How the Book 'Traction' Grew My Maid Service

In his presentation, Roman explains that much of his Maid Services growth can be attributed to following a path set out by a book titled Traction by Gino Wickman.

He discusses the 6 basic steps covered from this book that helped his cleaning companies grow and how you can use these same steps to build your own successful home cleaning business.

Step 1: Establish your overall vision for your Maid Service

To get your home cleaning company started off on the right foot, you should first organize and iron out your core values.

Have a staff meeting to come up with 4-7 core values as a company.

When you start out by clarifying the basic ideas of your overall grand vision, it makes the decision making in your Maid Service easier because your values provide the guiding principles for what you will and will not do in your cleaning business.

Next, consider your purpose, what drives you most when it comes to growing your Maid Service?

Your purpose can be as simple as having an awesome company with good results or it can be as specific as providing cleaning services to veteran families moving in and out of their homes with ease.

After you find your purpose, focus on your niche.

This all comes down to identifying your target market and specifically marketing your Maid Service to those people.

The marketing process is super important, so you should spend some time learning how to speak directly to your desired cleaning clients.

When deciding who it is you want to hone in on, choose your most profitable clients and find out what they want from your home cleaning services.

Once you have all of this information clarified, develop a plan to get you to your long term results.

Create a 1 year, a 3 year, and a 10-year plan to grow your Maid Service to be successful in the way you envision it.

This will allow you to have goals to work backward from so that you can use your numbers to figure out how to get yourself there.

Step 2: Get the people at your home cleaning business organized

It is very important for a growing cleaning company to have regular meetings to check progress, but possibly one of the most vital meetings you can have is one to decide who is doing what.

With a growing Maid Service, you don’t want any redundancy in positions, so gather all of the staff needed and make sure you are all covering different things.

In the process of figuring out where your people belong, you can find out some wonderful things about their skills and where they might shine.

Maybe someone in sales actually prefers the steps to organize operations or maybe they even have a special knack for finances.

If you need to, move your cleaning office staff or partners around to be sure they fit into a role they are good at and enjoy doing.

Keep everyone’s positions and duties organized with an accountability chart so that you can sit down with your team to discuss progress regularly.

This accountability chart will streamline your cleaning business and help it grow.

You’ll be able to appropriately direct problems to the correct person who can handle that issue rather than doing it all yourself.

By having this meeting, you can establish roles and set systems in place that will allow you to prioritize the daily ongoings.

Step 3: Track your Maid Service data

In order for your home cleaning business to be successful, you need to make friends with your numbers… even if you don’t like math.

Your Maid Service growth data should be organized and tracked so you know where to focus your efforts in order to improve your business over time.

By monitoring the day to day progress, you begin to understand your residential cleaning business and the fluctuations over time.

Track your numbers with a scorecard, including how many complaints your Maid Service gets in a day in order to measure your progress as well as to see if issues are getting worse or better.

Step 4: Automate your house cleaning company’s process

Talk to your cleaning office staff and cleaners about what their process is.

Together, you can come up with the best system to use. Then record this process step by step so it can be easily followed and replicated by other cleaning employees.

Develop a step by step process for each role in your cleaning company as well as systems for how to handle assorted issues that arise such as cleaning client complaints or queries.

Each process should always end in a follow-up with cleaning customers since that is one of the most vital things that you can do to build rapport with your clients.

Follow-ups show cleaning customers that you are interested in their feedback on your cleaning services. The more cleaning clients you have on your roster, the more difficult it can b to keep up with this manually. So use automated software to make your cleaning job follow-ups easy and consistent.

Step 5: Gain traction by breaking down and chipping away at long-term goals

In order to ensure the success of your Maid Service, set goals so that you can clearly see how to move forward.

One way is to decide your long-term goals and then working backward to know what you need to do to achieve them.

Break goals down into smaller milestones or tasks so that everyone knows what to work on each week and each quarter towards the larger goal.

If someone completes their weekly tasks ahead of schedule then they can move on to quarterly tasks.

However, if a weekly or quarterly task is not completed, find out and discuss why so that it can be taken care of in the next session.

Be sure to check-in weekly on how tasks are progressing and what can be done to streamline processes to maximize efforts and outcomes.

Step 6: Set aside time to address issues at your Maid Service

Finally, identify, discuss and solve all of your cleaning business’s growth problems by holding regular progress meetings.

Go step-by-step with each issue and identify the underlying problem.

There are typically 3 types of issues:

Weekly issues
90-day issues
Department issues

Record the issues that are raised on the board in terms of priority of what needs to be addressed first.

Department issues are office staff type problems for the department to go through and are typically lower on the list of priorities as they often do not need to be solved right away.

90-day and weekly issues may be more urgent or can be addressed quickly.

Meetings to grow your home cleaning service should only include your office staff unless there is a specific issue with the cleaners.

These improvement sessions should be limited in time, generally about an hour.

Organize them so that you can discuss the top priorities in a timely manner and get back to business. Keep discussions on topic and do not go off on tangents, leading away from the issue at hand.

Consider making the meetings fun since we all know meetings can be a bit on the boring side! Make it enjoyable for your staff to participate and engage with the discussions.

This article is based on a talk by Roman Peysakhovich from the 2019 Maid Summit, which was hosted and organized by ZenMaid.

Watch the full presentation from Roman now.

About the presenter

Roman Peysakhovich is the president the home cleaning company Maid Masters and the commercial cleaning business Building Masters in Minnesota.

Roman started his road to success with Maid Masters in 2015 and he has built businesses that allow him to have the kind of freedom that we all strive for.

This talk first aired at the 2019 Maid Service Success Summit.

The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure you’re on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.

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How the Book ‘Traction’ Grew My Cleaning Business