Okay, well, Johnny, thanks for joining. Why don't you tell us who you are and what you do? Yeah, so my name's Johnny. I run a company called Home

Service Academy. We teach people how to start house cleaning businesses and run them remotely. So like to think that I started the wave of cleaning businesses. I'm kind of the uncle of cleaning Twitter. And yeah, I got my start when I was 19 years old. I'm 26 now. I started the largest window cleaning company in Orange County. It's still number one ranked on the map pack on the first page of Google, even over Yelp. Built that up. Still own it today? I don't own it. I sold it. I built it up to about nine full-time employees before I switched to contractors and developed this whole remote cleaning model. Then I started that same business for my mom. She's a single mom, raised me on her own. She was driving Uber in Orange County with $3,200 a month rent. And I was like, okay, well, the window cleaning business is doing all right, but it's not doing good enough to be like, here, mom, here's 10 grand a month. She's 64 years old or 63 at the time. And go retire, you don't have to work anymore. I was like, but I can use my skill set that I've learned building this window cleaning business to do it in house cleaning. And house cleaning, my kind of hypothesis was, well, house cleaning's going to be much easier because the availability of contractors and labor is far greater than window cleaning because you don't need the water fed poles and the DINI's water tanks and the trucks and the ladders. So we, me and my business partner, Sergio, we took out a new Amex gold card and we said, let's try to replace my mom's and come and tweet about it.

Real quick, without the whole plan all along, let's build this in public. document it. This is going to be a great story. Worst case, best case. We've got a great business. The whole plan

was knock out two birds with one stone. Number one, get my mom out of driving Uber. And number two, make content about it because I know if I made content about it, people would eat it up. And people were already asking me all over Twitter, how can I? Because I was tweeting about growing my following about how I was running the window cleaning business. And people were like, how can I do it? How can I do it? But it didn't feel right to teach them how to do it because I like to think orange window cleaning was a little anomaly given the market. And I wanted it, if I was going to sell something like that, I wanted it to be mass market and be able to start in any city in any Metro and window cleaning, you just couldn't do it. Can we dive into that for a minute? Why was it an anomaly in Orange County? Just because the contractor availability, if you really wanted to grow the business, you were going to be capped and you'd have to eventually go back to employees. With Orange County, there's 3.2 million people that live there. Window cleaning is very in demand. There's a ton out there. There's a ton that don't market. They don't know how to sell. There's a ton of contractors you can hire for a window cleaning business. Sure, there's a lot of big metros, but there's also a lot of smaller ones. And so when people ask me, hey, how can I do this? How can I do this? I wasn't confident given their locations that they would see success. And so because of that, I was like, okay, well, I need to build credibility with this model in general by doing it again in house cleaning. Then I was like, okay, well, if we're going to – if people are going to ask me, let me prove it in house cleaning and I can knock, I could do the two birds with one stone thing and help my mom out while growing my following. Okay. So basically,

if I'm understanding this correctly, you didn't feel comfortable teaching people how to wash windows in their own markets because you thought that Orange County was an outlier because it was so big. There's a lot of people, a lot going on, unsophisticated operators. Whereas if you're in, let's say you're in Huntsville, Alabama, 200,000 people, couldn't the argument against that be, yeah, you're gonna have a hard time finding contractors, but there's also gonna be a proportional same amount of business out there. It's a wash, or is that not the case? A lot of problems with home service companies and why they can't grow is never demand

because people are always gonna need their windows clean, their house clean, refrigerators repair or not refrigerators, but air conditioning units, stuff like that. Problem with home service companies is always staffing. And a lot of times with the window cleaners too, is you're investing into the water fed poles, the trucks, maybe you're getting your truck wrapped. If you're doing all that stuff, you're not going to be willing to take the 50% or 40% that this referral agency, it's the official term of these businesses, is going to give you. And so paired with that, and just kind of my hunch of like, I just don't really feel comfortable. I think it's going to be a real challenge for you to find contractors and labor. And I don't want you getting stuck in the field, cleaning the windows yourself or having to feel like you need to go buy the equipment to do it because you're getting these leads. I could be totally wrong. I never actually tested it. It was just, let me go do house cleaning instead. It sounds logical to me. I'm just

trying to take the contrarian side of it because we're in Dallas and there's 8 million people here. We don't really have that hard of a time finding contractors. I think what you're saying is just a bigger pool to draw from, right? Like they might have to drive from further away because Orange County is pretty spread out, but you just have more options. And like, let's say there's a hundred contractors and a thousand businesses. If you're top 5% of those businesses, based on how you treat your contractors and how you pay them, then you're in a better spot with more population because you're gonna be more likely to be able to recruit them. Whereas if there's less people, it doesn't matter how good you are, there's just not enough people to recruit. Yeah. Well, also too, from my experience of hiring window cleaning

contractors, you need to check for the equipment and the ladders and the water for the pool, stuff like that. With cleaning, I mean, anybody can go to Home Depot and pick up some cleaning supplies and go clean a house. I can throw in Indeed posting and have applicants flooded onto my Indeed profile with tons of potential labor. And so my thing was like, okay, well, the hiring bottleneck is going to be solved way easier and cleaning than it would for window cleaning, because you're probably doing a lot more manual outreach, trying to get these people on board to take jobs, which is kind of a sales process in a way, if you can utilize Indeed, then it flips the frame of, hey, now you have people coming to you and wanting to work for your company. So that was my also my second thought process was

it just be easier

to hire on top of that. Okay,

so how did you wrap up the window cleaning business? Like how big did you grow it? What did you sell it for? And how long did that whole process take? This was during

the time where we had launched the cleaning business. We got my mom out of driving Uber, then we pre-sold $50,000 of Home Service Academy programs. So we sold 15 programs at $4,200. And for the first three months, this all ties in. So for the first three months, we said, let's just take this money and let's sit on it. Let's not do anything with it and let's make sure we can get results and not sell anymore. So for the first three months, that's what we did. We got results, crushed it for these people. In April, we started selling again. And in April, we started the run up from considering, I consider April zero, I consider like the 50K as like those like our seed money. So from zero in April to December, we did 2.8 million in revenue with 1.5 of profit. About midway through that point, I was like, I've never seen this before. This is it. We got to go all in. Let's fire sale orange window cleaning. I don't want anything to do with it anymore. And we had one of our contractors who used to be an employee for us, but switched to contractors. He stayed on, had his own truck, his own equipment, stuff like that. He's like, dude, I really want to buy it, really want to buy it. And so we're like, okay, well, we want to get this done quick. So we sold it for a little over a hundred grand. He put about 50 down and then seller noted the, or financed the rest over 12 months. That was it. And then we went all in on. And he's still doing great. He's still doing it. Oh dude, he's crushing it. Orange window cleaning does over, we got it to 65K a month, our best month was 70, but consistently about 65. And he's gotten it to over

a million dollars a year. Wow. That just sounds like the perfect win to me, because you kind of did fire sale it. But you had this shinier object, and that played into your decision making, right? Which benefited him, but you're fine, because you're moving on to something else. He's thrilled, because gets to sell our finance half of this business and he knows the business. He's de-risked. It just seems like the perfect win to me. Yeah.

I mean, we still talk. We're still really great friends and he'll call me here and there and we'll talk. We'll chop it up about how he's doing. And if you look up window cleaning in Orange County, Orange window cleaning still shows up one. So I take a lot of pride in that.

Yeah. I mean, that's amazing. It's such a huge market, probably insanely competitive too. So, all right. So you got your mom out of Uber, you made a little cash, you launched your home service academy, you made a lot of cash from that. And then you started scaling that. I'm curious what like, from the perspective of a house cleaning remote business owner, what are the headaches that they don't foresee going into it? Because on Twitter, on the surface, it looks really sexy, passive. I'm sure you're not telling people that, but what are the unknowns of this industry? No, we never say passive.

It's far from passive. That's a four-letter word in my book. Yeah. Anyone selling you passive stuff, saying passive, automated, it's just Kim. It doesn't exist, at least in my experience, if you want to show me something that's passive, and it's real, hey, I'm open, but I've never seen it. But yeah, headaches, hiring, it's a staffing business. That's all it is. It's just a recruiting and staffing business. If you can do like, if you can just be good at that, it solves the rest of your problems. 80 20. Yeah, because your cleaners are your product, right? Your service-based business, your cleaners are customer-facing. If you do a good job at hiring the cleaners and you set good expectations, and they show up to your customer's house, they're going to do a better job, you're going to get more five-star reviews, which helps you rank higher on the Mat Pack and hopefully get you to the first page of Google. You'll get more referrals, and you'll get more customers that convert to recurring clients, which is where you actually make your profit. The weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies. And so the headache is if you've never recruited, well, it can be a pain in the ass, especially when you're talking to a bunch of house cleaners all the time and you build up your first big team of cleaners and then all of a sudden some of them are coming to you and they're going, oh, I want more money or I don't want to take that job. I want this job. I only want these jobs and get real picky. And you can feel like you're held hostage a little bit by your cleaners because you need them to go do the work. You don't want to do the work. And so I see a lot of that. And the way you solve that is you just have to screen cleaners constantly. It's a hiring game. And it's why most house cleaning businesses get stuck. And it's why you can go and build a million to $2 million house cleaning business in any market because no cleaning company, your competition can't staff quick enough to service all that demand. So I would say that's the biggest one. And then obviously, it's a service business. So you have customers complaining about the littlest things. You're going to get customers who complain about, oh my gosh, this one little, there's a dust particle on my baseboard, one dust particle come back, or I want a refund, or I want money off, typical service business stuff.

Okay, so I want to talk about this because I started a cleaning business, a remote cleaning business. Like,

you know what, I listened to your podcast of your say you're listening to all the businesses and I heard you say, when and you're like, don't recommend, I see people talk, I don't recommend it. I wanted to

bring it up. Yeah, well, I did it the wrong way. Clearly it works for lots of people, but his name was Ro-hoon, I think. Have you heard of him? Ro-hon Gilks. That was the system. Anyway, I didn't do it right. I was probably doing four other businesses at the time, but it was, I talk about binary outcomes. And this is my example. Like if you have a tree removal business, it's like you show up, you remove the tree. You get it out and you get a five-star review. It's like very binary. You win, pass fail, right? Whereas with this business, in my experience, it was there's a hair on my toilet. Like this, like they were late. They stayed too long. Like, oh, there were like, there were so many little ticky tacky things that you could screw up and they're all small When you have other things going on, it's like what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Yeah, right? What am I doing here? And so you abandon it? But if it was your only thing you push through and you figure out those stupid little things that really every business has Yeah,

I was gonna say it's like any business has its kind of pains in the ass. I can talk about going back. You said, oh, well, your shiny object kind of created this win. Well, my shiny object also created a whole hell of a lot of other problems because I got punched in the mouth in year two, trying to grow a course business. If you make anything your main focus, you can make it work. And every business kind of has its trade offs. And don't get me wrong, cleaning is no different. It does suck at times. But I will say too, when you're in the trenches and you're answering the phone calls and you're dealing with the customer complaints, that goes away as you grow and as you scale because you start to get your team to take all that stuff for you.

For us, it really did come down to the cleaners period. I could say it revolved around really annoying customers, but they were just annoyed at the cleaners. So if we would have pushed through and found better cleaners, it probably would have been great. Is Indeed like the 80-20 for recruiting for you?

Like that's what? 100%. It's just the quickest way. If somebody comes in and they've never built a business, I'm like, yeah, they're like, oh, I'm checking out these like Facebook groups for cleaners, or I'm checking out Nextdoor for, I just tell them, just go to Indeed. You'll make one post, we've got the templates. Just post, print these words on Indeed and you'll get applicants. And then your job is just 80-20 that which is 80% of the applicants are going to suck and 20% will be good. Yeah.

Is it a game of just like hire three to fire two, hire three to fire two, and you're just like, you're always filtering

for the best people? Basically, yeah. And the ones that pass the screening, they've got a year of cleaning experience, they've got their own transportation, they have their own cleaning equipment. You're going to want to background check them and you're going to want to send them to do a test clean. Have you seen what the test clean is on Twitter? So test clean, it's a good way because you're hiring contractors and the risk there is that, or at least a lot of people coming into the business is, well, what if they take my customers? So the way to prevent that and the way to test character is to do what's called the test clean. What the test clean does is the people you interview, the ones that you want to hire, you send them to a friend or family member's house. And this friend or family member knows it's a test clean, they're getting it for free, you say, I'll clean house for free, just I need you to ask one question. And to the cleaner, this is a real job. Like they don't know it's a test clean. Oh, okay. And like, sicker shopper. Yeah, exactly. And so the friend or family member asks, how can I book again? And so when they ask, how can I book again, it shows you one of two things. Either they're gonna say, Hey, I'm cheaper. Here's my card, call me, I'll do it for cheaper. Or they're gonna say, here, call Chris office and he'll get you rebooked. Now if they say that, really good green flag pass, they're probably good to send out your jobs.