What if you only needed one small tweak to achieve success? How can making small changes to your business improve your cleaning service?
Listen: One Small Tweak
Watch: One Small Tweak
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
What Small Changes We Make
Holy smokes. It’s a Saturday afternoon and I should be out Christmas shopping right now. And instead, I raced back to my office after a quick interchange with one of my top team members at Savvy Cleaner. I just realized after doing a thousand, a thousand YouTube videos, we were doing some things wrong.
In the house cleaning business, we were doing everything we knew to do. And we were correct at everything we were doing, but we had a lot of callbacks and we were making a lot of mistakes and we didn’t know why.
You Need to Tell the Customer What the Finished Job Looks Like
So, all of our team members got together. This is early in my career, but we discovered that we needed to tell the customer what the finished job looked like. Right? Because we know what the finished job looks like, we just need to educate the customer.
And then, as we started trying to work through that and trying to figure out what that looked like, we discovered something beyond. We discovered, wait for a second, instead of us, we the house cleaners, educating the consumer on what their home will look like when it’s clean. What if we have them educate us on what the home would look like when the home is clean?
So, check it out. What we did when we went to the customer’s house, we changed one thing. The one thing we changed was, we asked the customer, how will you know when the house is clean? And the customer would come up with these great ideas, and then we would make a note.
Each Customer is Different
We said if that customer thinks this would change the outlook of their home, let’s do that in all of the homes. Then we would ask the next customer, how will you know the house is clean? And they would say, it would be something different. Okay. Some of the homes would say, some of the homeowners would say, “The blinds will be turned to a slant instead of being horizontal.”
And so, we said, “Okay, great we will turn them to a slant.” There were other customers that said, “All the fringe on the Oriental rugs will be combed.”
And we said, “Oh, okay, interesting, let’s make a note of that.” So, there was a series of all these little things that every different customer had told us were important to them. Then we started incorporating those and we created a series of about 22 things that we do at every single house.
This Question Revolutionized Our Business
It revolutionized our business. Just that simple question, got callbacks and reduced them by 67% in a matter of about three weeks. And so all of a sudden, our business was changed. Okay. So, what happened today?
Today something also happened that was very similar, where if we change one or two things, everything will change. And I sat there going, “Wait for a second, how come I didn’t see this?” Well, it takes me back to earlier this year, this is 2020. This is the year of COVID. And what’s interesting is I normally take five or six vacations a year to exotic places just to clear my head and to get away from my life, just to take a break and have a breather.
And then I come back, and I run hard and I do my business. Right. But because of COVID and they’d cut off the international flights from the United States, I was not able to go on my vacations this year.
Quality Comes With Expectations
So, we took a vacation in the low country of South Carolina at this really fancy resort called Palmetto Bluff. Everything that happens there, happens on bicycles. So, you check out a bicycle when you get there, and you ride it everywhere you go. And every night, there was a great big fire pit, where they have a little roasted marshmallow party where you make s’mores.
So, it’s super cool. But there I was on this bicycle and I noticed that every time I got on the bicycle; the seat was a little bit wobbly. So, there I was driving along like the wicked witch from the West.
My seat is like turning and moving on me. And I’m like, “Man, this is sort of uncomfortable. Should I say something?” Well, it’s this really fancy resort and you would expect that they would have a working bicycle.
You have expectations. So, I said, “This is crazy. I’m going to take this back and I’m going to get another bike.” So, my husband’s like, “No, no, no. Don’t cause a fuss, just trade me with my bike.” Well, he got on it, and of course, he driving along and he’s like sliding around and whatever. It’s not comfortable for either one of us. So, finally, we agree that we’re going to take the bike back. So, we go back and there’s this guy that’s standing at this little podium. He’s waiting for people to come to ask questions about the bicycle.
One Little Tweak Can Fix Your Problems
So, I go up to him and I’m like, “Hey, I hate to interrupt or whatever, but I have this broken seat and when we try to drive, you’re like slipping and sliding around and it’s just not a good user experience.” So, he says, “Oh, I can fix that. Hang on one second, I can fix that right now.” And he brings out this little set of tools, and he tightens the seat.
And I’m like, “I don’t get a new bike. It’s just tightening the seat. You’re just going to tweak something and then off I go?” He’s like, “Okay, it’s all fixed now.” And I said, “Okay.”
So, I got back on the bike and it was fixed, just like that. A small tweak to the seat and it was fixed. I think he had like a little Allen wrench or something and he tightened the seat from the little lever that adjusted up and down. My point is this. One small tweak changed my whole bicycle riding experience the entire time that I stayed at this Island.
Small Tweaks Can Make Big Improvements
Now what’s interesting about that, it also changed the way we do business by asking the customer one question in our business. We didn’t change everything. We did one small tweak and then as our business progressed, we made a couple of small tweaks along the way. Right?
So, what got me in here on a Saturday afternoon, I know you’re dying to know. Right? There were a couple of things about the YouTube channel and we just reached a hundred thousand subscribers. We just finished and crossed the milestone of a thousand shows. So, there’s a part of me and it’s like, “Huh, look at me. I’m a house cleaner. And I figured out YouTube.”
And then there’s another part of me that’s like, “Holy cow, there are one or two other things we could tweak that would make all the difference in our YouTube show. What on earth have I been doing all this time?”
I’m Excited for What Our Small Tweaks Will Do
Now, wait a second. I know what you’re thinking. Don’t beat yourself up, Angela. And I’m not, because I started out at the beginning of this show, committed to doing a show, no matter what, but hey, guess what? You’re still here.
And so am I, and I’m super excited because as I move forward, this shows just kind of took a little tweak for me. And I’m really excited about where it’s headed next. So, I’m going to keep you posted, because you’re about to see some amazing changes.
Resources
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