You Own a Cleaning Business, but Who are YOUR Clients?

As the owner of a residential cleaning business, the answer to this question appears to be obvious: Your clients are the families and individuals for whom your company performs house cleaning chores. However, if this is your answer you would only be partially right.


Actually, YOUR clients are the hard-working folks who clean for those customers. The folks they clean for are THEIR customers. Does this sound like some form of abstract double speak?



The Definition of a Customer or Client


According to Wikipedia, “the word derives from "custom," meaning "habit"; a customer was someone who frequented a particular shop, who made it a habit to purchase goods of the sort the shop sold there rather than elsewhere, and with whom the shopkeeper had to maintain a relationship to keep his or her "custom," meaning expected purchases in the future . . . . However, some managers in this environment, in which the emphasis is on being helpful to the people one is dealing with rather than on commercial sales, comfortably use the word "customer" to both internal and external customers.”




Let’s think about this for a moment.


Good client relations are a key to encouraging purchasers of your service to continue to patronize your company on a long term basis; hopefully for many years. You have read books and articles on the subject and have likely attended seminars on the topic as well. However, and this point is key to my argument, neither you nor your management or office support staff have direct oversight of how well your employees are serving their clients. You are forced to rely on the people to whom you assign cleaning schedules to provide high standards of service and customer care. Without this result, people will certainly cease to patronize your company’s service.


Now, if you view your employees as YOUR customers and regard the relationship similarly to the way you should want to nurse a paying customer (as referenced in the underlined portion of the quote from Wikipedia above), think of how this management behavior can create a positive impact on your company’s end customers.


You see, if you want to get a paying customer to trust your company, do business with you on a long-term basis – in other words, becomes totally loyal and committed to your company, this won’t happen unless you earn their loyalty and respect. The same holds true with the people who work for your company.


How do you behave to attract a new client to your business? You advertise and market and tout your service’s best features. You make a case for why the public should do business with your company rather than the competition. Then when your courtship works, you go all out to earn their continuing patronage. Doesn’t it make sense that we adopt the same behavior when it comes to our employees?


You go out of your way to keep your paying customers happy because you know you’re not the only game in town. There are other cleaning services actively looking for an opportunity to usurp your clients at the first opportunity. Well, think about it; the same holds true when it comes to good employees. Good workers are in big demand in this industry but, on top of that, they’re in demand by other types of businesses as well. To attract and retain the best employees, think of using the same kind of behaviors and tactics you use to find and keep loyal and profitable clients.



You May be the Boss, but . . .


Many, many (too many then I care to think about) years ago when I was opening up sub-distributorships in the vacuum cleaner business, I encountered a bad situation with one of my offices. The sub distributor decided to move on in another direction, and left town without notice leaving a staff of angry, unpaid commission sales people for me to face.


I called a meeting with his abandoned sales staff, found out how much money they were owned, and wrote each of them a check right on the spot. Needless to say I garnered some fans right on the spot, too. Since I had intended to place the abandoned operation under my wing, I felt it was better and less expensive to pay a week’s worth of owed commissions than to lose the people in place and start all over again. I also felt it was the moral thing to do, regardless of whether the staff stayed on with me or moved on like their recent boss had done.


Near the end of the meeting, when I sensed I had won the attendees over, I made the following statement: “I don’t care if you like me or not, I just want you to do a good job selling. However, one thing I do demand is your respect.” At that point, a cocky young man in the group responded to my comment with, “Gary, you cannot DEMAND my respect; you have to earn it.” After I took a minute or so to react, and after thinking about his comment for a few seconds I said, “Do you know what – you’re right, and I will do my best to do just that.”


I must have earned his respect, as well as all the other sales people, because he and the rest of the crew went on to produce record new sales numbers for that office.



That early lesson paid off throughout my career


The Golden Rule tells us to “do unto others as we would have done unto you.” I like to give a little twist to that code: “Do unto others as they want done unto them.” In other words, treat them as THEY want to be treated, not strictly as you think they should be treated. This might sound like a play on words, but if you really think about it there is a difference.


Many years following the incident I described with the brash young salesman I described above, we had opened up a 4,500 automotive appearance center in Toronto for my TIDY CAR business. The people we hired to polish cars, detail interiors, install sunroofs, etc. were of a similar mold to that of the good folks we hire in the residential cleaning industry. But we treated them like the V.I.P.s all good employees really are and handed out Employee of the Month Awards and hung their Employee of the Month Photos in the customer waiting area.


One 23-year-old young man was Carlos Frietas, an immigrant to Canada from Venezuela. When we presented him with an Employee of the Month Award, he broke into a huge smile and then went out into the shop area and set a new time record for cutting a whole in a car’s roof and installing a sunroof in a total of nine minutes! When I went out into the shop to admire the quality of his work and the new installation record, he said, “Mr. Goranson, this is the first place I’ve ever worked that has treated me like a real person. I love my job and I love working here.”


As it turned out, Carlos went on to become one of two travelling Operations Managers for TIDY CAR, travelling from town to town throughout the USA training franchise owners and their employees on the art of auto appearance and enhancement services. Today he resides in South Florida and has done very well for himself in other business environments.


I believe that the way we treat the employees we are lucky enough to supervise and share space on this planet with can make all the difference in the world for both us and them. A HUGE DIFFERENCE. Start today to look for ways you, too, can improve the relationship between you and your employees so that they will in turn do what they can to satisfy THEIR clients and YOUR bottom line.