Wanna Sell Commercial Cleaning Services in Multiple Locations? Episode 152 Featuring Mike Ofrias Suffolk Cleaning Today your faithful host Mike Campion talks selling commercial cleaning services with Mike Ofrias, owner of Suffolk Cleaning, Mike coaches Mike on how to sell more commercial cleaning services by adding locations in different states. Our guest wants to know how to expand his business into other states without sacrificing his current business. He has systems and a basic understanding of what he needs to do but is looking for a step by step walk through to help him expand as smoothly as possible. Mike Campion starts with first things first. So often owners of commercial cleaning companies want to grow just to grow and see multi state commercial cleaning services as an exciting way to do that. Although that can be the case, it is crucial to be crystal clear on your WHY. Don’t jump into adding locations before you know EXACTLY what you want your business to look like. KEY POINT: Always look for the “Why” behind the “What” Before Mike pulls out the big guns on how to transition to offering commercial cleaning services in multiple states, he offers a warning. Don’t just focus on top line growth. If your life is out of balance and not making more money as you grow, you have a problem. You can be consumed with “getting bigger” without a clear picture of what they really want. This leads to the trap of the owner doing $100K in revenue wanting to do $250K, the $250K owner wanting to sell $500K/ year and on and on. The problem with this strategy is you may never hit your true goal. You never know when you are finally “done”. Even worse, you may find yourself with a large business making the same or LESS than you were when you were small! Throw in the possibility of working way harder with tons more stress and you can see why this is a dead end strategy. KEY POINT: It’s NOT about top line growth- focus on PROFIT! As you and your business grow, you will find yourself with more and more opportunities. Your job as owner is to determine which of the opportunities you are going to pursue. It’s easy when you have few opportunities and they aren’t very good. It gets hard when you have to decide between lots of really good opportunities. This often means saying no to legitimate opportunities. Before you consider taking on a big opportunity like multi state commercial cleaning services, get clear on the life you want to create and how your business can support that life. Then consider expansion in light of your overall goals. As you consider expanding to other locations you want to decide what parts of your business There are 3 major parts to your business that you need to duplicate in additional locations . The rest you can perform from your “home office”. Every business, cleaning and otherwise, has three parts: Sales & Marketing (getting customers) Operations (delivering your product or service) Finance (accounting for everything) The only pieces that you typically need to export for commercial cleaning services are operations and sales. Marketing (getting the phone to ring) can be managed from afar. You can manage your accounting form a central location. Job walks and getting signed contracts is a face to face proposition. NOTE: In some cases residential cleaning companies can do sales virtually, but it is nearly impossible for commercial cleaning services to do this Now that you understand what parts of your business need to be local and what can be done from the home office, it is time to look at your business and decide what is already working, is scalable and can be exported immediately. Finally, determine what parts of your business are not running smoothly, often have fires or emergencies and depend on you as the owner to manage. Before you will be able to offer your commercial cleaning services in other states, you will have to remove yourself from the processes that your branch office will be doing remotely. BONUS LOVIN: Check out this FREE video on creating systems for growth You have to be brutally honest with yourself now because the market will be brutally honest for you. Once you have determined what you need to stop doing, it’s time to hire or outsource those activities MORE BONUS LOVIN: CLICK HERE for a great episode on hiring a cleaning supervisor If you are already working 60 hours a week you have to fix that first before splitting your time between 2 places. Setting up a second location isn’t just 2x as hard, it is exponentially more complex. Just when you think the fun is about to end, Mike takes Mike on a trip to the…