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What do you do about people who try to get free cleanings from you?

That is a great question, 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 if you have a question, you can go to AskaHouseCleaner.com, and there's a little

blue button at the bottom of the page.

You can click on that blue button and, mysteriously, a little microphone appears, and you click

on the microphone and it's like leaving me a voicemail, except it sends it to me here

at the show.

So, if you have a question, you can call in your question to the show, or you can email

me Angela@AskaHouseCleaner.com if that's easier for you.

All right, onto today's show, which is what do you do if a customer is trying to eke a

free cleaning out of you?

All right, well, I don't like this question at all because it suggests that there are

people out there that would do that.

And I like to believe in the kindness of humanity

and that everybody's good and kind and has everyone else's best interest in mind.

I know, I live in Utopia.

Right?

Okay.

So the truth of the matter is, believe it or not, there are some shysters out there,

and they're going to try to get something for nothing.

Okay, so is the customer lying to you?

Are they just being sneaky?

What is this all about, right?

Because I hear it all the time like,

"Oh, they're just trying to get free cleaning out of me."

The very first thing that I want to suggest is, as a business owner, how did you explain

your business in your walk through?

And I want to go back to you because you don't have control over the customer, but you do

have control over you.

And so I want to go back to the walkthrough.

Did you specify what you do when you were with your customer face to face?

Because there are a lot of times that house cleaning business owners will say,

"Well, I'm a house cleaner. They should know what I do."

Uh, no, they don't, unless you specified what you do.

That's like going inside a restaurant and saying, "Well, of course they know what we sell.

We sell food. Right?"

Well, but what kind of food?

Does it have MSG in it?

Is it precooked?

Is it frozen food?

Like, what is it that you're feeding me?

Is this organic food?

Is this just food off the store shelves?

What is it that you're feeding me?

Is this stuff that has already been sitting here for a couple of hours?

Are you cooking it fresh?

Are you making it to order?

Can I make some adjustments to the dish that I'm ordering?

Like, what happens?

Right?

House cleaning is the very same.

When we come to your house and we bid a job, we're customizing your order.

It's a made-to-order order.

So what is it that you're getting?

No, you have to specify.

Now, there's a house cleaner that called me and she's just in tears.

She's irate.

She did an amazing job at a customer's house.

The customer called her up and said, "I can't find anything in my kitchen.

I want a refund.

You didn't put stuff back where it was supposed to go."

So the house cleaner is just beside herself because, guess what?

She doesn't open cupboards and put anything away.

As part of her cleaning, she doesn't do dishes, but she failed to mention that to a customer,

so the customer just expects that that was going to be done.

Then when she couldn't find anything, it wasn't because she herself misplaced it or someone

in the house misplaced it.

She immediately blamed the house cleaner, and then she wanted a refund.

So then I had to ask the house cleaner, "What is your guarantee policy and your refund policy?"

which she had not clarified either.

Okay, so this is where we get into trouble.

Is the customer trying to eke something out of us for free?

Oftentimes the answer is no.

Oftentimes the customer doesn't know where our boundaries are.

They don't know what we've promised, and they don't know what we've delivered.

And so I asked this particular house cleaner, I said, "Did you use a checklist?"

And she said, "Oh, no, because there's a lot of stuff on there I'm not going to get around

to, and I don't want it to look like I left a whole bunch of stuff off because then they

wouldn't want to pay me."

Okay, but the customer doesn't know what you did anyway, and because you didn't check anything

off and there was no checklist, and you weren't very clear about the terms of what you did,

and you're not very clear about the terms of your refund or your guarantee, your customer,

and I'm just making a wild guess here, but your customer is not trying to eke something

out of you for free.

Your customer is trying to find and establish some boundaries.

They're super confused right now.

So I need you to go back to the customer's house, and I need you to redo your walk through.

And you can go back and say, "My bad, I didn't explain it very clearly.

When I clean houses, I don't do any dishes, and so if there's stuff in your dishwasher,

I don't even put it away.

I don't open any closed doors and I don't open any cupboards, and so if there's something

that's misplaced in your kitchen, it had to be someone in your house because I didn't

put anything away."

Then you need to say, "It has come to my attention that people would like more clarity on what

it is I'm doing, so here's my new checklist," and I'm really a big fan of the checklist

for this reason.

When you do a walkthrough with a customer, you give them a checklist, and you yourself

have a checklist, and as you walk through the house, there are things that will trigger

a conversation.

So if you're in the kitchen, then you can tell the customer right there.

You can stop at the kitchen sink and say, "Hey, listen, there are no dishes in the sink

today, and I just want to know if it's always going to be this way when I arrive.

And just to make sure you understand, my company does not do dishes.

And so if I arrive and the sink is full of dishes, I'm going to work around them and

I'm going to leave them in the sink for you because I don't want to be responsible for

your dishes.

That's a daily chore, and it's not part of the weekly maintenance that you're paying

me to do."

And so you need to have that conversation.

If you don't have that conversation and the customer leaves dishes in the sink, and then

you go home, and you left the dishes in the sink but you didn't tell them you were going

to do that, then they're like, "Oh, you didn't clean my house.

I came home and there were dishes in my sink.

I want my money back."

Oh, no.

They're not trying to get something for you for free.

They just thought that that was included.

Right?

So the checklist says we did this, this, this, and this.

Now everything that you're guaranteeing is checked off.

These are the things we did.

If your house was super messy and we didn't get around to it, we had to skip some things.

And so on the Walkthrough, you say, "Hey, if we have to skip some things, because sometimes

people's houses are messier than others, what are your priorities?"

And they say, "Well, you can skip the blinds.

That's not a priority to me, or you can skip the baseboards."

They will give you things that are not their priorities, and then you can skip those things

because you made notes on your initial walkthrough.

Now, if it's clear to the customer what you offer, and it's clear to you as a housekeeper,

and it's clear to you what your guarantee is and it's clear to the customer what your

guarantee is, it's going to remove a whole bunch of this weird, "Oh, you need to come

back and give me a refund for the money that I paid," because there are a lot of house

cleaners that are overcharging, and they are not being very clear about what it is they're

charging for.

And then the customer sees how much money they paid, and then they look at the whole

house and there's like a whole bunch of stuff that got skipped, so something is not right

here, I want my money back.

But if they say, "For this amount of money, we will do these things, and in the event

that something has to be skipped, we are going to skip these things and we will pick them

up on the next week when we do a rotation.

Is that fair?"

And the customer says, "Well, yeah, that's fair."

And the reason it's fair is because you just explained it to the customer that if the house

is tidy and everything is picked up and all the dishes are put away when I get here, I

can do everything every time.

Everything that's on this list.

But if there are other things in the way and I have to pick stuff up and put it away, it's

going to take away from the time that I've allocated for this list, but everything that's

on the list, we guarantee.

Then they're going to look at it and go, "Wow, there's some things that are missed, but they

didn't check that off.

So ... I should clean up before they come next time."

Right?

So there are customers, there are, that are going to try to eke a free cleaning out of you.

That is true, but for the most part, it's just customers that misunderstand what the

original deal was, and it is your job as the house cleaner doing the walkthrough to make

sure that everyone is understanding what your offer is, because if they don't understand,

when it comes time to pay the money, now you have a different problem.

Alrighty, that's my two cents for today, and until we meet again,

leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.