 I'm often asked why I train house cleaners and I'm about to share that with you 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, which is a company that I started on January 1st of 2016. And we have produced all of these videos for you and we're going to share with you a series of five over the next week that's going to introduce you to our new learning library and how it came to be. So first of all, why I train house cleaners? Well, all right, back up a second. I've been a professional house cleaner for 25 years. I started my business back in 1991. At the time, I was doing a bunch of odd jobs. I was delivering pizzas for Domino's. I was delivering newspapers for the Charlotte Observer. I was waiting tables at Harper's Restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina. And one of the waiters asked me if I would like to help her during the day on her house cleaning business. And I had the small window of time and I was really in need of money. So I said, yes, I will help you. My business relationship with her lasted all of one day when I realized that our work ethics did not match up. So I left the next day after earning $150 cleaning my first house. And I said, wait a second, I could make a business out of this. All right. First and foremost, I had no business experience, but I realized there was opportunity. And that's the first step to running a successful business, to recognize there's an opportunity and you may be a good fit. Now, I jumped in head first not knowing if I was a good fit. This is back in the days. I'll be honest with you, not a lot of small businesses had websites. And so as house cleaners, we did not have websites to promote ourselves. There were no Facebook groups at the time to spin ideas off of. There wasn't a Google that would answer questions for you in a way that it does today. And YouTube did not exist. And so as far as finding information to start my own business, I had to go back to the community college and I had to take business and marketing courses and sales courses and customer relationship courses and management courses and how to hire employee courses and a whole bunch of other things in order to learn the skills that I was missing in my business. But I jumped in head first and within three months after starting my house cleaning business, I had a full staff of people. My schedule was full and I was being invited now to go to other cleaning companies that were in other cities and other states to train their people with the systems that we had pulled together. Now I say systems. I love to batch things and I love to streamline all of my work because I like to only do things once. I want to repurpose it as many times as I can. I want to figure out a way that I can systematize everything so I'm not reinventing the wheel over and over again because that to me is exhausting. So if I can make this easy and simple, that's my goal. So now I started training after three months in the business and I've been training for the last 20 years all over the country and all over the globe. I've now been in 31 different countries training different cultures on how we do the business. And it's a little bit different based on where you are geographically but the core values are the same. So what I've been doing is training while I've been running my house cleaning business. All right. So fast forward back to 2015, 2015 I've been in the business and all of a sudden my husband and I, we were gifted a troubled 15 year old and the troubled 15 year old was a huge turning point in my life. It was the moment where everything came to a sudden halt and I had to stop and reinvent myself. Now as house cleaners you will find through the course of your career there are times you will scale up and scale down based on what is going on in your personal life at the time. It's one of the things I love most about the house cleaning business. But here in 2015 I found myself with a troubled 15 year old on my door, everybody had given up on her because of the choices she had made and she had become so problematic to everyone around her. No one could live in the space she was in. She was self-harming. She would cut herself on a regular basis. She threatened suicide. She was addictive. She lied to everyone. She stole from everyone. She assaulted people that were in her reach. She put her head through walls and just destructive things that normal, everyday people don't do. And my husband and I had a long talk about it and one of the challenges that we had is the family member whose daughter she was, we were unable to save. And so there was always this kind of lingering guilt we wish we could have done more. And so now her daughter comes to us with some of the same self-destructive behaviors and we felt that if we could let her live with us and we could help her find some hope and some happiness and some stability that perhaps she could have a better life and this would be like our way of a second chance, if you will. So we agreed to bring her in our home and it was one of the most frustrating, most devastating things I've ever been through. I was not emotionally prepared to finish raising a child with those behaviors. I'd never been through that before. I'd never seen it before. I don't have any official training or licensing or whatever to manage that kind of behavior. And so I found myself going through a bunch of logical questions and comments in my head. Like if she physically assaults people, I can't have her assaulting my clients. I can't have her assaulting my employees. If she steals things, I can't take her to jobs with me because I can't have her stealing from my customers. If she's self-harming and cutting herself, I can't leave her at home because while I'm out on the job, I may come home and she has expired. So there are some very serious issues going on that made me just stop in my tracks and say, you know what, I've got to reinvent myself. And so in 2015, with everything that I knew, I had run a very incredibly successful cleaning company, but now I'm at a pivoting point, I've got to change. I've got to be able to stay at home and reinvent my life in order to help her save hers. And so for me, everything that I knew was getting on a plane, going to other companies, sitting there for a week or two weeks or whatever it was and doing training and helping their people get up and running and then going on to the next company or coming back and managing my own. And so I know the internet existed. I wasn't a fan of it. Quite honestly, I'm scared of it and I hoped it would go away, but it did not. And so there I found myself at a crossroads saying, okay, I can learn this. I can learn the internet. I can learn social media. I can learn about websites. I can learn all the things that I need in order to create my training online. And so I sold all of my assets. I got rid of my business. I close out my business. I officially retired at the end of 2015. And I opened the doors to Savvy Cleaner Training on January 1st of 2016. Now don't miss tomorrow's episode because I'm going to share with you the reasons why I offer all of the free content that I do. I know it's very unique, but it's a great strategy. I'll talk to you about that tomorrow. If you found this helpful, please pass it on to a friend. If we've earned your subscription, please subscribe. And until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.