Self-motivation is one of the hardest things for any small business owner to try to muster
up every day to get going, and we're going to talk 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 question comes from a woman who's been a house cleaner for many years and she's
just moving into owning her own house cleaning business, and she wants to know,
"How do I find the self-motivation to get myself up and get started every day?
In the past, I worked for another company and I was required to be at a certain place
at a certain time, but now that I work on my own I don't have the self-motivation?
What do I do?"
All right, that's an awesome question and my answer is this: If you don't have the self-motivation,
get out of the business immediately.
Go back to working for another company because they will provide you a set schedule in order
for you to show up every single day.
Now let's go back to the beginning of our youth.
When you're a little kid and you're just born, your parents give you a schedule.
They put you on a sleep schedule.
They put you on a feeding schedule.
They put you on a play schedule.
They schedule your play dates with other kids and then you grow up a little bit and you
get to daycare center, and the daycare center has set hours.
So, your parents wake you up at a certain time and they get you ready and feed you breakfast.
And they send you to the daycare center for a particular window of time.
It's a schedule.
Then you go to regular school, kindergarten and first grade and your elementary years.
There's a schedule.
Your parents get you up, they send you to school, they bring you home at a certain time,
they have a bath time, there's story time and a bedtime, right?
You're on a very tight schedule, all created by other people.
Then you grow up and you go to middle school and high school, and that's okay because you
still have a schedule that other people created for you.
Then you got out into the workforce and that's okay because there's a schedule for you there.
You have to get up and go to a job every single day,
and so that is a schedule that you've created.
But what happens when you decide you're going to be the boss and suddenly you're on your own?
No one has created the schedule for you except you,
and you just don't know how to create a schedule.
So, you wake up and you're like, "Well, I'm not self-motivated."
Maybe it's not that you're not self-motivated at all.
Maybe it's that you just don't know how to set a schedule.
Because setting a schedule is very easy.
But if you have a schedule and you run a very tight schedule, then it's just
like all the rest of your years.
You have a certain place to be so you show up and you are there.
It has nothing to do with self-motivation.
It has everything to do with you being where you're supposed to be when you're supposed
to be there.
So, my suggestion to you is this.
How many houses are you going to clean in the course of a day?
If your answer is two, usually it's two or three depending on the size of the house and
depending on how close they are to where you live.
So, let's say that you are going to clean three houses in the course of a day and every
one of those houses will take you three hours.
So, you're going to work for nine hours.
While you're working for nine hours, just for the sake of argument, we're going to say
that all three of those houses you're going to clean that day are in one neighborhood,
so your commute time is one to three minutes.
That's for you to get to your car, grab your stuff, get to the next house.
One to three minutes.
So, you're going to block in your nine hours plus five or 10 minutes on each side of those
houses so that you have time to grab your stuff and get to the next house on time.
All right, so now you have a schedule.
It has nothing to do with self-motivation and everything to do with you being at the
next house on time because your customer is expecting you.
The very worst thing that happens in the house cleaning business is people will give a range
of times.
I will be there somewhere between 8:00 and 12:00, and in the house cleaner's mind they
think, "Wow, I have a range."
Okay, what just happened is this.
You just removed the schedule and so now the motivation goes along with that schedule,
and so it makes it harder and harder for you to show up at the next house on time because
there's a range.
"Well, if I just run a few errands, then I can still be at the customer's house in that range."
It works for some house cleaners but usually, it doesn't.
There's usually lots of problems that come around not having a tight schedule, but if
you have a really tight schedule, it builds in your boundaries, right?
So, a customer says, "Well, can you do these extra things?"
If you're working on a range, yeah you can and so it's harder to say, "I can't.
I would love to but let's schedule that for next time" when you can charge them more money
"and I will block out a window of time where I can fit that in.
I don't have the time today."
It forces you to have boundaries, right?
Again, it has nothing to do with self-motivation.
It has everything to do with being on a schedule.
So, set a schedule because it removes last-minute problems that customers throw at you.
It removes the possibility of you staying later to clean a house that's even messier.
If you contracted for a certain particular job,
you've got to be done in that window of time? Why?
Because you have another house and because that's your schedule, see?
All right, so when I talk about self-motivation, there are a couple of things you can do to
get up every day to motivate yourself.
The real motivation part comes in knowing that this is probably the best job you're
ever going to have.
It has the most flexible scheduling you're ever going to have.
Because if you decide you're not going to work on Tuesdays, you're the boss.
You get to decide that you don't work on Tuesdays.
If you decide you're going to take a vacation, you get to pick when you're going to take
the vacation.
You don't have to clear it with any supervisors.
You get to decide.
If you decide you want to work weekends on the evenings and pick up some commercial accounts,
you get to decide that, right?
It's one of the best jobs you'll ever have and the pay is pretty good if you bill correctly.
So, when it comes to self-motivation why are you doing this?
If you're doing it to support your family, that's awesome.
If you're doing it to pay off bills, that's awesome.
If you're doing it because you want to buy something nice for yourself, there's awesome.
There are so many different reasons why you get to have a house cleaning business.
But when you get up in the morning and you decide to go to work, your reasons why are
your motivation.
Then if you follow a really tight schedule, even if you wake up on days and you don't
feel motivated, you will still be on schedule and you will still be on track to follow through
on all of your dreams and all of your ambitions.
Does that make sense?
All right.
So that's it for self-motivation and until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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