A few months into Think Maids, bookings were finally coming in faster than I could quite believe. Halloween fell on a Monday that year, and I did what an eager new owner does with a busy day: I filled it. Every open slot, every team, as many cleans as the calendar would hold.
I didn’t ask the teams whether they wanted to work that day. I assumed they would want the extra jobs. It did not occur to me that people might have children to take out, costumes to finish, or simply a different idea of how to spend the evening.
About half of them didn’t turn up.
The phone that kept ringing
What followed was the worst day the business had had. Customers who had arranged their day around us were waiting for cleaners who were not coming, and the only person who could sort it out was me. There were a lot of upset customers, and I refunded them.
I couldn’t really afford the refunds. I gave them anyway. A cleaning company is a promise to be somewhere, and we had broken it; the least we could do was not argue about the money.
What actually went wrong
It would be easy to tell this as a story about unreliable cleaners. It wasn’t one. The teams did something entirely reasonable: they had not agreed to work that day, so they didn’t. The failure was mine, and it was structural. I had made a decision that affected everyone without asking anyone, and there was nothing between my assumption and the customer.
The deeper problem was that the business ran through one person. I booked the jobs, I set the schedule, I took the calls. When something broke, it broke at me. That feels like control when things are going well. On Halloween it felt like what it was: a single point of failure, wearing my name.
A single point of failure, wearing my name.
A week in Japan
I was crushed by it. So I tried something that, at the time, felt slightly reckless. I found virtual assistants and trained them to run the two things that had failed: the phones and the schedule. I wrote down how we answered calls, how we booked and moved jobs, and what to do when a team cancelled. Then, after only a week or so of them doing it, I got on a plane to Japan for a week, to see my girlfriend and get some distance from the whole thing.
I expected to come back to a pile of fires. There weren’t any. The phones had been answered. The schedule had been kept. The reports were mostly good. The business had carried on for a week without me, which was more than it had managed for a single day with me.
What I took from it
Three things, which I still use.
Ask before you decide. Every schedule is made of people with lives. The best systems in a service business are the ones that find out first.
The owner is usually the fragile part. Owners aren’t careless. Everything simply routes through them by default, and anything with only one route will eventually fail. The first job of any system is to give the business a second path.
Hand over the thing that just broke. I didn’t start with a grand plan to delegate. I started with the two jobs that had failed most visibly, wrote them down, and gave them to someone else. It is still the best place to begin.
The virtual assistants stayed. Over the following year they became the operating team of Think Maids, and then, when other owners started asking how it all worked, the beginning of Inova Local. That is the next story.
It is strange to be grateful for the worst day in a company’s life. I am, though. Halloween 2016 is when the business started learning to run without me.