This is Waste to Wealth, a podcast about turning your waste hauling business into a profitable, scalable cash flowing machine. And now, here's your host, Michael Hello, everybody. Welcome to Waste to Wealth, the podcast where we talk about waste haulers, business, and growing your wealth. Today, we have a special guest, Alex Gorelik and he's going to talk to us about what he does. He's got some businesses that he's worked in, and he's doing one right now. And so welcome, Alex. Welcome Thanks, Michael. Excited to be here. Doing great. It's very exciting times. And, you know, finally, Summer's Yeah, that's a big deal for you, right? Because you're in Canada, Yeah, yeah, well, we're in better part of Canada. Sometimes it's called Canadian California, so we're quite warm compared What do they call it? They call it the Canadian, what do they call it? Canadian California. Oh, I don't think I've ever heard that before, because you're on the West Coast, is that why? Yeah, yeah. Is that kind of like an extension of California, Oregon, We're on the same coastline. Yeah. We're just north of Seattle. We have pretty much Seattle climate. We're Yeah, well, I'm on the East Coast. I used to live very close to Toronto. It was just a couple hours away and actually closer to Ottawa. So is there a West Coast versus East Coast Nah, yeah, I guess so. There's some going on, but obviously Yeah, right. Of course, you have to say that. If you didn't say that, I'd be concerned. Well, the reason why we're talking today is because you're an entrepreneur and a business owner, and you're the kind of person we want to talk to because you've got a lot of experiences and stories. So why don't you tell us about where you came from and what you're doing now? So we'll start with like, what are you doing right now? You're working as Yeah, I would be happy to. I have two businesses, in fact, but we're concentrated on one of them. And I'm quite sure that the second one will come up in conversation, but I'm Land Surveyor by trade. But the business we're talking about today is a residential cleaning business. And it's in a very much building stages. Um, it's not done yet. And, uh, the goal is to get it to, uh, to some heights anyway. So yeah, so the, the residential cleaning business, um, this is the one I'm concentrating on. And of course the, the challenges that I have in other businesses, uh, land surveying business that I'm quite heavily involved with. So doing two is a challenge, but Squeakly, well, I mean, it's Squeakly. Squeakly Ventures Incorporated is the official name. We operate under Squeakly. We advertise ourselves as Squeakly Your Cleaning Company. I, on purpose, didn't want to call it Squeakly Cleaning or Maids or anything else. Um, I just want You want to stand out? Yeah, but the thing is, it kind of bite me back a little bit because I have to specify on our advertisement that it's a gleaming business, right? But if there's any interest, I'll tell about the name a little bit. We're thinking about the name. Squeakly is a weird name. I know that. In a game by design, I came up in our conversation with my wife, we're trying to figure out things. We didn't wanna do a geographical location. I truly believe that it's boring and not very farsighted because what if you global? And then you call Vancouver Island Cleaning And then you have to think about how you go about that. In fact, we have a mentor company that named themselves after a geographical feature. And when they're trying to go into different areas, It doesn't create problems, but it's just, right? Just a little awkward. So we're talking and trying to figure out catchy name. And of course it's squeaky clean. And of course it's, you want to done things quickly. So squeakly is a very loose abbreviation of squeaky clean quickly. And we just came with squeakly. Got it. We have a lot of elderly people in the area and they tend to resort to Squeaky, That's great, so you have a nickname. So Squeaky is a combo of clean, it's squeaky clean and quickly. I like that, that's awesome. So that's great. So doing cleaning businesses, I think it's a hard business to be in. And it's not one that everyone wants to try out because it's very hands-on, it's a service-based business. And we really love service-based businesses, people that get their hands dirty. Obviously wear gloves, but you're still dealing with dirt. So what inspired you to get into that business in the first place? Like what gave you that idea and It was quite the story, actually. We started this business as short-term company, catering to Airbnbs, Virgos, whatever, whatever you call it. You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah. Short-term rentals. We had a couple of our Airbnbs on our own. We had a couple of cleaning companies helping us out. We weren't necessarily happy with everything and we decided to solve that problem in a very dramatic way. by starting our own company. I've always been interested in running a business. And I mentioned I'm a land surveyor. I'm a partner in a larger company. And I don't feel that I have enough, how do you say that? Enough freedom to fully build what I want to build. I always want to have something on my own and perhaps it's just that entrepreneurial thing that came to my life very late in my life. Like I didn't start at 20 like a lot of people did. But I really wanted to do something on my own. And I basically talked my wife into it. It's like, let's do it. Let's go. Let's go. And we started the business. We didn't want to do anything with residential, commercial. just Airbnbs, and perhaps we'll talk about it, but I really, I'm a big believer in niche-oriented businesses. Like- Yeah, that makes sense. Narrow, narrow, narrow, right? Yeah, so you didn't want to say, we'll do anything and everything. No. You said, these customers, I don't want those customers, I want commercial, focus on one type of customer, And that's exactly right. So we started Airbnb cleaning business and that was April 2023. And in November 2023, our government dumped some news on us saying that no Yeah. So basically come in May, 2024, uh, there are very specific rules in, in greater Victoria area where we are, uh, what you can and can do. And basically we had a few buildings, um, what they call legal non-conforming buildings in downtown Victoria that could have like the, they were allowed to do their B and B's and started in May, 2024, no longer can. 80% of our customers were That's wild. So that totally changes your strategy, right? It completely changes our strategy. So we're sitting out there, I was like, okay, so what do we do? We're six months in, of course, we invested some money. And do we just quit or do we pivot? And I mentioned we had a mentor company and we still have them and they located in states and they do residential cleaning business. So it was kind of natural for us to go residential and I said okay well and my wife I don't want to clean people's houses like I don't want to clean people's houses I said okay well let's let's not talk about feelings because at the end of the day yeah sure you'll have to clean people's houses because we're bootstrapping it and doing a lot of things ourselves but the goal is not the goal is to grow it where we have people clean people's houses and we operate the business, you know, working not in the business, but on the business. That's very common, right? And we thought about it. It was quite obvious that we can't, we have to do something. So we decided to pivot. Pride got the best of us and we thought that folding is not an option. And we decided to pivot and we became the residential cleaning company. We invested an insurmountable amount of money in advertising for us anyway. It's not huge in a grand scheme of things, but you know, wrapped cars. And because when you do residential cleaning, it's a very fierce competition here. And when, we are compared to single cleaners. We are compared to ladies who just go and clean houses for 30 bucks an hour. And we certainly Yeah. So you, you, your company, your everything changed, right? Your customer changed, Target market changed, purpose changed. Vision, everything, everything. It was a brand new company, pretty much. We kept the name, we revamped the logo, we revamped the website, business cards, whatever. Name stayed. We still, we love the name, still love the name. I'm not letting go of the name. We probably should trademark it. Might as well keep that, yeah. Well, actually, quick note on trademark. I learned this a long time ago when I was worried about that. Yes, you should trademark your logo, but if someone else uses it, you can prove that you had it first, so you actually will have a trademark. Once you start using it, you're legally protected, but you don't want it to go to court to figure that out. That's good to know. Thanks for mentioning. Yeah, so I wouldn't stress about that. You still want to trademark it, but it's not the end of the world if you don't- It's not my highest priority at this point. Right. You got it. You got to get the business making profits, enough profits so you can hire more staff So, that's actually kind of how our paths crossed. So, I see you have a lot of books behind you. I know you're a reader. Late last year, I started reading books and I now read a book a week is my target. And one of the books that I read was Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time. And you and I are both coached And he has this hiring ladder. And so you have to be profitable enough to hire people to take those responsibilities away. So I guess you and I are both on that, everyone's always on that journey as an entrepreneur. But did you, is that one of the books that you've had a chance to read or have you learned some Yeah, yeah. Dan Martell book, I listened to that book and It's, in fact, funny enough, the only book that I listened to that I actually decided to buy a paper copy That's quite the testament because normally you read a book or listen to a book and you're like, all right, check. I'm done with that. There's another one that I really want to get a copy of. I haven't yet. And it's a book by Rory Vaden, Take the Stairs. Have Yes, I have heard of that one, and I've never read it, but I did see some of your inspirational quotes. That was one of them that you mentioned in your inspirational quotes. So what makes you want Well, the way how Rory did it is fantastic. Rory is a world-class speaker to begin with, and he knows how to deliver things. I'm listening right now book called Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday and Take the Stairs resembles that book quite a bit. Although it's how it compiled, it's just, I can't put a finger on it, Michael. It's very inspirational book and it teaches you How do you go about your career and how do you build things? It's basically, yeah, and that's exactly why I want to get a paper copy of it because now I can't remember exact things. But one quote that stuck with me is, Success is never owned. Success is rented and rent is due every day. Yes, exactly that. You don't own it. To be successful, you have to consistently work on it. we see what Dan Martell does and Yes. So going back to Dan's book, a beautifully written book, and it's not a new concept, of course, funny enough, I'm reading this wonderful piece of literature. Oh, yeah. Yes. And when we're talking about Drip Matrix, how Dan calls it, and Quadrants, how Colby calls it. It's a very similar concept and I'm sure Dan read that book and I'm sure he based his Drip Matrix on that. But I loved how Beautifully Like- Yeah, when he's explaining concepts that are confusing, he just makes it this actionable, is how I interpret it. And he says, instead of just leaving it nebulous, he actually says, these are the things I did, gives real examples. Like he talked about riding in a car, with a couple of people that he's trying to train and explaining to them what he's doing. Cause he had like a five hour drive between places and he's Canadian. So he had to go between Canadian cities. I Oh, okay. So he's moved. Yeah. But he learned that he had to do this training in the car and he realized he didn't have to do this every time because he did it, I don't know, 50 times. He said, I can just record myself training and then I can share that with this team. And he calls it the recording method? Yeah, camcorder method, yeah. Yep, just record it with the person that needs to learn the skill, they watch it, they replicate it, and you don't have to use up all your energy training people all the time. And his magic number was three, to record it three times. Three times, And I'm using that methodology right now. And I always done that. Well, I shouldn't say always done that, but I've done that. But again, the playbook, how he calls it, system, makes a lot of sense when you do video, but you supplement it with a checklist. some bullet point action plan, it makes it complete. And I've done a couple already for both of my businesses, actually, which is quite exciting because my land serving is a very large machine where But yeah, so. That makes sense. A bigger organization is harder to steer, right? Yes. So what kind of procedures do you have to make for your cleaning business? Is it related to the workers? It's, Michael, it's absolutely everything. I'm in the depth of it right now. Very, very committed to get a lot of things organized because I know that we'll have a lot of things that are just fly without process, which is not great. The main thing right now for me is like, I started recording doing anything and everything, but main thing is to get our sales process organized. I have a person, she does phone calls and everything, and I have a script for her. And she does quite well, but quite well is not a number. So what I need to do here, I need to put certain, There are certain processes in place, but they have to be documented in a way of playbooks. So she can teach other people. Right now, we're in a very exciting stage of our growth. Next week, we'll start AI implementation for our business and AI is a very tricky thing because if you have chaos and disorganized Right. Yeah, actually, that's a really good observation. AI is the big buzzword. And I just went to a conference last week in Las Vegas for the Wastex. Oh, wow. Cool. Yeah, it was great. There was thousands of people there and some industry leaders. And that was one of the hot buzzwords was AI. And they want to just automate everything. But you're 100% right, if you automate Trash, it's trash, yeah. Bad trash, not good trash. So then you're just gonna get a lot of useless work. Elon Musk has this, he's very successful and I'm always curious about how he's able to run so many companies. He has a framework that he uses to solve problems to make companies better. And it's like a five-step process. And automation, which would be AI, is the last step. You don't do that first, you do that last. Step one is make the requirements less dumb. Make it very simple. Step two is remove all the wasted effort. I can't remember number three. Number four is get more iterations. And then number four is automated. So that's the last thing you want to do. You do want to automate, but you don't automate everything at once. We're not quite Elon, fortunately or unfortunately, but I know for a fact that we have something good going on. It's just not quite a hundred percent yet. So, but again, you work, it's a constant work. You never stop. You always improve. And for me, this is what we're doing right now. We have a script for sales. We know the pain point questions. We know what to ask. It's just refining this process and putting it into play. We have one person answering phone calls. The problem is she can't physically get to all of them. And of course, she calls back, people don't pick up. She leaves a message and then they call, she's on another call. And this is what we're trying to get AI to solve. We're not trying to get AI to get sales. That would be quite silly. People, I'm getting into, I was never in that space, but I'm really putting my head into it now and learning a lot. People think that AI is going to solve all the problems. It's incorrect, at least at this point. There's a lot of things that we need to do in order to make that AI process successful. So quite excited to start working on this next Good, well, I fully expect that they'll iron out that specific application of AI, because it's really a tool. It's not going to replace. Yeah, it's just another tool. Just like computers are tools, didn't make our work go away, it meant we could do more effective work. So that's actually one of the applications that the big publicly traded companies are trying to solve because it's hard to have people answer the phone. Like for us, it's dumpsters. So if somebody calls and they want to rent a dumpster, they want someone to answer the phone. And so if a robot can answer the phone and take the Well, at least take some information, at least to give them the sense that it's being worked on. I don't know if we can talk about AI, of course, but I don't think that's the point. So maybe the closing thought about AI, something I heard from Seth Godin, who I really love and respect, and I read quite a few of his books, So he says, think AI will be like electricity in 20 years. Nobody brags about having electricity in our house, That's true. But a hundred years ago- A hundred years ago, electricity was such a novelty and it was such a huge thing. Not anymore. So he says, you have to think about AI the same way. Just think about it, yeah, like you think about electricity now, and this is what it's going to be in 20, 30, 40, 100 years, right? So, and I thought about it as like, yeah, that actually makes What do you think about what Dan Martell says about how if you're not recording yourself or not getting out there in social media, then you could get replaced by AI because nobody knew what you looked like in the first place? I don't know if you've heard him say that. I've heard him say that and I get very, like, I just never thought about it that way. I don't know Well, it's funny. If nobody knows how you look like, then it will be harder for AI to replace you, in my opinion. I follow Tim Ferriss quite heavily. You must know Tim if you started reading books. He has a very- Five hour workweek? Four hour workweek. And he has a wonderful podcast. Absolutely amazing. Anyway, recently, somebody using AI created videos with him talking about certain stocks, which was a complete scam because he never said that. But it was fully, and I saw this, and it does look like Tim Ferriss. Wow. Yeah, so have to be careful about that. However, being out there and you know, we both know what then tells tells people about social media. I was never on it. I hated social media. I can see the point though. I can see the point for me right now. I'm active on my social media. However, squiggly social media is what we want to concentrate. And I'm not the person to post there because I'm not in the business. I'm the person who is least in the business out of all of us. We were about nine people, nine people altogether operation. You want to promote what the business is doing, not because what you're doing is growing the business. You're not actually doing the cleaning, or at least that's not what you want to promote the cleaners, right? Correct. Yeah. The Squiggly account should actually say stuff about what we're doing on a daily basis and stories should be you know, behind the scenes, um, short videos or pictures of what's going on and reels and stuff. So this is actually speaking of priorities, that's probably our number number one with sales, you know, one slash two, where Right. Yeah, so good. Well, when I became an entrepreneur, my expectation about business was one way. I expected it to be hard, but the challenges I was going to face were known. But then when I actually started my own business, I was completely wrong about what I was going to deal with and the stress. So do you have like a before belief and an after belief now that you're in business? Like what changed about your understanding of business now That's a great question. It's very hard. Okay. It's, it's very hard and very stressful. And I know that at my scale, I think it's hard on some other scale where you're making, uh, uh, 10, a hundred million revenue. It's even harder. Um, I, I will say that actually not that long ago, I was still thinking about business as a game almost, right? Like it's a game and you just play the game. And it's not, it's actually a serious thing, especially if you want to make money. And this is our goal. Our goal is to make quickly profitable business. operating remotely from us and supporting us. And it's our, if you will, investment. Uh, so, so it's, it's definitely not a game. It, it needs to be. So I, I just thought, uh, before I started a business, I thought, well, you just do this, do that things work out or whatever, but you face million decisions a day. And, and, and, and the thing is, next day you understand, you realize that that decision actually affected your business dramatically. So you start thinking a lot harder about those decisions. So before I started business, I thought it's just, okay, well, you just, you make a decision. How can it be hard? So it's just the seriousness of this. And now when I'm, in the middle of building business, there's, um, there's understanding. Oh, okay. Well, this is, this is actually a lot harder than it is. And that's why we get ourselves into coaching programs. And that's why we get ourselves in reading books. And, and that's why we learn because if, And before I started a business, I was reading books, but not as many. I don't read book a week. Michael, kudos to you. You're, it's great. I do about two a month. I do morning. I have a morning book and evening book. And I have an audio book, but I don't drive as much. So that tend to go a little longer. So I have three on a go at the same time. And I know that there's a belief that you can do that, But I seem to be okay with two paper books, one in the morning, one at night. And my morning book is typically more technical. Well, coffee is not technical, but it's still Very business. I don't do fiction at all. My evening book can be autobiography or some, like right now I'm finishing up actually Tim's for our work week. Something that you don't really need to make notes on, I guess. Yeah, right. More of a story. Story, Yeah. That makes sense. That's a great idea, actually. The reason why I adopted the book a week is because I took a class to learn how to speed read with Jim Quick, who's Yes, I know Jim. Well, I don't know Jim, but obviously, yeah. He is out there. He's pretty good. He's really good. But it became very comfortable to read fast and retain more. But he does that. He reads a technical book in the morning, like his morning book is a technical book. And then his evening book is a light, no stress, not going to put stressful thoughts into his head. I think he reads a storybook at night. So that's the perfect, that's what the pros do. So you Well, I'm proud of myself because I haven't heard that from from Jim Quick. Would you recommend speed Yeah, definitely. And it's not that complicated. It's just a group of skills that you learn. Number one is if you're reading a physical book, just point to the words that you're reading and that will make you read faster because you don't accidentally backtrack. If you just do that one thing, you'll just be a faster reader and retain more. That's actually the most important part. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yes. So, I had some thoughts based on what you just said about what life was like before you owned the business and then once you got into it, like that it was going to be very hard. I think there is a misconception that when you're your own boss, you get to do whatever you want, you set your schedule, and that is completely opposite of the case. That's the Yeah. Some people never get there. Correct. And I did notice one of your inspirational quotes, which I have here, is that- Oh, wow. Yeah. When you have systems and you do everything right, you can take it easy. Things won't break. Everything will flow. That's the ultimate goal. So systems is going to get you there. But when you start a business, you have no systems. So everything runs through you, and so it's very stressful. And you have to make a million decisions, like you just said. I appreciate your, uh, your, uh, quoting me. That's the first for me, but, uh, I obviously am inspired by a lot of different authors and stuff, but, uh, those, those thoughts are truly my own. And I don't use AI for that, by the way, it's, it's basically every, every evening, uh, I sit down and I come up with something. When I have sometimes scheduled periods of time where I just do a bunch of those, just sit and think and write. And of course they're inspired by how the day went and tonight it's probably getting inspired by you, Michael, and your podcast. But I try to be authentic and try is a bad word. I am authentic. I know that because I do use concepts from books because all the concepts are not new. It's just your interpretation of those concepts. And really this is what Dan did with his book. I don't think that any of the concepts are breakthrough entirely new concepts. He just interpreted them and packaged them in a very beautiful box where you can just unpack it and use it. And not a lot of people can do that. So that's why his book is so popular. Yeah, and he lived it out. So the stories he tells are his stories. Like you really did it. So he is an expert with that. And you're an expert at what you had to deal with. So it sounds like you're an expert at land surveying, and now Yeah, well, I'm getting there. I'm getting there. It's an exciting journey. It's not necessarily, going back to your last question, easy journey, but I love new things for me. If it's Good, good. Well, I do want to ask more about Squeakly and your customers. So you're trying to help customers clean their house, right? So I don't know if you have a customer story or not, but what's the goal with that, trying to help out customers? Like when you find somebody that has this need, what's the transformation that Yeah, well, thank you for asking. That's a great question. And for listeners, it wasn't set up, by the way. It's truly a question. Authentic question. You know that we don't sell cleaning services. We sell feelings, right? How we put it to people is we're trying to gain you your time back. We're giving you your time back. And going back to Dan's book and buy back your time, the ladder and everything, replacement ladder, this is exactly what it is for this people. We operate in teams of three. So we offer a unique, it's not unique, but it's not a lot of companies do that. So we do a lot of things quicker. So our target market are busy moms with families. both working parents, two plus kids, pets, they make money, they want to have fun with their families, they have younger kids, they want to have fun with their families, they want to see them their kids grow, they wanna see their kids grow in a clean house. So for them, it makes sense to outsource cleaning. And we sell them feeling, feeling of a clean house, feeling of accomplishment, feeling of spending time with family. We can go somewhere for a weekend. I don't need to stay home and clean and get ready for a week. And this is, This is who we target and this is what ultimately we Yeah, that's really valuable. I mean, I can experience that in my own life. If I've got a messy house, then the time that I'm supposed to be spending with my family, I'm actually spending cleaning, or my wife is. And she runs out of energy. She doesn't have time to actually do family things. And normally it does happen on a Saturday. Like that's when the cleaning happens. And that's prime family time that we're gonna lose. And you can't get that time back. So it makes sense to hire your company and make it so that you actually can enjoy This is how I think businesses should approach it. I recommend anybody who owns a business, don't sell your service. Sell the feeling and build your selling strategy on that. And this is exactly what we're doing. And again, we're not quite done with it yet, but Right. Yeah. So you're, when you, when you're talking to a customer about their problems, you're identifying maybe probably over, they're probably overwhelmed with a messy house. They don't have time to clean. What, what does it look like to clean a house? I mean, do you do the whole thing? Do you do the kitchen? Like what's So we operate in teams of three and they, they rotate, they have their areas. It's a kitchen, bathrooms and dusting. And they all start in their areas, kitchen, bathroom, and dusting. Basically, it's everything. Living rooms, bedrooms, we offer, we change in beddings if customers want to do that. So we change beddings that they provide with the fresh ones. And then the team just starts to have specific specific routine that they do. So they go, you know, from left to right, up, up and down, and they go through. And, and then once everything's done, they go to the next house and they switch. So one person doesn't do same thing. And there's, we have a, we have a checklist. There's an app that we use for scheduling and tracking things. So there's a checklist, they go through checklist. Yeah, typical house of like a recurring clean typical house on a bi-weekly basis, for instance, is like, and when we say typical house, maybe around 2000 square feet, it's anywhere from hour and a half to maybe hour and Yeah, it is. It is quite fast and can be done faster. And we're working on that too, of course. But clients, clients, customers love that because it's a matter of go for a walk with kids and they come back to a clean house. They don't, you know what I mean? Like we have quite a few customers with a small babies and a lot of them just go for a walk or go somewhere to do chores and they back in a couple hours and Wow, that's great. So yeah, so you can show up, the family goes for a quick activity, maybe go to the park, maybe run some errands, and they come back and house is suddenly clean, right? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Talk about feelings, the before and the after of that feeling must be great, right? Imagine like, I just, I have one family in my head right now, I don't know, for some reason, they have a, I don't know, I think, Baby must be over one year old now. They always, they let the girls in and they go for a walk and then they come back. And I can't even imagine when you come back in the new house and we'll leave some treats for them. We have like little chocolates and cards, thank you and whatever. That must feel good. So this is what we sell, Probably a sense of peace and relax. Because when I come home, I want it to be a peaceful experience, not a stressful one. And when I walk through a house that's just got things all over the place, It stresses me out and I think, oh, I got to pick that up. I got to pick that up. We've got all these chores. We actually have a chore chart because my kids help out and they never do them all. So I'm totally stressed and my wife is angry. So I imagine the feeling I have two teenagers, Michael. They don't necessarily help that No, they help a little. They help a little bit. You have to tell them. It's never volunteering, you know. We've incentivized them with money and it's, you'd think money would matter, but once they have enough Yeah. Well, my oldest works, so you can't incentivize him with money anymore. He's like, I'll just go to work instead. Yeah. He's got a job, right? Yeah. Now you got to compete with something else. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a couple other questions I wanted to ask you. Absolutely, yeah. So I did ask you about customers. I didn't know if you had, if you wanted to talk more about customer stories, if you had any more experiences that changed how you do business, maybe a lesson you learned through it, either a good or a bad one. I have a bad one. Okay, Well, it's not, so the point is, I wanted to say that I think it's important We've, we had to in our short career, like I'll start with residential business, Airbnb is gone and done. So we're only not even year and a half into residential cleaning. And in this period, we had to fire two customers. And, and the experiences of firing, firing a customer is It's not something that you want But there is a point. The first one was very obvious that we need to fire them. It was just the the conduct towards the team. But the second was less obvious, and it's recently happened actually, a couple months maybe. You can tell that it's not fit. It's just not fit. We had a customer, he's very, high level professional and that was for for the parents and you know parents would say one thing and. I felt like there was miscommunication and game playing between parties, what we did and what we didn't do and what we're told to do. And at some point you just have to say stop. You can't because it stresses everybody out and it's not helping anybody. I guess the lesson learned from it, and I really recommend people think about this, Who is more important for you? That client that makes you whatever, 300 bucks in two weeks or whatever, or your team that thinks about it, all the time. And what resonated with me, my wife was telling me a story, she was going, so that clean happened, something again, we got complained or whatever, nothing good came out of it. And then at the end of the day, My wife driving one of the cleaners home and she's a very quiet girl, the cleaner. And she says, it was my wife saying, it's quiet in the car. And then all of a sudden she says, but we did clean that. And I was like, it's been seven hours and it's still in her Think about it. Do you want to stress your team out like that? I don't, I don't think so. So obviously there are cases where like, you can't fire every client. If something says something and, and your team is the goal hurt my feelings. No, well, come on. We're, we're all adults. We, we can, we can go through some upsets and, If we didn't do something, we didn't do something. We're all humans. We make mistakes. We just go through it. We pride ourselves on the customer service of world-class level customer service where you actually, you Right, yeah, and you want feedback when it doesn't go Yeah, but when you see this pattern, and it's constantly happened two, three times, and you know that, like, well, and we sent different people and mixing up teams and trying to make it work, and it's not working, and you just have to say stop. And that comment from my wife, when she said, she's still thinking about it, like one of the girls still thinking about it, I was like, yeah, no. Yeah, in the world of business, everybody opts in, the customer and the vendor, we both opt in. And I think that there's two currencies that get exchanged. One, you exchange money, right? We get paid in money, but we also get paid in gratitude. Both parties should be thankful for the relationship because it should be helping both of them. And if that's not the case, it's okay. You don't have to work with everybody. There's 9 billion people on the planet. So I can't help 9 billion people. I can only help some. And I'll They want help. And that's the key. So I don't know if I necessarily answered your question, but I hope that Oh, yeah, you definitely did. Yeah. And I totally resonate with that. I'm sure every business owner does and every customer does. They've all had, people they've worked with that either did a great job and they loved it, or they didn't, maybe they weren't the best customer. So I try to be the type of customer that I wanna have. So I don't nickel and dime people. If they say this is the price, I don't haggle, because I don't wanna get haggled with. And there's other people that love haggling. Haggling is probably not the word they would use, but negotiating. They like negotiating. Well, good. So we like to think about entrepreneurs and what they have to deal with. So I see a lot of business owners. I'm sure you interact with a lot of business owners. Is there a mistake you see other owners making on a regular basis again and again, regardless of It's being in the business. It's not, it's not working on creating systems to get yourself out of the business. And you know what, nobody's perfect. Uh, and it's certainly, I certainly can't say that I'm there. Uh, but it's constantly on my mind, uh, document everything, set it up so somebody else can do that job. And, um, I see a lot of business owners, uh, given their, you know, putting their personal cell numbers on their trucks. Uh, And, uh, and I, I know that it must, it must feel important. You know what I mean? It is important. And you feel important. If somebody calls you and I started my land serving company that way, I had my personal cell number. and I suffer from it still to the day. It's been over six years since I did that. You don't give out your personal cell number ever. But it feels good when your number rings and somebody wants Yeah, you're needed, right? You're getting that request for help. But this is a very narrow example about cell number, If we look at the big picture, the biggest mistake is not working on getting yourself out of the business and systemizing the business so somebody else can do your job. I think there's a lot of small businesses and people think, oh, well, this is for enterprises, we're a small business, we're just a family company. Well, do you wanna be family or do you wanna be company? I personally, with my wife, we're going through a very stressful period where she has to be in the field and we in the business, but every day we sit down and then talk about, even if it's brief, five, 10 minutes, we talk about, okay, what do we need to do next? Because ultimately we want to live as a family and have the business supporting Right, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So yeah, I make that same mistake where I'm in the business instead of outside Everybody does, but we're here and we're talking because Right, yeah. And not selfishly, but unselfishly, we want to help more people and we can do that if we build And you employ more people, you make jobs essentially too. Yeah, we want to create jobs, we want to help customers, we're solving problems, we're problem solvers. So looking ahead, where are So I was inspired by Dan and his brother, I guess more than that. I want to be in, Yes. And. I don't know about that one, but potentially I want to turn it into franchise, but I honestly don't don't know if my heart and soul is in franchise and business yet because it feels really disconnected and I want to be sure I want to be more more connected. So maybe maybe it's not franchise. I don't I don't know yet, but the definitely We want to be in every major city in Canada. But before we do that, we need to absolutely capture the market here in Victoria. It's one at a time. You can't, you have to be focused on one thing. You can't really, yeah, I have that thought and goal and dream, but I don't want to distract myself because right now we have, you know, 30 we call it BW, bi-weekly equivalent. So we count everything by bi-weekly customers. So it's a bi-weekly, it's one, if it's monthly, it's 0.5, it's weekly, it's two. So right now we have just over 30 bi-weekly equivalent customers and we need to up that number. We need to get more market. So, For us, this is number one goal, but ultimately, yeah. Ultimately, we That's awesome. Well, you got to have a big goal. So that's a big goal. You have to. I think it's awesome because you need a really far off target. That way, you know which way you're going. Great. Well, you can do it if you put your mind to it, you build those systems, help Well, we're at about an hour of us talking, but we should probably wrap up. And I'm sure you have other things to do today. Yeah, I in fact do. Yeah. Yeah. But Alex, it's been a joy. It's really been great talking to you. And I'm gonna look forward to it. We can talk again. We're both in the same circles. Yes. So we can talk more. Yeah. Yeah. But before we go, where can customers find you? Where can people find you? Do you have a website or Instagram handle Yes. The website is... Let Check that to make sure I'm not... Yeah, Yeah, okay. The website is squeakly.ca, S-Q-U-E-A-K-L-Y, and I'm sure you can put it somewhere over there. So squeakly.ca, and the Instagram handle is squeaklycleaning, at So I will put it in the show notes and I did already have your Instagram. So squeakly.ca is your website? Yes. I found that no problem. It says welcome at squeakly.ca is your email as well. There's That's good. 778-561-5601. And you give free estimates. So somebody could call you and you'll get Yeah. We do it over the phone. It's based on square footage typically. And we just, we talk, we assess problems, figure out what actually, what is the most important for a customer. And then we, the estimate is based on the square footage. mainly. And then that's it. And of course, we typically do initial clean first. Initial clean is the most expensive clean, but it's a deeper clean. We don't like the word deep, but we really go above and beyond to get it to a level where we can just maintain the house. And the recurring cleans are maintenance cleans, basically that are that are just done every week or two weeks or four weeks, whatever Okay, so you can select more on what your needs are. Correct, correct. So if you need the refreshing feeling of having a clean home and you're in the greater Victoria area They should give us a call, absolutely. Perfect, excellent. All right, Alex, it was great talking to you today. I hope you have a wonderful day going forward and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Michael. You're Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Waste to Wealth. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you connect with us on social media and subscribe to the show wherever you consume podcasts. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and tell a friend about the show.