The hardest money I ever earned.
I'm going to tell you about that 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 MyCleaningConnection.com
And if you have a day where you absolutely hate your job, and you hate what you're doing,
you're going to want to head on over to MyCleaningConnection.com
And in the resource section, I have books and podcasts that will re-motivate you to
the reasons why you picked house cleaning as a business.
Okay, MyCleaningConnection.com
It's a resource and a hub for really cool cleaning stuff.
Okay, onto today's show, which comes from a house cleaner who wrote in the other day,
and she was having a really bad day.
And she wanted to quit and get out of the business because it just was not the business
she thought she signed up for.
Now, my suggestion to her was yes, get out of the business.
Hang up your towel, call it a day, call it quits, you're done.
Fire yourself, get out of the business.
And go to bed tonight and you will sleep like a baby.
And when you wake up in the morning, your head will be clear, you will be refreshed,
and then you can start a new house cleaning business.
Now, you know what you now know, and you can do things differently or you can do things
the same, but you have a choice.
Here's where it comes from.
It comes from years of experience of me firing myself.
Now, if you are in the business long enough, you're going to have days where they're just
crap days, and you hate your job and you hate the people that you work for and you might
even hate yourself.
And you say to yourself, "Why am I doing this to myself?
This is a stupid job for me.
I don't even know why I'm cleaning houses."
In the back of your mind, you do know.
You do know it's either because it's paying the bills for your family, it's an honest
way to make a living, it's a good way to make a living if you have limited education or
if you have an amazing education but you've decided this is a better way to earn a living
than the previous job that you had.
It might even be that you love seeing completion, where you see something really dirty and you
know with your magical powers you can turn it into something amazing.
I'm now going to tell you about the hardest money I ever earned.
There was one particular day I was just having a crap day and I decided,
"This is not for me!
I have no idea what I'm doing here.
Why am I in this business?"
And I fired myself.
I was so pleased.
I fired myself, I'm working all these hours, there's all these problems, I have employee
challenges, it's just a crap business.
I'm out.
And I'm going to go get me a 9:00 to 5:00 job.
So, I marched into an office where they do recruiting.
And somebody pays you and they send you out on a job, and then when you get there, you
learn the job or you use the skills that you have, and then at the end of the day or the
end of the week, they cut you a check and they just provide these jobs for you until
you find a good fit.
So I was like, "Okay, I will do that.
I will go find a job that's right for me."
So I went into the recruiter's office and we had this little meeting.
She sits down and she says, "What are your skills?"
I said, "Actually, I'm very talented.
I can do a lot of things.
I would like your highest paying job and I will match my skills to that highest paying
job that you have."
And she said, "Well, what do you know?"
I said, "I'm very strong, very multi-tasked, I can do all kind of handyman chores, I can
do physical lifting, I can do cleaning, I can do this, I can do that.
Whatever.
I'm really good on a variety of things, I've got good people skills, you name it.
I want your highest paying job."
She said, "Great.
How soon can you start?"
And I said, "Right now."
And she said, "I have a job for you first thing tomorrow morning."
And I said, "Great, what do I wear?"
And she said, "Comfortable clothes."
Okay, so comfortable clothes for me, it's a house cleaning uniform.
This is what I've been wearing every day for 25 years, this is comfortable for me.
I showed up the next day and I was grossly overdressed.
I get there and there's a room full of people, and we all look like we're homeless people
and she says, "Okay, the bus is about to leave."
I'm like, "What do you mean the bus is about to leave?"
"You're going to get on a bus and they're going to take you to the job."
I was like, "Okay, well I have my own car."
She's like, "No, no, no, your own car's not allowed.
You have to ride the bus with everyone else and go and come on the same bus, otherwise
you don't get paid at the end of the day."
And I was like, "Whoa, I just lost some of my independence."
But all right, so I get on the bus.
Turns out that we're heading to a thrift store.
When we get to the thrift store, the manager comes out and he says, "Okay, our job for
the day is I have three tractor-trailers that are full of big bundles of clothes."
And the clothes were about 200 pounds in each bundle, and they were wrapped together with
wire wrapping.
And so they were stacked, 16 in a stack, all the way across this tractor-trailer.
And so I was like, "Holy crap, what is this?"
These are all the clothes and all the donations that people had sent to this thrift store.
And now we were going to be pulling off these big bundles of clothes and we were going to
be cutting off the wire wrapping that bundled them together, and then we were going to be
sorting the clothes into piles, like shirts, pants, socks, shoes, whatever it was, the
bundles of stuff, we were going to be separating them and then determining whether this gets
chunked, whether it goes to the dry cleaners, what the different possibilities for these
items were.
And I looked at these three tractor truckloads of clothing, and then I looked over at the
team, and I was like, "Oh boy, we have our work cut out for us."
And I start trying to do the math in my mind.
If we're only here for eight hours today and we have those three tractor truckloads, how
many hours are we able to spend on each tractor-trailer load and we are going to have to work as hard
and as fast as we possibly can in order to get this job done.
So, I start looking around at the team that we have and I start trying to analyze in my
mind, who am I going to buddy up with that looks like they can help me get this job done.
And so, I started picking out, just in my head, picking out my favorite people, like
I got to go make friends with this perfect stranger now and
he has to help me on this job.
Anyway, I buckled down, I can do this, this is fine, I'm sure we're going to make a boatload
of money for this.
And I got to work.
And I've never worked harder, I've never worked faster in my life.
I was just sweating profusely.
And it's not all the clothes are at this level, okay?
They're all big bundles on the floor and so there's a lot of bending and reaching and
lifting and sorting and moving, and it's a lot of physical movement.
And by the end of the day, my back, my neck, my shoulders, everything just hurt.
All right?
So it was about two hours before the end of the day, and the manager pulls me off the
job, and he takes me down a hall into a little private sitting room, and he offers me a job.
He says, "Okay, listen.
I've seen you work, I don't know where you came from, I have no idea what your story
is, but I would like to hire you as a manager for my store."
And he said, "We can even cut out this temp agency that you came from so that I can pay
you more money and I don't have to pay them a commission."
And my first thought was, "Oh my goodness.
You're offering me a job and these are your ethics?
You're going to cut out the person that found me and brought me to your store.
Wait a second, let me think.
Yeah, that's not the kind of guy that I want to work for."
And I decided in that moment, this is not a good fit for me personally.
This is not a good job for me, but I will finish out the day because I promised that
I would, and I will give you 100% of my efforts.
Again, I went back to work and I worked and I worked and I worked, and almost blood, sweat,
and tears.
At the end of the day, we had three tractor-trailers completely emptied, completely sorted, and
I was literally managing this team of people, like, "Hey, I need this, I need that," and
we were having fun and we were friends at the end of the day.
Thank goodness we made it work, we did the job, we met the task, we met the requirements.
We get back on the bus, we're feeling' like a million bucks, and we go back to the station
where they write our checks.
And this is one of the days where they pay you at the end of the day.
So we get back to the little station and the lady has this little window, and you stand
in line and you go up to the window.
And we'd already filled out paperwork and 1099s or W-2s or whatever it was.
It was actually a W-2 because they took the taxes out.
So I get up to the counter and the lady takes my name, she looks at my paperwork, and then
she takes her own sweet time and she writes me a check and she hands me back the check.
And I look at the check, and I look at the lady, and I look back at the check, and I
look at the lady, and I busted up laughing.
She says, "Is there a problem?"
And I said, "Yeah, how much did we get paid for today?"
And she says, "You get paid minimum wage, and then we took the taxes out."
And I'm holding a check in my hand for $14.63.
I have never laughed so hard in my life because
I've never worked so hard for such little money.
And I looked at that check and I said, "You know what?
I'm not even going to cash this check.
I'm going to frame it and I'm going to remind myself on days where I feel like I'm going
to get out of the business and I'm going to fire myself, I'm going to remind myself that
there are people out there that are willing to work for a whole lot less money and do
much, much, much harder tasks."
Because on my worst days in the house cleaning business, I have never worked that hard.
And I went racing back to the house cleaning business.
I'm like, "Hey, wait a second.
This is where I belong.
I was wrong.
I got out of the business for 24 hours, I just checked, I'm back again.
I belong in the house cleaning business."
So if you have a day where everything goes to crap, that's okay.
You're human, it happens to all of us.
It happens to me.
It happens to me now.
There are days ... Just a couple weeks ago, I'm like, "Why am I doing this?"
It's a crazy business.
It is a crazy business.
We can deal with crazy people.
That's how life works.
And that's how we pay our bills.
So if you have a really bad day, you're not alone.
It's okay.
You're not alone.
Fire yourself for the day, get out of the business, wash your hands of it, and then
come back tomorrow with a better attitude and do things differently than you did the
first time.
Because every time you fire yourself and every time you bring yourself back, it will renew
your reasons why, and it will renew your enthusiasm for being your own boss, and for making your
own hours, and for balancing out the workload so that you're not doing the hardest work
of your life for the littlest amount of money.
All righty.
That's my two cents for today, and until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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