Smart Cleaning School

The business week started out great. I recently upgraded one of my commercial cleaning clients by $350 per month. When I got the call at the Airsoft field about another veterinary hospital, I was thrilled. Yes, that's right. The Airsoft field. Here's a short bonus funny papers. My oldest son, Kenny, just 16 recently and we decided to do a birthday party for him. It involved 7 of his teen...

 Teresa and I went on a honeymoon retreat in the Amish Country, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was so quaint and beautiful. The rolling country hills with farms, horse and buggy, small antique shops, and farmer's markets were such a breath of fresh air to our normal busy and chaotic life. We planned multiple day trips from our wonderful bed and breakfast called the Barn at Strasburg . Sight &amp...

 Let's journey together into an update of my own solo cleaning business. 2020 was a great year. I started at $29,000 in total cleaning revenue, which was the beginning of the Stabilizer Phase of my ISO Model. After hitting multiple 60-day SMART goals, I ended the year at $80,000! That's a $51,000 increase in 1 year! Our profit tripled to just under $5,000 per month on 2 cleaning days per...

I still remember the car ride to Gatlinburg, TN with my wife when she told me this story. I had no idea that one story about shopping at the discount racks would turn into a podcast episode that has helped solo cleaners understand their value in the marketplace.  

 In my first full year as a solo cleaner, I worked a lot but we had no money. You've heard my story on this podcast a dozen times! We just lost our car to repossession. We had $170,000 in debt and no house! We earned under $2000/mo, lived in a ghetto, had bill collectors calling every day. We lived 5 hours from our closest family and we were new parents. In December 2006, we had no idea how w...

 In this episode, I have an important lesson to share from a new friend of mine in the digital marketing space on the power of Facebook and Google. Eric Laylon is a consultant with ReachLocal. He understands the online landscape more than almost anyone that I know. He's a new member of the MCBA networking group and had a chance to share a presentation on his work. I asked many questions as I...

 Today is a very sad day for me. My Nana passed away 1 year ago on February 22nd, 2020 and my Pop-Pop passed away 3 months ago on November 22nd, 2020. They were married for 63 years and raised me to be the man that I am today. I miss them tremendously. If you are interested, check out the podcast episodes where I read the eulogies for each of my grandparents. My Nana - It Was All a Blur , My Pop-P...

This is an article I wrote for my solo cleaning company, Carfagno Cleaning. I encourage you to check out my cleaning website for ideas on how you could build An Optimizer's Website .  Would you like to schedule a free call with me? I leave 1 30-min slot open per week to connect with listeners! Go to the bottom of the Elite Membership registration page to schedule a time!

 I'm not sharing as many of my own solo cleaning business updates as my own personal goals are beginning to shift. I am following my own ISO Model System . I am almost through the Stabilizer Phase of the plan, which focuses on growth and earning enough profit and experience to remove ALL financial stress from your family. In 2021, I'll be optimizing my company to $6,000 per month profit...

I love listener questions! Here's one I got a few weeks ago that was a perfect excuse to teach on the topic of affiliations. "Hi Ken, I listen to your podcast religiously! I got "legit" (DBA, EIN, sales tax ID, etc) at the end of last year, and fully launched at the beginning of January. I previously was a manager for Pizza Hut in my area for 15 years. I started working there w...

Do you struggle with selling and not charging enough? Do you believe you offer something special to the world? Listen to this "Best Of" episode called " Blueberry Pie ". This is one of my favorite episodes of this podcast. I've used this mindset to teach multiple solo cleaners the value they can offer.

This is a story that will cost a cleaning supplier a lot of money. First of all, I hope you all know me by now. I am not vindictive. I did not have a bad experience with the company I'm going to mention. However, I chose to do my 3-stars out of 5 review to the world because it will illustrate a vital lesson on the lifetime value of a client. I purchased my Mosquito Carbon Lite vacuum cleaner...

There are so many questions that clients and prospects have asked me over the years. As a consultant in the cleaning industry, I get asked even more. My cleaning company website has an in-depth Learning Library that I'm very proud of. Several of these articles are FAQs that I've pulled to the home page of my website. From time to time, I'll bring you one of these articles. Today is...

Right off the bat, let me make this statement. There is not one way to properly do a COVID-19 clean and disinfect, but there is science that governs us to follow protocols and procedures to ensure best results. There are so many companies out there doing COVID disinfection. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell which are tried and true with years of disinfection and training from the ones that saw...

I have two related funny stories to the theme of this podcast. Have you ever seen the " Polar Express " movie during Christmas? Most of you have. Toward the end, when the main characters are lost in North Pole, they stumble in the elf operations room. There are a number of videos playing of kids and a red buzzer goes off. One kid is shown on the Naughty List as he repeats the phrase, &qu...

In this episode, I'd like to share a few updates from my solo cleaning business. It is true that I stopped striving for my goals in late 2020. But I didn't stop marketing. My " Optimizer's Website " , strong " Google My Business " profile, and participation in local networking and chamber events. Recently, I had a couple find me on Google that lead to my website...

It's a new calendar year. 2020 was so difficult for many families and so many are exploring other options for income. In this new "Best Of" series, I bring you an older episode that truly connected with my audience. " How to Start Your Solo Cleaning Business " is still one of my most downloaded episodes to date. Everything that I taught in this episode is valid in 2021 and...

I was listening to the Tim Ferriss Podcast recently as he interviewed the one and only Seth Godin. Between comments, Tim uttered the metaphor of the duck does all of its work under the surface. I literally had to pause the episode and write out this one! In my last episode, Mission 20/20 Accomplished , I painted a picture of team cleaning companies growing through insurmountable odds and I shared...

2020 started with such promise to many. Unfortunately, it ended much differently. This episode is not a co-miserating-let-you-off-the-hook-if-you-did-nothing-about-it episode! This is an episode to fire up the winners. With all the doom and gloom in the media of pandemics, failing economy, and people's livelihoods being destroyed, do you know that there are scores of absolute winners that cru...

I started this podcast with no expectations. It's a highly niched show for people wanting to optimize a solo cleaning business. When my show got to 1,000 downloads, I was shocked! It kept growing. Recently, the Solo Cleaning School Podcast crossed 20,000 downloads in 13 months! That's incredible to me. I am a member of the podcasting community and the "Downloads" metric is so i...

" Hi, I'm Ken and I'm an overthinker. " I constantly make simple things complex. That's what an overthinker does. We complicate the most simple task to the point that we cannot take any action to complete it. Another term for this failure disease is procrastination as Dr. Schwartz talks about in " The Magic of Thinking Big ". The rare person that can take the com...

Make this a play on the year 2020. No one could have ever guessed 2020 would go as it did. There was a major pandemic that shut down the country for months. Riots broke out across the country. A presidential election turned into a 2 month battle in court. On a personal note, I lost both grandparents and nearly lost my mom. No matter what goals you set for 2020, few of us were able to hit them. In...

In my last Carfagno Cleaning update, I shared about my honeymoon getaway with my wife, my grandfather in the ICU, and some wins in my solo cleaning business. I've already shared a " Tribute to My Father " in a previous episode as well, so you know how that ended. I have a few other updates from this week in business. As I've shared previously, Matt and Laura are a young family...

This was my 4th episode of the Solo Cleaning School Podcast. My goal was to share the top tangibles and intangibles that made solo cleaning so awesome. I also wanted to balance this with the Cons of Solo Cleaning. This has been one of my most popular episodes, so I wanted to bring it back. Enjoy!

I've shared about my mastermind community many times. Total Life Freedom has members all over the US and for some cool reason, there are a few in my area. We formed up TLF Philly and held our first local lunch get together recently at Chili's in King of Prussia, PA. We had a wonderful time and discussed big ideas, what's working and what's not in our businesses. We laughed. We...