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Growing in commercial cleaning doesn’t just mean scaling up your services or adding to your team. It means keeping your employees and clients happy so they stick around, and that requires good communication. But if you’re a larger firm or manage multiple employees, it might be hard to define what that looks like.
Here are strategies for solid communication so you can stay connected with all the key players in (and outside of) your commercial cleaning company and help your company grow in janitorial cleaning.
Grow My Cleaning Company Tip #1 - Make good communication part of your growth strategy.
Your business plan shouldn’t just include a strategy for growing your profits. It should also focus on how your team operates. That requires clear, consistent communication.
But this is an area where most companies (across every industry) tend to fail. According to Entrepreneur, “Many otherwise-successful, growing companies falter because of miscommunication.”
Maybe you have team members who speak multiple languages, or you don’t often see the people who work for you. Either way, managing your team effectively will require good (and consistent) communication with all members.
To grow in janitorial cleaning, you have to make communication a top priority from the beginning (before you start to seriously scale). “Rapid growth is a wonderful opportunity, yet it abounds with chances for communication breakdown,” states Ash Rust for Entrepreneur. “Booming business necessitates new hires, but frantic hiring often leads to miscommunicated expectations, misunderstood roles and little interpersonal familiarity.”
Growing teams can stay on track, however, when you set an example of good communication.
Grow My Cleaning Company Tip #2 - Give your team guidelines for good communication.
You can’t just preach about effective communication—you have to take the lead. Help your employees understand what connecting and engaging with others actually looks like.
Managers can make that happen by setting guidelines for their employees:
- Establish a baseline for consistent communication: meet with your team members regularly to check in on projects and their role in the company.
- Help your team understand what kinds of things need communicating, whether that’s customer requests, scheduling, supplies, or issues on a project.
- Give your team everything they need to communicate with you, your clients, and with each other. Set up a protocol for reaching out to each other, whether that’s via text, phone call, or other application.
Grow My Cleaning Company Tip #3 - Empower your team with better tools for good communication.
“In my opinion, the biggest trend in the cleaning industry today is the continual improvements to worker productivity and account retention,” says Rich Parillo for Services Magazine. If you’re not investing in software or some other type of communication technology to keep your team in touch, then you’re missing out on opportunities that your competition has already seized. “Up-to-date software is critical to any professional cleaning company,” says Parillo. “Without it you cannot be truly competitive. All of the major contracting companies have this type of software and, regardless of your size, it is needed strictly from a business management perspective.”
These kinds of tools help companies grow in the janitorial cleaning industry, so they can stay on top of projects and connect with their clients, which ultimately helps their bottom line, even in an industry with a great deal of demand.
“[Building services companies] are looking for every edge—whether it is equipment, supplies or processes, that can help them in this area,” explains Parillo.
Grow My Cleaning Company Tip #4 - Assure your clients that good communication is a core value of yours.
When you establish good communication on your team, your clients will start to notice. Projects also run more smoothly when communication is a priority, which means fewer issues with supplies or other setbacks because problems are addressed head-on and handled immediately.
You can encourage openness in communication with your customers too, which helps build trust with them. Trust will help build loyalty. That kind of good communication can lead to referrals.
“If a business has an ever-increasing number of referrals, it’s a significant hint that the business is doing something good for its clients. Conversely, if there are none, there are issues abound,” says R. Kenner French for Forbes.
Grow My Cleaning Company Tip #5 - Keeping Up with the Cleaning Industry
Despite or because of the COVID-19 crisis, janitorial and building services are in high demand.
According to data from MarketWatch, “Many companies, workplaces and transportation systems are trying to assure customers that they are safe by sanitizing and deep cleaning their premises. That’s leading to a steep increase in demand for cleaning services.”
To stay on top of trends and afloat in the industry, janitorial company owners can establish better policies and protocols around communication. To help janitorial companies encourage better productivity and consistency in their teams, the Swept app was created as an easy-to-use solution for communication and project management.
“Swept has helped us tremendously, in terms of the communication and the retention,” says Swept user Evelyn. “Just being able to manage our business better, during the day or at night. We used to rely on the old notebook system . . . you know how failproof that is!”
From supply tracking to translation service, scheduling, and client messaging, the Swept app has a full menu of ways for cleaning firms to stay on top of their projects.
Swept’s janitorial software helps janitorial company owners build trust with clients and get ahead of the competition by giving them the tools they need to spend more time managing their business and less time working in it.
Know Your Commercial Cleaning Business to Grow Your Commercial Cleaning Business
