Wow, this is a great question! The way you answer can mean the difference between your success and failure. If you have to think long and hard about your answer, then sit back, grab a cup of coffee and uncover some secrets to your future success.
If you started in this business as many did, cleaning for a living, you probably know the technical side of this business better than most business owners who did not start that way. Now that you see your business struggling to keep up with the pace of new business, not enough help, employees whose work ethic may be be the same as yours, you find yourself continuing to clean on a regular basis just to keep jobs covered. You find yourself being pulled back into the field to solve one crisis after another and see no end in sight for this process. You find that the moment you leave your staff alone, the quality slips and the complaints roll in. So 2 steps forward and 3 steps back becomes the routine.
This is not what you envisioned for yourself long term but HOW do you get out? Here’s the most important tip:
Nothing will happen until you change your mindset about your business and respect it as a business instead of a job! Starting today..if you have made the decision to run your business as an ower/leader, you need to think ahead only and never look back. What this means is: if you have decided to hang up your apron, put down the vacuum and retire the bucket….you can NEVER go back. You can never be the “fill in” again. You can never be the one who “saves” that customer by showing up to help clean or fill in when someone is ill. For every time you do, you have enabled your staff to use you as another member of the crew rather than the owner of the company. You have reinforced your role as “substitute cleaning person” rather than ower and leader of the company who has a goal and vision.
Here’s a quote from a favorite speaker of mine “Behaviors Never Lie” ~ Richard Flint. What Richard is saying here is: no matter what you say you are going to do or want to do, the only thing that counts is what you ACTUALLY do. If you say you want to be out of the field and have not changed your thinking about your role as owner/leader, NOTHING will change. A year from now, 2 years from now and even 5 years from now, you will be singing the same song about wanting to get out of the field. You will continue to go to your J-O-B everyday instead of the business that you own.
Put the processes in place today to make others in your company responsible for technical side of your business so that you can focus on the growth of your company. Let it go! Be ok with the fact that every client will not be cleaned to 100% perfection every cleaning and then look at your training systems when quality starts to slip. It is not the complaints that are the issue, it is the mindset of the owner and training processes that need revamping. It is the training, followup and quality assurance programs that have failed, not the fact that you are not in the field cleaning.
Think seriously about how long physically you can clean and how limiting you have made your income when you don’t grow your business
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