How Can I Take a Vacation & Run My Business
A recently got an email from one of my readers:
Hi Rod,
I love the website. I'm sitting on the fence to fully exploring cleaning offices due to one main issue that keeps coming up. How does one take a vacation when clients are depending on their offices being cleaned?
I prefer not to hire people but rather to use this business to provide financially for our family but also teach my children the invaluable lessons of work. So the obvious answer of having my employee(s) clean when I am on vacation is not a viable solution for what I envision.
Do you have another way? I would love to know your thoughts. Thank you!
That is a very good question! There are a number of factors to consider when addressing it, but the first question I would ask you is, how big do you want to grow your business? Are you looking to start a part-time business to supplement your family income, or do you intend to go full-time and make commercial office cleaning your sole income 'stream'?
If you are looking at starting a part-time business, you may end up with a half-dozen small accounts. The majority of these will be one or two nights per week, with a good possibility that most of them will want the work done on the weekend. That was our situation when we started out, and it was relatively easy to find friends or family to cover for us while we were away.
As our business grew larger, and it became our sole source of income, we did the same thing but with more deliberation. We selected some individuals that wanted to earn some extra money, took the time to train them to do the job over a longer period of time, and paid them very well for that responsibility.
There came a point in which we could no longer do all of the work involved. Some of our business contacts wanted to clean for us on a regular basis, and we set them up as legal contract workers. That gave us a core group from which to fill cleaning slots when we wanted to take some vacation time.
Finally, we HAD to add employees; we simply has too much work and couldn't pass up the opportunity to grow the business. That created a core group that allowed us to vacation for entended periods of time.
Hope this helps you choose to try office cleaning. The possibilities are endless!
Rod
