CBL EP 150 The Holiday Gift Card Playbook for Cleaning Business Owners

 Holiday Gift Cards & Cleaning Packages That Actually Sell!

 In this episode of Cleaning Business Life, Shannon Miller and co-host Jamie Runco break down how to turn seasonal gift cards and cleaning packages into real fourth-quarter profit without burning out your team or blowing up your schedule. From low-tech Canva vouchers to plastic gift cards and “Mommy Reset” premium packages, they walk you through how to sell more, protect your margins, and avoid the most common mistakes cleaning business owners make during the holidays.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why house cleaning is one of the most appreciated (and underused) holiday gifts
• How to add an extra $5K–$40K to your Q4 bottom line with gift card sales
• Smart ways to redeem gift cards in phases so you don’t overload your schedule
• The difference between charity/fundraiser gift baskets and paid gift cards
• How to use paper vouchers, Canva designs, or third-party plastic cards
• Why you should number, sign, and track every gift card to prevent fraud
• How blackout dates protect your calendar around Christmas, Mother’s Day, and other peak times
• Ideas for profitable packages, including:
  • Mommy Reset Packages
  • Mini top-to-bottom deluxe cleans
  • Laundry-only or dishes-only packages
  • “Make Your Bed” recurring service bundles
• How to price high-ticket packages so they actually move the needle in your business
• Turning one-time gift card redemptions into recurring weekly, biweekly, or monthly clients

Resources Mentioned:

• Klean Freaks University – Training, tools, and resources for cleaning business owners:
  KleanFreaksUniversity.com
• Maid-Broker Cleaning Services & Packages:
  Maid-Broker.com
• Black Friday Bonanza & Mommy Reset Package (for strategy, pricing, and done-for-you structure) – available through Klean Freaks University.

Chapters

• 0:00 Tempo: 120.0

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:53

This is Cleaning Business Life with Jamie Runco and myself, Shannon Miller. Today we're diving into one of the easiest ways to add serious cash to your fourth quarter. You guessed it. Seasonal gift cards and holiday cleaning packages that actually sell. We'll talk about how to structure profitable offers, avoid overloading your schedule with redemptions, and turn one-time gift card buyers into long-term recurring clients. Ding ding ding. Let's dive in. Recording in progress. Recording in progress. Oh my gosh. It's yeah, these days go by fast. Long time no see, Miss Jamie.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34

Hello. Hello, everyone. Hello. Hello. Hello. I have a blue tongue. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. And today we're going to be talking about seasonal holiday gift cards packages that actually sell. And I needed a lot of coaching and training in this area because I really couldn't get it. I was just, I don't know. My head couldn't wrap around it real easily. But Shannon has it pretty pretty good and down. And she has a lot of success in selling gift cards and such to clients.

SPEAKER_00: 2:13

Yes. And when you first start to think about it traditionally, and this is changing over time, no one really thought of getting house cleaning as a gift. I mean, I would think it was the most awesome gift ever, right? Imagine it. So it's it's like, what do you what are you doing with this stuff, right? So what do you want, what do you want to get grandma or mom or your sister, your sister-in-law, whoever, a gift? Why not give them a gift card from your business, right? You can add on an extra, depending on how you sell them and where you start and how big your email lists, you can add on an extra 20 to 40 grand on your bottom line for fourth quarter just by gift card sales. And you don't have to redeem all of the gift cards at once. I reiterate this on more than one occasion on multiple podcasts, because what happens is if you sell 20 to 40,000 gift cards and you redeem 20 to 40,000 gift cards all at once, it could stop the bank and lots of things can happen. So you, when you sell them, and this is a strategy that's talked about in the Black Friday Bonanza, you have to do them in spurts. So if, especially if there's a lot of fundraisers, a lot of charity giveaways, those are a little bit different, but they are gift cards. So you don't have to redeem all of the gift cards at once. You can redeem maybe one or two, you can say my schedule is full. There's avenues for you to get out of. So you don't have to redeem all of them at once. Because if you gave out 15 gift baskets for the school and the soccer team and the PTA and all that other way down. And then you're gonna have 15 people who all want to have a free clean because you gave away the gift card, that could really be detrimental to your bottom line because you're still paying all that labor and the expenses of running that labor. So you have to do one or two a week, depending on where you are, budget-wise. There's a whole philosophy behind it. So make sure that you understand that you don't have to do it all at once, but you can sell gift cards. Jamie and I were talking pre-podcast that I actually occasionally still have people go, I have this gift card that I had with Castle Keeper Cleaning, and I would still take it to this day, even though my prices have increased, because I'm hoping to close them and get them back on my schedule. So if they have a$150 gift card, their cleaning more than likely is going to be$250 or$300. So I might be eating initially because I don't own that company anymore,$150. But the reality is in the long term, I'm looking at what I'm gonna make off them in the future.

SPEAKER_01: 4:40

Yeah, you're looking at the long, uh, you're looking at the long goal here, which is we're hoping that we're closing on clients, right? And that they are going to continue services, whether it's weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, that they cannot. We have wowed them so much, they cannot go without us.

SPEAKER_00: 5:04

Sorry, it looks like an 8-year-old.

SPEAKER_01: 5:05

I can see the green light.

SPEAKER_00: 5:07

So I was like, I might change that. I'm sorry, I should have said something. You're totally fine.

SPEAKER_01: 5:12

So where do where do people how do you so you say gift card? I mean, can you just go and I guess like Amazon or something? They would have gift cards, but I would want third-party vendors that you could buy from.

SPEAKER_00: 5:25

There usually is a setup fee when you buy the plastic gift cards. You we've seen them, you go into Target. We I I go to my kit, we every birthday party because I don't buy gifts. Oh we cards, we put it in a card, I send it over. We sometimes we throw it in the bag, sometimes we don't. And there's a whole section over there. They have like Apple, Apple Bee's, and then they have maybe Friday, they have a visa or whatever. Well, it's a prepaid, it's not prepaid, but the card itself has to be purchased. It's something that you buy. So when those restaurants and those parties, like pottery, barn, or whatever, they pre-buy those in bulk. So there's a setup fee usually at a third-party vendor. They approve the website and then they they send you these plastic cards. And there's criteria. Some of the plastic cards now, because of the fraud, have to be scratched off with an actual different label put on because of the fraud that was happening, or you can number an initial, is what I recommend. And it and it's a little bit of an expense. So if you're new to this and you're not prepared, do not panic. What you can do is you can go right into Canva and or Jamie, you flash your um your voucher there. Jamie has a nice voucher that is good for a cleaning.

SPEAKER_01: 6:35

I'm assuming I didn't read all of the yeah, it's a deep clean service. This was actually for the kids at the TLC camps to support that. And this, you guys, got the highest bid at this auction for$650. So all that that is like me donating all that to, but I still had to pay the labor on it, right? Which was great because this house was already immaculate. Sometimes those are really hard to clean, but sometimes uh it was a really great clean. But, anyways, that's neither here nor there.

SPEAKER_00: 7:16

This is a paper voucher, like what Jamie did. I don't remember what you paid for that to have this printed out.

SPEAKER_01: 7:23

I this was actually a trade for services.

SPEAKER_00: 7:28

Okay, so she traded, so there was no out-of-pocket expense off the top.

SPEAKER_01: 7:32

For yeah, for me, for me, and I it's funny whenever you're networking the things that fall into your lap like this. Networking is just that, it's just out there talking to you know, a lot of my church members, church family members. Those little ladies just love, you know, they love to help and they love watching you grow and they love helping you make up gift cards, but the gift card itself is I I that's mostly not done.

SPEAKER_00: 8:08

Right. So I'm reading when I'm talking about a third-party vendor, I'm talking about the plastic gift cards that you can get anywhere. You can have your own box of gift cards, you can buy 500 at a time, 250, whatever. Right. You would just number them and give them out if you had time. We're getting to the precipice of the start of the holiday season here. So it by the time you're listening to this, it might be too late. But I don't want you to refuse a sale. So, what you're going to do is you're gonna go right into Canva, and you're if depending on if you have a free or a paid account, and you're gonna design, you're gonna type in search, and the AI will actually even help you now. Type in gift card and it'll give you 15 or 20 different options. Click one, change all the elements, and then when you print it out, sign and date it for fraud. Don't just give out a blank gift card because then they'll go to it's photocopies, right? We have really good 3D printers now. Oh, other printers, so you're not having fraud, right? So when you have them numbered one out of a hundred, two out of a hundred, or nine, nine, eight, seven, or one, whatever number sequence you pick, put it in a three-ring binder or a digital format and keep track of it that way. So that way, if you get a weird random, hey, I have this$500 gift card, can you come? Can I use it? And then you can say you can look back in your binder on your document and see if that is a legitimate purchase or not. Right? I have no way to tell if it was a legitimate purchase from Castle Keeper Cleaning because I don't own the company. I gave all of that information over when I sold, but I'm not about to turn down business. So, you know, I just kind of made the decision, and that's what I did with that one. So you can do paper or or if you don't want to do anything complicated, you could go right to Staples or Office Max or whatever, one of those places. They have generic gift cards. You can just write if it's too stressful and you're not creative, you could do that way too, gift card, and they could just slide it over. You could go in a Word document or pages. I mean, there's all kinds of options for you to not refuse that money.

SPEAKER_01: 10:04

Yes, no, and that's and that's exactly it. We actually have somebody again. This may air after the holiday. Uh, however, this is for in the future. Uh, we actually have a new client that got her deep clean, but they came to me and asked me, Do you do gift cards? And I was like, Absolutely. I I don't sell many of these, so I'm not really good at it. I know that there is a better strategy than what I'm I'm doing. I know that you have Black Friday Bonanza, and it's the mommy. I'm doing a mommy reset. Perfect. Uh so we still have to work that out. All the kinks out because this will be my first mommy reset. And we've first laundry that we've offered, all that. I just want it to be presented well whenever they open up their gift and their, you know, because high dollar. These are high dollar. I mean, my minimum on this is twelve hundred dollars.

SPEAKER_00: 11:24

Yeah, and it goes.

SPEAKER_01: 11:28

But you also think, okay, I gotta also you you you have to think that you have to get your you have to, it's for a month, and you have to make sure it goes up to like six weeks or something like that. But you have to make sure that you have the payroll and and everything to cover it, which I will because all that recurring revenue that's coming in each week will fund that job.

SPEAKER_00: 11:54

If you face it out, and this isn't a full-on automated strategy. You know how when you've gotten an Amazon card from your grandma and it sends it to your email and says you have an Amazon card valued at whatever, and then you you you either scan it or copy and paste it, and you link it into your Amazon account. That is not what we're talking about here. That's more for someone who actually does a lot of volume with gift cards. We're talking about you guys, the smaller guys who haven't quite pondered the possibility of oh my god. We don't have a website yet. This quarter by selling gift cards. So if you need the more technically savvy, there are third parties that will do it. And then there's the whole point system. I don't even think bars and restaurants do points anymore. I don't even remember it's been that long. Remember when you used to go to TGA Fridays? You'd slide your card through and it would get people who had like a million points. I'm like, oh my God.

SPEAKER_01: 12:49

You know, Starbucks. Everybody knows my Starbucks addiction.

SPEAKER_00: 12:52

Woo Starbucks. Um an automated way to do it. And then there's the low tech easy method that so we're talking about more of the low tech easy method, and then when as you progress, you can take your numbers from the from this year and then put them in for next year and say, Well, I sold 1500 in gift cards in sales, and then that then you know that your goal for maybe 2026 is that you sell two thousand dollars in gift cards and that you have a whole strategy behind it. You have an email, a funnel, all that other stuff. Maybe you still do that part by hand, and then when you hit the 10,000 mark, maybe you can afford to have the automated delivery system like Amazon has, or you know, linking it.

SPEAKER_01: 13:30

I could some some of these big and if you're listening, I do look at all your guys' websites, and they have sometimes they'll have it linked gift certificates down at the bottom in their website. Eventually, I would like to get to that point. I don't have a gift certificate yet working on it, but blackout dates for scheduling. We gotta make sure that we do blackout dates, right?

SPEAKER_00: 14:01

Definitely have blackout dates. So if you have mom or dad buys, you know, grandma a gift card and she wants to have her house clean over the Christmas holiday and you're slammed, you can have like blackout dates. When I go to Barrizona and I buy the membership, which I believe is 500 bucks for the year or whatever, I don't remember. There are blackout dates that my membership does not work because they're too busy to accommodate that. They need to they have animals to feed. I get it. They have animals to feed. Right, right. There's blackout dates for that. So you could also control your schedule that way as well. These are the blackout days, like Mother's Day, obviously, Mother's Day is honestly. You have would have really have to look at your schedule as Valentine's Day, Easter, depending on what part of the country it could be Passover. I mean, these are all like big haul any of the you know bigger holidays, you could put blackout dates on redemption for that. I definitely recommend that.

SPEAKER_01: 14:52

Right. Oh, I love it. I love it. I didn't see I'm learning right alongside with everybody else. Still, still, here it is four years later. I am still learning how to do gift cards. I do sell them every now and again, but whenever I do, it's so I don't know what I'm doing. Half the time, I'm just like flying, flying, shooting at the side of my hip here sometimes.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

The whole point is make it work using the income coming and landing in your lap. If someone wants to give you money to give you a gift card, come up with a way to take the money so that you can use it later. Definitely. And then let's talk a little bit about cleaning packages. Now, cleaning packages, you could offer a cleaning package if you wanted to. And I I'm one to talk, I cannot toot my horn on this. It took me like seven years to finally, you know, I got squeezed hard enough where I finally did it. You can go to my website, it's madehyphenbroker.com. I have some mini set packages that you can buy. It took a while to get those set up on that thing, but you could offer a mini holiday package, or if you bought the Black Friday Bonanza, you could you could actually sell the mommy reset package right on your website. And it comes with all of the things that talk about it. But the as Jamie mentioned, the mommy reset package is not cheap. It's it's meant it's meant to set mom up for success. You're just resetting her house for her, you're giving her a break. She's not having to overdeal with whatever's going on. Um, it's catered to a specific type of person. But if you wanted to start small, you could do a mini top-to-bottom deluxe cleaning where you don't do all the baseboards. Maybe you skip the vents, maybe you don't do the appliances, maybe whatever it is you decide.

SPEAKER_01: 16:34

Or pick three, pick two, you can spin it however you want, right? And that's what the greatest thing is about owning your own company. Isn't it fun, you guys? Like this is so much fun. And and all while we're doing it, we're we're making money, and I love bouncing our ideals off of each other like this. I love that.

SPEAKER_00: 16:55

I I so you could have a mommy reset package there, you could have a mini top to bottom deluxe cleaning. Sometimes it's we had one last year, they just wanted dishes done. This person hated doing dishes, so we would go in once a week and do the dishes, and I guarantee that there were five to six loads of dishes every single time. All right, you could do you could sell pre-sell the make your bed package. I still have two people and I'm I'm gonna stop you right there.

SPEAKER_01: 17:23

Those that are like, wait a minute, you said we're not doing dishes, you said we're not doing laundry. That's all we did. Let me tell you, yes, exactly. There are times whenever we really honestly think about that. How cool would it be for somebody to buy a gift card for you and say you don't have any dishes to do, you have no laundry to do for, and we're gonna also clean your kitchen and bathroom, right?

SPEAKER_00: 17:57

These are all of the possibilities that you could offer as a package. There's the laundry package, there's the make your bed package where we'll come like eight times in a row, once a week and once every two weeks. I still have two people who drive around all day and make beds, that's all we do. And I just brought that back this year because of COVID and the coody thing, and everyone was all freaked out about everything. But now I think we're past that we're post-COVID. Though you could sell that at a little bit of discount. I those are pretty low-priced items, so you have to be really careful on that margin. But the laundry packages, who doesn't want the cleaning fairy to come at your house at 8 a.m. and just take care of all of your freaking laundry? Three kids and a husband.

SPEAKER_01: 18:36

And that's who that's who this the one that I told you about. That's what they have. She has three little kids under the age of six.

SPEAKER_00: 18:46

And so these are all these. So I wanted to make sure that we discussed that so you can sit there and when you have the shower gods deliver your brilliant idea that you can actually make money. Putting a spin on things, making it fresh and exciting and new is awesome. It's still the same thing that we're selling, we're just selling it in different ways. Um, so that you can keep your income level high and that you can scale and grow and scale and grow. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 19:11

I love that. Oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna work on this right now.

SPEAKER_00: 19:16

That's gonna be awesome. I think we've discovered all of yeah, no, cleaning holiday. I know it's got all I have to cheat now.

SPEAKER_01: 19:26

This number, but it can bring in uh quite a lot of money. I I remember that one year whenever we were doing the structure scale profit cleaning academy, and you first started introducing the Black Friday Bonanza, and that I can't remember her name.

SPEAKER_00: 19:45

She sold like$45,000 worth of stuff. I was like, Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01: 19:49

And she was able to do such. She was able to do such. Uh uh, she she had scaled her business to where she was able to still fund that. Oh, I was just so I was that was a a moment. That was so cool. So there's a couple of other work, and Shannon's living proof that I I have literally watched her help get somebody situated to sell those.

SPEAKER_00: 20:18

Definitely. So make sure that you have very clear redemption policies. If someone buys a gift card, you actually they technically and they paid for it. There is no expiration on a gift card, so check your state laws. Um I know that when you buy like the Visa check cards, once you activate them, they start to take it away immediately because they're trying to get you to use it because they don't want to keep it in an escrow account. And then do not offer deals that confuse customers. Make sure that your offer is clear and what they understand what they're getting. And then there's underpriced bundles, unlimited redemption windows, and low margin combos. You're wanting to sell high-ticket items so that you have a huge profit margin. The mommy reset packages are a great way to go because there's a lot of working parts, but the profit after you sell the package is a lot because they're not cheap packages at all. Wow. Okay, yeah. So I think that we covered all of that. So those are two options for your holidays. Again, thank you for considering us and actually, you know, referring to us. We we love you. It tells everyone that we are worthy. If you found this podcast useful, please send it over to a friend. We would love for you to share it as well. And we hope that you have a great afternoon. You guys take care. Bye, you guys.