First off, apologies for the delayed post. This was intended to be my journel which I had written but never posted for end of summer 2022.
It was a wild summer! This is the first year (starting in March 2022) where my partner and I quit our full time jobs to focus on growing this machine. Two goals that we were trying to hit this summer:
· Residential Weekly Turnover: $19,000 || $79,000 monthly
· Airbnb Weekly Turnover: $750 || $3,000 monthly
· Total Business from all portfolios: $82,000
· Cleaning Teams: still falls in the ranges between 37-45
· Office Team: 1 Operational Manager, 2 Full Time Operational Specialists, 1 Part Time Operational Specialists, 1 Full Time HR Specialist, 1 hybrid assistant (sales, reviews, hiring etc..)
The weekly money graph:
Overall Update:
We came oh so close in hitting our target number of $83K monthly revenue (run rate of 1M Annual) by the end of the summer. Though I did not hit my revenue target by end of summer, I did however get to enjoy some time off – spending a few days off at the cottage with friends, enjoying out of town weddings. Something that I didn’t necessarily have the luxury to do in the past 2 years. We continue to work on solidifying our corporate structure, with our operational manager overseeing most of the day to day operations. Myself and my partner “act” as the operational director for any escalations/tasks that are out of the managers role and responsibility. With much of the day-to-day handled by the team, I am now heavily focusing on building a strong office team backed with data. Analytics will be key to ensure we continue to offer fantastic support to both customers and cleaners. As I look forward to the final stretch of the year, I will keep a close eye and continue to push our unique subscriber count(# of people with recurring service) without compromising on quality of service. And finally, I’ve been holding off on a pricing increase for a while now and I look to implement this shortly.
Update from Branch #2:
With our recent expansion (June 2022) into our second market – things have been picking up. Certainly, a lot of opportunities for improvement as we think about our third market. We’ve been able to grow the second market to about $5000/month in revenue thus far. We have aggressive goals to close off the year strong, bringing momentum into the new year. Much of what created a lot of success in the beginning of our first location was having an extremely tight handle and relationships with cleaners – knowing this, we have created a part time role of “regional manager”. As much as its simple to say that we’d “just” use our existing infrastructure for our new location, it seems like it needs that extra attention to propel it forward. Running a fully remote location has proven its challenges and we look to continue to push through, double down on our investments, and leverage as much infrastructure as we can from location #1 to achieve profitability – we aren’t there yet but we are getting close.
One obvious thing that we’d forgotten - Analytics:
With our brand having two locations now, we identified quickly that we cannot simply look at our company metrics and goals overall, we had to breakdown per location. Seems quite logical and simple but creating systems and segmentations of data requires thought, planning and execution. We’ve been working hard to automate analytics gathering by having logical breakdowns of key metrics per city – metrics include revenue, cleaner performance/ratings, unique recurring customers, new customer acquisition, average order value, frequency of orders per customer etc… Understanding and having real time company/location metrics have been useful for our profitability and growth projections for location #2.
How do you find your VAs?
We have a few strategies around this. When we first started, we interviewed a few VA staffing firms. Most firms offer the same service/value so we decided to move forward at the time with a small firm. Firms as you can imagine are businesses as well so they do charge a premium in terms of hourly rate. In Canada, we were paying around $8-9/hr for the VA. This was a great starting point for us as minimum wage in Canada is significantly higher than – so at the time we were ok with it.
As with my other posts, I will try to answer and help anyone with questions. Certain questions I will use in future posts for a more indept write up.
It was a wild summer! This is the first year (starting in March 2022) where my partner and I quit our full time jobs to focus on growing this machine. Two goals that we were trying to hit this summer:
- Trying to cross the 1M mark and;
- Having somewhat of a balanced life outside of work.
· Residential Weekly Turnover: $19,000 || $79,000 monthly
· Airbnb Weekly Turnover: $750 || $3,000 monthly
· Total Business from all portfolios: $82,000
· Cleaning Teams: still falls in the ranges between 37-45
· Office Team: 1 Operational Manager, 2 Full Time Operational Specialists, 1 Part Time Operational Specialists, 1 Full Time HR Specialist, 1 hybrid assistant (sales, reviews, hiring etc..)
The weekly money graph:
Overall Update:
We came oh so close in hitting our target number of $83K monthly revenue (run rate of 1M Annual) by the end of the summer. Though I did not hit my revenue target by end of summer, I did however get to enjoy some time off – spending a few days off at the cottage with friends, enjoying out of town weddings. Something that I didn’t necessarily have the luxury to do in the past 2 years. We continue to work on solidifying our corporate structure, with our operational manager overseeing most of the day to day operations. Myself and my partner “act” as the operational director for any escalations/tasks that are out of the managers role and responsibility. With much of the day-to-day handled by the team, I am now heavily focusing on building a strong office team backed with data. Analytics will be key to ensure we continue to offer fantastic support to both customers and cleaners. As I look forward to the final stretch of the year, I will keep a close eye and continue to push our unique subscriber count(# of people with recurring service) without compromising on quality of service. And finally, I’ve been holding off on a pricing increase for a while now and I look to implement this shortly.
Update from Branch #2:
With our recent expansion (June 2022) into our second market – things have been picking up. Certainly, a lot of opportunities for improvement as we think about our third market. We’ve been able to grow the second market to about $5000/month in revenue thus far. We have aggressive goals to close off the year strong, bringing momentum into the new year. Much of what created a lot of success in the beginning of our first location was having an extremely tight handle and relationships with cleaners – knowing this, we have created a part time role of “regional manager”. As much as its simple to say that we’d “just” use our existing infrastructure for our new location, it seems like it needs that extra attention to propel it forward. Running a fully remote location has proven its challenges and we look to continue to push through, double down on our investments, and leverage as much infrastructure as we can from location #1 to achieve profitability – we aren’t there yet but we are getting close.
One obvious thing that we’d forgotten - Analytics:
With our brand having two locations now, we identified quickly that we cannot simply look at our company metrics and goals overall, we had to breakdown per location. Seems quite logical and simple but creating systems and segmentations of data requires thought, planning and execution. We’ve been working hard to automate analytics gathering by having logical breakdowns of key metrics per city – metrics include revenue, cleaner performance/ratings, unique recurring customers, new customer acquisition, average order value, frequency of orders per customer etc… Understanding and having real time company/location metrics have been useful for our profitability and growth projections for location #2.
How do you find your VAs?
We have a few strategies around this. When we first started, we interviewed a few VA staffing firms. Most firms offer the same service/value so we decided to move forward at the time with a small firm. Firms as you can imagine are businesses as well so they do charge a premium in terms of hourly rate. In Canada, we were paying around $8-9/hr for the VA. This was a great starting point for us as minimum wage in Canada is significantly higher than – so at the time we were ok with it.
As with my other posts, I will try to answer and help anyone with questions. Certain questions I will use in future posts for a more indept write up.