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,
I get to help you find an answer.
Okay, so, today's question comes from several house cleaners that are getting ready for
Mother's Day.
And they want to know; "What little gifts or trinkets or kind things can I do to celebrate
Moms on Mother's Day?"
Okay, I'm going to answer that question.
And you're not going to like my answer.
I'm very opinionated about this because I've been in the business for twenty-five years.
Here's what I have proven again, and again, and again.
It is number one, not sustainable.
So, if you give something to all the mothers this year on Mother's Day, next year on Mother's
Day comes around, they are going to expect whatever it is you gave them this year, or
the equivalent of.
So, let's say that this year as a nice little gesture you give them a nice bouquet of flowers.
Okay, the nice bouquet of flowers probably costs you what?
$10?
$15?
$20 bucks?
That's a lot of money for one customer.
And when you add that up, for all of the customers that you have, that can become a very costly
expense.
Now, we just came off of Easter.
And there was one of our house cleaners that decided she wanted to give all of her customer's
kids and Easter basket that had little candy and toys and fun things in it
to remember her by.
So, she did, but what she didn't consider when she started this little process was that,
(and this is her first year in business).
What she did not consider was that there were about 60 kids between the twenty or thirty
families that she worked for.
So, try buying 60 Easter baskets at $20 dollars apiece or $15.99 or whatever.
They're not cheap.
Okay?
She spent almost one thousand dollars on Easter baskets.
And what did she get out of it?
I mean they were like "hey thanks, yeah whatever."
And you know, they kicked the baskets around and ate the candy and whatever.
It did not necessarily make her any more memorable in the eyes of the consumer.
And then what happens is this, they are going to expect it next year.
"Well, last year you brought us an Easter basket, are you bringing us one again?"
Okay?
So, it gets really expensive and it's not sustainable over the long haul.
This year she is only one person. So she just has her thirty accounts, right?
But next year as she expands her business and the year after that as her business grows
exponentially, the customers that have heard about that, and the customers that are in
on the Easter basket thing, are going to expect Easter baskets every year.
And so, the question is, how do you afford Easter baskets for all of the different kids
as your business grows?
And you can't give it to some and not the others because people talk.
You're working in the same neighborhood right?
So, what you do to one customer, you kind of have to do to all of them.
Now, back to the Mother's Day thing, here's a really sticky situation.
Let's say that you buy a beautiful bouquet of flowers for a woman whose house you clean.
But her children or her husband did not.
Okay, so the cleaning lady just kind of outsmarted and did the rest of the family for what they're
doing for Mom for Mother's Day.
And the mother may really appreciate the gesture and she may feel important and grateful to
you that you brought her these flowers, but again, that's not sustainable.
What are you going to do next year?
Bring her more flowers?
It's not sustainable year after year.
The next thing beyond setting a precedence that people are going to come to expect is
it's very expensive.
There was one woman who set a precedence that every year on your birthday you would get
a free house cleaning.
Right?
Yay.
Okay, well, house cleaning costs anywhere from what a hundred to two-hundred plus dollars?
And so, we figured out over the course of the year, the free birthday gift, (had she
been paid for the jobs,) the free birthday gifts that she gave away?
Added up to over $7,600 dollars in one year.
Okay, what's weird about that is this.
That is the price of a payment of a car.
If you were going to expand your business, that's another car you could bring into your fleet.
So that as you expand your business, that's a useful tax deduction.
Giving people birthday gifts, you might be able to figure out a way to tax deduct it.
I don't know.
I would talk to your accountant.
But why?
Why would you do that?
And here's the question behind that, it's a nice gesture, but it doesn't bring in any
new business.
These people are already your clients.
And what happened was there were people talking going "Well, my house cleaner gives a free
house cleaning on the birthday."
And so, there were people signing up "Oh, hey, it's my birthday."
And so, they would get the free house cleaning and then they would fire her.
And so, she was giving a lot of free birthday gifts to people she didn't even know.
And that weren't her regular customers.
So, it's not sustainable.
It's not sustainable once you start hiring lots of people.
And your business grows, now you're paying people to what?
Go give a free birthday cleaning?
This is not a charity.
This is not a tax deduction.
It's a weird gift.
Speaking of gifts, and we talked about the girl that gave out the Easter baskets.
She's not the Easter Bunny.
She is not Santa.
You're not expected at Christmas time to give gifts to all the family.
It's just weird.
It's weird for this reason, as a house cleaner or a maid, you're a service business.
You're a paid service provider.
Somebody pays you to come in the home, you do a service, they give you money.
Okay?
You're not a member of the family.
You're not expected or obligated under any way to provide pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving,
or flowers for Mother's Day.
Christmas gifts at Christmas and Easter baskets at Easter time.
What is that?
There are no other service businesses that do that.
Your landscaper does not bring you Easter baskets on Easter time.
He does not bring you pies at Thanksgiving.
The guy that comes to fix your air conditioning unit he does not bring pies.
He does not bring you gifts at Christmas time.
The lady at the hair salon she might give you a five-dollar discount on your nails or
your hair, but guess what?
She doesn't give you whole free service.
She's still in business.
And she doesn't give you Easter baskets and buy you gifts and these other things.
That's just weird.
It's really weird.
And so, I appreciate the fact that you want to give a little bit more.
So, my suggestion is this: Be an excellent outstanding house cleaner every single time
you come.
If you want to be outstanding, do outstanding work.
Get to the point where people refer you and people talk about you and people love what
you do because you are excellent.
Not because you bring Easter baskets and you give them candles on Mother's Day.
Those are all the wrong reasons.
Right?
And if you want to do something really amazing, make sure that it's for the right reasons.
So, if you want to go out a limb and you want to give someone a gift card, or you want to
take them out to lunch or you want to give them flowers or balloons or whatever, just
don't attach it to a holiday.
You can still do that.
Don't attach it to a holiday because then there's no precedence attached.
They don't think "Oh, it's my birthday again, so she's going to bring me some gifts.
Oh, it's Christmas gain, she's going to bring me some gifts."
Right?
We train people how to accept us.
And the truth of the matter is, you're already accepted.
They've already hired you.
They are already paying you for your service.
You don't get extra accepted anymore or liked anymore if you make jars of jelly and give
them gifts and little soaps and handmade things.
It's a nice gesture, but it doesn't bring any more business in the door.
These people are already your customers.
If you're spending seventy-six hundred dollars a year to get people to like you, then there
are other issues going beside you doing excellent work.
So, my answer for you is don't buy gifts for your house cleaning clients.
It's not expected.
It sets a weird precedent that is really hard to keep year after year, after year.
And as your business grows.
And then the next thing is you don't want to compete with the family.
You don't want to out do whatever the family was going to do for a birthday or for a holiday.
And there are people who are scraping by in order to have a clean home, but they don't,
they're not going to buy lavish gifts.
You don't want to be the one that provides lavish gifts.
Because that's weird.
So that's my two cents on that, and if you like this tip, or you found it helpful, go
ahead and pass it on.
Share it with a friend.
Or you can leave comments in the section below and you can argue with me and tell me why
you should leave gifts.
And I would love to hear your opinion as well.
Until I see you again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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