Episode 689 – The Secret Hack to Making Systems WORK in Your Cleaning Company
Today our guest is Savannah Armstrong. She and her husband, Nick, started Lemon and Love Cleaning Club. They started officially in December 2019 in the Birmingham Alabama area with residential cleaning services. They are blessed with four children whose ages are 8, 6, 5 and 3.
Savannah and Nick are really interested in opening up the second location down in Florida. Before they set up the second location, Savannah wants to dive into how to get her employees to clean up to a good, consistent standard.
Systems are the first step, but are not everything.
Certainly, there are things like checklists, systems, processes and training and all that sort of stuff. The problem is that business owners put 90% of their focus there and really that should be 10-15% of their focus on their business. Really what matters is that you come up with a system, write it down, and you can adjust it as you progress. Generally do not spend a lot of time on systems because any system is going to be fine. But if you have the wrong person, that would be a major problem.
Most cleaning business owners hire people based on their perceived perception of the person’s ability to clean. In other words, if the hiree has experience, they’re good. If they don’t have experience that would be bad because they would need training.
Core Values
In our program we teach our clients to hire according to their core values. We shift the thinking from “how good of a cleaner are you?” to “how much of a core values fit are you?” For example, if two of your core values are “be real” and “to help out” but the person isn’t a great cleaner, then there’s a good chance that they’ll be willing to work and learn, and be honest with you that they’re not a great cleaner and need training. So if you look for people based on the standards of your core values, and making sure they’re a match, you can train anyone to clean (because cleaning in and of itself isn’t as difficult a job as brain surgery). You first put in the type of core values fit you need, then build up the training as necessary.
If you run your company with your core values, you will start to only attract people that are going to help you do anything in the end, as long as you also set up basic systems. By setting this up business model up with her core values in her first location, Savannah can scale her company to a new location using the same model!
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