Business Systemization: Stop Being a One Man (or Woman) Show in Your House Cleaning Business

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Are you still trying to run your house cleaning business as a one man (or woman) show? If so it’s time to stop. Don’t you want to free up your time, save money and just sleep better at night? Let’s look at how you can accomplish these things.

Your first step is to stop trying to do everything yourself. If you are marketing your business, returning prospect calls, scheduling in-home estimates, maintaining your schedule, doing your books, dealing with customer support, maintaining your cleaning equipment, and ordering products, you are totally overworked. By this point you probably aren’t even enjoying your business that much.

Instead – start documenting everything that you do on a daily basis. Then take a step back and see how certain areas can be improved.

Call Automation

For example you may be responding to all your new prospects yourself. This can take a lot of your time. Instead, consider how you can semi-automate the process. Yes – responding to these inquiries personally may convert more prospects into paying customers, but you know most of the calls are just that – inquiries.

The solution to this problem is to setup a call funnel to tell the caller what to do. For instance:

• If they want information about your service, direct them to your website
• If they are calling to schedule service tell them what to do.
• If they have a complaint, tell them where to go to file the complaint or leave a detailed message.
• If this is about something else, tell them what to do.

These are just a few of the things you can do to filter the calls coming in to your business.

Use eMail to Convert Prospects

By setting up an eMail system on your website, you can have a series of messages that are sent to your prospect that will tell them about your service and try to convert them into setting up an estimate or scheduling an appointment. These messages are written by you once, added to an autoresponder (an eMail service like Aweber that provides followup scheduling for your messages) and then automatically sent. Download their FREE guide to learn more about eMail marketing.

Add an eMail signup box on your website and offer them a free guide to using a house cleaning service. This guide will provide them with all the ins and outs of find, selecting, and using a service to get the most for their needs. When they signup for the guide, they are added to your eMail autoresponder service. You write and add followup messages to the sequence so that when people signup for your guide, they continue to receive information from you automatically that gently persuade them to give you a try.

Delegate Tasks to Employees

For a long time I did everything myself in my business, even after I started hiring employees to do the cleaning for me. That meant I had to maintain the cleaning products in the caddies, the daily laundry, the work orders for the next day, and everything else I had to do. After a time I realized I could have the employees do some of this at the end of their shift.

I created a process document that told them how to clean their caddies, refill their bottles, where to put the laundry, how to complete their paperwork, and why. I also added a penalty for workers who failed to complete their tasks because so often they were in a rush to run out the door. I then implemented a point system whereby employees could earn bonuses – this was a HUGE hit with them and improved many of the quality and attitude issues I had been having with some of them.

Create Business Goals

Next you want to start creating goals for your business. As well as writing out your goals, write out what your strengths and weaknesses are. Use my simple step-by-step plan to do this. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and then review your responses.

Take a look at your weaknesses and make a point of handing this off to someone else. Why waste hours of your time trying to do your own business accounting when a professional can do it for you?

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Procedure Documents and Training Manuals

Start creating procedure documents and training manuals for everything you do. These can be as simple as a one page document, or as complex as a 500 page manual. The advantage to this is that you can hand off these documents to someone new and they can easily take over. This is a key to growing your business that makes it very easy to hire employees when the time is right.

Create templates for things like how to set up a new customer account, or how to deposit money into the bank. Again, these can be given to an employee who can easily follow your instructions. This frees up your time and takes a lot of stress off of you.

If you end up with long winded templates or manuals, try to refine them into shorter steps. While you may have initially written the manual, have the person who is performing the task tweak it. What you explained in 5 steps could be cut down to 2.

Once you have systems in place you need to let go and hire some help. This could be an employee who comes in every day. Or you could hire a virtual assistant that works remotely for you. A good example of this is hiring someone to manage your phone calls, customer service, and scheduling. They work for 1-2 hours each day (billed by call duration) and follow a script that you have prepared.

Are you tired of doing all the cleaning yourself? The first step to hiring workers is to have a document for them to follow that tells them how to do the cleaning to duplicate your process. This is the only way to ensure your clients don’t bolt when you stop doing the cleaning for them. This is a big issue in residential cleaning for small business owners. You can minimize the effects of the transition by telling your clients how you train your new workers to ensure them the cleaning will be maintained at the quality level you have established. I have created templates for the employee handbooks you will need. All you have to do is customize them for your business. This is so much easier than trying to start from scratch!

Social Media

Using social media to market your business in your community is one of the fastest ways to turn leads into customers… if you do it right.

Unfortunately, many businesses only use it to post their offers and miss out on the power of building trust and turning tire kickers into customers. By posting every single day, you stay in front of your audience because Facebook rewards you in their algorithm. If you only post sporadically, you won’t get any exposure because Facebook has already forgotten about you.

Finding something to post and taking the time to do this every day yourself is time consuming. Use a system that can do it for you. A social system can provide you with a daily action plan that will give you great post ideas, amazing images and more! A good plan will show you what to post and how to get more engagement!

Social media posting is so time intensive, you can’t do it effectively yourself unless you make a plan and stick to it.

CLICK HERE to see the system I use and recommend. They have a manual system of forms with a calendar filled in with generic posts you can use and post yourself. They also have an automated system where they populate your calendar for the month with relevant posts. All you have to do is approve the posts and schedule additional posts for your offers, seasonal reminder, tips, etc.

Conclusion

So are you ready to stop being a one man (or woman) show and start the process to systemize your business so that it can run without you for a while?

Join my House Cleaning Business Mastermind for professional tips to help you succeed.

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