WALKING THE TALK

Your cleaning crews hear what you are saying, but they give more value to what they see you doing. Are you guilty of Customer service hypocrisy?

Do you ever catch yourself giving lip service to Customer service? Do you catch yourself taking a Client for granted? Do you ever start to think that Clients are here to serve your purposes? That you can easily replace them? That you’re doing them a favor sending cleaning crews out to their homes to clean their toilets after all. Do you ever find yourself badmouthing your Clients with your crew. It’s normal for business people to have these thoughts, these temptations. The key is to change your mind set the instant you get these cancerous thoughts.

If you buy these Customer disservice lies, it will be the beginning of the end for your cleaning company. You will never reach your potential if you let this mentality take root. Because your cleaning crews will follow your lead. Your cleaning team is watching your steps…evaluating if your actions match your words.

Your cleaning crews hears what you are saying, but they give more value to what they see you doing. Do you give Customer service lip service?

• Do you honor your promises?
• Do you honor you commitments?

If not you are living a lie. You are not being honest with yourself. And the worst of it is you're the only one in the building that doesn't know it.

At You've Got MAIDS our management team recommits to Customer service everyday. Everyday our goal is to lead by example.

MAID SERVICE SPIES

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I don't think I'm paranoid...I like to keep my focus forward, therefore I don't spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror.

This blog is all rear view mirror.


If you own a competing maid service please don't apply here for a job. Don't send one of your employees either. Whatever you do, don't do both at the same time. One day I pulled up to the office and noticed a woman sitting in her car. When I went inside the office I learned we had an applicant that had just recently worked for a local competitor. While she was completing the application, I pulled up her old employer online. The maids service owners had their pictures on the web site. The woman sitting in my parking lot was the owner of the applicants previous maid service.

If you compete with You've Got MAIDS, and don't know how to run your business let me give you a piece of advice. Don't apply for a maid position with You've Got MAIDS. Our maid associates sign a contract in which they agree to not solicit present or former employees or present or former Customers from You've Got MAIDS. They agree to pay You've Got MAIDS three thousand dollars ($3,000) for each employee, and/or each You've Got MAIDS Customer, past or present, that they solicit or steal. They agree to make this payment within 7 days of notification from You've Got MAIDS. They also agree not to duplicate or divulge methods of operation, trademarks, logos, forms, etc... If they fail to pay You've Got MAIDS what they owe, they agree to pay any and all legal expenses and court fees incurred by You've Got MAIDS to collect what they owe.


If you compete with You've Got MAIDS, and don't know how to run your business let me give you a second piece of advice. Find business mentors in another maid service market or another industry. You will make friends, learn more, and no one will be able to call you a weasel.

If you compete with You've Got MAIDS, and you can't figure out why we are growing so much faster than you, let me give you a third piece of advice. At You've Got MAIDS we never focus on the competition. Our competitors are on the fringe of our radar screens, & right in the center is our Customers. We focus on our Clients.

Forget about You've Got MAIDS, develop mentors, focus on your Customers. This is simple stuff.

WINTER PARK CREW PREDICTION

Congratulations to the young men and women rowing for Winter Park High School. Last week Winter Park High School traveled over 600 miles to distinguish themselves and their community at the 81st Annual Stotesbury Cup Regatta in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Over 5,000 athletes competing in 850 boats from 177 schools competed on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River May 18-19, making the 81st Stotesbury Cup Regatta the largest ever, and the largest high school rowing event in the world.

Winter Park Girls Lightweight Eight brought home the bronze while the Winter Park Boys did even better. Winter Park Boys Freshmen Eight, gold medal. Winter Park Boys Second Eight, gold medal. Winter Park Senior Eight, silver medal.

So why blog about the Winter Park High School Crew? Because Winter Park High School, is situated in beautiful Winter Park, Florida. And because Winter Park is a strong segment of You've Got MAIDS Customer base, and I'm proud of what their children have accomplished up in Philly.

Prediction for 2008...Winter Park, Florida will be the home of the national high school rowing champions. Winter Park High School Crew will be invited to race at the Henley Regatta. 6 out of the 9 young men in Winter Park's varsity eight will receive full athletic scholarships. 2 of the 9 will earn a seat on the US Junior National Team (that All American in the rowing world). Someone will row for Yale, another will row for Harvard. Harvard will continue beating Yale. You've Got MAIDS will continue to prosper, expanding into 5 different states.

IS YOUR MAID SERVICE FOR SALE?

Many professional maid service open quietly, acquire Clients and then close without a whimper. Maybe they are frustrated. Perhaps it wasn't what the entrepenuer had expected. Perhaps they were not profitable. Perhaps their temperment wasn't a good fit for dealing with the labor pool or the high end consumers. Whatever the reason they just close their doors, leaving their employees and Clients high and dry.

Every day we talk to professional maid service consumers who had a professional maid service who just stopped showing up. Not even a Dear John letter. What is professional about that? What a waste.

If you are one of the professional maid services poised to throw in the towel, please consider selling your business to You've Got MAIDS of Orlando, Florida & Charleston, SC. It is possible that we could help you, your employees and your clients. Please call or email to discuss this further.

Information You've Got MAIDS would need:

• List of Clients per zip code. We would not require their names or addresses until we finalize the agreement.
• For each Client we would need to know how long you have been serving them, price per clean, square footage of house, #bed, #bath, #people, #pets, how long you spent cleaning it for the past 4 cleans. Just email me, and I will send a Excel form for you to fill out.

Thank your for considering my offer.

TEAM BUILDING STARTS WITH ME

Whether your goal is to motivate your team, or attract stars to join your crew, you need to look at yourself objectively. Do you bum people out? Are you a whiner? Do you act pompous? Do you take yourself entirely too seriously?

Jack Welch writes, “…it is very hard to get ahead without being a positive person because, very simply, no one likes to work under or near a dark cloud. Even if the “cloud” is very smart.”

Do you know any "Dark Clouds"? I do...and my advice to anyone working under a dark cloud is to forget about finding an umbrella. You need to run, not walk away. They can only dampen your spirit if you let them.

At You've Got MAIDS we are working very hard to attract maid associate stars. Our efforts are starting to pay dividends. We are getting less Customer concerns, better feedback, lower employee initiated turnover, and dare I say better profit margins because of our human resource efforts. We are also having more fun.

The next step for You've Got MAIDS will be to attract superstar franchise partners. We get a several serious inquiries each month from people who want to franchise with us. The cool thing is we aren't advertising for franchise partners yet. I tell the prospective franchise partners that we are not ready & that we will get back to them when we are. I've been told that it takes a 100 such calls to find 1 good franchise partner. I hope it will not be that high.

BEWARE MOTHER-IN-LAW BEARING HOUSE CLEANING GIFT CERTIFICATES

You've Got MAIDS is in the business for more business. We like selling gift certificates. If you want to learn more about You've Got MAIDS Gift Certificates click here.

BEWARE MOTHER-IN-LAWs BEARING HOUSE CLEANING GIFT CERTIFICATES. Mothers Day - Fathers Day - Merry Christmas - Happy Hanukkah - Happy Birthday - Happy Thanksgiving - Congratulations - Just Married - Newborn Baby - It's a Boy - It's a Girl - Get Well Soon - Graduation - Sorry - I'm Sorry - Sympathy - Wedding - Anniversary - Good Luck - Thank You. These are just a few of the reasons you can purchase residential house cleaning for a loved one. Just make sure there is more love and less animosity to make your gift of cleaning more valuable.

When the woman's mother purchase a You've Got MAIDS home cleaning gift certificate it is always a positive experience & the son-in-law loves it. However when the husbands mother purchase a home cleaning gift certificate for her daughter-in-law beware...you could be skating on this ice.

Mother-In-Laws need to hold up the mirror of objectivity. Evaluate your relationship with your daughter-in-law. Never mind that she doesn't deserve your son, everyone knows that anyway. Have there ever been any Freudian slips that might demonstrate your daughter-in-laws frustration? For example, if during last years Thanksgiving dinner your daughter-in-law meant to say "Martha, would you please pass the cranberry sauce?" But instead the words... "You silly mule, you have completely ruined my life"...come out of her mouth, you might have problems. (note to self: less social lubricant at next years Thanksgiving Dinner)

Here are a few samples of feedback from daughters-in-laws who have unexpectedly received the gift of house cleaning from their mother-in-laws:

• "I was hesitantly happy before the service...but not too happy about the service afterwords"
• "I can't put a finger on it but I'm not really happy"
• "I don't know what i was expecting...but i thought it would be different..."

Like I said earlier, You've Got MAIDS is in the business for more business. However, if you find any similarity between you and Jane Fonda's character at the beginning of the 2005 movie Monster-in-Law, please reconsider the gift of house cleaning. A gift certificate to LLBean might be more effective.

Residential Cleaning Service Turnover

Turnover is a fact of life in the residential cleaning service industry. At first I thought my residential cleaning service brand, You've Got MAIDS, could beat turnover, but turnover taught me I was naive.

Turnover is here to stay if you are a residential cleaning service. Prospective Clients usually ask if we will send out the same maids to clean every time. It is obvious that this is very important to them, and it would follow that other residential cleaning service get the same question everyday.

It is my fixed opinion that any residential cleaning service that promises to send you the same maids every time is either lying, or incompetent.

At You've Got MAIDS we tell our prospective residential cleaning service Clients that if they are a multiple X's per week, weekly or every-other-week Client that we will assign a Team Leader to their account. It works for the Client who becomes more comfortable with their maids, it works for the Team Leader who gets to know her Clients better, and it works for the residential cleaning service brand, You've Got MAIDS, for all of the above reasons. Click here to read our policy on this.

Nearly all of our maid associates are Moms and Grandma's. We have extremely low turnover among our team leaders because we pay well ($370-$520 a week), because we provide safe company cars, because we offer some benefits, and because we built this residential cleaning service brand, You've Got MAIDS, on the premise that we will treat both Clients and employees with respect and dignity.

These hard working women have families that come first in their life. Here are some reasons why our maid associates have called off or quit:

• Husband/Partner transferred.
• Children become sick.
• Earning more money than husband is causing problems at home.
• Earning too much money and would be disqualified from the government assistance program that they have become fond of.
• Child care issues (just yesterday we had a wonderful young woman report to work with her child...her day care arrangement didn't work out, so she couldn't work that day).

Some of these excuses might be hard to imagine, but I assure you that they are a reality for many women in our labor pool. My respect for the woman that work in the residential cleaning service has grown a great deal over the past two years.

Can we send the same maids every time? We sincerely say that we'll do our best.

You've Got MAIDS CLEANING SERVICE POLICIES: Will I always have the same MAIDS?

You've Got MAIDS CLEANING SERVICE POLICIES: Will I always have the same MAIDS?

WHAT NOT TO DO LIST

Do we need a NOT TO DO LIST?

Most of us are good at making To Do List. I use reporter notebooks to take notes, make list, and manage my time. It's an old fashioned PDA. I take it everywhere. When it's full I grab a fresh one. I have a Palm handheld device, but I find it easier to throw the reporters pad in my back pocket.

My life is filtered through that reporters notebook. Commitments recorded. Phone call notes. Honey-do list. Customer notes. Sermon notes. Questions. Blog fodder. Strategies. Tactics. Policies. Dreams. Stretch Goals. Business enhancements. I cross off things that I accomplish and use a highlighter on things I should have accomplished yesterday. The best stuff finds its way to my laptop.

Sometimes I find I am putting things on my To Do List that have nothing to do with my mission. Perhaps I should be more selective on what earns a spot on my list.

Perhaps we need a NOT TO DO LIST. We need to not over schedule our lives. We need to find a balance between contentment & growth. Specifically we need to:

1. Learn to say no more often. For example, why do we so easily give permission to cold callers? We are allowing them to hijack our precious time. Today with search engines like Google & Yahoo we are able to find what we need, when we need it.
2. Not over commit to social functions, if the cost is less time with your family.
3. Don't invest a disproportionate amount of time with under performing team members. Help them. Be candid in evaluations. But if they aren't cutting the mustard, you are doing a disservice to them and your business to keep pouring your limited resources into them. Focus on the winners...they will put more value into your business.

What do you need to add to your Not To Do List?

PURDUE CREW WINS DAD VAIL REGATTA

Yesterday Purdue University swept the Dad Vail's Regatta winning both the Men's & Women's Heavyweight Varsity 8. Purdue has been rowing since back in the 1950's and this is the first time their men have won. For the men it was Purdue, Temple, and then FIT.

One of my business role models it Temples University's head coach Dr. Gavin White. I will delve into all the things that Gavin White has taught me in future blog post. Yesterday Gavin stated... "I do not know if we had a bad race or Purdue had a great race, I suspect it was a little bit of both...I was disappointed in the outcome, not the effort. They worked hard and gave me everything they had. They did exactly what they were told to do. If anything I let them down." To read the entire story click here.

Please note Gavin White takes full responsibility for his team. Gavin is a true inspiration, and a great leader. Rowing is in a world unto itself. Rowing celebrities exist in this close knit society but not many other people pay much attention. Except for people like me.

Rowing is a great training ground for business. Join a team with a good coach, work hard, stay optimistic, plan your work, work your plan, make sacrifices, follow your coaches directions, work well with others, lay it all on the line...if you do these things you can succeed.

In the sport of collegiate rowing the participants bet shirts. This means at the end of the race the teams come together and you literally give your shirt off your back to your counterpart on the victorious team. A Dad Vail Regatta champion goes home with 40+/- sweaty racing shirts!

I congratulate Purdue's men and women on an awesome Dad Vail performance. Take mental snapshots that you can savor later, but don't rest on your laurels. You can count on the fact that Gavin White, and the rowers at Temple University have already begun training for next year.

• 1-2-3 finish line for Mens Heavyweight Varsity 8.
• Purdues Men at finish line.
• Silver Medal Temple U.
• Purdue Womens HV8 Champs.
• Purdue Women row off with Gold Medals.
• Dad Vail race course.
• Dad Vail finish line.

You've Got MAIDS & The Miniature Earth

Here is a cool video entitled the Miniature Earth highlighting how great it is to live in United States of America. Our forefathers "maid" some very wise decisions and we are all reaping the rewards today.

The ability to run a residential home cleaning business wouldn't work in most of the world; thank God it works for You've Got MAIDS here in Orlando, Florida.

Record Day, Record Week

Is it wrong to brag? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag." This doesn't really sound like Emerson, it sounds more like Mark Twain. Mark Twain once wrote,"Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, redheaded." Wouldn't it have been cool to dine with these two men? Emerson the blue blooded Harvard minister & Twain the Midwest river boat captain...it would have been lively conversation.

I know not to boast about tomorrow, because no one knows what that day may bring. So I'm going to strut about last week. A record Thursday set the stage for a record week. I wish we could achieve record weeks 4.3 times a month, but alas our last record week was in March. Last week our teams performed perfectly. I am so proud of them!

In the pizza business record weeks could be orchestrated. They could also come unexpectedly as a result of weather (rain & snow), or sports finals (World Series or Stanley Cup going 7 games). All of a sudden a Tuesday night dinner rush that usually was 75 pies per hour turns into 150. It is exciting stuff.

It is not this way in the maid biz...we normally see it coming a week out. The only thing unexpected is the number of maids whose children will become sick and will not be able to come to work. That in a nutshell is the single toughest element of this business. It's a drama.

To all of our maid associates...job well done! To our You've Got MAIDS™ Clients in Orlando, Winter Garden, East Orlando, Lake Nona, Ocoee, Windermere, Winter Park, Maitland, Oviedo & Winter Springs, thank you...without you we would be nothing. To my wife Cynthia, this is all because of you.

Technology, Maids, NASA, the Russians & the Fisher Space Pen

Technology and Maids. Just how hi-tech does your professional residential cleaning service need to be?

I began thinking about the residential cleaning services use of technology, and ended up remembering how "NASA spent millions of dollars developing an astronaut pen which would work in outer space while the Soviets solved the same problem by simply using pencils." I had heard this story several times so of course I believed it to be true. Turns out it's a myth. Click here to read Snopes.com debunking this urban legend.

Here's the readers digest version. Paul C. Fisher independently invented a pressurized ball pen that could work in zero gravity. He sold 400 of his pens to NASA for $2.95 each. Up to this point both the Soviets and Americans were using pencils (pencils had inherent dangers in a zero gravity, 100% oxygen atmosphere). Russia quickly adopted Fishers astronaut pen.

Now the Russians are upset we aren't inviting them to join us at our moon base. Click here to read how the US "snubs" Russia on moon request. Hey Russia, Fischers astronaut pen was a freebie, now get your own moon base. I digress.

How hi-tech does your professional residential cleaning service need to be? It depends on your volume. If you are just sending out two maids and a mop to clean three homes a day you don't need much technology. If you are cleaning 100, 200, or 500 different homes a week you better embrace technology or you will crash and burn.

The good news is you can be like NASA and outsource your technology needs. There are plenty of companies that devote all of their resources to creating software that can add efficiencies to your operations. Outsource your back room functions so you can focus on your Customers.

To quote Jack Welch, "Don’t own a cafeteria: Let a food company do it. Don’t run a print shop: Let a printing company do that. It’s understanding where your real value added is and putting your best people and resources behind that. Back rooms by definition will never be able to attract your best. We converted ours into someone else’s front room and insisted on their best. This is what outsourcing is all about."

Click here to read why Maid Service is Outsourcing.

Mothers Day - May 13th

Are you looking for the perfect Mother's Day gift? Something you can't buy her in any store? These brothers should have called You've Got MAIDS of Orlando to give Mom the gift of cleaning. Mothers Day is May 13th this year.

5 Hours on Maid Service $199.96

-or-

1 Month of Maids Service $499.87

**This is based on a 1200 square foot home, and would include an initial cleaning, plus three(3) additional weekly cleans (up to 14 Maid Hours total). Please call for an estimate.

You've Got MAIDS focus is on exceeding our Residential Home Cleaning Clients expectations everyday. If your Mother lives in Winter Park, Winter Springs, Winter Garden, Maitland, Longwood, Ovieo, Ocoee, Orlando, East Orlando, College Park, Gotha, Windermere or Doctor Phillips, Florida click here to visit You've Got MAIDS or simply call 407.737.7773 during normal business hours.

Cleaning for a Reason in Ashland, OH

Inspired. Involved. Committed.

Making a Difference One Home at a Time

Cleaning for a Reason is a nonprofit organization that offers free professional housecleaning services to improve the lives of women undergoing treatment for cancer. Cleaning for a Reason was founded by Debbie Sardone of Buckets & Bows Maid Service in Lewisville, Texas. Click the logo to go to Cleaning for a Reason website.

Good job to all the folks over at JoAnn's Professional Touch. Here's a thank you letter from one of their Clients:

Mary recently wrote:

I want to thank JoAnn's Professional Touch for all the kindness and consideration shown to me during my cancer treatment and recovery time through Cleaning For A Reason. The girls would show up every week with a heart full of cheer and clean my house, do errands or whatever I needed. I was treated like a queen by cheerful, loving women. This certainly has been a big help in my recovery process. Being in a clean and orderly environment enhances healing.

Please accept my heart-felt appreciation for the care and happiness you gave to me during a very difficult time in my life.

Mary Mace, Ashland, OH

JoAnn's Professional Touch of Ohio. If you need professional housecleaning services in serves Stark, Summit, Portage, Wayne, Medina, Ashland, and Richland Counties call JoAnn's Professional Touch at (866) 337-7689.