How to Start and Grow Your Own Cleaning Business
 

GOOD NEWS FOR YOUR CLEANING BUSINESS IN AN ECONOMIC DOWNTURN
By Gary Goranson

Back in 1976 when I started Tidy Car in Toronto, Canada I wanted to get my workforce up to 100 mobile car polishers as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, I was holding three mass interviews daily and interviewed an average of 20 to 30 people a day, five days a week for two straight months. Needless to say, at that rate of recruiting I made plenty of hiring mistakes. But I also managed to find some workers who were real gems, in part, by asking ONE simple question during the interview process.

In those days I wasn’t using anything nearly as sophisticated as the five-step selection system we teach you in House Cleaning Business 101. In retrospect, if I had access to such a reliable method of choosing my workers back then I could have accomplished my staffing objective much more efficiently and with far fewer headaches.

Attitude is key

A tool I began using in my selection process was a question on my employment application form related to attitude. It’s an allegorical question you have no doubt heard countless times, “If you see a glass of water filled to middle, would you say it is half empty or half full?” What I soon noted was that the group of people who answered “half full” were far more likely to succeed at their job than those who responded “half empty.” It’s a simple question which can indicate whether a person identifies his or her environment positively or negatively. Employees who have a positive outlook on situations and see the glass as “half full” are more likely to succeed than people who tend to view things as “half empty.” I found this to be a fact after being able to look back on how well my new hires worked out after a period of time. You might try an experiment on your own by asking this question to your current employees, since you most certainly already know which ones have a positive attitude and those with a more negative disposition. You might be surprised how their answers match their known workplace attitude in most cases. The same “half full – half empty” outlook can also determine how well the owner of the business succeeds at his or her venture.

There Never is a “Right Time”
Over some four and a half decades, most of that time in my own business, I have been through both economic booms and so-called “busts”. I’ve seen it all. And I have succeeded by looking for the positive side of every situation, both the good times and the more challenging. In fact, when I started WorkEnders in 1991 the United States was in a recessionary period. Fifteen years earlier I launched my Tidy Car mobile car polishing business in January; a time of year when my friends thought I must be insane! A mobile care polishing business in the dead of winter in Toronto?!?!?!?! Maybe I was a little crazy, but in spite of my questionable wisdom, I managed to grow Tidy Car into more than 2,000 franchises in 38 countries in just 4 years – and my franchisees started and ran their businesses 12 months of the year in every one of those countries – winter, spring, summer and fall (I’ll give you my secret to meeting this challenge at the end of this article)!

How many people do you know who dream of being in their own business? Probably most of your friends and acquaintances have thought about it. But, for some reason or another, the time is never “just right.” There’s always “something” which seems to create the opportunity to procrastinate; to put off doing something about it. A lot of times it is a fear of moving out of one’s comfort zone; of taking a calculated risk. Fear of failure. And in a downturn economy it is easy to allow the word “recession” to amplify that fear. This fearsome word also causes some of us who are already in business to panic and hide under a rock until the “storm blows over.”

I Believe That We Create Our Own Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
In that legendary movie “Jaws” the mayor of the hamlet says, “If people hear the word Barracuda, they say, ‘huh, what’ …but if they hear the word shark they panic and run.” In the business community, the scary word is “recession”. The lemming mentality often causes a stampede of folks following others blindly over a cliff. In my humble opinion and from observing the economy over many decades, the media talk about recession and the public’s response to it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – FOR THOSE WHO ALLOW IT TO.

It’s a fact! If you believe you can succeed at something, the odds are stacked in your favor that you will indeed succeed. Even more certain, if you believe you are facing tough times and don’t treat problems as challenges to find opportunities, you are very unlikely to achieve success. I am not an economist, but between 1983 through 2007 economic forecasters were wrong about half the time according to a study by Michael F. Bryan, a vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and Linsey Molloy, an economic analyst at the Bank. Unfortunately, when the lead lemmings jump over the cliff, there’s always a herd that will follow. YOU don’t have to be among that herd!

I’m not suggesting we simply bury our heads in the sand and pretend there aren’t some challenges. There are ALWAYS challenges in business, regardless of what’s going on in the economy, whether the nation is in a funk or not. Let’s look at how the present economic conditions can be a blessing in your business.

So, Let’s Look at the Good News!
There are always two challenges in this industry: (1) finding and keeping good employees and (2) building a loyal and profitable client base. I don’t have to ask you which of those two endeavors is the most challenging. More than 5 hours of our 11 hour House Cleaning Biz 101 seminar program deals with employee recruiting, relations and retention.

Finding and keeping good employees: Back in 2000 I held a series of seminars around the country with owners of cleaning services on the challenge of finding novel ways of recruiting good employees. You may recall seeing newspaper and magazine articles talking about the lengths to which employers were going to recruit employees in almost every industry. They were paying current employees hefty finders’ fees of up to $10,000 for referring potential job candidates to their companies. Some companies were offering new hires a leased luxury car like BMWs and Porches. Hiring bonuses of $5,000 or more were not uncommon. That’s the challenge in a vibrant and glowing economy. This was the state of the economy in 2000. Some of the solutions we suggested to owners in the residential cleaning industry is a subject for another article.

The major blessing in an economy with a rising jobless rate is that it makes recruiting good employees much, much easier. If you’re actively growing your business at this moment, you have already found this out. Good people are a lot easier to find – and keep. Now is an excellent time to be recruiting and sticking firmly to our intensive 5-step selection process down to the letter. You should not be as willing to gamble on “iffy” job candidates these days. You can afford to be more selective. NOW IS THE PERFECT TIME TO BE BUILDING YOUR WORK FORCE!

Building a loyal and profitable client base: Yes, there are people losing their jobs. The unemployment rate nationally is around five percent. However, this also means that 95% of the nation’s population is employed. And yes, according to a recent March 7^th  article in the Los Angeles Times some 2.3% of the nation’s mortgage holders were in foreclosure and 5.8% were delinquent. However, this means that at least 94% of America’s home owners are not having a problem. The article also stated that 35% of the country’s home owners own their homes outright and do not have a mortgage.

My point here is that, the glass is way more than half full! It is better than 9/10 full! We have clients successfully using our program in every state in America and 48 other countries; many of those countries with much less disposable income ratios than the U.S. We have customers operating their businesses in Australia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Barbados, Bermuda, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Great Britain, Honduras, Holland, Hong Kong, Iceland. India, Indonesia, Ireland, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Virgin Islands and Wales. In some of these countries, much fewer than 90% of the population holds potential customers for a cleaning service!

Many owners have accumulated clients who are under-priced and taking up spots on their cleaning schedule which could be better filled with more profitable customers. In a down economy, these are the people who are most likely to terminate your service. What a wonderful opportunity to replace them with clients who are more profitable – and very often, much easier to deal with.

Remember, you don’t need a zillion clients to operate a $1 million cleaning business. You can achieve that with about 400 regular clients. You only need about 400 households in your market to build and maintain a $1 million dollar business. You only need about 800 regular clients to build and maintain a $2 million business. Compare that figure to almost any other business! It’s exciting when you stop and think about it.

Now is the Time to Leap Frog Over Your Competitors!
Now is not the time to slow down your recruiting of either new hires or new clients. Now is the time to grow your business while many of your competitors are absorbed in “glass half full” reaction. DON”T stop advertising for clients; there are hundreds out there ready and willing to hire your service. DON’T stop hiring workers; now is a great time to find good people willing to work for you and stay with you.

I am excitedly looking forward to sharing YOUR success story. Go for the gold and never look back!

P.S. How did we manage to polish cars in the dead of winter with snow, ice and frigid conditions? Simple and fortuitous. We found gas stations willing to allow our folks to use one of their service bays during inclement weather (yes, back then there were full service gas stations). And that’s how so many of our franchisees gravitated to leasing facilities and operated their businesses from a fixed location rather than doing the work mobile. Indeed, necessity IS the mother of invention.
 

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