Many cleaning business owners desperately want to grow their business and they do a great job of focusing on marketing when they're just getting started. But once they start gaining new clients they realize that they now have to manage the business too! Pretty soon the business isn't growing at the same rate it was at the beginning.
The problem is, they skipped an important step in setting up their business. They went from marketing to cleaning without giving much thought to what kind of systems they should put into place to make things run smoothly. The result is that they spend most of their day reacting to problems that come up because no one knows what procedures to use for any given task in the business.
For example, you hire a new employee to clean, and you spend a day or two showing them what you want them to do. Then a week later you get a call from a customer wanting to know why a trash can was missed and why there are crumbs on the floor near the kitchen sink. Or perhaps you hired an office worker to answer phones and then get upset because she didn't write down a prospective client's contact information so you could follow up with a phone call.
The underlying problem is not that you have incompetent people, it's that you didn't put into writing the system they should use for doing their job. As a result, you start having a hard time growing the business because you are focused on solving problems, not growing the business and making a profit.
Start analyzing the decisions you are making each day. If you discover that those decisions are problem-solving decisions, you are reacting to day-to-day problems. Also, if you find you are continually having to solve the same problems over and over again, it's a clue that you should create a system around that problem so your employees can handle it themselves and avoid it occurring again.
If you want to stop stifling the growth of your cleaning company, you need to start weighing each decision you make by deciding if it will be profitable for the business. These decisions should be directly related to growing your business and making a profit -- NOT putting out fires.
The problem is, they skipped an important step in setting up their business. They went from marketing to cleaning without giving much thought to what kind of systems they should put into place to make things run smoothly. The result is that they spend most of their day reacting to problems that come up because no one knows what procedures to use for any given task in the business.
For example, you hire a new employee to clean, and you spend a day or two showing them what you want them to do. Then a week later you get a call from a customer wanting to know why a trash can was missed and why there are crumbs on the floor near the kitchen sink. Or perhaps you hired an office worker to answer phones and then get upset because she didn't write down a prospective client's contact information so you could follow up with a phone call.
The underlying problem is not that you have incompetent people, it's that you didn't put into writing the system they should use for doing their job. As a result, you start having a hard time growing the business because you are focused on solving problems, not growing the business and making a profit.
Start analyzing the decisions you are making each day. If you discover that those decisions are problem-solving decisions, you are reacting to day-to-day problems. Also, if you find you are continually having to solve the same problems over and over again, it's a clue that you should create a system around that problem so your employees can handle it themselves and avoid it occurring again.
If you want to stop stifling the growth of your cleaning company, you need to start weighing each decision you make by deciding if it will be profitable for the business. These decisions should be directly related to growing your business and making a profit -- NOT putting out fires.
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