 Are you starting a business or starting a job? It's a great question and we're going to talk about it today. Hi there, I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer. Now, today's show is brought to us by Savvy Cleaner Training where we just released a brand new course called Is Cleaning Right for You? And if you are coming out of the COVID pandemic and you are thinking about starting a cleaning business, this is a course I really want you to take. It will save you light years off the learning curve and it will save you years of trial and error and a whole bunch of money. So check it out at SavvyCleaner.com. On to today's show. We have a house cleaner that just started a cleaning business and she wrote into the show and I would like to read to you her email. And the reason I would like to read it to you is because there are a lot of things in here that I don't want to miss, but I want to cover this because I get five or six of these a week and emails, phone calls, consults and it is house cleaners being taken advantage of by people who are coming out of the COVID pandemic who want to prey on their not being in business anymore and needing a job or wanting to start a cleaning business. And so they come to me and they go, is this a good deal? We need to learn to recognize the signs. That's what we're doing here today and the reason I'm going to read this. She says, I have two people who have a cleaning marketing company startup who approached me to start and run a cleaning company. They made a website, started an LLC and are supposed to get the insurance and they have a Google business account for my company. I've invested tons of my time and I purchased an Adobe Cloud to create our business documents, our logo, service agreement, cleaning checklist, estimate, invoices, templates, all that stuff. And they want me to run the company alone for free at first to do the estimates, scheduling, hiring, invoicing, data entry, accounting into quickbooks and do the cleaning for $15 an hour. The company would make 20% of what we charge before taxes and I would only get a third of that. I'm not expected to take any money until we grow. I've only done one cleaning and I feel like I'm not ready. They don't want to do any of the cleaning with me. Is this a bad idea? Should I back away from this deal before it goes any further? I really just want to get one client and clean and learn everything slowly and then when I get everything organized and I have enough business to hire and create an official company, I feel like this is a bad deal for me. Please email me. I'm sick about this because I don't want to let anyone down. Thank you. Okay, so there's a lot going on in here. The very first thing that I am flagged by, and I say flagged like huge red flags, there's a startup marketing company that wants to work with a startup cleaning company. Okay, so if you are the startup cleaning company, I want you to look at the track record of the marketing company. You said they were a startup marketing company. Now, we know in the world of marketing, you cannot market something that doesn't exist. So if they are trying to market your cleaning business and you only have one client, I'm suggested by your email that there are no ratings and reviews and no satisfactory cleanings under your belt. What is it that they're going to market? Now, in this email, it says they created you a website. Websites are a dime a dozen and you can create them for free. So for somebody to come in and suggest that you start up an entire business and you are going to work for free until the money comes in, at which point you start earning $15 an hour, that's a huge red flag for me because it sounds like you're going to be doing all the work. Now, once the website is up and running, then what? How much work are they going to be doing? Now, I'm not knocking the fact that it is possible that they are stellar marketers, but the words here are startup marketing company. Okay, so what is marketing? Okay, we know in business, there's advertising and there's marketing. Advertising is the stuff you pay for that drives traffic and marketing is the stuff that you do for free to set up the business so that when you pay for the advertising, there is some place for them to go. It is setting up a website, it is creating your social media platforms, it is creating your blogs and your to-do lists and your free ebooks and all those things. That is all marketing and those are things you can be doing as you're setting up your business. Now, I encourage you as the business owner to do your own marketing. Now, it would be so easy to go, well, I'm just a cleaner and I don't know the marketing, so it makes a whole lot of sense to have a third-party marketer come in and then run my business. Okay, in the email, you mentioned that they don't want to do the cleaning and they are not house cleaners, so what do they know about cleaning? That part is missing. Now, maybe they've worked with a hundred other cleaning companies, I don't know, but if they've never worked with other cleaning companies, I don't want that company marketing my business. Now, the reason I say I want you to market your business is because if you are new and you are trying to come up with marketing materials, all of a sudden you have a lot of questions that you have to answer about your business and it will force you to sit there and say, what is the image of my company? What does my company look like? Is my company fun? Is my company serious? Is my company high-end luxury? What does my company look like? Because the pictures that you use in your marketing will dictate the type of customer that you have. The words that you use in your marketing and the ad copy will dictate the type of customers you attract. The type of ads that you create will dictate the type of customers that you attract. So, the reason I want you to do it is because I want you to be in the driver's seat. This is your business. I don't want you running a business and earning $15 an hour, and I'm really confused here because it says they started an LLC and they're going to buy insurance. If they're going to buy insurance and they run an LLC, this sounds like a job. Not you're starting a company. It sounds like you are an employee. And so if you are an employee and you're running the company and you're doing the hiring and you're creating, you're doing the QuickBooks and the accounting and the data entry and all this stuff, it sounds like you're doing all the work and they're going to make 20% commission. That's a lot of money. That sounds like a franchise opportunity. The difference is this. When you join a franchise, the franchise has an existing proven track record. And so what you're giving them the 20% of is yes, they will do the marketing. And they have a national marketing campaign. They have the websites already set up. They have the social media already set up. They already have the company cars. They have the business plan. They already have all of the training in place. They have mentors to help you with the business. Everything that you need that you are trying to create on your own is already created when you join a franchise. And for that, they've earned their 20% commission, okay? What they're earning from you is you are buying into their reputation. You're saying, I don't have a reputation yet, so I'm going to jump on someone else's wagon and I'm going to go along for the ride. That is what you are paying the 20% for. But if you are creating it from scratch, why would you give them 20% of your business? Now, I'm not knocking business partnerships because sometimes they work. Most of the time they don't. And if you're new and starting up in the house cleaning business, I highly recommend you stay away from business partnerships unless it is your spouse and your spouse is going to help you grow the business. But for the most part, I don't recommend it at all, especially with people that you hardly know, because there are a whole bunch of unknowns that have to be factored in. And right now it sounds like there are more unknowns than there are knowns. In the end of your email, you use the words, I got to read it again. It made me cry. This is so sad. You said, please email me back. I'm sick about this because I don't want to let anyone down. The only person you're going to let down in a situation is you, because if you are going into business and you're going to give everything away to some people that are just starting a company that don't have a track record and they don't have the experience in this, it's not that you're going to be letting them down if you say no. You're going to be letting yourself down because every single day that you show up to work, every single client that you go to, you're going to wish in the back of your mind, I wish I were doing it my way. I wish I had the latitude to call all the shots that I didn't have to run it through a board of directors who has to say that yes, this matches their marketing campaign. These are not the kind of customers that I wanted. This is not the way that I wanted to run my business, but that's the way they marketed me. Therefore, I have to lean into that. So I don't want you to go into this thinking it's the only way out. There are lots of other options. And there, if you look around, there are lots of people that have gone into the cleaning business and they've been incredibly successful. And so, I don't want you to fall into the trap of having someone else come in and promise you the sun, the stars, and the moon. Because what we find oftentimes, all that's there is just a whole bunch of wind. All right, if you found this helpful, please pass it on to a friend. Give us a thumbs up. Let us know how we're doing. Leave comments below so that we can answer them so that we can talk to you. We can carry on this conversation until we meet again. Leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.