Episode 270 – How to avoid burnout while growing your cleaning company.
Today we’re talking with Michelle Middleton!
Michelle has a GREAT problem. She wants to take her business to the next level, but her calendar is totally booked. She’s working six days per week cleaning for her clients. This is something that happens when you’re a solopreneur and doing everything yourself, and luckily it is something you can easily solve.
The first step in growing your cleaning business when your calendar is fully booked is to simply raise prices.
You need to thin the herd somehow. Something has to give. Almost always the cleaning entrepreneur is charging too little for their service. You need to call up all your current clients and raise those prices. A few things will happen from there.
On one hand you will thin out how many paying clients you have, but you’ll actually be making the same amount of money or more for less work. This saves you a ton of time to allow you to focus on the other aspects I’m about to dive into here.
Or… all of your clients love you and agree to your new pricing model and suddenly you’re making a dramatic amount of more money that you can use to grow the business aggressively.
In this situation, you really aren’t looking for new clients just yet. Instead, it is time to build up an application getting machine that will put your company in front of an unlimited flow of qualified applicants that want to work for your company.
Resource Alert: Hiring for Cleaning Companies Made Simple! https://oldsite.growmycleaningcompany.comcleaning-company-hiring/
How you do this is actually quite simple.
You create what I call a core value based ad. Not one of those ads that just sounds like everyone else where you’re offering free training and no weekends. You want your ad to REALLY represent what makes your company so great to work for, make them feel like they are about to join a community of colleagues that they will absolutely love to work with.
When those people click through your ad, it should lead them to a page on your website specifically for people to apply. This page should reflect the core value ad that you wrote. It should not be just another web form for them to submit information to, otherwise it’ll cause friction and you’ll get less qualified people filling out the form. There needs to be a continuity.
When they do submit their information, have it tied to an autoresponder like Aweber or Mailchimp. The autoresponder will send out dates for a weekly (you can make them monthly too if you want) group interviews. These group interviews will only take about an hour of your time, so it won’t be a huge time investment cost.
Resource Alert: Best Practices for Hiring Cleaning Employees https://oldsite.growmycleaningcompany.comhiring-cleaning-company-employees/
The people that stand out, invite them back to a one on one interview where you can start training them on how your company works.
By creating this system, it will only take you a few weeks to have a huge pool of qualified applicants looking to work for you. These new workers will alleviate huge portions of your time since you will remove yourself from the actual cleaning portion of your business.
Once you have this system up and running effectively and a team of competent cleaners working for you, then you can start to aggressively build out your client attraction systems.
Alright! Let’s dive into the Lightning Round!