How do you deal with customers who don't pay?
That's a great question.
Hi there, I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
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All right, onto today's show which is, what do you do about customers that don't pay?
Okay, well, this is a tough question but it keeps coming up again and again in all the
different community groups and in the consulting that I do and all the different trainings
that we do, it keeps coming up as a problem because there are house cleaners that have
failed to understand that the main focus of the business is to make money.
So if I do not collect money from this job, I am out of business.
I am not a charity.
I do not work for free.
So when you go to a customer's house, you can be fun and you can be likeable and charming
and all of these things, but you have to have a conversation from the customer on the very
first walkthrough that you have with a customer about payment.
Because if you do not get paid you're out of business.
Or you have to say goodbye to that customer and you have to go
find a new customer, which costs a lot of marketing, it costs time, it costs onboarding
expenses where you have to go do the walkthrough again
and meet new customers and build new rapport.
It wastes time.
It's easier to take the existing person in front of you and say, "Listen, I am not
a bill collector.
I am a house cleaner and I'm here to do an amazing job on your house.
But, here's the catch.
If I don't eat, then I can't clean because I have no energy so I must get paid for the
job that I do."
The customers laugh and they go, "Yeah, that's funny.
Okay, cool."
"All right.
So when I come to your house, there must be a check on the cupboard," and this is if you
accept checks.
Some cleaning companies don't even accept checks anymore.
"There must be a check on the cupboard for this amount of money so that I can eat, so
that I can do the job that you deserve."
They go, "Okay, great, that's fair."
"Now listen, I'm not a bill collector.
I'm not going to chase you down for money.
If I come to your house and there's no check, I'm going to be so sad because I'm going to
be hungry, so I'm going to have to leave and I'm going to have to go find some food somewhere
else or hold a sign on the street corner.
So if you don't leave me any money, no cleaning,
and until I get paid for the cleaning, no cleaning."
And that customer's like, "Okay, I get it."
"Now if in the event something happens, because sometimes something happens, if something
happens and you forget to pay me, I'm going to text you and I'm going say, 'Hey, there's
no money,' and you're going to say, 'Oh, I can't believe I forgot to pay you.'
And then you're going to send the money via PayPal through your smartphone."
The customer goes, "Okay, great."
Now on my checklist there's a place with my email address, here's the email address where
you send the PayPal money, and as soon as I get the money, then I'm like, "Yes, now
I can clean the house and I can eat right."
You can make fun of it.
You can make a joke out of it, and you can say that it's your kids that need to eat or
whatever your story is, but you need to paint a picture that's very clear in the customer's
head, I don't work for free and I'm not a collection agency.
I'm not going to come after you for the money.
I'm not going to hire a bill collection company and we're not going to chase you down, we're
not going to hunt you and torment you and stalk you and all of these things.
You offered to hire me.
I accept the job.
In exchange, I need the money.
Those are the goods.
The business is called cash on demand, COD.
That means I do the job.
You give me the money.
It's at the time of service.
These are not 30, 60, 90 day terms.
Now in commercial cleaning, which is very different from house cleaning, you do have
terms and the terms are 30, 60, 90 days.
So you have to figure out how you're going to eat during those 90 days when a customer
is very slow to pay because you still have employees that you have to pay for, you have
vehicle expenses, you have insurance, you have bonding, you have supplies, you have
uniforms, you have overhead, you have a bunch of stuff that you have to pay for even if
you're waiting 90 days for a payment.
Then if your commercial accounts don't pay, then you do have to hire a collection agency
or whatever.
So the easiest way to do it is to get your money up front.
Now there are lots of software programs on the market and we have lots of them listed
on MyCleaningConnection.com.
Go over there and check it out.
But you can add one of these portals to your website where a customer can go on and they
can create their own estimate and say these are the rooms I want you to clean in my house
and a price pops up and it says this is how much it's going to be, and then they enter
their credit card information.
Then you take that information and you're like, "Hey, I've already been paid."
Then you go and you do the job.
If the customer is not satisfied, then you hit the little refund button and you give
their money back or you go back and clean, but you've already collected the money upfront.
Now what you may do is you may say, "I get the money upfront and I will hold your credit
card on file, and when I text you the confirmation the day before, I will text you the amount
of the cleaning."
Or you can do it after the job is done and say, "I …" You already have the credit card
on file so you're going to charge it for something, but you send the customer before and after
pictures, and again, there's software that allows you to upload your before and after
pictures, the job was complete, here's the total price of what it was and I just charged
your credit card.
Thank you so much for the business.
There are ways of doing that as well, but then you get paid and the customer knows how
much they paid you if the price changes.
I recommend the price not change.
Agree to something that the customers can budget and something that you can budget because
that way you know how much you're getting paid, they know how much you're getting paid,
and then there's got to be a cut-off point.
So if we come into your house and there's a whole bunch of other things going on, I'm
going to have to have a quick text to you and say, "Whoa, there's a whole bunch of
other stuff going on today.
What are the priorities?
What did you want me to do today because I'm not going to be able get to everything based
on the time that I've allocated and the time you're paying me for at your house?"
So you have to have those agreements, but as long as you keep the customer in the loop,
they're not going to run off with your money because it's not that customers don't want
to pay you.
Sometimes they don't know how much they're supposed to pay you.
Sometimes it's not clear.
And there are house cleaners that every single cleaning their price changes.
Whoa, how can anyone plan for that?
It's super expensive.
It's like going to the grocery store and not knowing what your budget of the week is and
just filling up your shopping cart with all sorts of stuff.
Then you get there and it's $100 more than you were expecting to pay.
Whoa, I'm going to have to put some of this stuff back.
It's great if everybody is working on a budget because then you can budget your own bills
based on what you know you're going to get paid.
The customer can write you a check in advance because they know what they're going to pay
and then something has to drop off if they have more work than what you've agreed to.
All right, now the last thing that I would recommend the rules change when you have a
move in or a move out cleaning because you might have a move in cleaning where a customer
is going to be moving in and then you go in and you clean the whole place and you make
it magnificent, and then for whatever reason the deal goes through and the customer doesn't
buy the house or they don't move in and they leave you stranded with the cleaning.
Or they move out and because they're moving out someone else is moving in, and on their
way out they just leave town and they forget to pay you and you never see the money and
you just spent nine or 12 or 16 hours doing a fantastic move out clean that you're never
going to get paid for.
So on a move in move out clean not only do you get the money up front but we charge a deposit.
There may be a $600 deposit for this move out clean.
Now the quoted price based on the time that we have allocated might only be $320 and so
we're going to hold $600 until the job is finished, at which point we will refund the
difference.
Now if it goes a little bit over based on what you requested that we do, or if we find
there are things that we didn't know about like there's mold behind some furniture or
something that we don't see as we're doing our walkthrough, then we're going to have
to add that onto the price.
Before you add it on to the price you need to text the customer and say, "Hey, by the
way, when we moved the couches out and the movers got everything out, we realized there's
mold that goes all the way around to the inside of that room that was flooded that you replaced
the carpets but the walls were not fixed.
So there's a bunch of mold that we have to remove.
It's going to be an extra $200," or whatever your price is.
"I just wanted to give you a heads up.
Do you still want us to do that?"
And if they say no keep it to the original $320.
Then you will refund everything and you will leave the mold.
They can hire a remediation company to come in and remove the mold.
There are things like that that can happen,
but again, you have to keep the customers in the loop.
Because I don't think people want to rip you off but customers don't pay because
of a lot of things.
Now sometimes it is financial and people get in a bind.
If somebody didn't pay last week's cleaning but they still expect you to come for this
week's cleaning, you need to renegotiate your terms and say, "Listen, you didn't pay me
for last time, which automatically drops you off my list and now new customers are free
to hire me."
"No, no, no, no, no, I really want you.
I just screwed up.
I didn't transfer the money from my bank account," or, "I ran out of money," or, "I got
fired from my job," or whatever.
Things will happen.
Then you may want to negotiate, and this is on a case by case basis.
"Okay, so here's what happens.
I charge $200 for your cleaning.
You owe me $200 for last time.
So cash on demand you pay me $200 for this cleaning and we will split the $200 up from
before into four payments.
So this week you give me $250 and that will cover 50 from the $200 that you owe me.
Then next time it's $250, $250 for four times and then that one particular cleaning is paid for.
I will only do this one time," because you don't want to train your customers to get
in the habit of saying, "Well, she'll split it up and she'll let me make payments."
"No, no, no, no, I'm not a bank.
I cannot finance this for you.
I am not a bank.
I will do this one time because you are a loyal customer and because I want to keep
your business.
That's it.
I'm trying to help you out here.
But again, if I don't eat, I can't do the cleaning," or, "I've got kids to feed," or,
"I've got school," or, "I've got," whatever it is.
If the customer is reminded that you do have bills to pay because they are your income,
they're paying you is your income, this is how you make your money.
And so you can't just give everybody a free pass and you can't finance people.
You might do it one time per one customer, but do not get in the habit of doing that
on a regular basis.
But you might work with them in order to keep their business.
Alrighty, that is what you do when a customer doesn't pay.
You take full responsibility and you revise your program so that never again do you forget
on a walkthrough that you need to clarify with the customer upfront about the money
and the terms because if you don't get paid, I'm sorry but you're out of business.
Alrighty, that's my two cents for today and until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
For more infomation >> Falco | Capítulo 08 | Telemundo Novelas - Duration: 12:42. 
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