, that’s getting me two inquiries a day. And I’m booking about almost one a day. Right. Can we get more? Maybe there might be More people in the marketplace looking there might not be. Let’s bump it up and see if they’re not there. You won’t be paying for them. Like they’re just not there. But if in the spring they are there and you’ve got this dialed in and you’re tracking this, why don’t we go to 4 or 5 right now? We spent $3,600.

John Clendenning [01:08:36]:

We invested in your pay per click. You made 10,000 and you took home 7. Still 3 to 3, 3.2 to 1 ROI. That didn’t change the cost to buy the customer. Didn’t change the average cost or the. Sorry, the cost to get the phone call didn’t change the cost to buy the Customer is still $120. That’s good. It was $80 22 years ago in the yellow pages to buy a customer in the yellow page.

John Clendenning [01:08:56]:

If you put a call tracking number in and tracked it, that was good because the average lifetime value of my clients was $5,000. I’d pay $80 all day long to make $5,000 from them. Right. So then you might say, hey, cool, I’m in Dallas, Fort Worth. Can we go up to 10 in the busy season? Yeah, you can. You’re going to invest $8,400 in just this one pool in the water? It’s one of many. This is just one. This will keep a bunch of trucks running and you got a bunch more trucks, but you’re going to book 71 jobs a month or $26,000.

John Clendenning [01:09:27]:

And $18,000 is after you’ve paid for the ad car that goes towards gas technician solution and running the company. Right. So still that, that’s not take home money. That is still. That’s to run a business money. Right. Your profit margin is probably still about 10% to 15% if you understand the law of numbers. Right.

John Clendenning [01:09:45]:

So cool. Cool. But let’s take it down to reasonable. Let’s say it’s four. I’m not even happy about this. Where I’m happy is this. Let’s say you do nothing and you have no clue if your customers come back. I normally find that’s about 10 to 15%.

John Clendenning [01:10:02]:

If I check your service monster or, or house call pros and I know that your average customer maybe comes back. 15% of them come back a couple times. So you made $7,000 in profit on a $10,000 in revenue. And over the lifetime, 15% of them came back. So four of them came back and you earned about $5,000 more to the life of Your business because you do nothing here. You do not market them every single month. You don’t stay in touch with them. You’ll put them part of a VIP club.

John Clendenning [01:10:30]:

You don’t give them free spotters for life. You don’t do anything else. You, you don’t have a referral reward program. You don’t stay in touch with them with mail, newsletter, because they’re on golf course road every single month about how to take care of a happy, healthy home. Not about carpet cleaning. You do all of that good marketing, have a system in place or a vendor that can help you with that. What if half of them, my retention rate was at 50%. Half of our customers we never saw again, and the other half we saw regularly.

John Clendenning [01:10:56]:

Some of them up to $20,000 in their lifetime. So some of them only up to about $4,000. But our average, when I tracked it, was about $5,000. Put that 5. 5. So now every single month, I might be adding 70 $200 to gross profit for that month, but I’m adding $70,000 to the growth of my business in the future because I understood this and I started marketing for this. So I fixed this, scaled this, and then started marketing for this. Now, hopefully, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, if you do know what I’m talking about, awesome.

John Clendenning [01:11:39]:

Thank you so much. Right now we’ve got some clients, George and Mia. 10,15,000 is their average lifetime of half their customers. Every single month, they could be adding a couple hundred thousand dollars to the lifetime value of the business. Right. Even if they only keep about 40% of them coming back repeatedly. Right. 156,000 to the lifetime value of the business.

John Clendenning [01:12:03]:

Right. So what you, how, how you do stuff is really important. Over that puts a little bit of a dovetail in why knowing your numbers is more important than going. I need more leads. Right. So define your differentiators. Why will people reach out to you? How do you become the best known cleaner? Right. Everybody knows and talks about.

John Clendenning [01:12:25]:

You have to have a plan. You have to have a blueprint for that. You have to before the sale, during the sale, after the sale, all of it. But you start with building your foundation. If you don’t have a foundation, none of it matters. All of your marketing is about why you’re different. You dial in a compelling sales proposition. If you don’t know what that is, you get coached on it.

John Clendenning [01:12:43]:

You learn it. You risk reversal guarantee. You have a guarantee so bold, your competitors think you’re insane. Why? Because it’ll land 10 times, 20 times, 30 times more customers than you’ll ever have to make good on the guarantee. Because you’re a good carpet cleaner anyways. The job is you have to do a great job. If they’re not happy, you have to go back and reclean it. If they’re still not happy, you have to give their money back in 2026 or they’re going to blast you.

John Clendenning [01:13:05]:

I just say take it even farther than that, right? And then you have a founder story again, Your origin story, why you got into this business, why you’re from my family to yours. Here’s my wife, my kid, my dog, blah, blah, blah. We want to be your carpet cleaner. Here’s why. Aw, shucks, you drip on them, right? And you have impactful branding. Your van is not a white van with a magnet on the side that will never fly, right. Clicks are down massively and searches way up, says Neil Patel, one of the smartest people in the world of digital marketing and global marketing. Then why do.

John Clendenning [01:13:41]:

Why the f. Do I even need a website in 2026? Great question. Your website feeds everything. It speaks to your ideal customer. It’s got the real authentic images. It’s, you know, it does all of that kind of stuff for the people that do land. They do make it there. They’re even more eager to buy.

John Clendenning [01:13:57]:

They’ve learned so much about you because they’ve done searches way up. Because they’re getting answers, answers, answers, answers, answers. When they make it to your website, they’re closer down the funnel to buy. So you better take them the rest of the way. Telling great stories, teaching them who you are, making it. Let them know what it’s going to look like to have you in their home. And absolutely. That you clean people like them, that you do them right.

John Clendenning [01:14:20]:

So your website is built to train AI as well. That’s the other reason you need 1, 2, 3 new pieces of content on your website a week per service. That isn’t your $400 SEO guy. Sorry, it isn’t. It isn’t. That isn’t ChatGPT writing articles. No. That is talking about the neighbors, the neighborhood.

John Clendenning [01:14:43]:

That is talking about your, your, your stories and your customers. That is talking about you’re training AI properly with schema and coding and, and, and, and, and, and you need at least a 20 to 25 page website in today’s day and age. About every city, every, every that you service, every subdivision, every service, and then about four or five other pages for every compliment. Like secondary parts of the service tied to your Google Maps listing and then posts on Google Maps every single day. And you need that. That sounds like a lot. I know. So how do you go from where you are to where you need to be? Now we know the gap.

John Clendenning [01:15:16]:

Can we start that journey while you’re out the door landing 1,000, 10,000, $20,000 worth of commercial work and have a journey happening behind you that builds the machine that saves your business? That’s the way people think, right? You want to build your target list. Lists are your most important thing. You have your customers. Do you have a list of all your customers? Do you know how many people have pets, how many have children? How many people came back in the last every six months? How people come back in nine months, 12 months? Is your average return rate 18 to 24 to 36 months? Or have you gotten it down to 14 months? Because you send a really great series of messages and then when it comes to anniversary month, you actually have an early bird special, an anniversary special, and anniversary extended one month further, and it’s automated and you don’t even have to think about it. Do you have that in place? And it’s not just one message, not an email. I send an email. Okay, well, 30% of emails get open, so 70% didn’t see it. Only sent text messages.

John Clendenning [01:16:11]:

How many are on your do not disturb list now because you sent too many text messages, right? No, you need to send mail. You need to pick up the phone and call. You need to leave voicemail as well. It’s got to be multi step marketing. That’s the marketing that works commercial. You have a list of all your commercial clients. You have a list by service. Do you have a list of property managers who you’re reaching out to, who you know? Do you have a list of all of your inquiries, Everybody that ever was interested in you, that didn’t buy from you yet? Are you marketing to them every single month in a welcome way that they’re wanting to see? Not discounts and offers, but actually telling them stories about other happy customers to get in their head? Are you, do you have referral partners? Are you having your referral partners help you find more referral partners so that you don’t just lose that one great restoration company that was giving you $100,000 a year worth of work? I don’t know where they went, but I just lost $100,000 a year.

John Clendenning [01:17:03]:

That should not be a thing. That should be cool. Who else do you know? I’d like to talk to them as well. Right. And, and and so you need lists, you need to know who your ideal person is. It’s not everybody. You target the right people. We talked about that last time we talked about another trainings.

John Clendenning [01:17:17]:

We don’t need to go into it. But people in affluent neighborhoods and live around golf courses have different concerns than somebody living in an apartment building or in a 1970s suburb. They just do. They care about different things, they have different concerns. And you better be speaking to those concerns. Everything you do when you show up better be showing up better to those concerns. When you are, you’re in the right neighborhood. So.

John Clendenning [01:17:50]:

And then you pick your message from there, right? Once you know who you’re talking to, right? High end neighbors, you’re talking about trust, you’re talking about people that refer you, you’re talking about, you know, you’re getting in there through somebody else because they don’t, they don’t want to be, you know, rob blind tomorrow kind of idea that we hear it all in the news, right? And they’re not hiring the guy that’s the lowest price right now at all. They’re hiring the one that every one of their friends hired so they can go. I feel good about that. Want to maximize your conversions. So you need a lead nurture. Automation, right. Lead generation, meh. Lead nurture.

John Clendenning [01:18:30]:

That’s where your superpower is. You talk to people until they buy or die. Right. Inquiries are not followed up within two to five minutes. Go cold. So you need some sort of automation, AI and real people, right. If you’re out on the road, do not answer your phones. Hire somebody to answer your phones.

John Clendenning [01:18:44]:

There’s call centers, there is stay at home moms, people that you know, disabled people that sit at home and will be able to answer phones and spend the time needed to turn them in and charge you per booking. So up your prices by 20, 30 bucks. They’re free, right? Pay 20$30 every booking they get. Cool. The average quality customer must be followed up with five to seven times before they’re ready to book. Some people book right now, other people are just check, checking out and you’re cool. Yeah. Let me send you some information.

John Clendenning [01:19:13]:

Oh, by the way, I sent you this yesterday. Did you see this here today? Hey, just quick call. Just want to see if you got that right. You touch base, you stay in touch, right. Today they prefer messages. So you want to make sure you have a message system in place and customers want to do their own research and gather answers before reaching out to confirm and finalize. So you want to be able to give Them all that information, hey, all inbound leads to one place. We call it carpet Cleaner.

John Clendenning [01:19:42]:

Lead Pro is the one we built out. It’s every one of like we’ve got layers that we can add onto it, but it’s the psychology of starting, starting at one point, adding on more modules as you need. But it’s, it’s the full program like you, you need to have automation that reminds you to call put the human in the loop. It’s not all digital. You don’t just get oh, I want to put a self booking button on my website and everybody book themselves. Cool. So why is the competitor three rooms in a hall for 149 and they ran your calculator and you’re three of them is in a hall for $425. How does your calculator explain that to them? Oh, how many people come do that and leave and don’t book? If you’re not watching that, it’s great that you booked one job last night.

John Clendenning [01:20:27]:

A real person might have booked the other four at prices higher than your competition. Knowing your numbers, right? So there’s proven solution. Lead automation automate. Put AI in the loop properly where it needs to be human, human back in. Build your lead list market to them relentlessly, forever. Your lead list should be 10 times bigger than your customer list and should be separate when you get conversions, right? We’ve talked about this before, but if you had 164 inquiries come in in a month and you booked at about 30% conversion because your phones were met, this is new people coming from these sources, not repeats. You booked about 49 jobs. Your average job was 325.

John Clendenning [01:21:07]:

Hey, you made $16,000. You’re happy about yourself, right? And that’s even after having all of these, because you’re going to have 164. You need all of these. You got all of these. You got lots going on. You made about 16 grand. You paid 20% of that towards marketing. So you put in, you know, about 2,000 or $3,000 of marketing, right, to get that, that’s not bad.

John Clendenning [01:21:27]:

You kept 1200, 12,000. You had to pay the gas, stuff like that. There you go, nice little business, right? But what if you took those exact same people and not just booked 30% but had better scripts and you booked 40%, 45% on the front end and then you dripped on those people that three months, six months, nine months later, some of the other ones came back. Cause you’re targeting the right people, you know, they’re your Customers, they, they just have to learn you’re the best over time. Not with deals and discounts, but with happy customer stories and endorsements. And now you booked 114 jobs from the same group of people. You still only charge 325. That’s still too low.

John Clendenning [01:22:07]:

But the same group of people from the same month over a right away and a little bit longer period of time made you almost 40 grand. You more than doubled and you did nothing different but put in lead conversion automation. Your business went from $250,000 to $400,000 in one year on the exact same volume you have as an example, by putting a machine in place. Kind of cool. So you’re going to build your plan, right? We’re at the end. Oh, gosh. I’m on on time too. That’s incredible.

John Clendenning [01:22:44]:

Let’s recap. Visibility is shrinking for carpet cleaners. Even if they’re doing everything right, customers are deciding who to call before they ever get to your website. We know this offline and online and everywhere else. AI is becoming their best friend. The critical decision owners must make now, before the market makes it for them. It’s now. Are you ready to make the decisions of what you need to do? Know your numbers.

John Clendenning [01:23:10]:

More poles in the water. Build out your. Your database as your most important friend, your commercial residential lead list and your referral partners. You need to be back out in the marketplace. It worked 40 years ago. It worked 30 years ago, works 20 years ago, work 10 years ago, works today. And the sit behind a hope and pray digital marketing or ads. I got Facebook ads right now.

John Clendenning [01:23:35]:

I got Yelp ads right now. I got, whatever. I’ll turn them on, I’ll turn them off. You know, I’m a carpet cleaner and I’m also an ad manager. I’m amazing ad manager for my carpet cleaning company. Are you. Do you got 20 trucks on the road? 10 trucks on the road? Maybe you’re not that good, right? Maybe you should be out knocking on doors and getting some business and wrapping the vans and wearing, you know, teaching the technicians to take some, you know, second shirt with them and wear some ax and checking in on them and making sure that they’re putting the, the drop cloths down the hallways for the, for the hoses and the corner guards and delivering a client experience. Because your average job is sitting at about 500 and you got time to do that and you’re blowing off the front porch with a leaf blower.

John Clendenning [01:24:13]:

And I can go down the road. I can go on for hours. What you should be doing. I’ve been flown around the world to teach how to deliver a high end Disney like experience in a customer’s home so that they have you back forever. Have you orchestrated that? Have you planned that? Right. That’s what the people that are that you know aren’t just surviving but thriving are doing and thinking about. There’s a lot to being a business owner that just happens to be in the cleaning industry. There’s even a lot to be a carpet cleaner that just happens to own a business.

John Clendenning [01:24:42]:

There’s two camps, right? You can do an audit of some of your stuff. We go to our website. You can sign up for an audit. We won’t bug you that much but you’re going to get the audit and you’re going to get some invites to some of these webinars and join our AI powered marketing experts Facebook group. You’ll get a chance to do that as well. Which is a great group to be in because we, we talk about this kind of stuff. There you need. But what you really need to do is figure out how to implement this stuff.

John Clendenning [01:25:09]:

Right. It’s not easy, it’s not intuitive. You have to learn it one step at a time. You have to either be an absolute weirdo like me and just want to grow and do stuff for no God knows what reason. Painfully too introspective or something. Don’t know. But. And just did it and didn’t know it was a weird thing.

John Clendenning [01:25:34]:

Hired coaches and consultants when I didn’t know what to do next. Right. And learned things I didn’t know. Right. And learned how to implement and still felt I did it badly by the way because I saw other people implementing even faster. I was in a crowd where they were running even faster and I’m just trying to keep up. I’m in those rooms right now for agencies and coaching and, and you know, and podcasting and everything. I’m in coaching programs and groups to learn where the.

John Clendenning [01:26:05]:

What am I missing? What’s next? We’re not born with it. Right. So most businesses fail not because they don’t have the ideas but because they don’t execute on the ideas. It’s 90% is between the ears. We, we have a story running in our head. We have this big elephant in the background caught our subconscious that keeps telling us all the stories. We have this little lizard going nah, you can’t do that. I’m afraid of that.

John Clendenning [01:26:26]:

You can’t do that. That’s not right. Right. So we need to be able to quiet down. No, no, I Believe this is right. I trust this. I need to lean into this. And we got to keep retelling ourselves that story, right? The key to growth is taking immediate action on one high impact shift every single day.

John Clendenning [01:26:47]:

Marketing is not a side activity. It is the business you’re in. Even if you’re a carpet cleaner that happens to own a cleaning business, you are the marketer of that services. Word of mouth was a way of marketing. It’s not anymore. It’s now AI. But you are the marketer of cleaning services. The best businesses are not the best operators.

John Clendenning [01:27:06]:

They are the best marketers who then need to refine operations to scale, not hire the kid that shows up drunk every morning. Right? Commit to one major marketing shift this week. Put it all in place. So what I do want to do at the end of this one is tie it all together for you, right? Because I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I get asked a lot by a lot of our clients. Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? Which is great. Great. I love helping people.

John Clendenning [01:27:34]:

There’s only one of me and I get asked by hundreds, right? We try and put things in place and some people go through it, they read it, they kind of do it. They’re. They’re on an island of one, right? And as we said, if you own a business, any business, you’re the marketer of that business. These are all the books of Dan Kennedy I’ve read. Right again. Met the man. I’m like all of five foot six and a half on a bad day. Six, if you want to call it little.

John Clendenning [01:27:58]:

Come from an Irish family. Dan Kennedy’s six something. I don’t know. Bill Glaser was even bigger than him. I felt like, you know, me and my buddy Sean that were there that had started our coaching program while running our cleaning businesses and we felt like hobbits before hobbits were ever a hobbit. But these are all the books that we’d read. Learned all about the psychology of sales. Learned all about persuasion.

John Clendenning [01:28:22]:

Dan learned it, distilled it to everybody he’s ever talked to in every room he’s ever been in. Good people to follow. That’s where our friends Joe Polish came from and stuff like that. He was a student of Dan Kennedy. That’s what he learned. That Magnetic marketing. I sold magnetic marketing as part of my coaching program. I was, I was.

John Clendenning [01:28:37]:

I became a magnetic mar. Co coach as well. All businesses succeed or die based on Effective marketing, period. Period. Right? Your real job is marketing the product or service that the business offers. The guys and gals who master marketing are the ones who have cash registers ringing and live the good life. Your products and services are not your business marketing. Your product service is your business marketing.

John Clendenning [01:29:03]:

Done well, does the majority of the selling for you? The greatest day in a business owner’s life is when he stops doing the doer of the thing and becomes the marketer of the thing, right? Going out and joining the bni, walking in with donuts. And that’s a marketing moment. So you orchestrate it a little bit, you think about it, you leave and go, hmm, how would I do that differently next time, right? Little things that who can I learn from that might already have that thought through? I just did a commercial job last night. How do I get every single one of the employees of that company to use my services too? I just cleaned a Church. There’s 600 parishioners there. Half of them like 300 couples, 600 prisoners. How do I get 10% of them, 30 of them to become clients for life worth 5, 10, $15,000 for the rest of their lives? That makes cleaning the church well worth it if you figure that. So the product service are not the business.

John Clendenning [01:29:59]:

Your real business is marketing, advertising and selling your products and services. If you have a barbershop, for example, it’s not your job to cut hair. Instead, it’s marketing advertising to find new clients who want their hair cut and then come back again and again. You market to them to come back again and again. You market to them from the moment they book to the moment they show up to get the highest price, right? So you actually have three businesses when you think about it, three distinct businesses. And if you think of your business this way, you’ll run your business in a much better way. When I learned this, it changed my entire life. You have a lead generation business, right? Your lead list needs to be 10 times bigger than your client list.

John Clendenning [01:30:35]:

Everything you do to attract your ideal customer, get in front of the people that are already in front of your ideal customer. Everything you do is a lead generation business. If you just did that for carpet cleaners and they did the rest, that’s still a business, right? Client attraction, all of these things. Grassroots outreach, local referral programs, weekly outreach and awareness campaigns, referral partner reward systems, on and on and on and on. All your digital marketing, all your offline marketing, you just build it over time based on a structure that already exists. There is something to do first while you’re out doing this, there’s something to do. Second, when it grows to this level, there’s something to do. Third, once you get to 5, $600,000, there is a point at which the revenue should go to radio and stuff like that because that will get you to 800,000, $900,000, $1 million.

John Clendenning [01:31:20]:

You start buying some businesses. There is a process to this and very less than 1%. Figure it out. Right? You want to make sure you have your poles in water and what order you’re going to put them in. There is an order of operations. Business number two is service delivery and customer experience. From the moment they reach out to the moment you go, bye, ma’, am, or your technician does, you are in business number two, every interaction has to be a marketing moment that’s controlled and managed. What you say, what it looks like, what it feels like.

John Clendenning [01:31:52]:

Even when we had on hold music, we didn’t put on hold music. La la la la la la la la. On our on hold music. Because I’m thinking of every single moment. When I put them on hold, I was with a very pleasant female voice. I paid dollars to have a machine hanging on the wall that every time a customer got put on hold because we’re on too many lines ringing and we had, you know, enough gals on, but it was a busy time of day and they had to go, hey, can you put your hold for a quick minute? I’m just wrapping up with another client and get back to you right away. Thank you so much. You know, hey, it’s a great day here at Acclaim Carpet Cleaning.

John Clendenning [01:32:22]:

Blah. And they, they hear an on hold message with music about the company, about a unique sales proposition, about our risk reversal guarantee. I about why we’re different. By the time we pick up from on hold, that marketing moment influenced them to buy easier phone call. Sometimes it’s actually better just to put people on hold than talk to them. They’re grumpy. Hey, yeah, let me figure out an estimate there for you. Like, can I put you on hold for a minute? Then instead of going, oh, I just want a quick price really quick.

John Clendenning [01:32:48]:

Okay, no worries. Let me figure out an estimate there for you. After you’ve got their information. And the on hold message was everything you’re about to say to them anyways, you get back on the phone, hey, so here’s, you know, we’re looking at a range between this and this and this, blah, blah, whatever. And it’s again, not a price, not a quote, a range, scripts, routines, mechanics, humanics, remarks, that’s all what that’s all about. You need to learn that, right? So during the sale is all of these things, right? And then you need to, you have a client retention business. Once you’re done the job, the fun part starts. What’s the very first thing you follow up with them within an hour or less.

John Clendenning [01:33:23]:

What’s the thing you follow up with the next day? What’s the thing that. Well, how are you indoctrinating them into Love U refer you if there’s any problems. The recipe for recovery as I call it. What are you doing? Right? There’s a whole bunch of steps to that. And then your database follow ups and then you get back into the house. Did you know that if you get into a customer’s house once, you get an 80% chance of never going back again. If you get into their house a second time, you have a 50% chance they’ll call you back again. If you get into the house a third time, you have an 80% chance you’re their customer cleaner for life until you screw something up.

John Clendenning [01:33:54]:

Did you know that that’s true. That that is the psychology of our industry. So I, when I learned that, put a system in place where our very best clients had us back in their house with three times within six months for different reasons. That’s using marketing and inception to build a long a lifetime business that I could work three or four or five hours a week on and start other, do coaching companies and start other businesses. Right. So that’s a process as well. So AI is now the great equalizer. AI is commoditizing your business.

John Clendenning [01:34:26]:

If you fail to differentiate, it’s making other people show up instead of you that were never there before. And it’s recommending differently. If you don’t stand for something different and compelling, AI will blur you with the competition. You’re just a street full of the same. The winners will be authentic, trusted and build human relationships and have those represented online that AI can pick up. Right? Your brand is your AI strategy. AI reads everything. Your website, your social reviews, your video content.

John Clendenning [01:34:57]:

Omnipresence builds that domination everywhere online offline will be requested and recommended the most. Right? So people recommend you and request you the most. That gets through to AI as well. Both of them happen if they don’t even have to go to AI because they know you, because you’re in the neighborhood and you dropped a, you know, a yard sign, a door hanger and a QR code and they scanned it and they had a conversation. Right? AI looks for Real brands, not keywords and ads different now. Being the best known cleaner wins over having discounts and deals. A strong offer helps convert leads. But an omnipresent brand gets called first at prices higher than the competition.

John Clendenning [01:35:39]:

If no one knows who you are, a great offer doesn’t even matter. Customers don’t buy based on price alone. And the best customers, that 10% that is the ideal to continue shopping with, that will give you a thousand dollars a year worth of services and you only need a thousand of them to build a million dollar business, right? They buy based on brands they know, trust and respect. We’re back to those days again, right? Blueprint for Success is the exact training program that we, that I run. That’s it’s my private coaching that I do one on one, right. And what we’re actually looking to do for the first time ever, you know, in, in this iteration since 201011 is open up growth coaching again for a very select few people. Right? Just it’s a night. The world is changing and people need help.

John Clendenning [01:36:38]:

So we are creating coaching programs to help people get through the million dollar growth plan and build a business if that’s where they want to go, stabilize a business depending on where they want to be. Creating referral partner outreach programs. Exactly. What to do, what to say, how to get in there. Because I’ve already trained on this, I already do this, I do this one on one. We’re now looking at coaching it through what to do in the winter, your winter outreach program. What to do after the after you show up, what to say when you’re there, what kind of material to leave behind. All of it, right? Coach not done for you.

John Clendenning [01:37:16]:

What to do in the winter when you’re slow, it’s not run more ads. You should keep the machine running. But it’s going to be slow. You’re not going to spend a lot of budget on LSA and pay per click because there’s not a lot of people looking. But your database is active, right? The commercial database. Do you have a winter save the carpet program where you’ll come in and clean and protect right now and you’ll give them a half off end cap cleaning in April, May, they get back in that second time even if they’ve only cleaned you cleaned with you once before. Can you walk in the door and mention that? Can you call them and mention that? Can you send them something? I suggest do all of the above, right? Do you have grassroots? Are you doing commercial 5 arounds condos? Are you meeting people all day long you’re gonna get some work right now and you’re gonna prime the pump for the busy season and hire more people. You create an operations problem when you market well, right? And then you got strategic partners and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [01:38:08]:

That’s all the stuff we talk about all day long. That’s what I want to start having a group accountability group where we keep each other accountable. We, we, we train on one great new strategy a month, put it all in place. But we get together a couple more times throughout the month and have conversations about your risk reversal guarantee. And you have, and your compelling sales proposition and how it fits into everything and what this can look like. Everybody’s got different ideas. I’ve got samples of mine and everything else I’ve done with other people, but they’re not, there’s not an exact, it’s not an exact thing. It’s, it’s a, it’s.

John Clendenning [01:38:46]:

Marketing is, is, is psychology and math together. It’s. You’re different than the guy beside you. You’re different than any of our other clients, right? So whether you’re a client of ours and need help with the services, right? We do all of this at a price insanely, insanely affordable. Like, insanely affordable. The average of getting one new customer a week is our base program, right? You get one new customer from an idea, you get one new customer from an ad, you get one and it’s break even. Nobody does that. And we’re doing everything that you need done and then we scale up as you need, as you grow, you need more, but you also need more help offline, right? You also need.

John Clendenning [01:39:26]:

We’re making partnerships with print partners, we’ve made partnerships with, for, for companies that, when, when somebody shows up on your website, do you want to know their address to send a postcard? Like that’s inception type of stuff. That’s a little bit more expensive. You need to be half a million or more because it fits into your budget. Then because there’s other things you need to do before that. But that’s just a plan. That’s a consult, right? So we actually help our, our clients go through some of that consulting. One of the other pieces in that, the mix, just to show you, oops, I can get to the right screen on my computer right there with our clients, we go through what we call a million dollar growth audit. This takes you about an hour or two, say two hours to fill out a hundred very thoughtful questions all about your business.

John Clendenning [01:40:11]:

And thanks, Slatel, by the way, for suggesting that we put in a Few little caveat. I used to do this live with people. This is now what I send ahead of time. Right. Oops. Before I. Is that what I said ahead of time before I, I meet with one of our coaching clients like before I fly out and, and help a business go from 1 million 2 million to 5 million 10 million. Fill that out first.

John Clendenning [01:40:34]:

We will go through and we will create a growth audit plan. Right. And it’s a right so we have, we have all of this stuff available. So if you’re interested we’re going to have a founder’s discount. It’ll be half the price that we’re going to charge. We still kind of dialing in the pricing. We’re still trying to figure out the, the logistics of it but it’s going to be a small group so a first come first serve. So if you’re on live you might want to reach out to s or somebody to send a text message say you might be interested.

John Clendenning [01:41:00]:

It’s any one of these things. Could any one marketing program, any 13 package pricing program anyone better scripts on the phone program will 10, 20, 30, $50,000 growth to your business this year alone? This year alone. Right. Two of them, three of them, five of them. The mindset you’ve just changed your entire business. So if that sounds interesting, it’s just something I think the industry needs. It’s been missing for a long time. It’s been private and I think we need to find a group of a small group of people that want to collect together at an, at a sort of an equal level and just become the, the learn how to be the growth partners with each other.

John Clendenning [01:41:42]:

Right. So whether you, whether you’re a client of our services or just want to figure this out, that will be where the coaching program will fit in and then yeah we can help you with our automations and our AI tools and our scan the side of the van and have AI start having a conversation before it hands off to real people and all the other stuff that we’ve got and building and growing with because it’s all just around great marketing. Everywhere you go, great marketing has a moment. So you need to learn the great marketing. So anyways, if that sounds interesting at all, reach out to us. We’ll put you on a short list. It’s by invite only so we’ll have a conversation, we’ll let you know what it is and it isn’t and if it makes sense and it’s a good fit as we dial it in in the next couple weeks. Cool if it, if, if you’re looking to go it alone, hopefully everything we teach here and all of these master classes are helpful to you as well.

John Clendenning [01:42:31]:

So with that, I shall let everybody go. I appreciate your time as always. As we always say, you can reach out at any time. And I think that’s the yeah right there carpet cleaning, marketing masters.com schedule. We can jump on a conversation and see where you’re at, where you want to go, see what the gaps is and give you some direction. If we can help, that’s great. If not, you at least got some really good value and direction. We figure out the demographics of your marketplace, how many households are in the affluent crowd that you should be targeting, where they exactly are, what, what your competitors are doing, all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:43:05]:

So jump on one of those calls if it makes sense. We’ll figure out where you are in the million dollar growth plan. Are you a hustle helper? Are you an essentials, an enhanced, an elite? And where are you going? And we’ll see if we can give you a hand getting there. So anyways, with that, everybody, I appreciate you, I appreciate your time and yeah, hopefully we found some value. If you did find some value in this, let us know. It’s always nice to know if we’re, we’re helping out where we can. So thanks a lot everybody. Take care.

John Clendenning [01:43:33]:

Until next time, happy cleaning and God bless.