Episode 67: Why Reacting to Problems and Putting Out Fires is Stifling the Growth of Your Cleaning Business

Many cleaning business owners are stifling the growth of their business because they're spending most of their time reacting to problems that come up on an almost daily basis. This video will give you tips for breaking free of the daily problems so you can work on growing your business.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Episode 67 - Video Transcription In the 8 years that I've been working with cleaning business owners, I find similarities in the way they manage their business. One of the common threads I see, is that many cleaning business owners are stifling the growth of their business because they're spending most of their time reacting to problems that come up on an almost daily basis. The problem is, right from the beginning, they skipped an important step in setting up their business. They went from marketing to cleaning without putting much thought into what kind of systems they should put into place to make things run smoothly. The result is that they spend most of their day reacting to problems that come up because no one knows what procedures to use for any given task in the business. Let me give you an example that has to do with hiring and managing employees. What typically happens is, you decide to hire someone; you get the required paperwork done, and then you spend a day or two showing the new employee what you want him to do. Then a week later you get a call from a customer wanting to know why a trash can was missed and why there are crumbs on the floor near the kitchen sink. Or maybe you hired an office worker to answer phones and then get upset because she didn't write down a prospective client's contact information so you could follow up with a phone call. So the problems continue, and pretty soon frustration sets in because you're spending your days fixing problems and putting out fires. All the excitement about growing the business is fading because you can't seem to find competent people to do the work. But the underlying problem is not that you have incompetent people; it's that you didn't put into writing the system they should use for doing their job, and then training them on how to work the system. As a result, you start having a hard time growing the business because you are focused on solving problems and putting out fires, not growing the business, nurturing your client relationships, and making a profit. So what I recommend you do right now, is to start analyzing the decisions you are making each day. If you discover that those decisions are problem-solving decisions, then you are reacting to day-to-day problems. And if you find you are continually having to solve the same problems over and over again, it's a clue that you should create a system around that problem so your employees can handle it themselves and avoid running to you to always fix the problem. So if you want to stop stifling the growth of your cleaning company, you need to start weighing each decision you make by deciding if it will be profitable for the business. And these decisions should be directly related to growing your business and making a profit -- NOT putting out fires. So let me ask you -- are you spending the bulk of your days solving problems and putting out fires? Or are you spending your time on strategizing and then implementing those strategies in order to grow your business? Please post your comments below the video at CleaningBiz.tv.