Cleaning Business Market Changes in 2026: Why the Rules Have Already Changed

A K-shaped economy is where affluent populations receive greater disposable income and wealth, while middle and lower-income groups face stagnation or decline. Carpet cleaners must shift marketing focus to affluent clients for sustainable growth.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:

Welcome everybody. Hope you had a merry Christmas. If you’re seeing this after the new year and you’re still enjoying a Christmas break, well, happy New Year to you as well. We are rapidly approaching 2026 and I know it sounds like a broken record. This is one of my favorite webinars of the year. This is that planning time. This is the week between Christmas and New Year’s when I ran my carpet cleaning companies, duct cleaning companies, maid service companies, janitar companies, all that kind of stuff. All of those.

John Clendenning [00:00:29]:

This was the week where, you know, the crews might be out doing some commercial jobs. There might be like, there’s a little bit of, of that kind of thing in the going on. But I spent most of my time planning the entire next year, triaging what happened the year before, planning the next year, looking through all of our marketing, setting up the marketing calendar. We’re going to talk about all of this kind of stuff. Some of you are going to, hey, preach it, brother. Got you. Other people are like, I’ve never done that. That sounds weird.

John Clendenning [00:00:59]:

And there’s a couple sides to, you know, we’re gonna explain the importance of all this kind of stuff. As we’re transitioning a second of the top corner, we’ll get through into the presentation. We’re gonna spend a probably a good solid 90 minutes. Sometimes I try and say, hey, I’ll try and get you out of here in, you know, 60, 75 minutes, that kind of thing. This is important and it’s more important than it’s ever been before. And I’m going to make that argument. So bear with me. When we get into it, keep up, pay attention.

John Clendenning [00:01:28]:

I’m not trying to create any sort of hyperbole. I’m not trying to sort of, you know, fear monger. This isn’t the, you know, we’re getting holes in the ozone layer. Oh no, 2000y2k issue, stuff like that, or that’s not what we’re going to be talking about here. There is a shift happening. We feel it, we know it. I’m going to show it, I’m going to prove it and we’re going to talk about all of that. How it affects businesses in, in the world, throughout North America, Australia, New Zealand, England, all of our great clients in all of those places, and, and all of that kind of stuff as well.

John Clendenning [00:02:06]:

So let’s, let’s get started because we’ve got a lot to talk about. We want to prepare you for what I am going to prove might be one of the most pivotal years in our lives. Not your life. Not everybody’s.

John Clendenning [00:03:06]:

Here I am. Very scary graphics are we could created this one for us but yes, this, this wasn’t my statement. This was a statement made not just cleaning businesses but service businesses. Many might not survive. What’s happening with, with, with the world around us. And there’s a bunch of headwinds in front of us, not just one or two. There are some really major ones and then there’s some transformational ones. So lots, lots to unpack here.

John Clendenning [00:03:36]:

So let’s, let’s just get kind of rolling on this. And again there’s an answer to all of this so there’s not all doom and gloom. So turn your cell phones off, turn, turn your Facebook off. If you’re in the cleaning or home service business and you’re serious about getting results, the next 60, as I said, might as well just update that slide to 90 minutes is going to be transformational and tell me in the comments afterwards if it was, tell me what you’ve taken away from this. I’d love to have a carry on that conversation. So what we’re going to cover today, we know that consumers aren’t searching anymore. They’re asking what does that even mean? Visibility is collapsing, not expanding. It’s getting harder and harder and harder to find people like you.

John Clendenning [00:04:22]:

Where the people are now looking. The game is changing massively. Tactics are different. Authenticity is, is more important than ever. We’ll go, go through that as well. And you know anybody who says my business is word of mouth, watch out. I got something coming up for you here to kind of prove that that’s, that’s, that might be a problem. What prepared owners do when everybody else panics and why.

John Clendenning [00:04:53]:

Playing it safe, putting your head in the sand, y2k ing. This is probably the most dangerous strategy. So whether you listen to me, listen to somebody, somebody else do something different. Let’s, let’s talk about what we’re talking, what this is going to all be about. So why should you listen to me? Well if you’ve been around here a while, you Know been in the industry since I was a kid and 1990 and built a, a over a million dollar a year cleaning company starting in a town of 30,000 people. I’ve only found out recently that’s, that’s rare. Under less than 1% of home service businesses ever reach that level. Not just carpet cleaners, but home service businesses.

John Clendenning [00:05:36]:

Only about 15% ever make it to half a million. Most businesses, 80% go out of business in the first five years, another 80% within the next five years. That’s just the Small Business Administration numbers. And so you’re left with 80% and then 80% of the next 80% that leaves you, that’s 94% roughly. So you know, 94 to 96%. Trying to do the math in my head quickly but so call it in the middle 5% actually ever make it 10 years. Very few, very few ever make it to half a million. That’s out of the truck.

John Clendenning [00:06:09]:

That’s crews running and starting to scale. Almost nobody makes it to a million dollar business. But the ones that do get to 2, 3, 5, 10, 9 if they want to as quickly as they want to. There’s a difference. There’s a game being played, there’s, there’s a knowledge gap and that knowledge gap is important. So not saying everybody needs to make it there as well. Some people want to be a carpet cleaner that owns a business, other people want to be a business owner that just happens to own cleaning businesses. You’ve got to pick your lane because there’s two entirely different paths.

John Clendenning [00:06:42]:

So we talk about that as well. So I’ve, I’ve been flown around the world to talk about, they’ve trained call centers and elite cleaning service businesses how to run an experience based business, charge prices higher than your competition, systemize your company, all of that kind of stuff. I’m the, I wrote the book on it, I run the podcast about it. This is, this is what I do, this is what I’ve done since, since high school. So and I was in the truck as a cleaner for less than two years starting in 1995. Decided I wanted to do that second path. I wanted to own businesses and I had to learn a different approach. And I was just a kid, I was a punk nosed 20 something year old kid and I, and shy as all get out as you know the story.

John Clendenning [00:07:30]:

So I, Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, I kind of learned from the masters, Dan Kennedy eventually and, and, and, and, and so we’re going to talk a little bit of how that all kind of dovetails. Obviously Industry leader of the year in cleanfax a couple years ago, my good friend Jeff Cross, I’m on with him every single month on their Take Five and a bunch of their other programs. Then spoke with Howard Partridge. We all know Howard, and Dusty Roberts and Mark Sagers and all those guys. This is my industry. You’re my people. But even more importantly, we’ve got clients that have stabilized businesses. People just like you, grown businesses solve problems, right? And that’s what we’re going to do.

John Clendenning [00:08:20]:

So what do we do? We make at our agency, make our clients the top cleaning brand in their local marketplace so they attract the best clients, are able to charge the top rates, and are booked out weeks in advance, some of them years in advance. Our clients, we were able to say on the phone that when somebody called, we were able to tell them part of our script, part of our social proofing, part of our pacing, you know, to, to get them out of how much does it cost to clean? And oh my gosh, I need you guys, how much extra do I have to pay? There is a way to do that. It’s influence, it’s, it’s learning the right words to say at the right time. And, and we were able to say, well, you know, you know, we’re one of the most in demand. So we are booking out, you know, a week or so in advance. Our next availability isn’t till next Friday. You know, again, part of being the most in demand, our regular clients book a year in advance into our schedule. And we had that, we meant that because we had a program where we pre booked them.

John Clendenning [00:09:20]:

Psychology also got meant that twice as many people had us back for the, that repeat cleaning because we just kind of pulled them along. Hey, you need this. And, and there’s a whole marketing campaign around it, you know, done. Well, again, if you’re the carpet cleaner that runs a business, you still have to market that business to be different. And then there’s things that can be automated and help and you’ll be the guy in the truck. If you’re a business owner that happens to be in the cleaning industry, everything you do is marketing. Every moment, every technician training, Tuesday morning, you know, role playing and, and, and all of that kind of stuff, all of it is marketing. How you answer the phones, how you, how you do everything, how you, between the moment they book a quote or a job and you show up, how you indoctrinate them well so that you, you show up and they’re like eager to have you there and excited and add extra Stuff on.

John Clendenning [00:10:14]:

And your average job goes up to 4, 5, 6, $700. Doable in almost every market. Going to show you that again today as well. But that’s what we do. We talk about this, we do this. We help our clients get there as well. So how do we do this? What’s it all about? What’s this crazy integrative omnipresence marketing system? What does it mean? Integrative omnipresent? Didn’t have room for the word integrative there. But what, what is omnipresence? That, that’s, that’s crazy.

John Clendenning [00:10:37]:

What it is, is you want to maximize the opportunities to generate a qualified lead, qualified inquiry. Do you know what qualified means? We’re going to unpack that today. You want to maximize your brand impressions online, offline, and in the minds of the, of your, your ideal customer, Right. You want to take a customer, I call them a wiggly fish, an ideal customer, and hold on to them for as long as you can. Turn them into a lifetime client. There’s a psychology that creates that. It doesn’t happen on its own. Sure.

John Clendenning [00:11:14]:

You get called back from your clients and they love you and stuff like that. You try that with five and 10 trucks on the road without a system in place. You even two trucks on the road and you’re not in one of them and your business is doing half a million 600, $700,000 a year and you’re working on the business, not in it. You’ve got Janice on the phones and two, two or three technicians out on the road and you have a whole role to play in that company. That’s what I got to learning a lot of the stuff that I impart here. So again, maximizing brand impressions online, off and in the minds of the, of your ideal consumer. And you want to maximize conversions. If you have 10 people coming to your website or to your local service ads or see your flyer or whatever, whatever that is, and you turn two of them into jobs and your average job is 250 bucks.

John Clendenning [00:12:08]:

You made 500 bucks, right? Maybe you get them back once more. You don’t really try. I don’t really market my database, John. I just go for new. New customers, new customers, new customers. That works. Until it doesn’t. And then most people, that’s why you go out of business.

John Clendenning [00:12:23]:

80% in the first five years, another 80% in the next five years, and only 15% make it to that half million because you’re not worrying about the right thing. Right? So again, even if you want to be One guy in a truck and do $200,000 a year and take $125,000 a year home, and the other $75,000 goes to build your brand. Again, rambled a lot there. But if that’s what you want to do, maximizing conversions. Mean instead of 2 out of 10, maybe you get 5 out of 10 right now with better conversions, better scripts, better follow up, better systems, and you collect another two of them on the tail end with lead nurture. Now you’ve got seven out of 10 and maybe your average job, you understand how to pre, preempt, upsell and create better moments in the home. Hire targeting the right client, the right ICP, as they call it. We’ll get into what that means if you’re not sure what that that acronym is.

John Clendenning [00:13:13]:

And now maybe your average job is $500. So now instead of $500 out of 10 inquiries, you’ve got $500 jobs times seven, $3,500. The difference wasn’t the marketing or wasn’t the number of calls, definitely the marketing, but not the 10. The difference was that. But then if you take those, that $3,500 and understand half of them should be lifetime clients worth 5, 10, 15, 20,000. Or as my good friend George Smile says, oh, heck, John, no, $200,000 worth residential clients lifetime value over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. You can track all of this stuff. Now.

John Clendenning [00:13:57]:

You didn’t make $3,500 out of seven people. You’ve gotten four of them to come back for $20,000 each. And you’ve made another 80 over the lifetime value of your, your business. So that 10 inquiries that came in turned into $3,500 in your bank account, not five. That feeds your technicians really well and yourself. And then you’ve turned it into $80,000. Lifetime is at one day, one week, one month. But you’ve turned it into 80,000 for the future your business next week.

John Clendenning [00:14:28]:

80,000 for the future business next week. 80,000 for the future of business. See how this compounds or without it, how it shrinks. So that’s where we’re going to get into, how we get to that point. Here’s the scary problem. There has never been a year like 2026. And I’m not. This isn’t hyperbole.

John Clendenning [00:14:48]:

I’m going to make a proof case that this is one of the most pivotal, pivotal years on planet Earth. The way people buy work and experience. Life has already changed forever. And it changed in the last 24 months. Not even Kind of rolled down the highway over the last three or four years. Changes and we feel it, we see it. If you follow the news, if you, if you go to independent media, if you get off the mainstream, if you look around, if you, you do your research, that’s allowed, you know what I’m saying? Right. I’m going to make a quick proof case on that and then we’ll get into what do we do as business owners in this cleaning industry to respond for that.

John Clendenning [00:15:42]:

So consumers aren’t searching anymore. They’re asking, asking long winded questions. We know that we’re going to talk about this. So asking is different than searching. Keywords don’t matter anywhere near as much as they used to. And starting in the beginning of 2020, 25, 1-1-2025. But 1% of the population used LLMs, Chad, GBT, Gemini, the whole AI war that’s going on. One’s jumping over the other Grok and, and Perplexity and, and, and, and Claude, why do I know about this? Every Friday with four other of my smartest agency friends, we run the AI Marketing Experts Podcast.

John Clendenning [00:16:20]:

Go look us up on YouTube and or your favorite podcast platform. We’ve got 30, 40 episodes out. We speak with guests. I am, I’ve been deep in the weeds on this for three, four years minimum. We build AI agents, we build AI workflows. I built most of this presentation without having to type a word with a, with just going back and forth with, with, with an AI agent that out and do the research, put, you know, did the slide together, move this over there, do that, that’s, that’s simple now to me it might be simple to you, might be hard to you, but that, the point is I couldn’t probably do it. I couldn’t do that that way. Three, four months ago, the technology barely existed.

John Clendenning [00:17:00]:

So that’s what we’re dealing with. Most cleaners like the market is split into two. This is, this is, this is a big, a big point we’re going to drive home as well. The market is split into two and most cleaners are targeting the wrong side. I talk to 10 to 20 cleaners a week last week, not so many because it was Christmas. This week we got New Year’s, not so many. But there’s a re, there’s a reality check for 2026. It’s getting worse.

John Clendenning [00:17:27]:

So we got a split in the road and now it’s getting worse and it’s going to continue to get worse. I’m going to prove this to you. How do I know it’s going to get worse. Don’t take my word for it. Go look this up yourself. 1980 to 2020 was an exception in the economy, not the rule. We had rapid globalization, rising of emerging markets, offshore jobs, 40 years of declining. That 40 year period of declining interest rates, they started at 20%, right? 40 years, it was 20% fell to near zero.

John Clendenning [00:18:06]:

The feds in every country flooded the system with money. If you own stocks, real estate, assets, a business, anything, you got richer, you made more money. Wages might have stayed flat, but the value of your home started to soar, right? You, you’re wealthier behind you kind of idea. But here’s the thing. That era is over. This isn’t a little blip. Read the room. That era is gone, right? The rules have changed.

John Clendenning [00:18:35]:

And your customers, they’re living in a completely different economy now than their parents did. So again, will money printers be turned back on? M2, money supply, M1? Yeah, absolutely. I follow this stuff. I have investments. I crypto. I’ve loved crypto since 2013. My first Bitcoin, I bought in 2013 as a weird kid or a weird adult, I guess mid adult. But yeah, this is a real thing and it’s continuing.

John Clendenning [00:19:05]:

So this inflation is real. The real inflation is not 2%. Real inflation is sitting 9, 10% or more, depending on who you listen to. The S&P 500 is almost dead flat. If you put money in the stock, the index, all you’re doing is trying to keep up with the eroding of your cash. Well, very small percentage of the market even has money in the stock market. Your customers, the middle class, not a thing. We know this cost of living.

John Clendenning [00:19:32]:

2020 eggs. Why are we talking about eggs? I don’t know. The media talks about eggs. $1.20 missed a decimal point. There was not $120. Let’s see if I got my little cursor. There you go. $1.20 per dozen now.

John Clendenning [00:19:48]:

$5.29 per dozen on average across the country again, source USDA BLS Consumer Price Index. That’s just eggs. That means rent, food, school, health care. Soaring, families are squeezed. Carpet cleaning becomes a luxury. It was something you could, you could sell to people because. Yeah, I got some spare cash. Yep.

John Clendenning [00:20:09]:

Yeah, we’ll go for Chinese food tonight. Let’s get the carpet cleaners in. You know, buy the second car now. It’s becoming a luxury. So there’s an answer to this, right? The wealth gap is real. This is real. 10% of the population has investments. Is Wealthier and well, they calling it a K shaped economy.

John Clendenning [00:20:28]:

Half the population is getting poorer while the other half is getting richer. It’s not. Oh, the rich are bad. Nope, just different. They people with investments, people with, with money, with savings, with, with things like that did different things and it’s benefiting them while it’s really hard to benefit the rest. Part of that is the way we offshore stuff and all the things we do did and the changes are going on. Right. But Today the top 1% own 25% of the wealth back in 1980.

John Clendenning [00:20:59]:

Today it’s over 30.5% and growing. The affluent are pulling away. It’s just getting wider. Your average customer has less discretionary income to spend on services now than they did even just five years ago. Right. And I’m sure you hear it right. So the affluent are untouched, they’re wealthier, they feel better. Even if their price of eggs went up.

John Clendenning [00:21:21]:

They’ve got more money and investments in the bank and feel wealthier. So you know, home values for them are soaring. The portfolios are hitting all time highs. People feel wealthier, they spend on premium services, they spend more again, a $202,000 in home cleaning of your carpets, upholstery and area rugs to a smiley dude like this, not a problem. $2,000 cleaning to an average middle class person would mean they can’t go with groceries this month. So now you’re trying to do a $200 cleaning. Two different worlds. So think about it.

John Clendenning [00:21:59]:

Think about your marketing, Think about your business. Think about what you’re targeting right now. Are you targeting price shoppers with discounts and deals? Is everybody calling you up for price? If they’re all calling you up for price, it’s because you’re marketing price. You’re picking the people that care about price. Everybody is not your customer. You have to pick your ideal person that you want to target. You have to know your demographics of your marketplace, know your competitors. You have to know your business again.

John Clendenning [00:22:26]:

If you want to be that business owner that owns cleaning services. And even if you want to be a cleaner that happens to own your own business, you need to target the people that can pay you enough that you can go do two jobs a day and make $801,000 and still get home to, you know, kiss the wife and you know, help the kids with homework. So which one of these two do you want? The loyal customer. That trust, that values trust is repeat and referrals. You stay in touch with them, they love who you are and what you Talk about they value you, they value your technicians. Imagine what it looks like when you go into that house, what you have to look like when you go into that house, what your technicians have to look like and smell like and feel like and speak like to go into that house compared to that guy’s house. This guy just had buddies over for the weekend and his buddy Sam just puked all over the carpet. And he’s just looking for a cheap way to get the puke out so he doesn’t have to rent a machine.

John Clendenning [00:23:22]:

This last. Here she is taking care of her home. She has a job in corporate or medical or owns her own business. Her husband makes money as well, or a partner. And they have children and pets and they are they. To them, the world’s a wonderful place, right? So which one of this does your marketing attract? Which one of this does your messaging attract? Which one of this does your foundations attract? Your compelling sales proposition, your risk reversal guarantees your founder’s story, your story brand. Which one of it do you emote? Think about that. Because you might be on the playing field, but you might be playing the wrong game entirely.

John Clendenning [00:24:08]:

Competing on price attracts people who can’t spend more. More competitors entering the marketplace. We saw this in 2008, 9, 10, the, the housing crash, right? It wasn’t what we’re going to be talking about here. It was a blip that resolved itself. I’m going to make a case why that’s, that’s entirely different right now. But what we saw was as, as people got on, laid off and unemployed and unemployment rose and interest rates rose, all that kind of stuff. More people just entered the cleaning services right now. Franchising is at a record high.

John Clendenning [00:24:44]:

People are looking for franchises and other business opportunities left, right and center. So there are more competitors entering our marketplace and some of them are farther ahead in their knowledge. They came from a corporate job starting a cleaning business. Look at rolling suds, pressure washing. Hey, Aaron, how’s it going? New Aaron back from franchise days more and more. My buddy Brett reminded me of Aaron recently. Yeah, fast growing, fast. One of the fastest growing franchises.

John Clendenning [00:25:14]:

And it’s Pressure Washington because. And you’re. The whole goal is not to be the operator in the truck, is to own the business and hire the operators so you can grow it right. Affluent customers are spending, but they’re not looking at you. If you show videos, if you run Facebook ads and Facebook ads used to do 10, 15, $20,000 a month worth of transactional customers showing dirty black carpets getting completely clean. Oh, my God. Look what we could do with cleaning. Guess who doesn’t have dirty black carpets.

John Clendenning [00:25:41]:

Guess who that doesn’t relate to. Think about it. So this only ends one way. Unless you shift. We’re going to talk about that next. Disruption. AI is disrupting everything. These are the job losses globally due to AI.

John Clendenning [00:25:55]:

Permanent job losses. You are facing more competition, more people entering the marketplace with fewer customers who can afford you just let that sink in for a minute. There is an adjustment needed. This is why I’m saying 2026 is a pivotal year. AI is getting better and smarter. There’s an arms race between all of them. Google sat in the background, sat in the background most of 2025 and looked bad. And all of a sudden we just did a podcast on this recently and all of a sudden just leapfrogged ahead with Gemini 3.

John Clendenning [00:26:24]:

They were cooking in the kitchen in the background like crazy. To the point. Sam Altman at OpenAI and issued code Red there a couple weeks ago. All hands on deck. We got to get back ahead. We’re losing market share. Google’s not going anywhere. And their behemoth Open AI Chat GPT.

John Clendenning [00:26:44]:

That’s the background of chat GPT. Huge. And then you’ve got the other players. Claude Perplexity Deep Seek from China and now Alibaba’s got their own massive AI in China. We got Grok and, and, and, and, and this whole. And then Rufus on Amazon. Like, come on. They’re all their own data centers and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:27:08]:

So. And they’re replacing Jobs. Robotics is place replacing Jobs. Atlas Robot is going to replace Jobs. Like and then there’s going to be new Jobs but different and sort of less needed. Listen to what Elon said recently about we have to get over this hump to get to a utopia at some point. It’s it, it. This is transformational in human existence.

John Clendenning [00:27:29]:

So the real shift is happening in the market. Buyer behavior is evolving, not disappearing. The decision to be influenced before customer ever searched. Right. So decisions are being influenced. Are you influencing your customers before they even search? Do you even know what that means? You understand? People need to used to say they need to see you like 11 times. Google zmont0 moment of truth. Needed to know you, see you, trust you, your brand.

John Clendenning [00:27:53]:

11 times before they took the box off the shelf or called the carpet cleaner. Now they’re saying it’s over. 20 are touching. 20 times before they ever reach out, before they ever search. Do they know your name in their head before they look around? Trust, familiarity and recommendation signals now lead choice Simply online. It’s no longer enough being online. Fewer business are showing up. Recommended platforms are filtering aggressively.

John Clendenning [00:28:18]:

Visibility is, is earned through brand recognition, consistency, sentiment of real people, not just Google reviews. People don’t make it there anymore. The AI information is well above that and that’s only in Google. People are going ChatGPT is not Google. They’re not even going into Google. Like when you talk to your home device and say, you know, hey Alexa, hey, don’t talk about Siri yet. IPhone. Apple’s way behind on this one but you know, hey G o o gl I got one on my desk, I don’t want it talking to me right now.

John Clendenning [00:28:54]:

I just got mine upgraded to Gemini in it so it’s not that dumb voice that you have to say 20 times to turn the lights on. It now has a conversation. Yes jc what would you like to talk about? And off we go right there. That’s a huge shift. So what I’m going to walk you through, that’s the pain. There’s a problem. You either care about it or you put your head in the sand. It’s still coming, it’s still a freight train rolling down the highway.

John Clendenning [00:29:19]:

I want to share you the clear path for better clients, predictable growth and real scaling. That’s what we’re going to do right now. This is part one of a two part training that we do every year. This one is getting you in the right mindset and getting the groundwork running and giving you something to think about and some homework to do. And the next one is rolling up our sleeves and putting it in place. Right. So we’re going to kind of touch a little bit on the putting in place. We’re going to really go deep on the next one.

John Clendenning [00:29:47]:

What prepared owners do everyone else, when, when everyone else panics, what do we do? Prepared owners plan before pressure forces a decision. Are you planning before the drop off happen? The cliff shows up. Less people, less people, less customers, less returning, more competition, less of your customers coming back. I don’t market my database. Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do. I don’t have people referring me. I don’t go out and you know, I don’t, I don’t work the system, I don’t build the machine. I’m not, I don’t price right.

John Clendenning [00:30:18]:

I’m trying to match everybody’s prices. I don’t, I don’t have upsells and offers and I’m you know, blah, blah. There’s a list, the list is long. I’m not even going to go down the list. You invest in market position, not experiments. You protect your brand visibility as your core asset at all costs. And I’m going to tell you right now, your brand. Whoops, terrible.

John Clendenning [00:30:39]:

I gotta, I gotta fix that for us. Let’s erase all your brand. There we go. Is what you sell when you go to sell the business. Very few home service businesses, especially carpet cleaning business or cleaning businesses sell. I sold mine for a really pretty penny. All of my businesses, right because I didn’t sell the equipment, I sold the brand and the systems and the predictability. That’s what you want to get to even if it’s a one man show, right? And you right now you might want to be the buyer of businesses of the ones that don’t know what they got.

John Clendenning [00:31:13]:

Playing a safe is the most dangerous strategy. Pulling back feels responsible. Everybody said oh it’s the market’s getting slow, I got to back off on my marketing. There is not a marketer on the planet who made, who didn’t, who, who stayed in business, who backed off on marketing. When things got tough, they doubled down. They might have cut costs everywhere else. They might have found better supplies, cheaper suppliers. They might have worked out terms and deals and they market, market, market, market relentlessly to anybody and everybody that has their ideal customer as eyeballs so that they can get in front of them.

John Clendenning [00:31:49]:

So you need to think of where that is. There’s lots of places. Stability and growth today requires decisive action. Past choices to protect comfort is not the future. I’ve talked to businesses all the time going yep, we’ve, you know, things are stable, they’re slip, they haven’t grown. Things are different in the last year too. It’s because what got you here is not going to get you there. So we’re going to plan for the next 12 months so we get you there.

John Clendenning [00:32:17]:

That’s why you’re here. You’re in a very select crowd. So honor that we must remain visible no matter what. What deserves focus and what doesn’t is going to be talked about for the next little bit and we protect the momentum going into the new year. I want to show you what’s happening and how to protect that. Hopefully that feels good. So there’s lots of marketing choices. Where do you invest? It’s a really good question.

John Clendenning [00:32:48]:

Do, what do you invest? How do you even know? Right. We got, we got SEO now it’s considered search everywhere optimization, not engine everywhere optimization. Right. Geo is another is now the AI or AI SEO or there’s all like nobody settled on a term yet, but generative search is. That is the other thing we’ve got paid ads. Paid ads are now starting to get Google starting to put paid ads in the results because Google doesn’t make money when somebody searches. They make money from you being an advertiser. They want you to advertise.

John Clendenning [00:33:26]:

And if, if they, if people aren’t making it to the ads, you stop advertising. They don’t make money. This is the big fix, the big shift they’ve got on Google Maps Organic that is starting to feed. Always good. Do you know how far you actually show up? Is it 1 mile, 3 miles, 5 miles, 10 miles? And you know for how many services you show up? Is it just carpet cleaning? Is it carpet cleaners near me? Is it like what were all the different, like the multitude of terms for every one of the services? Do you show up for your upholstery cleaning, your tile cleaning, your area cleaning? Do you know any of that? Do you have a provider that’s showing you that? Right. You’ve got to target each of those separately. Right. That’s now starting to show up in.

John Clendenning [00:34:05]:

Oops, lost my mouse. The geo. Social media is influencing AI and geo and then you’ve got every door mail so that you can step completely outside of this. There’s good, better best ways to do that. There’s the right timing to do that. There’s when it fits into the budget. There is like an order of operations and then you’ve got referrals, referral partners. And every job begets more jobs.

John Clendenning [00:34:31]:

Ideal client avatar allows you to be in front of all of the rest of them and a lot more. There’s a lot more ways that every carpet cleaner should just start checking the list off and going, you know, all the way down. Yep, I’m getting, I’m getting a 3 to 1 ROI. Let me find my. Oops. Where is he? There he is, way up there. Like I can never see where this little mouse is. It’s such a tiny dot there.

John Clendenning [00:34:55]:

So we are going to say, yep, I got Google Ads running. Oh, should I put them on Bing? What about Facebook ads Done right. Facebook ads aren’t three rooms in a hall. Discount people didn’t go to Facebook to find a carpet cleaner today. They went to Google, Bing and other places like that. But you can influence them and create a billboard effect and still break even, make money. Instagram, YouTube, another great one. Google Maps Organic, like on and on.

John Clendenning [00:35:19]:

We’ve got this whole thing and we walk our clients through all of this as far as they want to want us to take them again, lead a horse to water. We will help you where we can. So it’s a major investment to market? Yes. It’s not an expense. Marketing is an investment in growth. You don’t invest in growth. Growth stops. Not right away, sometimes right away, but usually three months, six months down the road.

John Clendenning [00:35:43]:

All of a sudden you’re just slowing down because of what you didn’t do in January of 2026. Right. So January 2026, if you’re in northern climates, keep the lights on, go get work. There’s lots of plans for that. We’ll be doing a training for our clients on that shortly. John Braun, you’ve got a training on that as well? Yeah, keep the lights on, do stuff. Right. There’s ways to keep the business busy and keep the technicians employed and all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:36:12]:

What we’re doing now is what we had to do in 2008. Nine during a recession. The housing bubble is now an actual auto loan bubble. There’s a whole nother one coming down, but we won’t even talk about that. So. But marketing is an investment of time, energy and finances. And there’s a amount that you need to put behind it. And there’s a mix that, that, that works.

John Clendenning [00:36:33]:

Well, if you’re not getting much to show for it. There might be a couple of reasons why marketing isn’t a. I’ve talked to people going, oh, I spent $5,000. I sent out a whole bunch of, of postcards and yeah, crickets. Didn’t get anything. I’m going, okay, $5,000. How many, how many runs did you do over what period of time to what neighborhood? Oh, I did it once. 20 z mot have they seen you 20 times? At least 5 to 7 in the world of advertising.

John Clendenning [00:37:07]:

You know the old, you know the old door to door guys in yellow pages, five to seven times before, right. One, it’s got to be put into the mix of what you’re doing to be omnipresent in your marketplace. Then you are going, oh, van, door hanger, yard, sign this, that. Boom, boom, boom. Social media all over the place now. Door hanger or postcard. Oh, honey, do you want to call these guys? One and done. Spray and pray.

John Clendenning [00:37:34]:

Marketing has never worked. So you don’t have a clear plan, you overspend or worse, you underspend. Right? So I got a workbook here. Carpet Cleaner, marketingmasters.com 2026 workbook. It’s going to look like this. It’s where it’s going to take you, you’re going to make a copy of it, you’re going to print it off. I would suggest you print it off, not leave it in PDF form and you’re going to start filling it up. We’re going to walk about, we’re going to walk through some of this right now, but you’re going to go to the workbook and you’re going to, you’re going to think through some stuff now and between now and the next, next webinar because there’s an opportunity here.

John Clendenning [00:38:09]:

With a clear plan and goals and targets, you have something to aim at. Could you imagine jumping in a car and going, hey, let’s go. Where are we going? Don’t know. That way. Where are you gonna end up? Right? Jump in a boat. Hope you try and find where you don’t. You have to have a plan. Businesses with a plan are the ones that make it past five year.

John Clendenning [00:38:35]:

Five are part of the 15% are part of the 1%. You learn what you don’t know and you grow. You have to have enough inquiries to hit your goals and grow your business. Do you know how many inquiries you need? It’s a number. It’s a number based on other numbers. You have to have a return on your investment, an roi. Do you know what a good ROI is in carpet clean? Everybody says, oh, I want to spend $300 and I want to be. Make that, have that, make me $20,000.

John Clendenning [00:39:05]:

That’s not a thing. That’s not a thing. That doesn’t exist. If that existed, it’s a flash in the pan because everybody else would figure it out too. And next thing you know, it wouldn’t work. That was local service ads early in the day. That was pay per click ads early in the day. That was even Facebook ads early in the day.

John Clendenning [00:39:22]:

You could run ads, get a whole bunch of people to. Everybody started doing it until the market got flooded. People saw it too much, the cost went up and the ROI went down. And you still didn’t probably get the right customer because now you hired a discount customer that just wants to discount and a deal from somebody else next time, right? You want a return on investment now. And in our business, right, we’re not like roofers that make 20, $30,000 a roof or even $10,000, $15,000 a roof, wherever they’re, you know, whatever they’re repairing and replacing and stuff like that. And therefore you can, you can spend, you know, you can think of a customer in that, that, that regard we make a couple hundred dollars, but many times they don’t ever get back to that house. We get to make that 5, 10, 15, $20,000 from the same house or the same commercial business. Right.

John Clendenning [00:40:08]:

We get to make that. We just have to do it over time. So the lifetime value of the client, knowing that number determines as well how much you should invest in your marketing. Right. So locking that in and getting better at that marketing to get them back, marketing to get them back, not hoping and praying means you can spend more to get them the right people as well. You start knowing those numbers and it’s like you work your way up. So what are your goals again? Success is based on goals. All else is commentary.

John Clendenning [00:40:39]:

Thank you, Brian Tracy. Great books to read, stuff to get in your head. 90% of the how to run a great business is between the ears, not out there. With no direction, you are literally dead in the water. Right? Clear goals, wind in your sails, you are moving in the direction. And the cool thing is, even if the direction’s a little bit off. Ready, Fire. Aim.

John Clendenning [00:41:02]:

Fire. Aim, Fire. Aim. Oh, bullseye. Now you can hit it. Even if the direction’s a little bit off, you know, it’s a little bit off because you took your shot. Minimum viable, get it out. Good, better, best is the way my brain works.

John Clendenning [00:41:15]:

I work in frameworks. Good, better, best. So you get something started, give it a try. Iterate, iterate, iterate over time, come back around to it. Right? That’s running a business. Harvard study found that, you know, in 1979, review of grads, 84% had no specific goals. 13% had written their goals down or had not written them, but it stated them. 3% wrote their goals down and what they wanted to accomplish.

John Clendenning [00:41:41]:

Interestingly, they followed up with these. I think it was 20 years later. I don’t think we’ve got it on here. But the 13% of the class who had goals were earning on average twice as much as the 84%. The 84% that never had a goal. Still, Harvard still one of the best ivy League schools ever. 13. The 13% that wrote the goals down when they graduated were earning on average twice as much.

John Clendenning [00:42:09]:

More staggering this 3%. These guys had goals. Sorry. These guys wrote their goals, put plans in place to accomplish it. Right. They were earning 10 times as much as the entire rest of the crowd. Goals give you somewhere to go. So we set clear goals.

John Clendenning [00:42:28]:

Do you have written goals? You need a one year goal. What’s the business going to look like this day next year? What is Your quarterly goal. We call those rocks around here. I’m a big proponent of the Gino Wickman’s Entrepreneur Operating System. Read the book, get a grip. It’s easier than reading traction. Even better. Audiobooks, Way better.

John Clendenning [00:42:49]:

Grab the book to highlight and make study notes and dog ear and all that kind of stuff. But listen to the audio. You get the understanding of how to, even if you’re a company of one, how to set realistic goals, how to put the time in. Put the time in, schedule it on your calendar. It’s like, I’m not taking a job on Friday afternoon from after 2 o’ clock or after 1 o’ clock because I’m going home, I’m going to sit down and this is, this is work. It’s still work. Well, I. If I don’t do a job, I don’t make money.

John Clendenning [00:43:20]:

If you don’t do this, you don’t make future. So you have quarterly goals and then you have monthly goals to put the quarterly rocks in place. You can really only do about three or four things in a quarter, three or four big goals. So you break them down into monthly goals. You must have a stopping point at the beginning of every new year, end of each quarter. And we also like to do it halfway through the year to reflect and adjust your aim. That’s all it is. So ready, fire.

John Clendenning [00:43:46]:

Aim, Right? That’s why I love Entrepreneur Operating System. Works great with my brain. Right? So what are your revenue targets? How much is that monthly? How many jobs will that require? What is your average job value? All of those are levers that create this amount, this momentum. So I’ve had people saying, yep, John, I did $80,000 last year and I want to hit half a million next year. Okay, it’s aggressive. I wouldn’t be in the truck if you’re going to do that. So who’d you hire? Because you have an entirely different role to play in the company. If you’re going to be that aggressive.

John Clendenning [00:44:23]:

You have a lot of things to build and fix as they break, right? That’s huge. What’s your average job right now? Oh, $180, John. Okay. It needs to be 800. How are we going to get there? I’m going to show you the math, right? Break that down like 40,000amonth gets you to half a million a year. You’re doing 80,000 a year right now, which is but 6,7000amonth. From 7 to 40, what is your $33,000 a month plan? And how many technicians do you need? And what’s your average job. Right.

John Clendenning [00:44:56]:

It becomes business math. So you just figure it out. If you’re going to do it, put a plan in place to do it. Make sure it’s reasonable. So say you wanted to hit half a million dollars, 45.8 thousand a month. If your average job is $375 you need 122 jobs a month. Well it doesn’t sound that hard. Well how many of the people that reach out to you inquiries, how many book? Think about that.

John Clendenning [00:45:25]:

Your average conversion rate, you’re booking at 30%. Everybody says they book at 80% 70%. Go back actually do the numbers per source, your repeats. Absolutely. Referrals should be really close to 100% as well. But what about local service ads? If you’re cheap you might get a lot of calls but then you’re not building a long term client the lifetime value where all the money is. So right. Do the math.

John Clendenning [00:45:50]:

Think of the persuasion, do all that kind of stuff. Divide the number, divide your call target your inquiry target by your conversion rate. So if you average a 50% booking rate on cold business now you need 244 and 50 is pretty high. We, we’ve got some clients peaking a little bit above that 60, 65%. Way to go Addison. Right. But last couple months we’ve had other clients that thought they were really high and they were at 30, 32% when we, when we listen to the calls, gave them the real numbers. Right.

John Clendenning [00:46:29]:

So 244 inquiries. Now where are those coming from? That’s not a Facebook ad. It’s not pay per click. That’s not getting more reviews on your Google. Right. You got to think that through so you can go to this. We’re going to go deeper in this next time. But this is carpet cleaner marketmasters.com 2026worksheet so we had Workbook and now we’ve got Worksheet Worksheet and I’m actually building an app for this.

John Clendenning [00:46:54]:

Didn’t get it out in time. So you’re going to deal with the Excel one but I’m building an app. We do have a PPC calculator that I have turned into an app for to determine actually how much to invest in PPC and stuff like that. So but you’re going to go here, you’re going to make a copy. You can watch this training. You click there, there’s actually a link to watch your training but you’re going to put your dollar amount in of your annual target. It’s Going to tell you the monthly amount, right? Just average. It’s going to.

John Clendenning [00:47:22]:

You’re going to put your average ticket. Get that off the front screen of your house call pros, your service monster, your Marquette. Hopefully you’re using something to put your database in and keep your numbers because you’re in business. You own a business, right? You need to your database. That’s your most important asset and you need to know your numbers. So you need this in this example, half the size. The other one needs 56. Book at 45%.

John Clendenning [00:47:42]:

Know that number and you know you need 123 inquiries. Book at 35% and you need 159 inquiries. Book at 55%. You only need 101 inquiries, right. What is your average cost to acquire to get a call? You can break it down over here. It will automatically plug that number back in here. Realize that even some of those calls are from repeats and referrals. How much do you spend to market them? Oh, I send text messages and an email once in a while.

John Clendenning [00:48:16]:

It’s free. How well is that working? Are you getting a client retention rate of 50%? Half your clients come back. Did you know that a customer needs to come back three times before they’ve locked in and chose you potentially for the rest of their lives? Right. How do you get back into the home three times in the first six months? I had a program for that. When I learned that, I built a program that 30% of our clients had it back into their house three times within the first six months. Why? Because I wanted to lock in for life, know a number, build a business around it. Right. So that’s just.

John Clendenning [00:48:47]:

It’s just again, don’t know. Learn it now, you know, do it. It’s one step at a time. So this will help you walk you through that. It’ll teach you about the budget allocation. Marketing budget should be about 20% right here. If you actually hover over that, it tells you 15%. You’re treading water.

John Clendenning [00:49:03]:

15% of revenue going towards marketing. All revenue going toward marketing. You’re treading water, hoping nobody else runs past you because you just don’t have enough revenue to do everything you need to do. 20% of revenue, really good for growth, Right. And that’s all in. I mean that includes the uniforms, the shirts, the gals that go out. If you’ve got somebody else doing the outreach for you and things like that, their wage, their incentives, you name it. Referral, reward programs, cash going back, everything that goes into generating the next job, the Next customer, the next customer, repeat client, all of that, referral sources that get you them.

John Clendenning [00:49:36]:

All of that’s marketing, right? 10% is way too conservative. If you’re at 10% all, yeah, I can tell you probably a guy in a truck, maybe you got two guys in a truck, you might have great word of mouth. That’s going away and I can prove it to you. So then you can break this down, we can walk through this. If you want to jump on a call with me, we can go through and figure it all out. And then you build your marketing calendar for the year. So pretty good resource, going to be turned into an app. Just wanted to share that with you.

John Clendenning [00:50:03]:

So you got your goals, you know, your inquiries, who you’re targeting. This is just the very next. This is a logical order. What do I want to do, who do I target? Right, Marketing. Who, what and how? So who you’re marketing to, what message do they want to hear and how are you going to get in front of them? Who is your ideal customer? If you can see Joe Jones through Joe Jones eyes, then you can sell what Joe Jones buys. Do you know what people with a investment portfolio worth $5, $10 million, retirement portfolio, their house valued at a million in Canada, that’s nothing. That’s a three bedroom bungalow, unfortunately in Toronto. But do you know what any of these things are right? And they did.

John Clendenning [00:50:58]:

You know what, what they think about, what they care about, what keeps them awake at night. It’s not the same things that keep you and I awake at night. It’s just not. We don’t market ourselves. We market our client avatar. That’s our client avatar, right? A little bit blurry. I should probably fix that someday. It’s been blurry for, for every time I’ve used this slide in training.

John Clendenning [00:51:19]:

So who is our ideal avatar? Well, in our cleaning world, it’s a 35 to 55 year old. It’s typically the female that reaches out, married couple, kids. That’s probably going down. I would probably say it’s probably one to two kids. Now the annual income, oh my gosh, that should have a one. And like demographically, let me find my little cursor again. That should be a, like we’re talking 100 to 150,000 a year, 200,000 a year. Even better.

John Clendenning [00:51:50]:

The people that live around golf courses, ideal customers for a lot of us. If that’s not the crowd, we’ve got to be very specific. But think doctors, lawyers, accountants, chiropractors, that kind of idea, right? Family oriented, reliable pet Owners. Can we find some commercial jobs like that? Commercial businesses. That’s a different avatar. Build one for both. It’s actually in the workbook talks about building one for both. Build one for your ideal residential client.

John Clendenning [00:52:14]:

Build one for your ideal commercial client. So commercial you need way more volume and not get kicked out next time the person who’s in charge of hiring the cleaning companies changes. Homeowners just need to continue to love you. They’ll keep calling you back until they’re friends. So a little bit more stable if you do it right. The other one’s a little bit harder. But both work in the right environment. Right.

John Clendenning [00:52:38]:

So they typically live in higher end neighborhoods, all that kind of stuff. They’re not Granny. Love granny to death. Love my granny when she was Alive. They’re not 12th floor of A, an apartment building, you know, that wears slippers and the carpet doesn’t get dirty for like years. It’s not our ideal client. We want people bouncing on couches and big media rooms spilling popcorn and pop and you know, you name it and the dog runs through the kitchen, needs the tile clean, needs everything sealed and protected and you know, use sager sauce and protect the whole thing and all those kinds of things. We want that crowd.

John Clendenning [00:53:14]:

So you know, they can’t get a company on the phone. Maybe they’re frustrated with AI. Some people AI first gets a little challenge. I still like humans in the loop first AI as your triage in your backup or at least in the self discovery phase. Right. They, they, they’re worried about being ripped off. They need to know that you have happy customers. So you need to be telling them happy customer stories everywhere they look.

John Clendenning [00:53:42]:

They don’t want to be paying too much for something they need to know. As Marcus Sheridan, they ask you answer and can’t remember the name of his new book right now need to get in my head. There’s a self serve economy. People want to walk their way through to a near end point and then justify, have the conversation to solve. So you want to have content on your website, content on social media, not quotes, not prices, not exact. Because you don’t know that until you show up. And that should be obvious. Right? Carpet cleaning is time and materials.

John Clendenning [00:54:12]:

How do you know for sure if this mansion is 8,000 square feet and that one’s 4,000 square feet, they’re going to be vastly different prices. So you’re not giving a quote and you’re not giving a discount because it’s too big. That’s kind of silly as well, right? So you’re going to give them good, better best options and things like that. Right. But you want to make sure that they know going into it they can do their research, not just read Google reviews, do the research and know other people are talking about you. That’s your brand, that’s your marketing. So. And they’ve got these desires, having the issue behind them being able to, you know, drive a nice car, live in a nice home, have guests over, clean it before, clean it right after again, right.

John Clendenning [00:54:50]:

The number of times that our ideal clients, we’d do a winter promotion where we’d clean the before Christmas and provide a half off cleaning after Christmas once the tree’s down, right. Once, once Uncle Tom spilled the gravy, we’ll come back again. Things like that, right. Commercially, great time of year to have a winter slop and muck. Protect your carpets now and we’ll come back in the spring for a deal. We’ll use our, you know, we’ll do a full extraction clean now and protect and we’ll do a end cap in, in May and we’ll call it a bundle. Like there’s ways to do this. So can you make the case for messages they want? Right.

John Clendenning [00:55:27]:

I don’t, you know, same day estimates, same day quotes, things like that. I don’t, not same day service. That’s, I mean for your ideal clients you can have a sort of a VIP club where they can sort of jump in and for only 20 extra they can have you pop out at the end of the day today and your technician gets the whole 20 as a bonus or most of it. And, and now you got a technician that’s quite happy when he comes back to the shop or before he comes back to the shop. Hey, is there any, you know, any calls? Because they’re going to make an extra 150, 200 bucks just to go and solve a problem because you know, you know, the executive came home and their dog got into the crayons and rainbow pooped all over the carpet and you’re going to go fix that, right? So that, that, that should cost more. You want to leave the job site squeaky clean. These are messages. Experience, proven track record, background checks, meet the team, you know, videos and training, you know, all that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:56:19]:

Great service guarantee. If you’re not happy, not only you’re not paying, we’re going to come back and reclean it. You’re going to have what I call the recipe for recovery. If you have to come back so that you turn that, that unfortunate experience into a Lifetime client because of the way you solve the problem. And. And Right. So what’s your message? Right. Who are you targeting? Some takeaways from that.

John Clendenning [00:56:44]:

Now you know who’s the right people to target? Where are they in your marketplace? You need to do some demographic research. The old days that used to be going to library. Now that’s going to chat GPT or perplexity and ask a bunch of good questions. How many people? How many households? What are we doing? Is this growing? Is it shrinking? But like just, just spend an hour. You will have really cool demographic data. Call us up. We’ll help you with it. Now you want to make sure your hub converts.

John Clendenning [00:57:09]:

What’s your hub? Your hub’s your website. And I hear this a lot more now. People have heard clicks are down massively. Zero click search people search. Get a recommendations. Never saw your website because AI is now the new word of mouth. And influencing AI is not a little game. I’ve got a buddy, Lane Hook.

John Clendenning [00:57:33]:

Hey Lane, if you hear this, the Spark framework charges from 3,500 to $15,000 a month to make businesses and their websites and their companies AI ready. He ran the Quantum Agency. One of the smartest guys on the subject. I know. I’ve got a personally signed copy of his book. It’s about yay thick. And the sops to run that program even ten times thicker. Right.

John Clendenning [00:58:00]:

So it isn’t just a. I got mentioned in LLMs. How? I don’t know. This little tool just told me that’s not the game. There’s. There’s a way to know this. There’s a way to this. So search is way down.

John Clendenning [00:58:12]:

Or search clicks are way down, but search is way up. What the heck does that mean? What it means is that more people are getting better answers, that they’re asking more questions by a lot. Like massively a lot. Our cars. Now the GPS is now in. Cars are rolling out with AI in it. So it’s like, you know, you know, hey, Revy, whatever you want to call your call car. If I had one on my car, I’d probably call them Revy.

John Clendenning [00:58:39]:

Hey, Revy. Yes, J.C. yeah, I need to grab some flowers on the way home. And apparently some Chinese that’s gluten free. Can you figure that out for me? Yes. I can map you to this. Here’s a couple of choices for you. Guess what it just did.

John Clendenning [00:58:56]:

It searched for you. Here’s a couple of choices. Which one do you. Oh, I’ve heard of that one brand. Haven’t heard of any because Nobody’s doing good marketing. Pick one for me. This is our world now. Everything’s changing in 2026.

John Clendenning [00:59:09]:

Right? Oh, and by the way, I also need to hire a carpet cleaning company. You know, before the big game. I want to make sure it smells nice in that media room. Carpets and the, and the, the 27 foot sectional around the big screen. You know, the 150 inch big screen on the wall or the projector TV. What you know, who should I call? Well, you got a lot of choices, but one of the best ones would be this. They have the best customer comments. I’ve checked all of these sources, whatever.

John Clendenning [00:59:47]:

They might be a little bit more pricey, but it’s a different answer. How did it figure that out? Your website. Right. So why the f do I even need a website in 2026? You need a great site to train AI, so it needs a lot more content styled in a very specific way. This is not about getting ChatGPT to write your content on your website. That’s not what that is. Dribble. You need to have well trained.

John Clendenning [01:00:17]:

If you’re people, you can use AI in the mix as an assistant, but you better be talking. You better have a really, really, really, really, really deep coded system that teaches AI about you, your business, what you’re all about. And your website is still built to convert humans who will make it there? Getting less but not none, right? Maybe it’s 50, 50. Now. There used to be about 35% of people never went to your website. Still important to rank for SEO. Still important. Now it’s even more important.

John Clendenning [01:00:54]:

Even if nobody ever shows up a year or two from now, probably less, you’re going to have a website that changes based on who shows up. Oh, hey Tom. Thanks. So this is the carpet cleaning company’s website. And I think you might be interested in the website changes. That’s where we’re going. So the people that do make it there are going to have a personalized experience because of their search history on AI, Right? But that doesn’t mean that the static, it’s not making it up. The static behind it, right? Google Business Profile, Google Maps just shut down FAQs, Q&As.

John Clendenning [01:01:27]:

People ask questions, you answer. Nope. People ask questions, AI answers on your behalf. That’s scary. Unless you know how to train AI to answer on your behalf correctly, it’s just faking the answers and you have no choice anymore. Right? So you need a website that can convert. We know what happens. Causes convert authentic authority signals right in the coding on the Website guarantees clear contact information, all that kind of stuff that can be read easily by the AI and by the human.

John Clendenning [01:02:00]:

Consistent and transparent messaging. You want to avoid exaggerated claims, but you want to, you want to speak in a way that answers the questions the AI’s been asked, right? So there’s a very specific way to do this as well. You want real human proof, real stories. You want real, real, real, real, real. You don’t want to be making stuff up, so you want to be capturing those. You want to be using those. We call that in our world project capture stories. Right? So happy customer stories.

John Clendenning [01:02:29]:

So case studies, testimonials, not just reviews. You want AI readable trust markers, structured data, secure site, fast loading, all that kind of stuff. Trust must be visible to people and machine readable to AI. From static pages to smart adaptive experiences, right? You want to make sure that there is some personalization. People want to get some answers before they reach out to a human. They don’t want to be sold, they want to be informed. You want to get them down, down the path, but you want to put a real person in front front of them at the end. AI driven conversations can help.

John Clendenning [01:03:04]:

AI tools can help down that path. Having having two way communications automations. Absolutely. And your website is the hub of an AI powered marketing ecosystem. So it is not a five pager, right? It’s 20 pages and then a new 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 new pages a week. A week in content, relevant, localized, customer centric content. There is no babies lying on carpets and dogs and families sitting on couches. That, that’s long gone.

John Clendenning [01:03:43]:

I, I’ve been saying that for as long as you’ve heard me. Real people, real things. Right now we need video now we need all of this other stuff because it’s going to convert the human and it’s going to get picked up by the AI. AI is now the new word of mouth. Let that sink in. Anybody who told me, John, I get all my customers from word of mouth, okay, that’s now this thing. People don’t need to ask their neighbor. Had a friend call me the other day about how to get salt broken up in their salt.

John Clendenning [01:04:18]:

Their, their water softener. New house got a water softener, have left it off for a couple months now. Trying to clean it out, realize it had a crust, right? I’m going, I chat GPT it. I knew a little bit, I actually knew a lot about it. I already had water softener, talked about breaking it up and then underneath you’re going to probably find a bit of a Slurry, you have to scoop it out, you’re not going to try and rinse it through, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. Then I got another question, an hour or two. Oh my God, sweating. I got all the way down the bottom.

John Clendenning [01:04:44]:

Now this and that, whatever. And there’s a point at which I just, I said you’re using chat though? Yeah, a little bit. Ask, take a picture, show it. It’ll tell you what size it is, how much new salt you want, what kind of salt, you know, where you are, what kind of water conditions it is, all that kind of stuff. Well, how do I know if it’s even working? Well, I don’t know. There’s a, there’s testing kits for that. But you got, you know, on and on and on, right? And then I finally got, oh my gosh, look at all this. And I asked this and I got chat.

John Clendenning [01:05:12]:

I don’t need you anymore. And I’m going, I had a good run. You know, I used to be the person people ask questions like this too. Don’t need to be anymore. Right? Because people are asking their AI friend, they’re asking their chat, they’re not asking their neighbor. Word of mouth is going away. One of the massive shifts happening, societal shifts happening. Never happened before.

John Clendenning [01:05:37]:

So conversion science. Doubling inquiries without any more traffic. The psychology of conversions when why people click call and submit forms. Trust signals are really important for that. Social proof telling stories. Optimize your website, identify and fix the leaks. Simplify call to actions. Right.

John Clendenning [01:06:03]:

What you don’t want to do, what you don’t want to do is have a button on your website as an example. Sign up for my newsletter. When’s the last time you signed up for a newsletter on a carpet cleaners website or a plumber’s website or maid service website? Join our VIP club and get 10% off and get this free bonus and get a spot remover for life. Blah blah blah blah. And then you send them a newsletter every month or every week with not with dribble and offers and deals with local content, happy customer stories, tips for around the home. They are homeowners, they have children, they have dogs and cats and pets. They have things to take care of. They want a nice safe living environment, green products, how to clean your bathroom shower spotless with vinegar.

John Clendenning [01:06:58]:

Right? Whatever you want, all of those things. Way easier nowadays to even research that and create these things because you’re going to do some research with AI again. Understand AI is going to hallucinate. You got to know how to prompt It AI Marketing Experts podcast. You’re going to learn a little bit on there. We help some of our clients with stuff like that as well. But yeah, we’re in a world now where if you’re not doing it, your competitors are doing it. Guess who gets the job? Because somebody went to their website, decided to download their guide, decided to get on their list, not their newsletter, and then they’ve now stolen that customer from you.

John Clendenning [01:07:32]:

You might have thought it was a client for life, but you’ve talked to them once in the last year and they’re going to start talking to them every single week. Right? AI enhanced personalization for higher conversion. You want to make sure you’re tailing the customer journey and talking about them. There’s ways to do this better and better and better and better and better so that, you know, they got a post carpet cleaning now, you influenced them. You came back and did upholstery cleaning for them. In 32 days, you’re reminding them for their annual cleaning. Like, you stay in touch, stay in touch, stay in touch. Check out checkpoints.

John Clendenning [01:08:07]:

Checkpoints, stay in touch. There’s a whole system around that. And then you start the early bird and then the anniversary and the, you know, last chance and then you go into the, you know, lost client advisory and miss you down the road. But you’re not going to just talk about carpet cleaning and then 32 days later talk about upholstery cleaning. AIs and stuff can help combine that and say, hey, you got your carpets clean and a little while after you got your poster clean, you’d like to get them both done. There is a savings to get both done at the same time. Right? That’s the world we’re in. Use it so website, you want to make sure it’s set up the right way for the humans.

John Clendenning [01:08:41]:

People do certain things with their eyes. We put heat maps on websites called Hot Jar is one of them. But there’s what is Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s got one that we put on as well, and tools that see where people move their mouse, where they click and things like that. We kind of call it tracking their eyes, but we can’t really track their eyes. We can track where they’re. Because people tend to track their eyes with their mouse and stuff like that as well. So we know where they’re going.

John Clendenning [01:09:03]:

On a desktop website, surprisingly, 50% of traffic still ends up on a desktop. They might start on a, on a, on a cell phone, but if they’re not urgent, like readers, leaders or readers, the people that spend more time thinking and deciding once and then never having to decide again. They might look it up quickly, take it to a bigger experience at work, at home, on a tablet, whatever, and see the more, the bigger experience to just, just absorb it better. Right. So you want to make sure that you’re speaking to your target avatar again. If you’re showing black dirty carpet getting cleaned, you know, white. If your target avatar lives in a million dollar gated community, they don’t have black dirty carpet. That’s not them.

John Clendenning [01:09:47]:

You’re. You’ve missed the message. Right? Real authentic images, speak their language, have video elements, show online reviews and reputation and feedback and customer stories and have some the right kind of offers, not discounts. When I say offers, I don’t mean discounts. You want to have packages and programs and upsells and services, chat to text, leverage automation. So go take a look at your website. Is it built to tell your brand story on every page, talk to AI and convert visitors into real inquiries all at the same time? What do you need to tweak? We went through a lot. I’m going to wrap this up.

John Clendenning [01:10:27]:

Hey, we’re, you know, 15 minutes. I think I’m on, I think I’m on pace here. So unconverted leads is where we want to get, we want to solve for. We talked about this. 6056 of inbound inquiries don’t get converted. That means people call and say, maybe look at your LSA again, Addison, if you’re on the call. Love you, brother. Up to as high as 62% I think recently.

John Clendenning [01:10:52]:

But I said raise your prices, Ben. Make more money, justify it. Better offer quotes before cleanings for the rest of them, things like that. But 50 to 60% of inbound inquiries go unconverted. 90% of web forms, people that fill out a web form failed to convert. Oh, can you take web forms off my website? Those are crappy customers. Or though I’d rather they just call, I’d rather they just call or text or do something too. But they’re the type of people that want to fill out a form.

John Clendenning [01:11:22]:

You give them all options they picked. You take an option away, they pick by hitting the back button. You can’t force them to do what you want them to do. You have to meet them where they are. So 90% of web forms do fail, but there’s an answer to that. There’s a way around that. You can fix that. So inquiries that are followed up with within two to five minutes go cold.

John Clendenning [01:11:45]:

What that means is they go to the Competitor. The average quality customer must be followed up five to seven times. They’re not booking on the first, you’re dripping and staying in touch. Follow. Hey, did you right, we, you know, call it the chase process. For the next two weeks after they reached out, are you staying in touch with them, teaching them, educating them why you’re different, why you’re better and why your pricing reflects that? Today’s customers prefer to interact via message first, then before phone call or email. Customers are now want to do their own research and gather answers before reaching out to you and finalizing, but they still want to reach out to you. Self booking buttons, giving a quote and booking yourself sounds so convenient.

John Clendenning [01:12:30]:

Oh, let me just let them just pick the price and pick the rooms and I’ll just show up and clean. How are you doing that if you’re $800 and your competitor is 1 99? Oh, I should be 1 99. Yeah. The $800 guy is going to survive because he knows how to do it differently. It’s a different mindset. You got to think differently, right? If you know what I just said, you’re going, amen, brother. If you don’t know what I just said, I confused the crap out of you. We need so lead nurture versus lead generation.

John Clendenning [01:12:58]:

Hugely different things. You can generate leads inquiries all day long if you don’t nurture them. That’s that 2 out of 10 that we talked about earlier versus the 7 out of 10. That’s the 2 out of 10 giving you $500, $250 each average job, as an example. And the 7 giving you $500 each, $3,500 with a lifetime value of what did we say, about 10,000, $50,000, $20,000. Somewhere in that range we’ve got half of them coming back and we made another 80 grand. It’s the difference. So how many touches do you need to do that? When they reach out and say maybe are you calling them back tomorrow? Not you, somebody else.

John Clendenning [01:13:40]:

You’ve got a job to do and this ain’t it. You’ve got a job to do. If you want to be the cleaner, be the cleaner. Somebody else does this. If you want to be the business owner, be the business owner, Hire cleaners and somebody else does this. Automation, people, systems, that’s how you grow. So send emails, phone calls, touches, and the emails aren’t just, hey, hope you you’re still thinking about us. Hey, let me tell you about Janice who had the exact same problem as you and here’s how we solved it.

John Clendenning [01:14:09]:

Here’s what she said. There’s ways around this, there’s ways to make this happen. And it sounds like a lot. Not with somebody who knows how to market with you partners that can help you grow. That’s what you need to do. You stay in touch. Until they buy or die. That sounds so crude.

John Clendenning [01:14:26]:

Learned it years ago from old marketing men. Until they buy or die, you stay in touch. Joe Gerard, Guinness Book World records most sales in auto sales history. You buy a car what every five years, 10 years. He sent people personal notes by the thousands every month. He hired teams of people to write handwritten notes from Joe. He stayed in touch with anybody who ever came into his world even if they didn’t buy a car. Hope you like the car you got from the competitor.

John Clendenning [01:15:05]:

If you know anybody who might want one of ours, you know, go read the book, go read the story. Interesting, right? None of that’s changed. We just don’t like the fact that it was work again. We had a 40 year history from 1980 to 2020 where the world screwed around, things changed and that’s our living window. That’s my living window. That’s your living window. The new window is different. The window before that was different.

John Clendenning [01:15:34]:

Go talk to grandma and grandpa. Go talk to people that made it through the, the, the, the Great Depression, the second World War and, and, and, and, and totally different way of living. Interest rates were 20%. Still bought houses, still bought cars. They didn’t hunker down and cry. So our world is changing. What was there was fake. It was a money printing system and we have to get out of it.

John Clendenning [01:16:00]:

And we are getting out of it because it’s forced. We can’t just keep it going. There proven solution we got, we call ours carbon cleaner Lead Pro. We have an AI and automation building thing that you can add modules onto and do a bunch of other stuff. But we leverage market automation to follow up with web forms, messages, chats. Within the first two minutes, as soon as somebody fills out a form, your phone is ringing during office hours, after hours you can turn on AI systems that have it answered or you can have automations. There’s a bunch of different ways that, that, that we engage at different levels. But you can automate that whole storytelling, you can automate that whole follow up, you can, we’re even working on triaging people through how they answer, what they get seen next and things like that.

John Clendenning [01:16:44]:

They’re pacing. That’s all becoming, you know, good marketing psychology is what would you have done instead of cookie cutter? What Would you have done if you paused and did it for real? Thought of the person did something different. Thought of the person did something different and had a team doing that. That’s what we’re getting closer and closer to with these guys. These, the whole AI armies use AI when appropriate, but you put the human in the loop for the authentic touch. People still say they want to talk to real people. Build a lead list that you can continue to market to that is 10 times bigger than your customer list. I have said that for decades.

John Clendenning [01:17:23]:

I’ve been coaching this industry while still owning my business. In 2007, right runner up to market of the year, Dan Kennedy talked me into met him for a whole weekend and a bunch of guys talked me into helping cleaners specific target market with all of this stuff because I had figured it out, me and a buddy, Sean Barrett. Time started our consultancy, went on from there and yeah carried on lead list. You need people that haven’t said yes yet or maybe said yes to the competitor. As long as they’re still on your list, stay in touch with them in a meaningful warm welcome way until you win them over. What if you’re just too expensive for them now and they in two or three years they are an AI implementation expert. AI it used to be prompt engineering was a $350,000 a year job for a 21 year old that just appeared in the last two or three years. Now it’s context engineering.

John Clendenning [01:18:27]:

Not even prompt engineering anymore. Now it’s context engineering. So yeah, and that’s a 350, 450, $500,000 a year job. Now they’re ready for you. Oh my gosh. I should, I’m ready to. I’m ready to use that, that maid service, that high end one, the spa like experience, right Boris, I’m ready to use that. That cleaning company that delivers a client experience.

John Clendenning [01:18:53]:

When you are more affluent and make money, what do you do with that? That extra money? You buy services that make your life simpler and you invest in experiences. I did a presentation, the first presentation I ever made outside of grade six space shuttle when I completely destroyed the the stand. Grinding my nails talking about it. Skipped out of every other one of them all the way through until I was asked to speak in Orlando, Florida in 2001, 2, 3. Somewhere in there built my very first PowerPoint presentation. Gave my 45 minute presentation. Went back up to the room and puked for the rest of the day and made it to dinner later that night. Couldn’t talk in front of anybody.

John Clendenning [01:19:34]:

That presentation was The Experience Economy. How to create a client experience repeatable amongst technicians from the moment they reach out to you, to the moment to again for the rest of their lives that you create an experience in every touch point that sets a tone. So it’s the uniforms, it’s the booties, it’s the rolling out the red carpets, it’s the like I was doing that in 2000, 1998, 99, 2000. I started speaking about it and the Experience Economy was actually a book that I read that was really great. And I started speaking about it and got flown around the world to talk about it. Flown to the island of Samoa in 2010 to speak about all of this stuff. So your lead list, you can show the experience you you deliver. Referral partners, you can show the experience you deliver.

John Clendenning [01:20:29]:

And get more social media, you can show the experience you deliver. So that can all be automated until they’re ready to buy or die. Your customers should be automated in contact as well, but reminders for the human outreach as well. It’s a mix of all of it. So what does it do to your business as we wrap this up? We’ve talked about this before, but say you get 164 inquiries leads coming in new. These are cold because you’ve got all of this stuff running because any one of them is not enough. But you’ve got 164 inquiries coming in a month from Organic Maps, AIs, you know, referral programs, door hangers, yard signs, you name it. I don’t care where they’re coming from.

John Clendenning [01:21:14]:

And your conversion rate, when you actually really track it, is 30%. That is really average. When we, when we start looking at our clients, actual real data and doing the data for them, they think they’re booking a lot higher. They’re not. You booked 49 jobs. Your average job is 325. Not a bad little business. You just made 16 grand from that.

John Clendenning [01:21:33]:

You got a few repeat clients. You don’t mark your database when you do 50 to 60 of your work every single month should be repeats and referral or repeat business probably refeets and referrals. You can see that in house call pros. But if it’s not, you’re just not marking your database hard enough. Straight up, but and staying in touch in a welcome way, not discounts and deals. How you doing? Let me check in. Do you need something from me? Anything free I can give you, right? There’s a way to do this. 16 grand.

John Clendenning [01:21:57]:

That’s cool, that’s cool. But what if you Had a way to stay in touch with those people after they reached out. You have a better script on the phone, you have a better immediate follow up. You have, you know again conversion principles we talked about. The second they call, somebody answers. The second they fill out a form, their phone rings. Things like that. You’ve got all the speed to lead stuff.

John Clendenning [01:22:17]:

So you, you, you, you take your conversion rate to 45, 50% today and you grab the next 20% over the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 months, get them to come back, right? The exact same 164 people. And special hopefully your marketing’s targeting the right people that you want. The exact same 164 people are now 114 book jobs. You’re still only $325. Say you didn’t figure that piece out yet. We love to show you how to fix that one and get up to 500, 600. But you just made $37,000. You almost made, you made $19,000 more.

John Clendenning [01:22:59]:

One and a half, two times three more money from the same marketing investment. So the marketing wasn’t bad, the list wasn’t bad. You, your follow up, right. So you just got to put it all in place. Takeaways from that. So it’s all about knowing your numbers. Again, another case study. 599 inquiries, 40% booking rate.

John Clendenning [01:23:21]:

Right. This is the before average ticket. 350, $83,000. This was and total marketing investment again. The marketing well, $10,000 average cost per inquiry, 18 bucks. That’s really low. Some of that’s again organic, right. You gotta get your website ranking and AIs a pay per click.

John Clendenning [01:23:41]:

Google Maps, right. You’ve got a mix of marketing, right. That brings that down. The pay per click was probably sitting at about 3 to 1 ROI. The the organic is probably sitting at a 7 to 1 ROI. Once it gets developed and you start actually showing up in AI and rankings and stuff like that, right. So it blends it all in. You’ve got it all kind of factors out.

John Clendenning [01:24:02]:

And you made $83,000, right, all in across all variables. None of its repeats yet. Just, just new new business after same. But now you got your conversion rate up to 65%. All right, so now, now you’ve got more work still average 350. But now you made $136,000. Is that a month, a quarter, a year? I don’t know. But if your year last year was only $83,000 and you go John, I want to get to close to 140150 grand.

John Clendenning [01:24:36]:

Yeah. Change nothing but your conversion rate and you might get there. That’s just one lever. What if you change more levers? What if you up your price? And, and, and we love to walk our clients through that conversation. So clear targets and goals for 2026. Clarity around marketing, message and media. Who is your market? Not marketing market. Who are you targeting for real residential, commercial.

John Clendenning [01:24:58]:

Right. Do you want to be out at 2 o’ clock in the morning cleaning a greasy restaurant or do you want to be at the end of the day at 5 o’ clock going to do chiropractors, accountants, dentists, that, that determines what doors you walk in. Right. What is the message to those people? Why are you different? You might have tried this, you might have got this experience. Here’s why we’re different. It might cost you a little bit more, but you’re going to love us because of this. And here’s what we’ll do for your staff, and here’s what we do for this, and here’s what we do for that. Totally different message.

John Clendenning [01:25:26]:

Gets the right people. The people that care about it will hire you and then you prove it. Make sure that your website is optimized for conversions and AI and set up a tracking dashboard. Must have an omnipresent all in. We call it our best known cleaner program. But SEO, pay per click, local service, ads, social media, email, direct mail, and you’ve got to have a piece of all of it. And there’s an order of operations. Let’s get that going.

John Clendenning [01:25:52]:

You need video, video, video and probably more video. Right? Some of this could be done with AI now getting so close, we could probably, you know, we’ve got some of our clients. With all of our clients, we actually train an AI command center to know everything about them, their competitors, their marketplace, their demographics. We do an interview podcast to help them build their brand in their local market. There’s lots and lots of things that you can do to become omnipresent. That somebody who was not a cleaning company owner, who didn’t run that one less than 1% million dollar cleaning service business, has no clue about that. You can learn here, right? Tommy Mello, good guy to follow for the home service industry. Garage door guy.

John Clendenning [01:26:35]:

Listen to him as well. You’ll hear a very similar story. He did it, he understands it. Right? So success leaves clues. So build your plan. Start one, two, three at a time. Set your rocks. You can’t do everything all at once.

John Clendenning [01:26:52]:

We actually have an entire training program on how to put that in place. For our clients. You can audit your current marketing. Just go to our website carpet cleanermarketingmasters.com you’ll see a pop up. You can get the AI marketing checklist just to see how close you are right now. So we got the workbook, the worksheet, Carpet Cleaner MarketingMasters.com 2026-workbook Carpet Cleaner MarketingMasters dot com 2026-worksheet Go through some of those. Go to go to the carpet cleaner marketmaster.com just straight and download the checklist. Make sure that you are AI ready.

John Clendenning [01:27:30]:

Understand what that means? Get started. Consumers aren’t searching, they’re asking. And word of mouth is now AI1 from 1% to 30% in 2025. People using AI as their instead of search that in one year. We haven’t even hit the inflection point yet. We haven’t hit banana zone yet. Is that 80 by this time next year? Nobody knows. It’s entirely different world and it’s moving faster than you and I have ever moved before at all.

John Clendenning [01:28:04]:

So take a deep breath, slow it down. You got to become more visible to your ideal market in a bunch of ways. So you need to think about that prepared. Owners do everything that do what everyone else when everyone else is panicking, right? Do what they do. Do not play it safe. Do not put your head in the sand. This is not going away. This is not a Y2K moment.

John Clendenning [01:28:31]:

This is not an ozone layer. Oh, guess that didn’t happen. This isn’t global, you know. We’re going in a mini ice age. Oh, it’s global warming. Oh, it’s just climate change. This isn’t that. We feel it, we see it.

John Clendenning [01:28:42]:

Everything. The numbers are all around. The world is changing. Everything is becoming different. Our phones will eventually be zero. Apps. We don’t need apps. We just need to ask an AI questions and it’ll get us the answers, right? It’ll go on Amazon and give us a list.

John Clendenning [01:29:00]:

It will on and on and on. I can’t even imagine what five years from now is going to look like. But we have to respond to that as business owners. But there is a clear path to better clients, predictable growth scale. We’re building that club of people that want to stay in touch, learn it, work it out together, solve these bigger problems. Whether you want to be a carpet cleaner that owns a business or a business owner that happens to be in the cleaning industry. Pick your poison, pick your place. Two entirely different paths.

John Clendenning [01:29:42]:

Two entirely different ways of running a business. Not one isn’t better than the Other, you know, you, where do you, what do you want to do? Where do you fit in? Right? So write down your takeaways. This is good information. But as I say at the end of every one of these master classes, implementation is everything. Businesses don’t fail by not having enough ideas. I, I can’t even count how many we just, we just laid out on the table in this, this call alone. Right? You’ve listened to more of these. You know, it’s drinking from a fire hydrant.

John Clendenning [01:30:17]:

My brain is mud puddles of information that go together and, and experiences and good, better bests on everything. It’s just how I operate. Right. And there’s other people that operate like you’re learning it from other people as well. Right? Make sure who you’re learning it from at least got to the place you want to go. Start with that razor. Get rid of anybody who doesn’t. Right? You don’t take marriage advice from a four time divorcee.

John Clendenning [01:30:42]:

Might be the greatest business owner you’ve ever met. Elon Musk is not the person for marriage advice as an example. Right. Key to growth is taking immediate action before inertia and life steps back in again. Because it will and it will fade. The moment will fade. You’ve got to keep the moment alive. 90 of it’s between your ears.

John Clendenning [01:31:03]:

What are you listening to every single day? Is if. Is it trap? Is it death metal? Is it. I just found out about baby metal the other day. Oh my gosh. Hilarious. I think they’re awesome. I play guitar and. Just incredible.

John Clendenning [01:31:18]:

But hilarious. But yeah, that’s not what you should be listening to all day long. I’m also a Dave Matthews fan and I love the new Aerosmith with Youngblood. Anyways. Kind of an old rocker. But. And, but that’s not what I listen to. 99 of the time.

John Clendenning [01:31:36]:

That’s, that’s in my chill time and I, you know, it fits into a day. It fits into my, my time blocking and my, my energy plans and stuff like that. Like again, that sounds all woo and weird. No, I just mean there’s certain times of the day that you’re, you’re sharper than other times of the day. I do these webinars at this time of day for a reason. Right. There’s other times a day I ain’t got this in me. Right? So know that between jobs, if you’re in the truck, you’re not listening to the radio.

John Clendenning [01:32:04]:

You’ve got to learn and keep the motivation alive. You’ve got to make plans and dive in, right? So the best business do not are not the best operators. They are the best marketers who then need to refine operations to scale. You market so well, you break stuff, you fix the stuff you break, you hire the people, you learn how to hire the wrong people, you hire the right people, you get it figured out. You talk to the right people, you hire coaches, you hire. There’s not a single successful person, business, sports, religion, who didn’t find a mentor, hire a coach. Just. It’s an old adage and it’s absolutely true.

John Clendenning [01:32:48]:

So you do all of these things to, to level up, to whatever level you want to get to. Somebody ahead of you reaches back and gives you a hand up, not a handout. You commit to one major shift. This week we got a, you know, New Year’s, you know, New Year’s Day. We’ve got tomorrow, part day. Do some thinking, do some planning. What top three marketing plans initiatives are you going to take away? Understand, there’s a blueprint for this. There’s an exact blueprint to work on before, during and after the sale.

John Clendenning [01:33:20]:

There is mechanisms and things that you need to put in place at every level of that blueprint. I learned it, I adapted it. Sean and I built it back in 2007. We called the marketing maniacs back then. It was hilarious. Where the core of the company started, it’s been advanced and moved forward since. The foundations don’t change the world around us, the eyeballs, how you influence them does, what’s happening does. But you respond the same way.

John Clendenning [01:33:58]:

So if you need any help with any of this, reach out. We can jump on a call. I have consulting time. Spend about an hour. You fill out a survey, fill out a form ahead of time, get some data on you, learn about your business, where you want to go, what you want to do. We do a bunch of research. We don’t charge you for it. We have a conversation.

John Clendenning [01:34:15]:

It’s not a sales pitch. We, we’re very selective. We are very selective. There are people that just don’t fit with us because they’re not looking to move and grow again. Whether you want to be a cleaner that owns a business or a business owner that happens to be in cleaning, there’s a path, but there’s a path. You, there’s still work to do, right? So we’ve got, we’ve got some conversations. We will create a growth plan together. That’s it.

John Clendenning [01:34:43]:

There’s an opportunity for us to help you with all of the stuff that we do. And we do very, very, very well, but that’s where we’re at. So if you’re interested in any of that carpet cleaning, marketmaster.com Schedule one of our team will reach out to you. Answer the phone, don’t dismiss the call. Right. My time is busy. If you book a time with us, show up, honor it. It’s a business consultation meeting, not a sales call.

John Clendenning [01:35:14]:

It’s not a sales call. So if there is something that we can help you with. You’re taking away the time, the hour of my schedule that I have and the hour my team is done. You’re taking that away from somebody else who might want it more. But if you want it badly and you understand 2026 is gonna be scary, but huge opportunities, K shaped economy, pick the right side. You understand that. Let’s get on a call, let’s talk about this, and let’s see if together as a community, we can create the select few that get it, want it, and can move up with it and hope the other ones figure it out on their own. There’s only so much we can do.

John Clendenning [01:36:01]:

Again, hand up. Not a handout. Anyways, with that, thank you everybody. Again, end of year, want to want to lay the truth on you and hopefully you resonate with the message and found something there. And peace out to everybody. Love you all. Thanks so much. Till next time.

John Clendenning [01:36:21]:

Cheers.