197: Time to Talk Dirty with Two Maids & A Mop (featuring Georgia Fan 🐶, Ron Holt)

197: Time to Talk Dirty with Two Maids & A Mop (featuring Georgia Fan 🐶, Ron Holt)

Background on Ron Holt of Two Maids & a Mop:

Ron Holt founded the original Two Maids & A Mop inside a 250 square foot office space on April Fools' Day way back in 2003. In their first year of operations, they cleaned less than one hundred homes and only staffed a few part-time employees. It took the business eighteen months to make its first dollar in profits and took Ron more than two years to earn his first paycheck. It was a humbling start packed full of desperate moments that nearly forced the business to close its doors on multiple occasions.

Today, Two Maids & A Mop is recognized by Inc. Magazine as the fastest growing cleaning company in the entire country for three consecutive years and their story received national recognition from other nationally recognized publications such as Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN Money, Yahoo News, Wall Street Journal & Success Magazine. Ron’s rags to riches story received so much national attention that CNBC decided to air a documentary on prime-time national television. Two Maids & A Mop was flying high and decided to leverage its success to create a franchise business model so that it could grow even faster.

Tampa, FL became the first Two Maids & A Mop franchised office in 2013, with several more franchised units opening in 2014. It soon became clear that franchising the business model was more effective than opening corporate stores, so Ron decided to pivot the business and focus entirely on franchise growth. Demand for their franchise opportunity exploded once the news broke that they were available for development across the country and the enthusiasm for the brand hasn’t slowed down since. Ron’s little 250 square foot office is now a national brand and his original vision of building the largest, fastest-growing residential cleaning service in America is more alive today than ever before.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[2:36] Two Maids and a Mop founder and CEO Ron Holt is 46 years old and based in Birmingham, Alabama. His business is a residential cleaning franchise serving 81 markets all over the country.
[3:38] Ron provides a more detailed description of his company.
[4:14] The idea of recurring revenue is one of the reasons why Ron wanted to create his own business.
[8:12] One of Ron’s biggest mentors is Warren Buffett.
[10:27] During the first 2 years of his business, he lost money but he describes it as one of the best periods of his life.
[16:51] The first day of Two Maids and a Mop turned out to be disastrous for Ron.
[21:53] By reading the book Good to Great by James Collins, Ron learned the idea of having a vision for the future of the business.
[25:35] Ron saw a very huge opportunity to build a brand and do something different within the cleaning industry.
[29:25] After an incident in the restaurant and a meaningful conversation with his father, the business rebounded and started growing.
[36:20] For Ron, implementing an efficient process or system is crucial to a business. The book E-Myth by Michael Gerber was a huge influence in teaching Ron about processes and systems.
[41:12] In terms of revenue, they were doing half a million dollars in revenue per store.
[45:44] Meeting Fred DeLuca, the founder of Subway, changed Ron’s perception of franchising.
[52:33] Ron explains why being a franchisor is very different from running a house cleaning company.
[1:00:19] Being in Birmingham became an advantage for the business.
[1:05:41] From 2015 onwards, they were opening an average of 14 to 15 stores per year.
[1:08:38] Early in the franchising business, Ron made mistakes in selecting the right franchisee.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖📚 Favorite Books? Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin.
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Ridiculous amount of books. I purchase 1-2 books per week.
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Zoom….other tools include Linkedin and Spotify (for podcasts).
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Keeping up with the demand of our industry without hiring the wrong people.

Key Point from the Interview:

“One of the things my mother said to me was – Ron, not only do I think that this is a crazy idea, you’ve never really cleaned your room. Why would you start a house cleaning business?”

Resources Mentioned:

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