My mentor always said “owning a business gives the greatest joy AND the greatest grief”. Hopefully more joy than grief, but you never really know what the day will bring until it comes.
Needless to say, owning a cleaning business comes with many challenges. Any business does for that matter, but today I want to chat about four things in particular that can sink your ship, or at the very least send you to bed each night with a raging headache.
Issue 1: Not training your staff enough
As with most lessons, I learned this one the HARD WAY. I made the mistake of thinking everyone I hired would be just “like me”. Giant mistake!! Anyway, you have to really hold peoples hands and walk them through EXACTLY how you do things. TRAIN, TRAIN, and TRAIN some more. This is a process, it never ends. Enough said. For some tips check out this post on managing your staff.
Issue 2: High staff turnover / hiring wrong people
For some reference, I’m pretty sure (if memory is correct) that I had over 100 people on my ADP payroll in one year. And I only averaged about 15 to 22 workers on the payroll each week. So that tells you I blew through about 80 plus or so people in ONE YEAR. Yea… it was UGLY! I had a lot of turnover and I was struggling to plug all the holes. Eventually I figured out a plan that involved hiring “high quality” people. This wasn’t a overnight fix, but it did slow the bleeding enough so I could stay alive.
Issue 3: No quality control on your accounts
This issue boils down to a “lack of inspections” done by YOU on YOUR STAFF. This is another one of those lessons I paid a high price to learn. Lost my fair share of accounts in the early days becasue I was “tired”, “too busy”, “working on something else” or just plain “lazy”. I know following behind everyone is a tough thing to do, after all it’s late, and you have to get up early in the morning to start all over. But losing accounts and starting over again is WORSE.
Issue 4: No open lines of communication with customer
When I first started, my goal was to “stay out of their hair”. Just show up and do my job, stay in background. Big mistake. When issues arose, and they always do, the customer didn’t have any type relationship with me. I sent them an invoice and they just sent me a check each month. That was our relationship. Minimal at best, non-existent at worst. I soon learned that I needed to be as close as the customer “would allow”. Some wanted a tight relationship, others didn’t. I rolled with whatever they wanted! This produced much better results.
Anyway, that’s it for today. If anyone has any other comments, ort would just like to add their two cents, feel free to do so below.
Words of wisdom, “quality control on your accounts”. Your people do not share the passion of the business like the owner does, and employees tend to get comfortable. I thought I could buy quality, I was wrong. One thing I did before the pandemic was to hand deliver the invoices. That gave me a relationship with my clients and allowed for me to check up on my employees at the same time. And believe me, clients will tell you if their unhappy with something.
Awesome comment. Also love the idea of delivering the invoice. Thanks for sharing that!