Reinvent Your Cleaning Company Before It’s Too Late!

Scary, I know, but let’s be honest; today isn’t like yesterday.

Yesterday, you might have been able to “pick and choose” which buildings you wanted to clean.

Today, you’re just downright grateful for every customer you have and every office you clean!

Yesterday, you could expect to see at least a few decent applicants apply to work for you.

Today, you may be wondering where all the truly hard workers have gone.

Yesterday, you could go out and land cleaning jobs where you’d have enough hours to…

clean the way you’d like, that delivers the kind of quality you like to give.

Today, you question whether or not anyone even cares what the cleaning will actually look like – as you watch your prospects skip everything else… and go right to the price page!

Yesterday, you could count on your ‘contacts’ who’ve gotten to be friends of yours over the years, to always be there.

Today, the building and property manager contacts you’ve developed over the years – can disappear in a ‘puff of smoke’ as your friend is suddenly transferred, reassigned, laid off, or has his or her position eliminated altogether, leaving you standing there like the nervous, new kid at school, wondering who to sit next to at lunch.

Ugh!

I could go on, but I won’t, because the point is clear.

Today isn’t yesterday.

Harder? Sure, but not impossible.

In fact, the very fact, that things are harder and more challenging means that if you can find a way, or create a way to meet these challenges, then you will stand out from the crowd!

How?

Well, let’s look at two ways to ‘reinvent’ your company to meet these challenges head on…

Operational and Strategic

First, let’s look at OPERATIONAL.

Here we’re talking about finding better ways to get leads, bid jobs, land jobs, hire, train and motivate people, control expenses and manage quality with systems that work for you all the time – not just some of the time.

Then there’s STRATEGIC.

What’s that?

Well, these are ‘big picture’ decisions designed to respond to, and capitalize on, the new and changing world you’re running your cleaning business in today.

Let me tell you just a couple of the strategic decisions we’ve made over the years…

We decided to expand the geographic area we serviced from 30 miles to 60 miles by boosting on-site supervision, hiring close to the account, and cross-training associates to cover for co-workers, if necessary.

We decided to change the internal reality of our company by stepping up to, and guaranteeing, a set of higher level service standards to – set us apart from our competition!

And then we pro-actively educated our prospects to the differences between us and the competition.

Here’s an example:

Our Customer Service Guarantee:
We will return any service call within 1 hour, and respond to any service request within 24 hrs. of being received.* exception: schedule floor maintenance

We decided to increase our profit margin without raising our general monthly cleaning charge, by concentrating price increases to extra services such as carpet and tile maintenance, as well as, the consumable poly/paper restroom and lunchroom supplies.

And, a fuel surcharge on floor work and product delivery.

We decided to limit our target market to buildings requiring a minimum of (3) three times per week cleaning where we can clean after 5 PM and have key/code access.

We decided to expand our market by targeting additional types of buildings we were interested in, like churches, and then niched our marketing to speak directly to that target.

Take the time to think about what operational and strategic steps you want to make to move your company in new directions, after new markets, in new geographies, with new pricing strategies in a new way.

You don’t need to fear tomorrow.

There are answers to the challenges we face. We can face them together.

You Can Do This, You Really Can,
Dan