Why Most Cleaning Companies Will Never Grow

During our employee evals last month, our Procurement Officer, Eli and myself, sat down and asked the team what their experience was like working at Priority Clean. We were happy to find that they like and trusted our managers and that there was almost no stress in their jobs. But, as it would later be revealed, studying everyone’s questionnaire after they left, the employees all marked down two topics that we failed at—training and communication. 

Almost every single cleaner had marked down being trained only once at their facilities. We were in shock. How can someone do a job confidently with only one walkthrough? Worse yet, some were thrown a vacuum and never received our Priority Process training. Others could only recite a few company policies. This had given me the startling realization that our company is tight-knit and trained at the top, but poorly lacking at the bottom. Guess what happens to a company whose seeds are well nurtured? It eventually dies. Forget about growth—if we don’t give everything to our new people, then we’re finished. 

The fault is ours. The next day I called an emergency meeting with all our managers and told them to stop inspecting accounts and go teach someone. Inspecting is important, but not investing time with our employees is damaging this company. How can we grade performance without training? How can we call ourselves leaders and managers when we don’t spend our time elevating employees on their skill sets, exposure to accounts, company policies, and procedures? 

I guarantee other companies are out there just trying to survive. It’s easier for them to hire a body and hope everything works out and that the employee will figure it out. But that’s not going to keep people or clients. We’re guilty of it and I put a highlight on the problem. Eli and I spent the first few weeks testing out team messaging apps to fix our communication problem. Once we got a good one, we tested it with our management staff before introducing to our employees. It was and is a gamechanger. We’re on the same page with this app! 

In those same weeks we came up with a solution to our training problem. It seemed that every time we had call offs or a problem account, managers could cover or fix easily. But training was lacking. A new hire would be shown, inspected, and checked up on via phone, but they would then be left alone from there on out. That is a huge ingredient in the mixture of why we lose people. If steps aren’t broken down and done together with manager and employee, somewhere along the line of solo-work, that person will fail. Training is the most crucial component in every business and yet it gets the least amount of attention. We deserve to lose every new employee if we can’t get this right. 

It might be a mystery to some that employees need appreciation. It doesn’t matter if you appreciate them in your head—they need to hear it. The magic of appreciation doesn’t come from office snacks or a text message. Food is great but it’s just not it. It’s not even a raise. Employees should know how grateful we are for having their help. I expect management to relay this truth to all our team—without them we can’t service our customers. They need to know that their doing a great job, that their keeping people safe from germs or the flue, that their helping offices stay focused on their work so they don’t get bogged down on ours, and that they’re leaders in their own accounts. They need to know. 

I have updated this blog post since publishing. Today is March 20th. After careful thought, we have implemented a company trainer for Priority Clean. Her roles is never to be a cleaner. We hired her to elevate our team and to spend fifty hours a week doing nothing but training and inspecting accounts. The best part of this is that we can deploy her to retrain employees on their accounts whenever we receive a complaint. What a tremendous safeguard! And better yet, what a terrific way to enhance our quality control, skill sets, employee morale, and employee retention. I don’t doubt that our management team doesn’t know everyone, but I know our company Trainer will. This is also a game changer. 

Looking forward, I know that our company will grow the right way. A strong foundation will erase inconsistencies in the cleaning industry. Our company will flourish with a trainer, you wait. 

Thanks for reading! See you next month! 

Mickey Dayton

Chairman & CEO

Priority Clean LLC

(406) 590-1987

“Bringing Value Back to the Cleaning Industry“