In the wake of COVID-19, the commercial cleaning industry faces a time of unparalleled opportunity. Cleaning services find themselves in an unexpected spotlight as the world slowly reopens.
As JANCOA Janitorial Services CEO Mary Miller puts it, “When would you have ever thought that the janitors were in charge of the health of the people?”
In spite of this newfound responsibility, retaining staff and clients while also finding ways to grow continues to be a significant challenge for many cleaning company owners.
“At JANCOA,” says Mary, “One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned is to stop being a revolving door.”
The revolving door is a situation where a lot of effort is spent on signing up new clients, mostly because you need to keep up with the amount that you’re losing. It is a trap that can turn into inflated sales teams, aggressive telemarketing efforts, and a constant source of stress.
The same idea often happens with the staff—cleaners get hired as quickly as they’re quitting, creating another revolving door.
“We’ve created a program where we bring customers in and we really work hard to maintain them. And then we’ll bring in more. We don’t lose contracts very often,” explains Mary, who noted that this approach helped keep her business stable even though the worst of the pandemic.
This program involves several shifts in mindset, including:
When you start to leave the revolving door mindset behind, what should take its place? In many ways, the opposite of a revolving door scenario is the ‘system of predictability” scenario.
“When you start improving your turnover, and when [customers] start to see the same people, that creates a system of predictability which helps stabilize your business and lets you focus on what’s important,” says Mary.
Predictability—or stability—is critical for most businesses. In some sectors like tech or new ventures, some chaos is standard. For commercial cleaning businesses, stability is your friend.
Customers and clients feel better when they feel they can trust and get to know the staff taking care of their space. This can’t happen if the staff is always changing.
Staff feel better and are way less likely to quit if they’re confident that there will be a stable amount of shifts for them, and that the rules, tasks and expectations aren’t going to change week after week.
Here’s an example of failing to stick to the system:
“Years ago we had a customer service manager that went around and checked with customers to see how things were going, “ says Mary. “And I swear—every week—he would bring back a list of 38 things that were wrong in the building! And so our team was cleaning to fix the problems and so they weren’t following the system, so that created more problems!”
Chasing 38 different problems a week is a highly unpredictable way of doing things.
Mary explained that once they “stopped this insanity” and focussed on the top three cleaning needs, the chaos subsided, the 35 other things eventually got taken care of, and everyone was happier and more productive.
By the way, those top three problems were:
Predictably focus on doing an amazing job on those areas, and you’ve actually covered the majority of pressing issues. The customer is much less likely to view the other 35 things as pressing issues, and your (happier) staff will take care of them in due time.
When things are stable, and the revolving door has been decommissioned, it becomes much easier to work on creating genuine relationships with people. And this is where the true, long term payoff comes from.
100% of JANCOA’s new business comes from referrals. They do not run advertisements or invest in a sales team. Much of those saved costs can be used to further improve relationships, training, and wellbeing for their customers and staff, which increases happiness, which increases referrals, and so on.
This is a true growth engine. This is how Mary’s company made it through COVID-19 without shedding tons of clients or staff.
Three key groups to build relationships are:
Relationships don’t form overnight. It takes time, effort, and a strong system of predictability and communication.
In the webinar, Mary and Michael continuously come back to the topic of communication.
Unsurprisingly, solid communication practices are the heart of the three topics discussed above.
Communication also comes in many forms. Mary and Michael touch on several, such as:
Swept is super passionate about improving communication within commercial cleaning companies, so much so that it’s one of the app’s core features. We also write a lot about the topic. We recommend the following articles for those looking to dive deeper into the topic:
We hope this writeup has given you some additional perspective on how the pandemic impacted the cleaning industry, and how you might approach the re-opening. We recently published a piece specifically about hiring cleaners during the COVID-19 reopening that you may also find useful.
Good luck out there!