About
Greetings. My name is Scott Rendall and I’ve been in the cleaning and restoration business since 1994.
I know firsthand how difficult it is to grow a cleaning and restoration business. At times it’s definitely challenging, frustrating, yet FUN and most importantly can be extremely PROFITABLE!
Like most cleaners and restorers, I entered the field because I could do a better job than my competitors. I became an expert technician and customer service junkie. The first years were very difficult and we’ve had many growing pains along the way. Like most, I entered the field undercapitalized but full of enthusiasm and a willingness to work as hard as I could to grow the business. It was safe to say at the time I had more brawn than brains! Fortunately that all changed in 1998 when the company finally became profitable.
Customers loved me and called me back time after time. Within a couple of years I had a sizable database of happy customers who completely trusted me within their home. Oftentimes they’d leave a key or let me in and leave. That’s the level of trust I built with my customers and probably one you have with your clients too.
Soon I discovered that there is so much more to running a successful business than just being a great technician. Over the years some customers left me because, as you’ll hear me repeat often, “Events Don’t Wait for Carpet Cleaners” or that they didn’t want to wait a week or two because I was too busy for them. For a few others, as I increased prices (I had to!) the amount I charged exceeded what they were willing to pay. It all worked out in the end and I got a great education along the way. In the early years the biggest problem for me was trying to keep up with all of the work.
So I added another truck and technician.
And within a month I fired him and tried another tech.
Within another month I fired the new tech. and threw up my hands in complete frustration.
Sound familiar yet?
I finally wrote systems, with the help of my great partners at BRC Systems Solutions, Dan Burk and Keith Collins, that made my business and my personal life so much easier and more fulfilling. I created the systems so that I can hire just about anybody (we’ll get into how to hire at another time), plug him or her into my system, and they could be just like me when I was the cleaner / restorer.
Things started clicking and I passed the wand to my technicians. This allowed me to focus on growing my business instead of having to do it all. I’ll be completely honest with you, as I always am. This may make you upset but it’s the absolute truth. I had a hard time believing it myself when I first heard it. Are you ready?
If your company is not growing, it’s dying
A business cannot simply hum along without growing. There is no “steady as she goes” in business. At some point the wheels will come off and your cash flow will come to a screeching halt if you become complacent and do not do the right things in your company. A successful business MUST always do these things in order to survive and thrive.
The company must create a sales system that looks like this:
- Attract a steady stream of qualified prospects (generate qualified leads)
- Turn a percentage of these prospects into customers (convert)
- Turn these customers into fanatical repeats and referral sources for your company (create fans)
- Make a fair profit (net profit)
- Repeat 1-4 five to seven days a week (replication)
That’s it! It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Well it really can be. But then another problem pops up: What to do with all of the work?!?
We’ll get into another integral part of the business – Personnel and Operational Systems – at another time. But it’s really not as hard as it seems IF you have the right systems in place.
What I learned over the years is that it does take a lot of work at the beginning, but once the sales process becomes systematized it makes your business life much easier and your personal life will reflect this. As long as you love what you do you’ll become richer, happier, and maybe even easier to get along with. After you get a couple of team members on board you’ll have more time off than you could ever have imagined and most importantly – you’ll finally have much less stress.
Yes, through the use of good systems and training, employees can and do actually give you less stress than if it was just you! It’s really just a frame of mind so think of it this way. In fact, contrary to popular belief, employees (I call them “Team Members”) can help you grow quickly, profitably, and relatively pain-free.
We’re in the people-pleasing business. Individually we can only make a handful of people happy each day. But with cheerful, trained, and genuinely happy employees, the satisfaction factor multiplies. Now instead of only making 3-5 people happy per day, with one tech you can double that to 6 to 10. With a 3rd tech 12-20 happy people per day, etc. The more people you make happy, the more successful you will become.
So don’t think of employees as a necessary evil; think of them as extremely valuable assets in your business whose sole focus is to extrapolate happiness.
But this freedom can only happen When and If you create and implement this sales system I am referring to.
Let’s back up just a little bit
Remember above in my Sales System I mentioned one of the most critical steps is to generate leads. It was actually step #1 and one of the most important parts of a successful sales system. But it’s not the most important. There’s something even more important than generating leads that’s not on the list…
…and that is Differentiation
The reason it’s not on the list is because you would have already done this most important step. That’s right before you sell you really need to give prospects a good GREAT reason to choose you in the first place.
This is where differentiation comes into the equation. To not provide a great reason for the prospect to choose you over the competition means that you become a commodity. A commodity is where choice A = choice B = choice C. A commodity is shampoo, a bag of rice, or even a cow. There might be minor differences in commodities but they’re still too similar to command major price differences.
A warning: If your differentiation is only based on price…
This is where most cleaners and restorers start in their career. They have no idea what it costs them to do business. Most also don’t realize that there are many reasons prospects call us that have less to do with price than we think. In my experience the #1 reason we’re called is because of trust, #2 is that we do a great job, and #3 is value, which is different than price. Let me explain.
Price is the amount paid
Value is the amount of satisfaction the customer receives below or above the price
If I go to the convenience store and buy a candy bar, the price is $.99. If I go to the grocery store the price is $.79. I received the same candy bar but at a discount in the grocery store compared to the convenience store.
What’s not mentioned in my example is the convenience factor. Convenience = higher value = higher price. Convenience is a positive value. If I had to stop to get gas anyway, the value I received from buying a candy bar from the convenience store is well worth the extra $.20 I paid for the convenience of buying that candy bar here rather than the grocery store. However if I didn’t need gas but did need groceries, the convenience factor now actually works against the convenience store!
What I’m saying is it’s not about price; it’s about convenience. Most people aren’t going to drive out of their way to save a few pennies anyway.
But what if the price differential for a commodity is $50? or $100..or even $500? Would the typical consumer take extra steps and sidestep convenience in favor of saving money? Yes for the most part the majority do – unless and until this thing called Value trumps the price.
So what’s this have to do with the cleaning and restoration industry? Notice in the scenarios above I’m talking about commodities and not a specialized service. You MUST NEVER forget this. Your company cannot be viewed as a commodity or you will forever be embroiled in price wars.
The Lesson Here is…
Price is what you charge while Value is what the customer receives for the price they paid. Therefore the lesson here is that we ALWAYS need to make sure we deliver more value than the customer believes they paid for. It’s hard to put a price on service, but we must. Sure, we can figure out the raw costs of performing the actual service, but when it comes to our own labor it’s not so easy. If we just charged a tiny profit above our costs, unless we had a dozen trucks on the road our profit would be minuscule and we’d work ourselves to the bone for peanuts. I don’t know about you but that’s not my idea of a successful business.
Got it. So what does this all mean?
Everything I’ve written above is the reason we’re in business. There’s no two ways about it – you’re either doing something very similar to my sales system example above or you’ve gotten lucky so far. Believe me if you’re relying on luck it WILL catch up with you sooner or later. (I already got the T-shirt for luck and it wore out!)
I’ve been to dozens of industry conventions, seminars, and meetings and the same questions continue to pop up about Value, Sales, Pricing, Differentiation, Branding, etc. All of these things are critical to growing a successful cleaning and restoration business but very few people implement even a little bit of the things necessary to become a great company.
You’re probably wondering why the majority don’t do the things that are necessary. There’s really only 4 reasons:
- Lack of knowledge – you don’t know what you don’t know
- Lack of time – you’re too busy cleaning and restoring to grow a business!
- Complacency – we all get a little lazy from time-to-time. it’s our right as a business owners to call the shots. But unfortunately our businesses suffer when we become complacent. Sometimes we’re our own worse enemy.
- Fear – There’s a human tendency to fear the unknown. Some are afraid of failure while, believe it or not, some are afraid of success. Both of these two fears subvert our efforts as business owners to thrive. With research and testing, the fear of failure becomes nil. With success the fear of more success eventually subsides.
Notice I didn’t say “can’t afford it”. The truth is you can’t afford not to market. You absolutely MUST allocate a portion of your budget (generally 5 – 25% depending on many factors) to marketing. Smart marketing is more of an investment than an expense. Yes it shows up on the profit/loss sheet as an expense but no matter if you’re building your database or expending some dollars to “lock in” your customers, wouldn’t you agree that successful marketing is actually an investment in your company?
This is where BananaProfits.com comes in to help you!
If you’ve read this far you probably felt like I was standing in your shoes. That’s because chances are I’ve been where you’re at now and know the pains, trials and tribulations of growing a business. Since I’ve probably already been where you’re at I know how to overcome these challenges.
Therefore I’ve set up a business to assist fellow cleaners and restorers accomplish their dreams and goals of running a wildly successful business. For reasons I’ll share with you in upcoming posts my company is named Banana Profits, LLC. Believe me the name itself is a marketing lesson that you won’t want to miss, and once you hear it you will never forget it.
So let’s cut to the chase. Here’s where I can help you:
- I want to help you avoid the marketing mistakes I made early in my career
- I want to help you understand how successful marketing works so that you can stop spending money on campaigns that don’t work while assisting you with replicating those that do.
- I’ll help make your life just a little bit easier by automating your marketing process
- I want you to have a successful career, not just a job. Your success means everything to me and I’ll do whatever possible to assist you.
Here’s how Banana Profits, LLC can help you
- BRC Systems Solutions – Presently, most of the fundamental systems that I use in my own company were developed by my partners and I at BRC Systems Solutions. You can choose to purchase any one, or all of our systems from Cleaning/Restoration Business Systems, to Forms, to fundamental Marketing Systems. The BRC Systems Solutions Manuals/CDs are excellent for the beginning business owner as How-To guides, or for those who are trying to expand from 1 or 2 trucks up to 4 or 5, as well as veterans who want another perspective from 3 extremely successful business owners.
- Cleaning Mentor Program - This is my own personalized one-on-one mentoring program that I developed to assist cleaning, restoration, and other service business owners become wildly successful. This is an intense program that is designed for real-world results. There are no theories with the Cleaning Mentor Program. It is all real-world and proven to work. Make no mistake; YOU are the determining factor of your success. My job is to guide you and assist you with your success. You will learn things about finances, systemitization, sales, marketing, building a team and growing your company that you’ve probably never considered or heard of before. My mentees receive my “top shelf” materials, not just the basics.
Here are some of the things we accomplish together with the Cleaning Mentor Program:
- We will build your own customized real-world budget so that you’ll never wonder how much you’re spending, how much you should spend in any category, how much you should be charging down to the fraction of a penny, whether or not you’re on track with your financial goals, and where to make adjustments to get on track
- We will analyze and tune up your brand completely so that your customers will never be confused about your company promise, value and why you’re worth what you charge
- We will analyze and overhaul your sales systems so that you can maximize revenues and profit
- We will build a customer retention system that feeds you more referrals and more work, forever
- We will work on ways to maximize your profit, reduce inefficiencies, and create more freedom for you
- We will create high, yet attainable goals for your wants and desires
- We will create high impact and effective marketing pieces and collateral material
- We will create a truly fun place to work for you and your team members
- We will tune up your website to get more work, more referrals, and make more profit
- You will get access to my “top shelf” systems including goals, marketing, advertising, sales, tracking, sales, etc.
- You will receive unlimited support by phone, fax, or email
- …and Much MUCH more
I know the Cleaning Mentor program is not for everybody, and that’s ok. Due to the amount of personal time I invest with my students, it is not inexpensive. And unlike other marketers that may tell you that they’re only offering a certain amount of openings for marketing purposes or make broad unspecific promises, I am always upfront and honest and will tell you whether or not the program is right for you. My time is extremely valuable to me and I will only work with those with a willingness and a hunger to VASTLY improve. Because I’m honest and upfront at all times, let me tell you some things you may find negative about the program:
- While I am easy to get along with, I demand accountability. My students pay me to help them and if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, I’ll be the first to tell them. A student that does not do well with the program is a negative reflection of me and I’m not the type to let people tarnish my reputation.
- I may not accept your application for a variety of reasons including clash of personalities, lack of money, unwillingness to adapt, and unrealistic expectations of overnight success.
- The program is not inexpensive. Expect to pay $10,000 per year and I require a 1 year commitment from you
- You will have to work your ass off, especially in the beginning. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially in these tight economic times
- You must keep an open mind. By design a lot of the things I teach and use in my own business go against the grain of “traditional” business practices; however, everything I teach works for everybody who uses my strategies and tactics
- I only accept up to 10 students a year. This is not marketing hype, this is a reality of time management. I have tried working with more than 10 per year and it just requires too much of my time to be completely effective with all students
That about sums up the Cleaning Mentor Program. If you want to grow your business beyond your expectations, are struggling to do it all by yourself, and want to work with someone who has probably already been in your shoes, give me a call and let’s chat. You have my personal promise that I will be upfront and honest with you, aIways. I even answer my own phones. My phone number is 517-618-3038, or you may contact me via email at scott@cleaningmentor.com if you prefer.
Future Banana Profits Services to Help You Grow
I am presently working on several marketing and sales programs that will launch in 2009 so keep your eyes PEELed. (get it? Banana…peel…nevermind) I don’t want to tip my hand to my competitors but I will keep you in the loop if sign up for the Banana Bunch Newsletter. Speaking of the free Banana Bunch Newsletter, I believe in giving tons of value and letting you, my potential customer, decide whether or not you want to do business with me.
What I’m getting at is I promise not to load your email box up with junk like a parade of offers and thinly disguised sales letters. That’s not the way I do business and I’m not about to start now.
I also promise NEVER to share your private information with anyone. Like you, I HATE junk mail, especially from those I’ve never requested information from. Those who share email lists should be tried and prosecuted, in my opinion. Not only is it against the law (Can-Spam Act of 2003) to share lists, it’s also disrespectful of your privacy. So don’t worry – we’re on the same page.
Click here to sign up for the Banana Bunch Newsletter
Thanks for reading. I sure do appreciate you telling your colleagues about BananaProfits.com.
Yours in profits,
Scott F. Rendall
Founder, Banana Profits, LLC.
