Episode 687 – Do I Need a Cleaning Manager for My Cleaning Company?
Today our guest is Sarah Gaborik. Sarah is the owner of Coastal Cleaning Crew and started it in January 2020 In Indian Rocks Beach, Florida. They serve residential and short-term vacation rental turnovers.
Sarah decided to start her own business when she had an incident at her previous job which caused her to be suspended from work. It was the last pay period of the month, and with her suspension approaching. Sarah knew she needed that paycheck to be able to pay her rent. She decided to start cleaning and now she’s enrolled in the Grow My Cleaning Company Elite program. She is ready to finally get out of cleaning and to focus more on running her cleaning business.
Sarah’s Progress and Current Challenges
Sarah hated that she wasn’t running her business because she was still in the field cleaning. She had so many hats to wear in her cleaning company. During the peak season, she would only take a single day off a month. She would come home and spend hours running the business after already working all day cleaning.
Sarah has finally reached the point where she has a great crew and they are doing a phenomenal job. Yet, she can’t seem to stay ahead of the volume to focus on running the business.
She’s thinking of taking one of her current cleaners and putting her into a position where she can start overseeing the rest of the team. She is Sarah’s most senior cleaner and she’s doing a fabulous job. Sarah doesn’t know how or when to start her plan.
Mike’s Advice for Sarah Regarding Hiring Managers
There are lots of things to consider before doing Sarah’s plan.
- The first thing to focus on is making sure you have the right clients in place.
- Make sure you’re charging the right amount of money.
- Make sure you’ve got a funnel that’s going to bring you more than enough quality people to work for you.
There’s good news and bad news when thinking of hiring some kind of manager.
- The bad news is, it will cost you margin, and it’s hard to find that person so you can walk away from the business. When you do, there’s still turnover, whether they say six months, a year, or two years, every time there’s a turnover with a manager, now you’re back in the business. More times than not, they don’t do what you want them to do anyway. 100% of the time they take out of your margin. Since they’re not really the cost of goods sold, they’re not cleaning or doing anything you’re doing that you can charge for, and we coach only 30% for the cost of goods sold, we’d rather see more of that money serving elsewhere. This could be in marketing or professional development for you and your team for example. There are a lot of downsides to hiring that person in a manager role.
- The good news is you don’t need that person. First of all, we don’t coach to ever pay someone to do a job, and then pay someone to watch them do that job. If your cleaners are doing a bad job, that’s the problem. They most likely need better training, not a manager. You need better cleaners, and/or a better culture within the cleaners.
You need a system before you need a person. Sometimes we think “I’m too lazy to make a system or think it through. So I’ll just hire a person.” The problem here though, is that it’s more work to hire that person, train that person, find that right person, then it’s expensive to pay them, and then they’re going to quit someday. Instead, just have a system you put into place once and it solves a problem forever.
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