Have you heard about the ZenMaid Summit, 2020’s biggest cleaning conference? Follow 45 of the industry’s top cleaning experts as they teach you how to grow your cleaning business.
By now, you may be asking, “what are the benefits of attending an online event as a house cleaner?”
Find out today why joining the ZenMaid Summit is an investment you don’t want to miss out on.
Listen: ZenMaid Summit 2020’s Biggest Cleaning Conference
Watch: ZenMaid Summit 2020’s Biggest Cleaning Conference
Hey 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. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
What is the ZenMaid Summit?
Do you know about the ZenMaid summit, which is 2020’s largest online cleaning conference that happened this last week? ZenMaid.com hosted a conference this last week. It was a brilliant marketing PR move because instead of doing a bunch of advertising to say, “Hey guys, here we are.”
They hosted an online summit and they brought together 45 of the industry’s top cleaning experts to do 30-minute presentations on how to grow your business. They talked about how to grow your business, how to scale your business, how to track your numbers, how to hire people, how to work through a pandemic, how to fire people, what happens if you have difficult customers, how to run an Airbnb industry.
They had a whole bunch of different things that were peripherals, like how to build a website, how to do a sales funnel, how to do Facebook ads, how to do SEO. There was a bunch of stuff to build your business. Then they did it in English and Spanish. It was absolutely brilliant. Now what’s even more brilliant about what they did last week was not that they were catering to the pandemic.
They Started the Summit a Year Ago
Last year was the first year that they did this, and it was all online and it was so peculiar and different. This year, everyone fell right into line because now everyone knows what it is.
What was great about last year is that if you take the rules of regular networking at a conference and you apply it to the ZenMaid summit. Then you can scale your networking on mass production because you don’t have all the travel and the online conversations that you have to have in person at a regular conference.
The Beauty of an Online Conference
The beauty of the two, and we’ll look at the two real quick, but a regular conference, you have to take your house cleaning people off the front line. You have to take them out of work. You have to reschedule your clients. Then you have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for airline travel to get the people to the conference.
Then you have to pay for conference registration fees, which are usually a few hundred to a thousand dollars. Then you have to pay for hotels and housing, and you have to pay for food or whatever. Lots of expenses. If you’re a business and you’re promoting your business at the conference, oftentimes there’s an expo.
Then you pay for an expo, backdrops, a trade show display, tables and you pay for gimmicks and giveaways and all that stuff. It can cost thousands of dollars to attend a conference live. What happened was they did the ZenMaid Summit all online. It was cool. What they did is they sent out in advance all of the rules and regulations for the conference.
I Was One of the Guest Speakers
Now, I was one of the guest speakers, and I was so honored to be a part of that, but I received one of these packets as well. They said, “We need your speech to be under 30 minutes. These are the kinds of graphics that we want. These are the kinds of handouts that we want. If you want to give a giveaway, here’s what we will accept.”
They had all these rules and regulations. “We need your speech edited and uploaded by a certain day. We want you to be present when we are presenting your information inside our chat room so that you can answer questions live with anyone who has questions.”
They had all these rules and regulations, and then they worked together with an affiliate program, where if you recommended it to your friends and people that were in your network, then you would make a small commission if someone were to buy an all-access pass.
They Had Others Pushing the Conference Out There
The beauty of that was instead of them doing the marketing for this great big conference. This is a huge expense for a conference, they had the speakers pushing this out to their networks. This is really awesome because all of the speakers are connected with the very people that need that information.
They did a lot of work, but sitting back, they were able to exercise the help of all these different industry experts who with all of their knowledge that they have and all of the people that they know to come to the conference.
Now, that said, the conference was amazing. I want to share with you a piece of information. There’s, at a conference, the networking. We have what we call here, now.
How to Network at Conferences
If you’re at a regular conference, let’s say the ISSA show last year in Las Vegas, Nevada. We are here now. Anyone that I met at the show, I would exchange business cards with them. On the back, I would re ISSA, 2019, and their name. I’ve got their information right there, or the name of the person or their assistant or whomever I was going to contact following up.
The here, now part of networking is this. I can call them up anytime within the next year because the next year there’s the next conference and so the information changes on the back of the card. You say, “Hey, I was in Las Vegas at the ISSA show and I met you and they’re going to say, wait a second.”
They remembered that they just spent thousands of dollars to attend this live conference. Absolutely, they’re going to take your call.
Networking at an Online Summit
With the online summit, I did the exact same thing. I showed up during every person’s speech. I said, “Hey, I’m watching your show right now. I just wanted to reach out and introduce myself. Who knows? Maybe there’s a way we can collaborate, or we can share information or at least swap ideas. Contact me. I’d love to speak with you.”
Through the course of the next year, I made lots of friends. I didn’t get in touch with everybody, but I would say 60% of the people that spoke as guests at last year’s show are now friends of mine. Some of them I met last year. Then some of them I saw in person at the ISSA conference in November.
What is the ISSA Conference?
The ISSA conference is a great big, large convention. It is an in-person convention. The maid summit that happened was a lot of the panel type stuff that you would get at the conference without the expense. It didn’t have the expo and It didn’t have all those other things, but it was the educational part of the conference.
If you’re going to go to a conference, that’s online, a couple of things I would recommend. I would recommend planning on showing up during the time and because the speakers are there, they’re in the chat rooms. They’re available. I know that for me personally, throughout the night I was getting one IM after the next.
They would all pop up on my screen and I sat there non stop answering as fast as I could. Well into the middle of the night and early the next morning, I’m still answering the items and it went all week long.
You Start to Make Connections With People
What happens is you start making connections with people and even if you don’t have a way to do business with them, right then, introduce yourself. “Hey. I’m watching your speech right now, live. I love what you’re saying about this. I would love for us to connect sometime during the next few weeks or the next month. Whenever the dust settles, I’d love to have a conversation.”
What’s cool about that is they say, “Oh my goodness, do you know so and so?” Then I say, “No. I don’t know so and so.” “Well, listen, based on what you just said, you need to know my friend.”
Back and forth, people are sending me instant messages with links to YouTube shows and websites and different pieces of information. You’ve got to know this person and that person. It was a massive week of networking, but the weirdest part of it was, it wasn’t live.
Online Summits Allow You to Have Uninterrupted Conversations
We weren’t interrupted by conversations of people passing by that jump in on your conversation. Then you never get to finish the conversation you were having. What happens as I was sitting there in the privacy of my office with my computer in front of me, running three computer screens at a time and instant messaging as fast as I could go.
I was sitting here saying, “Oh my goodness, this is amazing. This is really outstanding.” What’s interesting now is they have an all-access pass and the all-access pass allows you access to all of the sessions that were played during that week long session.
I love the all-access pass and it’s not cheap. It’s like 300 bucks, but I love it for the fact that it’s far cheaper than the thousands of dollars you’re going to spend to go to a live conference.
A New Concept But the Same Networking Experience
You still get all the networking experience because you have them here now concept. If you contact any of those people and say, “Hey. I’m watching your ZenMaid talk on replay.” They’re going to say, “Oh yes. I put together a lot of time and energy putting my presentation together. How can I help you?”
They’re still going to take your call. What’s fascinating about this is we have now what’s called now and later information. If you listen to something like Facebook ads and you say, “Well, my business is not quite ready to run a Facebook ad.”
That goes for later. That’s information you need to know later, not right now, but there are classes that you will take in this masterclass session where maybe it’s on how to track your numbers. You’re like, “Ooh, I need to be doing that right now.”
You Have Information for Now and Later
You have new information and then the later information. I even contacted people this week, that their information is later information for me. I contacted them.
I said, “This is fascinating. It went right over my head. I’m going to have to listen to this thing five times before I even understand it. I’m pretty sure we need to have a conversation about this at some point.” Just opening a door because you never know. Now I’m on their radar. They’re on my radar.
Then every time you have a conversation, it builds the education of your standing in the industry. So, this is interesting because even though you might be a house cleaner and you think you are a solo cleaner, networking with other people that are in the industry, they all have connections.
People You Meet Will Have Connections
They all know people. Maybe you need one thing and they can’t help you, but they probably know the person who can, and they know the person who can in your area. I recommend utilizing these opportunities at their maximum for what they are and the ZenMaid summit this last week was just pure gold.
I’m absolutely a fan of it. I absolutely love it. I’m so thrilled that they’ve done this for a second year. I am hoping this is an ongoing thing year after year. Anyway, hats off to ZenMaid. It was a brilliant production.
Hats off to the speakers that gave their time and attention, their handouts, their giveaways, all that stuff.
Resources
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