Episode 13: Motivating Supervisors and Tracking Online Comments About Your Cleaning Business

A cleaning business owner is frustrated. Just when it seems his supervisors are doing a good job, their performance goes downhill. He's wondering how he can keep them motivated, so we offer 5 tips in this episode for keeping your cleaning supervisors motivated.

Do you know what people are saying about your cleaning business online? If not, you should! In part two, we share a resource for tracking what people are saying about your business. http://www.myreviewspage.com.

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Episode #13 - Video Transcription

A cleaning company owner contacted us because he's having problems with keeping his supervisors motivated. The problem is, they start out doing a great job, but just when it seems he can trust them, their performance goes downhill.

This is a pretty common problem; so what can you do do keep your supervisors motivated? First you need to realize that no one will ever do things just like you, which means you'll never find a clone of yourself, or someone that is as motivated as you. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can spend your time finding trainable and coachable supervisors. Start with your existing supervisors, and write down their strengths and weaknesses. In their "strong" areas, be sure to give them plenty of praise. Recognition and praise for a job well done will go a long way towards motivating your supervisors.

Next, it's your job to set the tone and follow up to make sure your supervisors are staying on top of things. Even the BEST supervisors let us down at times so we need to stay in touch with them and hold them accountable. An effective way to motivate your supervisors is to do short training sessions with them. Pick a topic and offer useful tips. For example, "how to be a more effective delegator". Advise them that when delegating tasks, they should ask the employee to "repeat the instruction back to them", to make sure there is no mis-communication. When they get into the habit of doing this, they'll find they are becoming a better delegator.

So if you can offer useful training that makes them a better supervisor, they WILL become more motivated in their job. Another tip is to let your supervisors make decisions and let them know that you will back them up. Yes, they WILL make mistakes, but as long as they learn from their mistakes, they'll become better supervisors and more loyal to you, as well as becoming self-motivated.

Here is a great way to keep your supervisors motivated. Conduct a short, "daily meeting" for just 5 or 10 minutes with all your supervisors. This meeting has a specific agenda. You always want to start out on a positive note, so start with yesterday's accomplishments. The second item on the agenda is today's to-do list, so everyone knows what will be happening today.

The third item is to discuss is today's priorities; and the last item on the agenda is to identify where people are "stuck" and what they need help with. By covering these items daily, they avoid calling each other, interrupting each other, and basically wasting each other's time during the day. So if you can get your supervisors "un-stuck" with the daily meeting, it will give them the motivation they need to keep going.

My Reviews Page (Resource) - Video Transcription

I've got a GREAT resource for you today! It's called MyReviewsPage.com, and what it does is allows you to track online reviews of your business. Many cleaning business owners are not even aware of the reviews that are out there on their business, or what people are saying about them.

So this tool allows you to enter basic information about your business, and then it collects the different reviews about your business from websites like Yelp, Google Local, Yahoo Local and City Search. Now you have one place to track all your reviews. It even links your account directly to your review pages on these sites so you can see what people are saying about your business.

Another thing I love about this tool is that it also allows you to send emails to your clients so that you can ask them for a review! This makes it easy for you to request a review and it makes it easy for your clients to write a review for you. So check it out at MyReviewsPage.com.