Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Heatherdale.
Hi Chris, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
It was January 2021, I had just gotten sole custody of my daughter and the last job that I had was facing massive layoffs. Originally I was supposed to franchise for someone out of Houston and on the very last day of my job when I walked out into the parking lot….. I stopped hearing from the owner of the franchise. I had never owned a business at that point, an LLC once to help with taxes from some freelance work that I did in the past but that’s as close as it got. I would not hear back from that person for another year.
For the next month and a half, I buried my head into videos, mini courses, researching software, you name it. I was dating someone at the time that was staying with me, but she described it that she just felt alone while being around me while I desperately tried to start getting income again. My daughter and I just got a home together, I wasn’t about to lose it all. That person that I only dated for a short while ended up leaving. I was all alone, monitoring my savings and my credit cards at the time.
That February I had the makings of an LLC made and DoubleTime Cleaning was born.
That March I settled on a software and started getting to work. I decided that my intent was to not go out there and perform a single job and to do nothing but work on and grow the business. We started receiving leads pretty quickly but because I did not have any team members, I passed them off to other neighboring cleaning businesses that had good reviews. One of them months later, the owner and I accidentally ended up networking together and reciprocated.
While DoubleTime Cleaning did not have the fastest start because again, I did not know what I was doing, we were able to get our first jobs under our belt before the end of March. April didn’t get much further. Savings started running low and one of my credit cards was getting maxed out from paid marketing and leads that I kept losing money on. My ROI kept getting deeper into the red hoping that recurring cleaning jobs will make up for them. There was no such luck.
In May, in the middle of the night. I suffered my first heart attack. It was a major one. They called it a Widowmaker. 100% blockage to my LAD. Somehow my body sustained just long enough to survive and it was my training as a former first responder years and years ago that probably saved my life. My daughter was picked up by one of the few close friends I had at the time. I was still pretty new to Texas. COVID was still around so she wasn’t allowed to visit.
Over the following months I watched every remaining bit of credit and savings disappear. Without the strength to grow my brand new business it almost died out as quickly as it was started. I picked up a tele sales job but my struggle to stay up was noticed and my supervisor kept telling me to get off.
Finally, in July, my strength started to return little by little. I was determined to get back and there was one cleaner left from the original team that stuck around. I showed up to houses to inspect with my cane. Clients worried about me as I would struggle to catch my breath despite trying to hide it.
August came, at this point all of my finances were gone. All the credit cards maxed out. And some cards were already becoming late so I couldn’t get more. I had started a GoFundMe and enough money was raised to pay bills for one month. It was just enough to buy me enough time. DoubleTime Cleaning was about to end.
I sat down and combined the strategies from a real estate coach and a networking coach that I learned in the past. And modified it to apply to a cleaning business. I re-structured my systems. Built them so that it can handle like a large company. It was actually that design that people thought I was a much larger business than what I was at the time.
I developed to what I call this day the Daily Action Strategy. I had no more money left for marketing, no more money left for leads. I refined it until I got it near perfect. It is a set of daily tasks that I must do no matter what, that only took anywhere between 15 minutes to 1 hour each day, then the follow ups and answering leads that resulted. I just had to be focused on making it consistent. I share it freely now to other business owners because it’s what saved me. And then….. I put it into action.
By september, the one cleaner that I had gotten too busy. We brought another one in. In October we became the backup and sole crew for a hotel. Meanwhile we were growing in Airbnbs exponentially. My daily action strategy was working. At that point I had developed a system and standard operating procedures that could handle the chaos that comes with having Airbnb hosts and managers as clients. We grew quickly after that.
October was our first five figure month from almost nothing but that was because of the hotel. We started getting that on the consistency, by that December.
Shortly after in 2022, the last cleaner that was left became the first team lead. Before the end of 2022 we hired our first admin. This was the point where I started walking away. The team was now running itself. We still had a lot of obstacles to overcome, disgruntled former team members, clients stealing our team members, you name it. A second leader rose up in our team. She runs my entire business today. She learned how I overcame and how I treated situations and later started taking them on herself. The thing is, every person that we hire, we saw potential as future team leads. That’s how we hire such a great team.
I wanted to grow further because we plateaued. So I interviewed a coach, and she interviewed me, and so I hired her. It was a bit of a naive moment, and I spent $10,000 on nothing. Yes she actually did have a course, but nothing that was beneficial to me. I was the one that was teaching the group strategies instead of me learning. My own systems were more advanced. My free marketing strategies were more effective. I vowed that when it came time to start a coaching program that it will actually help others and not put them in a hole. More on that later.
September 2024, I suffered 3 heart attacks back to back. They were more mild than the Widowmaker, so recovery was a lot faster. However, it damaged my heart and I needed to be put into receive a bypass surgery. Despite that, I started a handyman service, and a junk removal service, DireX Handyman Pros was born and we started off right away with a renovation. We also had just crossed our 100th Airbnb with DoubleTime Cleaning. I had already started doing handyman work on the airbnbs that we have but I had not delegated it at that time. Right before the surgery, I had finished delegating the rest of what I was doing. The concept of Biz Rise Coaching started to give other home service business owners the proven strategies that can help them grow, and own their business instead of giving themselves a job and working in it. This concept….was to continue slowly developing over the next year.
December 2024, the bypass surgery turned into a full quintuple bypass. I wasn’t even recovered when three weeks later an internal infection had spread and I was back in the hospital. The infection “healed” by the beginning of February, only for a scan that led to them telling me I had cancer. At this point I was hitting a breaking point. But two months later, the infection returned and I was back in the hospital. It was a blessing and a curse, because me being back again they administered more scans. Turns out….they were wrong. I didn’t have cancer. The mass that showed before was the infection not fully eradicated. It had returned and with a vengeance.
I went through healing until June. At this point so much money had poured into medical that despite our revenue I couldn’t keep up with them. My businesses were fully delegated and I didn’t want to take up jobs from my team members. So….i started another one. A lawn service.
All summer I took every bit of strength I had left over and grew a lawn service almost overnight. Again, a blessing and a curse. My body wasn’t ready for it. And finally in late September…..my heart failed me again…..and dropped even further by middle of November.
The thing is, my team, took care of everything. Administrative, customer service, growth, hiring, training, supply replenishment, all of it. DoubleTime Cleaning has a reputation for being one of the highest quality cleaning companies in DFW and the gold standard for Airbnb turnovers. I always believed that when you take care of your people, they in turn take care of you. And that’s exactly what the team proved. They held the high standards, they sustained the quality of their work without me.
Now with the quiet time, Biz Rise Coaching started falling into place. And The BizRise Effect Podcast was born. For the price of a Grande coffee at Starbucks someone can download every strategy and every method and template that allowed me to build the company like the one I created with nothing. The podcast, I’m sure people are tired of the same gurus saying the same thing. These however, are the stories behind the grind. True stories. Real pain as I talk. And raw excited energy from myself and my future guests. It’s something that people can relate to. Free flowing, all unscripted.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Oh man, I already put everything in the “Your Story” section including all the challenges. I can paste it here as well.
It was January 2021, I had just gotten sole custody of my daughter and the last job that I had was facing massive layoffs. Originally I was supposed to franchise for someone out of Houston and on the very last day of my job when I walked out into the parking lot….. I stopped hearing from the owner of the franchise. I had never owned a business at that point, an LLC once to help with taxes from some freelance work that I did in the past but that’s as close as it got. I would not hear back from that person for another year.
For the next month and a half, I buried my head into videos, mini courses, researching software, you name it. I was dating someone at the time that was staying with me, but she described it that she just felt alone while being around me while I desperately tried to start getting income again. My daughter and I just got a home together, I wasn’t about to lose it all. That person that I only dated for a short while ended up leaving. I was all alone, monitoring my savings and my credit cards at the time.
That February I had the makings of an LLC made and DoubleTime Cleaning was born.
That March I settled on a software and started getting to work. I decided that my intent was to not go out there and perform a single job and to do nothing but work on and grow the business. We started receiving leads pretty quickly but because I did not have any team members, I passed them off to other neighboring cleaning businesses that had good reviews. One of them months later, the owner and I accidentally ended up networking together and reciprocated.
While DoubleTime Cleaning did not have the fastest start because again, I did not know what I was doing, we were able to get our first jobs under our belt before the end of March. April didn’t get much further. Savings started running low and one of my credit cards was getting maxed out from paid marketing and leads that I kept losing money on. My ROI kept getting deeper into the red hoping that recurring cleaning jobs will make up for them. There was no such luck.
In May, in the middle of the night. I suffered my first heart attack. It was a major one. They called it a Widowmaker. 100% blockage to my LAD. Somehow my body sustained just long enough to survive and it was my training as a former first responder years and years ago that probably saved my life. My daughter was picked up by one of the few close friends I had at the time. I was still pretty new to Texas. COVID was still around so she wasn’t allowed to visit.
Over the following months I watched every remaining bit of credit and savings disappear. Without the strength to grow my brand new business it almost died out as quickly as it was started. I picked up a tele sales job but my struggle to stay up was noticed and my supervisor kept telling me to get off.
Finally, in July, my strength started to return little by little. I was determined to get back and there was one cleaner left from the original team that stuck around. I showed up to houses to inspect with my cane. Clients worried about me as I would struggle to catch my breath despite trying to hide it.
August came, at this point all of my finances were gone. All the credit cards maxed out. And some cards were already becoming late so I couldn’t get more. I had started a GoFundMe and enough money was raised to pay bills for one month. It was just enough to buy me enough time. DoubleTime Cleaning was about to end.
I sat down and combined the strategies from a real estate coach and a networking coach that I learned in the past. And modified it to apply to a cleaning business. I re-structured my systems. Built them so that it can handle like a large company. It was actually that design that people thought I was a much larger business than what I was at the time.
I developed to what I call this day the Daily Action Strategy. I had no more money left for marketing, no more money left for leads. I refined it until I got it near perfect. It is a set of daily tasks that I must do no matter what, that only took anywhere between 15 minutes to 1 hour each day, then the follow ups and answering leads that resulted. I just had to be focused on making it consistent. I share it freely now to other business owners because it’s what saved me. And then….. I put it into action.
By september, the one cleaner that I had gotten too busy. We brought another one in. In October we became the backup and sole crew for a hotel. Meanwhile we were growing in Airbnbs exponentially. My daily action strategy was working. At that point I had developed a system and standard operating procedures that could handle the chaos that comes with having Airbnb hosts and managers as clients. We grew quickly after that.
October was our first five figure month from almost nothing but that was because of the hotel. We started getting that on the consistency, by that December.
Shortly after in 2022, the last cleaner that was left became the first team lead. Before the end of 2022 we hired our first admin. This was the point where I started walking away. The team was now running itself. We still had a lot of obstacles to overcome, disgruntled former team members, clients stealing our team members, you name it. A second leader rose up in our team. She runs my entire business today. She learned how I overcame and how I treated situations and later started taking them on herself. The thing is, every person that we hire, we saw potential as future team leads. That’s how we hire such a great team.
I wanted to grow further because we plateaued. So I interviewed a coach, and she interviewed me, and so I hired her. It was a bit of a naive moment, and I spent $10,000 on nothing. Yes she actually did have a course, but nothing that was beneficial to me. I was the one that was teaching the group strategies instead of me learning. My own systems were more advanced. My free marketing strategies were more effective. I vowed that when it came time to start a coaching program that it will actually help others and not put them in a hole. More on that later.
September 2024, I suffered 3 heart attacks back to back. They were more mild than the Widowmaker, so recovery was a lot faster. However, it damaged my heart and I needed to be put into receive a bypass surgery. Despite that, I started a handyman service, and a junk removal service, DireX Handyman Pros was born and we started off right away with a renovation. We also had just crossed our 100th Airbnb with DoubleTime Cleaning. I had already started doing handyman work on the airbnbs that we have but I had not delegated it at that time. Right before the surgery, I had finished delegating the rest of what I was doing. The concept of Biz Rise Coaching started to give other home service business owners the proven strategies that can help them grow, and own their business instead of giving themselves a job and working in it. This concept….was to continue slowly developing over the next year.
December 2024, the bypass surgery turned into a full quintuple bypass. I wasn’t even recovered when three weeks later an internal infection had spread and I was back in the hospital. The infection “healed” by the beginning of February, only for a scan that led to them telling me I had cancer. At this point I was hitting a breaking point. But two months later, the infection returned and I was back in the hospital. It was a blessing and a curse, because me being back again they administered more scans. Turns out….they were wrong. I didn’t have cancer. The mass that showed before was the infection not fully eradicated. It had returned and with a vengeance.
I went through healing until June. At this point so much money had poured into medical that despite our revenue I couldn’t keep up with them. My businesses were fully delegated and I didn’t want to take up jobs from my team members. So….i started another one. A lawn service.
All summer I took every bit of strength I had left over and grew a lawn service almost overnight. Again, a blessing and a curse. My body wasn’t ready for it. And finally in late September…..my heart failed me again…..and dropped even further by middle of November.
The thing is, my team, took care of everything. Administrative, customer service, growth, hiring, training, supply replenishment, all of it. DoubleTime Cleaning has a reputation for being one of the highest quality cleaning companies in DFW and the gold standard for Airbnb turnovers. I always believed that when you take care of your people, they in turn take care of you. And that’s exactly what the team proved. They held the high standards, they sustained the quality of their work without me.
Now with the quiet time, Biz Rise Coaching started falling into place. And The BizRise Effect Podcast was born. For the price of a Grande coffee at Starbucks someone can download every strategy and every method and template that allowed me to build the company like the one I created with nothing. The podcast, I’m sure people are tired of the same gurus saying the same thing. These however, are the stories behind the grind. True stories. Real pain as I talk. And raw excited energy from myself and my future guests. It’s something that people can relate to. Free flowing, all unscripted.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
DoubleTime Cleaning doesn’t just have the reputation of quality and professional cleaning jobs completed and successful partnerships with short term rentals (AirBnBs), but also with the people that work with us. At some points we get overstaffed with people still wanting to work with us. Our leadership team does well to reward and recognize, while being respectful whenever there are pitfalls. I’m the founder of the company, well known among my clients for the relationships I have had with them over the years. Some have even become close friends. I’ve had realtors, managers, throughout different parts of DFW that I never met tell me they have heard of my company and our reputation when I tell them my name. I couldn’t be more honored. People do not come to seek us when they’re shopping for cheap prices, they come to us because they’re already seeking quality and professionalism with the comfort of knowing that things will not only get done, but done correctly. For AirBnBs, we treat their business exactly as if it’s our own and go way above and beyond to ensure their success. We’re more than just a cleaning company, we’re a family that treats our clients just as such.
How do you think about happiness?
Other’s wins ARE my wins. Whenever one of my team members is able to do an upgrade in their lives, whenever we have a client with their first AirBnB get excited over their first 5 star review, THAT’s what gets me excited. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had this team allow me to have the freedom I sought when I first built it. I got to be there for all of my daughter’s high school events being I’m a single parent, she and I got to hang out and spend time with each other. For the team members, I emphasize family time and do our best for them to do the same, to have time with their kids and loved ones. Quality time, quality of life, and ensuring that I can provide that is one of the biggest things that make me happy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://doubletimecleaning.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doubletimecleaning
Image Credits
Chey Baker, Destiny Heatherdale, Rockel Mundy
