FIRST QUARTER REVIEW

Well here we are nearing the end of the first quarter of 2015. Remember back in late 2014 when I was suggesting you establish quality, attainable goals for 2015? Well, are you one fourth of the way to the goals you established? Did you establish any 2015 goals? Here are some areas you may want to pay particular attention too,

1. SALES--Have you made the volume goals for the first quarter that you established? If not, maybe we should be checking things like,

   A. Are we making enough calls to secure enough proposals to close enough sales? What type of accounts are we calling on? Do they fit the profile of the type of customers we want? Do we know how many calls we have to make to secure one proposal and next do we know how many proposals we need to deliver in order to close a sale? What is our average sale amount so it follows how many of those do we have to have each month to make our goal? These are all numbers we should be keeping accurate track of because, after all, sales really boils down to a numbers game most of the time.

   B. Are we focusing on the profitable accounts that produce not only top line volume but bottom line profits or are you "bidding" anything that comes along and hope you are the "low bidder"? You may remember my Selling DVD talks about the difference between bidding and proposing. We are not a commodity so we shouldn't be "bidding" our service.

   C. What type of promotion have we done to our prospects to call attention to our ability to provide their service. Have you done focused mailing with follow up calls or are you waiting on the phone to ring? Be aggressive with the prospects you want to close. 

2. OPERATIONS--Have you reviewed your new employee orientation and initial training to make sure it is up to date? Are you doing any initial orientation and training? No? Start now to make it happen. Remember, sending a new recruit out to "learn the ropes" with an experienced employee is not the way to train. That experienced employee may just be very experienced at unsafe shortcuts and poor overall quality. Being with you as an employee a long time does not necessarily mean they know how to do it right.

Have you held a quarterly training meeting with all of your supervisors and project managers to remind them of your detailed policies and procedures for cleaning a building? Better yet, establish the date and schedule and then assign several supervisors or project managers to train on the various subjects so you can see what really is being done in the field. Don't embarrass them if they are wrong but coach them in the way you want it done. You'll probably learn more about you company with a meeting like this than you ever wanted to know but you need to know. 

What type of retraining has taken place with the regular cleaning techs? Had a refresher? 

How about retuning each of the accounts to see if you can reduce labor and or supplies and equipment in the buildings? Remember, 15 minutes a night in a 5 night a week account at $10 per hour loaded rate is $55. Ten accounts like that will pay your way to the convention in Las Vegas in October. (Not accounting for gambling losses).

3. ADMINISTRATION--One thing I have really noticed over the last several months is that many BSC's are letting their receivables slip. Might be a good time to review your billing and collection procedures. After all, ours is a payroll cash flow business. Just a reminder, your receivable collections in this industry should be around 22 days. To make that even clearer that means if you billed $20,000 this month, at the end of the month your receivables should be no more than about $14,500. How you doing on that program?  Hopefully everyone by now is billing at the beginning of the month for that month's service but if you aren't, get started now. We can help develop a schedule for you so the customer is not inundated with 2 bills at once while you are converting. 

We can go on and on with benchmarks to be checking on at this first 2015 first quarter review point but I hope you will check the things we have mentioned and add  a few of your own.  

THANKS to all of those that attended our Selling Contract Cleaning Services workshop in Orlando, March 6. We had a great group and you can review some of their comments on our home page at www.consultantsincleaning.com. 

Our next workshop on this subject is July 24 in St. Louis MO. and we just added Walnut Creek CA. on September 10. Over 4 months out and we have several registrations already for St. Louis. Looking forward to it. MAKE IT A GREAT DAY.