Ep 77 – From Cleaning Houses To Building A Brand

What does it actually take to grow a home service business from the ground up?

Kent and his wife started their cleaning company themselves. And now? It’s a thriving business with a substantial team serving the Dallas area.

But it didn’t happen overnight.

In this episode, we sit down with Kent Davis of Dallas Sunrise Maids to talk about the messy parts of growth, including hiring, delegation, knowing when to bring in outside help, and figuring out which numbers actually matter.

The big takeaway?

Pay attention to the numbers that matter. Build your foundation. Hire good people. Invest consistently. Let’s go!

– Amanda Joyce (00:00)
Hello, welcome to today’s episode. We are so excited to introduce you guys to Kent Davis of Dallas Sunrise Maids. He’s one of our favorite clients, he’s one of our most hilarious clients, and he has grown his business from a bootstrap company that he and his wife started to an incredibly established brand who’s dominating across the board in his local market.

Devon Hayes (00:22)
So stay tuned. We dive into ops, we dive into hiring, what’s working, what’s wasted. and most of all, we do talk quite a bit about what he’s found to be the most successful marketing channel. So stay tuned. it’s a fun episode.

Amanda Joyce (00:00)
Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Kent. We’re so excited to have you on.

Kent Davis (00:03)
Thanks for having me.

Devon Hayes (00:04)
I know we absolutely love working with you your story is so interesting and intriguing. And a lot of business owners, I think they listen to this podcast. Maybe a lot of marketers like to within different home services businesses to get some some meaty takeaways. But a lot of times like the good stuff is when we talk to owners like you and just like get into like, you know, get into the nitty gritty of like your journey kind of

Devon Hayes (00:28)
how you grew the business, when because we met you obviously because we’re your marketing agency and kind of get into some of like the story, the history of the brand and how you decided to go from just, you know, a smaller organization into, you know, something where you’re like, I want to invest in the brand. I want to grow. I know I need help with it. And and kind of just get the background. So I guess with that, just give us like a little give us a little history here.

Amanda Joyce (00:52)
Tell us the story.

Devon Hayes (00:53)
Like tell us, take us back to when Dallas Sunrise Maids

Devon Hayes (00:57)
was much smaller. did the business look like? You know, how many cleaners, how many customers, stuff like that.

Kent Davis (01:02)
Sure, yeah, awesome. All right. Well, let’s go. so I had the good fortune of meeting someone who already had a house cleaning business and was looking to expand. it wasn’t a franchise opportunity, more like, hey, I’ll teach you the tricks and I’ll give you a head start in the business and I’m gonna get equity and then I’ll just kinda disappear and you, you know, pay me a dividend based on my share in the business. But yeah, so that that was my

Kent Davis (01:30)
situation. my friend ran a very successful house cleaning business in Atlanta. when we started Dallas Sunrise Maids, I think they had around fifty-two teams and all of our house cleaning teams are two people, so that’s like a hundred and four people. They were cleaning a boatload of houses in Atlanta. So he was really

Devon Hayes (01:50)
my god. Yeah.

Kent Davis (01:51)
smart.

Kent Davis (01:52)
And what he did was he created a second Google My Business profile and started feeding all of his lead requests to that Google My Business profile. And he gave that to us to open up a new market. So he was in Atlanta, we opened up in Dallas, and when we came into the Dallas market, we were we had like 40 reviews and five stars. So we kind of caught some momentum. As you guys know, it’s annoying doing anything with Google My Business, you know, to explain.

Devon Hayes (02:20)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (02:20)
That

Kent Davis (02:21)
we had moved to Atlanta or from Atlanta to Dallas. and he allowed me to come in and step into his business for about a month and a half. my wife and I literally every day were in that operation understanding the nuts and bolts of how it works, so that when we hit we came to Dallas, we hit the ground running. And but yeah, it was just us two at the beginning, husband and wife doing what we could. in this business, I don’t know if you guys have found this with other your

Kent Davis (02:47)
your other clients, but I think the Achilles heel is always the hiring, at least in this side of home services of house cleaning. there’s always clients. well, I mean you gotta look for and you gotta work with amazing marketing agencies like y’all.

Kent Davis (03:03)
But, you know, I would say it’s it’s more challenging to find good employees, good contractors, good team members than it is it’s always a balance, right? Of like, yeah. boy, you sure you wanna have me on this

Devon Hayes (03:16)
Yeah, do you find

Kent Davis (03:17)
podcast? I just speak in paragraphs, y’all. You gotta cut me off.

Amanda Joyce (03:20)
Thanks.

Devon Hayes (03:21)
No,

Devon Hayes (03:21)
it’s no it’s true, but that is like a follow-up question that ’cause depending on the industry, it’s like what is harder to find customers or to find employees. And so the customers, because you already had a leg up with like this organic like five star rating for house cleaners, which as anyone who’s ever been through a housekeeping company or cleaners, like you you just want consistency. So when you have a profile with reviews, people are giving you five stars, you had that, but then

Devon Hayes (03:47)
to be able to fulfill the promise, that sounds like the harder part, which it sounds like that could be true for a lot of businesses, not just, you know, not just yours, is finding like the keepers, who’s consistent, who shows up, who does a good job, not just on the first clean, but on the rest of the cleans and and like building that out. So you’re speaking in very relatable paragraphs, Kent.

Kent Davis (04:08)
All right.

Amanda Joyce (04:08)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (04:09)
Cool. Yeah. No, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. wife and I got it started in Dallas and you know, I mean we tried to bootstrap it at the beginning like any business owner does. I had a little bit of SEO knowledge.

Kent Davis (04:23)
and you know had a friend build out the website for us. but we knew that it was gonna be a slow journey. but we wanted to kinda get some dynamite about year one point two, you know, once we had

Kent Davis (04:37)
Let’s call it maybe 12 people working for us, cleaning houses. We’re like, all right, let’s go you know, let’s try to 2x this every year. And that’s where we had to bring on an agency. and yeah, I was listening to a podcast, golly, contractor revolution or something. Some dude

Devon Hayes (04:54)
yeah, evolution, contractor evolution, yeah.

Kent Davis (04:56)
Yeah. Is that guy still around?

Devon Hayes (04:58)
So the podcast is around the original host, Benji. He now has a new podcast called well he works for LeanScaper and I think it’s the same name of the podcast. And

Amanda Joyce (05:07)
I think so.

Devon Hayes (05:08)
Contractor Evolution, their host is Danny Kerr, who I think is one of the founders of BTA. So it’s morphed a little bit, but yeah, it’s still there. It’s still still a great resource.

Kent Davis (05:18)
It was awesome. Yeah. And you know, and you were on and I was like, my God, this lady knows what she’s talking about. I was flying on an airplane so I couldn’t like immediately go to the show notes or whatever. I was listening on Spotify, but I wrote down your name and I found you on LinkedIn and I was like, Hi, can you do our SEO? And like you always do, answered immediately. And what, six years later, we’ve got I don’t know.

Kent Davis (05:46)
People we have now, 50, 45, something like that. Thanks to you all. Thanks to Elevation Marketing.

Amanda Joyce (05:52)
Amazing. So you were so

Devon Hayes (05:53)
Some

Amanda Joyce (05:55)
early days you said twelve. So you were so you were running like six crews, is that safe to say early on? And then now you’re you said you’re you’re up to like twenty five crews? Yeah. That’s

Kent Davis (06:04)
Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Kent Davis (06:06)
that’s that’s that’s what happened. f as always you hit a lot of bumps in the road. Whew

Amanda Joyce (06:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Devon Hayes (06:13)
Yeah. I was gonna say

Devon Hayes (06:15)
like with with that, like the bumps in the road, like what what did you have to like what do you think you delegated too late?

Kent Davis (06:23)
Delegated too late. Well,

Kent Davis (06:26)
To delegate as much as possible as early as possible. to do what I do best, which is shaking hands and kissing babies, you know, going to the chambers of commerce and working the real estate people. I think we made some mistakes in delegation. You know, we wanted to bootstrap with you know, Thailand and

Kent Davis (06:46)
the Philippines, no it’s the Philippines. We had a girl from Africa, I don’t know remember what country, trying to do our social media and it was just a disaster. So that was you know in Spanish you say

Amanda Joyce (06:58)
Lesson learned.

Kent Davis (06:59)
huh?

Amanda Joyce (07:00)
Just a lesson learned. Yeah. Yeah.

Kent Davis (07:02)
Yes, yes.

Kent Davis (07:04)
the the cheap ends up being expensive. Lobarato Sale Caro. and yeah, it was very cheap and very expensive. So not the exact answer, Devon, as far as what I wish you would have delegated earlier. Whew, I can’t think of anything, man. I like to delegate way early on.

Amanda Joyce (07:22)
So outs of then I guess the s the other side of that, obviously one thing was social media that maybe you shouldn’t have delegated. Was there anything else that you delegated early and had to take back, or do you feel like aside from that one example, you were able to just smartly delegate to the right people?

Kent Davis (07:36)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (07:36)
I think, you know, some of it we kept doing in-house. like

Kent Davis (07:41)
the Facebook groups, we’ve had a lot of success with those in finding workers. you know, but you can’t outsource that because from a logistics standpoint, then you can’t see when people comment on it because you can’t always post in these groups as a business, you gotta post as an individual. So if somebody comments on that individual’s post, that individual

Kent Davis (08:04)
individual needs to be actively working, you know, the conversations and the whatever comments and direct messages and all that jazz. So we found that you gotta do that in house. You can’t outsource it

Amanda Joyce (08:15)
Okay.

Kent Davis (08:15)
or else it’s just it at least in our case, kind of a mess. And

Amanda Joyce (08:19)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (08:19)
Yeah.

Amanda Joyce (08:20)
Awesome. is was there so when we’re kind of thinking about obviously at the end of this we’re gonna talk way more about the the arc of how just how where you’ve grown, but are there any other like kind of growing pains that that you felt like maybe you was there a point that you guys were adding crews quickly and you you you hit a bump or two, or do you feel like you guys have been methodical with are you are you the unicorn business owner that’s managed to scale at a level that’s consistently c sustainable?

Kent Davis (08:47)
Definitely not the unicorn business.

Kent Davis (08:49)
No, I think we’re the the typical business owners that it’s been in

Amanda Joyce (08:52)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (08:52)
fits and spurts, you know. I mean all we I’ll I should I go there? we have a head of our human resources and a big big role so our first hires were husband and wife, amazing from Honduras. And you know, as as you guys have found, it’s very difficult to find good people and we had to interview

Kent Davis (09:17)
10 people and you know the first ones we got them cleaning and then they just never showed up again. And the next ones they cleaned and then they just broke more stuff than they cleaned. So finally we found Jason and Anna. And we were like, God, we love these guys. So they started cleaning for us, and we developed a you know a pretty professional relationship that evolved into, you know, a friendship as well, because they had kids that were our kids’ age, and my wife is from Panama. So they slowly gained more responsibility.

Kent Davis (09:46)
within the company. You know, they became our quality inspectors and then they became our trainers for the new team and we were growing, you know, in that stage exponentially, it was like five and then fifteen and then, you know, after that it was like usually five teams a year. because you know you lose three and then you whatever.

Devon Hayes (10:05)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (10:06)
Electrician.

Kent Davis (10:07)
but last year and you know Anna perfectly legal,’s got her green card, everything’s groovy, shows up for a court appointment and Ice scoops her up and we lose her for five months.

Amanda Joyce (10:18)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (10:19)
And that makes the operation a little bit difficult to sustain, yet we pulled it together and then you know, she did voluntary deportation back to Honduras and now we are a very remote business. we still

Kent Davis (10:31)
still

Kent Davis (10:31)
have a very key employees in Plano in Dallas. But yeah, some of our other key employees, husband and wife, Jason and Anna are now

Kent Davis (10:40)
working not from Texas. So that was

Amanda Joyce (10:43)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (10:44)
a little disruptive. You guys have, I think, you know, you’re probably aware of that story, but I hope that anybody that ends up listening is you know isn’t as affected by that. But it’s an interesting market right now, you know, I

Devon Hayes (10:56)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (10:56)
mean it’s a lot of contraction in the labor supply. Maybe that drives prices to our favor, but it also means, you know, it’s it’s it’s getting tricky. People are poor workers.

Devon Hayes (11:07)
Yep. And

Amanda Joyce (11:07)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (11:08)
we heard that from a lot of our clients, like a lot of the owners around the country. And it was worse in some cities than others. But, you know, we’ve got clients in Minneapolis and San Antonio. It was a there was a lot of that going on too. and just yeah, we won’t get political on this, but it’s more of a disruptor than anyone who like doesn’t they want to throw their hands up and not be involved or not have an opinion. It impacts

Devon Hayes (11:31)
you more every day than you realize, you know, and it takes a toll on small business and of course the individual, but it’s yeah, it’s it’s a brutal landscape. So despite that, you were this this amazing husband and wife team. They’re now working remotely. You’ve been able to kind of sustain the growth or start to rebuild, I guess, a bit from

Devon Hayes (11:51)
Poor Anna and her her stint and I I can’t imagine what that

Amanda Joyce (11:55)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (11:55)
was like for Jason and her husband and how yeah that that impacted them like emotionally. That’s awful.

Kent Davis (12:01)
Yeah, it’s awful.

Devon Hayes (12:02)
so then kind of changing the channel a little bit there,

Devon Hayes (12:05)
Now you’re back in growth mode. You’ve got your team back. They’re working remotely. You have key employees that who are just lovely that we love interacting with there in Plano. talk to us a little bit about how how you decided to choose SEO as a marketing channel, because a lot of times when I look in like these Facebook groups that you mentioned, and I kind of am just a fly on the wall a lot of times, I see people saying, just tell me which marketing channel works.

Devon Hayes (12:31)
That’s what I wanna do as the business owner. Save me the dumb tax. Like I I just want one that works. Like how did you decide where to focus your marketing on? And and like I originally asked, like how what made you decide? You know what, I need SEO?

Kent Davis (12:44)
Sure. I come from a a real estate background. So I I was involved in a real estate company for many years. and that was always one of our key

Kent Davis (12:55)
channels for marketing is is Google organic search results and SEO and now AEO are a direct function of that and there’s only so much you can do and going back to that podcast when you said anybody that’s charging you less than fifteen hundred dollars a month is simply not doing enough like period that that really said to me this lady has she’s got it she’s got a team

Kent Davis (13:20)
behind her and it’s such a thorough sort of bean counting process. It’s not just writing articles and like you know stacking in keywords to win Google anymore. It’s it’s this massive beast of a

Kent Davis (13:38)
Data management exercise that an optimization exercise that a business owner just, you know, and I knew a bit about it and knew that I wouldn’t do a good job at it. So I said, all right, well, it’s time. It’s time to bring in a professional. I’ve been shopping for a while too. And you know, just like just like real estate people and maybe just like taxi drivers and house cleaners, SEO agencies are I don’t want to say a dime a dozen, but there a lot of

Kent Davis (14:06)
Them and it’s all over the world, right? It’s

Devon Hayes (14:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kent Davis (14:08)
yeah, it’s it’s a very competitive industry, but when you find a pro that knows what they’re doing, that runs their team effectively, that communicates well, that stays on top of industry trends, that does like the dopest podcast out there, you just know, you just know that these guys and gals are the real deal. So no, I mean we’ve been with y’all for gee whiz. I mean.

Kent Davis (14:33)
what is it four years something like that? It’s been a minute.

Devon Hayes (14:36)
So yeah.

Amanda Joyce (14:38)
It’s fine. Yeah,

Devon Hayes (14:39)
yeah, yeah, we started,

Amanda Joyce (14:39)
it’s fine.

Devon Hayes (14:40)
we did we did a I think we did a marketing plan first and then yeah, we kinda so you could see what it was like to work with us. and then and then yeah, we got into recurring services after we did I think we did a s marketing plan, then we kind of did a setup, so kind of eased you into a recurring marketing retainer, I think. So

Amanda Joyce (15:00)
Yeah. And

Kent Davis (15:00)
And it’s

Kent Davis (15:00)
working.

Amanda Joyce (15:00)
it was

Amanda Joyce (15:01)
yeah. I was gonna say it was fun too, ’cause Devon and I were like I mean, we’re in home service but we’d never we were sleeping on your vertical, honestly. So it was it was a fun exciting challenge, but it completely aligned with what we were offering to other home service companies.

Kent Davis (15:14)
yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m glad that you guys took us on. and the cool thing is, you know, a lot of these house cleaning companies are some of them are smaller that have been around for a while that simply do not understand the value of the internet mar as a marketplace and rely on traditional media like signs and flyers and maybe a radio ad or two or something. so yeah, we were able to kind of thanks to

Kent Davis (15:40)
you guys jump past a lot of people and get towards the top, you know, first page and even, you know, top one, two or three on quickly. And but now, you know, the market has changed and we’ve got a lot of competitors nipping, nipping at our toes, but man, we we on the elevation train. So we’re not worried about them. We’re staying

Devon Hayes (16:00)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (16:02)
ahead of them. we’re

Kent Davis (16:04)
with you guys, continue to reinvest in best practices, you know, and yeah, it’s it’s it’s a fun industry to be in.

Kent Davis (16:14)
And one thing I really like about working with you guys is, you know, we have like some crazy tech stacks with like our, you know, our automated

Devon Hayes (16:21)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (16:22)
dialers and SMSs and zapiers connected to our Hubspot and all that stuff. And you all have the expertise to kind of jump into not just SEO, but kind of the full suite of marketing to help us, you know, all the way down to like signs, you know, and and and verbiage for it for text messages.

Kent Davis (16:43)
Like that kind of stuff is really that that’s what moves the needle, I think, is being able to kinda, you know, just cast a wide net, but be really effective in what we go after together.

Devon Hayes (16:55)
Yeah, that is true. We didn’t just say, Okay, we’re gonna stay in our little local SEO bucket. I think that’s where we started, but I think what makes the entire marketing program for Dallas Sunrise Maids work is that we do get a we get we get a peek at everything else you’re doing. So we get a kind of tie it all together in a nice bow and make sure that what you’re saying on text or on flyers or your leave behinds align or emails align with what we’re doing organically, and making sure that, you know, we’re we’re kinda

Devon Hayes (17:24)
complementing all the other marketing channels versus that’s and that I I guess I mean we didn’t mean to talk about how wonderful elevation is here. But that’s

Amanda Joyce (17:31)
I think.

Devon Hayes (17:32)
what that’s what’s kind of nice with clients. We get to kind of add more of these flex hours on to really like have a comprehensive marketing program instead of just like we only do this one service and this is all we do. I I think I don’t know if a lot of agencies do that, but that’s a great point, Kent, in in sharing that and bringing that bringing that up. But we

Devon Hayes (17:52)
Definitely so I think something that you do within your marketing that all business owners listening to this need to think about is that yes, we’re we’re super strategic and wonderful, but the other part of it is the the review piece of it. I feel like you guys have nailed that side of life to to maintain that visibility in the local three pack. We know that that’s where the most transactions happen, but I was like going back and prepping for this. I looked at some stats and

Devon Hayes (18:19)
Think when we started with you even just this just this year actually 2026, you had 409 reviews and now mid-year. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean you guys

Kent Davis (18:28)
Approaching six hundred I heard this morning on our sales meeting.

Amanda Joyce (18:32)
Mm-hmm.

Devon Hayes (18:34)
have figured out the review game, which really moves the needle. Can you? I mean, that’s incredible. I it so complements what we’re doing, and it makes your investment that much more impactful for for this channel. And and

Devon Hayes (18:48)
Organic conversions are like the creme de la creme. They’re the best leads. They’re looking for you where you want to be. So for anyone like confused about which marketing channel, I mean, that’s it. You really want to be in the three-pack. Transactions happen there. But talk to us about your like getting reviews. How did you get your team’s buy-in on that? How are you asking customers? How are they being such good reviews that Google is actually letting them stick and not taking them down? Share your secrets.

Kent Davis (19:17)
Well,

Kent Davis (19:17)
I got a guy in Russia. if I pay him five just kidding. Vladimir. It’s amazing.

Devon Hayes (19:21)
Wait, hold on. Hold on. Let’s Okay.

Devon Hayes (19:26)
It’s fantastic. Okay, you got a guy in Russia. Go on.

Amanda Joyce (19:29)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (19:30)
No, no, I got two words

Kent Davis (19:31)
for you. Nice job. love that

Devon Hayes (19:32)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (19:33)
platform. It’s very effective, multi-touch. So we’ve built that into our system where we send them the nice job immediately after you do the review. I mean after you do the nice job is a platform that allows us to communicate via email and SMS with our clients and we roll enroll them immediately right after the cleaning. So that’s the one that’s part of our tech stack. And then internally

Kent Davis (19:56)
We incentivize our team members to solicit a review. We pay them 10 bucks per review whenever they get a review. good job by them, you know. They may or may not work harder knowing they’re gonna get a review, but that extra little, it might be 15 now, I don’t remember, but that extra little. and we chart it so that everybody, when you come in on payday on Friday and you see your name with two.

Kent Davis (20:21)
Columns. Column one is how many reviews you’ve gotten that week, and column two is how many complaints you’ve gotten that week. So it’s very competitive. people, you know, I mean, they you don’t want to be at the bottom. so yeah, I think that’s a couple of things we’ve done. I hate asking for reviews. literally, me as a as a as a person, I’m embarrassed too, but when you can automate it, it’s like whatever. I set it up and then it just happens.

Kent Davis (20:47)
happens, incentivize your teams, you know. we actually just designed T shirts, the new uniforms that

Devon Hayes (20:56)
Hey, hey.

Kent Davis (20:57)
have a QR code on the back. And it’s it’s like I think it says like like what you see, scan for a review or something like that. I don’t think it’s that scandalous, but ’cause it’s double on Tandra there.

Kent Davis (21:10)
But yeah, QR codes. QR codes and booty sorts. That’s kind

Devon Hayes (21:13)
You say things like watch me as I walk away.

Kent Davis (21:16)
of what is is getting the job done for us. Got a team of viewers.

Devon Hayes (21:19)
so okay, so you’ve got the QR

Devon Hayes (21:21)
code takes them probably to what leave like your Google business profile.

Kent Davis (21:26)
Yep.

Devon Hayes (21:26)
I like it. And and you get reviews there. Well, I hope you have a UTM code on that because I would love to I would love to see how many people are scanning the t-shirts. That’s awesome. So you keep

Kent Davis (21:36)
Yes, that’s new.

Devon Hayes (21:37)
it competitive and obviously you know, there’s there’s no

Devon Hayes (21:42)
unnatural patterns to how they’re getting reviews because those reviews wouldn’t stick to Google. That’s you know, that’s what their AI is looking for. Cause a lot

Kent Davis (21:51)
Yep.

Devon Hayes (21:51)
of companies in our in our world we see a lot of fear mongering around asking for reviews. And even Google has come out and said like, you know, we’re we’re gonna penalize you if you’re sitting on their doorstep asking for a review. We don’t want you to do that. Yada yada yada. But if it’s

Devon Hayes (22:08)
not forced it’s an option here it is and there’s not like use this description where you know ai matches a pattern of hi Kent was really helpful with my house cleaning

Kent Davis (22:19)
Be impaced.

Devon Hayes (22:20)
in Play No like it does you know there’s no pattern to it so for those someone listening to this they we I see a lot of noise from the home services agencies about reviews and how you ask for reviews and where you ask for reviews.

Devon Hayes (22:33)
and a lot of fear mongering, but if it’s done naturally, you really don’t have anything to worry about. It’s the it’s the pattern recognition of the same device that has the same IP address and you’re handing it to the homeowner saying, leave me a review, that’s gonna, that’s gonna be your red flag. And then if the text within the review matches like 86% of your reviews match that review pattern, then then you’re gonna get dinged. But outside of that, but going back to what you said about nice job, I love that too.

Devon Hayes (23:00)
I’m with you, just set it up and it’s like I think they recommend with all the data that they have. It’s four touch points. And I think maybe the first is an email and then a text. you can set it up however you want, but I don’t know. Do you do email, text, text, email or email and then three text messages? How do you know your do you know your workflow?

Kent Davis (23:20)
Whatever I

Kent Davis (23:21)
set up like five years ago when we s turned that on, I haven’t changed it because it’s you know, it’s it’s worth

Amanda Joyce (23:26)
And it’s working. Yeah. I

Devon Hayes (23:27)
I think it’s their recommend yeah, I can’t remember. I think it’s like

Amanda Joyce (23:30)
think it’s text

Devon Hayes (23:30)
one email and three

Amanda Joyce (23:31)
and then and then it goes all email. ‘Cause I was kinda surprised by

Devon Hayes (23:33)
Okay, I

Amanda Joyce (23:33)
that when we were setting it up for clients, but that’s what they recommend and they’ve got the data to prove it.

Kent Davis (23:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Devon Hayes (23:39)
Yeah, clearly.

Kent Davis (23:40)
You know, and then you can get granular and talk about exactly what the copy looks like. You know, we we subscribe to the the story, Donald Miller story brand, you know, make the marketing about your client versus about you. So it’s very

Amanda Joyce (23:54)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Davis (23:55)
second person wording. but yeah, and our team members are incentivized to get those reviews and there’s a nice little element of competition.

Amanda Joyce (24:03)
Love it.

Devon Hayes (24:03)
Okay,

Devon Hayes (24:04)
I love that. I love that. That’s some good some good ops intel right there. what about like outside of digital marketing and anything we do for you, do you guys do like leave behinds? Do you do direct mail at all? Is there like what other kind of like little hidden gems do you have in there? Like any other job site marketing? Like, I don’t know. Like we we had a plumber leave behind a a custom poopery.

Devon Hayes (24:27)
with their logo on it in our bathroom for us, which I’m like, that’s that’s brilliant. so yeah, do you guys have anything considered that doesn’t

Kent Davis (24:35)
We

Devon Hayes (24:35)
that?

Kent Davis (24:36)
Every now and then we go on a little run of generosity. So we’ll we’ll buy like on on Mondays for a couple months in a row, we’ll we’ll go to like Trader Joe’s and buy like a giant bouquet of flowers and then break up that bouquet into like five bouquets and leave them at like five clients’ houses and then we’ve got like a

Kent Davis (24:55)
thank you note that everybody from the company signed and that says thank you for your business. So we’ve done that before. I’d say we

Kent Davis (25:03)
To track that, but we do that. let’s see here. we tried to do some charity cleans. those were just complete disasters, though. my god, awful man.

Devon Hayes (25:12)
Why? Why?

Kent Davis (25:14)
People be tripping. Like like we did for the whole all of my kids elementary school, we gave at the end of the summer, like all of the fourth grade teachers, a free house cleaning, because it always gets a little slow for us over the summer.

Kent Davis (25:29)
And like, I don’t know, maybe we average like one complaint a week. Like, the team forgot to lift up the I don’t know, the the move the ovens. Like, we don’t move we don’t move ovens, ma’am. Sorry, we don’t wanna we can’t move anything over twenty pounds. We don’t wanna damage your floors. but like we got more complaints from those damn teachers and their free cleanings. Can you believe

Amanda Joyce (25:50)
Whoa.

Kent Davis (25:50)
that? We just laughed.

Devon Hayes (25:51)
No.

Kent Davis (25:53)
How are you even giving feedback right now? You didn’t even pay for this.

Amanda Joyce (25:58)
Wow.

Kent Davis (25:59)
and you know, this is like a two, three, four hundred dollar free clean. It’s like, hey, let’s

Devon Hayes (26:02)
Donation, yeah.

Amanda Joyce (26:04)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (26:04)
go 80-20 here, lady. Like, but we do good. I mean, you know, we we we we have very high standards. Our teams, you know, we have we do a full-time quality checker who’s out auditing seven to eight houses a week a day. we clean about three hundred houses a week. So, you know, like we’re good at what we do.

Kent Davis (26:22)
do

Kent Davis (26:22)
and we’re not light on the the details and the professionalism both within the office and obviously in the cleans because you can have the best office team and like they’re they’re forgetting to clean the kitchen floor, you’re not gonna

Devon Hayes (26:35)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (26:36)
survive. But man, can you believe these damn teachers? I’m not gonna tell you which school district it was but wow

Devon Hayes (26:42)
I I can guess.

Kent Davis (26:43)
I mean, yeah, it’s like Karen Elementary, but but that’s okay. That’s okay. We we you live and you learn. we also what’s that?

Devon Hayes (26:51)
So that was okay. go on.

Devon Hayes (26:53)
Go on. Go on. You also do what? Sorry, I interrupted.

Kent Davis (26:56)
I remember the question. What was the question?

Devon Hayes (26:59)
just about marketing outside of digital, leave behinds. You talked about bouquets breaking those down. You did the free cleanings. So within the community you’ve done charity work, but charity work is a disaster.

Devon Hayes (27:11)
I was

Devon Hayes (27:11)
gonna ask about your referral partners too, ’cause that’s a whole other like side of the business and like you know, that relationship based marketing.

Kent Davis (27:20)
For sure. Yeah. I mean like we’ve identified real estate agents, and property managers as kind of a honeypot. and have found even that smaller agencies, like if you have a hundred percent of their business, it’s it’s it can be great versus trying to get, you know, like fifty agents from like the Keller Williams office and just chasing them and spending money like I

Kent Davis (27:46)
I used to do, I used to do like free breakfast, you know. We got an agency here, it’s not Keller Williams, but man, these clowns, they have they have vendors come in once a week and you pay for their you know their whole breakfast, and I like cooked all this food for like 30 people and I got up super early and like had this spread. And I rolled up, and you know, you get a couple minutes to talk to them before their weekly sales meeting. And man, these people could care less. They just kind of were like, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Kent Davis (28:15)
Uh-uh, and just like stuffing their face with my like, I don’t even know what I made, but chew wee. I have a good breakfast.

Amanda Joyce (28:22)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (28:23)
so yes, versus this one guy that runs a small boutique agency that also does property management. he just happened to use us for his house. And he’s like, I like you guys, you know, I’m gonna let you l get your name around our office. And sure enough, you know, we gotta we’re we’re still

Kent Davis (28:42)
steady with them. so we’ve got some friends in the industry, actually in in your neck of the woods, Devon, out there in Littleton,

Devon Hayes (28:49)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (28:50)
that had a lot of luck with home builders. so like new new new homes getting clean for the first time. I think that’s can be seasonal and or very kind of economically turbulent. You know, you can’t build your business on that. But yes, it’s nice to I kind of go up

Kent Davis (29:08)
up channel a little bit and think about people that can put you in touch with other people and we’ve had good success with those guys

Amanda Joyce (29:16)
Awesome.

Devon Hayes (29:17)
Yeah, that’s a good

Kent Davis (29:18)
but

Amanda Joyce (29:18)
Not true.

Kent Davis (29:19)
you still gotta do it ’cause you never know who you’re gonna connect with. Like I did another one of those events and I did get one dude that like handled some of the Dallas Cowboys. So like we’re cleaning Dallas Cowboys houses. So that kinda it’s a crapshoot. you gotta kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince but or princess. but yes.

Amanda Joyce (29:39)
Yeah. You’ve you’ve got a good ecosystem that you’ve built there. Yeah.

Kent Davis (29:42)
Yes.

Amanda Joyce (29:43)
Okay, so this kind of plays off that a little bit, but like so you’ve talked to us about a lot of the experiences you’ve had over over the years growing Dallas Sunrise Maids. If somebody was to hand you if all the money that you’ve invested over the years and you got to take that and invest it over the next next year or two, where would you put that money?

Kent Davis (30:01)
Okay, so so I guess the question is let’s say that hypothetically we’ve spent you know fifty grand a year over the last five years. So somebody’s

Amanda Joyce (30:09)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Davis (30:10)
like, hey man, go spend two hundred and fifty grand and just like yeah.

Kent Davis (30:17)
probably just like quadruple down with you guys,

Amanda Joyce (30:17)
Other than a vacation.

Kent Davis (30:20)
be like, All right ladies, let’s get let’s let’s dominate Dallas market. No, I don’t

Kent Davis (30:26)
That’s a hard one. I don’t think marketing works like that. I think marketing is slow and steady. I think it’s

Amanda Joyce (30:32)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (30:32)
spending just enough money. you know, you never get the results immediately. it’s always I mean, AdWords maybe paid a little bit more. and you guys have done a terrific job managing all of our paid advertising as well. with AdWords you know, very transparent in the way that you guys deploy our our budget.

Kent Davis (30:51)
budget but and it works but I wouldn’t dump it all into AdWords either you know because I think that there’s just so yeah I don’t know Amanda I mean it I would probably you know put it away for a rainy day take the wife out for a weekend somewhere cool maybe buy mama some new shoes too you

Amanda Joyce (31:10)
It’s

Kent Davis (31:12)
know I mean like marketing’s just a slow you just gotta keep going y’all know that

Amanda Joyce (31:16)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. But there’s not

Kent Davis (31:17)
So I don’t know what I I don’t think what would you do?

Amanda Joyce (31:20)
something that you invested a ton in that you would have if you could go in a time machine, you’d take the money out. I mean, it seems like you’ve been pretty wise with the way you’ve invested. You’ve you’ve been you’ve been smart about it and like you said, it’s been a slow grow. But you know, some people might say, I invested a ton early on in this and w if I had that money again I wouldn’t do that.

Kent Davis (31:37)
Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a better answer in a little bit. But I tell you what, we didn’t make hardly any money that first year. Ooh, we we lost money because we were, you know, putting it all back into business, you know, and

Amanda Joyce (31:52)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (31:52)
and hoping to get a little book of recurring clients. so

Devon Hayes (31:55)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (31:56)
you know, and we probably spent about thirty grand, easy.

Kent Davis (31:59)
in year one and that’s even before we had an agency. So but that was getting stuff set up and like kinda bootstrapping all the stuff that I’ve ultimately had you guys do much more efficiently than I could have. but yeah, just plan on that too. But if you know, if it was easy everybody’d be doing it. So like a lot of people step out year two just ’cause they were waiting for that bingo but that’s when you start hitting a stride. You can breathe.

Amanda Joyce (32:25)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (32:26)
It does take a whole a whole lot of like groundwork, foundational work. Like you there’s there’s so much there. And even like when we thought we had gotten this great foundation for you, because when you came to us, you already had a boatload of content that you had been writing and things that at the time for SEO, it was great. I think there was like a blog on like cleaning out a cooler and marble cleaning.

Devon Hayes (32:50)
And then as like, you know, search engines and AI came along, things got smarter. And then all of a sudden, all this content, we had a ton of traffic from it that was the how-to versions of cleaning X, Y, and Z, and you became like a cleaning, like your your website became known as an information source for how to clean things versus a service provider of a housekeeping company.

Devon Hayes (33:16)
So we had to say, sorry, we need to actually clean up your your site, your entity, and make it all about the services you offer in the locations that you offer. So those vanity metrics are gonna look bad because we’re not gonna say, you got five million impressions, Kent. We would we had to say, well, we’re reducing the impressions, but at the same time, your phone calls on your Google Business profile have gone up like 46% because now search engines and AI was understanding that you’re a service provider.

Devon Hayes (33:45)
not an not just like like a how-to resource for cleaning things, but I think that like ties into having understanding a bit about your marketing. So like you said, year one is gonna be slow, but you’re but not being married to the metrics and vanity metrics in marketing, I think is another important thing and you’ve always been easy to work with because you listen to what we’re saying. A lot a lot of feedback we get is that we’re we’re we educate a lot.

Devon Hayes (34:13)
During our quarterly reviews with clients, we don’t do automated reports because to us it’s like charts and graphs and here makes sense out of this. What we do is say, okay, here’s charts and graphs. These numbers of impressions and clicks and organic traffic to your website, they don’t look as good this quarter, but look it now. You’re understood as a service provider, not an informational blog website. So anyways.

Devon Hayes (34:37)
the proper growth, the proper foundation, that slow grow in the first year in terms of like SEO, that’s part of like weeding out, looking at the data, seeing what works, making sure you have like a variety of like top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of funnel content, and having like a partner on your side who’s looking at how the machines look at you. I I call machines robots, but ’cause now it’s search and it’s AI and how they all work together. But

Kent Davis (35:00)
My God, if we didn’t have you guys, I would have had no clue what was going on. I would have been like, Where where’s our traffic? Why, why, why did everything just sort of fall off? Like, what business owner knows to look and figure out how Google is looking at us? Like that’s that’s worth its weight in gold. There’s my two hundred and fifty thousand. I would just clone Devon. That’s what I would do. I’d be another Devon. Yeah. Like you know, or Amanda. no,

Devon Hayes (35:18)
Yeah. There we go. my gosh.

Amanda Joyce (35:23)
Great answer.

Kent Davis (35:25)
I mean that’s you guys are invaluable and I found it and anybody

Kent Davis (35:28)
Again, if you make it this far in the podcast, surround yourself with people that are extremely capable. Don’t be, you know, bring in some cheap solution because it’s not gonna do you any good. Bring in pros. just like if you’re a contractor, you know, you’ve got your professionals working for you. Same same applies to vendors and

Devon Hayes (35:51)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (35:51)
and and partners, business partners. So

Devon Hayes (35:55)
And taking the

Devon Hayes (35:55)
time to actually listen, I think, and and not just say, you know, set it and forget it. Okay, I’m marketing’s taken care of. You actually still have to like show an interest and pay attention to the kind of what’s happening, some of the numbers and not ignore our emails and and click up tickets. But okay, so we have taken up so much of your time this morning and we so appreciate you. We do have

Devon Hayes (36:21)
whole bunch of fun rapid fire questions that I think will help. I mean house housekeeping business owners, but truly like any business owner, these are some good meaty rapid fire questions. So you just

Kent Davis (36:31)
Right.

Devon Hayes (36:32)
as best you can, you don’t have to answer in the form of a question. All right. All right. You can just see see see what and and don’t feel like cutting yourself off either. It’s not like, you know, we’ve got a a a timer right here. But all right.

Devon Hayes (36:45)
Amanda, you wanna let’s see here, you wanna you wanna kick us off with these rapid fire?

Amanda Joyce (36:48)
Yep.

Amanda Joyce (36:49)
Let’s go. One thing every housekeeping owner should measure weekly.

Kent Davis (36:53)
Number of reviews.

Devon Hayes (36:54)
Mm-hmm. One marketing expense you’d never cut.

Kent Davis (36:57)
SEO and AEO.

Amanda Joyce (36:59)
Most overrated marketing tactic.

Kent Davis (37:01)
Shaking hands and kissing babies.

Devon Hayes (37:03)
Mm-hmm. Most underrated?

Devon Hayes (37:04)
most

Devon Hayes (37:05)
underrated.

Kent Davis (37:05)
Underrated would have been shaking hands and kids. Overrated? I don’t know. Maybe print media?

Devon Hayes (37:11)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Best

Amanda Joyce (37:11)
Mm-hmm. Love it.

Devon Hayes (37:13)
source of recurring customers.

Kent Davis (37:14)
Furals.

Devon Hayes (37:15)
Mm. Always right.

Amanda Joyce (37:16)
Yeah, best partnership you formed.

Kent Davis (37:18)
Now y’all know elevation marketing.

Devon Hayes (37:22)
Boom. biggest hiring mistake.

Kent Davis (37:24)
Working with my wife? Just kidding. Honey.

Devon Hayes (37:30)
Yeah,

Devon Hayes (37:31)
right.

Kent Davis (37:33)
Whoa,

Kent Davis (37:34)
retake. let’s see. What was the question? Where’s hiring mistake?

Devon Hayes (37:37)
Biggest hiring mistake.

Kent Davis (37:39)
I think as you different industries call for a different level of employee boss relationship and certain contractors or

Kent Davis (37:50)
Employees or workers will kind of step a little bit further and might need a little bit more kind of stay in your lane versus like let’s do an employee picnic. so we stopped doing those. sadly, just because I don’t know, people didn’t stick around, like it was weird. but yes,

Kent Davis (38:08)
That hiring mistake would be getting too close to your employees, maybe dropping your

Devon Hayes (38:14)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (38:14)
card.

Amanda Joyce (38:14)
Answer.

Amanda Joyce (38:15)
Yeah. Okay, biggest pricing mistake.

Kent Davis (38:18)
increasing pricing early enough.

Devon Hayes (38:21)
Mm mm. What would you tell yourself when Dallas Sunrise Maids was at five hundred thousand a year?

Kent Davis (38:27)
I mean keep grinding. You know, you got though it’s fine. onwards.

Amanda Joyce (38:31)
Love it. Okay. And then what’s one thing an owner listening today could do before Friday that could genuinely positively impact their their business?

Kent Davis (38:39)
Look into nice job.

Devon Hayes (38:42)
Mm-hmm. Love it.

Kent Davis (38:42)
I would say

Amanda Joyce (38:42)
Awesome.

Kent Davis (38:43)
yeah. If they’re concerned

Devon Hayes (38:44)
Yeah.

Kent Davis (38:44)
about their reviews.

Devon Hayes (38:46)
G get them reviews. Yep. Absolutely. Well, those are some great, great nuggets. Thank you so much for sharing so much about your kind of journey and how you’ve grown and all the the nitty gritty, the good, the bad, the ugly with us. We we so appreciate it and you know, we love the partnership and working with you and this did feel a bit self promotional, but we did not aim for it to be. But we gotta thank you for all that ’cause that’s fantastic.

Kent Davis (39:12)
can’t I always have

Kent Davis (39:14)
I mean this is Dallas and I’ve been s I’ve got elevation on my other other side.

Devon Hayes (39:18)
No, we could Yeah.

Amanda Joyce (39:18)
And a QR code on your back.

Kent Davis (39:21)
Like what you see. anyway yeah cool happy to do it y’all thanks for having me on

Devon Hayes (39:25)
Yeah, thank you. And if you guys found this helpful or think somebody else will, please like, share, follow, comment, let us know what questions you have.

Amanda Joyce (39:34)
All the things.

Kent Davis (39:34)
Cool.