This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings and welcome. You are listening to Sadduceful School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I have a pretty awesome story for you today. I mean, yesterday's was pretty cool about the guy who made a million dollars selling dry wash, but I really think you're gonna like today's as well.
And let's just begin with a reminder that every story featured on the show is true. I got a complaint from someone the other day who said, "Oh, these stories sound fake. "They sound manufactured." Well, that is not the case at all. These people are real. Their stories are true.
You can go and look them up yourself. 95% of them have websites or social media accounts. So I know that most of you know that, but just to be clear, in case you meet someone who is skeptical, you can say, "Yes, in fact, it is legit." And I preface today's story with that statement because I'm gonna tell you about a college student who makes $20,000 a month with a very common business. Something that doesn't sound exciting at all. He didn't make an app.
He's not selling his website to Facebook. He's managing a cleaning service. Oh, and he's also able to take off and go to Japan and not stress out about this business that's making so much money for him back at home. So I'll be right back with this pretty awesome true story in just a moment. [Music]
Today's story comes from Christopher Schwab.
His side hustle, which is turning into his main gig in a very short period of time, is called ThinkMates, a local residential cleaning service in the Potomac area of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia. Christopher started ThinkMates very recently. It was just July 2016 during his last semester of college. Now, even as a college student, he saw a huge demand for transparent, high-quality cleaning services. Every city like D.C. has a ton of cleaning companies,
but many are unreliable or they have hidden costs. Christopher believed he could fix many of the complaints people had about cleaning companies, and he also thought the cleaning industry was a safe option for a hustle because there's no shortage of people who need their homes cleaned. So he thought it was just a matter of being able to reach out to them effectively with the right message. Christopher spent a lot of time researching the competition and mapping out how he'd deal with the common problems of the industry. He really wanted to understand why cleaning services are often perceived as unreliable so that he could truly present a counter message, a benefit related directly to the problem that a lot of people were having.
And that research was one of the most important things he did, but after that, he made a website with instant online booking. He then added his business profile to Yelp and other leading online sites where customers actively look for cleaning services. He noticed that a lot of other cleaning services had websites that were greatly outdated and they didn't accept any kind of online booking. So he addressed that right from the beginning. And while he was doing that, he was also working to find reliable, quality cleaning teams.
He posted recruitment ads on Craigslist and Care.com, set up interviews, and he even had applicants clean his apartment to see how skilled they were. He paid them for that cleaning, regardless of whether they were hired after that or not. And he learned an important lesson by doing this. He said early on, there were a couple of people who said they were already experienced. And so I actually didn't go through the interview process.
I didn't have them come and clean my house. And surprisingly, none of those people worked out. The people who became his most reliable cleaners actually had no experience. And so he learned to look for people who are prompt, attentive to detail, and are friendly, instead of people who had worked as cleaners before. So we talked about a couple of problems with the industry, reliability, the hassle involved with booking, all those cleaners that don't have real websites, and just kind of a perceived lack of honesty or integrity with the process.
So another thing he did in starting up his maid service to counter this concern of reliability is Christopher is great at communication. He sends reminder emails to clients three days before, one day before, and then on the day of their clean. They also get text messages when the cleaner is on their way. They get an immediate feedback survey after the cleaner leaves their home. And instead of saying, here's how you have to contact us, he tries to be available for contact by phone, email, and text, and get this with the goal of responding within three to five minutes.
I thought that was pretty awesome. After each booking, Christopher will follow up sending out a discount for their friends and family. And then the next day, they'll get a phone call just confirming that everything went well and asking them if they want to sign up for a regular service. Right now, he has 10 people who clean for him on a regular basis and two assistants who help with that booking, scheduling, those immediate responses to people when they email or text, and just general administration. If there's ever any problem, one of those assistants will call or text the customer as soon as they find out about it and work to make it right for them, sometimes even that same day.
In just a few months, in this crowded, kind of boring industry, Christopher's ThinkMaids hustle has had more than 400 customers, and as I said, is earning $20,000 a month. A big part of that is focusing on recurring cleaning services, which accounts for about $6,000 to $7,000 a month. He also focuses on move-in or move-out cleans in the last week of each month, where the weekly income is typically twice that of the other weeks. He makes sure to have extra availability during that time because other maid services tend to get booked up. Most of his customers come through referral, but after setting up his profile on Yelp, he's also found customers through Google AdWords and about a dozen smaller platforms, including Nextdoor, which is a social network where you can communicate with your immediate neighbors to talk about any shared issues and offer referrals like a cleaning service.
He's also worked hard on automating and delegating wherever he can. He recently took a 10-day trip to Japan. He was admittedly a little worried, but as he put it, his business didn't burn down while he was away. His goal is to grow ThinkMaids from $20,000 to $50,000 a month while still only working half the day. What will he do with the rest of his time?
Well, he'll do whatever he wants, but he's also putting thought into a second side hustle, which will complement this one. Pretty amazing. [Music]
Well, that is an awesome story, of course. It kind of speaks for itself. I do think that it's amazing that an extremely common industry has such bad practices that just by doing a decent job and being hyper-reliable, you can essentially disrupt it and capture so much market share in a major city like Washington, D.C.
So good for him. Maybe he'll franchise at some point. And my favorite part is his three-to-five-minute response time. I think that is genius. And remember, he's not necessarily on call himself 24 hours a day.
He's just set up the structure of the business to where at any given time there is someone who's able to respond. So he's really chosen to focus on that customer service. And this is not hard to do if you prioritize it, if you kind of build it in from the beginning. A cleaning service lives or dies by customer service. So doing something like that has a ton of value for customers and for potential customers.
Okay, so what else can you take away that's helpful? Well, you can learn to think like Christopher and make your list of all the businesses and industries that kind of suck, or are just the same, or are just not awesome. And understand that you're not going to fix every one of those things, but someone needs to. And someone's going to have a story of fixing that problem. And hopefully making a lot of money from it.
So why shouldn't it be you? I hope that every day as you listen to these stories, you feel excited by the possibilities. You know that creating a side hustle is important. And hopefully you also go away with some better idea of how to proceed. Christopher took action on his idea, and I hope you do too, to read more about his story, because it is in fact true.
You can check out the show notes for today's episode at sidehustleschool.com/87. You are a rockstar. I'm Chris Guillebeau, and I'll see you tomorrow.
