Table of Contents
Table of Contents
It can be challenging for commercial cleaning businesses to hire and train employees to thrive in the industry’s high-demand work environment.
Capable, confident account managers are integral to your ability to face and overcome challenges and scale. Individuals in these roles need to wear many hats and possess a suite of skills to manage client accounts and customer relationships proactively.
Look outside the industry for new team members
When business owners restrict their talent search to candidates with direct experience in the industry, they’re forced to compete in crowded job markets to attract qualified prospects.
You can limit the risks of bad hires by focusing on individuals with proven experience managing commercial accounts in the industry, but the cost of this strategy outweighs the potential benefits.
High-growth janitorial businesses use innovative ways to navigate common hiring challenges. As integral as skilled account managers are to scaling a business, adaptive companies avoid sinking hours into recruiting candidates with direct experience.
Many skills go into making a successful account manager—many of which can be taught or supplemented by the right tools. Property Works discovered the benefits of this route when they fueled the success of their hiring with a management software platform.
Take a chance outside the industry box
Every career in janitorial services is unique. Some individuals begin their journey with a legacy of generational talent, while others work their way up the ladder from crew worker to the top of the office, and some simply apply to a job posting. For Lady Perez, her journey began in a bar.
“I was serving and bartending for 10 years,” Perez said, describing her background before joining Property Works as an account manager. “I came into it without knowing a single industry term. I didn't know what a work ticket was. I didn't know how labor hours were built, nothing. I didn't know anything.”
On the surface, this lack of commercial cleaning service experience might result from a rushed hiring process and urgent staffing needs. But Perez’s lack of industry knowledge hasn’t hurt her ability to hit the ground running at all. Lady Perez manages almost half of the company’s total transactions.
“Right now, I handle 40% of all the POS coming through the company,” Perez mentioned.
This doesn’t mean you need to hit the bars in search of rising talent, but searching beyond the industry for developing leaders yields better results than many business owners realize.
“She's probably got the largest book of work in the company,” said one of Perez’s mentors, “She came here with nothing more than a drive to improve, which took her to where she is now. She started as an assistant, developed her skill sets, and leveraged that experience into the account manager role.”
So what’s the secret that took an experienced bartender to one of the leading account managers at a multimillion-dollar janitorial maintenance company? It could be Perez’s drive to succeed, but many new hires at Property Works have similar stories.
Both established and new businesses can drive successful hiring and training processes with tools that:
Simplify operations and processes
Educate leaders on procedures and features
Enable growth and exploration
Reduce nuance and tedious tasks
Simplify the ramp-up
Unlocking new profitability means optimizing and streamlining every aspect of your business. Consider what it could mean for your commercial cleaning company if you ramped up your company’s 30/60/90-day roadmap for new hires.
What if your 60-day goals could be achieved in 30?
Or your 90-day goals ramped up in only 60?
The onboarding process is a huge indicator of how successful new hires will be. When your team members quickly gain the confidence and knowledge to hit the ground running, you can make growth part of your daily operations.
Give operations managers the structure to improve routine systems
Janitorial operations can be a significant slowdown in the ramp-up process. Every operating system is unique, and this challenge is not exclusive to the commercial cleaning industry. Optimizing procedural processes minimizes time spent learning the ins and out of a new business.
Instead, your commercial cleaning team can invest their time learning the industry, the CRM, and the market.
→ Management software streamlines and automates certain operations, reducing time-consuming tasks to just a few clicks.
“I like how everything was laid out in Aspire’s platform,” Domingo Rodriguez said of his training process. “You don’t need a teacher. It’s about how much you want to learn for yourself. I just used the Sandbox and explored the videos a lot.”
Rodriguez began exploring the Aspire platform two weeks into his account manager job at Property Works. The software aided onboarding, providing essential insights into account histories and new ones he managed.
These insights enabled Rodriguez to adapt to his new role, quickly understanding how the company operates with clients and learning valuable tricks to handling new accounts.
“The system eliminates extra steps because Aspire does it for you.” Aspire’s management software functions as a helping hand during the demanding onboarding process. In Rodriguez’s experience, it was like having a personal teacher. “I wouldn't be able to do the job without it.”
Enhance education and development
When hiring account executives for your business, you want ambitious candidates driven toward growth. You don’t need to hire for specific abilities when you have talent who desire to learn and develop independently.
Focusing on someone's ability to learn during the hiring process enables you to recruit for culture fit. Looking outside the commercial cleaning talent market allows you to find candidates who can:
Lead your crews
Work well with your clients
Align with the company vision
The challenge comes in how well you utilize this drive for growth post-onboarding. Dedicating ongoing resources to get full-time employees up to speed can over-burden indirect costs.
By enabling management with an easy-to-use platform with independent growth opportunities, you can actualize responsive leadership without adding to your overhead expenses.
Independent, customizable training lets managers in the facility services industry progress at their own pace
“I like the freedom,” Perez said about the learning curve of Aspire’s software. “I like creating my own schedule, the training incentives, and the knowledge accessible for free. It’s free schooling.”
A single roadmap can’t meet the needs of every future leader’s development. Not everyone progresses at the same pace or with the same methods, and if they’re limited to scheduled learning and structured lesson plans, they may never feel confident getting up to speed.
You can provide new hires with the resources to thrive in their role by letting them independently explore your company’s history, learn from previous successes and failures, and navigate the features of your operations.
“I was lost at first,” Perez said. “It took me a couple of months to get involved with the account managers. Aspire helped—I dove into the tutorial videos.”
“If you wanted to learn something, you could. You don't need a superclass,” said Rodriquez. “You can spend hours learning. You just need the drive to learn it.”
Improve employee retention by empowering problem-solving and adaptability
Walking new hires through processes and tasks is essential for getting them comfortable, but there won’t always be someone to solve every struggle they encounter.
A comprehensive management system lets employees learn and review standard processes or expand their skill set and facility services knowledge base. Aspire offers detailed tutorials to simplify system usage and encourage new, long-standing employees to broaden their knowledge.
“The Hundred Thousand Dollar Account Manager,” Perez said, noting her favorite tutorial resource. “It was just breaking down Aspire. I used that video. I would watch it every day for weeks. It's how the hundred thousand dollar account manager does his day-to-day. The Aspire Care web tutorials are really good. It's a great system.”
Reduce the weight of nuance
As a manager, you want employees to be the face of your business. Unfortunately, the day-to-day challenges of managing janitorial and office cleaning accounts can limit how much time your new hires have to grow accounts.
In a high-demand industry, even new account managers have to multi-task and adapt in their day-to-day to handle:
Client communication
Sending invoices
Every task comes with its own challenges and curveballs.
Give your commercial cleaning staff the tools to excel at their jobs and focus on scaling the organization
Even small nuances in daily operations can deter employee progress in a significant way. It can affect confidence, productivity, and results.
When your office team wastes time on redundant and unpredictable tasks, the business can’t benefit from the full weight of its talent, innovation, and dedication. Companies focusing on scaling get ahead of these mundane challenges.
Choosing the right management platform equips your account managers with technology designed to help them speed through the routine aspects of their job and devote more time to growth.
Use technology to free your staff to drive innovation, organizational improvement, and growth
Offloading smaller process steps or operations to your digital system automates repetitive tasks, reduces risks of human error, and drives efficiency.
“Aspire organizes everything,” Jamie LaRue said.
Coming from the food and beverage industry, LaRue found managing janitorial accounts more hectic than expected.
“It was difficult at first, but that's because I didn't have background knowledge. Once I got the hang of Aspire, it was easy,” she said. “Organization is the main benefit.”
LaRue found how Aspire connected processes a great advantage in learning the industry and the company. An organized and automated workflow lets her focus on giving each account personalized attention rather than focusing on routine tasks. A system where she didn’t need to switch tabs or hubs to manage accounts was a huge relief.
“I have a lot of subcontractors and a couple of in-house crews. I use the schedule board to manage ticket times. I can see how long a crew was on the job, and once it's complete, the work ticket goes to invoicing. Any purchases are also tied to the ticket. Aspire helps me organize everything. I probably couldn't do the job without it. It's too much to track.”
The seamlessness of being able to shift between daily duties, tap into different accounts, and never miss a beat is a massive benefit to employee training. Minimizing time spent on mundane tasks frees your talent to make a more significant impact.
For LaRue, she can learn about the people who hire Property Works for facilities management and cleaning rather than wasting time on the routine steps of servicing the account. With Aspire, Property Works can trust accounts to new hires like Jamie LaRue, who lack industry experience but excel at serving people and growing a business.
Investment in leaders is also an investment in scaling
Property Works needed a solution to empower scaling their business. By investing in management software that accelerates growth beyond the industry average, they also enable their workforce’s ability to develop new skills and advance their career.
What began as a software implementation to improve operations became a foundation for launching the training and development of all their new hires.
If you can find employees who understand growth, leadership, and accountability, then all you need is the right growth tool to unlock their potential.
→ A comprehensive management platform is crucial to the growth of your commercial cleaning business.
The right software creates a roadmap that moves employee growth at twice the average rate and fuels impact rather than process.
Speaking to the developing managers at Property Works, Aspire’s impact seems pretty clear:
Lady Perez – “Visualizing everything with Aspire helped drive my motivation.”
Domingo Rodriguez – ”Aspire does it for you. Everything's in the system laid out for you. I wouldn't be able to do the job without it.”
Jamie LaRue – “Aspire is a one-stop shop. There’s not much you have to do outside of it.”
Aspire is a trusted technology partner helping professional cleaning companies scale
Aspire’s cloud-based janitorial business software provides features that enable employees to excel in their role.
Our industry expertise empowers growth for janitorial businesses at every stage. From time-tracking to business management, Aspire provides end-to-end optimization.
If you want to connect your business from top to bottom with tools to win more jobs, Aspire delivers.
Want to experience software designed to help commercial cleaners achieve growth at twice the industry rate? Schedule a commercial cleaning software demonstration with Aspire Software and see how to take your scheduling efficiencies to the next level.
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Chesterfield, MO 63017
