Last week my friend Chad Henley messaged me via Facebook Messenger: “Candice has been working on over/under. Last three days we have been under on average! Gone from 52% to 42% last week!” Chad runs a residential cleaning service called Natural Care Cleaning out of Houston, Texas. It is a family-run business that has 2 generations counting on it for income. When he shared that with me I was pumped for them. They were putting MaidCentral’s Scheduling & Dispatch Software and tools to reduce direct payroll and increase profits. And not just by a percentage or 2, but by 10%. I have a similar story, and I have increased my profit margins by 6%, and I know how hard that was to do. So when I saw the message below I was excited for them. I may have even said, Dude.
Chad was excited because he had been using the tools in MaidCentral to reduce his payroll to revenue from 52% to 42% with a goal of 40%. One of the tools Chad was using to do this was the Dispatch Report. That report is a wealth of information about jobs as they are completed, but they were looking daily at the “over and under” as he describes it. If a job has a variance where you went over allowed hours, that is displayed as Red. If the job is under the allowed hours that is displayed as green. MaidCentral uses visualizations like this to help you clearly see your companies KPIs and data in a clear and compelling way. I don’t know of any other Maid Service Software that does this in such a clear and concise way. MaidCentral gives you the tools to sell and schedule jobs with extremely accurate production times, but if you are off, it gives you the tools to know right away and make corrections. That is exactly what the team at Natural Care Cleaning is doing.
Candice is Chad’s daughter and Natural Care’s operations manager. She took this data and sorted it. Chad told me “Candice would review it (the dispatch report) and review the daily logs to see who requested time and why. She created a message thread asking people to respond to let us know why they went over. In our morning meeting, we spent 2 to 3 minutes discussing, which is magic. We find things like the office forgot to add the time a client-approved or the team was training and we need to watch them. Just us keeping an eye on it and the staff knowing we are looking seems to help.”
Every job that was over she reached out to the team to find out why. She reiterated their policies regarding requesting additional time, she worked the process, and the results were a 10% decrease in revenue to payroll. This is huge. If they can keep this up at their size, they will be able to generate an additional $100K in gross profits, and most of that should go right to their bottom line if they manage other expenses well. I don’t know about you, but $100K is an exciting number.
The next step for Natural Care is to make informed decisions on who to raise prices on. They plan to use MaidCentral’s rate adjustment report to find any clients that are more than 10% off on their pricing. They can run a report, sort those clients, and with a click of a button send them a personalized email explaining why they need a major price adjustment or a reduction in their scope of work. Sometimes we are cleaning for clients and we might actually have more money left at the end of the month if we didn’t even clean those jobs. The rate adjustment report in MaidCentral is really good at identifying those clients.
Once the team at Natural Care uses the rate adjustment tool in MaidCentral to identify any clients who are still way over on time and under on price he will be able to create a price increase for the remainder of his clients based on a set percentage. MaidCentral automates that process as well with a Rate Increase report. Filter and sort the clients you want to give rate increases to based on when their last price increase was, how frequently they get service, what zone their home is in, and more. And simply input the percentage price increase you need to give to all of your clients, and with a click of a button, you can send out the rate increase letter and adjust their cleaning rate for future cleanings. This tool alone pays for MaidCentral for most users. A large company can save 140-160 hours of admin time on this one activity.
