Ivan
If I were going to do it again 7 years later. This is how I would go about it.
Remember I started with a used Bane and a used truck also.
Truck
Get a Hydramaster4.8 or
Butler PTO. Day 1 no questions
The $900 monthly payment is nothing to the production you can get.
Why? Employees can deal with this.
Advantages - Chevy with a
Hydramaster 4.8 can haul Restoration equipment,
Butler cannot.
Repairs -
Hydramaster can go to local service center.
Butler cannot.
I do think that
Butler seems to have a somewhat better service record if you listen to guys talk.
Brian runs 30 of them must be something to it.
You just give up the restoration space and with your mix that might mean something.
Had a guy start a small water job yesterday
hydramaster, 1 dehu, containment, power box and 12 air movers all in the back.
Can't do that with a
Butler. Quick $2,500 - $3,000. Easy.
Butler would need a trailer or another vehicle.
Box Truck
Employees in a 16 foot truck cleaning residential just seems like daily problems.
Guys bang up small vans all the time. 16 feet man I would stay away.
Sure some do it but no one that runs massive fleets does it. Learn from the big national guys.
Besides as you grow residential cleaning several truck mounts can come in handy for water loss extracting lots of properties at once. $$$$
Night Employees
It will be a greater challenge to get employees for your night crew than the day.
Work your employees Monday to Thursday nights. You will get better people.
I have never lost a job over striving to clean Monday to Thursday.
We do select Saturday work. 3-6 Saturdays a year but it is really big dollars for all and we give guys comp time off later.
Pay an after hour’s bonus for really late work. Helps moral.
Marketing
Let's talk on this live.
We can trade some coaching. Cleaning advice for water loss advice. I could use a little more water work.
You helped me at my first
SFS years ago. Happy to help.
Restaurants / Night work
Stay away unless they can be done from 5-9 p.m.
They have no loyalty.
Too many guys work for nothing. You will always be under cut.
You will spend lots of time selling trying to keep your routes full.
200 foot run is not enough for commercial. Need 350 -450 sometimes.
We stretch and then pull off hose as we can to increase vacuum.
Pricing
Go for an hourly earnings on the truck not sf.
Who cares how much you clean it’s about how much you make each night!
You’re a better business guy than me this should make a lot of sense.
With 2 guys I want a route to do $800 - $1200 per night.
If you do restaurants at $190 - $275 a pop you will need 60 plus routes per month to run full.
Selling new accounts will be a constant push to have a full schedule.
Some guys will jump in and talk about big accounts worth $10's of thousands. I have a few but they are rare.
Most commercial accounts want cheap pricing.
I would go after big commercial A level office's you can Cimex not new restaurants.
We are selling away from all of our restaurants and the guys are liking it.
Scheduling
Lots of people make careers out of working second shift. People hate third shift.
You can easily ask a guy to go noon to 9pm and be back at 8 pm the next day.
Later than that it is impossible to get good people long term to do crazy hours. Sure owners will do it employees will not.
We are sliding people’s schedules to meet 8am to 9pm commercial now.
Later than 9 pm we stay away from unless it is big Cimex for awesome hourly rates.
We send 4 guys so it can still be done by 11pm and everyone is back at 10:30 am to start next day.
We used commercial big time when we started, today it accounts for about 20% of our business. It was 50-60% 3 years ago.
We have grown tired of the push and turn over. There are other services to sell that have higher margins. Let’s talk about those live.
Call Billy Lewis he helped me on commercial. He has done it for years and still does it.
Let's talk after the holiday. Happy New Year.
