My company - background

I have realized by some of the questions sent to me that I may need to give you some background on my company, or rather companies. I spent 12 years at Procter & Gamble so I am a strong believer in different brands with different management for different customers. At P&G many brands like Tide, Cheer, Gain, and Deft are all owned by the same company but each brand has a team assigned to it and they are rewarded for the results of their brands. I have sort of done the same thing here.

My Maid Service is my biggest company and the parent company. Back to my P&G example, this is my Tide. My Maid Service has been in business for 14 years but I bought it in November 2007 so we are going on 4.5 years now. My Maid Service is 100% owned by my brother and I and we are not a franchise. We have tripled the company in the last 4 years. http://www.mymaidservice.net/ is the Cincinnati website. 3 years ago my brother, Shawn, opened My Maid Service Dallas. His office is now almost as large as the Cincinnati office and he will probably pass us this year in terms of revenue from maid service clients (he has no commercial division yet). http://www.mymaidservice.com/ is the Dallas website. Both offices use solo cleaners, paid on commission, driving their personal vehicles. I have a General Manager in charge of My Maid Service Cincinnati named Rachel. Shawn runs the Dallas himself.

ACS Cleaning Services is my commercial cleaning company and it only operates in Cincinnati right now. I also bought ACS but less than 2 years ago and we have grown the business to be 4 times larger than when we bought it. David is the General Manager for ACS Cleaning Services. ACS is not as high margin as My Maid Service but it is the fastest growing part right now. Back to my P&G Example, ACS Cleaning is my Gain. http://www.acscleaningcinci.com/ It is going to be an interesting year for ACS. In Commercial Cleaning you kind of work your way up the food chain from smaller accounts to mid teir and then finally the big ones.  In the last 2 months we have been invited to big on two very large projects.  I am both excited and terrified to win these.

I will be launching a new company in June to do chemical free cleaning. Carole is the general manager for this company and she is doing all the work to launch it and she is running some test teams to work out the systems and to test the marketing and pricing. This will be a premium priced company. We expect it to be smaller than My Maid Service but with better margins. This company will use company cars, teams, and the employees will be paid hourly. In my P&G example, this is my Dreft. A smaller brand that will never be huge but can earn very nice margins.

I meet with all my general managers once a week to talk about their key measures, progress on projects, and where they may need help.

Finally I am a partner with 3 other cleaning service owners of the Institute for Service Excellence. This is a school for other cleaning companies and it is the first school certified by the Clean Trust to teach the new Home Cleaning Technician program. This school will be the topic of other articles in the future but I want to be up front that I own part of it since most of what I will be doing and writing on next week will be related to the school. The website for the school is http://www.isetoday.com/ There is no P&G example for this one.