By giving away our cleaning company knowledge we run a risk. Will the client or prospect just do it themselves? Will they run away and give it to their current cleaning company? This subtle step in client interaction is the difference between a good commercial cleaning contract and a GREAT one. It requires practice, patience and discernment. And for those shy cleaning company owners, this is far from being manipulative. In our humble opinions, this is one of the most honest and honoring tactics for customer interaction. Identifying WHAT commercial cleaning knowledge to give away, WHEN and WHO is crucial.

• Your clients need good commercial cleaning & janitorial services.
• You’ve earned your cleaning knowledge through study and physical practice.
• You and your front line cleaners need to be paid for your time, talents and cleaning knowledge.

What commercial cleaning contracts do you want? Small, cheap and fast to perform cleaning services is OK to start your business. But if you want commercial cleaning work that pays you well, you’ll need to invest more. Cultivating that prospect takes time: YOUR time in the commercial cleaning industry and YOUR time with the client. Among the time invested in collecting your cleaning company knowledge, you might also want a seasoned cleaning professional coach.

Joel can be reached here for consultations and how to grow YOUR commercial cleaning business.

 

In this episode we’ll answer:

00:26 Should I charge for my knowledge?
00:36 Is offering advice about my work experience a poor choice?
01:02 How do you decide how much information to give away?
02:26 Is it selfish to avoid sharing all your work experience for free?
02:30 Are you tired of giving away your knowledge?
03:52 What to do when you know the scope of work provided will not solve the problems?
06:32 How do I close more cleaning contracts?

Ray

Joel, we’re back and we’re going to hit a topic that is near and dear to both of our hearts. “How much to give away?” <BANG>

 

Joel

That was close!

 

Ray

Get up off the floor, Joel! As you and I have both qualified customers and gotten to know prospects over the years. There’s a tendency to have conversations. You learn a little bit about each other. And in the course of doing that, you are displaying knowledge of certain issues. You might even propose a change. But as we talk about that, there’s a danger: You’re handing them your knowledge.

 

Joel

Yes.

 

Ray

How do you decide how much to give away?

 

Joel

That’s a really good question, Ray.

 

Ray

I only try to ask really good questions, Joel.

 

Joel

Boy, you always have good questions every podcast for me. And the answer is, it depends. It’s a vague type question. I know some people say, “Well no, that’s pretty direct”, but there’s so many variables.

 

Ray

So what hits you first?

 

Joel

The first variable to me is what is the potential size of the contract just in your head? And that could be either; How many locations do they have; How big is the building; How many employees do they employ; What’s their geographic region? Things like that. So, as we talked before this, there’s a potential client that I have given a fair amount of information to over the course of the past few years, and we do quite a bit of business with them over the course of the years too. And still do quite a bit of business. But there’s still a lot to grow. But it’s the knowledge that I bring that they keep realizing that we should eliminate the housekeeping department that we have in this building and turn it over to Joel’s company. Because he is more knowledgeable than the people that we have in place already. And his staff in the other locations seem to be better trained, more knowledgeable. So, they kind of get to see everything firsthand. But if a 3,000 square foot facility were to ask me, I’m not going to be anywhere near giving if that’s their only location.

 

Ray

Now for some folks that’s going to sound utterly self-serving.

 

Joel

I’m sure it does.

 

Ray

And quite frankly, for those other folks, if that’s you, it needs to be. As business owners, you are not only paying yourself, assuming that you have employees or contractors, you’re paying them too. Part of what you’re safeguarding is your ability to continue your business.

 

Joel

You have to be able to continue to grow. As they say, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. So, you have to have things in your funnel constantly. And part of how you do that is you attract the types of clients that you want. And how you do that is through some of the knowledge you have. Some people would even say, I’m crazy for doing a podcast and giving the information out that I have so far through the first, you know, 30 plus programs that we’ve already done. And that’s true. But it’s not all a special sauce. That’s some of it. And you can probably, you know, win some contracts based off of some of the information given or whatever. But there’s always more. And that’s what you want clients to realize. That you can do so much more for them. I had a client that came on board a little over a year ago. They had had the same contractor there for quite some time, and they were a manufacturing firm, and they were having some issues with quality assurance on the product that they were shipping. They called me in, and I looked at the facility and I asked them what were all their issues and why were they looking for another contractor? Because they had the other contractor in there for more than five years.

So, they downloaded and told me all of the issues that they were having. And they gave me a scope of work to bid on. And the first thing I did was I looked at the scope just generally sitting at the table, and I said, “How important is this scope of work to you?” And they go, “Why?” I says, “Everything that you told me, the scope of work doesn’t fix.” So, the person said, “Go ahead and rework it.”

 

Ray

How long have they been using the scope of work?

 

Joel

Again, the contractor at the time was there five plus years.

 

Ray

Okay, so half a decade.

 

Joel

Half a decade.

 

Ray

All right.

 

Joel

For whatever reason, they were starting to look at other vendors at this point. So, I went back and I really reworked the whole scope of work. It had a lot more meat on the bones. It had a lot more, you know, looking into the fine detail cleaning that needed to be done, on a daily basis in order to reduce all of the problems that they had. And you gotta put money at problems, in order to fix the problems. So the end result is that they could have more product that was able to be sold out to their clients.

 

Ray

I would also imagine that doing that eliminates some special projects that were sometimes urgent because they had to address issues.

 

Joel

Okay, I’m sure. Cause when you increase cleaning specifications and you’re not really looking at a cleaning for appearance, and you’re looking more at cleaning for health and things like that, you are trying to stay on top of some of the project work before it needs to be done. So, yes, there’s a little bit more of that coming. But we were also working longer hours than the other person was. We increased the scope of work on that, and that was giving them the entire program. Well, they went back to their other vendors seven times and had them try to rework it based on the scope of work. And their vendor said, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s too beefy. And that’s, you know, you’re never gonna get the results that you want.” So, they always had a reason why they didn’t want to change things around. Well, they eventually went with me after going back to their competitor, my competitor, seven times, and they finally signed a contract with us, and they haven’t been sorry since. They were a little bit intimidated by the price. There was a lot of push-back on the front from their upper management because it was a huge increase in costs.

But in the end result, everything I said that was going to happen by an increase in frequencies, and the increase in task and frequencies happened. And they ended up with more products being able to go to market. And because they had less error rates, they were buying less raw material. So, their profit margin started going up based off of doing something the right way. How much information do you want to give away? Well, that company is growing. They’ve added more space. We’ve now we’re doing more space than what we were doing when we originally walked into the place. So, they’re growing as a result of us being proactive for them, because now they have a more marketable product. So, it’s a win-win when you’re doing things for the right reasons, and that is, we want our clients to make money.

 

Ray

So, to the cleaning company owner who’s listening in, Joel has just shared a lot of information with you. And if you would like to be able to use this, I’m going to transition from the service side to the consulting side. If you really want to learn how to turn this opportunity into something viable for you, as well as something very serviceable for your manufacturing customers, for other customers who will benefit from a cleaner space, a better handled space. You need to contact this guy. Joel. Thank you.

Joel

And thank you. And you’re welcome.

 

Joel can be reached here for consultations. Learn how to grow YOUR commercial cleaning business.