Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi This is Dan again from Clean Guru
Want to feel better about your cleaning business? No problem, let me tell you about ours -
in the early days...
Ok, first of all, Tony and I were NOT, unfortunately, born with a silver spoon in our mouths...
We're from working class families, both of our dads were barbers, yep, pole-out-in-front-of-the-shop
barbers in Toledo, OH.
Yep, that Toledo, OH. - just a hour south of Detroit - home of Jamie Farr from MASH,
home of the world-famous JEEP and the not so world famous, but beloved, Toledo Mud Hens
minor league baseball. Stop by in the summer and see 'em sometime...they're pretty good.
Anyway, I guess the important thing to know is that when we started in cleaning we were
anything BUT a success,
You see, we had really no idea what we were doing.
We had bought a small cleaning business from a nice enough guy - named Jim. Oh, yeah, the
name of Dan and Tony's new business is --- you guessed it - Jim's Cleaning.... that
got us off to a good start.
What else? Let me give you the quick run down:
Ever heard of working capital? Yeah, well, we hadn't, or if we did, we had no idea what
it was or what in had to do with us. Turns out it's the money you need to run a company,
pay the bills -- little things like payroll when you first get going.... So, here's the
problem we had with this working capital thing - we didn't have any!
We had thrown every dollar we had into buying this 'little beauty' of a cleaning business
and so, when it came time to pay the bills - more times than I care to admit - we had
to break out the plastic. So,----- that's how we were doing on money.
As far as vehicles -our grand fleet was - a couple old cars, one was an old Bonneville
or Catalina -or something like that that we bought from my dad -, and a horse trailer.
Yeah, we picked up an old horse trailer from some guy out in the country so we could haul
our floor machines around.
Why? Well, because, a lot of these 'great' accounts we picked up from the previous owner
were jobs where we'd end up dragging an auto scrubber and mops and buckets off... yep,
the 'horse trailer' into a local hardware or grocery or paint store to try to rescue
a floor - maybe once a week if we were lucky.
Here's the bad news - running an auto scrubber on them wasn't what these floors needed...
yeah, they needed to be stripped and refinished, scrubbed and recoated, burnished, swept and
mopped - you know maintained...but, we weren't getting the 'ok' to do any of that 'expensive'
stuff.
I'll leave it up to you - to imagine how these floors looked and how much money we were 'raking'
in from these 'cherry' jobs. Yeah, not so good.
Oh, what else.... if we did land jobs...we'd run and ad in the paper...but the economy
had different problems back, so, it wasn't unusual to run and ad -- and have no one ---yeah,
absolutely no one, show up - to even to apply for the job.
So, we ended up covering a lot of accounts back then. - the Good News is my wife, Jennifer
and I did get into a country club... The bad news is it was one of our accounts, and we
were only allowed in at 5:30 AM - and the only reason we were there - was to clean because
the folks we scheduled to work didn't show up or call.
What else? Oh, our secretary slash office person....did
MUCH more than just handle the accounting duties for us - she also went the 'extra mile'
by stealing about four grand before we figured out how.
You see, in spite of the fact that we had all of her 'handwritten' receipts scribbled
on sticky notes that 'proved' she had "bought" a lot of stamps and office supplies -yeah...
we never seemed to have any stamps or supplies. I'll try to stop doing " " " " this now.
See, I told you this wasn't going to be pretty ... anyway...back to the story...
What about customers? Well, let's just put it this way, we didn't have many of them either,-
and frankly, we had put all of our eggs in a just a few baskets ...so we were counting
on a handful of big industrial accounts to keep us a afloat.
So, we babied them because we thought they would always be loyal to us...stick with us
---...and we actually believed that fantasy, right up until they called to say something
like... hey, we don't need you to clean anymore...we're going a different direction, the owners' gonna
have his kids do it for a while in there free time... I mean how tough could it be, right?
It hurt hearing that - But, don't worry, I got even with that guy.... I think I said
something like.... "Oh, ok," before he hung up the phone on me.
Anyway, you get the idea - we were completely burned out - financially, emotionally, everything,
- and we probably would have sold out - only problem is nobody in their right mind
would have gotten within 100 ft. of this mess we had on our hands.
Ok, I think I've shared enough of our failings for one day.
That was our glorious start. I hope you found some of it a little comical, but more importantly,
I hope you found it well, encouraging - hopeful -along the lines if these two guys can make
it anyone can - because you see, that's actually about right- Tony and I took that mess and
we turned it around into a fast growing, profitable and easy-to-run cleaning business.
By the time we sold in December of 2008, we were doing over $2,000,000 in business, had
over 125 fantastic employees, owned are own building and had it all running as they say,
like a 'proverbial sewing machine' -and in something that can be as chaotic as the cleaning
business - that's really saying something.
Moral of the story - we were a mess and faced what seemed like endless problems. But we
made it work - Just when we were about ready to throw in the towel, we learned a number
of marketing, selling and profit strategies that turned things around for us - big time.
Those are the 'things' we're going to tell you about in these videos so you can have
the kind of cleaning company you've always dreamed of having.
So, I hope you'll stick around.
That's it for today...and remember, You Can Do This - You Really Can!