August Focus: Domestic Cleaning Service

Know Thyself

I came to a point in my career where I decided to avoid running businesses that require lots of staff to be supervised, lots of customers to handle and lots of paperwork to do. Handling too many people in a customer service role isn’t one of my strengths, so I took my original training and capitalised on that. I do very well as a teacher or trainer, and by teaching one day workshops I found that I could give 110% of myself for that particular day and the students go away with all the information they need to go out there and become successful. Plus they usually got a strong burst of enthusiasm after hearing me speak as well, which then helped them take off in their new venture of creating their own business.

So, I guess what I am trying to say here is to get to know yourself so that you can enter into your business in a way that capitalises on your strengths. Then you won’t have the opposition within yourself of trying to do something that you aren’t particularly suited to. Or, work out a way of doing business within the field that you are interested in so that you don’t have to rely on other people in order to become successful. Become as self-contained as you possibly can so that all your needs are met by you. The fewer people you have to rely on, the more likely you are to succeed.

I am not saying here that having partners or staff is all bad. As I have mentioned in one of my earlier articles, I was involved in some very successful partnerships when I was dancing, so if you find the right people to work with your business can be very successful. If you are thinking of going into partnership with the person that you are involved with in your personal life, this can work quite well as you both have each others best interests in mind when building your business. A business built by a husband and wife team works really well, especially when you are both in roles that are suited to the strengths that you each have and are doing separate jobs that have you working apart for most of the day. For example, in your Home and Strata Cleaning business, one could be the person who does the heavy work and the other could be the person who does the detail work. Also, one could be the ‘client relations’ person and the other could be the bookkeeper and accounts manager. This would work extremely well if you intend to expand at a later stage in your business. The wife could answer the phones and take the bookings, and the husband could train the staff and do the quality control.

It would also be up to the person who has the office position to interview new staff and attend the quotes in the clients’ homes. The perception of the public is that women know much more about home cleaning than men do, so it is a wise move to have the female of the partnership doing the in-house quotes. If she doesn’t handle difficult clients very well, she could leave that to her husband, and one could act as ‘good cop’ while the other takes the role of ‘bad cop’. When two people work together like this, the situation can work extremely well. But you must know and trust each other well first, and have no issues between you around money. You also must be trustworthy and reliable yourself, because the partnership will only succeed if you pull your own weight within it.

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You can read in the next article: When to Begin