45. Operational Insight: Launching a Partner Program for Your Cleaning Business
An effective way to recruit and manage contractors.
At the beginning of 2018, I pivoted my cleaning business from 30+ staff to a wholly outsourced operation.
After testing the model with construction cleaning, I felt it could apply to the commercial cleaning as well.
30. How I started a construction cleaning business and won a £25,000 contract in 3 months (4 Steps)
We stripped out a bunch of operational costs:
Office
Products + Materials
Equipment
Vehicles
Employee Taxes + Pensions
The business was left with a small management team, client relationships and ongoing contracts.
We focused on marketing, sales and operations management to win new clients and grow the business.
To service these clients, we needed contractors to execute the work.
As a result, we created a partner program - an ecosystem of approved, vetted and qualified contractors who we outsourced work to.
Agenda
Challenges for Contractors
Introducing the Partner Program
Joining the Program
1. Challenges for Contractors
We launched an email marketing aimed at cleaning businesses in Q4 of 2017.
The cornerstone of the campaign was an insight report highlighting the challenges faced by cleaning businesses.
We used the same approach to partner with security businesses so this was a tried and tested formula.
We outlined 5 main problems:
Most cleaning businesses didn’t have a follow up process for prospecting;
They were spending excessive amounts on ad campaigns which was wasted because of the lack of follow up;
Most cleaning businesses lacked a client onboarding or client management process to provide a consistent client experience;
A lack of automation in the business - sales, marketing and operations;
No way of measuring customer satisfaction or feedback to build case studies, collect testimonials and improve their service.
These problems were highlighted on the first page of the report.
2. Introducing the Partner Program
After highlighting the most common problems, we outlined our solution.
By joining our partner program, cleaning business owners could focus on what they do best - delivering the cleaning.
The only had to focus on the operational elements of each clean.
For commercial contracts that meant:
Setting up each site with cleaning products, equipment and materials;
Managing staff and products; and
Quality control - supervising and spot checking sites.
For tenancy and deep cleans, it meant:
Collecting keys or meeting clients on site;
Taking before and after pictures and completing a property damage report;
Carrying out and checking the quality of each clean; and
Completing a revisit at no additional charge where the cleaning wasn’t up to standard.
In return, we focused on winning new business and managing client relationships.
This included day to day client management, chasing and collecting + distributing payments and site visits for new contracts.
We identified 3 core benefits to contracts joining our partner program:
The key to the program hinged on our payment cycle.
Contractors received payments every 2 weeks - on the 15th and 30th of each month.
We could do this because as a business, we collected all of our payments up front.
For commercial clients payment was collected in advance via direct debit on the 1st of each month.
For tenancy and deep cleaning clients payments were collected on booking.
This payment upfront policy allowed us to maintain positive cashflow for contractor payments.
Maintaining our payment cycle provided certainty for contractors.
3. Joining the Program
The onboarding process for our partner program was straight forward.
The online application asked for basic information including:
Company details
Services and coverage
Insurance information
Team size; and
Accreditation
Every application was reviewed and those companies that matched our criteria were invited to an interview.
The interview stage was a deeper dive into the decision maker responsible for managing the work and to make sure they were a good fit.
We discussed the details of the partner program and answered any questions.
After a successful interview, we sent out a partner pack and our contractor agreement.
The pack included the following:
After signing the agreement and partner pack, the administrative side of the onboarding process was complete.
Now they were ready to clean.
Need More Help?
Email me with the growth strategy for your cleaning business. The more details you provide, the more personal I can make my response.
Want to increase your revenue by £250K/mo in 12 months? Book a call.
Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
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