Couch Coaches versus Reality

I am going to rant but to make it a clear rant I am going to outline the characters first.


1. Couch Coaches

(disclaimer: this does not refer to everyone doing this, just a hell of a lot of them)

These are the self anointed guru's of the industry. The folks who always take the high road and insist that you must buy every new gadget, gizmo, product, book, video, dvd and webinar that comes out in order to be a state of the art toilet cleaner.

These folks probably haven't held a broom in their hands for business purposes, [sweeping the garage at home doesn't count] in decades.

You will find these folks, in the trade magazines, websites, Ebay etc... pontificating on how you must sacrifice business for the purity of the industry. How you shouldn't worry about what your competition is doing, that you should ignore all the illegal operations that are stealing your customers away, that it is unimportant that other service firms don't use the ultra new turbo deluxe steaming triple headed scrubbing feather duster but you must.

It's very easy for them to say this, they have established, large companies and they are not actively out in the field. Reality to them is a spreadsheet of numbers and a list of who they can fire when the numbers don't go their way. These are the folks in the owners box, calling down the occasional play that interests them and then firing the manager when it doesn't play out correctly.

2. Reality

We, the people in the field, the hands on owners, are up against a stacked deck with no wild cards and the dealer is sliding cards out from the bottom of the pile to the chosen few.

We have to battle franchises that sell accounts to meet contract obligations so they underbid, cut so many corners they make the buildings round and make it impossible for us to compete legitimately and screwing the heck out of their franchisees in the process. But hey, that's their business plan and it's OK with the ranking powers to be in the industry.

We also have to battle the big mega service corporations with offices in every city manned by one salesperson that perpetuates the fallacy that they have staff everywhere but in truth only find poor mom n pop companies to take the work, less 38% for them. Yeah, those mom n pop's may as well take jobs packing groceries for all the profit they are going to see and the sad part is, it will be awhile before they figure it out.

We also have the illegal operations, these are the folks with the old hoover in the trunk of their car, a couple bottles of some crappy cleaner from the dollar store and a bunch of rolls of 2 for $1.00 paper towels. They are the pinnacles of the industry, still collecting unemployment from their real jobs and now operating under the radar, collecting checks without reporting the extra income, not paying taxes and certainly not carrying any form of insurance.

Back to the Coaches,

These guru's are constantly telling us to pay no attention to these situations, we must take the high road of starvation and business loss while the crooks take our customers. It seems every time I read a post, blog, article or interview these folks are telling us to spend, spend, spend on products to show our professionalism but never taking a stance on the true problem/challenge

The Challenge

We are in down turned economy, price is king, don't let them lie to you. Quality is job 2, Money is job 1. Sad but true and instead of helping contractors find ways to be more efficient, stream lining operations, fighting the lowball bidders and illegals, these folks tell you that you aren't selling enough, that their book/video will help you. Or magically customers will flock to you if you spend more money on the latest green gimmick that they are espousing.

It makes me sick. I'll take their advice when their video's show them stripping floors on Saturday night for 5 hours or pressure washing the factory walls on a Sunday morning or cleaning the restroom stalls in the plant after 3 shifts have used them, when I see them out in the field experiencing the reality of today's cleaning world then I might listen, but not until then.

Of course most of them don't own cleaning companies anymore, they just sell stuff you didn't know you needed until they told you or they own the big mega service companies and are now trying to cash in on the other industry outlets.

I just had to rant, had a couple of purists hit me with some BS today about how we shouldn't concern ourselves with costs, just buy the goodies and customers will fall all over themselves to get to you because you have their goodies. Aarggh.

In the mean time Home Depot is out of bucket/wringer combo's cause Ford just laid off another 1000 and 500 of them are printing business cards at home and trying to figure out how the wringer works. They will be calling on your customers next week offering to do the job for $10 an hour, but that's okay you'll be out shopping for some more microfiber flat mop systems and green power scrubbing machines, right?

enough.

for now.