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Episode 119

Cleaning Company Operations : Episode 119: Mike Campion LIVE

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EPISODE 119
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Episode 119 – Cleaning Company Operations

Cleaning Company Operations
In today’s episode Mike coaches Neel Parekh from Maid This www.Maidthis.com on cleaning company operation. Neel would like to know the best way to set up his cleaning company operations so that he can be involved as little as possible to serve his lifestyle of traveling the world.

Let’s start with the foundation. A lot of people come to me asking how to market, what’s the best way to bid? What’s the best way to get clients? What’s the best way to run my operations?

The only responsible answer is to ask a dozen questions about what your goals are for the business and personally, how you want to live and how you want your business to serve you.

Most of the people I talk to are in a lot of pain with their lifestyle, money or both.

The big foundation is you have to understand you created this business to serve you, not the other way around.

Lots of owners have written their business a blank check, whether that be financially, emotionally or with their time. Whatever the business needed they gave it at great cost personally or financially. It’s fine, if you are clear on what your goals are with your business serving you.

It’s crucial to know what your goals are before you set up your internal processes of your business. The way you set up a business for someone who wants to be involved with their employees and the community is going to be very different from how you set up a business for someone who wants to travel and be as light touch as possible.

In Neel’s case he would like to set up his cleaning company operations to serve his lifestyle of traveling the world and to have as light of a touch with as much systems and automation as possible.

The way to achieve having as little involvement in your business as possible is having great systems.

You have to have either great people or great systems. If you have great systems you can hire average people who are easy to interchange, if you have really poor systems you have to hire great people and keep them because they have good systems in their head and they are going to be able to make the same decisions you would while you are away.

If it were my company, and I wanted to leave town, I would have systems for what happens if I leave town and my one administrative person quits. I would go over how would he quit, how would he leave, if I were to fly back how many days would it be before I could get back and what would happen in the meantime?

I would likely have a backup plan for 2 or 3 of my cleaning employees who are looking for a promotion who I have been training to be able to fill in in the interim or even an outside person with administrative experience who I have been in touch with. Just to make sure I have all contingencies covered.

BONUS TIP: If you want a low touch lifestyle, you need excellent systems.

With Neel’s business model, he has a lot of customer churn. Instead of doing 10 $2,000 commercial jobs a month, he does 200 or 300 $200 dollar jobs.

If I have 25 customers and they pay me a lot, I don’t need a lot of systems, because if something goes wrong, I can be there to fix it. But with Neel’s business model, he’s just attracting a wall of customers, giving them a low drag experience where they can just get a service in and out, they don’t build a relationship, share core values, they just provide a service and their customers pay the bills, then move on to the next customer. There is nothing wrong with that business model, it just requires a different set of systems within your cleaning company operations that are not necessarily employee based to keep customers coming to him.

Neel’s cleaning company operations need to be set up much like a McDonalds. If the fry guy quits, there are 20 other employees that are ready to step in and do that job because they have systems for everything. Employees are like widgets, if one widget breaks, they just replace it with another widget.

Take out dependance on any one employee and have a group of systems you can put in a handbook that anyone, in any language can understand and follow.

BONUS TIP: Write down exactly how you want each job to be done. That is the start of your systems and manuals.

It takes a while to create these systems. But when you have them, you can set your cleaning company operation to make the decisions you would make if you were there automatically. Most importantly build in several contingencies so that you have plan a,b,c,d and e so plan f is the one involving you flying home.

Lightning Round
It’s better to try and fail than never try to begin with.
Don’t wait too long to get rid of employees that aren’t working out!!

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