247. Increasing Revenue In Your Business with Adam Povlitz and Cedric Francis

Speaker A: Do you want to have a business or do you want to own your own job? M. You go to work, you go to work for someone else or some other company and you do what you do. And if you're a small company, what happens? You take vacation and things start falling apart. You're getting phone calls or anything like that. And what do you think happens if you own your own business? If you don't set up a system and a process and cultivate leadership, there is no vacation, There is no time. You just now you have a little bit more freedom with your own job.

Speaker B: Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome to another Knowledge Bomb. Um, episode of Elite the Greatness, where we believe in helping others reach their greatest potential and together change the world. And if this is your first time, don't forget to subscribe. Hit that like button. Hit the notification bell so you won't miss any of these amazing episodes. And if you on itunes, go ahead and rate the podcast and leave a review that helps get the word out to great leaders and entrepreneurs like yourself. Hello, Adam. How you doing, sir?

Speaker A: Hey, Cedric, how you doing?

Speaker B: I'm great. I'm doing amazing and definitely glad to have you on the Lead to Greatness podcast on today. What I want you to do is just go ahead and introduce yourself to the Lead to Greatness community. Let us know a little bit about you. What's your story?

Speaker A: Sure. So, um, I'm Adam Pavlitz. I am the CEO of Anago Cleaning Systems. We are a three tier commercial cleaning franchise company. Just a kind of quick overview. Most people are probably familiar with franchising to some degree. You know, like a McDonald's. People that own, uh, you know, the stores versus the, the people that own the corporate offices. Uh, and that would be a two tier franchise. We're a three tier franchise, which is a little unique. Not, uh, to my industry, but unique to, to most people. We have a, the corporate offices, we have a regional or master franchise, and then we have the janitorial franchise. So a little bit of a spin on, uh, your, your typical franchise model. But we're across, um, about 1800 locations across North America, uh, as of lately.

Speaker B: How did your journey get started? Did you, um, just come up with this idea of how. Tell me the story around it?

Speaker A: Yeah, so, uh, was not, not my idea. Um, it was actually my father founded the business back in 1989. I, I was. My background was corporate finance. I had no desire to get into the family business. Um, I worked at IBM for a little while. I was in investment banking before that. Um, and then it was 2009 and it was end of 2008, IBM, um, did this huge round of layoffs. I was an analyst and I didn't get laid off. I was, I got employee numbers, exit packages, and was basically reviewing, you know, who's, whose parachutes, uh, were the golden parachutes. Whose parachutes were not so golden. Uh, um, and, and you know, I'm probably mid-20s at this point. And it just leaves a really kind of terrible taste in your mouth. You're going like, okay, I could be here 15, 20 years from now and they hire some 20 something year old kid who's decided my fate without knowing my name or my story or anything like that. And you go, and so I happened to talk to my, my, my father and he goes, you know, you got to check this Anigo thing out. I think I got to tiger by the tail here. Um, and it was about six months later that I ended up joining. And he goes, congratulations, you, you're leaving your, you know, your highfalutin fancy finance job job at Anago. You're going to be a telemarketer by day and a franchisees assistant at night. And I was cleaning a daycare. Uh, so I, I left finance to, to empty diaper bins.

Speaker B: Wow. So, okay, so you're doing three things. So you, you actually working in the business. You say you're doing the franchise and you're doing the calls. So what was that, what, what was that like in the beginning? Did you get did from what you're doing now? Did you gain any experience to lead you to this or kind of walk us down that?

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So I mean, at the time it was, it was humbling to say the least. Right? You know, you're, and you're working double shift, right? Because you're working all day making the, making the calls, trying to set the appointments for the, for the salespeople that are, that are trying to sell the clients. And then you're going out at night, you change your outfit and go clean, um, and you're cleaning until, you know, 10, 11 o' clock at night or something like that. And so, you know, I mean it, number one, it gave me a lot of perspective on a lot of times what the janitorial franchise owners are doing, right. A lot of them are doing it as like a side hustle, right? They keep their day job and they're going, hey, I just want to make a couple extra grand every month and, and how can I do that without leaving my job? Um, and that's where. That's where, you know, our janitorial franchise comes in. But, uh, living that life, um, I did that for a while. I ultimately moved to the client sales role. I moved to customer service. Um, and that was before I even got to the corporate offices. Right. So that was the local office here in South Florida. And. And then in the corporate office, it was okay, you know, you. You need to meet everybody. So I was traveling the country going, who are you? How can I help you? Um, and, you know, I was probably maybe late 20s, early 30s at that point. And so you go, well, what the heck? You know, these guys have been in the business for 20 years. I'm the, you know, I'm coming in, you know, a couple years in. It's like, who the heck am I? And, you know, you have to come in of. Not like, hey, here's how we're going to fix you. You come in of like, how can we help you? You know, what. What is it that we can do to help you grow your business? Um, and I feel like I've. I've tried to maintain that, like, servant leadership approach.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Even, you know, even as I've come up through the ranks and now I'm CEO of the company, um, it's still very much driven on, like, okay, what else can we do to help you as the franchisee grow? Because if you're growing right at the end of the day, my, My. My revenue grows too, if they're growing.

Speaker B: Adam, this is pretty cool. And, and I love it because you, you went through the organization, you're learning, you know, here and there, and actually you're not. Not only are you doing it from the corporate aspect of it, but you're actually doing the work. So you get a 3D, uh, 60, uh, view on that. So you did that. And then. So now you're kind of moving through the organization. What kept you, like, stable, where he. He was patient along the way? I mean, what was going on through your mind to do that? Or did you make those mistakes and try to rush and change things or whatever? What was that like?

Speaker A: Uh, both. There was definitely, I mean, you know, there's definitely a, you know, a ready, fire, aim kind of component. As a younger guy, you're hungry, you want to make some changes, you want to go faster. Um, and, you know, I remember. I remember the, The. The former president, uh, of Anago before me. He was, you know, I met with him pretty regularly as I was kind of climbing the ranks and told me the story about. And I'm going To butcher it. But it was some story about, I guess there was some, uh, the Germans and the BMWs, they wanted to make something with their engine, and they found something that they liked in the one Buick engine or something like that. And they said, oh, send us that, and we're going to, you know, dissect that and try to use that in our next BMW. And there was some rough patch like inside of the carburetor or something. Again, I'm, um, butchering this. And they go, oh, no, we got to sand that down. We got to. We got to. We don't do rough parts. We're the Germans. We're the peak of engineering. They sanded down. The motor won't start. And. And he goes, the lesson is you're going to see a lot of things here that are. That look rough. Don't sand it down until you know why.

Speaker B: Oh, yes, that is so good.

Speaker A: That was a great lesson. And so that, you know, sometimes you go, okay, this is. This is. This doesn't make sense for why we're doing this. Like this at first pass. But then you get deeper in and you go, oh, no, that's a deliberate, you know, place where we're creating the friction because it, you know, it helps somewhere else. Um, but, yeah, I mean, I mean, I, you know, I think it was great to just go through everything because I also m. Know, you know, I've lived as a salesperson. I've lived as a customer service person. You know, get it fielding the phone call of, oh, you left a paperclip in the corner, and therefore your cleaner hasn't been here all week. And it's like, no, we've been there. The paperclip either, you know, like, uh, you get to see it from every perspective. You get to see what everyone, you know, boots on the ground or feeling every day. Um, and I think that that lends to a broader perspective when you're. When you're coming in versus someone who just came in from the, you know, the, the senior leadership right away without having done the work.

Speaker B: What type of edge, uh, do you think it give you, you know, being a C suite leader now?

Speaker A: So I think, I mean, I think during that transitional time, right, it gave me. It gave me credibility. Right? I'm not just, I'm not the. Oh, you're the founder, son, coming in with your silver spoon. Uh, it was. I've. I've cleaned buildings, I've run the appointments, I've. I've had. I've had literally thousands of people hang up on Me as a telemarketer, I've done the work. And so you come in and. No, no, it's not. This isn't theory that I'm. That I'm preaching to you. This is something I've lived and done and worked. And so I think it helped build my credibility in the organization very quickly. Um, because they know that I'm not just coming from, you know, some. Some place of, you know, barking orders. It's like, no, I've lived it, done it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, yeah. That's really cool. I kind of want to talk because I'm thinking about. From the franchise aspect of it, answer this question for me. Do you think even if someone not planning on going franchise, should they still set their business up like a franchise or should they not?

Speaker A: I think you have to think about it from a perspective of like, do you want to have a business or do you want to own your own job? M. And I make that distinction. Right. Because there's a lot of people, you know, if you're, you know, you go to work, you go to work for someone else or some other company, and you do what you do, and then, you know, and if you're a small company, what happens? You take vacation and things start falling apart. You're getting phone calls and really like that. And what do you think happens if you own your own business? If you don't set up a system and a process and cultivate leadership, There is no vacation. There is no time. You just. Now you have a little bit more freedom with your own job because you don't have a boss. You know, the customer is your boss. Um, so to me, I mean, I think any. Anyone starting your business when you're in startup mode, you got to do what you got to do, right? You got to get your hands dirty. You gotta. You gotta do everything. It is what it is. There is no vacation, you know, for your first year or two or three.

Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, then after that, you have to decide, like, do I want this to be, you know, the job I own, or is, do I want to have a business that is designed to give me freedom, that is designed to, yes, obviously, generate income for me. But at the end of the day, you know, are you working 80 hours a week in your own business and now you're not spending any time with your family, your kids, your friends, and, you know, is it all worth it or for me? I, um. You know, uh, I'm so. Have you ever heard of the Eisenhower matrix? I'm a big proponent of this now. I just learned the name of it not that long ago.

Speaker B: Urgency. Not urgency than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Important. And so what, what I found is I, I, I became, I didn't realize what it was called. And so I found that out. I, I had to Google that, you know, and it, it basically talks about like most people, right? You either you're spending all your time and that it's, it's urgent and important, right? Your school calls and you gotta take the call and you gotta go pick them up. Urgent, Important. You gotta go, right? Uh, you have the not, not urgent, not important. You know, you're scrolling on your phone, whatever. You know, killing some time. Most people don't spend nearly enough time in the important but not urgent quadrant. Right? And that's the, that's the quadrant of, it's just a little, you know, that's what it looks like, a little T chart. Um, that little quadrant where it's, where it's important but not urgent, that's where all the money gets made. Okay. That, that's where, you know, if you're trying to spend, uh, if you're trying to grow your business beyond you and make it so that it's not like you're the only person who can make the big decisions, well, then someone's going to have to spend some time working on like a process flow. Working on, uh, you know, what does it look like to hire and train people and spending the time investing in like non, again, not urgent, but is going to change your life if you do it for a couple of years.

Speaker B: Yeah. And what you're saying, I mean, uh, somebody right now, Adam, like, man, you know what? This, this, this takes discipline. This takes strategy. I mean, you literally have to slow down because now you're not no longer working in the business. Now you're working on it. I want you to kind of help us with that entrepreneur right now, that small business owner that's on the fence with this because it's like, man, Adam, I don't have the time. What, what advice can you get to someone that says right now I don't have the time to do this in that transition phase?

Speaker A: So, I mean, so there's good news and bad news, right? The good news is you'll, you're going to create time, okay? The bad news is it ain't gonna be right now. And that's what it is. It really, it really does, it really does come down to like, if you're going to spend time in that quadrant in that important but, but not urgent, you're going to have to lock it. It's not going to come naturally. I'm a Christian, I go to church. And they always talk about, you know, you give your first 10%, right? Not your last 10%. You don't wait until the end of the month and then say, okay, whatever I got left. Here's what I'm going to give. It's, you get your check and you give your 10%. Uh, in mind, you have to do that same kind of functional approach with your, you have to tithe your time. There's, there's money. Trademark that, right? You got to say, what's the 10% of my time that I'm going to dedicate strictly to developing the business? And so for me, I'm, I block my time. And on my calendar in the mornings, I don't take, I don't take a phone call, an appointment before 10 o', clock, between 8, 10 o'. Clock. That is my time for me to do deeper work, to focus on things that I think are going to really change the business, invest in myself, move the needle. And I won't, I won't meet with anybody by then unless something's absolutely burning down. Um, that's my time. You have to block the time. And there's been times, frankly, where you know, that gets completely blown out of the water and you're going to, you know, maybe you got to spend a couple hours at night, the kids are in bed or whatever, and you go, all right, I'm going to, you know, you spend a few hours while the kids are in bed getting ahead and setting it up so that ultimately more things can be automated or outsourced or hired for. And yeah, it's a grind for a couple of years, but you know, you want to do a slow grind for the rest of your life or a hard grind for two, three years and then tee yourself up to have that freedom. You know, I'll take, I'll take the latter.

Speaker B: My goodness. The franchise, right. So what are some of the scaling aspects from like, okay, where you are now and where you're trying to be,

Speaker A: you know, so right now, um, we're focused on what we're calling Vision 2028, which is growing the system wide revenue from, to, to about 300 million. Um, we, you know that, that started with, um, it was coming out of COVID We were doing system wide, around 66, 67 million. And I said, I want to be a $100 million brand. Uh, and how do we do that? And we kind of, we, we brainstormed we put together a plan and we said okay, I want to. And we were able to, we had a five prong plan. We messaged like crazy out to our franchisees. We were, we gave away some incentives. We really, you know, promoted the heck out of it and we able to, we were able to do it in 19 months. And um, and then stupid me, you know, I stuck my neck out again and I go, well now I want to be a 300 million dollar brand. And you know, and we're halfway there. Um, so you know, doing all right and, and now, you know, investing in everything in its mother including AI related sales, lead gen ideas. That's amazing to get us over to that hill. Wow.

Speaker B: Wow. I want you to kind of. So, so you did it before successful, you're doing it again and you're halfway there. But what are some of those similarities that someone, you know that maybe I don't know that first million and trying to get to 5 million. What is something uh, that you know that, that you've been successful with a strategy that works. What are some things, some areas they need to be looking at and how do they dig into, you know, getting that, you know, getting that done for that success?

Speaker A: Yeah, so it's, it does, it's, it's not, it's, it's essentially the same blueprint. Right. So it's, you know, you could be a million or 100 million, doesn't matter. Right. It's okay. What is the goal? What are the first principles items that you need to do to get there? Right, so say you're, you know, like I'm a sales based organization and so you need more customers. Right. And so you say, okay, if I need more customers, well how, how much is my average customer worth? Okay, and how many of those do I need to get to the 100 million? Okay, so I need X number of customers. Well, how many leads do I need to get that many customers? Okay, well where am I going to get those leads? And you keep walking it back down to the smallest number of thing and you go, okay, if I spend so much money on a lead gen thing, you know, finding customers, I know that 1 out of 10 will turn into a customer. That one will be worth $500, a thousand dollars, whatever. And now I know I need 20 of those, uh, you know, to break down your goal from like, you know, a dream to okay, here are the exact number of things I need to hit every single month. So you have your target, you have your first principles, breakdown of what it takes to get there, then I think you need to have your messaging, right? If you have a team, even if it's a small team, it's. It's getting everybody excited about it, right? People work harder toward a vision than just working toward an everyday job. If you're just grinding, you know, m. Hey, I'm a, you know, I'm, you know, my stepfather is in the plumbing business. If every day you're just going out and dealing with toilets, you know, you go, well, I deal with toilets and I go home and, and you know, and the next day I wake up and I deal with toilets. Um, but if you're going, hey guys, we're working toward this goal of being a million dollar plumbing business. And, and when we get there, here's the incentive for you. And that's number four. What's the incentive?

Speaker B: I got that.

Speaker A: Why should I, Why is your staff. Should I care?

Speaker B: People miss that. People miss that. Then what is it for the person?

Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. What's in it for me? Right? So you have so it. So now you go, okay, I have my goal. I know what breakdown I need to get there. I have my, um, uh, my messaging. I'm making sure I'm talking about it to my team all the time so that they always hear about it. And then number four, they know what they get. And if they participate and help me get there and that, I mean, you. And rinse and repeat. You know what I mean? And it's not easy. I mean, it's, it, you know, it's a lot of work to build all that together and think about that. And that's, that's hva high value time where you're gonna have to just sit aside and go, okay, what does this mean? How, how can I incentivize my team? Um, but you start building that up and now that, like, that's all you talk about. And, and the only other thing I would say is number. Number. Let's call it number five is whatever your, whatever your vision is, it has to have a name or it's not real. So now we called it the hundred million dollar challenge when we first did that. Now we're calling the 300 million level. We're calling Vision 2028 because it gives it a hard timeline. And so when, when I go to our franchise conferences, all they hear me talk about Vision 2028. Vision 2028. And then maybe super secret number six because I'm the idiot who committed to it. You know, I'm 10 times more likely to figure I mean, I will buy hook or by crook, man. I'm gonna figure out a way because I publicly committed to. To, like, we're getting there. Uh, we're gonna get there. You know, I was like, that was actually a pro tip. I learned it was some bio of Mark Zuckerberg, and he said, they said he publicly commits every year to some massive goal in front of the entire Facebook employee, you know, staff there. And so, like, one of the years, he was like, I'm going to learn Mandarin Chinese and give a speech in Chinese. And, you know, and he did it. And he actually did it. I mean, you know, and granted, it was a little broken, right? It was like me trying to, you know, speaking gringo Spanish, like, hola. I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't perfect. Um, and that's a quite a complicated language to learn, right? But, you know, but. But you go, if I don't do this, what is my company going to think of me, right? They're going to go, okay, Mark's a quitter. You know, Mark. You know, Mark phoned it in. And so you go, no, I'm going to commit to big goals and I'm going to achieve them, and I'm going to make sure all of you help me do it, and I'm going to make sure you're excited about helping me do it.

Speaker B: Knowledge bomb. Uh, and this is some good knowledge you're dropping. I'm loving this information. You just. Oh, man. Putting a name on it. I mean, you just said a lot, um, to help us. So in this process, uh, or whatever, what are some of the common mistakes you make of you have made throughout the last year or so? So I think.

Speaker A: I think one of my bigger mistakes is, um, I, as you. As you kind of climb the ranks in corporate America, right, What ends up happening is you get those promotions because you're doing it a certain way and that way works, right? And so they go, oh, you know, you're really good at that. We're going to make you a manager. And then you excel at being a manager by doing it the way you think it should be done, within company guidelines, but you do it your way. And they go, oh, we're going to make you a director, a vp, uh, and so forth. And so when you get to the C suite, what ends up happening is you're very used to doing things your way. But when you become the CEO, what you find out is you have to completely, like, unlearn all of that. Now. Now, your role as CEO, if you if you're just doing it your way, then every decision has to flow to you. And the bigger the company gets, the bigger you become. The bottleneck of everything. Oh, we need this. You know, we need to write this check. Can you sign it? Oh, we need to give this guy a refund. Can you approve it? Hey, we need to get this new marketing whatever going. Can you review it and approve it? The long story, short version is I actually went to the pastor at my church because they were like the 8th fastest growing church in the country or something like that. And I said, man, you guys are. You guys are killing it. You're growing so fast. You're hiring so much staff. And I go, no, granted, right? Like, you're saving souls and I'm cleaning toilets. Your mission's a little higher than mine, but, like, how is it that you were able to find these people? Um, and shame on me, right? He told me a book. The book is called who by Jeff Smart. Um, I don't get any plugs or anything from it. I just swear by the book at this point. He, uh, told me when Shame on me, I put it in my Amazon cart and I left it there for probably six months. And finally, uh, I finally got around to reading it, and I was like, oh, my goodness. This is. It gives you, like, a blueprint on how. How to write a job ad for someone, how to. How. What questions should I ask? What. What. What should I be saying for any role? It doesn't matter. I mean, I can ask, I can hire. I've hired an IT director. I've hired, you know, I don't know anything about it. I've hired. I've hired a cmo, a coo. I've had nine director level and up people, actually ten. Now, uh, using that framework, and it helps you find good, you know, great people. Um, and. And then what you end up doing, you go, wait a minute now. I need to hire people smarter than me on marketing, on operations, on sales, and just step back and let them work and say, here is what my expectation is. Here's what the goal is. Here's where I want. I'm going to cast the vision on where I want to be and when I want to be there. And you're smarter than me on marketing. So here. Get us there.

Speaker B: Thank you for sharing with us so freely. Um, you know, some of the things that you're dealing with, uh, within your organization moving forward from. In the next two to three years. What are some of the things that you're thinking about and Ah, taking your organization to the next level. What are you seeing right now and what are you working on for the future?

Speaker A: So, I mean, it's, it's a little bit, I mean, a little bit of everything, right. I think, um, you know, we've invested heavily in marketing. I've, uh, literally. And I hired. I literally, I was telling you about, you know, hiring. I hired that cmo. I hired a CMO in, uh, September. And since then she has added four new people to the marketing team, which is way, way more than I was expecting, frankly. But at the same time, I said, okay, at the end of the day we, we say, you know what, we, we're a sales and marketing and, and coaching organization and, uh, we just happen to be in cleaning, right? And, and because at the end of the day, right, you got to find the customers and you got to train the franchisees and help them be better business owners. And, and you could, you know, plug that into any industry. We could be in cleaning, we could be in, um, burgers. It doesn't matter, right? And so we're at the end of the day that on. So if we're going to be a sales marketing organization, we have to have world class sales and marketing. And so, so you go, okay, so step one, I need to invest significantly more money in marketing dollars. And we actually brought on another person who is going to be designing like a national sales training program for us. Um, and, you know, we have to be world class at that. My background was IBM. If you worked at IBM in like the 80s and 90s and you know, you learned sales from Big Blue. Remember it was Big Blue, Right, the guy.

Speaker B: I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: You know, you could sell ice to an Eskimo. Uh, because their sales training program was that good. And so I said, we need a sales training program that's that good where we can sit. People go, oh, you went to the Anago sales training school? Like, yeah, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're it. And so we said we need that. We need to give them all the tools possible to make their sales marketing better. And then at the end of the day, yes, we have, we're, we're investing way more money than I'd like to admit in our technology. Um, because that, I mean, that's where it's going. That's where the future is. It's how, you know, technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper because of AI. And so you have these, you know, kids coming out of college that can program things that used to cost, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're programming it in their basement in a, uh, you know, on a long weekend, filled, fueled with Mountain Dew.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And you go, like, wait a minute. We need to figure out a way to, you know, to catch that wave and ride some of that. And so how can we use technology ultimately? Right? I mean, technology in my industry is not like a better mop or a better vacuum or, you know, it's not. We all have the same equipment to clean the buildings. But, you know, but what. Where the technology, where we're investing is, number one, anything that can speed up processes for our franchisees, right? So from, you know, from a client being quoted to follow up, to sold to build, to collected, anything I can do to compress that and make that, you know, frictionless. And then number two, if I'm a customer, if everyone's got the same mop and buckets, what's going to be different about me? M. Are all our technology investments been in customer service? So we wanted to minimize that friction. Right? In. In. In most industries, you can have three levels of service. So you can have a delight experience, right? You go to a restaurant, food is great, waiter is wonderful. Um, you have a crappy experience, a terrible experience, right? Food's cold, waiters jerk. Or you have sort of that middle of the road, like, whatever. You know what? Nothing memorable. Impressive. In commercial cleaning, there's not three. Uh, we have two. Either you get to work and you go, well, I gotta work, and you don't think about the cleaning at all. Or you get to work and you go, why is my trash can still full? Why does. Why does the bathrooms have that funky smell to it? What's going on here? Is this cleaning company even working? And so, because I don't have that, oh, my gosh, this place is so clean that I'm gonna buy my janitor birthday present. That doesn't happen.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, I said, okay, how can we use the, you know, the neutral experience is what it is. How can we use the negative experience to make a friend and a lifelong customer? And so anytime there's an issue, which they're always, you know, I don't want to say, like, we're prone to issues, because we're not. The reality is, though, there's a human walking into your building to clean it, and people make mistakes. And we have. We have three things going on with that one. Um, we do performance evaluations and inspections. So if on one hand, I want to capture both perspectives, right? So I might be able to say, wow, uh, this place looks spotless. But to you as the customer, maybe you go, hey, there's that paperclip in the corner that you're forgetting. And that's really getting on my nerves. I need to hear both perspectives so that I can make sure the franchise owner knows, hey, we looked at it and either A, it's not up to our standard and you need to fix it, or we did and great job. However, the customer said X and it could be the other way. We've seen that, hey, the customer is fine, but it's not up to our standard. Make sure it gets there because the customer might realize that it's not as clean as they, you know, they think it is there. So you have that. Um, and the second piece is when there is an issue, we need to be able to fix it fast. Most cleaning companies, the way they're structured is like, you go, okay, well, first of all, half the time it's like, well, who cleans our office? And like, all right, do we. Do they have a website? Or. I know it's that one lady that comes in every night, but I don't have her number. And. And so it's like, you. It turns into this mess. Or like, you know, they have this book and it's like, oh, we leave a note in the book and it's like, hey, do you speak Spanish? Or do you speak, you know, Mandarin or whatever? Can you leave a note, speak with their, you know, so it turns into this mess and then you leave the note and you're like, I don't even know if they did anything about it. M. So we created a software called Clean Calm. And what cleancom does is you have an issue. You take your phone out, you log in, you take a picture of it, you log the. The room that the issue is in. There's no, there's no exchange of cell phone numbers or anything like that. It's all private communication. It's got built in Google Translate, so you can speak in whatever language you speak. They can speak in whatever language they speak. And everyone can commun. There's a guaranteed two hour response escalation built in. So if you don't get responded due within two hours, it alerts the regional office. So you get a response. And then it has, on the back end, it has analytics where we can say, hey, that particular franchisee, he's gotten three complaints on how he's servicing the restrooms. Let's bring him back in and retrain him on how, uh, to properly do that to Prevent future issues. So those are the investments we're making is, is. It's all about, you know, process and technology and then obviously empowering and educating our people more.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, man, this is amazing. Amazing. I, I want to. So if someone, you know, think about it, like, man, Adam, I, I like it. I like you. So what do I need to do to become a franchisee?

Speaker A: So, um, again, there's two levels of franchise with ours. There's the web, the, the unit or janitorial franchise, and then the, the master or regional franchise. Um, the, the different path. The, the master franchise is more your white collar, your sales. It's a higher, much higher investment level. Um, and that's someone who's wanting, you know, kind of former director, VP level person that, that wants to repurpose like a corporate career and says, wait a minute. Instead of money for somebody else, let me do my own thing at the janitorial franchise level. Um, any, any, any. We have 50 regional support offices across North America. If you're near any one of those, um, you would get in contact. You can go to my website, obviously, anocleaning.com and it'll route you to wherever you need to. But you, you set up a meeting with, with one of the regional folks there and they can walk you through the whole process. What does the investment look like, the time commitment look like? But that one, that one, I think that one got voted. Um, I don't know. It was Entrepreneur magazine or, um, I want to say it was Entrepreneur magazine. It was like top 10 side hustles of, you know, 20, 26. And it, because it is. I mean, it's something you can say, I'm going to start this. It's low cost, right? You can get, you can get involved for a couple thousand dollars down. I mean, it's very inexpensive. Um, and, and, and then you can say, I, um, don't. I don't even. I just want to test the water, right? I don't want to. I want to keep my job. I want to do, you know, do a couple of accounts after hours, make a couple extra bucks, see how it feels. And, and you can do that and you could stay like that. That's completely fine. And then I just. As an example, we just did our annual conference back in a couple months ago in March, and we just met with a, with a woman. Um, she does $1 million a year as a janitorial franchise.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Uh, she's. So you go. She. I think she's got staff of 15 or 20. I mean, you know, I mean, she's no joke. You know what I mean?

Speaker B: And it's like.

Speaker A: So she, uh, very much. And she started as someone who wanted. I think she bought $3,000 a month as her original package. She was. I just want three grand a month. I'm not trying to break, you know, go crazy. I'm just looking to make some extra cash. And now, now she makes a million dollars a year because you realize the value.

Speaker B: That's insane. And so, Adam, if someone wants to connect with you personally, what you're doing, what should they go?

Speaker A: So, yeah, so sorry. I should have spelled that, by the way. It's Anago A N A G O cleaning dot com. Uh, we're on all the social media and, you know, so if you want to check in there or if you want to chat with me, I'm. I'm very active on LinkedIn, so just type in Adam Palitz and shoot me a note and I'll be sure to respond.

Speaker B: I didn't get to spell. And just look on the screen. Just put that, uh, dot com to it and you're good to go. I love your business model. I love what you're doing, man. Blessings to you. Blessings to your organization, to your family, to your children, to all your endeavors. On behalf of the Lead to Greatness community, I want to thank you so very much, Adam, for taking time out of your. Your busy schedule and adding value to us all. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: We want to thank you for joining us today on the Lead to Greatness podcast. So remember, if you help others reach their greatest potential, together we can change the world. Peace.