Matt's Story

Matthew or Matt as he is most often referred, an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur started a small carpet cleaning business. He would start each day very enthusiastically ready to clean the carpets of his newly acquired clientele. Most of his work came from referrals as he did a very good job always taking care to exceed his customer’s expectations. Matt’s little business was growing nicely, but as the business was growing with more jobs each week, Matt was getting tired, physically. He was fast becoming exhausted. His day typically started at 5 am with an inspection of his equipment – it always had to be clean and ready for a hard days work. Then he would plan his route, careful not to create a backtrack effect, making his route as fuel and time efficient as possible. Then he would prepare all the cleaning chemicals carefully ensuring that enough chemicals where loaded into the truck for the next days work. Matt was slowly developing his business into a 6 day a week “job”.

Matt also noticed that he was arriving home later in the evenings. 5 am to 7 or 8 pm was a normal day for Matt; he used Sundays for book keeping admin work and other tasks that needed his attention, but could not be done during regular hours of operation.

One morning Matt awoke early as usual, 5 am and was checking his equipment when he began to think about his business and the direction it was headed. He took a long hard look at his rigorous schedule – how long can I keep this up he thought? The physical pressure was fast becoming a torment and he was not enjoying the business he so happily started. “What business am I really in, Matt asked himself?”

He spent many late evening hours evaluating his financials, and one thing stuck out like a sore thumb, no matter how many hours he worked there was a maximum earning potential as the day only had 24 hours and he could only work so many of those.

The second question he asked himself came for his number crunching and evaluation of his financials – what was the time factor’s related to cleaning rooms of different sizes? It was clear that a small bedroom took almost as long to clean as a larger lounge area – in both cases he had a fixed time for travelling and equipment set-up – no matter the room size.

These questions made him realise that he had a very linear business model and that no matter how hard he worked his earning capacity was dictated by the time he had available to perform the work and that the cost of cleaning the carpets in a small home had fixed travelling and equipment set-up time constraints.

The shock and reality of income stagnation was significant to Matt as his income was solely reliant on a few basis factors:

Ø his skills and effort

Ø his capacity to do all the work himself

Ø the number of available working hours in a day

What this meant was that he could never earn more than the hours available in a day and if he took ill or had a vacation his income stopped. After contemplating his situation a little more he was able to answer his first question, while negatively he knew he was not in the carpet cleaning business he was just a carpet cleaner. While it was registered as a business it lacked the potential to make money in the long term – one of the required long term criteria is, business longevity.

What a realization!!

How could he make a change, how could he stop working in the business and start working on the business? Matt realised that he needed to find out how other companies did business in the industry he was in; what was there business model/s.

The second question he raised earlier was the differential between cleaning a 3 bedroom home versus a 5 bedroom home – this realization was significant as he was now correlating productivity and earnings. This meant that additional effort to get larger jobs gave him a better income in more or less the same amount of hours.

After examining similar businesses in the market he found that most were operating just like he was – day to day and by the hour all these individuals were either cleaning for themselves or cleaning as a sub-contractor for someone else.

It was what was not being done that sparked his interest. He did not find a business that was providing the cleaning industry with secure contracts for industrial carpet cleaning. He found that most cleaning companies would themselves try to provide this service. This opened a door of opportunity for him to provide the industry with professional carpet cleaning services through the provision of professional contract solutions. So he developed a business model for his business where he would assist the cleaning companies to secure the carpet contracts as part of the overall building maintenance contract. Through this process he began running a carpet cleaning contracting business which provided carpet cleaning solutions through the employment of carpet cleaners who where sub-contracted to him. He went from working in his business cleaning carpets to developing systems that would assist larger cleaning contractors and building maintenance companies in fulfilling their maintenance contracts where carpet cleaning was an element of the whole contract. By working on his business he developed carpet cleaning and maintenance programs as well as training modules for all those cleaners that sub-contracted to him, he developed systems that provided services from emergency clean-up to daily maintenance.

Matt computerized all his system and management controls and billing by setting up a specialized communication hardware and software that tracks all of the jobs as well as complaints and emergencies, man-hours worked and automatic maintenance follow-up.

Of course, over time he went on to develop financial benefit models for clients who saw the carpet in the property as an asset, thus its longevity became a key element in the cleaning process. Continued value added packages for clients and a highly intellectual approach to viability and sustainability have made this one of the premier carpet cleaning businesses in the market today.

Do you feel like Matt, call or email the Virtual Business Incubator.