MBA1660 Q&A Wednesday: How do I grow my cleaning service business?

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Hey oh welcome to the Hundred dollar RBA show where knowing is growing every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar is at home. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask here on the show, just leave me an email. Just drop me an email over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Paul and Paul asks how can I grow my cleaning service business? Hey Omar, love the podcast. I've been listening for a few months now. I run a cleaning service with me and my buddy. We clean homes and we have over 100 five star reviews on Google. But right now it's just me and my friend and I want to grow the business. I want to scale. I'm not sure how to do that without sacrificing quality without getting negative reviews. Any advice would be helpful. Thanks Paul. Love this question from Paul because scaling a service based business requires a different strategy than say a product based business or a software or e commerce business or whatever it is. If it Requires somebody to spend time to do the work. The equation to scale is different. We're going to get into how to grow a service based business like Paul's, a cleaning service and how to maintain quality. Make sure that your reputation continues to be stellar. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Paul asks here on Q and A Wednesday how he can grow his cleaning service business. It's just him and his buddy and he wants to be able to grow it and expand, but he's worried that he's going to sacrifice quality or if he hires other people, they're not going to do as good of a job. That's an astute observation from Paul. But one of the things I want to start out with is that Paul is exactly right. He's probably hitting a ceiling right now because he can only do a certain number of jobs given there's only 24 hours in the day. Right. Even if he works 16 hours a day, which is crazy, there will be a limit to how many jobs he could take. And at that point, that's the ceiling. Unless he expands and grows and gets other people to take on the jobs. But how does he hire people and make sure they're doing as good of a job or better than he's doing? One of the good things about business is that our problems as entrepreneurs, as unique as they may seem to us, are not. They're not unique. They have been experienced before by other businesses. And that's a good thing because we can take a look at how they tackled those issues, those problems, how they overcame those challenges. Can you think of a service that's nationwide? One of the easy ones to think about is a restaurant like McDonald's, for example. The experience you have in one McDonald's is pretty much the same in any McDonald's. Same thing goes with, you know, in the U.S. cheesecake Factory or Red Lobster, these types of retail chains. What about the Apple Store? Yes, there's products, but there's an experience going on here. They also do repairs, they have the Genius bar, they help people out. It's pretty much the same experience in every Apple Store. How did that happen? Well, that's because these companies, these places of business, decided to create a system. They systematized to the granular level of the business and the service they're providing to every single step. So the first place somebody like Paul should start is by documenting everything, I mean, everything they do when they clean a home. Now, obviously he's got to do a job. He's Got to clean the house, but also he's got to document everything that's going on. So it might be helpful to hire somebody to do the documentation or get somebody like your nephew or a cousin who wants to make a few extra bucks. And this could be taking notes or video, if the homeowner is okay with that. And you're basically going to write a playbook for every single thing you do when you clean. At what level, at what quality? And how do you verify that quality? Whether it's a white glove test on the mantel, or even a verification or a rating, a personal rating, and review when you complete the job at a house? Now, the reason why we're documenting everything is because you want to have a guidebook, a playbook, something that somebody else can pick up and that you can point to. This is how we do the job. This is how we deliver our service. And this is at what quality. This is how McDonald's was able to expand and have that same quality and franchise. If you're interested in the story, check out the movie the Founder, starring Michael Keaton. It's on Netflix, which is all about the story of McDonald's, but it's really about the secret sauce of McDonald's, which is the system, the playbook, that makes it so successful. And you want to do the same for your business. Now, this is not going to be easy, but it's totally doable. It's training people, and you're going to do this slowly. So what you're going to do is maybe have one person as a trainee to come along with you when you clean the homes, and they're going to follow the playbook that you give them, and they can even have it on their phone. And you can basically give them a playbook for the living room, give them the playbook for the kitchen, and every time you go to a new house, you give them a new room. Okay, now we're doing office. Check out the playbook for the office. Follow to the T. You inspect, and you make sure that it's at that level. Once you feel like this trainee is at the level where they can do it on their own, they can train somebody else. You can then obviously hire managers that can do the training for you, that can inspect the quality, that can make sure that there's one manager and one cleaner in every job. One of the things I would enforce in this process is taking your time and making sure that the quality is there as you expand, as you train. I want to tell you that you're not Going to always hit out of the park. Sometimes you're going to hire people that just can't do the job as you want it, as you prescribe it. They may not understand the level of detail that you want and that's okay. And you're going to find somebody that will be able to. Okay, so not every hire is going to be a winner, and that's fine. That's business, especially in a service based business. Of course, when it comes to services and a business like being in somebody's home, you want to make sure that you do the proper background checks. You make sure that they're credible, make sure that they're professional. And you want to advertise this in your business, that you do this, that people that come into your home and clean are trustworthy and professional. I'll give you a little story from my own experience. About 10 years ago. I used to build websites for businesses. I used to build business blogs and websites and pages. And one of the things I used to do as a part of my service were graphics and logos and business cards and things like that. But I didn't like that part of the job. It took too much of my time. And I like to focus on the websites. So I actually hired a team of graphic designers. And it took me a while, but I finally found three or four that are solid. I probably had to hire around, I would say 10 to 12 people before I found that core group of four designers. Because they just didn't pull off the service the way I wanted. Whether it's the actual design of the logo or the graphic, or it was the way they communicated with customers or communicated with others on the team, I wanted to make sure that my service was top notch. So I was picky and I took my time and I hired slowly because I wanted to make sure my brand wasn't tarnished.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's Question from Paul how do you scale a business like his, which is a service based business, a cleaning service business? It all starts with a protocol, a playbook and then hiring slowly, training, having managers to train and scaling up that way. You need to have a Bible, so to speak, that everybody reads and everybody follows. It has to be your business's religion. I know this sounds a little bit extreme, but you really do have to have some sort of protocol or it's gonna not look the same. Your business will look different from one customer to the next. This might feel or sound like a boring task to document everything and create playbooks, but it's gonna allow you to scale a whole lot easier and it's going to give you the confidence that you know what it looks like to do it right. We know what a good job is in our own business, but you need to be able to communicate that and pass it on to other people or it's useless. You can't scale otherwise. It's just you and your buddy Paul. I hope that helped and I hope that helped all of you who are listening who are thinking about scaling your service business. Totally doable, but you just need to document what is a great job so that you can then train other people to do it and they can follow it. Why documentation? Why something like a Google Doc or even something written down and printed. Okay. Why? Because you need a reference. Okay. Because if you try to train them on a video call or in person, they could forget. They may not take notes. Videos are hard to kind of go back and find the specific information they need. Have a document. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love this show, hit subscribe right now so you get the next episode automatically. Do that right now. Hit subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Also check out Our new website over@100mba.net on the new site we have a new goodie for you to grab. It's called the Breakout Business Roadmap. If you feel overwhelmed about starting your business, you don't know which steps you have to take in what order, well, the Roadmap is here to solve that problem. Go ahead to 100mba.net and pop in your name and email address and grab our roadmap. It's that simple. He'll walk you step by step what you have to do when you have to do it all the way to launch. Pretty cool. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. At every stage of any business there's going to be challenges and there's going to be things we have to do differently in order to move on to the next stage. So you know what it took to get you to this point in your business, whether it's a service based business or a product based business. Now if you want to take it to the next level and scale, you're going to have to do something new. And this is something that a lot of people miss in business. You can't just do the same thing. You have to do something new, something different. It's going to take you to that next level. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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