Thursday Feb 27, 2025

8: The Adel Majd Episode

In this episode, host Sid Graef interviews Adel Majd, the owner of two successful home service businesses in Toronto: 416 So Clean (carpet and upholstery cleaning) and Air Force (duct cleaning). Adel’s journey includes working in IT, launching his first cleaning business, taking a five-year sabbatical traveling through Central and South America, and coming back with renewed focus on systems, automation, and people development. He explains how “relentless communication” (before, during, and after each job) boosts referrals, why empowering employees with life goals fosters loyalty, and how he’s embraced chatbots and AI to streamline operations. If you’ve ever worried you can’t balance personal dreams with business growth, Adel proves you can do both—and thrive.

SHOW NOTES

TRANSCRIPT
Sid (Host):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. I’m Sid Graef out here in Montana.

Gabe (Co-Host):
And I’m Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee. We are your hosts and guides through the landscape of growing a successful home service business. We do this by interviewing the best home service business builders and owners in the industry—folks that have already built seven and eight figure home service businesses, and they want to help you succeed. You have no fake gurus on this show; just real-life owners who’ve been in the trenches and can help show you the way to grow profit. We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100 percent experience.

We are going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our guests will share with you the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to winning. In short, our guests will show you how to transform your home service business into a masterpiece. Thanks for joining us on the Wild Journey of Entrepreneurship. Let’s dive in.

Sid (Host):
Hey, this is Sid with Huge Transformations Podcast, and today’s interview, I think you’re really going to love. I had the privilege of interviewing Adel Majd. Adel lives in Toronto—or outside of Toronto. He’s got a fascinating background. He’s got an IT background, a computer science background, and he’s been in service business not once but twice. And you’re going to be fascinated—or at least I was—by his story of taking a five-year sabbatical to travel in Central America and Colombia before coming back to business and starting an air duct cleaning company called Air Force, as well as a window cleaning company, and his rapid growth. Most impressively, his smart growth and his use of automations.

Adel is a regular guy just like you and I, but he has learned and knows how to learn from others, and to apply what he’s learned and to grow really rapidly. Please join me and enjoy this interview with Adel.

Sid (Host):
Oh, hello, my friend. It’s Sid Graef with the Huge Transformation Podcast, and I’m excited to have you here today because our guest today is going to be a lot of fun. It is Adel. And Adel, I apologize—how do I pronounce your last name? I always call it, say Majd.

Adel (Guest):
You got it. Majd.

Sid (Host):
Okay, good. All right. And Adel, you’ve got two companies in Toronto, Canada: 416 So Clean and Air Force duct cleaning. I love your logo, which makes it look official, like “This is the Air Force.” When did you start these businesses? Because I realize you had a business career prior, so we’ll start with what you’re doing now, and then we might go back in time. When did you start the current business, and then what made you start that?

Adel (Guest):
So the first one was 416 So Clean, officially started in 2009—almost 15 years ago. And the Air Force, I would say halfway through that journey, almost seven, eight years ago.

Sid (Host):
Why did you add a second company?

Adel (Guest):
Many things. The main reason is, I am already at the homeowner, and I’m looking for a service I can add to diversify and see what kind of value I can add to the homeowner. But I’m also always looking back and saying, “What could happen in my existing business? I need to diversify. God forbid something happened with this business, I have something I can back into.” From economy, from a different scale of things happen. I tried different things. I tried micro-seal application of fabric guards, to get into the marble restorations, wood restorations, you name it. Eventually, the duct cleaning side really stuck and went pretty well.

Sid (Host):
So, I’m not terribly familiar with duct cleaning. I know what it is, but is there a larger barrier to entry—especially equipment or could anybody start in that business?

Adel (Guest):
Technically, you could walk in with a portable system, but from the client’s perspective, trust is huge, because they don’t see most of the work you do. So showing up with a powerful vacuum, powerful compressor, with a big truck, well-branded, makes a huge difference to gain the trust if they don’t know you yet. And that becomes an entry barrier, a real entry barrier, for a lot of other guys to walk into that business.

Sid (Host):
So in a small business, a lot of people, when they start out, they just want to compete on price, like the homeowner gets a quote for 500, the scrappy hustle says, “I’ll do it for 400,” and it’s a price competition, which usually doesn’t end well. But it sounds like you’re not selling price, you’re selling trust. What else gives you—how do you view it? In your mind, how do you think about what you’re actually selling?

Adel (Guest):
Peace of mind, for the most part. It’s really a peace of mind for the homeowners. To them, it’s like, “Who can they trust?” With duct cleaning, you don’t see most of the work, so you have to set in place a lot of things to gain trust. I got fortunate that I had a really good client base using the carpet-upholstery cleaning business. And I didn’t go to the market for new clients; I offered duct cleaning to my existing database and said, “We also offer this.” And that helped me go just overnight with the successful Air Force duct cleaning business, with its own brand. Once they saw our trucks and people… And the funniest thing is our existing clients in the carpet and upholstery cleaning side, they went crazy, started referring us left and right because it’s almost like all the people they know, they want their duct cleaning done, but they don’t know who to trust. There’s a lot of 99-dollar offers out there. The moment we communicated with them that we are in this space, it’s almost like a relief for them. It’s like, “Oh, my cousin wants it, my mom wants it, my brother-in-law, my neighbors.” And it just spread out beautifully in that aspect.

Sid (Host):
That’s fantastic, because I love referral marketing more than any other form. Because it doesn’t really cost, and because it’s a transference of trust, you automatically have less price resistance, it’s easier to close, it’s just a clean step. So that’s great. When you said we had a conversation about some of the technology that you use, specifically your communications systems or processes, how do you typically communicate with your clients? You use email software, but how deep do you go?

Adel (Guest):
Communication, like from the website, from the phone, like live agents, obviously there’s the WhatsApp group, the WhatsApp messages. Right now, we’re investing heavily in AI, so at any point, if there’s a point of contact, there’s always someone talking to the clients, and there’s a lot of follow-ups. So the moment the experience starts, we immediately—like, lead comes in from Angie’s List or something, we reply to it. We wait a little bit, we follow up again, we have the conversation, the appointment is booked, everything is communicated through emails and texts and calls, email, texts, and calls.

To the point where sometimes they say, a lot of the feedback we get back is like, “The cleaning was amazing, but beyond the cleaning, we felt we’ve been walked through the whole process from the beginning to the end, and the handover from one department to the other was just amazing.” From the person answering the call, booking the appointment, to the technician showing at the door—there are no surprises. They text them half an hour before they come over, they know we’re on the way, we show up, we reiterate what we talked about already on the phone. It’s a different person, but we’re reiterating the same script, so they know what we’re going to do. The moment they’re in the middle of the job, they stop, they communicate again with the clients about what’s going on. They finish the job, they communicate again the post-inspection cleaning.

The moment they’ve left, we know in the office they left, we follow up with another text and email, says, “How did everything go?” 24 hours later, they get another text and frequent communication. Is there anything else we could have done better? A week later, the CRM immediately kicks in asking for referrals. A month later, we got another communication with them, says, “By the way, it’s been a month, anything went wrong after we left, let us know. Okay, I know it’s been a month, but we can fix it again.” So that’s communication. Obviously, they got their reminders, they got their six-month, but the leverage of the CRM, the leverage and the technology of the AIs right now that we get, like over the weekends, if I’m not logged in or somebody else is not logged in, we had our chatbot right now answers all the questions, gives them the pricing, schedule them in directly, give them dates available, and people want that immediate response, and it’s there.

Sid (Host):
That’s cool. Now I have 15 questions for you, but let’s start with your communication structure that you just walked through, from the time they make an inquiry till they get scheduled and confirmed, and then the tech shows up. Did you design that and think it through, or did you buy something that was off the shelf and just change the name?

Adel (Guest):
For the most part, it’s from the ground up. It starts, and it’s been like 15 years. We upgraded our CRM a few times—it used to be Excel sheet, then a database, and so on. Every time we adapt a new technology, we ask, what is the feature there and how can we use it? And we add more stuff. But then I always look around, like I ask my friends—like if I book something, and I got a notification that I like, something new that we don’t do, I immediately go back and change it.

But then I have a full-time IT guy; his job is automations and simplification. That’s all he does. So every day, he and I have our call, and I say, “Can you watch what this person is doing for a day, and let’s go back and simplify the process?” For me, my big part of the training with my technicians and my office staff is, in real estate business, it’s location, location, location. In service business, it’s communication, communication, communication. Because you cannot underestimate—things will go wrong, and they do go wrong. But every time something went wrong, but we were on top of it with communication, it turns into a positive review online.

Sid (Host):
Yeah, it’s surprising how it’s normal for the business provider, if something goes wrong, to try to avoid it. If it’s a contractor that repairs your door, then the door is broken again, they might not return your call. But if you address it so fast, so aggressively, they become a raving fan.

Adel (Guest):
Yes, 100 percent. Last month alone, I had two scenarios I can share with you. One of them, a client, because we send a month later—I personally send them my own email and say, “Listen, it’s been a month. I’m not leaving you out to dry. If you noticed, since a month, something else happened and now you noticed it, we still have a warranty, we’ll come and fix it,” even if it’s a month or a year or 10 years later, we back up everything we do. That person came back and said, “You know what, there’s a scratch in my floor.” And I said, “You know what, we’re coming back.” We jumped in, I sent my technician, we looked at it. By looking at it, I know this wasn’t caused by us, but I still said, “I’m more than happy to replace that tile for you, whatever it costs,” we were proactive.

He sent me a text right after he says, “I took care of it. I knew you guys didn’t cause it, and I’m impressed by the fact that you owned it. Although it obviously wasn’t your guy.” Another quick one: we’re doing dryer machine cleaning, and it wasn’t heating anymore. We immediately say, “We never had this issue before. I don’t know what’s going on, let’s look at it.” We followed up, we offered to come and fix it if needed, so we were actively going after to make sure it’s fixed. Eventually, she said, “I got a repair guy who came in, he fixed it, it had nothing to do with your guy. Your guy did an amazing job, but the fact you kept following up meant the world to us.” That communication helps with trust, referrals, everything else.

Sid (Host):
So with the day-to-day booking process, do you send them a reminder three days before, the day before, the day of, or how do you do it?

Adel (Guest):
Yes, I feel three touchpoints is perfect. I book the appointments, they get an email and text. Then three days before, they get the email and text. Then 30 minutes before the window arrival, we send them a text and call them to say we’re on the way. That works perfectly. I find nobody ever complains we need more. Nobody ever complains it’s too much. The three-day reminder is crucial because that’s where if something comes up, they forgot they have a doctor appointment, we can reuse that spot so we’re not losing that day. That changed everything for us.

Back to your question, we try, test, adjust. If the day-before reminder wasn’t working, we changed it to 72 hours, it helped. Everything is R&D, small improvements.

Sid (Host):
So you focus on constant refinements?

Adel (Guest):
Exactly. Constantly. We ask, “What could we improve?” We always see a million ways to improve, whether it’s the communication, the cleaning process, the email, the structure, the tools. As long as every single day we look at something and say, “Let’s go fix this,” that’s how we grow. If something’s not broken, we fix it anyway, because I consider everything always broken.

Sid (Host):
Cool. So let’s shift gears. First, for people listening, we got a lot of guys that are new in business or they’ve been in business for a few years. They want to scale, they have aspirations. I don’t know the size of your business—about what’s the scope? How many employees do you have, or what’s the size?

Adel (Guest):
We’re operating at $1.5 million revenue. We got around 20 full-time employees, 20–25 depending on the season. We do a little bit of subcontracting, but the majority are full-time. We’ve got eight trucks on the road. We’re almost at 50–50, half duct cleaning, half carpet upholstery. We do a little bit of windows and gutter cleaning as well.

Sid (Host):
Gotcha. So, going back in time 15 years, was it just you or did you start with a team?

Adel (Guest):
Probably I did it the worst way, where you just go get a small little portable and say, “It’s easy, just go and clean carpets.” And how hard could it be, right?

Sid (Host):
Yeah, that’s the typical. Right. So you were in the trenches. Then you took a break. You told me you took a five-year sabbatical to travel in Central America and such?

Adel (Guest):
Yes, probably more out of desperation. So I did my first career in IT—good money, good environment, but no freedom of time. Then I jumped to carpet cleaning. But I went extreme with entrepreneurship, ignoring everything else, and it took a toll on my marriage, the family. So I took a five-year sabbatical. I had enough staff to run it on a low scale, so it was easier to manage without me. I rethought what I wanted. Do I want corporate or keep being an entrepreneur? And I traveled from all the way south to Central America in different trips, volunteering, hiking, connecting with nature. It reenergized me to come back and say, “I love building a service business. I just need to do it better.” That’s what started my third phase—where I am now.

Sid (Host):
How did that sabbatical help your work-life balance?

Adel (Guest):
It gave me perspective. There’s a world out there beyond work; we’re very fortunate here in North America. We have so much opportunity. When I returned, I realized I want to be of service, to employees and customers. I was able to connect with employees in a deeper way because many come from tough situations too. We talk about traveling and volunteering, and we bond more than just “You clean carpets.” We’re building a meaningful culture.

Sid (Host):
So how do you convey that bigger purpose to employees?

Adel (Guest):
Money is just a tool. The bigger goal is what we create for homeowners and for ourselves. We share a vision and mission, talk about what each person wants outside of work. Then we map daily tasks to those bigger dreams. I might say, “What’s your dream, buy a house? Let’s tie that to your KPI.” We built a small app with scorecards so employees see in real time how each completed job moves them closer to their personal goals.

Sid (Host):
So that fosters reliability, commitment, retention?

Adel (Guest):
Absolutely. And there’s nothing more powerful than that. For instance, an employee might say, “I wanted a down payment on a house. Now I have it because of this job.” That’s the biggest retention tool.

Sid (Host):
Awesome. So to wrap up, if you had to give one piece of advice to a new business owner who wants to scale, what would it be?

Adel (Guest):
Don’t quit. Get out and meet others, attend conferences, see how bigger players operate. Avoid living in a vacuum. Every time I’ve gone to events like The Huge Convention or a mastermind, I learn something that accelerates us big-time.

Sid (Host):
Great. Adel, thanks so much.

Adel (Guest):
Thank you, Sid.

Sid (Host):
Hello, my friend, this is Sid. Thank you again for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. If you got value, check the show notes for all the resources, books, and tools mentioned. Also, The Huge Insider is our free newsletter, we’ve got Huge Foundations with 120+ hours of industry training, the Huge Convention every August, and the Huge Mastermind if you’re doing over $750K. It’s all at https://www.thehugeconvention.com. If you enjoyed the show, please give us 90 seconds with a review on iTunes, then subscribe and share. It helps more people discover these resources. Keep learning, keep growing, and we’ll see you on the next episode.

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