Learn the Proven Multi-Million Dollar Carpet Cleaning Success Tips Every Carpet Cleaning Business Needs to Grow Fast

Customer reviews are crucial. They build instant trust and sway undecided homeowners. Detailed, local, and frequent reviews signal legitimacy and superior service, directly impacting your bookings.

Robert Yockel [00:00:00]:

Yeah, carbon, which is great, don’t get me wrong. But I mean, you still got to drive them to get to their, you know. Yeah. And see that. And you know, sometimes I think we are, we have too many reviews sometimes because I think people think they’re fake and it’s like, yeah. And I’m like, no, these, this isn’t a, you know, a toaster from China. It’s.

John Clendenning [00:00:20]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:00:21]:

These are actual human beings in Colorado Springs, you know, leaving us reviews, you know, but it’s because we do exceptionally good work and, you know, you take pride in that and then you try to make that conversation happen elsewhere, you know, and sometimes that’s jumping on the mama’s groups on Facebook or the social media, Instagram stuff or, I mean, there’s other places these conversations are occurring outside of like, I shove money in the Google hole. And you know, that’s just not, you know, we, I mean, you know, like I said, we do a lot in carpet cleaning revenue. We didn’t spend any money this year on Google AdWords, so we only do Google AdWords in the winter.

John Clendenning [00:01:24]:

Hey, well, welcome back for another exciting episode of the Carpet Cleaner Success podcast. Today we got a powerhouse in the industry. I’ve got Robert Yockel on from Colorado Springs, Colorado. And I met up with Robert not that long ago, loved his story, loved his mindset and all the stuff that you guys hear me talking about every single week, every single month, all the masterclasses, all that stuff Robert embodies, he lives, he knows, he understands. So I wanted to get him on the podcast to really sort of hammer home, share out the growth, you know, all, all the stories, the, you know, the trials and tribulations and you know, we might not talk about the one that’s happening today, but of all the stuff that running these businesses means and how we get to the success levels that we can, because a very small percentage of our cleaning industry gets to that high success level, multimillion dollar cleaning businesses and stuff like that, and success leaves clues. We’ve heard that for years. So we’re going to try and pick up some of those clues.

John Clendenning [00:02:38]:

So welcome to the show, Robert. I really appreciate you jumping on.

Robert Yockel [00:02:42]:

Oh, thanks for having me on, John. And I’m an open book. I mean, I know it’s been a weird morning for me, but we can talk about that a little later too, because that’s kind of part of the thing. And we even have systems in place for dumb stuff, you know, because that’s just again, you know, being prepared, you know, hope for the best and plan for the worst to speak. But for anybody listening, wondering what I’m talking about, we had one of our guys run a red light this morning and totaled one of our vans. And so I was like 15 minutes ago. So I’m just gonna get some things done. But, you know, I wasn’t gonna miss John’s opportunity gave me here to be on.

Robert Yockel [00:03:18]:

On the, on the podcast with you guys.

John Clendenning [00:03:19]:

So I appreciate that and hopefully once we’re done here, you can get that all sorted out. But again, thus, you know, when you’re business owners, yeah, we wear multiple hats and we are the, you know, chief problem solvers and all that kind of stuff and have to build those systems around us. So. So speaking of that, like, I always like to start off with a little bit of a snapshot of, of where, you know, where the company is today, just what you’re doing right now. We’ll get into a little bit of the story of where you came from that was, you know, intriguing, a little heartbreaking as well. And but how you’ growing up in this industry and but where, where’s the business out today? Like, tell us, tell us what’s going on. We know Colors Row Springs is about half a million people and plus surrounding areas. What have you.

John Clendenning [00:04:00]:

What have you built out?

Robert Yockel [00:04:02]:

You know, so we’re. So we have several branches of the business at this point. We’ve been kind of slowly breaking it up into categories. But the primary and the original brand is Premier Carpet Cleaning. And that’s, you know, about to. Was it 20 years old as of May, so that’s doing about 2.5. And then our duct brand is only about a year and a half, two years old. That’s HP air ducts.

Robert Yockel [00:04:31]:

That’s doing a little over 180k, give or take right now for the year. And then for we have our. Another brand that’s just focused on the restoration. So that does the floods and the fires and the, the sewage and the mess. And those are more. Is going to do about probably about same 2.4, 2.5 ish, you know, give or take this year. So.

John Clendenning [00:04:56]:

And you’ve been in the restoration is only a couple years old, right?

Robert Yockel [00:04:59]:

If I recall about five years ago.

John Clendenning [00:05:00]:

It’ll be five years.

Robert Yockel [00:05:01]:

Yeah, five years in February, I think. Something like that. Yeah. So.

John Clendenning [00:05:05]:

Yeah, so very successful. There’s stuff that you Learned in those 20 years that allowed you to add these other things on. And, and we talked about that last time we chatted. Just sort of like, you know, and where you, you know, you’ve got ideas of where you want to go next, because once you kind of figure out some of this, then you can start packing on, you know, what do I want to do with all of this? I call that a little bit of grit to greatness. Right. So we don’t all come with a, you know, with a $200,000 build business building marketing budget and. And just can put ourselves into an industry takeover and have, like, business acumen coming out of our. Our buttholes, basically, and.

John Clendenning [00:05:41]:

And just know everything. We learn it. School of hard knocks. And one of those things you talked about is like, 20 years with the business, 25 years in the industry, and you started off telemarketing for somebody else and then transitioned and said, hey, I should do that for myself. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because again, some guys don’t quite understand. They kind of try and hide behind, oh, I hope I can have, you know, one flyer that builds my business back in the day or now, one ad that can build my business. And it’s sort of like there’s got to be a lot of grit and output and. And learning the ropes.

John Clendenning [00:06:14]:

So let’s. Let’s kind of. Let’s kind of scale back to about 20, 25 years ago and how the whole thing came to be.

Robert Yockel [00:06:21]:

Yeah, I mean, I was. I mean, long story short, I lost my parents at a young age, and I ended up being homeless, and I got a job that was in the, you know, what these paper things where people used to advertise in. And you. So I, you know, it was a telemarketing position because I had a little experience in high school doing telemarketing. And so I was like, okay. And I didn’t realize I didn’t know anything about carpet cleaning, so. But basically, over the course of my time, you know, I ended up getting the job there. And over the course of the four or five years I was there, I was.

Robert Yockel [00:06:53]:

I was 21, you know, by the time I left. Or no, 22. Excuse me. So, yeah, it was about four years and the. I had already bought my first house with the money I had made working there. And I just learned the process of the sales. And when you’re sitting there and you’re doing eight to ten hours a day at telemarketing and you do that for four years, it becomes not hard to see where the sales are coming from. It’s more about communicating with the client and spending that time.

Robert Yockel [00:07:31]:

And it’s a long period of that. But that kind of made me capable of when I said, okay, you know what, I can do this by myself. Now keep in mind, the carpet cleaning I was doing at the time was terrible. And I first to admit that I was probably one of the worst carpet cleaners. You know, I had a floor buffer and some one at the time was called coconut shampoo.

John Clendenning [00:07:54]:

Okay, okay.

Robert Yockel [00:07:55]:

All right. Anyway, so, you know, this is, you know, very terrible carpet clean that I learned from a terrible place I was working at. Right. And I also saw a lot of terrible things there. They, they treated their people poorly, they led through fear. They didn’t lead, you know, in a good. So anyway, so when I left that business, I was, I jumped in the phone book. I had my floor buffer in the back of my car.

Robert Yockel [00:08:17]:

And you know, I did those calls from, you know, 8:00am to 8, 8:00pm every day. And eventually I started having things do on my schedule because I only had about 500 bucks to work with, you know what I mean? So, and that’s. That was my budget because everything else was saved to pay the mortgage, you know, so and so with that, I mean, I already owned a phone in my house and a phone book came in the mail for free. So let’s get to work. And so that was just a process of really sticking to it. I think a lot of people, they have the strong desire to be like, oh, well, I just need to get big enough so I can hire a salesperson because nobody wants to do the sales. But even to this day, 25 years later, I still consider myself the head salesperson of my business.

John Clendenning [00:09:03]:

Interesting.

Robert Yockel [00:09:03]:

I’m the person innovating the marketing. I’m the person. I do have salespeople here, don’t get me wrong. At 5 million we’re there. But I didn’t even have a salesperson until we were 2 million. So it was always me and it was always, you know, I was the face and still am, you know, I mean we, I still go to networking meetings. I still, you know, do my best to make myself a part of the community, make myself known because People, you know, if they know you, they’re going to like and know your brand. People, they refer work to people they like.

Robert Yockel [00:09:33]:

Not necessarily because, you know, you’ve got the flashiest, you know, crazy looking vinyled up van that no one can. Exactly. That’s just my opinion. But anyway, the, you know that’s not what people call you, right? They call you because the owner’s excellent or the staff’s excellent. And so anyway, I spent a long time by myself. Eventually learned how to do portable carpet cleaning and actual water extraction and, you know, figured all that out kind of once again, trial and error. And then eventually I started, you know, I got a truck mount. It was a gigantic piece of junk.

Robert Yockel [00:10:05]:

I think I paid $1,500 for it. And I spent every evening fixing it. And then I bought a new one eventually thinking, oh, what a great thing I’m doing for my business. And that was a piece of crap too. And I think broke all the damn time. And at the time I was going to school for engineering because I thought I wanted to do that instead. And then eventually the cleaning business was just so busy, it didn’t make sense. I was already making more than most of my peers who had graduated two years prior because they were, they were going to school full time.

Robert Yockel [00:10:34]:

And then I also, at that point I started figuring out how to fix the machines. And then I started. We started building our own equipment in house or my. I was doing it by myself. And so, you know, it just, I was like, this doesn’t make sense for me to keep going on the college route. I mean, I spent like $70,000 in cash going. And I was like, I’m not going to make any more money than I’m doing cleaning, you know, so it made more sense to say. And I really, because of my prior experience with that old business, I was convinced that I didn’t want to grow the business at that time, okay? Because I, because those people that I worked with, they created such a terrible environment.

Robert Yockel [00:11:10]:

I just couldn’t see past it at the time. I couldn’t. I didn’t see myself doing any better than them, even though I’d already done so much better than them. I mean, they’d even gone out of business after I left. I mean, so, I mean, I was already doing better, but in my brain I was like, no, I’ll just be on the truck, you know, And I was, you know, cranking about 350k a year by myself, working my ass off, okay? I mean, huge profit margin because, I mean, I Just worked out of my house. I built my own truck mounts. I’d even started making some of my own chemicals at that point because that’s how cheap I was. So you, you know, thrifty, we’ll call.

John Clendenning [00:11:45]:

It thrifty Robert, I feel you for that one.

Robert Yockel [00:11:47]:

Fiscally responsible. And so there you go.

John Clendenning [00:11:50]:

Even better.

Robert Yockel [00:11:50]:

You know, I trimmed all that down. I. The marketing was wicked cheap. Everything was cheap, but everything was focused on that sales portion, you know what I mean? So, you know, that’s all, you know, when I wasn’t doing the work itself, I was selling the business, I was selling myself. And then eventually I was just so bloated and overworked that a buddy of mine who had been fixing his machine for free, we just kind of got to know each other in the industry. He came to me one day, he’s like, robert, I don’t want to do this anymore. Do you want to take over my business? I’ll sell it to you. And I was like, I don’t know.

Robert Yockel [00:12:23]:

And he already had an employee and I had an assistant at that point. And I finally pulled the trigger on it. He was doing like 180k a year, give or take. I bought the business for like 60,000, had a van, I was worth about 40, had an employee. It was a smoking deal, really, at the end of the day, so almost doubled my revenue. Was able to not be on the truck as much. And that’s how I got to that two truck phase. And then after that it was, you know, that’s a long phase.

Robert Yockel [00:12:52]:

But after that, you know, we got into, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6. We’re at like 11 carpet cleaning dedicated trucks now. You know, if we’re just focusing on that side of things, then, you know, just over time, you know, we absorbed about 13 different other businesses locally. Some of those local businesses owners now work for us because we provide health insurance, we provide retirement accounts, we fix the machines, we deal with the marketing, we fix with the stupid car accidents, you know, they come back, you know, so we had one guy. I mean, he has owned business for 22 years. He’s. He just turned 60 and he retired to Florida, sold me his business for about 80,000. And he called me after about a winter of doing nothing.

Robert Yockel [00:13:39]:

And he’s like, robert, I am bored to death. Can I come and work for you in the summer? And I said, yes, that is awesome. You know, and we have a bunch of people like that, like, fine, let’s.

John Clendenning [00:13:48]:

Let’s unpack a bunch of stuff because so a Lot of the again, success leaves clues. I talked to a lot of carpet cleaners. So do you. I’ve seen you on the forums going back and looking and I actually rechecked to see if I. Because I remembered the name. I mean like a decade ago I’ve, I’ve seen you on Clean Quip and, and other ones just answering questions and things like that. Right. I just kind of remembered the name and.

John Clendenning [00:14:07]:

Yeah. And so some of the best cleaning companies that we know, some of the best entrepreneurs like I mean this is like even the Alex Hormozis of the world, the new guys, the Dan Kennedys, the Jay Abrahams, all those kind of guys, they all came from a background of either doing cold calling or door to door cold sales. They learned the psychology of a human to get out of their own head to just always be marketing always like find out what people want, how to influence, you know, ethically but influence and, and, and really understand that side of it. And when they take that side of it as, as the, as, as as a major part of the business and then layer a business on it, you’re always kind of defaulting to what you know which is sales solves problems, money solves problems. That let’s, let’s. That’s massive imperfect action and figure it out as opposed to waiting for the best this or the best that or and volume as well. Like you mentioned like cold call 8 in the morning, 8 o’ clock at night. We’ve got some clients that I mean they started with auto dialers back in the day and we’re doing like you know when those were popular in the early 2000s.

Robert Yockel [00:15:12]:

I have a very funny story about that. I will.

John Clendenning [00:15:14]:

Yeah and yeah and even, even door like you know the free rooms on doorsteps but not like a hundred doorsteps, 10,000amonth. They, they scaled to the point where they broke stuff but built a business. And then the other thing that every one of the ones that I’ve seen the successful they get to a point where they start buying out competitors who think they’re carpet cleaners, not marketers and salespeople of cleaning of cleaning services. Because once you get that as you’re right like a couple million handed off but, but you’re still it’s brand, it’s people that people buy from a brand is great to have as long as that brand is in the especially local business in the local marketplace and we know who’s behind it. So when you buy the other businesses you’re buying the legacy and the reputation of the Guy that ran the other company, you, for 60 and 80 grand to buy a carpet cleaning company and take that database, have it handed over. Well, so a lot of them come over to you, scale them up to better pricing and better packaging and other services and stuff like that. And the lifetime value you just bought is hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars of lifetime 5, 10 year retainers from these clients for somebody who’s willing to sell it for the price of, you know, maybe a brand new truck mount. You know, theirs is used, but you could use it.

John Clendenning [00:16:31]:

You could clean it up and sell it on Craigslist. What you really care about is that that database and legacy that you can enhance. And again, you, you’ve done it 13 times now buying other businesses, which is a great, you know, growth lever as well. Always be selling, be in the community and buy existing companies that, that are, you know, that you can, you can level up. So, yeah, I mean, I bet the.

Robert Yockel [00:16:53]:

Cheapest one I got was like, $2,000. I’m not even joking.

John Clendenning [00:16:56]:

Exactly.

Robert Yockel [00:16:56]:

Yeah. And like, the guy didn’t even know his phone number was worth something. So I just called because he had some equipment for sale. I didn’t really want the equipment. I was like, well, because he said he was moving. And I was like, what about your phone number? And he’s like, oh, I don’t know. I’m just, it’s my cell phone. I was like, cool, I’ll buy your cell phone from you for $2,000.

Robert Yockel [00:17:11]:

And he was like, okay. And I mean, if we still track what we’ve gotten off of that over the years, because, you know, we. We remarket we. You know, obviously we. I don’t, I don’t like to tell him to tell his customers or he or Herb. Sorry. Or them, whatever, that, that we are buying the business. I don’t like that.

Robert Yockel [00:17:31]:

So I always tell them, just let me have that phone number. I’ve got a way to transfer it. You’ll know. All you got to do is sign this piece of paper. You’ll never see the phone number again. And don’t tell anyone anything.

John Clendenning [00:17:41]:

Okay.

Robert Yockel [00:17:42]:

When they call in, or we just answer the phone generically, hey, this is blah. How can I help you? Blah, blah.

John Clendenning [00:17:47]:

We.

Robert Yockel [00:17:47]:

Know what I’m saying. We don’. Go into it. And then we go through the thing, get, you know, get them lined up, and they get a text message saying, premier Carpet Cleaning is coming. And sometimes they call us back and they go, where’s Bob? And I go, wait, yeah, Bob retired. You know, he trusted me to take over the work for you guys and you know, we guarantee we’re going to do a great job. Look, our stuff on Google, we’ve got 3,000 five star reviews. If you don’t believe me, don’t pay us.

Robert Yockel [00:18:09]:

And so that way they don’t get the opportunity to start thinking, well, Bob’s gone, maybe I’ll start looking around.

John Clendenning [00:18:16]:

Yeah, no, that’s great. That, that, that’s a good, that’s a salesman’s mindset right there. You’ve done enough to know don’t give them something to anchor on and take them down a rabbit hole.

Robert Yockel [00:18:25]:

Don’t let them even think about it. Same thing, you know, like when you’re doing restaurants or any of that kind of stuff, you know, like if you work with those types of facilities, never change your price, never talk to them, show up, do the work, leave. The less they think about you and the more automated they pay you, the longer you have that contract and the happier everybody’s going to be. You know what I mean? So that’s a different mindset. But that’s, that’s another thought process too. So I had one guy who literally gave me his business and cool guy.

John Clendenning [00:18:50]:

I just, Those are fun. Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:18:52]:

And now he was just like, hey, I’m gonna send a postcard to all my customers. Robert, I like you very much. I know they’ll come and use you. Didn’t get a single phone call? None. Yeah, so. But go the other way and it’s good. Yeah, it’s. You don’t, don’t bother.

Robert Yockel [00:19:06]:

You know, you’re not gonna just trade them over to the new business. They don’t want to. They want their old Bob or Henry or Susan or whoever they’re used to talking to. Just one day they call in and a different person answers the phone. And that gives you the opportunity to close. You know what I mean? That they don’t let them think about it too much, you know, so.

John Clendenning [00:19:24]:

Yeah, and I mean, that’s psychology. So some of the things that, like just digging through some of your stuff that when we talked last time and then afterwards, like the psychology that you put behind your thought process ties in with again. If everybody’s learning from some of the smartest thought leaders, Marcus Sheridan, they ask, you answer. And the whole idea of the self service megatrend, but without discounting and commoditizing your brand again, keeping your brand separate so that you like some of your, like even that conversation. But you’ve, you’ve got the, the rare restoration and The HB air ducting stuff like keeping some of that but personalizing it. All of these things are, are brilliant ideas. Like even, even as for example, I’m, I’m one of these people that hate self booking widgets on websites because for one it will never root the same way your office gals will saying hey, we got the guys are going to be over here. I’d rather put that over on Tuesday on that customer instead of the opening tomorrow.

John Clendenning [00:20:15]:

You are not going to get AI to do that but. And you’re not going to get a self booking bot to give a quote that justifies your pricing. But you can give estimates and you can walk them through a gamified situation where at the end they have to opt in to get it. Now you have the opportunity to call somebody and use the actual human influence moment because they got the price and you pick up the phone and call them and say, hey, I noticed you got an estimate from us. When would you like us to come over, do a quota or a cleanup? Right? And now you’ve got that moment. So psychology is great. Like it’s just thinking through the tiny points.

Robert Yockel [00:20:46]:

Well, that’s just not, that’s noticing the difference between lead generation, sales, marketing, prospecting, these are all different things and they get lumped into sales. And that’s not correct. And so you know, and you know you can lead generate and not necessarily generate sales and you can generate sales but not generate enough leads. Right. Or you can do marketing that doesn’t do anything. So I mean there’s a lot that you could do other than just kind of look at it from, from you know, a single standpoint. You know, we have, you know, a lot of guys, when I have bought them out over the years, I mean the main conversation they have is like, oh my ad in the newspaper and yellow pages just didn’t work no more. And that, you know, stuff like that, it’s like, well, you know, yeah, times, they are changing.

Robert Yockel [00:21:27]:

Fifteen years ago, you know, I was telling people that. Yeah, yeah, you know, it’s funny. So during the end of my outbound sales telemarketing years, I, you know, I was sitting around and I was, because I was doing, I was going to college at the same time. And then I started looking online for something and for some reason it just occurred to me out of the blue I was like, I wonder if anyone’s searching for carpet cleaning on Google. Yeah, it wasn’t obvious at the time. It really was, you know, and so I went, I just typed in carpet cleaning Color springs. And there was only one guy who had a website. That was it.

Robert Yockel [00:22:00]:

And I was like, okay, well this doesn’t look too hard. You know, it was ugly HTML. This is even before cascading style sheets, any of that stuff.

John Clendenning [00:22:08]:

Like just like, yeah, yeah, early, early, early days.

Robert Yockel [00:22:10]:

And so I was like, okay, well I’m, I’m going to Barnes and Noble. And so I went there and I got a big ass book and I read it while I was going to college, while I was doing my telemarketing. And the website showed up on page one in like two weeks. And because you know, I did black hat SEO, I filled the bottom of the page just with the word carpet cleaning 7,000 times and you know, showed up like right away. And one day my phone started ringing and I was like, like hallelujah. You know what I mean? Spend so much time doing the outbound. Now I did never stop doing the outbound though. Even after that I kept doing it because you know, you know, never stop selling.

Robert Yockel [00:22:46]:

Right. And so eventually I got too busy to do just cold calls. So then I started out auto dialer and the website and then I eventually the auto dialer. Honestly I just kind of got sick of it and I gave up on doing that. But then I had, I started just calling my old customers. So you know, those, I never stopped telemarketing. And we still do it today.

John Clendenning [00:23:08]:

Yeah. Amazing how actually talking to your existing clientele that should be like 50, 60, 70% of any given week, month or quarter in bookings because they will come back if you stay in touch with them. Dan Kennedy Build a fence around them, stay in touch, tell them good stories, tell them what you’re doing. Get into their, their heads just a little bit. Just enough to not like I can be a welcome guest, not an annoying pest, all those cool things. But pick up the phone and call them. We used to call our regular clients every three to four months on a rot patient and then at the anniversary 12 and then at 18 and then 24, hey, we miss you. On top of sending them a mailing into their mailbox and you know, text messaging when it showed up lightly and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:23:46]:

Just, just let’s, let’s get in front of them in a multiple times because people do not make a decision from the first thing they see and they don’t make a redecision new like they re up that decision just on a one and done.

Robert Yockel [00:23:58]:

It’s.

John Clendenning [00:23:58]:

You got to kind of, you got to kind of treat it like the, the credit collection people at first they call up and they’re all nice and friendly, and then eventually becomes a, you know, a little bit harder sell, and then it becomes a final notice, and then it becomes, you know, all that. If you can set that up in marketing, that’s just psychology of fomo. Right. Feel our fear of missing out, and you just use a little bit of it and stay in touch and be. Be real. And people go, I like my guys. And then they refer you as, well, so sorry, the.

Robert Yockel [00:24:25]:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s always been about, you know, focusing on sales. I always said, like, I don’t care if you’re the world’s greatest lawyer. You know, if you don’t have clients, what are you doing?

John Clendenning [00:24:34]:

Yeah, who cares?

Robert Yockel [00:24:35]:

I mean, you’re just like, happy to be sitting around with a really expensive degree, you know, so, yeah, same thing with, you know, your equipment or whatever it is you’re attempting to do, you know, I said, yeah. And then as you start to expand your mind a little bit in terms of, you know, don’t get me wrong, carpet cleaning is very cool. And, you know, there’s a lot to know about it. And there. There is a surprisingly advanced subject, and people don’t understand that. But the. There’s more things to do in that house, you know, then there’s a lot more to do. And so by, you know, providing that customer with just the same level of customer service and letting them know, hey, listen, we do this too.

Robert Yockel [00:25:09]:

And if they. Because you’d be surprised how often, you know, we have one of our guys going, because we do sales trainings every week to, you know, with our full team. Every week there’s a Thursday morning meeting. We all go do sales trainings. I read sales books. We do captions of those books. We talk about those things. And.

Robert Yockel [00:25:25]:

But, you know, just the things I hear is that, like, the customer didn’t even know we did a post recall cleaning. Yeah, right.

John Clendenning [00:25:31]:

And it’s on the side of the van and every brochure you’ve ever sent them. Yeah. And it’s like.

Robert Yockel [00:25:35]:

It’s like right there, you know, I mean, and it’s also kind of obvious, but to us, it’s obvious. Right, Because I use my sucky thing to suck on this other thing. You know, why wouldn’t it? So, but so the customer, it’s not, you know.

John Clendenning [00:25:47]:

Yeah, but even to the technician. So what you just kind of keyed in on there. Like, I mean, there’s just so many knowledge bombs. Hopefully everybody’s picking these up. But again, sales Training for your team. Well, even if it’s a team of one, do sales training because you’re going to grow, you’re going to get more dollars per client. Happier clients deliver a great client experience that’s consistent. So technician Tom didn’t do such a, so much better customer service experience than Jamie that showed up.

John Clendenning [00:26:12]:

They all know what it’s supposed to look like to be in the house, to at least deliver the premier carpet cleaning base experience. And some guys are just chattier than others and whatever. But you train that, you have the sales training. You know when you’re gonna have that add on service upsell conversation with people, whether you’re doing three package pricing or the one price add on stuff. But you, you have it planned because now you’ve got a process that, you know when you have a process that it should be done this way and you have people, when something isn’t working, it is either the person not running the process or the process needs upgraded. And you know, it’s one of those two. And you can, you can identify and fix the problem and scale to the next level. If everybody’s winging it, which is most businesses, you don’t, you don’t know what the fixable point is.

John Clendenning [00:26:55]:

And it just becomes a mess, it becomes chaos.

Robert Yockel [00:26:58]:

Yeah, well, in the. Accountability is one of the hardest things to track. Yeah. And so, and especially like in the sales world where it’s not necessarily as clear as like, well, this guy’s making a lot more commission. Well, it’s a little bit more than that because, you know, it’s, it’s a little bit, it’s complicated to say like this is, this is the cut and dry, like this person’s excellent. This one is not. You know, I mean, I’m a firm believer. Steve Turbin, great teacher, he has the whole concept.

Robert Yockel [00:27:24]:

Good enough. Right. So some guys, they, they struggle to get past that first stage of development because they’re like, I need everybody that works for me to be perfect and they need to look like me. And I’m like, that’s not true. And you know, but I did the same thing, you know, I mean, when I, if I hired my first guy, you know, he had a couple tattoos on his arm, he had a ponytail, you know, and by the time I was like, he doesn’t look like me, you know, like a salesperson, what are.

John Clendenning [00:27:52]:

People going to think? What am I, what is my 60 year old customer?

Robert Yockel [00:27:55]:

Yeah. You know, but you know, you have to get a little past that and understand that people can open their Mouths, you know, and they can. They can do way more than, you know. I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you had tattoos all over your face, don’t do that. But, you know, you’re not going to be a salesperson, probably, but, you know, there’s definitely more that you could skid out of somebody and you can teach them, you can educate them and get them to the point where they’re communicative and, and, you know, like my, My, My, my GM now, like, he was, he was not like the greatest communicator when he, When I first started working for him. You know, this is like 10 years ago, and I, I worked with him, and now he’s fantastic. He’s a leader. He does all these things.

Robert Yockel [00:28:31]:

There’s so much that you can do with people when you develop the systems and you, you have the conversations with them, you know, and then eventually you can kind of start to take a step back to the business itself and start to work on it as a whole. But, you know, for those first few trucks, I mean, you are, you are the, the. The father of these people sometimes. Yeah, yeah. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But you, you know, you do have to draw the line somewhere. You know, if you’ve bailed a guy out of jail two times, there’s, you know, probably not the.

John Clendenning [00:28:58]:

Right in the middle of the night, and he’s the. You’re the only person he calls.

Robert Yockel [00:29:04]:

Okay. You know, there is. But, you know, there’s a lot you can do with people, and, you know, they don’t. You know, I think people struggle because they’re just trying to find this perfect, beautiful sales guy to walk in their door, you know, with big, shiny teeth, that he knows everything about carpet cleaning. And, you know, well, that guy probably has his own business. I’m sorry to break it to you. So stop looking for him. And so, you know what I mean? That’s just not the way it is.

Robert Yockel [00:29:26]:

Everybody’s a little imperfect. I’m a little perfect. You know, you have to, you know, come to the door, you know, knowing that. That the person on the other side is going to not necessarily be right where you need them to be, but if you put the effort in, they could be phenomenal, you know?

John Clendenning [00:29:38]:

Yeah. And you do that again. You do that training, you do that ops, you keep an eye on it, stuff like that. There, There are advancements in our industry, advancements in the world even nowadays, if you, if, if, if it makes sense, you can get little lapel pins that record conversations so sales guys can, you know, you can spy on them. That’s bad. But you could also have somebody say, hey, listen to your own conversations, run it through this triage and find ways that you can improve. So you know, and things like that. We’re in an AI world now where you can actually record and then, and then do some sales training back with yourself and stuff like that or with team members if it’s, if it makes sense in the business and, and that kind of thing.

John Clendenning [00:30:14]:

But you can just add that to an operations to say, hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do the Thursday morning training and I’m gonna add this now I’m gonna. And, and when you build that team, you’ve got the guys that are really good at doing stretching and repairs. The other guy’s not quite as much. One guy get. Now one guy can cross train the other guy going hey, if you want to make a little bit more commission of our jobs, have some sort of repair that’s needed, here’s how I talk. I explain it to them. And all of a sudden you’re lifting up that other guy who didn’t even know he could make that much money or get those marbles out of his mouth and things like that. So the team starts training the team as well, which is really helpful.

Robert Yockel [00:30:48]:

Yeah, we have guys just like that exact. Exactly. We have the same thing going on. Like these guys are awesome at this. These guys are awesome this. These guys are awesome at this. And then we all get together in these meetings and we let. I mean I don’t just stand there and yap for an hour and a half.

Robert Yockel [00:30:59]:

I let everybody talk. I don’t that much to say some days, honestly, you know, I come in Thursday, I’m just like, hey, hi everybody. But the. What was going to say, you know, we do a lot of education, focus, sales education and emotional. So you know, we, we try to bring the person to a place where they understand why, you know, and then why that’s going to help them solve their problem. Right. So that, that we bring that education level up and then we bring the emotional purchase up. Right.

Robert Yockel [00:31:32]:

So an emotional purchase is like, you know, don’t get me wrong, like last time I bought a car, which is three days ago. The just coincidence. I don’t buy cars all the time. I had Alaska for seven years. But the, you know, I, I bought a car that was a little bit more than I would usually buy. Right.

John Clendenning [00:31:50]:

Okay.

Robert Yockel [00:31:51]:

You know, you know you. Because you make the logical choice, you know, you. But that’s Just by the emotional decision. Right. Because I’m trying to solve whatever this issue is in my life, and I like this idea. So you just. It, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. So when we’re going to do sales in a home and the way we.

Robert Yockel [00:32:05]:

We try to talk about it, like, let’s say we’re trying to talk about a carpet repair or especially urine damage. Right. That’s a very emotional decision. These people have struggled. Their house stinks. They know their guests come in and smells to them too. This is an emotional thing. They called you out there to solve the problem.

Robert Yockel [00:32:20]:

Why won’t they pay you the extra $300 to fix it? Yeah, right, because you didn’t give them enough education.

John Clendenning [00:32:26]:

You didn’t tell them exactly.

Robert Yockel [00:32:28]:

You know, you didn’t get it and.

John Clendenning [00:32:29]:

You didn’t get that empathy. You’re. You. You didn’t get on their side of the table, as they say, you know, Whereas you’re coming across, you know, almost like, well, this stinks. I can fix it. As opposed to, you know, hey, I’d really.

Robert Yockel [00:32:39]:

Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:32:39]:

On be on their side of the table. Have you ever had an issue like, this is solvable, you know, And a.

Robert Yockel [00:32:45]:

Lot have you done on your time to deal?

John Clendenning [00:32:47]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:32:47]:

Because obviously.

John Clendenning [00:32:49]:

Yeah, exactly.

Robert Yockel [00:32:50]:

You know what I mean? So, you know, I love. I mean, my favorite one is like, will this keep the cat from being here? It’s like, know. But, you know, I just, I always like. But the, you know, so we try to get them to that emotional state where they. They use all the information, all the logic and everything we gave them to go ahead and get. Make that emotional and logical decision. You know, we’re not trying to trick anyone here. We’re just trying to provide them the best level of service, you know.

Robert Yockel [00:33:14]:

You know, we have a. Kind of a strong concept there too. We have. We call. We call it the cheeseburgers, Right? So, you know, okay, like, so McDonald’s, right, they sell more cheeseburgers than anybody in the entire world right now. They have the, The. The Whop or the Big Mac.

John Clendenning [00:33:27]:

Right.

Robert Yockel [00:33:28]:

The biggest, most pricey burger on the menu. And they got the dollar cheeseburger. Which one do they sell more of? The dollar cheeseburger.

John Clendenning [00:33:35]:

Dollar cheeseburger. Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:33:36]:

Yeah. They sell tons of these things right now.

John Clendenning [00:33:39]:

Can’t.

Robert Yockel [00:33:39]:

Do we offer the Whopper? Yes. Do I shove it down everybody’s throat and only sell Whoppers? No, because there’s more people who can afford dollar cheeseburgers. But I am just as willing to sell not just the whopper I’ll sell them the Red Robin. I’ll sell them them the Gold Leaf cheeseburger. You know, I mean, I’ll walk in there in a white suit and gloves and look like Michael Jackson and do the house, whatever you want. Like, it’s not important to me, you know, as long as I’m getting the value to the customer that they perceive. So, you know, so we have a wide array of how far we’re willing to go depending on what the customer wants to see. Right.

John Clendenning [00:34:15]:

So the cool thing about that is you’ve got customers that will start like, say again, say the 30, 28, 29, 30, 31 year old, new family, new mom, new kids on a budget a little bit tight. They don’t want to do it themselves. They don’t want to rent the machine, they don’t want the discount. They’ve kind of, you’ve either heard some of your stuff, educated a bit or just really understand that you get them started. Well, five years from now, 10 years from now, and they’re hitting 40 and they’re. And they’re buying the furniture that’s going to be the last furniture they buy. They’re buying like, you know, the kids are a little bit older. They’re not like, it’s not kids spilling Kool Aid on couches and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:34:50]:

You know, you got teenagers now and stuff like that, but they get into the family room and they can make a mess there. But, but you’ve got a little bit more. And now they’re. Now these people that were giving you a couple hundred dollars a year are giving you $1,000 a year because you’re doing the tile floors, the bathroom tile showers, and because you brought them along with you and they respected that as well. You, you have, you, you can meet them where they are, you can give them the dollar cheeseburger. And then when they, when they do grow up and they want the, the, the, the Big Mac or whatever, you also have that available. Exactly.

Robert Yockel [00:35:20]:

It’s all there, you know, and you know, we let them know that. And that’s what’s part of that education. Right. So I’m not going to go in there and, you know, throw the kitten caboodle, Scotch guards, grub all this stuff on a carpet that A, may not need it or B, they don’t want to pay for it. But I’ll let them know we’re not doing this. We don’t make that level of promise either, you know. Yeah, because that’s fair. You know what I mean? Like, just because, you know, like, I don’t have to guarantee that the this super fancy thing when they’re not paying for it, you know.

John Clendenning [00:35:50]:

Yeah, we’ll guarantee it at this. But we’re not. No, we’re not gonna get. There’s a trade off, right? Like.

Robert Yockel [00:35:55]:

Yeah, exactly.

John Clendenning [00:35:55]:

So.

Robert Yockel [00:35:55]:

But we make sure they’re aware of that. You know what I mean? Because I’ve gotten plenty of homes where I’ve just straight up turned down to work and I tell my guys to turn down the work if we go into a process that we feel as though that they are going to be 100 dissatisfied with if they go with level of service. And you know, I don’t want you to do that job that is a nightmare. I want you to walk out of that house if you can’t get that person on the same education level where they understand what we are doing today is possibly going to make this worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you need to leave because.

John Clendenning [00:36:25]:

Yeah, we called it, we called it in ours a restorative cleaning waiver where when we walked in, if the technician determined it was restorative cleaning. So, you know, think of the beaker like if you got. The average person has 10% of the beaker with carpet fiber, with dirt. Think of the, like and you can take 90% of it out and what’s left is such a small smidgen that again, a white towel test, you might get a little bit of gray on it, but it’s clean and somebody else has it full to the top like so it’s, you know, and then 90% of that removed is still more than the first person ever had left. You can’t get beyond that. So we would call it restorative cleaning and explain to them and show them like a soil density test and a couple little tricks on white towels and just tell them, I need you to sign this waiver if we’re going to go ahead with the job today. Because what this is is waiving all of our warranties and guarantees because I am literally just going to come in loaded bear. I’m going to get it as clean, if not cleaner than that spot I just took out for you.

John Clendenning [00:37:14]:

But I can’t guarantee perfection. And I don’t know what’s underneath all this dirt, all this other stuff. You could have red wine stains that I can’t even see right now. So there is, I’ve seen we’ll do twice as much work for the same price as we normally would charge. But we, we waive the, the warranties and guarantees because of that. And some people go, yeah, just go ahead. I just need it. I need it better than it is.

John Clendenning [00:37:32]:

Or, you know what? No, I’m, I’m gonna replace it then, or thank you for being honest. And at least you, you, you give the technician something. We gave them again, a restorative cleaning waiver. So they now had something say, this isn’t me saying it, Mr. Technician. This is the company’s policy. So they, they have something else they can anchor it against as well and not feel embarrassed to have to explain a bad situation as well.

Robert Yockel [00:37:52]:

So by that, you know, I do the same. I, I, we have the same kind of situation. And I will sometimes I play dummy on the phone with people. I never tell people I own the best business. Okay, yeah, yeah. I just like, you know, I’m like, you know, it’s company policy. You know, it doesn’t have to do it this way.

John Clendenning [00:38:08]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys just not tell them I’m the one that came up with the policy.

Robert Yockel [00:38:12]:

But who said the company doesn’t matter? You know what I’m saying? That’s not the point. You know, the point is this is our policy. So, yeah, very similar.

John Clendenning [00:38:22]:

So a couple things that came out of this as well is sort of like we’re talking about being, being available for a wider range. You definitely don’t want to be the, like anybody who’s looking for the rooms in a hall for $99 sellers that you got to educate them up to it. At least there’s a base, reasonable level. But having said that, the two sides of it are one, we talked about like the modern world. So you’ve got to be known in the public. You’ve got to have those chamber members and BNIs and referral partners and interior designers and Howard Partridge 101. You got it. You got to know your, you know, the flooring stores and all that kind of stuff and be relatable.

John Clendenning [00:38:56]:

But nowadays I even asked you, I said, so how many influencers do you have have referring you? Because when I started hearing what you’re doing, I’m going, Robert’s definitely got influencers. And I only talked to about maybe 5%, 10%, maybe at the most of carpet cleaning companies or home service businesses I know have even understood the local micro influencer niche. That is another referral source of people that are collected around somebody who on Instagram, TikTok, whatever, who’s in the local community and have has eyeballs, has as people that trust them so they can try somebody out, get a free cleaning do whatever, get a kickback. If that’s affiliate commission, however they want to work it. But they now call you out. And you just got made aware you’re on the radar now. The awareness of thousands more homeowners that go, I thought of those guys, or I’ve never heard of those guys, or whatever. And now you at least get them going down your rabbit hole in your world.

John Clendenning [00:39:48]:

So interesting that you, you, you. You already have. Have some of those in place and stuff like that. So when did you start the influencer game? When did you realize that there’s a. There’s a crowd collecting around these things?

Robert Yockel [00:39:58]:

Yeah, I gotta be honest, I had somewhat of an unfair advantage. My. My wife is an influencer, you know, and so we get invited to restaurants and all this stuff, and I started seeing that we were getting. I mean, we’re just going to eat places for free to give you some cocktails or whatever. And then she, you know, take some pictures. So I gotta take two steps back. So I started dating.

John Clendenning [00:40:18]:

Dating.

Robert Yockel [00:40:18]:

This is my second wife, just to be clear. I started dating her, like, almost 10 years ago. And I’ve never seen someone take pictures of their food before. I was like. I was like, all right, you know, because we were going out to dinner, I didn’t really think, okay, sure, take a picture of your food. I don’t know why you want to remember what you ate, but, okay. And so, but. And then, you know, she had just moved into Colorado, and then, like, you know, about a year, two years later, all of a sudden, we’re getting invited all these places, and they’re like, come and eat here for free.

Robert Yockel [00:40:47]:

Come and eat here for free. And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I just. It kind of occurred to me, I was like, well, what is this? And, you know. And eventually I heard the term influencer. I didn’t think about it at the time. This was, you know, a while back. And then, so I basically, I, you know, she started getting to know all these other influencers.

Robert Yockel [00:41:02]:

I was like, hey, do they need any carpet cleaning? Because, yeah, if a restaurant can do it, why can’t I do it? And so that just occurred to me, and I was just like, okay, sure. And so, you know, I just did a rug for one of them. The other day she did this big post. I mean, I mean. And, you know, hard to say how many calls you get, because I’m not having. They don’t do advertising. They. They just talk.

John Clendenning [00:41:23]:

Just do a shout out. Yeah, just a shout out.

Robert Yockel [00:41:25]:

It doesn’t hurt. And I don’t know, I can’t directly correlate that to tens of thousands of dollars worth of jobs. But I can say for 150 bucks to wash her area rug for free, she’s got 20,000 followers. So yes, yeah, it’s, it’s, at the.

John Clendenning [00:41:41]:

Very least, it’s a good try. But it’s a very good try because yeah, would she have paid you your price plus, plus profit to do the rug cleaning? Who knows? But you’re not losing that. You’re gaining the fact that for a little bit of time and a little bit of solution and a satisfied purchase, no different than if you want a real estate agent, interior designer, any those people to refer you, have a chat with them, call them up, meet them at the B and I take them out for a coffee, have that chat and say, hey, I don’t even want you to refer me until you have us come to your home and do 500 worth of cleaning. I want you to see the cleaning experience. I want to see the, the guys rolling out the red carpet, covering the hallways, doing all the things different. And here’s my guarantee, that’s different as well than other than other cleaners. If they’re not happy, we’ll come back and reclean. If they’re still not happy, give the money back, that kind of thing.

John Clendenning [00:42:26]:

So I want you to be 100 comfortable with us and if you are, then take pictures while we’re there, shout it out, do all that kind of stuff and we’d really appreciate it. And some of them will say, well, I would like an affiliate IT or kickback commission. Give them a bit of an offer, a package with their own code. Most of them don’t. What I found as well is most of them don’t. Most of them just, just want something for free.

Robert Yockel [00:42:46]:

I mean your cost per impression there is pennies. And that’s, you know, if we look at the old kind of thing of 14 touches, which is probably more like 20 nowadays. But yeah, yeah, the, you know, that’s a very cheap touch. And that’s. It is, you know, so I mean, when, you know, especially if you’re looking at Google and other things and your adword costs are skyrocketing, I mean if you can just get your name in front of somebody for, for 10 cents.

John Clendenning [00:43:12]:

I mean, yeah, and then I call it polls in the water because yeah, like we’re, we’re, we’re long gone. The days of stuffing keywords at the bottom of page in the same color as the page and getting Getting it to rank, we’re long gone. The 10,000 backlinks from Russia ranking, we’re long gone. The mini sites, every single keyword has its own website. Paid ads were cheap until they weren’t. Facebook ads were cheap until they were. But if you can, if you can turn the corner, keep the clients longer. If your average job is 4 or $500 and the average life lifetime value is 5,000, 10,000, $15,000 for half of those people trackable and you can do that now you know the value of how much you can put in to buy a new customer because the long term is a little bit more.

John Clendenning [00:43:50]:

And one pole in the water might be really inexpensive and a touch, as you said, those, Those Z mods zero moment of truth 20, 20 impressions before they’re ready to pick the product off the shelf or call the carpet cleaner. You’ve just added a couple more of those into that mix. They land on a website, maybe they hear about it and they follow through and land on a website. And now you’ve got retargeting that follows them around for a while and, and like you, there’s all this little nuance that you can put in. Then they see the van driving by. Now they gotta, now you start going into what they call your Dunbar number. So you people can only remember about 12,000 or 1200 sort of names and like their family, they know the name and all that in the, in, in the core ones. But you kind of get a general impression and beyond that you’re just mud.

John Clendenning [00:44:29]:

They don’t know who you are. So you start moving into the, that, that, that cognitive area where when they are ready or in our world now of AI where they, they just, you know what Chad, I’m thinking about carpet cleaning. I got some pet stains and, and they’re just having this conversation and chat, chat, gbt, Gemini, whatever comes up. Does a brand search, does a, a search around social now in all the different areas. Reddit’s a big one to, to rank in, in AI now and things like that. And you, you’ve got that out there there. They get two or three recommendations, they go yeah, I’ve heard of Premiere call those guys or that’s the kinds I’m going to call. Thank you you, because you’ve tapped into a sentiment and, and that, that endorsement as an authority somebody else referred you used you.

John Clendenning [00:45:13]:

So you’ve, you’ve started to kind of elevate your, your, your brand impression. They’ve seen you around and then when they do jump into the market then they can, they can say, you know what, SEO is changing, pay per clicks change. They don’t know that, but all of a sudden what they see is going to be different in different places and they’re moving to different places, but they also remember your name and they remember your brand because you, you showed up somewhere else in front of them as well. And those dots are, without them, you’re just hoping and praying that they like the, the words on the page and the ad that they just saw because it should never be about the lowest price, but done well. You are omnipresent everywhere they are and you’re just influencing them over time on all these different channels that you just become the obvious choice, the best known cleaner in the marketplace and then you can scale and buy these other businesses and just transfer. Hey, by the way, we also now do this. We also now do this and now you’re in the home for more services as well and you can start stacking that on.

Robert Yockel [00:46:13]:

So, yeah, it’s a conversational, I think is the way it’s changed now. It’s not just like who shoved the most of the same thing in the same place, it’s who, who’s getting talked about the most.

John Clendenning [00:46:25]:

Yes.

Robert Yockel [00:46:26]:

And the conversations can be read now as opposed to, I just translate keywords, which is. Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:46:33]:

So the intent is the, the sentiment and the intent. Right. So questions and intent are now, AI can go. I, I understand that this conversation happening here on social about this brand has this intent. So I’m going to recommend them because it seems to be a positive intent across where I’m looking.

Robert Yockel [00:46:49]:

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the Google reviews and all that stu, I mean, we do, you know, we got over 3,000 now.

John Clendenning [00:46:54]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:46:55]:

Carbon, which is great, don’t get me wrong. But I mean, you still got to drive them to get to there, you know. Yeah. And see that. And you know, sometimes I think we are, we have too many reviews sometimes because I think people think they’re fake and it’s like, yeah. And I’m like, no, these, this isn’t a, you know, a toaster from China. It’s.

John Clendenning [00:47:15]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:47:15]:

These are actual human beings in Colorado Springs, you know, leaving us reviews, you know, but it’s because we do exceptionally good work and, you know, you take pride in that and then you try to make that conversation happen elsewhere.

John Clendenning [00:47:27]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:47:28]:

You know, and sometimes that’s jumping on the mama’s groups on Facebook or the social media, Instagram stuff. I mean, there’s other places these conversations are occurring outside of like I shove money in the Google hole. And you know, that’s just not, you know, we, I mean, we’re, you know, like I said, we do a lot in carpet cleaning revenue. We didn’t spend any money this year on Google AdWords. So we only do Google AdWords in the winter. Because I get.

John Clendenning [00:47:54]:

Yeah, and you’re saying even in the evening as well, when, whenever, when the chip, the clicks are cheaper because you know your numbers, as we always say, marketing, you get marketing right. You create an operations problem. You get operations right. We talked about this. And then you, you have to know your numbers and, and know where you’re aligning things, including marketing. And that was one that, Yeah, I thought that was very impressive that you know your numbers well enough that why should I be there when other things are working? During the daytime, when it’s a little bit slower, I want to pick it up. And at night, that’s when the clicks are cheap and you have a system in place. It’s not just cheap clicks that are going to get a phone call to an answering machine.

John Clendenning [00:48:29]:

You also have a system in place that can now capture them, lead capture them so that somebody can still influence them and give them a call and influence them tomorrow. Have a real human behind the scenes. Right. So, yeah, and those are all just little as you know, marketing and as you know, business growth and you know your numbers, you know how to plug, you know when to plug things in, how to plug a hole and, and solve those kinds of problems. I even love like Facebook. A lot of guys go, I tried Facebook ads. They used to work. They don’t work.

John Clendenning [00:48:54]:

Well, the very first thing is you got to be real and you got to stop the scroll. So can you look like Hank Williams Jr. And sing a song? Well, Robert, Ken, so it’s like in the Facebook ads, it’s like, you know what I mean? But it’s, it, it’s, it’s, that’s, that’s, that’s being disruptive. It’s okay to have disruptive marketing. It’s okay to lie on top of your van in, in, in your pictures with reviews and stuff like that. You’ve got to get people’s attention and, and you can’t be just plain Jane Vanilla. You’ve got to stand out a bit. And these little things are, are, are ideas that help you be disruptive in the marketplace, which is one of the seven core principles of, of, of, of being, of surviving through all of these.

John Clendenning [00:49:34]:

These changes at any point is also make sure that you’re, you’re being a little unique in the marketplace with how you’re showing up as well because it’s just going to catch people’s attention and it’s just going to start that again. Those 20 points that they need to touch you before they go, okay, I trust these guys enough now. I’ve seen them around enough times and I’ve made enough connections.

Robert Yockel [00:49:55]:

Yeah. And I think a lot of guys, especially in like one truck operation because they make the mistake to think, well I’m going to vinyl wrap my van and then people are going to notice me and I’m just going to spend a ton of money on Google. And then you know that, that 0 to 100 is actually probably the most difficult part because your cost of acquisition is so high. If you are thinking, well I’m just going to do Google Ads, well, you’re gonna fail, you’re not gonna make it. So you just do the cheap advertising for that 0 to 100 and that’ll start to support you when it’s time to start spending the money down the road.

John Clendenning [00:50:32]:

Build the database, do the hustle. As we always we call it the hustle. I had guys. One guy I talked to, he stood like he literally, he started cleaning company. He stood out in front of Target, Home Depot in the nice areas of town in his uniform with a van in the driveway handing out business cards until he got kicked out. And he would go to another place and he’d stand there all day long just. And on the back of it was an offer. In the front was, hey, by the way, I own this carpet cleaning company.

John Clendenning [00:50:55]:

I just wanted to introduce myself. And some people would throw them out, other people and he, he would do enough to build up a truck worth of work to the point where he actually hired a guy to go out and cleaning because it was his best form of acquisition to get started. Right. Was directly to the public.

Robert Yockel [00:51:09]:

And I love those, you know, they people make fun of these guys in these old beat up bands, you know, I mean, and I’m just like go for it. You know what I mean? That’s the only way you’re gonna get the guy who goes and puts, you know, 150k down on the biggest truck amount in the planet, wraps the damn thing. And those are the guys who are free.

John Clendenning [00:51:26]:

Yeah, think, I think that that’s going to cause the phone to ring. Your equipment is going to cause the phone to ring.

Robert Yockel [00:51:30]:

Nobody cares what’s in there. You could literally show up with a floor buffer and grow your business for pennies on the dollar. And, and I mean, literally, you know, go buy an electric car and throw a floor buffer in the back. Thanks, man. Yeah, no money. And I mean, when you look at, you know, Heaven’s Best, look at some of these huge brands out there, they’re just cleaning with CRBs, you know.

John Clendenning [00:51:51]:

And look at Robert. Robert Harris started. I used to know Robert Harris back in the day. He started chem dry in 1976, 77, with a rickshaw over his shoulder at the, at the, the University in California, again with a buffer and a pop tank, like a Pepsi carbonated tank. And that was, that was the start of the entire Chem Drive franchise network. And he didn’t even have a car. He had a rickshaw and he would carry it from house to house.

Robert Yockel [00:52:15]:

I love those guys. I love seeing it. And I think there’s a lot of times people, you know, on the forums, they make fun of these people and I’m just like, no, that’s, that’s the correct way to go in my. It is, at least at first. I mean, eventually, sure, you’re going to start to build up and you know, yeah, we’ve got, you know, $100,000 machines out in the warehouse, but that’s. Yeah, that’s not the place to begin, in my opinion. You’re. There’s a focus on the sales.

Robert Yockel [00:52:35]:

It doesn’t matter how you do it, you know. You know, pick one thing and do it. Just be the best at it and sell the living out of it. Or at least believe. You know what I mean? At least believe.

John Clendenning [00:52:47]:

Yeah, that’s gold. That’s gold right there. Because so many guys seem to get the wrong idea. Or there’s these bro marketers. I say, oh, you can, you can live in Dubai and run a carpet cleaning company in, in, you know, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And we’ll just. Yeah, you just hire people remotely and they’ll. And, and it’s just super easy.

John Clendenning [00:53:01]:

And like this is all over the Internet these days. And it’s like, have you ever, have you ever run a business? Did you ever.

Robert Yockel [00:53:06]:

That’s the same.

John Clendenning [00:53:07]:

I know.

Robert Yockel [00:53:08]:

Like, I can’t even hire an accountant without being like, you are doing it wrong. You know, like, you have to. You gotta be able to look at every step of the way and be able to know. Because how do you know you hired someone who knows what the hell they’re doing?

John Clendenning [00:53:20]:

Exactly. No, it’s. Yeah, you gotta be all in. Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:53:23]:

At least a little bit. You know, I’m not saying you have to like, go to QuickBooks Certified or go to accounting school. But you gotta at least be able to read a spreadsheet. You gotta at least be able to do all these things. You have to at least understand the marketing. You have to at least understand the equipment. Not, you know, not necessarily like I don’t sit there and disassemble machines like I did 20 years ago, but nonetheless like I can, you know, if I had to, you know. So yeah, it’s more about like, you know, I don’t even think that’s necessary for most people.

Robert Yockel [00:53:49]:

But like we have a mechanic in house now. But that’s, you know, get there, you don’t have to worry about it. But until then, I mean if you can’t just do basic stuff on your machinery or your equipment or turn around ranch, you’re probably going to struggle a little bit. You know what I mean?

John Clendenning [00:54:03]:

You’re going to spend way too much money on. Yeah. We used to change our own brakes on our vans like the pads and eventually learn how to do the rotors and, and bleed the lines and. Oh my God. Because it’s like the van came back the brakes season. I’m going, you’re out tomorrow morning. I gotta, I gotta get the route. So I’m the guy that stayed to midnight at the shop and fixed the van because they had to be back on the road tomorrow.

John Clendenning [00:54:21]:

Right.

Robert Yockel [00:54:22]:

So yeah, I got two grand on the board tomorrow. Let’s go. I’m gonna figure out how to put a water pump in this thing.

John Clendenning [00:54:26]:

Exactly. Back in the old days of the book where it wasn’t the Internet. Internet, you literally got a grease covered book that you had to go to the right chapter to figure out how to do that. The Astro van or the Ford Transit or whatever.

Robert Yockel [00:54:37]:

I had an Astro van. I love that thing. That was a great.

John Clendenning [00:54:39]:

Yeah, I used to love the Astro vans and the safaris too. They’re just the right size back in the day. But. So where do we see the industry? I know you’re, you’ve shifted a couple things. We talked about sort of that, that, that shift to the like less carpet. But you’ve gotten into some of those, um, those multifamily jobs and stuff like that, which you’d always avoided and now and you saw a strategic position to move into that which is great. We’ve got AI coming in, we got less carpet. We’ve got, you know, hardwood floors and vinyl tile cleanings and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:55:11]:

Our business will still exist. People still need things cleaned. Until the day that, you know, everybody buys an Atlas robot. From, from Tesla and it can download how to clean carpets and how to do plumbing and how to do that stuff. We all have services to do. It is one of those sort of essential things. You got to keep your stuff clean. We kind of learned that through in Covid even more.

John Clendenning [00:55:30]:

But so where do you see the industry heading in the next couple of years and where do you see premier sort of tapping into some of the changes?

Robert Yockel [00:55:39]:

Well, I mean, I think to say, to speak for the industry, in my opinion, we’re seeing a little less carpet and a little more of ect. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we’re going to completely run out of carpet anytime soon. I mean, it’s a good product, especially in cold environments. I mean. Yeah, you know, it keeps echoes down. It actually cleans the air. You can look this up. And so I love having that conversation with someone.

Robert Yockel [00:56:06]:

I’m getting rid of all my carpet because of my allergies. I’m like, you’re doing it wrong. But anyway. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure most people here know that. But anyway, the, you know, there is. We are going to see that though. We’re going to see more of these more versatile, you know, water resistant because there’s no waterproof products. Yep.

Robert Yockel [00:56:21]:

And that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. I think we’re going to see a little bit more of a push towards some of these materials. But that doesn’t mean those can’t be cleaned too. We do quite a bit of VCT work. Not a ton or not vct. I’m sorry, lvp. Excuse me. So many rooms that, you know, we do that.

Robert Yockel [00:56:42]:

We do it, you know, quite a bit. We also do hardwood floor cleaning and we’re starting to see a little less hardwood floors. I mean, we do, do, you know, from the restoration side perspective of things, when we demo out a house from flood or a fire or whatever, I can tell you right now, if that house was 1800 square foot carpet, by the time we’re done putting the reconstruction together, it’s 800 square foot carpet. And this is just reality. Okay.

John Clendenning [00:57:05]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:57:06]:

If you’re not willing to open this to the fact that, you know, maybe we should be looking at ducks, maybe we should be looking at window cleaning. Okay. Looking at. I mean, there’s a lot of options out here. I did windows for five years. I just don’t like ladders. So I stopped doing it. I mean, just, I’m just saying, I mean, nowadays you don’t have to do that now.

Robert Yockel [00:57:22]:

There’s a water fed pole system. But you know, this was 20 years ago when I do windows. Yeah, yeah. But the, there’s a lot you can do outside of that that you can present to that same customer who may be transitioning from not having as much carpet. Right. So like 20 years ago I would see your average house at a living room, dining room, three bedrooms and a staircase, you know, $300 cleaning all day every day.

John Clendenning [00:57:42]:

Right.

Robert Yockel [00:57:42]:

Just 20 years ago. Nowadays it’s three bedrooms. Maybe the staircase location. Right, yeah. Where the living room, dining room go and what’s the dirtiest room in the house? It’s the living room dining room. Okay. So I’m just saying we have to be a little bit realistic about that. So.

Robert Yockel [00:57:54]:

But at the same time we’re going to possibly see a little bit less introduction to the market because people aren’t seeing as much carpet around. So why would people want to jump into a business that they don’t see as much carpet in? Right. So reduce itself in a sense because we’re going to start to see some of these people who are trying to jump in at these very expensive, you know, marketing issues and very expensive equipment to try to clean a very small amount of item that there’s already people out there who know how to do it. I don’t think we’re going to see as much jumping into the market as we did five, 10 years ago. I think we’re going to see a lot less. So I’m not saying carp is not going to exist anymore. I just think if you diversify or diversify is not going to be a bad idea.

John Clendenning [00:58:41]:

Again, area rugs, another one as well. When people pick up their carpets, then all of a sudden they don’t like the hard floor, they put area rugs down. Now we got Lisa Wagner and, and Mark and the whole, you know, learn how to clean area or iicrc. Learn how to clean area rugs properly and charge your 3, 4, 5, 6, $7 a square foot if you follow Dusty Roberts or whatever or wherever you fit in and the synthetic ones and you know, a little bit less. But people and respect their area rugs a lot more than they ever cared about the carpets.

Robert Yockel [00:59:06]:

Yeah, we do. We have a wash floor here and we go through a couple of hundred rugs a month.

John Clendenning [00:59:12]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [00:59:13]:

And but I will say this for someone because I’ve seen people do this, you know, they’re 11 truck guys and they board off their two car garage and start to run a wash floor out of there. You know, you’re Better off connecting with someone who’s got a legit facility. You tack on a couple of bucks a square foot, you don’t have to worry about the liability. Your wife’s not going to hate your guts because your house smells like wool all the time. Terrible. It’s awful. Don’t do it. Yeah, those little fold up pits, I mean they’re okay, but it’s, you know, know there are better things you can do with that money in that space.

John Clendenning [00:59:46]:

I agree. I think you need a shop, a centrifuge, like if you can’t like all the things to do. Right. A good rack system and dehumidifiers and air movers and that doesn’t fit in a garage. Well, down the road.

Robert Yockel [00:59:56]:

Down the road. Do it down the road.

John Clendenning [00:59:58]:

Yeah. Do Tyler grow? For now. That’s an easy add on things like that. Bathroom tiles and exactly that kind of stuff.

Robert Yockel [01:00:03]:

Yeah, we’re doing a, you know, 2.4 and you know, maybe 200000 in there. Dairy rugs.

John Clendenning [01:00:09]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [01:00:10]:

You know what I mean?

John Clendenning [01:00:11]:

Yeah, exactly.

Robert Yockel [01:00:12]:

Would I dedicate all this money in time if I’m only doing 20,000 or two or a hundred thousand dollars a year to bring in an extra 10,000? Right?

John Clendenning [01:00:21]:

No, exactly.

Robert Yockel [01:00:22]:

The value is not there. And so you know, but when you get big, you know, when you have enough space, a little more time, that’s a great thing to do. And I would definitely take some, some lessons though because boy, that’s, that’s easy to make an expensive mistake on. Yeah.

John Clendenning [01:00:35]:

And, and, and being method agnostic, he’s kind of mentioned that as well. So like if you are just all in on a bag of chips, it has to be truck mount. Well then you miss the whole ability to do encapsulation maintenance on commercial places and stuff like that. So if you have an maybe one of the ways to expand is beyond, like beyond your method. Like add other maintenance options and stuff like that. So you can go to the hotel and say hey, you guys might use your, your whatever machine down the hallways, your Malay or whatever that you bought and you’ve trained one guy on it and he’s laid off right now on. But we can come in between those cleanings and do like a SIMEX machine down the hallways and things like that and, and help out. Like there’s ways that you can, you can get into contracts and get into jobs and then I always say like condos and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [01:01:20]:

Get into the hallways. Your actual goal there is to have every single one of the, the residents of the condo building become customers yours. So if the new guy, if the new condo corp comes in or whatever, they hire a new president of the board, they wants to be all fancy and say I’m to going to get tenders for all of our quotes again and stuff like that. And you get kicked out, that’s fine. I also still get $80,000 a year from all of the residents of these two buildings because we, we’re here and we, we, we. Hey, while we’re in the building cleaning, would you like us to come in and clean your unit? There’s a bit of a break. There’s a. And you, you can do good marketing to the, the, the people that are at the commercial place.

John Clendenning [01:01:56]:

So accounting office, everybody gets a tent card saying you are now get RIP employee reward boards with our company. Learn about us kind of idea. Leave a couple of mints behind as well. Just make friends, you know what I mean? That kind of stuff. So you know, every, everything, every job should be thought of as a way to. How do I capitalize. Keep this person and get more like them from around them, their friends, whatever.

Robert Yockel [01:02:16]:

So yeah, that’s, I mean that’s a great opportunity. I like the way you put that because you know, we try to. We have some buildings that we work at. We do not a ton of commercial. Honestly, I wish we did more. I mean we did about 7,000 residential homes where I think it was 6,500 residential homes and about 500. So it’s less than.

John Clendenning [01:02:36]:

Okay.

Robert Yockel [01:02:37]:

And so. And we know this and because, you know, honestly, there’s just more houses. I mean, you know, if you walk down the street or more houses are more commercial. Right. And then you know, also you’re, you’re battling against the janitorial firms that have. Yeah. They figured out, hey, what’s this SIMEX thing? Oh, I can charge to do this. You know.

Robert Yockel [01:02:55]:

And you know that’s like it’s, it’s a lawnmower carpet. And so anyway they, you know, they kind of figured that out and they’re not dealing with these big stupid walk behind portables as much as we used to. Yeah. And so that market, we’re starting to see a lot of competition and price competition. So. And that, well, I’ll talk to someone about this. They’ll be like, oh well, you know, if I don’t get my 30 to 50 cents a square foot, I’m not doing it. And I’m like, okay, well what if it’s a 10,000 square foot building? Like you need to get five grand for that, I mean it’s only going to take you like four hours with a sign X.

Robert Yockel [01:03:29]:

You know what I mean?

John Clendenning [01:03:30]:

It’s so easy. So can we just do like 200 an hour, man hours and we’re good to go. Like have a figure, have no, you know, numbers, have a rate.

Robert Yockel [01:03:36]:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, it’s not that important. You know, like I used to talk to guys on the forums like Clean Quip and these guys and they were like, oh man, I charged $1.50 for carpet cleaning back in 1982. I was like, cool. You also had a drag wand. How, you know, how long did it take to do it? You know, like, no, I can do that. Same house that took you all day in like an hour. Like, yeah, of course the price is going to go down and there’s more of us here too.

Robert Yockel [01:04:00]:

It’s supply and demand and the product now is faster and better. Better, you know, and so people get obsessed with how much they’re charging per square foot or how much they’re charging per room and just try to figure out what it takes to make money. Especially when you’re looking at commercial residential, that’s a little bit of a different animal. But if you want to land, you know, you know, 50,000 square foot facilities, trust me, plopping a 30 cent a square foot estimate there, you’re not going to get it.

John Clendenning [01:04:25]:

You’re not getting it at all.

Robert Yockel [01:04:27]:

They’re bidding that against like 10 other people. Like, don’t even. Yeah, like your overhead is nothing. You paid the SIMEX off the first five jobs you did with the damn thing. And then your, you know, your end camp product is like maybe at like 2 cents a square foot tops.

John Clendenning [01:04:42]:

Yeah, your technicians, as you even said, your technicians can rattle through these fast. Even on the multi family ones where again, it sucks. But if they’re still making the same rate, the hourly rate and their commission, their pay is, is really, they should have no issue with it. It’s just, it’s just a different job for them. I’m going to give, give you a couple of these apartments, a couple, a couple of areas and you’re going to still make your same dollar per hour. So, you know, teaching them that, it’s like, why not have the ability to expand into those areas.

Robert Yockel [01:05:09]:

So yeah, well, and learn your averages, know your numbers, right? Like if I do cubicle farm that’s super dirty, how long does that take versus Gigantic Ballroom that’s completely empty, right? Yeah, a gigantic ballroom. You can haul through that thing. Like, I mean if you’re not cleaning 5 to 10,000 square foot an hour with a couple of guys, you are doing it wrong.

John Clendenning [01:05:27]:

You know, like, why build a calculator? I’m sure you got one too. I built a calculator decades ago now in Excel that was, you know, four different levels of dirty, medium, bad and nasty kind of idea, square footage wise because we had already got our numbers by that point. Every time we did a job I knew the square foot, how long it was taking, how much product we went through. I just kept track of that stuff because I’m a business owner, not just a carpet cleaner. So I wanted to know the math again. Marketing creates operations. Operations solve that and you need to know data and finances, stuff like that. So you know that numbers.

John Clendenning [01:05:59]:

And now all of a sudden you know your production rates. Now you know how much product you’re going to go through and how much the product cost. You can build that into a spreadsheet. Back in the day you had to figure out how to do it. Nowadays you can probably go into like you can you go into one of the AI tools like Manus or something like that and say build me a spreadsheet that does this and here’s the variables and have it build out, you know, copilot in, in, in Excel. But understand your numbers so that when you go to quote, you’ve got a measurement, you know, roughly how, how many thousand square feet per hour you can produce when it’s wide open and, and light cleaning versus very different dense and, and dirty cleaning and, and, and, and how much pre spray you might need and stuff like that. You just plug all your numbers in, want your hourly rate. Here’s your, here’s your, here’s your bid price and you’re going to realize it’s, it’s shockingly lower than you thought it was going to be.

Robert Yockel [01:06:45]:

Yeah, if you can beat it, beat it. But I mean I did, you know, I think that sometimes you get a lot of disgruntledness around like, you know, all these janitorial guys are doing it for nothing and it’s like. Well, yes, because they, they’re just trying to charge by the hour. You know, they’re doing a time and.

John Clendenning [01:06:59]:

They want to keep the contract they want because they’re, they’re making 50,000. Do they really care if the carpet cleaning costs 1,000 or 3,000? It’s the 50,000 a year contract they’re keeping. Right. So yeah, I don’t care. So part of it, so. Well, this is a great conversation. I always like, to end with a couple little things like a server reflection and advice. So at what moment did you reflect back and went.

John Clendenning [01:07:21]:

And what did you like. Do you remember a moment where you looked at everything? You walked into the shop one day. Yeah. You did something and you went, holy crap, I built this. Right? Is. Do you remember the day that that reflected happen.

Robert Yockel [01:07:35]:

You know, I mean, the. I think when we. So we bought our warehouse that we’re in, that was about five years ago. And, you know, prior to that, I was renting a slot that was like 3,000 square feet. And then. Which I was ridiculous. You’d be surprised how many vans I was able to get in there. But our office was 100 square feet.

Robert Yockel [01:07:56]:

It was me and other people in there, but. And so we bought this building. It’s about 10,000 square feet. We’ve got so much more room and it’s already full. But anyway, that’s not the point. But, you know, kind of once we finished remodeling it and getting, you know, getting here and like, I was. Went out. Out of.

Robert Yockel [01:08:12]:

Out of the country for about a month, didn’t hear from anybody.

John Clendenning [01:08:16]:

And. Which is a great moment when the business runs and you’re not involved.

Robert Yockel [01:08:21]:

I came back about a month later and everything was still here. So the building didn’t burn. You know, I mean, obviously there’s always these little whatevers, but, yeah, I mean, that was a pretty big thing. And, you know, and, you know, right now we’re trying to do the same thing again with the restoration. We’re trying to do the same thing with the duct cleaning. And, you know, we’ve been stepping into kind of nearby markets too, kind of widening our belt a little bit, slowly but surely because, you know, people don’t see how much the cost of that travel is. It’s huge. And.

Robert Yockel [01:08:50]:

And so, you know, we’re trying to kind of squish our way out before we kind of brick and mortar our way out and then, you know, so. But that. Those are the. Those have been the big moments for me, I guess. I think, you know, it’s. I mean, when, you know, like when you bought your 15th or 20th vehicle or whatever, and you’re just like, yeah. God, I’m so sick of buying cars. You know, it’s like.

John Clendenning [01:09:11]:

It’s not.

Robert Yockel [01:09:12]:

It’s not exciting.

John Clendenning [01:09:13]:

First. First world problems, growth problems. I’m so sick of. Of having to grow so much bigger. Yeah.

Robert Yockel [01:09:18]:

It’s just like, who. You know, it’s like, whatever. And so, you know, that’s kind of becomes A little bit. And the things you worry about more are very different. And. Yeah, you know, so, you know, like in, you know, honestly, one of the best things we did was buy this building, obviously prior to all this gigantic explosion and real estate in my city.

John Clendenning [01:09:33]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [01:09:34]:

So I paid. I got a very good price on it. But this, this, this has been a very excellent investment. And so I always highly recommend that to anybody. It’s like McDonald’s, you know, they have the kind of. When he’s interviewed, like, how do you feel about being the biggest cheeseburger salesman in the world? He says, we’re not the biggest cheeseburger salesman. We’re the biggest owner of real estate.

John Clendenning [01:09:51]:

Real estate.

Robert Yockel [01:09:52]:

The highest quality corners in the world so that those all play together, you know, don’t play just one game, play a lot of games.

John Clendenning [01:10:01]:

And.

Robert Yockel [01:10:01]:

Yeah. So, you know.

John Clendenning [01:10:03]:

Yeah. Have an exit strategy in mind as well. And that’s where we’re going. Like. Well, parting wisdom for new cleaners or guys that maybe been at it five or ten years. Years, but still just sort of in big areas but just struggling. Haven’t really put all the pieces together. Kind of don’t really.

John Clendenning [01:10:17]:

They still think they’re sort of a carpet cleaner. Then everything else comes second. If they have time at the end of the day or the end of the week or whatever, they’ll do the rest later. What would be some parting wisdom on, you know, people that get caught in that trap or maybe start off to give them the right mindset to understand what. That they’re in business first. The industry is just the choice, kind of.

Robert Yockel [01:10:40]:

Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, I think you mentioned I was on Clean Quip. I was in all these forums back in the day.

John Clendenning [01:10:45]:

Yeah.

Robert Yockel [01:10:47]:

And I just stopped. You’ll notice there’s kind of like this line where I just stopped and you just disappeared. Yeah, yeah, I just did. And you’ll see that with pretty much anyone who’s really successful in this industry, they’re not really there, you know, I mean, unless they’re there to sell you something. But the ones that are really successful, they’re not on there talking about truck mounts and what’s the best pre spray and you know, they’re focused on, on growth and sales and motivating and all these other things that are, that are the real meat and potatoes. Right. So, yes, be, be excellent at what you do, but don’t let that take over your, your ability to work on the business. You know, don’t get too stuck in it and forget that maybe, I mean, I, you know, don’t get me wrong, those first few years, I mean, you’re working eight to ten hours a day.

Robert Yockel [01:11:33]:

Day. You’re pissing your wife off because you’re working all summer. You’re not taking vacations, you’re not seeing the kids as much. Yeah, I get it.

John Clendenning [01:11:38]:

Right.

Robert Yockel [01:11:38]:

So. But once you get to that point where there’s enough room to wiggle, you know, learn to trust other people and start delegating and start working on it, not in it. And just don’t, you know, don’t blow all the money hiring people. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen plenty of people make, you know, too strong of a decision there. But, you know, start with somebody young. You don’t need like an experienced dude. That’s $180,000 a year. You need somebody who’s gonna love to learn from you and who’s gonna appreciate you.

Robert Yockel [01:12:06]:

And then you’re gonna push that person up. As you push yourself up. You’re gonna bring all these people with you and be proud of that. That’s a great thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with bringing a lot of people. I mean, if everybody that works for me is making 100k a year, they’ve got health insurance, they’re buying houses, they got new cars, I am the happiest man alive. You know, that’s, that’s.

John Clendenning [01:12:24]:

Yeah. And even if some of them say, you know what, I’m moving to another state, I’m moving out and I’m going to open up my own business, thank you for giving me the vision. Vision. You’re going, dude, stay in touch. Right? Like that’s.

Robert Yockel [01:12:33]:

Constantly talk to anybody who, who doesn’t work here anymore unless they did something so incredibly stupid. We are in communication. So. Yeah, don’t burn those bridges. It’s not a bad thing.

John Clendenning [01:12:44]:

No, I appreciate that because, yeah, you’re still like, that’s that sales, like always, like, understand, keep your thumb on the, the sales and marketing of the business because that’s, that’s the growth. You don’t need to be in it when you’re on it. Stay consistent. Never outgrow the whole hustle. We talked about that as well. It’s like, just make sure that your, you understand what your main thing is and should be that propels the business forward. And it’s not necessarily the $35 an hour carpet cleaning technician that you could hire to do the job because you’re moving the, you’re moving the, the, the ball forward. You’re creating that the momentum.

John Clendenning [01:13:15]:

You’re at that point where you. You have to straddle and then finally you can let this leg out of that. Get out of the van and do this a little bit more and maybe back in. In on certain days. But you’ve got a lot more. Exactly. There’s that game.

Robert Yockel [01:13:27]:

Yeah.

John Clendenning [01:13:28]:

You Talked about the 2 truck and then the 3 truck is a really interesting moment. And then you go over the hump. Like we’ve all. We know those moments in the business depending on your price points and stuff like that.

Robert Yockel [01:13:37]:

So I’ve always got the three truckish four truck. That’s kind of like. I call it the hostage period where employees hold you hostage because you’re. There’s not enough people for you to fire. But someone. Yeah. You know what I mean? And you got a full schedule tomorrow. And Jim’s.

Robert Yockel [01:13:53]:

He just keeps not showing up to work or whatever. He’s done. But you can’t fire him because you don’t have anybody to replace them. It’s going to take too long. And so you’re not big enough to have the flexibility to move. You know. And so you’re just. You’re held hostage by your employees.

Robert Yockel [01:14:08]:

That’s one of the more.

John Clendenning [01:14:09]:

Yeah, that’s. That is a real moment. And it’s like you’ve got it. It’s worth leapfrogging over. But it’s a real moment. And one of the ways to leapfrog a little bit faster. Faster is can you find a couple of these businesses to acquire and kind of do a jump. Jump quick because then.

John Clendenning [01:14:22]:

Then you can kind of get that. You don’t get stuck in that period for a period. I got stuck in that period. We talked about that. I had. I had guys that were great technicians to start. Eventually you’re knocking at their door and pull them out of bed and put them in the van and driving them to work because you know, they got into partying a little too hard and they weren’t until 2 or 3 in the morning and they still had. Yeah, exactly.

John Clendenning [01:14:40]:

And all that. So.

Robert Yockel [01:14:41]:

Yeah, been.

John Clendenning [01:14:43]:

Yeah. This has been gold, man. I really appreciate it. Hope folks understand what scaling a business actually looks like. A lot of guys do get stuck. A lot of guys. As we talked about it, it’s like it’s over. Like it’s.

John Clendenning [01:14:54]:

It’s. It’s less than 1% that scale beyond a million. And, and. And even. Even if you only want to hit half a million and a couple trucks on the road and you don’t have to be the Guy in the truck and stuff like that. There’s a, You’ve, you’ve got to be a student of the game. You’ve got to be, you know, listening to podcasts, reading books. You gotta.

John Clendenning [01:15:10]:

Learning new things, being contrarian and stuff like that and, and, and working on the skills that you don’t have that, that will be needed for the next level. Buy your buildings, create investments, figure out your, your legacy, all that kind of stuff as well. So definitely anybody who’s listening to that, who wants to reach out to Robert who’s like, you know, again in the, in the local marketplace and understand Premier is just the, the premium cleaning service there we’ll have in the show notes, links to the website and all that kind of stuff. But I really appreciate you having on and if anybody pinging us with questions, we usually get on, on Spotify and a couple other places people ask questions of our guests. I will definitely share them with you to, to, to, to go back and forth on as well so that you can, you can pop a few answers back to us if, if we get those in the, in the loop. But yeah, I think this is a, a golden episode because it’s it, it. I want people to open their brains up to understanding. It’s not luck, it, a little bit of luck, but it’s, it’s a dedicated effort and putting in the work and letting and, and aiming at the right things at the, you know, and moving yourself forward.

John Clendenning [01:16:07]:

And that shows up in, in, you know, happy customers, happy employees and great growth. And that, that’s ultimately the goal because our, we’re in trying times. We don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, we’re, we’re done quantitative easing for now. So there isn’t money printers necessarily right now. We’ve got markets and we got AIs and we got all this stuff and we just got to keep pushing forward and, and growing our, growing our business and our, and our, our, our reputation in the marketplace. So, so that regardless of what shakes out, we’re the one left standing and still growing our business. So appreciate it.

John Clendenning [01:16:41]:

I plan to stay in touch, dude. I want to see what happens next and where you go and you go wider, go deeper, go more services, buy more businesses, what you do next. But I really appreciate you jumping on the podcast today and helping all of the people that follow this kind of get a bigger vision of where they should be going.

Robert Yockel [01:16:58]:

Yeah, well, my pleasure, John. And just keep hustling. If you really, if you ever stop, that’s when you shrink that’s it.

John Clendenning [01:17:07]:

Absolutely agree with you.

Robert Yockel [01:17:08]:

Keep going. All right.

John Clendenning [01:17:10]:

Amen, brother. Well, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Take care. Bye, everybody.

Robert Yockel [01:17:14]:

Have a good day.