From Painful to Profitable. Grow Your Cleaning Company the Right Way.
Episode 16.
Ray
Joel, I wanted to return to a point that you made on an earlier episode. I think you found that one of the most beneficial longterm methods of getting new customers is an exclusive networking group. Correct?
Joel
Correct
Ray
Okay. Someone’s going to listen to that episode and go, “18 years!? need work now!”
Joel
What… what… (laughing)
Ray
What would you say to them?
Joel
Everybody needs work now. Any business owner out there is going to tell you that they need work now. The only people that say they don’t want is usually frontline employees that aren’t really thinking past their next paycheck. But you want to grow your business the right way. And one of the things, Ray, you and I have talked about numerous times is, gee, should I just buy followers?
Ray
Yeah. Can I buy followers? Can I buy a list?
Joel
Why would I want to do that on my social media platforms when organic growth is best and it’s no different with growing your business organically through the right connections, the right way to do that. So all right, the last four years have been successful for me. Oh, what were the early years like? They were an awakening period.
Ray
I think that’s a euphemism for painful.
Joel
Very painful. The first year, because I was not a salesperson when I first started, I was I worked for some other somebody else. I did not have the right look. The first year I was in my networking group, I did about $100 worth of business.
Ray
Oh.
Joel
It was painful. But part of being in the exclusive groups also requires you to sit down and have 1 to 1 meetings where you talk to other people in the chapter and you ask them questions about their business. And I talked to two of the senior members that are still in the group today who one sells insurance and the other one is financial services. And I’m like, what’s wrong with me? You insure people that I need to clean.
Ray
Okay, so he’s working with small business and.
Joel
You set up 400 programs for companies. I need to be cleaning. Why won’t you put me in front of your best customer?
Ray
And do they tell you?
Joel
Oh, they told me. Because you need to be honest, just like anything else. And it’s like, well, you kind of dress a little frumpy. You aren’t really all that well polished. You have some very coarse edges on your personality and things like that that you need to work on first, before we’re willing to introduce you to those types of customer. Now, was that painful to hear? Absolutely. It was painful to hear. But you know what? I’m not in business to be told a bunch of lies, things like that. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get you in front. I want to hear the truth because I cannot improve as a business if I don’t know what’s wrong with me. And of course, that’s when I work for somebody else. And maybe it was even because they didn’t like the company I worked for, or whether they didn’t like the colors of the logo or what. I don’t know, but I know that me personally, I was not a polished person that could go in front of the typical people that people in financial services deal with.
Joel
So year two and I got a referral to a client, and I did $179 worth of work in a year. What did that person that I did the work for was a bookkeeper. That bookkeeper did the books for another janitorial company. That janitorial company did not do floor work. And at that time I worked for a company that did floors and carpets. Well, she referred me to that company. We sat down and we had, you know, a cup of coffee, breakfast, talked about things, got to know each other.
Ray
So a potential competitor really was a potential collaborator.
Joel
Potential collaborator.
Which resulted in because they had gotten a call about needing floors done at a potential client. And that’s not what they did. And they didn’t want any piece of it. They didn’t want to be involved in it. They didn’t want to answer questions about it. They made it a straight referral based off of the relationship I built with them. It ended up being over $100,000 a year account in year three. Wow. And they held on to their account even after I had left it working for them and went somewhere else. They still had that account.
Ray
So, three years of an investment. Not only did you land a really nice account, probably some others as well, but you had the opportunity for other professionals to hold up a mirror and say, if you can fix this, we have a better shot at referring you.
Joel
We have a better shot at referring you. And that’s what I did, is I worked on me. And once I started refining how I was viewed by others, the referrals started coming. And then as I’ve ventured into, you know, creating and starting my own businesses, now, people have no problem because they see me as the expert that I wasn’t 18 years ago. I was still seen as a, you know, wet behind the years, you know, snot nosed punk 18 years ago. Let’s be honest. And now I’ve developed into somebody who has really embraced his craft and has learned a lot from his craft, as well as contributed a lot to his craft.
Ray
One of the things I think that that you’ve taken time to really buckle down and take ownership on Joel, is your differentiator. And that is cleaning for health.
Joel
That is huge because when we started the business in 2013, everybody laughed at us and to me, because of things that personally happened to me and my family, it was like, there’s got to be a safer way to do this. And making a cleaner environment for every person that walks in that door, whether they work there, they visit there, their clients to that place. That is my passion… To make this a cleaner and safer world for everybody. You know.
Ray
As we close this episode, you know, what I really want to do is point back to the listener, the small cleaning company business owner, and encourage them. Whatever your focus is, choose that focus. Make that your differentiator.
Joel
If you want to be the best at cleaning automotive retail outlets, become the best at that. Focus on that. Become the best. Get to know the client, the ins and outs. The hours, the do you have to work weekends because they sell cars on weekends? A lot of those places have shops in them. Get to know, talk the language. Understand what it is about that prospect or that industry, and really develop that vertical.
