Is Angela Brown a con artist? A lot of house cleaners use internet marketing to increase online visibility. Is Savvy Cleaner a fake cleaning business?
Check out the story of how Savvy Cleaner started, and, how social proof marketing and social media made its online success possible.Â
Listen: Is Angela Brown a Con Artist?
Watch: Is Angela Brown a Con Artist?
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.
Is Angela Brown a Con Artist
Is Angela Brown a con artist? The answer is no, not on purpose. But it is a question that comes up daily and it comes from some disgruntled house cleaning people that were inside Facebook groups that I moderate.
Firstly, we have rules against being a bully or a racist or a terrorist or making death threats or any of those things. So as people get wigged out and they go ballistic, we remove them from the group to create a better user experience.
It’s not because we have a personal vendetta against these people. But in the process of removing some people from our group, they’ve made it their life’s mission to destroy my character which doesn’t really faze me one way or the other.
I Know Who I Am
I know who I am. And I know what I’m here to do, I know my purpose. So that is their God-given free agency. If they want to do that, that’s fine.
We don’t engage with people like that. They will send me 40 and 50 texts and they will threaten me and do all kinds of crazy things. Then they go to other Facebook groups and they start these weird rumors.
But then the rumors bounce back to me and the people are, like, “Is this true?” So I’ve been accused of being a con artist and it comes from a disgruntled person that’s no longer with us in our Facebook groups.
What is a Con Artist
So a con artist, what does that mean? The root of that is there are people that say, “Well, you ran a house cleaning business, supposedly, but we can’t find it online and now you’re online. So this business over here didn’t exist.”
Well, to answer that question, and it’s a question we answer almost every day. The reality is when I started my business back in 1991, there were websites that were starting to come into existence. But at the time, I didn’t have a computer of my own.
I didn’t have the money for a computer and I certainly didn’t have a website for my business, as most of us did not at that time. When we ran ads, if we were running ads, they were yellow page ads.
There Was No Google When I Started My Business
I made a list here because I’m not so great at remembering all the dates, but this is before Google. Google did not come to fruition until 1998, which it’s now 21 years old, but way back in the day in 1991, there was no Google.
So, a lot of us promote our businesses on Facebook and Facebook is 16 years old. It did not come around until 2004. So I did not have the luxury of promoting my business back in 1991 on a platform that didn’t even arrive until 2004. Therefore, I wasn’t on Facebook.
Then you can look at Instagram. Instagram is only 10 years old. It came to fruition in 2010 and so my business was already 20 years old at the time Instagram came to fruition.
I Didn’t Try to Learn the Internet When I Started
Now as a house cleaner, I’m good at house cleaning, I’m good at training, I had all the business I could ever want. Why would I stop what I’m doing and diversify and go learn a whole new life, social media, that I knew nothing about and try to promote myself when we had more business than we could handle?
It didn’t make sense to me and I did not understand. This is my foolishness. I did not understand the power of social media, so I did not embrace it right away. I didn’t know how to do it.
So I joined LinkedIn and LinkedIn is 18 years old. It came to fruition in 2002, but I didn’t understand LinkedIn. To be honest, I still don’t. I’m on LinkedIn, but I don’t know how to use it to get business or how to find a business or whatever. I’m still clunky at it and only this year in 2020, I’ve committed full heart and soul to figure out social media.
I’ve Started Using Instagram More for Business
I have an Instagram account and I started activating it and really participating on it about three months ago. So to say that this business over here didn’t exist because you didn’t find it, it’s not that it didn’t exist. It’s just that I was really lousy at social media.
I mean, right now I know that TikTok exists. TikTok is three years old and I have yet to produce one jig where I’m up there dancing and fooling around on TikTok. I haven’t a single TikTok!
Snapchat has been around for a while. I’ve never done Snapchat. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how it works. I’m not very good at it.
So for somebody growing up on Snapchat to say, “Oh, your business doesn’t exist,” they would say today my business doesn’t exist because I’m not on Snapchat. I’m not on their platform.
I Just Did My First Facebook Live
Here’s the weird thing. I did my first Facebook Live after COVID started in 2020 after it started and there were stay-at-home mandates. That’s the first time in almost a three-decade career that I did my first Facebook Live.
So it’s not that I’m a con artist and I’m trying to trick you into thinking that I have all this experience when I haven’t been doing anything for the last three decades.
I’ve been doing this for the last three decades. I did not know how to market myself on the internet. So shame on me because I was learning a bunch of other skills about how to build a business and how to grow and develop, but I didn’t know any of those things.
YouTube is Only 15 Years Old
I started a YouTube channel three years ago and I’m looking down here at my notes, YouTube is only 15 years old. It came to fruition in 2005. I knew about YouTube, but I certainly wasn’t going to go make a YouTube video until three years ago. So for the last three years, it looks like we’re pretty visible on social media.
We’re also pretty visible now in the search engines because all of this stuff from social media links together. But I didn’t have the luxury of that for the last three decades because I didn’t know any better. I kind of hoped that social media was going to go away.
Then when it didn’t go away, I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got a whole huge learning curve” and for what? We had more business than we could possibly ever want.
People Think I’m a Con Artist Because of Our Social Proof
So now I had to stop and say, “But”, here’s the catch. We don’t have any social proof.” This is where it gets interesting where people think I’m a con artist. We are now building a business and it’s based on social proof. Like you, we ask people for ratings and reviews. It’s a way for people to grow their confidence in you for work that you have created.
Back in the olden days, we had letters of reference and if you’re old enough, you’ll know what I’m talking about. We would have customers write us letters. We would put them in these plastic sleeves and we put them in a three-ring binder.
When we would go to do a walkthrough, people would say, “How do I know that you are who you say you are?” And we would hand them this binder. They would open it up and they would read the letters from the happy customers. That’s so old fashioned.
Your Worksheets Can Be Your Letter of Reference
As soon as I figured out that we could use our worksheets and we could let the customer give the worksheet to their friend or their neighbor, that became our letter of reference. So what happened is they were taking our checklist that we marked off, “Here’s what we did at your house. We stand behind this. We offer a satisfaction guarantee on everything that we marked off.”
It had our contact information at the top. When we leave those at the customer’s house and they had a neighbor, they would give our worksheets to the neighbor along with their own testimony.
They would say, “Hey, this is my house cleaner. This is what she does at my house. Here is her contact information. This is how you can get in touch with her.” They would give that to their neighbor.
I’m Still Behind on Social Media
So for the very first time ever, I’m sitting here like a dork in high school, like, “Oh, my goodness, this world of social media.” I have yet to do a Snapchat. I have yet to do a little jig on TikTok.
I’m still so far behind. Yes, I’m on LinkedIn. I still have no idea how it works and I have no idea how I’m supposed to use it to grow my business. I’m on Twitter and we post on Twitter every single day.
Then there’s some automated program that’s posting a tweet on our account. But I have no idea how Twitter works. So if we’re using it to grow our business, I have no idea how that works.
I’m Still Learning Social Media
I’m still learning this. So here I am three decades into my business and I can’t be faulted for what I don’t know. I can only be faulted for what I don’t know going forward. So if you’re thinking that I’m a con artist, because I grew an entire empire with no social proof and I don’t have a trail, that is my own fault. I dropped the ball on social media.
Now as I’m pivoting my business and I’m doing online training, I’m now making more of a focus to actually learn the tricks and the techniques and the tactics of social media and search engine optimization and being more visible.
So am I a con artist? Certainly not on purpose. It was a lack of my foresight into the world of social media and how that all works. So that’s all that is.Resources
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