My
posts for the next couple of weeks are going to be a little different because I
am on the road from 1/16 to 1/27. Today I am in Charleston visiting Castle
Keepers. Tom and Janice Stewart have an
amazing company and I come here when ever I can to learn. Their company is larger and FAR more
organized than mine. Tom is an engineer
by training and everything here is very well documents and just runs in a different
class. Everyone has strong and weak
areas. Operations is my weakness and
Tom is an operational genius so I come to learn from the master. Castle Keepers has also gone nearly 100%
chemical free meaning no chemicals at all, just using water as much possible
yet still providing a superior level of cleaning. I am sorry if it sounds like and ad for
Castle Keepers but I admire this greatly about them which one of the reasons I
am here.
I mentioned in my last post that I am hoping to launch a new company in July to
offer chemical free cleaning in Cincinnati.
I have decided to do this as a separate company for a few reasons. 1. I
think operationally it will be too difficult to run two different business
models in the same company. 2. I come from Procter & Gamble and a larger
percentage of my customers work for P&G.
I do not think people that work for one of the world’s largest makers of
home cleaning products are ready for chemical free cleaning. 3. I
believe in niche marketing and letting this new company focus on the health and
environmentally focused customer will be successful versus My Maid Service
which focuses on the dual income family with pets that just wants help and free
time. 4.
One of my employee’s has a daughter with severe allergies and she is passionate
about chemical free cleaning. Enabling
her to pursue her passion by making her the general manager gives lets me keep
a super star employee and to grow in new ways.
This is not a passion I share. I
understand it, but I cannot sell it as well as she can. So my conclusion was the best approach was to
set up an entire new company that does chemical free cleaning. I know some people will think this is nuts,
but it was my solution and one I am excited to see.
I am also excited to start something new from scratch again. I have said before that I wished I could
start my company over with all the things I learned. I would be so much more successful so much
faster. This enables me to do just
that. It is going to be an exciting journey.
OK, I rambled some but at least you know why I am looking at setting up a new
company. So why am I in Charleston for a
company that launches in July? Well like
I said above I am trying to learn from the first go round. It is so much easier to get it right the
first time. Humans hate change. Once you have a system in place they will
fight you like mad when it you try to change it. So we are trying to make sure we do lots of research
and we have all the pay, work process, and pricing issues figured out well in
advance. At P&G we used to have a
saying on my team “Sell a little, learn a lot” which is what we are
trying. We are basically test marketing
systems and pricing in our market. For
ideas we are visiting different companies that have already done it. We do not have all the answers yet, but by July
we hope to.
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