The real reason your home service business feels chaotic

“Company culture” always sounded lame to me. Too corporate. Too HR. Too much like something a consultant says right before making everyone do a team-building exercise.

But once your home service business grows past just you, culture starts to matter fast.

Not in a fake, over-formalized way. More like: what do we value, how do we solve problems, how do we train people, and what kind of company are we actually building?

In this episode, I talk through culture from a normal home service business owner’s perspective. Things like accountability, coachability, being relentless problem solvers, and why “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” has become a big idea inside our company.

The point isn’t to make some polished corporate values page. The point is to have a baseline before you hand someone a squeegee and say, “Follow me.”

If you’re hiring, training, or trying to build a business that doesn’t feel chaotic every day, this one is worth thinking through.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to Clean for Profit, guys. I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about company culture, um, which used to sound hella lame to me, and frankly, still does. Um, and for good reason. HR sucks, dude, and they're the ones that are typically involved in culture um when it's bad. So the the reason and the reason that that is is because the leader of the company has no hand, no active hand in the in the company anymore. So culture should be like top-down. It comes from the owner of the company, you, the solo operator that's trying to grow. Um, and my point here is that like I'm I'm speaking from a place of extreme humility. Uh, I've I've hired less than half a dozen people so far, and I have learned very, very quickly that a lack of culture is the most surefire way to make bad hires and to um let stuff slide that you shouldn't let slide, basically, and let small problems compound over time. So the thing is that the idea of defining a company culture seems like a total waste of time. Um, and I mean, I think from the perspective of like the corporate world where you have long drawn-out paragraphs and like culture training, uh, I totally agree. Uh, but the reality is that the the culture at your company is just an extension of your values as the owner of the business. And so I just want to encourage you, because this is where I'm at right now. I'm going from an organization that has a culture that's completely in my head to one that is articulated consistently so that we can adhere to it um with integrity. So I think that the first thing I would say is to not over formalize it and just to start with the obvious and have it be really rough at first. You just need it out there, you need it communicated. Um you need to have some kind of a pulse on what your company culture is going to be, or else it's gonna be defined for you by your employees, which is not what you want because it'll just be a madhouse. And um the morale, the values, the consistency of your business and your service offering is all gonna be dictated by whoever it happens, whoever you happen to hire's values, basically. So you don't want that. Um the point is just to make sure that you have something before throwing a squeegee at somebody and saying, follow me. So quick, three quick things. I I think this honestly, this is probably gonna be like less than a 10-minute episode, but start simple. What are your values? So for me, uh it looks something, and these are literally my rough draft notes of our company values. I formalized them a little bit more on paper for our training. Um, but these are still like rough drafts. So what are what are the values of Sierra window cleaning? The first one is accountability, extreme accountability, extreme ownership. Shout out Jocko Willink. Um at Sierra Window Cleaning, we are coachable to the extreme. The we very rarely actually I've never hired an experienced window cleaner before. Um, we start from scratch every single time. Um, that's not like a hard and fast rule, it's just how the trend has been so far. And in a way, I mean I prefer it that way because there's zero to very few bad habits that are already baked into the psyche of somebody who's never been a window cleaner before. Um, so that helps, but you do need to be extremely coachable in order for that to work. And, you know, we we had to let go one of our employees, uh, one of our employees a couple of months ago because there was no coachability there. Um, quite the contrary, there's back talk, just a bunch of crap that I don't want to put up with. Like it's the reason that I got out of working as an employee, um, is because I don't want to spend a lot of time with people that don't share my values. And if I want to continue to sustain that, um the values, my values need to be the company values. Um, so, anyways, um, accountability, coachability, and relentless problem solving. So there's there's very, very rarely like we've been doing this for 10 years, and we've said no to one window before. I don't even remember why it was. And honestly, I don't I don't even know if I would say no to it now. Um, but it was uh at the end of the day, it was a risk, too much of a risk to clean the window. Um, and so the point with that is that there is always a way to clean a window or to solve a problem at a job site. Um, and so the mindset of being somebody who is not giving up and knows that there's always a different way to maybe approach it uh is is what we want to adhere by. And that calls me to a higher place as well. Um, because like yesterday, for example, dude, there were these I used to take these stupid risks that I don't anymore because I have a family and employees and stuff, but there was this house that I was at literally yesterday, and it has this steep roof on the front, totally not walkable, with six windows um that are only accessible, uh well, sort of only accessible by roof. And I hand washed them uh the last time we did it. So I walked the roof, which was way too steep, and I got four of the six windows done, and when I was doing the last window, I grabbed the bottom of an Eve to not fall, basically, and a wasp bit me, and I immediately started getting lightheaded. Uh so stupid, dude. Don't do that, it's dumb. Um and I immediately climbed down the ladder because I it was the the the roof was literally too steep to sit on. It's so dumb. I'm embarrassed even telling this story, to be honest with you. But my point is I I I walked down the ladder, sat down, got my second wind or whatever, and uh we it would ended up being fine at the end of the day. This year, um, I was able to do all of those windows by just tilting them out from the inside. Something that I didn't make a practice at the time when we when we did the last time, and that obviously was way safer. The last one uh had a frame on the inside, so I couldn't tilt the window out, so I removed the screen, set up a ladder at the roof, grabbed an extension pole, and did traditional extension pole cleaning for that, and and that was like the little bit of problem solving for that. But anyways, I say all of that to say that um I need to be better about training these little edge cases because there is always a way to solve that problem. And it's like we don't do a lot of trad pole work, so I haven't taken the time to really train my guys on being good at using the trad pole. Um, I mean, we use it maybe once every other week, something like that. But when we do, it really matters. So making sure that you're training your guys in every little edge case over, you know, a certain amount of time so that they can be relentless problem solvers and know all of the tools that they have at their disposal. And that's the other thing that this calls me to is not being cheap, like having a good extension pull, having a Mormon accelerator handle so you can do different angles to clean the insides of skylights without scuffing up walls with your ladder, etc. etc. Um, the second value that I really like, uh, thanks to a Reddit comment. I read this on a Reddit comment on the window cleaning subreddit once is the mantra slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So the idea is basically, and I've I've found this to be the case in our business, is like the thing that slows down new technicians the most is doing work twice. Like, no duh. But it's less obvious than it sounds when you're in the field. So, like if you're cleaning a window and you don't properly apply steel wool to it, like if you're too light, or if you don't feel with the nerves of your fingertips the spots that you may be missing and just going over when you should be scrubbing a little bit more in a specific area, that creates rework on the same window. Um, so it's very common, if it's not watched up front, for window cleaning technicians, at least in my business, because we really emphasize quality, to go over a window two or three times if it's not if this like slow is smooth, smooth is fast philosophy isn't immediately kind of baked into their process. Because, like, one of the things that I tell my technicians when they start is focus on quality and speed will come. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't watch speed. Like, pacing is really important to us as well, because we have we have dispatching. Like we have a certain amount of jobs that are scheduled for a specific day, and we want to make sure that we can complete those, and we do that based off of technicality and pain count. Um, but making sure that we're not creating rework for ourselves or taking more trips to the truck than are needed, or configuring our A-frame to extension ladders more times than we have to before moving on. Um, there are like 70 little things in this business that I train every technician so far on, and I'm getting better at it as we do it more, um, that feel super tedious. They feel like extremely small details because they are, but putting them all together often gets technicians from a place of doing like 15 windows, like 15 pieces of glass per hour to like 35 or 40 pieces of glass per hour. Um, so the little differences compound like crazy. So uh I think the last thing that we emphasize in our business is that there is a process for everything here, and it emblesses it blesses the entire company to adhere to them. This is not uh like this is not like a dictatorship like stance here, but just like I was talking about with the 70 small things or whatever, is like we have a certain way that we fold towels at CRL window cleaning. Why? Because grabbing a towel every single time feels the exact same way, no matter what. Um there's never like towels are never hiding. They're either they're one of two places. They're folded and in a technician's towel caddy, or they're in an overflow bucket uh where for clean towels where they can just be grabbed. That's the two places you will find dry towels. Um this so having a process for everything creates less surprises, way more predictability, way less chaos, and um not uh in a baseline to adapt from, basically. So it gives you all of the baseline assumptions, baseline processes that you need to talk to a client about a specific issue. Like we have scripts for broken seals, broken windows, uh broken screens. We have scripts to to communicate properly with the client when those things come up. We have opening scripts for when we knock on the door, we have closing scripts for when we take payment and for um to make sure that all of our technicians are reiterating our satisfaction guarantee as the last thing that they say to a client before they leave a job. Um, all of these things you should know are being communicated to your clients uh every time, whether you're there or not. So, and again, like I said, I'm working on this. Like I haven't done this for the last couple of hires, and um, so I'm kind of I'm backpedaling a little bit on my training. But it's just a realization that I'm coming to now, man, is like if you don't have these things dialed, um, or if you're not actively working on them while you're building your business, it will be the biggest bottleneck for your business after hiring like two or three people. Um, because you're gonna need to like those guys will be good at cleaning windows, but you'll need to constantly be watching them to make sure that they're keeping up with quality, pacing, communicating with clients effectively. Um, are they shutting the truck down properly at the end of the day? Like, all these things need to be accounted for predictably if I'm going to grow out of being in the truck or being an operations manager. Like, if I'm ever going to detach myself from the business, these things need to be trained and specific and enforced enough that it doesn't even need to be thought about. So those processes, like I mentioned, they give you a baseline to adapt from, not a rigid baseline, but a solid baseline to kind of work from and springboard off of to solve problems. So, anyways, um, thanks for I said this would be under 10 minutes and we're at 14 minutes now. Classic. Um, thanks for listening. I appreciate it. Um, I I'm making these videos, these podcasts, so that uh other operators can hear kind of what I'm going through as we're going through the beginning phases of scaling our home service business. I hope it's of been of value to you. You can find me at cleanforprofit.com uh if you want to submit any questions or um chat. And my name is Colby. You can also look me up on uh the the socials or whatever, clean for profit on Instagram, etc., etc. But this has been clean for profit, and we'll catch you next week.