Connected Marketing System for Local Cleaning Service Businesses: More CALLS – More JOBS – More REPEATS

A connected marketing system that combines digital (SEO, Google My Business, paid ads), social proof, community engagement, and robust follow-up generates the most qualified, recurring calls.

John Clendenning [00:00:08]:

Yay. Okay. Sorry, that took a while. Okay, we’re all good. So couple things to hit you up with. Right. 15.2.5. What do I mean by that? Well, 15% of cleaners ever make it out of the truck.

John Clendenning [00:00:35]:

That’s what we’re up against. Right. So 15% of cleaning business owners ever make it out of the truck. 2% sell their business for more than truck mounts and parts and equipment on Craigslist. 0.5% of cleaning business owners ever scale to seven figures, right? So $83,000 a month kind of range. Interestingly though, of the ones that do all, a full quarter of them make it to 5 million between 5 and 10. So there is lessons built into those 15. 2.5.

John Clendenning [00:01:30]:

There is things we know at the 15% that the 85% believe but isn’t true. The 2% that ever sell their business know things that the 98% never figured out. And the 0.5% have been able to create. What we’ve all looked for is that lifestyle that also creates that equity and the lifestyle you can hand off to somebody else. Somebody will trade money for the time compression that you’ve generated by creating systems and processes. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. The big promise is by the end of this call today, you will understand how the 15, the 2% and the 0.5% think and achieve this. And I’ll try and fill into the gaps here on, on where, where the average person gets in their own way, me included.

John Clendenning [00:02:52]:

I was one of these people and how I clawed my way out of, out of that and the things I had to do. Because it is very, very common to, to get caught in an echo chamber, to get caught in a feedback loop. And we just think what is, is. And I mention them lovingly, but I call them the forum flexors. If, you know, we go on the, the forums for cleaning business owners, and I don’t even know, I, I couldn’t even say if it’s 99 out of a hundred are sort of aiming the wrong way. Most of the, the very, very successful people I know at, at the various levels of success in our cleaning, our industry in general, or just business in general. They kind of leave the, the forums behind. They’re part of executive masterminds, they’re, they’re consulting, they’re, they’re in boardrooms, they’re in, you know, things like that.

John Clendenning [00:03:47]:

Because there is a whole thing about business and marketing. Incest sounds a little crude, but happens everywhere, all the time. And it Creates massive amounts of false belief. That is appears real.

John Clendenning [00:04:46]:

Okay, there we are. So more calls, more jobs, more often only three levers you can adjust, right? So this isn’t anything fancy. Tommy Mello talks about it in the service business. Millionaire Michael Gerber talks about it. It’s, you know, Jeff Slutsky from Grassroots Marketing or yeah, with John Janice Duct Tape Marketing. Again, if you don’t even know these names, that’s a sign because these are all places we need to learn from, right. Dan Kennedy’s obviously, and Jay Abraham and the list goes on. So I’ll probably rattle a whole bunch after in this conversation today.

John Clendenning [00:05:26]:

So what we’re going to talk about is connected marketing systems that actually work, right? So what do we mean by that? What do we, what do we, what do we try to say here? So let me pop the screen over. There we go. I’m actually going to pull it up on the ability to move through the slides a little bit easier on another screen. But okay, there we go. So yeah, we’re going to turn our phones off. We’re going to pay attention because this is important stuff in general. But why most marketing feels inconsistent, what’s causing that? Like, why does our marketing feel like scattered and sort of jerky and jumpy and we do this and then we do that every, like, you know, what do I mean when I say everything is connected? How every. How your marketing channels multiply on each other the three types of marketing that drive growth.

John Clendenning [00:06:17]:

And where most people get it wrong, it’s a mindset thing. And then it’s effort, right. And the more effort from, from more effort to more results. The compounding effect of. And we’ll fill in the blank at the end, right. So you’re going to pay attention. We could put a test out there, right? I’ll give you a gold star if you, if you get the answer before we get to the end. But what we’re talking about is what are these things that, that, that build the successful businesses quietly in the background? Some of them we know, some of them we don’t.

John Clendenning [00:06:52]:

Know, some of them we’ve learned and dismiss, some we learn and forget like we’re human. We wake up tomorrow and you know, it felt like today and it’s sort of like how do we get that momentum to move forward? A lot of times we get cut in, caught in ruts and we have to shake ourselves out of it. Right. So what are those systems, those processes that keep us just incrementally improving? Like Phil Jackson said to the, to the Chicago Bulls. He’s, he’s working with like Scotty Pippins and Michael Jordans and Dennis Rodman, some of the very best players in their, you know, in their category at the prime of their careers. And how do they continue to win and not get lazy 1% improvements? Because that stacks and compounds over time. Right. And it’s the stacking and compound compounding.

John Clendenning [00:07:40]:

So anyways, if you don’t know who I am new to this John Clementing owner of Carpet Cleaner Market masters ran Multiple Ran a seven figure cleaning business started in 1995 in a town of 30,000 people. Was out of the truck within about a year and a half because I, I understood to become a marketer of cleaning was of business market of of business services and if I was the marketer I would generate an operations problem. I’d have to learn how to manage people manage growth. The better I marketed the at every level the more, the more I had a sales problem to convert them into jobs and the more I had a business problem and then retention problem and all all the other things and eventually you get to a point where I was at like you know, maybe five hours a week worth of actual effort needed to run the business. Had systems and teams because I built that was the operations problem. I had to get myself out of the way myself out of the way. I can’t be working 16 hours a day. So out of the way, out of the way.

John Clendenning [00:08:38]:

So wrote the book on it. I consult on it, I talk about it. Sold my businesses, every single one of them for multiples. So exit plan with an investment bought property, all that kind of stuff run the businesses out of so you know the things that we want to do with, with, with the lifestyle that a any business could create. Right. It’s just a matter of how you’re chasing it. So obviously hey, I’m not sure why that, that, that that book is over at top of my logo. We’ll have to fix that slide.

John Clendenning [00:09:07]:

But yes, Carpet Cleaner Marketing the complete guide Internet Marketing for Carpet Cleaners Carpet Cleaner Success podcast and all over Cleanfax magazine, Jeff Cross and I get together on a regular basis and some of our good friends that we all know in the industry, friends of mine, so got clients that move the needle and I’m going to show you why. I can take credit for some of this, but I don’t want to take credit for any of it. There is a marketing, digital marketing component to a great business, but there is no magic. It’s marketing, not magic. Yes, you could be up $50,000, um, or in a down economy, you can save your business and be the only one. You know, you’re down 5 and 10% during a market downturn where you, the average business is down 30, 40, 50% because you’re a better marketer. Right. So you may not always be growing.

John Clendenning [00:10:03]:

The stock market doesn’t just go up and to the right, you know, up and down and up and down. But if you ride it out over the long term, you’re getting the growth right. You find those stuck points right, where everything kind of consolidates. That’s what they call it in stock market terms. It consolidates around a zone. And then are you going to go up or down from that consolidation? Anytime you’re consolidating, you’ve got to be worried where’s the inflection going to go. Consolidation doesn’t last forever. Sticking within a range doesn’t last forever.

John Clendenning [00:10:30]:

It is coiling up to go one way or the other. And that coiling up, you get to determine. So you want to become the top cleaning brand in your marketplace. So you get the best clients, you can charge the top rates and you’re booked out weeks in advance. Right. That’s what we, that’s what we talk about. It’s, it’s not a done for you. It’s how do you do this? What are all the moving pieces and how do you get the, take the deep breath, get the clarity to systematically put these things in place? That’s what we’re going to talk about.

John Clendenning [00:11:04]:

We’re going to talk about what they are, right? So we call it omnipresence. And omnipresence has always been important. And I’ve been harping on omnipresence on these webinars for what, six years now? Seven years. I’ve been talking about it for 20 years in my, my coaching programs and one on one consulting and stuff like that. But it is now the more important than ever. And we’ll explain why. But you want to maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified inquiry. Don’t like the word lead.

John Clendenning [00:11:32]:

Everybody’s I need more leads. I need more leads. It’s the last thing you need. You’ve got a leaky bucket you need fixed first and then you can make a lot more money, right? So we talk about this inside our coaching program a lot as well, is that if you got, if you could double the average job ticket at the exact current level you’re at right now, you just doubled your business and you didn’t get any more more leads than you’re getting now, right? If you can double the client retention so you get the people that you bring in are coming back because you’re marketing better, you can double the business. So if you’re doing a hundred thousand a year, you just went to 200 with either one of those. But if you do both of them, you double the average ticket. 200,000, then double the retention, 400,000. You have actually got a four times 400% increase from 100,000 to 400,000 four times or 400%, whichever way you want to word it.

John Clendenning [00:12:24]:

Then you add more customers in. What if you doubled then? Now you’re at 800,000 because now you doubled a machine that works, right? So that’s what we’re talking about. Maximize your opportunity, generate a qualified lead inquiry. Maximize your brand impressions. Huge, everybody. Oh, branding, branding, branding. That’s, you know, I don’t need to do branding done properly. It is part of a marketing mix.

John Clendenning [00:12:47]:

Done right, because always helped. And I’ll prove that to you. More important now than ever because of the way AI and conversational search is changing everything in our society in just the past year. And maximize your conversions. How do you make more people say yes? You get 10 inquiries from a local service ad, from a flyer, from a, you know, van in a driveway, from a yard sign. You know, whatever it is, whatever your metric, you’re tracking whichever pole in the water we’re talking about Here, you get 10 inquiries and you convert two of them and somebody else gets 10 inquiries and converts seven of them, right? Maybe your average job is 300 bucks. You converted two of them, you got 600 bucks. You’re not really good at the back end, right? Out of 100 people, 20 come back ever the other 80, you don’t know what happened to them because you don’t really pay attention.

John Clendenning [00:13:50]:

You send a text message once a year. You do a little, you know, a little bit of light touch, right? We don’t know, you know, that kind of thing. You made 600 bucks, maybe a little bit more. Other fellow able to take the same 10 inquiries book five of them right now. Better conversions, better scripts, better phone, better, Better follow up, better indoctrination. And their average job. They could get into the home, have package pricing, do a whole bunch of different things. I call it power pricing.

John Clendenning [00:14:16]:

And now they get $600 as their average. So now you made 600, they made 3,000 from the same 10 inquiries on the front end. You might get an extra three or four hundred bucks over the lifetime of those. The odd one coming back. These guys have two avenues. One, the other five get marketed to until they buy or die. You might get another two or three of them into your company back in three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, 18 months from now. They tried the other guys.

John Clendenning [00:14:42]:

They’re not happy. You’ve stayed in touch with them. You’re in their inbox, you’re in front of them. Your branding shows up in their, you know, they’re in, they’re in your ideal customer profile. So you’re staying in front of them because they showed up as somebody who buys in your category. You’re a happy camper, right? We’re all happy people. And now you’ve got, you’ve got that going on, right? So maximizing conversions. Now you can take that, that five, $6,000 front end, right? And half of those customers could stick around for ten grand more over the life in repeats and referrals and all that over the next seven, 10, 12 years, 15 years.

John Clendenning [00:15:18]:

So now you got five, you gather another two over the next year or two, you’ve got seven, and they’re worth 20 grand each. That’s $140,000. Those 10 inquiries that one week back then generated you in lifetime value your business. What if you’re doing that every week? Businesses grow, right? So what we’re going to be talking about today is the concept of everything everywhere all at once. Great movie, by the way. Watch it if you haven’t seen it. But the whole idea is the mindset, the marketing mindset. Must be seen, be trusted, be chosen, be everywhere.

John Clendenning [00:15:57]:

How do you do that? What does that mean? Like what? No, no. John, I run Facebook ads, okay. To get leads and jobs. Yep. So what discount are you offering? Because why would somebody go to Facebook to buy carpet cleaning today? They don’t. They go to a. You ask a referral partner, they ask their carpet store, they ask their, you know, their chat GPT friend. They might go to Google still, but less and less are going there.

John Clendenning [00:16:22]:

They’re asking their, their AI friend and, and, and that kind of thing. So AI is looking Everywhere, looking at everything, everywhere, all at once. Humans. If you’re showing up to your ideal customer profile in as many places in front of them as possible. That’s why all the little things like the home and garden show in the right neighborhoods and the, you know, sponsor, like percentage of revenue goes to marketing. That percentage breaks into very, very distinct buckets. And part of those buckets are how you’re doing community outreach. At first it might just be shoe leather pavement.

John Clendenning [00:17:07]:

Eventually it is. Look at the bigger companies. What do they do to keep their name in front so that when they do run the expensive paid ads, it’s not to a blind audience. Now their pay per click works better. Now they’re, you know, you name it, right? Because in the real world, that’s how grandpa ran a business. He was known, he shook hands, he met people, he talked to people, he made connections, he built real relationships. They got him in here, they got him in there. Oh my God, I hear about you everywhere, right? That’s till today.

John Clendenning [00:17:36]:

We need to be everywhere, everything everywhere, all at once. We’re going to talk about what that looks like, how you break that down. But AI is looking everywhere too. AI is looking at, it’s not looking at keywords. There’s no carpet cleaner near me. Like, it’s that. That is starting to, that is fading insanely fast, right? A year ago, that was, you know, all of the cleaning terms. You wanted to be ranking in Google Maps.

John Clendenning [00:18:00]:

Really? Well, now you need to be in Google Maps to teach AI. You want to be in pay per click to be in front of people at the right timing. Now you want to be in pay per click because Google’s putting pay per click into AI. But pay per click trains AI, right? So now there’s this back and forth, we talked about that on a previous call is you earn your way in. Now, even if you’re willing to pay, you have to earn the attention of the algorithm. Even like it’s trying, still trying to find the best answer for the consumer. The person on the other end, the searcher, doesn’t care about you. So those earn signals become everything everywhere all at once as well.

John Clendenning [00:18:37]:

The real authentic conversations, like there’s a, there’s a hack, you know, if you can get customers to give you a better review. So use mention the neighborhood in the review, mention the service in the review. If you can get a customer to give you a better review, AI could pick it up better. Yeah, but, oh, what are you doing sitting your customers down, writing them, writing the review for them. Say, hey, Go post this. How scalable is that? Right? So there are ways that you can sort of play around the edges with a little bit of sort of manipulation and hack. But, but the truth is, if you do it authentically and well, that is just one little microcosm of, hey, how can we get a little bit better content in our reviews? Well, if we’ve got great clients giving them great results, doing great things, we can call them up the next day, make sure they’re happy, right? Do that whole good, good, cleaner triage, right? So now it’s a little bit of work, but now we’re becoming nurturing and being, being warm and friendly with them and then we can say, hey, by the way, I noticed you filled out the feedback. If you haven’t had a chance to leave a review, I’d appreciate, you know, if you don’t have to.

John Clendenning [00:19:50]:

But if you leave a review on Google, Facebook, Better Business Bureau, whatever, that’d be appreciated. The links will be, you know, in the little thank you email for filling out the survey and the feedback, really, the internal feedback. Really appreciate that. If you do mention that, if you wouldn’t mind mentioning, you know, what service you got done and where you’re located, it really, really kind of helps other people in those neighborhoods connect, looking for those services. That’s how you can say, you don’t have to say it helps the algorithm, right, but it helps AI find you. That’s a little bit. But then you do happy customer stories, that’s a little bit more. And you tell the story of that happy customer and post it on social media, on your website, stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:20:21]:

Now you’re also creating that, what you did, where you did it, city references, services, all that kind of stuff in a story, not in a, in a hack, right? So there is authentic topic content that can be written for blog posts and press releases. There is topic authority. You want to be the authority on a topic in today’s day and age. Not ranking. Ranking is a, is topical authority in, in a marketplace and how that gets built out over time. But it comes with that authenticity as part of the everything everywhere, all at once. So from random tactics to a connected marketing system, that’s what we’re talking about, right? The goal is not more busy work. The goal is about connecting poles in the water phrase I use all the time, working together to create consistency, be seen, be trusted, be chosen.

John Clendenning [00:21:11]:

It works for everything. So why marketing feels inconsistent and what’s actually causing it? Too few channels, one or two lead sources carries way too much pressure, right? You want to have 20, 30 poles in the water that are generating one, generating one, two, three, four, five inquiries a month. Some of them might go cold for a month or two. So. Right. They might, they might scale back. The market might change. There might, there could be a whole bunch of reasons.

John Clendenning [00:21:41]:

Even if the market’s slowing down, the more poles in the water you have referral partners, we’ll talk about all the different polls, but you know, ads, refer partners, reminder retentions, like the, like you’re staying busy. You’re just staying busy. Well, well, you know this. The market is soft. There’s not as many new people looking. You want to get your existing customers back because it’s better to save your carpet than it is to replace it, right? You can start telling the $15,000 story. The average house spends about $15,000 minimum. Some clients, it might be 50 or 100,000.

John Clendenning [00:22:15]:

It’s depending on your clientele. But $15,000 minimum. Installing new carpet in a house today, right. Even if a lot of carpets are pulled out, area rugs cost more. But about 15,000, $15,000 in, in, in, in carpet flooring with it within a home. If it lasts seven years because of poor maintenance or no maintenance. Right. We’ve all seen carpets wear out in five, six, seven years because they didn’t maintain it properly.

John Clendenning [00:22:44]:

They call you after five years. Oh, it’s, I just got it installed 2021 or 2020. That’s not gist. You understand the manufacturer has a requirement that if you clean and protect it once a year, the warranty’s in place. If you don’t, the warranty is null and void. You voided your warranty and there’s a reason for that. They don’t own cleaning companies. They understand what causes a carpet to last.

John Clendenning [00:23:06]:

It’s, it’s under your foot. If that was. We tell our customers all the time, this is education based marketing. If that was your kitchen floor, ma’, am, if Sweeping a hard floor is like vacuuming a carpet and mopping a hard floor is like cleaning the carpets, how many times would you have mopped your, your, your kitchen floor, hallway, front room in the last five years? So no, you don’t need to carpet clean that often. But because carpets can actually absorb a lot more soil and they got a lot more surface area, you know, the way it sticks, all that good stuff. So there’s your storyline. But once or twice to get to keep it as clean as you possibly can so that it’s similar to your, your, your, your other flooring, it’s going to pick up the same amount of dirt. It’s just hiding it better.

John Clendenning [00:23:56]:

But once, once it stops hiding it, well, you’ve damaged it. So that’s why we need regular maintenance. And if you get it cleaned properly and professionally by the right company once a year, you’ll get 10, 15, 20 years out of your carpet. Even if you get 10 years instead of seven. 20,000 divided by seven is 2100 bucks. 21 something. 15 divided by 10 is 1500 bucks. You, you’ve, you’ve extended the life of your carpet.

John Clendenning [00:24:23]:

You’ve literally saved 620 some odd dollars. 623. I think that works out there. Dollars in, in replacement cost per year just by extending it three years. So do you need to go the cheapest $99 carpet cleaner or can you go to the $500 carpet cleaner? Because you’re actually not going to get 10 years, probably 15 or 20, and drop the average like the annual replacement cost of your carpet down to like 750 bucks. So you’re saving more money by spending more with the right people. Right? You want to stand, start. A lot of people do a start stop effort, right? So marketing only happens when you’re slow, try and start it up and then you get busy, slow it down again and you maybe do it over here.

John Clendenning [00:25:02]:

I heard about this, I heard about every door mail. I’m going to try that for a while. That didn’t work. I’m going to try this for a while stuff. And there’s no connected systems. Most cleaners are working really hard, but their work is not connected enough to create predictable momentum. So one pole holding up the whole business. A lot of companies I see with that, right.

John Clendenning [00:25:22]:

I’ve watched companies that grew on Groupon and then went bankrupt. I watched companies that grew on Facebook ads. Oh my God, I’m doing 15, $20,000 a month in, in jobs from Facebook. John, I’ve got two crews on the road now. John, I’ve got, right. As soon as that one poll slowed down change, more competitors came in. They didn’t have a business because they, they, they, they attracted price shoppers who will never be retained. You ran a transaction based business based on a blip in the marketplace, right? Local service ads were a blip for a while.

John Clendenning [00:25:52]:

Anybody, anybody jumped into them early was like, oh my God, that’s like right. But yeah, you, you don’t want a blip to be the whole reason why your business is successful because then you write it up, you write it back down, you get into despair you try something else, you write it up, you write it back down, and next thing you know, you’re just repleting year one 20 times. 20 years later, you’re still the same again. 15% of cleaners ever make it out of the truck. The other 85% do it this way. So some people do SEO only. Some people. All referrals.

John Clendenning [00:26:26]:

I just, it’s all word of mouth. I just, I just get referrals. Well, that’s now AI. So you’ve lost that battle. Only do ads, right? Paid ads. I’m on thumbtack, I’m on this, I’m on that. Or you just randomly do stuff, right? Maybe you do some social media, maybe. Whatever.

John Clendenning [00:26:41]:

You don’t even have a consistent pattern. Whatever your one pole in the water is, it’s not supported by anything else. Well, all my customers like me, John. Says the guy that does seven jobs a week. Yeah. All the customers love Robert Yokel in, in. In Colorado Springs. That does.

John Clendenning [00:27:01]:

But. But 11 trucks on the road, half million population, $5 million in revenue. Yep. They all love him as well. Go listen to that podcast. Go listen to the podcast with Ricardo, who is a work. Is in the Air Force as a pilot trainer and runs cleaning companies in Las Vegas. He doesn’t fly out of Las Vegas.

John Clendenning [00:27:21]:

That’s like he has to fly into Las Vegas to go see the companies he runs. Right. So yes, there’s There is a, an acuum, a business acum that helps get past some of these thoughts and these issues. So it is a. It’s a lot of mud in people’s heads. So, you know, if I’m speaking to the choir here and you go, no, I get it. I need more. What are we doing? That’s great.

John Clendenning [00:27:43]:

There’s some people that listen and go. I think I’ve heard from the forum flexors that I just need a better ad. And I’m trying to dispel that right now because everything is connected. Your marketing channels multiply each other. Right. Everything everywhere, all at once. It’s not literally everywhere. What we’re talking about strategically visible in the places where your ideal target customer is already looking.

John Clendenning [00:28:12]:

So marketing mindset, every poll should help the next one. Your awareness creates brand recognition. So how are you making yourself aware to your ideal market? How are you making yourself aware on social media? How are you making yourself aware in the real world? What are you doing? Like, obviously vans fully wrapped and uniforms and all that kind of stuff and, but referral programs and door hangers and, and, you know, joining the Chamber and, and you know, joining when everybody’s going out to clean up the beach and, and you know, all that kind of stuff, you and your team go out, you take half a day off and you go out and in uniform and go help clean up the beach and, and all of those kinds of things. Like there’s just there, there’s a million ways that you can be brand aware that are free, that are low cost and that fit into a marketing budget as part of a brand awareness campaign. All of them everywhere in the right crowds, right? So if you donate to the animal shelter that you will offer one free cleaning a month to any, anybody who takes Rescue Pets, 1, 1 free cleaning and pet urine treatment or whatever you want to do every single month. And they, you know, the board gets to vote on who gets that and you take the videos of it just like those guys that show up and just cut somebody’s lawn or clean the driveways and all that kind of stuff. Somebody who’s obviously not able to take care of their house as well and they just do it. They put it on YouTube, they feel good about it.

John Clendenning [00:29:41]:

The odd one gets called by the cops because some I didn’t want my place looking nice, but 99 times out of 100 they are so thankful. And we just do this, you know, to give back to the community once a month, whatever. And, but also the awareness and the attention they get in the marketplace is part of this brand recognition. There’s a lot of things that, that help in the brand recognition or happy customer stories help doing running ads about the local community and your involvement in it and stuff like actually ads about that very cool inception moment. Right. So we actually in that realm entirely. Something that we are actively developing is the, what we call the local story engine, which is sort of the next generation beyond happy customer stories. But how do you create a local story engine that fits into a budget that builds the brand awareness, not the leads.

John Clendenning [00:30:39]:

The leads come next, right? Reviews and reputation create trust. So reviews don’t get seen as much on Google anymore because zero click search means they never made it there. Everybody, I need more Google reviews. Yeah, you need it for the algorithm, you need it for AI to pick up. You need to be telling the stories, but it’s not being shown by humans. They don’t care if it’s on Google as much anymore than if it’s on Facebook, it’s on TikTok, it’s on Reddit, it’s on, you know, wherever, right. It’s, it’s syndicated, it’s like there’s a million ways that you can have happy customer stories and reviews and, and build your reputation and market that reputation in front of your ideal target customer. Market it in front of them to build trust.

John Clendenning [00:31:23]:

So now they’ve heard of you. You get into what’s called their Dunbar numbers. There’s. Everybody has about 1200 slots in their brain where they can remember stuff. Friends and family sit at the front and sort of vendors and brands are way at the back end. But most people are not in anybody’s dunbar. Even if you went and cleaned for somebody once, you don’t make it in there. You’ve got to be the recognized brand.

John Clendenning [00:31:44]:

That education based marketing helps with this being in, you know, in the newspapers and the magazines, the HOA magazines, not with an ad but with a, a Ask the Expert column. Right. I always bought ad space if somebody. I had a budget for it. So it’s like, hey, it’s $450 a month, John. And we’ll put you in this magazine in this high end neighborhood that goes to about 3,000 homes. Right. It was best version.

John Clendenning [00:32:06]:

Media was one of the ones, right? Yep. Cool. I’m going to have a negotiation with you. I want an article once every three months, a whole page article and I’m going to use my ad spot and I want that for free. Thank you. Because that’s, that’s my deal. You want me in. I want an article that educates the public.

John Clendenning [00:32:24]:

And every week I’m going to put in the. OR monthly. Monthly magazine. I’m going to put the Ask the Expert column in. Well, we don’t have one of those, John. No, you do now. When I started my advertising, 1995, Stratford, Ontario, when Kevin from the Beacon Herald newspaper came and said, John, we want you in the newspaper. Your brand new business.

John Clendenning [00:32:46]:

I know your brother in law Gary that runs a computer store and you see that you’re renting the broom closet. John, I need you in the newspaper. And I’m going, cool. Can I see that? You wrote an article about a new business in town. Like a whole article spread. Can you get. I will buy. It was like 500 bucks an article.

John Clendenning [00:33:05]:

I can’t remember if it was once a week or once every two weeks. But that was my budget. Right. No customers yet. That was my talk to Kevin. It was friends and family kind of getting the word out. Wasn’t even in the yellow pages. Internet wasn’t invented yet.

John Clendenning [00:33:17]:

Right. And brand new town. And one of the things I did was have them write an entire full page article. On me as a trade off like from the reporter. And I will buy ads in your newspaper. I will invest X number of dollars, whatever it was. I think it was $800 a month for, from. I think when I talked to Kevin, it was July or August.

John Clendenning [00:33:41]:

I’d started in May and for the rest of the year to the winter. Right. I knew the business would slow down in the winter. Brand new, nor, you know, up in the northern climate. There you go. Right. I didn’t run ads for my claim cleaning business. I did not run ads.

John Clendenning [00:33:57]:

I ran ask the expert columns with the space. I got advertorials with a line around it that looked like they wrote another article about me. Why? Because that original article, free as a trade off for running ads. Thank you Kevin for talking to the editorial team. New business in town. They came out, took pictures of me and the girlfriend at the time, wasn’t the wife yet, Kelly, and put us in the newspaper, all over the place. And the phone started ringing. Not saying, we got 40 calls a day.

John Clendenning [00:34:27]:

The phone rang and I went from 0 to about 5, $6,000 a month in sales. Between that, the advertorial and then me going down and knocking on doors, within a year I was $10,000 a month in revenue and out of the vehicle and hired Stewart. Why? Because we had brand recognition. We started to build trust offline. There was no online yet. How grandpa ran the business is how we need to run businesses. And then we just duplicate that online. And now AI has become the everywhere, everything everywhere, all at once engine.

John Clendenning [00:34:57]:

So you need to feed it as well. Follow up creates repeat business and search captures all of the demand. Right. So what we mean by that is they already know your name, they know about you. People are talking about you. Repeat and referral business. You do all of this, right? And then you run the ads so that when they’re searching, you do the SEO. So when they’re searching you do the AI content.

John Clendenning [00:35:21]:

So when they’re asking, they get recommended, you show up and they go, oh, I’ve heard of those guys. I trust them. Wow. My friend talked about them. Yeah, that, that SEO worked really well. Yep. Those paid ads work really well. They do.

John Clendenning [00:35:35]:

Because of this. Without it, you’re running blind. You better be the lowest priced guy in town because that’s how you’re going to get more work. Because it’s. If they don’t know you, you’re a commodity. It’s a price based war. Right. So more polls do not mean more chaos.

John Clendenning [00:35:49]:

It means more intentional chances to be Seen, trusted, remembered and chosen. Strong businesses do not wait for the one channel to save them. So a poll is any channel. So we understand clearly what we’re talking about here. What is a poll? It’s any channel or touchpoint that can capture, create, capture, convert or multiply demand. So let’s, let’s break that down for a minute. A poll is anything that can create demand. Like let’s just kind of, these are separate points here.

John Clendenning [00:36:17]:

Create demand, huh? Again, think of your ideal customer profile. Is everybody an ideal customer? I just need money, John. Okay? If you’re constantly chasing money, you’ll never get the ideal customer. It’s like you always say, well, once I get there, once I know. No, in even fact, our good friend Mark Sager, Sager sauce will tell you. He was on the training we did last March with the, the two day sort of emergency intensive that we did with cleanfax magazine. Jeff and I hosted and we had Mark Sager on with Kevin Kluth and a bunch of those guys. At the end of, I think day one, Jeff did a, a whole interview with them.

John Clendenning [00:36:57]:

What was the, what’s Mark’s advice when he does ride alongs and does all this? Mark’s advice is it takes a bit to get the flywheel going. A lot of times for new cleaners, I suggest if you don’t have deep pockets and can’t just build, build, build, build, build, build market penetration, you need, you want to be targeting the right customers who can pay you and come back again and again and again. If you waste your time targeting the cheap ones, you’ll never get the right ones because your whole business is aiming in the wrong direction. Well, yeah, once I get successful, then I’ll raise my prices. Once I get successful, then I’ll start targeting the right people. That doesn’t happen. It’s, you’re literally asked backwards. You’re literally following the forum flexors who haven’t figured it out, right? The truth is you get the, you got to get the flywheel moving.

John Clendenning [00:37:42]:

You can get the flywheel moving where in three months you’re doing $150,000, $50,000 a month in sales, half a million dollars in your first year and one point couple million in, you know, in the first 18 months of business like Tony did. If you do the, if you get the flywheel going and do really good market and, and you do the outbound, you do the outreach, you do all that stuff, but you’ve created the demand because you showed up. You just, you showed up, right? You’ve got, you’ve got either enough money or enough time to create demand. One or the other. You either got money or time. You’ve got one of the two, right? You’ve captured the demand when they come in. What are you doing to capture so you can follow up? Because conversions don’t happen. Conversions happen with great phone scripts.

John Clendenning [00:38:24]:

Conversions happen with great follow up. Conversions happen with great branding. Conversions happen with great stories in the marketplace that are already that, that pre sell you before they show up. Right? But what are you doing to convert and what are you doing to follow up? Because sometimes people convert two and three months later if you follow up. If you don’t follow up, they converted with somebody else. They still got the cleaning done, just maybe not with you, right? And how do you multiply demand? That’s the inception moment. That’s where you take all of this and then you just compound it. That’s when you start buying competitors out that are about to go because you want their database.

John Clendenning [00:39:00]:

That’s when you start looking at complementary businesses. Not because you want to do them, but because you understand marketing so well. You want to add them to the mix and manage them because you figured it out. You’ve got the flywheel running, right? So three types of marketing that drives growth, acquisition, conversion and retention. And where most people get it wrong, they’re always chasing acquisition. I just need more customers first. You convert more and you retain more. Then as you add, as you add acquisition, you add it to a machine that has doubled and doubled again.

John Clendenning [00:39:37]:

You compound and compound again. Most businesses chase this so hard, they never figure this out. So 15.2.5. Most businesses never sell because all they are is a lead gen trying to stay afloat even with one or two trucks on the road. So three types of marketing polls. Each type plays a different role. The power comes from using them together. You want to capture demand.

John Clendenning [00:40:08]:

So demand capture. Catch people who are already looking right now, right? There are people looking today for cleaning services. If you target million dollar homes, just talk to a gentleman that’s been kind of on our list for a while now in Montana. He’s got clients in his marketplace where the average home is between 7 and $12 million. Some of those people, it’s not them, it’s their house managers and the concierge services capturing they’re looking right now. What would make them want you or the other guy, right? It ain’t three rooms in the hall for 99 bucks, honey. Sorry about your luck, right? Demand creation become familiar before they need you. How do you Become familiar.

John Clendenning [00:40:59]:

How did grandpa do it 30 and 40 years ago? Do that too online, offline online AI picks that up now that’s the great equalizer. AI is finding more authenticity than ever before. The goal that Google’s always had was to provide the best response or the best answer to the search public. AI, although it can be minorly manipulated. Minorly is all about an authenticity engine. What would a real person go out and do every, you know, everything, everywhere, all at once? Let me go look there. So when somebody says hey, chat. So yeah, the dog crapped all over the carpet again.

John Clendenning [00:41:40]:

I need somebody who’s really good at getting dog poop out of the carpet. I’ve tried my best. I think I’ve just smeared it, made it a mess. Who should I call? Do you have happy customer stories, topical authority content and Google business posts and customers giving reviews and telling stories of how you got dog poop out of their carpet. If you do, you get recommended. And they go oh, I’ve heard of those guys. Because they’re familiar with you. When they need you, they connect the dots.

John Clendenning [00:42:11]:

You don’t have either. You’re not even on the conversation. And then demand multipliers. Turn trust follow up referrals into the big lift. You don’t leave people hanging. Some people aren’t ready. Now you, you follow up and follow up and chase and chase and follow up and chase and follow up. Right.

John Clendenning [00:42:29]:

You have an engine in place that keeps you top of mind. An ideal client retention engine. Grade your clients abc. A client should be hearing from you at least in an annualized basis roughly about 40 times a year. Done well, they don’t even notice it’s been 40 times because it’s all different touch points with tons of value to them. Your C list clients who meh. They’re all right. They’re not my bread and butter.

John Clendenning [00:43:03]:

They’re not. They’re not my repeat and referral high end clientele that’s going to build the business. I’m not gonna turn them away. Nice people, right? But if the economy turns down, they’re probably also not gonna call me as often. Where these guys do, right those people at least 12 times a year with a couple of personal outreaches. Right. So you can follow up, probably build trust. And that’s just your clients.

John Clendenning [00:43:27]:

What do you do with leads? Inquiries and leads need to be talked to until like years until they buy or die. They don’t stay in touch. They might be ready later. So that’s your multipliers. So the polls that can help you show up when somebody’s already close to buying Google Business profile reviews photos. Like lots of photos reviews, there’s a cadence that you need. It’s not about whether you have 200 or 2000 or 10,000, you know, 0res in every community because it’s all tied into one big listing somehow. Google doesn’t care about that anyways.

John Clendenning [00:44:03]:

It’s the velocity. How many new ones are you getting compared to your competitors? Are you watching? Are you tracking if your top competitors are generating 20 new reviews, legitimately answering every single one of them? Some of them are local service guys giving pictures. And you got two, right? That pole in the water is a little weak, right? Your bait is not as good as somebody else’s bait. If you’re not adding photos or having a team that can you give them photos, they can add them up. And we’re not talking fake AI photos, like real photos about different areas. Like your team in front of landmarks and on jobs. And like happy customer stories are really good for getting photos that can then be put into a Google business profile as well and just help, right? You got all your services listed properly and all your subservices. Like every in carpet cleaning, there’s about seven or eight subservices that qualify inside Google, and upholstery cleaning, there’s another batch.

John Clendenning [00:44:51]:

Every one of those need pages on your website and that’s part of your whole topical authority cluster, as they call it in the technic or in the AI world or the SEO world. On our end, our team develops topical authority content topic clusters so that our clients become the topic authority for AI mentions rankings Google Maps. So when we talked on the SEO training last month, I think it was, we talked about the everything everywhere all at once. SEO. It’s no longer, oh, I’m good at Google Maps. I’m, I’m good at SEO. Oh yeah, I, I get AI mentions, chat, GPT mentions me all the time. All of those are now one thing.

John Clendenning [00:45:31]:

How they all play together is one thing. This is what we’re talking about as well. Local trust signals, right? You want to be on all the directories and all the normal stuff. SEO and local pages. You want to capture demand by creating your, your visibility, right? So you want to make sure SEO is now search everywhere optimization. It’s the AI all blended in. You want to have local pages, local content, localized stories. That’s why again, happy customer stories work really well.

John Clendenning [00:45:55]:

But also they tie into a service page that’s talking about the local area. They tie into a secondary page that Talks about the local area, things like that. There’s all like, it’s just like you localize the crap out of. Because real authentic humans would be making sure that you’re not just dribble. It’s not a brochure, it’s a story being told that gets picked up. And even if it’s a zero click search and no human makes it to the page because they say yeah, chat, call that person. I’ve heard of them before. It’s because this all was there and being built as a machine and a momentum, right? Google local service ads, right? That again, right now the people are looking right now these play together and then conversions.

John Clendenning [00:46:37]:

There’s, there’s places that people look right now. There’s people places, people look offline as well. Think of all of that, right? So when somebody’s looking right now, where do they go? Some people call their interior designers, their maid service. Ask their maid services, hey, who do you know to get the carpets clean? Some people ask their flooring store that installed it, right? All of those kinds of things. So think of everywhere that somebody who’s looking right now might go to get that answer. Are you there? That’s your polls, right? Demand creation. These polls create recognition before the customer is actively searching. Real jobs, before and afters, education, proof all over social.

John Clendenning [00:47:17]:

Again, think of my offline, the community visibility we talked about as well, right? That’s who are these people and do I know what they’re all about, right? Every year we donated to the Santa tree of all the United way thingy, right? We, we collected coats for kids and, and all of that because they would take coats and boots and stuff like that. You give us, you know, you give us any of those, we’ll, you know, we’ll give you a free something. On the job we didn’t take discounts, we never discounted our clients. But we’d give them something, you know, a coat or boots or anything like that because we’re going to donate. And then obviously the, when we donated them all, we thanked people, we donated them, we put them on our social, right? And then when we actually the whole team took the morning, a couple hours in the morning off we went and you know, had went to the mall where the thing was, had told them ahead of time we’re going to be coming with like bins and bins of coats that we’d collected over the last two months or whatever through the campaign. We announced it in the newspapers and we don’t like it. Just created a buzz around. We did it every year.

John Clendenning [00:48:24]:

And we, we also got publicity to drop it off. We took pictures and stuff like that. They took pictures, they thanked us, we thank. You know, I think once or twice we had the, you know, we were able to get a local news reporter out just to hey, look what these guys did. Right? Things like that, like that, that’s just again, that’s what grandpa would have done to run the business. It’s not just, oh, I gotta hide behind an ad on thumbtack. Oh, bark isn’t working for me anymore. No, real people, real people build real businesses.

John Clendenning [00:48:49]:

They think of this kind of stuff, right? So you want to tell those stories on social. You want to tell real, real job stories. We call it happy customer stories. Again, it’s part of the new engine which is the said the local story engine. It’s all part of that whole same ecosphere because you really want that to be a big part of you in the community. For real. Educate, educate your audience how to take care of carpets, how to take care of stains. How often should you clean? What’s the difference between a low priced, middle priced and premium priced cleaning service? Educate them, right? Provide proof.

John Clendenning [00:49:22]:

Short videos, familiarity at scale without sounding like an ad, right? So you can run videos of. You know, we got some clients that take videos of like the office gal will take videos of the cruise loading up in the morning. Not every single day, but once a week or so. There’s something around the office just to add it in, just to create familiarity. Are you going to notice that? Oh yeah, we do all those videos and look at how much our business grew. No, not, not, not directly. You’re going to notice that people start talking about it and it’s, it’s one of many. Everything everywhere all at once.

John Clendenning [00:49:55]:

Commercial outreach, direct path. You’re walking into doors and knocking on doors and introduce yourself and leaving your free bottle of spa remover and a kit behind and finding out who’s in charge and grabbing their business card, laughing sweetly, you know, and aha. I’ll take a free spot out for you while I’m here. Thanks so much. And walking out the door again. Guess what? You come back again in three months. And in three months. And in three months.

John Clendenning [00:50:18]:

Three months and in three months. You know John, that sounds like a lot of work. Yep. And that lot of work can land you the Bruce Hotel for $7,000. First cleaning and about 20,000 a year in rooms and hallways. After three years of trying every three months and, and, and, and then get an endorsement letter from the Bruce Hotel and Walk into every other hotel and say, we clean for the Bruce. Oh, shit. If you’re good enough for the Bruce.

John Clendenning [00:50:45]:

Yeah, we can. We’ll take your free demo. Oh, my God, you guys are amazing. Yeah, we have this Malay machine in the back that nobody even knows how to use, and they never go in. It’s just a mess. Yeah. Yeah. How much did you spend on that? Cool.

John Clendenning [00:50:54]:

Let me show you the math education, because you already know your job. Let me show you why we can be better, cheaper, and more consistent than what you’ve been trying to do. Oh, my God. Nobody told it to me that way. Nope. That’s why we’re going to become your carpet cleaning company. Thank you so much. And your tile and your.

John Clendenning [00:51:13]:

Your p. That’s not on the first time you walk in apartments, condos, churches, you know, like commercial outreach, we teach this, right? That’s. That’s part of our coaching. Because it’s such a big part. You want to be everywhere. Some of the people at these places. Did you know that homeowners work at places that you might walk in the door of that when you clean, they might be able to get a replacement employee reward package from you. So maybe commercial outreach builds your residential business.

John Clendenning [00:51:44]:

Just maybe if you go into dentist office and chiropractors, maybe they’re a little bougier in the nice area of town, you know, salon owners. Right. So community visibility, local groups, bulletin boards, neighborhood presence, partner audiences. Like, do you. Is there, like. We talk about, like, referral partners, Interior design, like the core four. I always talk about interior diners, maid services, furniture and flooring stores, and real estate agents. Core four, Right.

John Clendenning [00:52:08]:

Everyone in town should know you. You should have taken everyone at one of them out for lunch. That’s worth. Worth anything. And you stay in touch at all times. Always. Community visibility. Oh, that sounds like a lot of work, John.

John Clendenning [00:52:17]:

Yeah, it’s about an hour to two a week. Sorry. Oh, you want to just go clean for an hour or two and make a couple hundred bucks? I’d rather go spend time here and make tens of thousands creating the. The snowball effect. Right. So it’s just a matter of getting it back into your head. How do I do all this? Good question. Because there is a straddling moment where you need to.

John Clendenning [00:52:38]:

You need to. You need to be. So get so good at that that you have to do a little bit of both. Hire Tommy the tech and get out of the truck and carry on. Right. So that part of your job is critical. Right. So another partner audiences.

John Clendenning [00:52:52]:

We’re In a world now where there are local influencers, the the that have your ideal target market. Who’s your ideal target market? We talked about it on many, many webinars and training. 35 to 55, college and university educated, upper end, usually 80. Skewed. Skewed 80% towards women who work outside of the home in legal, medical, own their own business and have a busy lifestyle, take pride in their home, want to do best for their family and take care of this stuff and want to solve it once and done. When are they ready to hire you? When the last guy screwed up, you might get lucky and it might be their first toe in the water because they just upscaled, bought their house, did this and have got money like crazy, you know, new job, whatever, next level of life or the last guy screwed up. You get that one chance. If they find the other company in town that’s good, does better marketing than you.

John Clendenning [00:53:49]:

You’ll never get that chance for the rest of your natural life because they should be able to put a fence around them and you’ll never talk to them again. You don’t get a chance again. You have to get a moment when they’re not happy with their last guy and they’re going to try, you understand? They’re going to have a moment where they’re not happy with you. You didn’t stay in touch well enough. If you don’t do your job right that they’re going to look elsewhere. And most carpet cleaning companies don’t pick that as a marketing moment as well. Client retention, so community visibility, that is all the local Facebook groups, the LinkedIn groups, things like that. You don’t post ads, you post local feel good stuff right now.

John Clendenning [00:54:28]:

You’re in people’s heads now. Demand multipliers, reviews and reputation. Email, SMS and calls. Reactivate past inquiries and customers with authentic follow ups at a decent cadence. Plan it right. Referral systems give happy clients and partners a reason to talk. How do you make referrals? Like again, a really cool strategy for referral partners. Like maybe they’re influencers.

John Clendenning [00:54:55]:

Maybe it’s the local beachbody gal who is a beachbody influencer. Plus, you know, runs does Duterra or Young Living Essential oils and you know, whatever and Pampered Chef, she does all of it. She’s got about 10,000, 15,000 women in the local marketplace that follow her on Instagram and TikTok or whatever it is and she does cooking presentations or workout presentations, you know, every couple of days. How do I know this? My wife did it for Years. All of these things in and out of different multiples and stuff like that. And had followers and other people I know. Right. There are influencers that have that crowd.

John Clendenning [00:55:29]:

Right. Does it hurt to reach out to them and say, hey, I’d like to create a bit of a referral relationship. I’d love to come and clean your house for free. All you need to do is take pictures of the cleaning and give me a great Google review if you’re happy. If anybody comes through your link, I’ll give you a special. Some people that’s enough free cleaning. I’m happy. Cool.

John Clendenning [00:55:54]:

I just, just, you know, do this as a side hustle, a hobby. Right. That’s amazing. I get free cleanings out of it. Holy mountain. That’s incredible. Right? You guys are awesome. Shout you out.

John Clendenning [00:56:04]:

Good. Now you got to pull in the water. Your demand multiplier. You could even give a kickback 10% of anybody that comes through your affiliate link. I’ll give you that back. As in gift certificates that you can use towards cleaning future cleanings. Right. Customer database, low cost audience is the one you already earned.

John Clendenning [00:56:23]:

You’ve already earned them. This is your most important. What are you doing to stay actively in touch with them and helping them out at every chance you can. You want to start a new service? This is who you start with. You want to. If the business is slow, my good buddy Ahmed, 1.5 million revenue. When he gets slow, he just hires girls on the on the phone to call more people, right. Does his market does data.

John Clendenning [00:56:48]:

But when if the economy slows down, if there’s a problem, he just calls and checks in with more. More customers. Gives them incentive. No hard sell. But he’s also one of the highest priced cleaning companies in the area. So the people he’s calling, it’s just like, hey, it’s been a while. I haven’t seen you in a while. Is there anything we could do for you? Carpet upholstery.

John Clendenning [00:57:04]:

F here’s an offer, right? Not a discount, an incentive. From more. From more effort to more results. The compounding effect of omnipresence. So everything just feeds like you. You’ve got an email list of prospects that hear from you on a regular basis about happy customer stories. Why you started the business. It’s called the Seinfeld series.

John Clendenning [00:57:33]:

Originally it starts as the soap opera series, then he switch into the Seinfeld series. Right. It’s just a psychological way. Thank you, Andre Chaperone who taught the rest of us how to use really good. Gary Halbert, John Carlton John Caples. Like writing into a system, right? How do I know this as a carpet cleaner? Because I was a marketer of cleaning services. So I had to learn right. Who Eugene Schwartz was and learn from him.

John Clendenning [00:58:06]:

Right. Claude Hopkins, scientific advertising from 1921. Great book to read. It’s now open source. You can read it, right? It is still like Edward Bernays, the father of modern wrote the book propaganda, but the father father of modern psycho Psychological advertising persuasion. Right. That’s the whole concept behind that. His the.

John Clendenning [00:58:24]:

He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. So all of that fits into the way we good businesses learn more, do better, hire the right companies that know this stuff, put it in place and they compound together. Video, SEO, podcast, partnership. I’ve got clients that we talk about. They do a podcast, right? My nephew talked him into doing a podcast landscaping business, right? No, the voice of the local marketplace. Right. Because everybody knows him. He’s the guy that walks into bar and everybody goes Greg, right.

John Clendenning [00:58:56]:

So yeah, his buddies own businesses and real estate agents and interior designers and feng shui. Like all the people he went to school with in the local community. Great. He runs his business landscaping, they run theirs. He just talks about property upkeep and promotes them. Guess who gets all the attention, right? Partnerships, community. There’s ways to think through marketing. Every poll needs a message that connects and converts.

John Clendenning [00:59:25]:

Connects to the ideal customer avatar and gets them converts them to what the next action would be. Stay in touch. Stay on the list. Download the free report. Get the free guide. Learn about the pet rescue special report you have the local pricing guide special report you have like what are all these things? Replaces the old sales script section with one sharper lesson. A poll only works if the message is clear. Say why? Why you? Why choose you over every other cleaner? Do you have an answer for that other than price? Price should be the last on a customer’s consumer list.

John Clendenning [01:00:02]:

Price is about fifth on the list. What they’re they’re more worried about trust, quality, blah, blah like you know, healthfulness and the right the ideal client who’s most worried about price. The worst possible customers who’s worried about quality and safety and being inviting somebody into the, you know, areas of their home. They don’t even let their best friends and you know and family health. The ideal customer. So why should they choose you over everyone else? If you don’t answer that in every poll, they don’t know why. Make the offer. Give the prospect the next step.

John Clendenning [01:00:37]:

That feels easy and specific. Download the free report, reach out. Talk to our Our staff, you know, book your follow up cleaning, book your holiday cleaning now and get a free touch up traffic lane cleaning in January. What’s the offer? What’s the next step? And then the fortune is often in the second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth touch. I talk about it all the time. Even when I open up a new neighborhood, a new area, I would start with back in the day before online, I’d still probably do a combination of this in today’s day and age. Don’t own the business anymore. But I started off with like flyers and, and what do you call postcards into the ideal neighborhoods.

John Clendenning [01:01:24]:

Not discounts, not deals. Introducing myself, me, the family, the kids, right. First time cleaning, get, you know, have us in to do a quote, get a $75 gift set. Whether you get us to clean or not doesn’t really matter, blah, blah, whatever. Like there’s all kinds of cool stuff. And I would put those out to the tune of about 3 to $5,000 a month to hit a neighborhood, the best neighborhoods in the new territory, the new area, the new city. And I’d get zero to one call. And you’re going, John, you absolutely suck at marketing.

John Clendenning [01:01:59]:

Yep. But I did it again the next month and at the same time I joined the local chamber, I joined the local whatever group. I started meeting some of the real estate agents. I went into every single one of the carpet stores and I also spent another three to $5,000 invested. By about month five or six, I was breaking even. I generate about three to $5,000 from that local community, maybe 10 cover the technicians, gas solution and all of the investment in the market. If I was putting about three or 4,000, I would try and get to about 8,007, $8,000 in return in jobs. Our average job was 500 bucks.

John Clendenning [01:02:38]:

Right. So you know, doesn’t, you don’t need a ton of jobs coming from that area. But we try to get. So we’d be, we’d be in the marketplace, but that would be also including from the referral partners because they would see some of those flyers because they lived in the nice neighborhoods too. Right. That’d be the real estate agents. So I was just trying to get the market to generate, not the flyers, the market to generate a 2 to 1 ROI. By month 9, 10, 11, 12 of that consistent effort.

John Clendenning [01:03:03]:

I wanted the market to generate a 3 to 1 ROI. Why? Because I have no repeat referrals yet or no repeats. I got referrals starting, but no repeats yet. By year two, that marketplace is now generating repeats. Half my Customers should come back because it’s the right people and they should be coming back once or twice a year getting some referrals. And we stayed in touch because it was always. We still did the, you know, we could back off a little bit on the, on the, on the direct mail. But why if it’s working right, it’s, it’s a retention pole in the water.

John Clendenning [01:03:35]:

That means that if the entire marketplace, not the one piece, it’s everything everywhere all at once. And then you follow up like crazy with anybody that reaches out in a nice loving way. So commercial outreach as a demand creation poll in the water. Grampus tactics still work today. The difference is that we are not treating them as random one off ideas anymore. Walk in commercial relationships condo partnerships poles in the water when they connect back to a clear offer and follow up system. Right. Walk ins packages of proof.

John Clendenning [01:04:07]:

You leave behind testimonials. You get testimonial letters from all the clients you’re currently doing. That’s again that’s just not something that was done in the 70s and 80s and 90s. You do that to this day. Not just I want a Google review. Okay, that’s great. No, get testimonial letters, stack them in your package. Don’t give a price on the back of a business card.

John Clendenning [01:04:29]:

Go in, measure audit test, leave, come back with a quote and a kit. Leave some stuff behind on the walk ins employee offerage. We talked about that. And consistent follow up. Stay visible in front of them. Get them on a list, mail them. If they’re a big fish, buy them a book. Put a little.

John Clendenning [01:04:50]:

Hey, I was thinking about you. I read this book, thought I’d buy you a copy as well. Whatever, right? What grandpa used to do to run a business. What you know is the way you need to think this through, right? Referral partners multiply. Trust, borrow. Trust is a powerful is powerful because the prospect hears about you from someone they already know and trust you get endorsed. Trust strategic partners. Realtors, flooring stores, furniture stores, upholsterers, property pros, beauty salons, local services businesses with repeat customers that can introduce you to warm audiences.

John Clendenning [01:05:22]:

Clear referral rewards. Make it simple, ethical and easy to remember. Monthly touch points. Keep the relationship alive. Bring a coffee Stories thank yous Anytime you get a job from them. Get the feedback of that customer. You’re not always gonna get a review. Get the feedback of that customer and send it to this person.

John Clendenning [01:05:40]:

Hey, thank you so much. They were so very happy. If there was ever a complaint. Hey, you know what? Thanks so much. They Had a couple spots that we had to go back for. We went back the next day, took them all out. They seem really happy. Authenticity and trust.

John Clendenning [01:05:54]:

Guess what? That gets you a lot. Nobody does this anymore. You can be in a category of 1. As the market gets tighter and harder and tougher. Right? Local visibility. Be seen where the work happens. Neighborhood activity works when it creates familiarity, proof and a reason to call your van is a moving billboard. I just talked to a guy the other day.

John Clendenning [01:06:17]:

Well, once I get enough money I’ll get, I’ll get the van wrapped. But I need to get work for first because I’ve got a van with a magnet going no. If you had a van that was fully wrapped and looked amazing and professional and a uniform on that van would create enough awareness that it would pay for the wrap within the next couple months alone. Put a QR code on it that they scan to download a guide. Now you even know how to track it, right? So door hangers and nearby homes, right? A frames and yard signs. I was a big proponent of the A frame. The way the real estate agents do it. An A frame at the end of the street.

John Clendenning [01:06:58]:

We are making a house safe, healthy and beautiful down this way with the logo of the business, right? People go walking the dog. Looking down, they see the big van. The A frame matches the van. There’s a yard sign in front of the house. You leave, leave the yard sign behind. Tell the customer going to leave the yard side behind. Leave it up for a couple of days. Um, and as a thank you, we’ll give you a free bottle of our spot remover.

John Clendenning [01:07:18]:

Neighborhood offers give specific steps without training people to only expect discounts. Right. So yeah, free rooms work really well still. Like that wasn’t just a Dan Kennedy idea that Joe Polish borrowed and stole, right? Works really well. So online and community visibility, don’t just post, participate where local buyers already spend attention. Join the right groups, engage before offering comments, help answer questions. I had a friend of mine that does roughly about 30 to $50,000 in new clients because she, her husband, they own the business. She is on social all day long and she just spends a maybe an hour or so a day.

John Clendenning [01:08:03]:

Again, it’s an effort, right? But an hour or so a day just commenting, helping and answering questions in Facebook groups they dm, they have questions. It’s just one of many poles in the water. But it she can directly relate it to first time cleanings of between 30 and 50,000 a year for like 10 years running now. No wonder they have like trucks and Trucks and trucks on the road and actually teach some of their staff to help and do this as well. Right. You got a gal in your office. She could easily be doing that as well from her own profile. Yeah, I work over here.

John Clendenning [01:08:35]:

Right. Owners come across a little bit better staff the longer they’re with you. Perfect. You know a good office manager, right. Share proof, not ads use and in your ads, share proof. The best Facebook ads are not an ad at all. They are stealth story and use clear link to the next steps. The win is not one tactic.

John Clendenning [01:08:57]:

The win is connection. Right. So visibility trust chosen. Booked a good buddy. Dan Kennedy says if you’re a business, you, you own a business, then you are the market. You’re in the marketing business. All businesses succeed or die on effective marketing systems. Systems is probably the key word right there.

John Clendenning [01:09:18]:

Marketing done well does the majority of selling for you. Marketing generates the sale conversation. The sale conversation generates the job. So without marketing, you don’t even have the conversation. Right. Marketing is not running, you know, a discount ad on, on Facebook. The great. The greatest day in a business owner’s life is when he or she starts being the doer of the thing and becomes the marketer of the thing.

John Clendenning [01:09:40]:

Right. Lots of good books to read from Dan Kennedy. Good starting point. It’s an open secret that to grow a successful cleaning business, a portion of every dollar must, must, must go back to marketing. Be invested. Less marketing, less leads, inquiries, less jobs, less clients, right? So marketing is that everything that you do in front of the. You market to get a customer, you market to indoctrinate them, you market to keep them, you market to upsell them, then you market to retain them and you get market to refer them and you just cycle, cycle, cycle, right? If you’re not investing enough, the entire business does not start the flywheel. Many new or broke business owners lack a marketing mindset.

John Clendenning [01:10:26]:

This is my quote. They go into the business being a technician, the doer of the work of the business, with very little thought or understanding of the critical role marketing plays in a business’s ability to ever grow and become successful. I talk to cleaners all day, every day, right. Strategy sessions, consulting calls, all those kinds of things. Discovery calls, you name it. And I hear that on Almost, I’d say 80% of the calls that marketing. They don’t understand it. They don’t know what it is.

John Clendenning [01:10:58]:

They don’t know how to do it. They hope somebody else can take it off their plate so they can just go out and clean more. Right. So understand that you are the marketer of your services first and foremost. Everything else is secondary. Consistently implement the best time tested, lowcost outreach marketing strategies every day, right? Every day you’re doing something. The grassroots outreach stuff, it doesn’t cost you much time. Shoe leather, right? And then reinvest 20% of your projected revenue back into your marketing and continue to use the low cost grassroots all the way through.

John Clendenning [01:11:30]:

It just becomes the flywheel, right? So we train on this all the time. You’ve got database, you’ve got grassroots, you’ve got strategic partners. This is your daily and weekly marketing opportunities map. If you’re not doing this daily or weekly, like these daily, these weekly. If there’s not something happening every single day, that is marketing the business that you’re doing on the grassroots side of it. This is like when somebody turns to me and says hey, I’m taking my marketing in house. Right? Awesome. Absolutely agree.

John Clendenning [01:11:56]:

Here’s what you need to be doing. And this is almost a full time job and you will grow a business like that. If you mean by taking your marketing in house that you’re going to spend the next six months learning SEO and creating content to try and rank and in six months the whole thing’s changed and you do it all over again. Your business has not grown. If you’re mean by taking it in house, you’re going to start figuring the psychology of an ad and, and a pixel and, and teaching Google’s algorithm on local service ads and pay per click ads and social media ads and tying all together and, and creating a, a Google tag manager account and putting it all in there and hiding it behind a clixies tracker so that you’re, you’re actually claiming back bad clicks and, and if you’re doing all of that, you’re not growing your business. Right. You should be having those poles in the water. But this is your business, this is your job.

John Clendenning [01:12:49]:

This is taking marketing in house. This are all the poles in the water and there’s some that you need assistance with, right? Because you want to be multi channel marketing, website neighborhoods, JV partners, social media, radio. When you get big enough video pre roll video on, on YouTube, pre roll from searches, video on streaming networks, email, direct mail. All of it. Yes, yes, all of it. Here to kind of wrap this up, put a pin in it. Let’s walk through a bunch of of these that we just talked about but just kind of put a visual on. We’re just going to stop a picture for each client check ins.

John Clendenning [01:13:29]:

Are you doing that? Are you calling every single One of your residential clients every three months just to see how they’re doing, if there’s anything that help they need, they need a free bottle. There’s spot where you were topped up. You’re just checking in to see if there’s any way you can assist them. Most people don’t even call back the next day. You check in, you nurture a relationship, right? You ever had your uncle, my dearly departed Uncle James, feel really bad? John, we used to hang out all the time when you were a kid and now I haven’t seen you in forever. Didn’t check in. I was a busy 20 something year old and 30 something year old running businesses. Is that completely true? No, I just thought as everybody does, time is this thing that you know will just not happen to me or whatever, right.

John Clendenning [01:14:18]:

Uncle James sadly passed away. Felt really bad I didn’t check in more often, right. He’s the guy that taught me guitar. He was, you know, all those kinds of things. So our clients, we can check in in a warm, nurturing way. We can check into every commercial business every three months. Everybody did a quote on, but everybody we clean for, go back the next day, make sure everything looks great, make sure they’re happy, right? Make sure to have a conversation with somebody, set the expectations, reset the expectations, tell them you give them free bottles of Spot Mover on the, on the trip back, right? And then tell them you’re going to come back in and check up on them every so often, right? Have a deal that if, you know, basically what we always did was instead of trying to get maintenance contracts all the time, if they came, if they cleaned anything within, you know, three months of the last cleaning of the same areas, they got 20% off. Four months, they got 15% off.

John Clendenning [01:15:13]:

Six months, they got 10% off after that it was retail. So I would stop in at month three, remind them at month four, stop back in at month six to say, hey, some of these areas might need touched up. We’ve been talking about this again. Not a hard sell, but a proof. So let me take out some free spots. That’s one thing you get from us is a $125 spotting visit absolutely free every three months. I’m gonna pop in and take a look at your spots and stains. But we might need a touch up around these hallways and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [01:15:39]:

Would you like to kick them off now while there’s still a bit of a discount on that? We’re talking them into a maintenance contract, but it might take a couple years in person. Sales visits talked about that. Outreach to strategic partners and referral partners talked about that. That’s an easy grassroots thing to do. A little bit of time, no money. Free giveaways. Free is always better than a discount. One free room of cleaning, a free spot remover, a free spotting kit with $50 off your first cleaning.

John Clendenning [01:16:12]:

On any second service, you add a free spotting kit with one free room of cleaning with any minimum job, by the way, My minimum is $325. You know, plot like right neighborhoods. Yep, that’s fine. Oh, you gave me a free room. That’s awesome. Right? Free is always better. Free cleaning. If you want to become my referral partner, I’m not allowing you to until I clean up at least 500 square or 500 worth of cleaning in your house for free.

John Clendenning [01:16:35]:

You take pictures, show it up on social media, write me a review if you’re happy. I want you to see the experience we’re going to deliver so that when you refer me, you’re referring the experience that people have with our cleaning company because you know it intimately. You’re not referring clean carpets. You’re referring the best service experience they’ve ever had. And I want to prove it to you. That’s how we sold it. Booties, red carpets, mats down the hallways, corner guards. A whole bit like, you do it all because you charge well enough to do it all.

John Clendenning [01:17:03]:

You blow off the front porch with a leaf blower. Like, I mean, there’s a million ideas, right? You know, lost treasures found by your acclaimed cleaning crew Bay, like little candy bags, like, I mean, I’ve got a million of them. We put them in one, one at a time. We wanted to deliver a better experience than anyone else. From the moment they reached out to the moment we said, bye, ma’, am, and then starting within an hour afterwards. It’s orchestrated. But a free giveaway can be part of that, right? Outreach to hotels and condo managers. Stay in touch all the time.

John Clendenning [01:17:35]:

Eventually. High end condos are a great, great source of referrals into all of the people that own the condo units inside. So what can you do as a trade off? Because all of the residents are potential customers and you get that endorsed trust if you’re the one doing the hallway and your guys don’t look like they show up in uniform and they look very professional and you’re in a professional building and your guys look professional. My carpet cleaning technicians wore shirts and ties up until about the last seven years. And we finally went into like high, high end polo shirts, like, or actually the the anti sweat shirts that you get for like the soccer polo shirts but made with that soccer material and khakis. I never let my guys wear shorts. I mean some people, I get it. I just didn’t want hairy, sweaty legs showing up in front of people’s homes.

John Clendenning [01:18:26]:

It’s just my call. I’d rather get them really lightweight khakis, like very special, expensive, you know, kind of pants or whatever than I would because I had an experience I want to deliver where we’re, we’re trying to make it feel and look like, like, like a system. That’s what we did. Sales from employees of your commercial accounts. So yeah, any commercial account, every one of the employees should be a potential customer. Referrals from your ideal customer profile. Targeted businesses, salons, wellness centers, vets. All of these people talk to your ideal customer, right? High end vet in a high end neighborhood.

John Clendenning [01:19:10]:

Their clients are perfect. So what do you do to warm them up over time? It ain’t one walk in, but how do you stay? And if they’ve seen you on social media, if they’ve been in those business, owners of groups and you’ve, they’ve, and then you walk in the door, you have a conversation, they’re part of the chamber, you’re part of the chamber, they’re part of a bni you’re part of. Like there’s a million ways that this then becomes, you know, hey, I’d love to, I’d love to, you know, have a give back for you. Here’s, here’s a thing I can do charity wise. Here’s the things that, you know, one cleaning a month you can give away to any client. You know, promote it all over the place, get them to enter the draw, whatever. I’d love our spot remover on your shelves. Give away a free bottle of our spot remover to any one of your clients, like whatever, however you want to deal with it.

John Clendenning [01:19:50]:

Like how far are you willing to go? But again, the best relationship there will generate you hundreds of thousands of dollars in first time cleanings and millions of dollars in lifetime value or never at all. Because most carpet cleaners don’t even go there. I’m not, I’m too shy. I can’t get out the door and do that. I guarantee you I’m more shy than you are. Club organizations, clubs, organizations, churches, churches, bulletin advertising, all of that kind of stuff. That’s a big one as well. Connect with furniture stores, flooring outlets and upholsterers.

John Clendenning [01:20:22]:

You know, many times I knew all the upholsters in our area by name. I’d stop by and just chat them up and see what they’re doing and ask them a few questions about different people, fabrics and stuff like that. And just became friends of theirs. Guess who they referred to? All of their clients. I’d bring them a coffee. I just shoot the shit. What grandpa did to run a business is how I ran my business. I just made friends with people.

John Clendenning [01:20:42]:

Residential neighborhood outreach. We know all about that. And number 11 online networking and community groups. Let’s recap why most marketing feels inconsistent and what’s actually causing it is you don’t have a plan. You don’t have a target IC customer. You’re not. You don’t have your grassroots plan in place. You don’t know what you’re willing to do.

John Clendenning [01:21:03]:

Everything feels difficult and hard and disconnected. And the answer is just think it through, plan it out, put it in place, close your eyes and just do it. And then layer. Everything is connected. How you’re marketing, how your marketing channels multiply each other. I hope you can see that by now. Everything everywhere, all at once it’s connected. The three types of marketing that drive growth and where most get it wrong.

John Clendenning [01:21:28]:

Right. So we talked about that. The again the generating the demand and. And growing through to generating the. You know, multiplying at the end. Right. So you want to create all of that. The three types of marketing that drive growth and from more effort to more results.

John Clendenning [01:21:47]:

A compounding effect of omnipresence. Right. Omnipresence scales. It creates the flywheel. So three grassroots marketing initiatives you think you’re going to do right now. What are your takeaways? You can always download the marketing Audit checklist. There’s a bunch of things in here. Right? The AI Ultimate AI Marketing checklist.

John Clendenning [01:22:10]:

Is your. Is your website AI ready? Is your world AI ready? We have a checklist for that. Go to our website Carpet Cleaning Marketmasters.com you will find that Right. So actually we have this twice. This is the new version of you know what are your top three takeaways? Are you going to hit your with this grassroots kind of everything everywhere all at once. You know mix of online offline. Make your plan, build your plan, stick to your plan. That’s where the money is.

John Clendenning [01:22:38]:

Again we want to remember we are talking 15% ever get out of the truck. 2 2% ever sell their business for more than the replacement value of the. Of the. Or the used value of the equipment.5 ever get to 7 figure the dream of the lifestyle business. Working on your business if few hours A week, not in it. And of those a quarter of them go from 1 million to above between 5 and 10 million because that they figured out the difference. They figured out that, that, that what, what it takes just to scale and grow and they can put that anywhere. So remember, AI is now the great equalizer.

John Clendenning [01:23:28]:

AI commoditizes businesses that fail to differentiate. If you don’t stand out, stand for something different and compelling, AI will blur you and not find you. The winner will be authentically trusted business nurturing real human relationships online and off. Being the best known cleaner wins over having discounts or deals. Being the best known is better than being the best. It’s great to be good. Being the best known and being competent is better than being the absolute best cleaner in your marketplace. Who might be the 70 year old dude that has never been, you know, has does his five, six jobs a month, right? A strong offer helps convert leads.

John Clendenning [01:24:07]:

But an omnipresent brand gets called first. No one knows who you are if they know. If no one knows who you are, a great offer won’t matter. Customers don’t buy based on price alone and very few actually have that as the number one criteria. They they buy from brands they know. Trust and respect. Your ideal customer, it ain’t this guy anymore because he is even more stressed today than he was a year ago and he’ll be more stressed next year than he was this year. This person has just watched the stock market hit another all time high after a dip and went holy crap, I’m glad my advisor told me to buy the dip.

John Clendenning [01:24:49]:

Wow, we are even wealthier than we were last month, honey. Thank you. War in Iran which one does your marketing attract? Not which one do you want. Which one does your marketing speak to and attract? If you don’t know, there’s a blueprint, it’s built it does it. AI ain’t going away. It’s getting more invasive. It’s getting more everywhere. People are relying on word of mouth is gone.

John Clendenning [01:25:23]:

If you’ve noticed a slip in sales, the market is softening because of recessionary tension, all of that kind of stuff. People worried about their jobs, middle class getting replaced by AI more and more and more. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s snowballing, right? Anybody sits behind a computer can pretty much have, you know what one person with an AI army replace 10 to 50 of them at any, any job. What do the other ones do? We don’t know. But the ideal people is not, not worrying about targeting those. Let everybody else target Those learn now how to target the right crowd that aren’t having these stresses that are tapping into all of this. Right. The way people buy work and experience.

John Clendenning [01:26:06]:

Life has changed already. So we have our growth coaching. We just mentioned started mentioning it. We’ve opened it up for a couple. A couple months now. Clear path, better clients, predictable growth and real scale. It’s a process. It takes time.

John Clendenning [01:26:22]:

There’s no, oh, let me join, let me see for a week and no it. Building a business takes time, effort, a group of people around you that are doing the same thing, rowing in the same direction, how to do Little John from the guitarist in a band, grow a cleaning empire and buy other businesses and stuff like that. I just got lucky and got in the right rooms. I got in the right rooms within six months, nine months. I ended up with mentors and masterminds and coaching groups full of other people with the same intentions. So we all worked at it together. I didn’t know that was weird. Turns out very, very small club.

John Clendenning [01:27:06]:

Right? So that’s. That’s the magic. The Forum Flexors don’t know this. That’s not the place. That’s how to figure out how to fix your butler truck mount. That’s how to, you know, should I use a, a zipper or RX20 or. Yeah, that’s great. That’s great.

John Clendenning [01:27:21]:

You know, what should I use to get pet urine out? Am I using enzymes? Am I trying to just deodorize it? Or am I going to be actually charging 15002000 dollars for guaranteed urine removal? Your ideal client will pay 1500 2000. Carl talked to us. The guy that bought my business. $3,000 was one of the. Was he just happened to walk in the door when I was on my. The last, just before last training seminar and said yep, just. Just quoted a client there. They’ve got us booked in just the urine Removal alone was 3,000 but it’s guaranteed subsurface extraction done.

John Clendenning [01:27:50]:

It’s not a deodorizing on the surface actually a full urine restoration done properly. Right. The right people will pay it. The wrong people. That’s ridiculous. Right. So if you, if you’re interested at all, reach out. We do have the.

John Clendenning [01:28:00]:

An active community coaching program. It’s by invitation only. It’s very select. But we’ll have a conversation about that if you need a conversation about how to, you know, how to have a growth partner help you grow your business. So you’ve got a role to play. A marketer should have a role to play. A vendor might help you with a pay per click ad may no carpet cleaning may not. May try and get you, you know you got to, you got to, you got to have a discount because all your competitors have discounts.

John Clendenning [01:28:26]:

I think we can get a better Facebook ad if you have discounts. Right? A growth partner is like oh hell no. Facebook shouldn’t be used for that. The best way to use Facebook ideally and properly is as a local story engine straight up. Right. There’s a, there’s, there’s a proven process around that. How do you put ad dollars behind telling the right stories in the marketplace that explode your business over the next 3, 6, 9, 12 months because it’s part of the everything everywhere all at once. So anyways that makes sense.

John Clendenning [01:28:56]:

Carpet Cleaner marketingmasters.com Schedule Reach out to us. Find us on socials. Reach out to Sirica. If you want any information on the coaching program, let us know. We again by invite only very slight crowd. There’s an application to apply if you’re one of our clients. Obviously first dibs on the group. But yes, we, we are here to try and help any way we can because everything has changed and most people have a mindset that isn’t accurate to how the 15% get out of the truck, the 2% ever sell a business for some sort of a value or the half a percent that ever grow the lifestyle business they were hoping for when they first started this journey.

John Clendenning [01:29:45]:

So we would love you to be one of those people. There’s a plan for it and if that plan, if that makes sense, reach out to us. We’re here to help. Anyways with that I will let you go. Hopefully you found some value in this and yeah, we’ll keep an eye out of everything we do and we’ll catch up with you next month for another one of these master classes, web classes on the right way to build a a home service business, a carpet cleaning business with the right tactics and the right strategies that the very few actually implement. Thanks. Have a good one. Take care everybody.