Table of Contents
Table of Contents
As a business leader, it is your goal to grow the business, whether into new services, new regions, or even with new employees. To succeed, you need a business management solution that can help you enhance multiple areas of your business without stretching your investment too thin. As a franchise owner, franchisee, or an owner with cleaning subcontractors, business management software helps you to improve your business in many ways.
Your solution should be able to help you build your business in a few key directions:
Organizational cohesion
Market expansion
Workforce retention
Scalability
If you can find a single, integrated solution that helps you manage these aspects of your business growth, you can hit the ground running with nothing deterring your growth momentum.
The software should be able to consolidate all your data but also have visibility across your business, whether that is a commercial cleaning business that has expanded across multiple geographies, a franchise and franchisee partnership, or a business owner that has partnered with other cleaning businesses as subcontractors.
Why a single solution?
Navigating a path to scale in the commercial cleaning industry is a difficult challenge. There are many curveballs and pitfalls that business owners come across on their journey to growth. It can be hard to prepare for all the obstacles ahead. This often leads to decision-makers investing in multiple business areas, trying to throw investment dollars at different solutions and tools to get over the hill.
Unfortunately, this mostly leads to much additional weight to carry up the hill, with slimmer investment dollars available as you go. Spreading yourself too thin on multiple tools, resources, and strategies can horrendously affect your ability to scale. You end up with multiple siloed teams, using different tools and techniques to overcome challenges but leaving your business with multiple management issues and upkeep.
A single solution that comprehensively tackles your pain points as you grow is a huge advantage in an industry as competitive as commercial cleaning. Not only is a single solution perfect for connecting your organization as you grow, but it means you can keep a bird’s eye view of how your business is performing against growth obstacles.
Remember how much easier it becomes to monitor the payoff of your investment if you choose a single solution. If you’re investing in numerous tools and still not finding the desired results, it becomes harder to know what’s still holding you back and how to realign your investment. With one solution driving the path ahead, you can keenly monitor performance to understand what’s limiting success and pivot as needed.
But how does a comprehensive solution present itself, and what impact can it have to drive results? Let’s take a look.
Organizational cohesion
High-growth businesses usually rely on partnerships and expansions to transform from a scrappy team of janitorial custodians to a large commercial cleaning franchise. This typically results in multiple organizations or teams coming together to grow as a larger unit. It’s a proven strategy for success, but it doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to work.
Let us consider an example in a different industry. Think of a large automobile dealer. This dealership has achieved a very successful business in the Dallas area. The business owner is evaluating other opportunities in Texas, but they decide to grow locally due to their success in the Dallas area. Three years later, after starting five new dealerships and purchasing seven more, the business has grown into a dealership group, offering twelve different automobile brands within their single group.
The exciting challenge is now, this dealership alone controls the distribution of those local automobile brands. But each of the seven purchased dealerships manages its business using different software solutions and processes. The original business owner struggles to monitor sales, evaluate customer satisfaction, analyze financials, and optimize the supply chain.
Sure, the five starting dealerships are all living up to the expected standard of quality service, but monitoring these additional seven has become too complicated for the business owner to get hands-on with the growth of the dealership group. all while continuing to grow?
How can the business owner ensure customers get the premium service they are paying for, even though they purchase from different dealers? Can they manage all of this with different technologies and ad hoc products? Probably not.
This challenge isn’t at all foreign in the commercial cleaning industry. Even beyond business acquisition, consider the challenges of a partnership as well. Suppose one of your best customers wants you to expand and manage some of their other locations 250 miles away. You might consider managing their other locations through a partner or franchisee. But how?
Without a single software platform for managing your business, including a partner or franchisee will never provide the visibility you need to manage the growth of your business successfully.
You need a solution that can consolidate data across the board and make it a quick and straightforward process to onboard or integrate new business departments. Often the new business you partner with may not even have a similar system for how they compile and track data, but if you have a solution they can onboard their system to, then you can at least get the visibility needed to give the partnership a chance at success. Using a scalable platform, you can successfully run day-to-day operations from any location, computer, or mobile device.
Market expansion
Monitoring performance is the first step in building the path up that long hill of growth. Without performance data, you can’t uphold specific standards. But once that data is present, and you have what you need to track those standards, it’s time to ensure they’re upheld throughout the entire business.
Think about your reputation. Reputation is everything when it comes to winning over new clients, especially in untapped regions trying to understand why they should choose you over the local competition. As you grow, expanding into new sectors with new franchises or partners, you must realize how your reputation is carried. You may be known as a top commercial cleaning choice in your local area, but a franchise a few counties over may not perform as well. This can have trickle effects that leave customers questioning your business standards in local regions or others.
Not having a full understanding of the performance or reputation of your expanded business can hurt your entire reputation as a premier commercial cleaning company. That’s why when it comes to onboarding new business sectors, you must ensure you’re equipping them to live up to the standards you’ve set. Sure, they may provide services that the rest of your business is unfamiliar with, have a better understanding of the local area, or use a different system entirely. From an operational standpoint, they need to work on your system, a proven system that guarantees satisfied customers.
Your operations and management system should be designed to streamline your day-to-day work. New franchises or teams should be able to take on your operational processes so you can ensure they’re streamlined and efficient in their work as well. If your new teams are underperforming, it should be simple to see where they’re falling short on the operational side that’s keeping them from achieving a high level of success. Whether this is customer communications, low visibility into on-site tasks, or an issue in management–spotting and amending the operational slowdown should be easy. But that’s only if your entire business runs on a connected system to be efficient.
Workforce retention
A growing business means a growing team. Managing that team can grow increasingly tricky as you build in numbers, roles, and departments. It’s not too uncommon for the workforce to get neglected as a business grows out of the small community of crew it started with to an entire corporation of franchises and departments. You don’t want to fall for the pitfall of looking at your staff as just a metric, though. You still need to treat your employees as the heartbeat and backbone of your business, and like a family in need of your support.
Visibility is a great advantage. Not just for you as the business owner of a team leader but for your staff. They need to see the ongoings of the business if you want them enabled to be the savvy leaders that helped you grow in the first place. How can your crew deal with on-site issues if they can’t connect with the operational staff? How can your team leads adjust sick notices or absences if they can’t see where the rest of your crews are and who’s available? How can your team accommodate customers if they don’t know your business capabilities?
All this information should be available and present by providing the information and resources your staff needs to handle rising issues confidently. Waiting for an issue to go up the chain of command is never sustainable in a high-growth environment. Starting with visibility is critical, but optimizing operations to benefit your staff is equally essential.
If your team isn’t optimizing routes to keep employees on the move, getting clear updates on the progress of jobs, or being able to communicate frequently, you’re limiting their ability to thrive. Having a tool that can organize team management, routes, communication, deadlines, and job progress isn’t about micromanaging; it’s about showing your employees they’re supported.
If you can eliminate the tediums of day-to-day management, you free up your crews to focus on what they do best. This can have a significant impact on employee morale and retention. But this all comes down to how you can onboard all these tasks onto one comprehensive tool so you’re not leaving different departments or roles siloed and feeling unconnected.
Growth and scale
The common theme here is scale. Many businesses grow over time but fail to discover that current processes may not scale as they did when they were smaller. Using manual techniques or relying on your employees’ instincts is not sustainable for customer satisfaction and resource management. Many business owners also discover that as they grow, they retain less and less visibility into business metrics. That is where a scalable solution can help them succeed while providing better metrics, visibility, and insights into the day-to-day operation of their business.
It can be hard to find a tool that focuses on scale since so many solutions try to specialize in only certain areas of the business. Aspire aims to do more by providing an end-to-end software tool that includes the following capabilities:
If you are a commercial cleaning franchise business or are subcontracting with partners for new work, many resources are available to help you make the best business decisions. Aspire can be a resource for your business. Aspire provides a comprehensive business management platform built for scale and growth.
Schedule a commercial cleaning software demonstration with Aspire Software and see how you can better manage business growth.
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Chesterfield, MO 63017
