Common Mistake: Hiring Experienced Cleaners

It might seem like the logical thing to do when looking to hire a new employee; find someone with house cleaning experience. After all, might this not be an indicator that their work experience will translate to knowing how to clean a home professionally and proficiently? Doesn’t this translate to being able to put the new hire on the firing line right away and avoid the tedium of conducting basic boot-camp training?

The answer to both questions is that, not only can we not make these assumptions; it can be downright risky and costly to you and your business to do so! Let’s examine why this has been my position, not only in this industry, but since early on in my entrepreneurial career dating back 45 years.

I built major sales organizations by NOT hiring experienced sales people.

As you may know, my first business endeavor started back in 1964 as a vacuum cleaner distributor in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I grew that business into an organization of 300 door-to-door sales people in 22 offices throughout Western Canada from Thunder Bay, Ontario to Victoria, British Columbia. And I did this without recruiting experienced direct sales people. In fact, if your application for employment indicated you had worked at selling vacuum cleaners, pots and pans, encyclopedias, aluminum siding or any other commodity typically sold door-to-door in those days, it as much guaranteed you would never work for me or any of my office managers or sub-distributors.

About the only profession that was considered to be lower on the ethics scale than used car dealer back then were those individuals earning a living selling goods and services door-to-door. Unfortunately, many of the people attracted to direct sales were not the most scrupulous souls on the planet, and the public’s disrespect for the profession was often justified. I had some bad experiences with the few “professionals” I did hire early on. I quickly determined that if I was going to build a large, substantial and successful business I was going to have to hire and train individuals with good moral values who had not been corrupted with “make the sale at any price” philosophy so prevalent back then.

I would hire people from any walk of life EXCEPT direct sales experience who had the will to learn and the ambition to earn more money on straight commission than they were earning from their salaried positions. I hired bank employees, railroad workers, waiters and waitresses, carpenters and other tradesmen, unemployed men and women – anyone from a background other than direct sales. I created a training program which included a product demonstration and a proven script they were required to memorize and deliver word-for-word.

The result of this hiring and training philosophy was that my organization sold over $55 million worth of vacuum cleaners (based on 2009 dollars) in the first four years. In fact, the average sales conversion ratio of closures to demonstrations consistently ran at a rate of just under 50%. We did all this without incurring consumer complaints with the Better Business Bureaus or government agencies across Western Canada. This could never have been accomplished without the recruiting and training practices I put into place to virtually clone every new employee to do things exactly the way I wanted them done.

Over the years, I learned that it is usually better to find good people and teach them your way of doing things rather than what I call bringing in “hired guns.” This is true of most positions from the bottom of the ladder all the way to the top of your company. Many of America’s largest companies have been run by people brought in years ago in low-entry positions and worked their way up the ladder to become presidents and chief executive officers. Bringing in high-powered, experienced professional from the outside often makes sense of course. Established companies usually don’t have the luxury of grooming a low-level employee for years when they need to fill an important slot in their organization now. But my own experience over the years is that people groomed from within your company make better cogs in the wheel, tend to be far more loyal and, unlike your typical “hired gun”, don’t switch teams as easily when another employer dangles a bigger carrot in front of them.

People much smarter than me adhere to similar principles.

My current read is a book recommended by my long-time friend and business associate Jim Cathcart; Bailout Riches! by Bill Bartmann. In 1986, broke and in debt to a bank for $1 million, he founded a new venture and created a new industry in debt resolution. On a borrowed $13,000 he managed to repay that $1 million in three years and over the next 10 years built a company with 3,900 employees, revenues over $1 billion and profits of $182 million. Although his company specialized in packaging and buying bad debt portfolios from banks at pennies on the dollars, and then collecting what could be salvaged from the debtors, Bill refused to hire experienced collection agency people. Why? For the same reason I refused to hire experienced direct sales people: he did not agree with the high-handed collection tactics then being employed and he wanted to train his debt-collection staff HIS way. In fact, his company policy was that any collector caught using old-school collection tactics was immediately fired!

So, where can we go wrong hiring experienced house cleaners?

If you are going to build a successful residential cleaning business, a key ingredient to that success is in providing consistently great service for your clients. Every employee needs to be singing from the same song book. In other words, they can’t be doing their own thing, otherwise there will be no standardization and uniformity will be virtually impossible to control.

An important foundation for profitability for both your company and your employees is learning to work efficiently. Obviously, a team who can do 50% more work in the same amount of time as a less efficient team will earn more money for you and for its members. Simply winding up with great results isn’t enough for a company or individual cleaning for a living. You need a combination of great results done in the most efficient manner. From what I have seen, it’s pretty difficult to get an experienced house cleaner to adapt to using a cleaning apron and following efficient steps throughout the cleaning procedure. Failure to do so results in the same inefficiency a carpenter would experience if he went up and down a ladder every time he needed a nail or another tool – that’s why he wears a carpenter’s apron. The end result could be the same with or without the apron, but without it the job could take two, three or four times longer.

I told you that I taught my sales staff to follow a script word-for-word. I didn’t just teach them to follow the script “more or less”; they had to memorize and deliver it word for word. The same holds true for the way your employees must be trained. They obviously don’t follow and deliver a verbal script, but they must follow and deliver a scripted method – as you or your trainer teaches them – and follow it to the letter. When a sales person went into a slump, I or his office manager would either go over his presentation in the office or accompany him on a live presentation in a prospect’s home. It was easy to see where the person was going wrong. The same is true with having all of your employees follow specific cleaning techniques without variation of any kind. You need to implement and enforce a no-tolerance policy in this regard. Of course, we’re assuming that you are teaching the most effective and efficient techniques in the first place.

As with my sales force, when you hire and train people with no professional experience in this line of work, they learn YOUR way of doing things. Yes, it does mean that time and effort must be put into training, which some owners feel can be skipped by hiring people with cleaning experience. And it does require supervision after the initial training but, believe me, it’s worth every ounce of effort and every second of time you spend up front. Plus you don’t have bad habits and inefficient methods to redirect.

I suppose one thing that might be presumed about an experienced individual applying to work for your company is that they have proven a tolerance for doing this kind of work. We know that not everyone can adapt to the work involved in cleaning homes for a living. For that matter, even someone who has worked as a professional house cleaner may not really be cut out for the work either and may be simply desperate for work until she can find something else. Whether the risk-reward ratio is worth gambling on hiring experienced cleaners is one which only you can decide. I can only caution that if you do decide to bring aboard someone with prior professional cleaning experience that you explain – in no uncertain terms, that you require all employees to follow your established procedures to the letter. NO EXCEPTIONS. Tell them to set aside any methods or policies they may have learned in the past which conflict in any way with the training they must go through with your company.