A short-form video (YouTube) by Mike Andes profiling Robert and Justin, two roommates who started a rapidly growing carpet cleaning business to support a newborn child. The video covers their background (moving from the South, prior window-cleaning attempt), financial struggles (negative bank balances, high ad spend), operational roles (Robert owner/manager, Justin handles cleaning and inventory), and motivations—particularly Robert’s newborn as the catalyst to commit to the business.
Chapters
I'm kind of screwed already.
My name is Mike Andes, and I travel around the country turning around small businesses that are struggling.
How can I call myself a business owner?
I never put my all into anything.
Because I was, like, super depressed doing that. But it felt nice.
Today we're going to a carpet cleaning business that's been growing really fast.
Most home vacuums suck. They don't suck or they don't suck?
Yes.
Yeah. But I'm always wondering, like, where the hell's all the money? I mean, I've been hiding, like, forever. Like, I had to throw a punch right now.
But over the past year, their bank balance has gone negative twice, and I just feel like.
Like a failure. Easy. It's brutal.
Yeah. Stressful, because we just didn't know, like, what to hone in on.
And more than 25% of their revenue is being spent on advertising. Like, you can make sense of a 10x multiple on marketing, but we can't have 25%. That's all you're in profit, gone.
We get kind of, like, verbally abused a little bit, and that can just be like. That kind of checks all the boxes. Like, no one really, like, was nice to me, and it was a nightmare, to be honest. What just happened?
Let's see if we can turn this thing around. Robert, how's it going, man?
What's up, man?
Good to see you.
Nice to see you.
This is a cool little spot you got.
Yeah, it is.
And who's this?
This is Justin.
Justin.
My name is Justin Thomps. I do all the company's cleanings. I handle the inventory and just any other little thing that needs to be done that Robert can't get done at the moment, I pick up for him.
And you guys were roommates, right?
We are, yeah. We were. Yeah. He lives with me now. He'll be trying to get a spot soon. Completely separate the business and the personal life and the home and stuff. Cool.
And then you guys raised down here in Marysville or.
No, actually, we were both born in the South.
Really?
Florida. I'm from North Carolina. Oh, wow.
What brought you up here?
Because my mom lived in North Carolina, then she moved to Texas. Yeah, I followed her about six months later or something, and I didn't want to just, like, follow my mom around, so here we are.
How much did you pay for this spot?
It's $1,400.
That's not too bad. And gate kind of includes all this over here.
Yeah. I was thinking I kind of need some type of space just to get away from home? Yeah, yeah. Because my home office is like my bedroom and I got a three year old and yeah, my son being born, if that one thing didn't happen, I probably would just be doing something stupid right now. When it came time to actually start that business. It's probably the sole reason why I actually went through with it is because my son was on the way. Every aspect of life, every decision is basically made based off of how he's gonn to perceive me as like a man and how he's going to try to like mold himself.
So like basically three years ago, what were you doing beforehand?
I was on unemployment. I looked into like home service businesses. I actually started a window cleaning company before this. Now when I say started like companies, I didn't go like actually have these real companies. It was just like an idea. I got a logo made, printed off some door hangers, hung them up. I cleaned one house of the windows and then I realized that that probably wasn't what I was going to be good at or be into. Found a carpet cleaning YouTube video. Okay. It's like I can figure that out.
Cool. Then what do you like posting Craigslist ads or Facebook ads?
What do you do?
At first, I mean, yeah, it was stressful because we just didn't know like what to hone in on.
I did Angie's leads. Yeah?
Yeah.
For like two or three weeks. I tried Yelp for a little bit.
Angie's List, thumbtack, Yelp, they're okay in some markets. I've seen people build an entire business of the back of these lead gen services, but I've also seen people spend 20 and 30% of their total revenue.
