Flipping the Script on Tech Friction | E22 – Hard Refresh – An ISSA Podcast

Foreign. Welcome to Hard Refresh.

Everyone.

We are back. I guess it's not a we today, it's just me. Wish Karina the best of luck. She is lost in Philadelphia. No, I'm kidding. She had a train delay in Philadelphia and was not able to make today's shoot. But none the wiser, we are going to move forward with our episode today. And today we have an amazing, legendary, I'd say guest in the even in the Issa world. Libby Delucian and Libby, welcome to the show. Libby and I have known each other for 18ish months. So somewhere around there.

Somewhere around there. Yeah.

We started in a, in a mastermind program together. Libby's been heavily involved in Issa residential things. So some of our listeners definitely may know the name Libby and Woot Recruit, which is just one of the brands that she runs, but that's definitely the, the one with recruiting, especially in the cleaning services space. So, Libby, let's do a quick introduction and then we'll, we'll go into our bantering moment of two truths, or excuse me, roasting by AI is what Libby has chosen to do today.

So, yeah, so my name is Libby Delucien. I am a cleaning business owner. So I own a cleaning company. We do residential, we do light commercial, and we do professional organizing. And I started that in the organizing in 2014, added cleaning in 2018, got pregnant, then got hit by Covid. Like just all these things happen. And my cleaning business exploded during COVID It was great for I'm in Florida, so we're always like, Covid what from Florida? And then, you know, my biggest struggle became recruiting to keep up with our growth during that time. And that's when I created the process that is now what Woot Recruit is. And we recruit for hundreds of home service companies, residential and commercial cleaning being our primary focus of who we recruit for. And then from there I added Cell Convert Clean, which is another software that's a quoting and bidding tool for, for cleaning. And then, you know, we have, I have a book launching. You know, I, I have no shortage of brands. And then my cleaning company is actually called Organize It. So our tagline is we are the most organized cleaning company in the world. And it was kind of my way to morph the two skills together, which is cleaning and organizing.

That's awesome. Tell me, tell me a little bit more about the book launch coming.

It's about my, my journey of growing and scaling businesses. I didn't really realize how much work it was to write a book. You know, I got The. I've always wanted to. I really got pushed to do it while we were in that mastermind together, the software mastermind. And I dove in and, man, it draws out everything you have in you. You have to, like, be able to just either bring it out through the writing sessions or go recall certain things and strategies or go dig them up. And it's a, It's a really daunting, exhausting process. And that's just the writing. Then there's the publishing part. You know, they're, they're, they're asking everything from what size of font do we want? To the color of the piece of paper, Do I want white or off white? And you're like, oh, my God, I don't know. And, you know, a book is forever. Once it's put out in the world and printed, it's forever. And you think that every time you have to go make a decision, and it just, it's kind of overwhelming. We're in the final stages now of proofreading, so that's also a ton of work. And then, you know. The book does launch September 23rd. It is called One Layer Deep. How to Win in Business Without Losing Yourself.

Amazing. I don't think I'm motivated now to write my own book from all that work, but.

So it's a lot of work and a lot of money, not going to lie.

Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe one day. I'm not. I'm not there today, that's for sure. So. But congratulations to you. We'll definitely look forward to that book coming out. And let's dive into a little bit of fun. Libby has decided now that you know some of this stuff about her, she's decided to share some roasts that AI just literally 10 minutes ago gave her for the first time. So this is like fresh.

This is fresh. Okay, so ChatGPT tells me that this is one layer, and it's one layer deeply brutal, and that I'm obsessed with systems and efficiency. I'm surprised that my morning. They're surprised that my morning coffee doesn't come with KPIs in a dashboard and a trello card, you know, and that I have more brands than a Starbucks drink. Than Starbucks. I'm sorry, I have more brands than Starbucks has drinks with. Woo, Recruit, sell, convert, clean, organize it One layer deep. That my email signature must be longer than a CVS receipt. This one's not mean, but I thought it was kind of funny. I lost 65 pounds, which I did lose 65 pounds, but then I found three new businesses. So that's kind of a positive. And you made a children's book, a business book and a podcast, all while planning a book launch. That would be Bezos. That would make Bezos sweat. Is there anything you can't do? And then the last one I thought was really funny. Wait, Closet has more brand is more branded than a NASCAR signature hat. Native earrings, which I have both of them on right now. So it does know me very well. And the power color orange, which I.

Don'T have on right today is purple.

It stays purple, but I'm on an orange. I got an orange pillow.

There you go. That's awesome.

In conclusion, you are unstoppable vision fueled machine disguised in a human as a human mompreneur.

There you go.

So that wasn't very mean though.

Yeah, you know, we've had some guests that have shared and you just, you must be so kind to it because it's kind in return. Mine, mine was more brutal. So I did that a few months back early, early on in doing these episodes with Karina and even Karina's was way nicer to her than it was to me. So it's not like I was using Grok that was like, hey, be so mean and just constantly.

Yeah.

Anyways, but now you all know a little bit more about Libby. Make sure to give her a follow on all the good social channels. So we're going to go over some quick control and this is just things that are coming up in the committee things events that are happening. We got two things. First is our next CLX event. So our cohort learning experiences. They've been going well. We do them quarterly. They are the Issa's Innovation and Technology committee flagship events. This next one is coming to everyone on September 23rd. So look out for registration for that digital online experience. The topic is going to be AI for customer relationship management. And then we also have coming up a webinar on August 26th. So literally right around the corner, about 15 days away. And this is what does best in class building retention look like. That's going to be led by Gerald Fong over at Bright Go, one of our committee members with a few guests. So be sure to tune into live on that webinar to learn from all of the amazing things regarding best in class retention and what that's coming up. So today's episode though all focused on Libby's experience. We are going to clear the cash on flipping the script however we want to say it when it comes to reducing friction with technology. Now Libby all of your experiences in developing technology, running a cleaning business. Right. You have both sides firsthand experience about this potential friction in residential cleaning or facility light commercial cleaning. So let's dive into this. How can these service teams, service businesses, leverage technology? And let's talk about the customer buying experience from these service based businesses, the friction points, things like that.

Awesome. Well, the first thing I want to say is when I first started my cleaning company, I had no idea. And everyone I've ever hired to work in our cleaning company in the office. Right. Had no idea that it takes the amount of tech it does to run a cleaning company. I always say that cleaning companies are sasses. Their software is as their services as a software. Right. And I've hired people fresh out of college, I've hired people with software experience and they just, they just think, oh, it's a cleaning company, it's easy, like paper and a pencil, like, no, they just need a mop. And so, you know, I didn't really understand the amount of tech it took to really run our cleaning company well. And then once I understood it, I, I went overboard just like everybody else. I was trying to solve all of my problems with technology and it became a bottleneck and it actually slowed our growth because I overcomplicated the tech portion for my office staff. Right. If they need 500 tabs open to do their job, we're overcomplicating their job.

Yeah.

And I realized that for us to break certain bottlenecks, we had to actually become more efficient with our technology. And so I had to go through like a technology house cleaning session of do I really need this? Yeah, my CRM does this too. But I, I bought this other thing and it does it better. But then there's another login. And then like just, it added, I added so many layers of complexity because I, I ran to technology to try to solve every problem I had in the business. And even problems I didn't have, I was trying to solve because it's like another shiny object.

Yeah.

And so for me, what I found was once we really went through the tech and said, hey, you know what, some of our stuff already does this, like, let's just get leaner. Let's really get focused on what we want. And you know, my suggestion to a lot of cleaning companies out there that are looking at tech and you know, how do we become more efficient with it is first. And being on a tech podcast right now, you might not like, what I have to say is don't run to buy the tech first.

Yep.

I always encourage everyone to create your process first on paper. Right. I have a notebook here on paper on a Google Doc. Lay that process out because the tech is going to help you scale it and automate it. But if you don't have it laid out first, you could just be amplifying the chaos. Right. You can just be automating chaos.

Yep.

And also then you're going to conform to the way that the tech delivers that process. If you create your process first, put it on paper, get your steps down, then you can go find that technology that will deliver it the way you want it versus let me just go buy that solution first. And then we dive in and we're unhappy with the way the technology works. Well, we didn't have our process laid out first.

Yeah, I, I love that because it's. And we've said this many times on the podcast between myself, Karina, and other guests. You go from chaos to order, then from order to automation. Software is your order to automation standpoint. And I've said so many times that, like. And you just nailed it on the head. You can bring chaos to software and then you just automated your chaos. Right. And you didn't do anyone any favors. And so absolutely love that. With, with that. What are there particular frameworks? Like, we've. We talked about this many times on different episodes. Process before product kind of mindset. What is it about the note taking, the process? Like, do you have something, a questionnaire that you go through to help our listeners understand, like, hey, this is how I try and identify the scope of works that I'm trying to implement.

So what I really like to kind of look at is there's a few things. And the reason why we want to put it on paper first before we go straight to the technology is we don't even know if it works. Like, you got to try it. Like, hey, give it to your office and say, hey, I need you to try this, this process and let me know what you think. And then you come back and you make some revisions. And then once they're like, hey, yeah, we like this, we follow it. Okay, great. Now let's go automate it. But the other thing that we look at and you know, I have a process somewhere, I have to go find it. But because we have a whole process to how we make Playbooks. But when it comes to the automating of it or how do we think about it? And this is what I. This happened in my own software company, by the way, until I had to, like, actually bring it to someone's attention. They were creating processes and automations that didn't fix a problem. It was in a reactive state versus why did the problem happen and how do we get in front of it? And so that's what we want to look at when we, when we're talking about like automations or building things to scale. Because we were building things and this happened to Woo recruit. We were building things and we couldn't figure out why we still had issues, why we still had chaos. Well, when we went in and we built original automations, I didn't have anything to do with some of them in the ops department. And what, what we found is they were building things that were only fixing the problem, but they were still allowing the problem to happen. They didn't actually get in front of it in a proactive state versus in a reactive state.

Love that. That's a writer downer.

And it's one of those things where why did it happen in the first. Can we get in front of it? What's that process versus hey, like, how do we fix customer complaints or churn or you know, this is broken. And it didn't alleviate anything what they were doing. And so we had to step in and I said, okay, well why did this happen in the first place? Everybody was doing their job, everybody was doing work, but nobody knew it because it was. We weren't. We needed to automate the steps to like, let the customer know, hey, your account is currently being built. Like, hey, this is where we're at in this phase. Like, hey, we need you to do this next. Instead, we were all working and a customer was like, hey, what's going on? Oh yeah, we've been working, but they don't know. They didn't know anything because it was just silence. And so that's the way we approach. That's why I approach automations in tech is like from a proactive state versus a reactive state.

I love that. And the friction. When it comes to implementing technology, how you reduce that friction is to like, do you literally have chicken scratch on a napkin that allows you to then go say, all right, we're going to go test this out. There's a, there's a product development book. I forget Marty, I forget his last name, but it's a product development book. Talking about like the idea of like, mm. It's just like, how do you literally go put something in front of. It's not, it doesn't actually work. It's not actually built. But it leads people to believe that that's actually how it would work. And if they still take the action and then it goes like to a webpage and be like, sorry, this actually isn't a real thing yet. But it gives you all of this data. That's what I was thinking about when you were talking about that. It's just like, do you have processes that you could build out tangibly in your business on. On pen and paper even to say, all right, we're doing this. Wow. Over the last month of tracking all of this. Yes, it was manual. That's a lot of work to track things manually. But now we know exactly what software needs to go solve and where our missteps are. So the. And I've seen that time and time again, even with our own tooling on the commercial side of enterprises, right. They're trying to get multi, multimillion dollar contracts from a reactive state to proactive of certain tools and tech out there. When it comes to like quality control, it's like get ahead of issues. Why issues are happening well before they become reactive. Complaints. Right? Absolutely. Love it.

You're just developing a proof of concept for the process, right? It's big in tech. And so before we do anything, we always say, okay, you know, what's, what's the proof of concept? Bring it back. Does it work? How does it work? Great. And I have to watch in our company, they want to run and like automate, like, wait, let's automate it. I'm like, no, we have to make it first.

Stop.

We have to build the proof of concept. We don't even know if anybody wants it. We don't even know if it will work yet. Yeah, stop it.

Yeah. The. I started thinking about when you're dealing with a customer buying experience, especially in like the residential to a consumer side of things, right? The ability like go to a website, put in square footage, my home, get an automated bid, all of that. It's like you, you. If I remember correctly, you acquired that business, right?

Yes, I bought that business. I bought the code, actually.

Yeah. And so like implementing that. Did you find that like, wow, some of this was just because a product person decided that would be cool, but the actual buying experience needs to be altered and changed in this way. And I'm going to elevate it this way. Any. Any aha's there?

So that's a. It's just a really good topic. A lot of cleaning companies are very resistant to putting their pricing online, right? A lot they're like, but I'm different and I'm special I'm like, we all are. But at the same time, consumers want access to information faster, especially if you are targeting a younger workforce, like the younger workforce who's coming in if you're targeting. So in residential cleaning, our target is primarily like working moms. And so they're busy. Like, if I have to pick up the phone and call you to find out how much it costs, I'm not going to call you. I mean, that's just the buyer that I am.

Yep.

And I think from a buying standpoint, you have to deliver your, your, your pricing in multiple forms. So, like if I want to fill out a lead intake form, call text, or get the price on, on your website, like, we have to meet the consumer where they're at versus where I want them to be at. And it's different for everybody. And so when I bought the code for what Cell Convert Clean is now, it was interesting because it was initially created to be a quoting tool for people's websites. But what we found in the power actually lies is it's a quoting tool for your office. Because so many cleaning companies don't know how to quote. They don't know how to give bids. They're like bidding off of gut and feeling and like. And so what I've done is create a standard of how you're supposed to quote a job and help, you know, your efficiency rate and how much per hour you're charging. Is. Are we adding different things like fixtures or people to the quote? And it actually helps them build a solid quoting system where they can quote with confidence every time consistently without quoting based off their confidence. Right. Without. Without being quoting how they feel. And then also with the cleaning industry going towards a lot of VAs remote employees, it's hard for them to quote. But now with this tool that we built, they can now like. So my tagline is like, so easy your VA can use it. But, you know, what we bought and built the software for actually wasn't where the power was. It was in the other side.

Interesting.

The office using it to quote with confidence consistently from anywhere. Like, they can quote from their phone now with just a touch of a button. And it delivers like accurate, consistent, professional quotes. Because I think, you know, in, in the cleaning industry, we struggle a little bit with how do we deliver that professionally as well.

Sure. Yeah. No, I, I love that because when it comes to understanding friction and like, where in the processes of business, what one tooling that you purchase and brought into your tech stack as an offering ended up changing and finding it, it's probably better path on frictions. That's a, that's amazing. And I think a lot of the lessons learned, especially for all of our listeners in the Issa audience, the ability to write things out and define things out on paper is so critical to reducing friction. With technology and implementation now, there's also different times and levels. Right. A much smaller entity is going to have a different tech stack than a hundred million entity. Right. And that's completely appropriate. That's the way it should be because you're, you're scaling with the different functionalities. You have a full IT team at a hundred million dollar company that can control and implement and go do processes at scale. So hopefully from today's episode and all of the things that Libby has taught that there were things that were caught. Libby is very well known on that phrase as well. It's not always what is taught, it's what's caught. The infamous mastermind and Dan Martell's group that her and I were both part of, that's where it comes from. I know I've said it many times on, on our podcast episodes, but that's really what we hope you get out of these educational opportunities, is that you are inspired to go take action to make decisions and actually move your business forward. So that's a wrap on today's episode. Libby, one last question. What's the one gold nugget that you would love to leave our audience say?

My gosh, the one gold nugget. I think since this is a tech podcast, I'm not a technical founder, right. I'm a systems based person and so don't like techno. Don't, don't let the technology scare you because like I said, I'm not a technology founder or tech founder. And to just be curious and lean into technology because it's going to create speed which then allows us to scale and reach those goals. So lean into tech. Even if you're not a technical founder, you don't have to be. You can hire great people around you that can help you build your vision and your processes.

Love it. Lean into tech, even if it scares you, because everyone around you is going to and they'll start moving faster. So that's where we're at today. Give us all comments in the threads of all the good social channels that we post this on and let us know what topics you want from guests that we bring on in the future regarding technology implementation and innovation in the cleaning industry. Libby, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining. Thanks everyone.

Thank you.