Hiring family and friends in your janitorial business

Ask Drake

President and Co-founder of CleanGuidePro

With the truly, humbling success of CleanGuidePro, we’ve received great questions by companies all over the world about varying topics in the janitorial industry. Allow me to share yet another one of them with you.

Hey Drake: My Janitorial business has grown and I’ve started hiring employees. I’ve got eight part time employees now. Three are family members (my son and one of my sister’s daughter), one is a friend from high school and five are employees unrelated to me. My biggest employee issues by far have been from my family and my friend. I’ll get a call or text saying, “Sorry, can’t make it tonight, I need Friday off, etc.”. Also, when they’re late or do poor quality work and I confront them about it, they don’t seem to care and actually get upset with me. We just landed a new cleaning account and I’ll need to hire three more employees soon. I’ve got more family members that say they’re available to work for me, but I’m reluctant to hire them. What do you think? Should I hire family and friends or not?

Family employees

Answer: This is a great question and one that is near and dear to my heart. The simple answer is “YES” if you do it right and definitely “NO” if you do it wrong!

In the early days, I had my little kids help me (on Friday evenings and Saturdays) clean buildings and pull trash. They got paid with a trip to 7-11 for Slurpees, Ring Pops and Lemonheads and were ecstatic to get it!

As my janitorial business growth continued, I hired well over a thousand employees, including all four of my kids (as well as their boyfriends and girlfriends), my wife, my mom (as honorary CEO), two of my sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, my mother-in-law, brother-in-law, friends of mine and friends of my family. I’ve also had to (reluctantly, tearfully and prayerfully) fire some of these people that I loved (AND STILL DO). All in all, family and friends have probably been about 4% (40) of my hires.

Hiring family and friends has been an incredible blessing to me by strengthening most relationships, yet it’s been a curse by destroying a few others. I have a close relative that still rarely talks with me due to our unsuccessful working relationship. This remains my biggest personal failure in business…

The bottom line answer to your question is this. Family and friends can be a great asset to your janitorial business, but establish guidelines and procedures for these people just like employees that are not related to you. When you do this, you will find that it strengthens both your business and your family!

Drake

Janitorial Employee-Supervisor Conflict

Ask Drake

President and Co-founder of CleanGuidePro

With the truly, humbling success of CleanGuidePro, we’ve received great questions by companies all over the world about varying topics in the janitorial industry. Allow me share one of them with you.

Hey Drake: As our janitorial business has grown, we’ve promoted two of our better cleaners to Supervisor positions. Soon afterwards, I had Supervisors telling me to fire certain employees and hire better people. I’ve also had employees calling me and saying that their Supervisor is bad, lazy and plays favorites among other things. What’s the best way to solve conflict between your supervisors and employees?

Supervisor-Employee conflict

Answer: First, let me congratulate you on your growing business! Your question is one that every successful business owner faces at some point in their growth.

Let me make it simple and clear. Your job as the owner is not to be a referee between supervisors and employees, making judgment calls based on some “gut feeling” as to who is right and who is wrong in each and every situation. Rather, your job to establish employee guidelines and criteria in employee handbooks, noting specific job descriptions for each position (from entry level cleaners to supervisory personnel) with clearly spelled out duties and responsibilities. Basically, everyone show know what their duties are and what the consequences are for failing to follow procedure.

Here’s how it works… Every employee should read your company handbook and sign off that they understand the consequences off “no call, no show”, “being late”, “poor quality work”, etc. Each cleaner should be trained and receive a checklist, detailing exactly what duties to perform on their shift. Likewise, each Supervisor should receive training and a checklist detailing exactly what duties they perform on their shift and (in particular) during the “end of night checklist”. This way when conflict arises (and it will!) you can look at which company procedures were violated and make a correct, unbiased decision!

Business 101 “rightly” teaches us that written systems and procedures, with clearly defined job descriptions with a touch of “common sense and love”, eliminates most of our business problems!

Drake

Janitorial Employee Time Keeping

Ask Drake

President and Co-founder of CleanGuidePro

With the truly, humbling success of CleanGuidePro, we’ve received great questions by companies all over the world about varying topics in the janitorial industry. Allow me share one of them with you.

Dear Drake: We’ve been in the janitorial business a little over a year now and are ready to start hiring a few employees to help with our workload. Managing employee’s time is new to us. Any suggestions on how to track their weekly hours for payroll? Should we put in time clocks, have a “self write-in sheet” for them to write their own times down, or just pay them for a set amount of hours? .

Answer: Great question! First, let me get you thinking the right way. You don’t manage employees time, but rather you “manage” the “system” that manages your employees hourly timekeeping.

Having employees write their own time down or paying them for a set amount of time is a system allright, but it’s a system of the employees managing you! Learn from my early mistakes. I’ve stopped by to check buildings with write-in sheets at 8pm, with all employees gone and the times written down are 6pm in and 10pm out. I’ve also paid employees for 3 hrs a night, received customer complaints that things were getting missed, then find out the employee was only there for 1 hour each night!

Time-clocks are an OK system, but have drawbacks. Units are expensive, travel time to get time cards and manually entering in payroll data are all time consuming. Cliche yes, but “time is money” off your bottom line.

Here’s the hands down, best system to keep track of your employee hours for payroll. Telephone Clock-in Systems! This is online computer software that allows employees to clock in/out from their jobsite using caller id. It’s in real time and sends email or text alerts to you if someone is late, no shows, etc. You can see reports, print or email timesheets, export payroll and much more with the click of a button. It saves you time and money and it’s affordable to even the smallest of companies. That’s managing a system that works!

These systems are not put in place to control or manipulate “bad” people/employees at all. Employees should be cherished, appreciated, taken care of, paid well and yes, even loved! Systems are put in place to create a work environment that reduces chaos, creates structure and a sense of order. Systems foster harmony and peace in the workplace and i’snt that what it’s all about anyway my friend!

Drake

Janitorial Competition and Fair Market Pricing

Ask Drake

Grand Master Janitor, 30+ years

With the truly, humbling success of CleanlyRun(formerly CleanGuidePro), we’ve received a lot of questions (from companies all over the world) about a variety of topics in the janitorial industry. Today I’d like to share one about Fair Market pricing.

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Hey Drake: I own a start-up janitorial business in a large U.S. city and I have to compete with large companies to win bids. How does CleanlyRun Janitorial Bidware address this issue as well the concept of “fair market pricing”?

Answer: First of all, there is no real “set market” or “fair price” chart – i.e. Dallas vs. Chicago – to go by. That’s the wrong way to think about it…

You need to think in terms of what’s the fair market costs associated with your area. For example, what are the minimum hourly wages, chemicals, state and local payroll tax rates that you have to pay. (By the way, our Bidware does all this for you in Step 4 of the bid creation process, the Workloading and Pricing screen.)

All companies (especially the large national and regional ones) have to FIRST calculate/count their monthly costs to clean a building. Only then do you add a fair profit price (which is also suggested by the software). Remember, the bigger companies will always have higher costs than the smaller companies because they have higher overhead, more mid level supervisors, and higher liability insurance which means slimmer profit margins.

Don’t be intimidated by the bigger companies, but rather focus on constantly improving your own company! Keep in mind that the “big companies” were all a startups once.

Drake