How to beat the BIG boys - What the Giants of the industry just don't get

I used to look forward to reading our trade journals. Services Magazine, Cleaning Management, Building Services Management and a couple long gone now. Those magazines weren’t just bathroom reading for me, I would hang on every word, read every article and carefully read every single ad. Editors had names like Terry “ Five Coats” Wilhelm (forgive me Terry if I got your last name wrong, haven’t seen your name in print for many years but I hope you made a good buck selling the magazine and are comfy in retirement).

Professional trade journal publishing companies took over and now the janitorial magazines are only one in an entire portfolio of trade journals, among other trade journals like for gummy worm manufacturers and “ethnic” hair care distributors. I am OK with this, its progress I suppose and the professionals have done a great job converting to digital formats. Terry “Five Coats” could never have dreamed of a digital magazine.

I used to love to read what other successful company owners were doing and what they thought was important. Fortunately, for me, the internet took off and today I talk to janitorial company owners all over the world directly and read what they say with no editors. I still do read our trade journals but now I read the digital versions.

Most new comers into the business want to know how to build big companies like the ones they feel are running over them. The basics of moving dirt seems so simple and big companies have developed systems that are very good in operations and job costing. However, they DO falter as evidenced by one of the biggest companies in our industry who once boasted 75% of the entire downtown market where they are headquartered but have today lost more than two thirds of their buildings in their own backyard.

Snail Mail (Direct Mail) - Time to dust off a tried and true weapon in your arsenal

This morning I blasted through my first batch of email in 20 minutes. To stay ahead of the curve, I get more email than most people do, about 400 messages a day. The first batch in the morning is the biggest anywhere from 50 to 65 pieces during the week. I can do this because of the magic of two buttons, delete, and archive. I delete 85% of everything that hits my email box after scanning for anything marvelous.

I have been advising my clients to go back to snail mail for marketing and sales in their janitorial business. Yesterday one of my clients reported to me a 5% return on his first snail mail campaign. For the younger crowd snail mail, is an old-fashioned letter sent in an envelope that comes occasionally in that pile of flyers, junk mail and bills.

I am an old direct mail sort of guy. I spent a solid 10 years learning everything I could about how to get people to buy things through the mail. I built my first cleaning business with direct mail all by itself. No cold calls, no phone calls and this was before anyone dreamed of computers or the web. I personally licked 5,000 envelopes after personally signing 5,000 letters in blue ink carefully folding each letter and placing in an envelope along with a brochure and my card.

Just like the law of gravity, there is an immutable law of direct mail that says, “The right letter, to the right person with the right offer at the right time ALWAYS works”. The truth is today a personal letter works better than ever because of the delete button everyone has with just a mouse click away.

To be very clear I am not talking about junk mail but a personal letter from you to your prospect with your signature at the end of the letter arriving in a business sized number 10 envelope with their name correctly spelled and typed on the envelope.

Could direct mail work in your business? Here’s a test for you to try before you jot off some trash can bound advertising with the usual blah, blah, blah, wasting precious first class postage (yes, first class, not the junk mail rates). For the next 6 weeks place EVERY piece of mail you receive into a box. At the end of the 6 weeks go through the box and pull out every single business letter you receive with your name spelled correctly, NOT in a window envelope (which tells you it was done by a machine) from someone that KNOWS you actually use what they are selling.

First count how many there are and then study them carefully to see if it was sent by someone who knows you need what they have to sell. You will be surprised how few you find. In the direct mail advertising world, what you have started is a swipe file. Be on the lookout for really great letters that makes you FEEL something and were written just to and FOR you.

So you know, with everything that I learned about making people buy things through the mail, I might spend 8 to 12 hours to write a good letter. Carefully honing every single word, using a personal voice and reading it through the reader’s eyes in order to make the reader DO something. Will your letter be tossed in the trash? Yes, most of them will but it is the ones that DO NOT that will make a difference in your sales.

The silver bullet you have been searching for, no but a very powerful tool to incorporate into your total marketing program. Once again, what do we do to grow a janitorial company? We do EVERYTHING and old-fashioned business letters is just one piece of ammo in a well-stocked arsenal.

Finding the truly remarkable at ISSA/Interclean 2011

When very large events take place, it is hard to see the overall impact and cull the essential lessons or observations. Communicating those observations is sometimes more difficult and I needed several days to process everything I saw, heard and experienced in Vegas at the ISSA/Interclean 2011 conference.

I am a man given to the remarkable, the most interesting, important or at minimal, the avant-garde. This is why when moving to the mid-west, hot dish seemed like what they feed prisoners to stay just this side of the Geneva Convention. I am not a meat and potatoes guy, I NEED spice. That is why I dumped my TV and can’t handle top 40 music or celebrity news. I am not just bored with the mundane but an avid hater of all that is average.

I attended the conference to find what I could see as the trends that now and into the future will shape our companies and careers in this industry. It was a hunt for the remarkable and I found it.

Five Undeniable Truths about Janitorial Blogging

A blog (a blend of the term web log) is the primary way for you to engage your prospects, your clients, and your community in this Web 2.0 age. There are 156 million blogs and if you are in the cleaning industry, you had better get yours and you had better make it good.

I look at janitorial web sites almost continuously. Few in our industry have figured out how to maintain a presence on the web and janitorial web sites are not much more than electronic brochures. How much time do you spend reading any brochure after your purchase? How can you use the web to interact with all those you seek to influence (both before and after the sale)?

Yes, we all know you vacuum and dust and polish along with the other 127,000 cleaning services in the U.S. that want that very same dollar that you do. Frankly, everyone with money to spend for cleaning is tired of hearing it. The question is, what makes you special and why should you get that cleaning dollar? I want to be very clear about this and make sure you understand that you are NOT special in today’s marketplace. (Your mom still thinks you are special but other than her, it is a very short list).

The answer is as it always has been, to build a relationship. The foundation of a relationship is engagement. For a whole generation of buyers and clients today engagement is something that happens on the web. A blog is one key piece of your internet presence that you cannot afford to ignore.

Who gets the last word?

I went to the funeral of an old friend. We have not been very, close over the last few years but he was a friend who taught me much that I have taken with me for several decades. We were fierce competitors for many years and then one day after he left a top position in a global company, he bought my company.

My friend cleaned buildings like many of my other friends but this one cleaned what equaled entire cities. You could measure what he cleaned not in square feet or even in how many buildings but in square blocks of downtown business corridors. People stood at my friend’s funeral because there were no seats left.

So much current conventional wisdom was shattered at the funeral; I had trouble deciding which nuggets of nonsense to disassemble for you. I decided to disassemble just a few here now.

I Did NOT Steal Those Books In Chicago, But if I Did I Would Steal These

Dateline: August 31, 2011 in the Chicagoland section of The Chicago Tribune, headline reads; Janitor charged with stealing thousands of books from Lisle library, By Brian Slodysko, Tribune reporter.

“Security procedures at the Lisle Library will be evaluated after a Glen Ellyn man who worked as a late-night janitor was charged with carting off thousands of stolen library books”.

For the record, I have not been to Chicago since August of 2010; I have never lived in Glen Ellyn and have never worked that night shift at that library. To those reading this headline and just naturally assuming it was I are wrong. I never stole a book from any library and feel that this sort of crime is one of the lowest.

To keep the record straight, once I reported a library book lost and paid the library for it but I knew where it was all the time. After checking with Strand’s in New York City, the final authority on hard to find books, paying the library for this book was the only way I could have it.

Now that I have cleared up this late breaking news, cleared my own good name and made a confession of my one misdeed against any library, we can all now move on past all this ugliness.

It's not JUST the Devil in the Details

The details matter. They matter on a grander scale then we can imagine. Sometimes those details matter to those who we do not expect them to matter too.

I just read a story of Steve Job’s concern over a small detail. I will let you read that story here yourself:  Steve Jobs and the Google Logo Ambulance. The story immediately brought to mind a man who worked for me as a day porter in the headquarters of a large company. His name also was Steve.

This week I followed a conversation about the frustration of finding and keeping good help. I was in the business long enough to fix that problem for good and never had to advertise as all my competitors did.

My Steve was no genius and was in fact developmentally disabled. Steve took his job very seriously. Though he was finished with work at 4pm, one night I get a call from Steve at 11pm.

Steve was bothered about a spot on a faucet that he was not able to remove in a men’s room on the second floor. He could NOT rest and called me to tell me he was working on it but it really was bothering him.