Define Your Company's Standards (or your employees will)

If you don’t define your company standards, your employees will.. and it'll never be the way you want.

In this episode, I break down how we're learning to build a strong culture inside our home service business. We get into the real-world side of hiring, where things go wrong, and how unclear expectations create problems in your team, your jobs, and your reputation. I also walk through how to create a clear “Standard of Excellence” for your company—covering communication, professionalism, and how your team shows up on every job.

If you’re trying to grow a window cleaning business (or any service business) without losing control of quality, this is the foundation you can’t skip.

What you’ll learn:

•  Why culture is built by default if you don’t define it 
•  Common hiring mistakes that cost you time and money 
•  How to set clear expectations from day one 
•  What to include in a Company Standard of Excellence 
•  How to get consistent results from your team in the field

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome back to Clean for Profit. Uh, my name is Colby. We're running another solo episode this weekend, keeping it pretty casual. March has been super. I'm sorry, it's April. April's been super busy. It's been a record month for us. And that's been awesome. There's been a lot of change in our organization, mainly that we have been hiring and hiring seriously for the first time ever. And there is a lot that I have learned from that, that's for sure. My brother and I have been the two people that have kind of run this business, myself, obviously, and then my brother on and off ever since we started, basically. And that's been good because it took a little while to train my brother to work in the way that is most appropriate for this business. You know, as anybody that has experience in window cleaning may know, it's kind of like construction adjacent, but it's not construction. So if you've ever worked in roofing or concrete, you learn pretty quickly that there's a certain culture that comes along with that. And the culture that I want to personally have for my business isn't completely compatible with a lot of construction culture. And so I just wanted to talk about that today because one thing that's become really, really apparent to me is that if you're not intentional about what the environment, the working environment, and the culture of your company is going to be, then who you hire will ultimately end up dictating that because the culture will be built based on who they are and not based on what your company stands for. So I've hired a few people in the past and this year, and I think that the biggest lesson that I've taken from hiring so far is that I did it too late, especially this year. I've been kind of rushed to get help because the schedule has been booking out. And if we don't have a couple of guys on to help with um the deliverables of the business, then we're not going to be able to fully fulfill what we've promised our clients, which isn't the end of the world, but is one of the things that we obviously want to avoid because it'll be a bottleneck for growth long term. And that is the current bottleneck that we're facing, is our ability to deliver. So what that has done is it has constrained my ability to do ironically things that will allow us to stay busy long term. So my schedule has been really compressed on the sales side of things because I'm still tied to the truck. And until I'm not tied to the truck, I have to both deliver, do the delivery of like window cleaning. And there's people helping me with this now. Like we have some employees that are getting up to speed, but we're not at a place yet where I can send, like I have one guy that I can send solo to some jobs, so that's great. Uh, but I need a crew that I can send out to a job. And ideally, I need two of them. At that point, I can get back out in the field selling. So we've we've we've had to turn our sales volume down a little bit, which is not a place where you want to be because this is a seasonal business and it will slow down eventually. And so when things are picking up, you don't want to have to slow it down on your terms, basically. You want to you can if you have to, and we have had to, but my whole point here is I'm still required in the field, and that's taking away from time where I can be going out and doing estimates and closing more deals so that my guys stay busy long term. So ironically, training my guys later than I should have is making like long-term job security less of an assured thing. And if any of my guys are hearing this, I don't want you to be freaked out by any means. That's not that's not the case, and and it will pick back up. But like my mistake as an employer was hiring later than I should have. And I mean, if I had known that running Facebook ads would have been this successful, I would have been hiring in December, which honestly, December, January is one I should have been hiring. But you know, we we're learning as we go here. We had our first high hire on in late February, early March. And uh and it is what it is. But one big thing that I have learned is that when you when you hire quickly, when you hire, you have to do it carefully and you have to vet people. You have to make sure that they fit your personality. But most importantly, they have to be entering a structure that sets expectations for them and that doesn't make up the expectations as you go, basically. So my my brother and I, we've been running together for a long time now. We've created a culture between the two of us that represents the standards of our company, basically. And that's been great because we're both on the same exact page. But that took a long time to iron out and we never really formalized it on paper. And there have been some like the hires I made are great. We've got good technicians that are gonna be, you know, at a good they're gonna be up to speed before long. So that's great. But there have been some instances where I've had to make some corrections in terms of like professional conduct, like how we respond to feedback, stuff like that that I might not have seen in the initial interview process, but that are kind of no-brainers to me personally. And that came up because the expectations of the company weren't set at the start. And you can do you can do that. We're doing that moving forward by documenting what the standards of the company are, period. And these aren't things that like I just make up and it's based on my personal preference or mood. We're gonna have core tenets basically of our business that are based on character, professionalism, and conduct with our clients that are standards that our technicians get trained on and that they are held accountable to. And the goal is that any piece of that, and it's gonna be like it's like three categories, and each of those categories is gonna have like three or four notes on it. Like professionalism is like reliability and showing up on time, always having the proper uniform apparel on, stuff like that. And the same goes for character, like who we are, how we take feedback, the integrity we have in our work, the thoroughness we have in doing walkthroughs, stuff like that to prevent callbacks. The idea of these is to be specific, but also broad enough that we can categorize any shortcoming of our technician or our leaders under one of those, under one of those categories. I think we're gonna call that document our standard of excellence. I just like how it rings and it just it sounds like something that you're supposed to be held accountable to because you are, and I am as an owner as well. And honestly, it's gonna benefit me more than anybody because and our leadership more than anybody long term, because how you conduct yourself shouldn't be based on what side of the pillow you woke up on that day. Of course, there's grace, there's grace to have have a bad day and and move through it to the best of your ability. That's all good. We know that's gonna happen. But when it comes to long-term, how you conduct yourself in the business, how you're interacting with clients, and things like that that are that are small details, but really important to the greater culture of the business, we should have standards that we hold each other to and that we hire and fire based off of this off of that standard long term. It's like if you're not falling in line with this particular standard long term and you're being reminded too and you're being held accountable to it, then it's not a good long-term fit. That's just been one observation that I've had in this last this last week, because there've been some things that I've had to correct some of my new hires on that for me are obvious because I've been doing it for 10 years. And because I am the owner. No one's gonna care about the business more than me. And so these things are obvious to me and my brother, for that matter. And I owe it to the people that we're hiring to make sure that those standards are communicated, and they owe it to themselves and me to do the best that they can to uphold those standards, which are like reasonable, but aren't gonna be assumed by everybody all the time if they're not if they're not standardized. And I think, and yeah, I just think most importantly, I don't want to have to train everybody on this. Like our standards of ect our standard of excellence, it's something that I have drafted up right now that I'm gonna finalize in the next 24, 48 hours. But this is something that I should be able to run people through once, have them sign a signature block down below, stating that they agree to follow that to the best of their abilities. And then any feedback that they get over the course of their training period that relates to the standard of excellence should be the standard of excellence should be written up in a way that any shortcoming to that standard can be pointed to. And it's not just something that that employee can be like, oh, well, Colby is having a shit day, and so he's like holding me unfairly to XYZ expectation. I should be able to point to our standard of excellence and say, look, you're falling short here. I need this to improve. And similarly, they should be able to look back at that document that they signed on day one and go, that's right, I am falling short of this standard. Or when a distraction comes up and they have the ability to waste time on the job site, or or when a dispute comes up, they should know based off of that standard when to escalate and how to handle it. They should know what it means to go the extra mile while being efficient, like going the extra mile for our clients while remaining efficient. Just things like that that are like really, really important to the long-term growth and health of an organization are just things that I need to get out of my brain because I've learned how to go the extra mile for our clients while maintaining efficiency, but I've been doing this for 10 years. So it's not fair for me to assume that everybody is going to know that right off the bat. And if I want to build something long-term that is going to be healthy and grow and eventually won't need me, I need to imprint the standards of our companies and they need to be tattooed on the forehead of every person that we hire so that we're constantly doing our best to abide by those standards and so that we can hold each other accountable to those standards as well. Yeah, I was writing this down yesterday, and you know, I'm a Christian. I was reading some scripture after that, and um, Proverbs 22-29 came to mind, um, which is do you see the work of a skillful man? Let me pull it up real quick. Proverbs 22-29 is do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings, he will not stand before obscure men. And I think that that that sums this up really nicely is that we want to do our work as excellently as we can, and we want that to benefit our organization. We want it to benefit the company, the people in the company, and the people that the company serves. And my hope is that by doing that, we'll build a great organization and we'll all lift each other up and we will be outstanding in what we do, and in that way we will stand before kings and not obscure men. So, anyways, um, I just wanted to share my thoughts on yet another Sunday. The schedule's been really busy, so we're just uh we're getting in by the skin of our teeth the last couple of weeks. I appreciate you guys listening, and uh that's it. We'll talk to you next week.