Two contracts. That's the whole target for the month, and everything below is built backward from it. The plan is for a service business with no marketing person: you build a list in three days, send in week one, follow up and call in week two and three, and spend the last stretch walking buildings and writing quotes. About 23 hours of work in total.
The business is made up, and so are the rates. Treat this as an illustration of how the pieces add up, then swap in your own numbers after the first batch of emails tells you what is real.
The target and the arithmetic
Marcus owns Bluebird Clean, two vans and four cleaners in a mid-size city. He wants to add recurring work, not one-off cleans, so he's going after property managers of apartment buildings with 8 to 40 units. They need hallways, lobbies, stairs and trash rooms cleaned twice a week, and they replace a cleaner whenever one stops showing up. A typical contract is $650 a month. Two of them is $1,300 a month, or $15,600 a year.
Work backward with these assumptions, which are guesses until he sends:
- 100 property managers contacted
- 9 replies (9%), counting phone conversations
- 6 agree to a walkthrough
- 5 get a quote (one turns out to be a bad fit)
- 2 sign (40% of quotes)
If the real rate of replies is 5% instead of 9%, he needs about 180 names for the same result, not 100. The plan has a review at the end for exactly that reason. The leads-per-customer guide shows the same backward math in general form.
Days 1 to 3: the list and the message
Day 1 is a Monday in this calendar, so days 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21, 27 and 28 are weekends and nothing is scheduled on them.
Day 1, 90 minutes: decide exactly who. Property managers of buildings with 8 to 40 units within 20 minutes of the shop. Search the county's business filings, the map for "apartments" and "property management," and the managers' own sites. Get to 40 names with a role and a building. Day 2, 90 minutes: reach 100 names, add emails, and drop anyone who is clearly a large national operator with in-house cleaning. The method is in how to build a lead list in an afternoon. Day 3, 60 minutes: write the three messages below and set up the sheet: name, building, date sent, replied, walkthrough date, quote, result.
That is 240 minutes, four hours, before a single email goes out. Most people skip straight to sending and then have nobody to follow up with in week two.
Days 4 to 10: the first sends
Send 20 a day on days 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10, which makes 100 by the end of the week. That's a safe pace for a Gmail address that has been in normal use for a while. For a new address, start lower and build up. Each email gets a real first line about the specific building, which takes about two minutes and is where most of the 40 daily minutes go. Here's the first email:
Subject: Common-area cleaning at Westbrook Lofts
Hi Rhonda, I run Bluebird Clean, two crews that work buildings on the east side. Westbrook Lofts is 24 units, which is about the size where twice-weekly hallway, lobby and stair cleaning costs less than a hire and doesn't stop when one cleaner calls out. Buildings your size usually land between $550 and $750 a month. Could I do a 20-minute walkthrough Thursday or Friday? If you'd rather not hear from me, reply "no" and I won't write again. Marcus Delgado, Bluebird Clean, 14 Mill Road, Suite B, 555-0142
The address and the opt-out line aren't decoration. US commercial email has to carry a real postal address and a working way to say stop, under the CAN-SPAM Act. Honor every "no" the same day. Five sending days at 40 minutes is 200 minutes, a little over three hours.
Days 11 to 18: follow-ups and calls
A lot of replies come from the second and third touch, not the first, so this is the stretch where the month is won. On days 11, 12, 15, 16, 17 and 18, spend 45 minutes: send the short follow-up to anyone who hasn't answered after three business days, then call the ones who still haven't. Six days at 45 minutes is 270 minutes.
Subject: Following up: common-area cleaning at Westbrook Lofts
Rhonda, following up in case this got buried. If hallways and lobbies are already covered, would a second quote on file be useful for when the contract renews? The walkthrough is 20 minutes and the quote costs nothing. Marcus
The phone call is ten seconds long: "Hi Rhonda, it's Marcus from Bluebird Clean. I emailed Tuesday about the common areas at Westbrook Lofts. Is cleaning something you handle, or is that someone else?" If it's someone else, ask for the name and write it down. For a longer set of follow-up emails, see the four-email follow-up sequence, and for a shorter daily rhythm, outbound in 30 minutes a day.
By the end of day 18, the assumed result is 9 replies and 6 walkthroughs on the calendar.
Days 19 to 25: walkthroughs and quotes
Walkthroughs happen on days 19, 22, 23, 24 and 25. Each one takes about an hour on site and 20 minutes to write the quote, so 80 minutes, and six of them is 480 minutes. Send the quote the same day, then follow up on day 2 and day 5 for 15 minutes a day across five days, 75 minutes. Total for the week: 555 minutes, a bit over nine hours, and the heaviest week of the plan.
Bring a tape measure, a note of the number of floors, stairwells and trash rooms, and one question: "What happened with the last cleaner?" The answer tells you what to promise. A manager who says "they stopped showing up" wants reliability, so quote a named crew and a backup. One who says "they were fine but expensive" is a price conversation. The commercial cleaning guide covers pricing the walkthrough so you don't underbid.
Days 26 to 30: count, thank, reset
Day 26 (Friday), 20 minutes: chase open quotes. Day 29 (Monday), 60 minutes: do the count. Messages sent, replies, walkthroughs, quotes, signed. Compare each step with the assumption above, find the biggest gap and fix that one. Day 30, 20 minutes: chase open quotes again and ask each new client for the name of one other manager they know. Total: 120 minutes.
Add up the month: 240 + 200 + 270 + 555 + 120 = 1,385 minutes, or about 23 hours. At $40 an hour that's roughly $920 of Marcus's time to open $1,300 a month of recurring revenue.
If the count disagrees with the plan, the diagnosis in why am I not getting clients finds the weak step, and how long it takes to get clients gives the normal range for the wait.
Which parts of this month to copy
Copy the shape: one narrow buyer, 100 names, 20 sends a day, a follow-up on the third business day, a call after that, quotes the same day. Change everything specific. Your buyer, your price range and your service area decide the list, and your first batch decides the rates.
The part of the plan that's hard to keep up by hand is days 4 to 18: writing, sending, following up, answering replies at 9 p.m. That's the work an AI worker does. In Rocketship, the worker builds the list, sends from your Gmail, follows up on schedule, answers replies and books the walkthrough, which turns days 4 to 18, about 8 of Marcus's 23 hours, into a few minutes of checking. You still do the walkthroughs and the quotes.
Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number works on Launch, with call minutes bought as you go ($15 for 50), and a dedicated line is $5 a month.