Today on the podcast, we have Mike chatting with Dustin Calkins, who started his cleaning company about a year and a half ago. He started Time to Shine cleaning in Monroe, Wisconsin June 2021 after being a manager at Subway and getting sick of all the hours he worked. He started a cleaning business to get more time with his family and began to market his business. He is here with Mike today to chat about the best first steps to take to get the word out. Listen in as he and Mike chat about how to dive deeper into becoming a business owner vs being your own employee.
Something we do commonly as business owners is go straight into problem-solving mode. We barely scratch the surface of the problem we are trying to solve, and then start to figure out a solution. It is much more useful to get to the core of the problem so that you can solve THAT rather than some superficial thing that will take your brain power and your time and won’t ultimately solve your problem. In the case, Dustin started out by saying he wanted to know how to market, and whether should he use Google ads, Next Door, etc, but after Mike asked him to get more specific, he realized that at the end of this line of thinking, he was hoping to increase his revenue. From this understanding, he can reverse engineer what he is hoping to do, and accomplish his ultimate goal.
When it comes to paying people for their time, the lowest quality work you could be doing is cleaning. The quality of work has to do with the amount of thinking that is required. Cleaning is a very teachable skill that doesn’t require high-level thinking to accomplish the task, so you can pay someone $15 dollars an hour to do it. That’s why it makes the least sense for you as the business owner to do the cleaning when it requires the least amount of skill. The highest quality of work you could be doing is either critically thinking through issues in your business and how you can make them better, or marketing or bringing people into your world.
