I started a residential cleaning business hoping to build a scalable company with recurring revenue. A few months later, I shut it down.

In this episode, I give an honest postmortem of why the business failed—and why the reasons were more complicated than simply not working hard enough or executing well enough.

The biggest problem was a lack of meaningful differentiation. To most customers, one residential cleaning company looked much like another, which made the business highly price-sensitive and difficult to market.

I also ran into challenging competitive dynamics. I was trying to operate completely above board - with W-2 employees, workers’ compensation insurance, payroll taxes, and other legitimate business expenses - while competing against independent cleaners and informal operators with much lower overhead. Immigration and the availability of lower-cost labor also shaped the market in ways that made it difficult to compete on price while maintaining healthy margins.

On top of that, I never found a reliable customer-acquisition channel. Yelp produced customers, but at a cost that didn’t make economic sense. Other channels failed to generate enough demand, and I ultimately spent too much money testing marketing approaches that didn’t work.

In this episode, I break down:

• How I launched the business and found my first customers
• Why recurring revenue wasn’t enough to make the model attractive
• The difficulty of differentiating in a commoditized local-service market
• What it costs to compete while operating legally and above board
• Why my marketing channels failed
• How much I spent—and what I learned from shutting the business down

This isn’t a story about giving up after the first setback. It’s a case study in recognizing when the underlying economics and market dynamics may not justify continuing—and what entrepreneurs can learn from a failed business experiment.

The 4 C’s Formula:

Commitment → Courage → Capability → Confidence

In this episode, I explore Dan Sullivan’s 4 C’s Formula and why confidence doesn’t come before taking action—it comes after.

When you commit to a goal that’s bigger than anything you’ve done before, you’re almost guaranteed to face uncertainty. Moving forward anyway requires courage. That courage forces you to develop new capabilities, and those capabilities ultimately create confidence.

I talk about how this framework applies to entrepreneurship, personal growth, and doing things before you feel ready—and why waiting until you feel confident may be exactly what keeps you stuck.

Commitment → Courage → Capability → Confidence.

Then the cycle starts again.

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I’m trying something new.

It’s called Opaque — a snail mail subscription built around one idea: How do you make good decisions when you don’t know how things will turn out?

Each issue puts you inside a real decision faced by an entrepreneur, leader, investor, or historical figure. You’ll get the information they had at the time — but not what happened next.

Then you have to decide.

What would you do? What are you assuming? What risks are you overlooking? And how confident should you really be?

Only later do you discover what actually happened and get a chance to compare your reasoning with reality.

In this episode, I explain why I’m creating Opaque, how the experience will work, and why I think practicing decisions under uncertainty is one of the best ways to develop better judgment.

No hindsight. No obvious answers. Just you, the information available at the time, and a decision to make.

This is an experiment, and I’d love for you to be part of the first group to try it.

Sign Up For Opaque: https://opaqueletter.com/

My Personal website: https://scotttaylor.me/