- The Workbench
- Posts
- How to build two successful cleaning businesses.
How to build two successful cleaning businesses.
An interview with Lexi Vindisch, Owner of Pure Cleaning Victoria & Victoria Home Pros
Bryan Shankman
May 17, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Workbench, a resource-rich weekly newsletter and podcast for home service business owners.
The Workbench is managed by Bryan Shankman (@bryanshankman). After spending ten years in tech sales, Bryan is now a full-time entrepreneur focused on building The Workbench and SaaS company, ToolDesk, an all-in-one marketing automation tool for Jobber.
As you may have noticed, we skipped last week. Why? With how busy things have become since launching ToolDesk, the team has decided to move The Workbench from once per week to once every other week, or twice per month. Appreciate you hanging in with us!
For this week’s newsletter, I had a great conversation with Lexi Vindisch, the Owner of not one but two cleaning businesses: Pure Cleaning Victoria and Victoria Home Pros. Victoria Home Pros handles all things exterior home maintenance, while Pure Cleaning is a traditional residential cleaning business focused on the inside of their customer’s homes.
In my conversation with Victoria, we covered how she transitioned from the high-paying field of mechanical engineering to entrepreneurship, how the climate influenced the business she started, how she expanded from one to two businesses and much more.
The 8 Key Takeaways
Below are the 8 most essential insights from my conversation with Andy that you can apply to your home services business today.
1. From Engineering to Home Services
Lexi followed a common path - get a degree from a university and start working in a high-paying field. In Leix’s case, that was mechanical engineering. After a short time in the corporate world, even though the money was great, Lexi realized it wasn’t for her.
Lexi did some soul-searching and knew that the corporate world would not leave her fulfilled. She knew she would find greater satisfaction in working independently and seeing the direct results of her efforts, so home service entrepreneurship would be the right path for her.
I learned a lot about myself because I thought I would find a lot of security in the fact that I'd have this really valuable skill set and I would have no problem ever finding a high-paying salary. And I thought I'd find security in that. As I got into the industry and enjoyed and was good at my work, I was under someone else's thumb. I went in daily, and someone owned 40 hours of my time. It was never on my watch.
2. Wet Weather and Victoria Home Pros
Recognizing a gap in the market can lead to significant business opportunities. Lexi saw an unfulfilled need in exterior home maintenance due to consistent wet weather conditions and seized it.
Her focus on specialized service areas like moss removal and gutter cleaning addressed recurring problems and ensured a steady stream of repeat clients. Understanding and targeting location-specific issues can give your business a competitive edge.
Specifically where we live, West Coast Canada, it's a very wet and damp climate. So there's moss all over people's roofs and it's recurring and it comes back and it's like clockwork. So it needs to be taken off and gutters also, we've got a lot of clogging of gutters because of the heavy rains. So it was just a need that needed to be filled. We didn't see anyone doing it very well around us."
3. Scaling Victoria Home Pros
Scaling a business requires more than just initial success; it necessitates a structured approach to operations and marketing. Lexi's experience demonstrates that closing in on six figures was a starting point.
She emphasizes the importance of refining backend operations and building a competent team to support growth. Effective marketing strategies and streamlined operations are fundamental to taking your business to the next level.
So in 2016, we got to the end of the year, the end of the first fiscal year of that business, and ended up closing in at around six figures. Now, all the backend operations are still quite a mess. So we had some work to do on that. But then we started building up a team underneath it, getting the marketing honed in.
4. Expanding from External to Interior Services
Victoria Home Pros customers often asked Lexi if she knew a good internal cleaning company, and Lexi realized there was a gap in the market.
So Lexi partnered with Marcus Clayton, a long-time friend and previous guest on The Workbench. By combining their expertise in SEO and operations, they made it easier to launch and scale Pure Cleaning Victoria quickly.
Pure Cleaning Victoria focuses on residential cleaning services designed to maintain a clean and healthy home environment.
This strategic move filled a market need and provided a complete service package for clients, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Covering exterior and interior services ensures clients can rely on a single provider for comprehensive home care, increasing customer retention and recurring revenue.
We’ve been friends for a long time, and Marcus is an SEO marketing expert who had complementary skills to mine in operations. We saw a gap in the market with my existing clients frequently asking for reliable interior cleaning services. We wanted to leverage our combined skill sets to quickly grow a new business. The aim was to provide a seamless service experience by handling both the exterior and interior needs of our customers.
5. Introducing A Digital Offering
A strong online presence is crucial for attracting and retaining clients in today’s digital-first world. Lexi and Marcus’ pre-built cleaning website template simplifies setting up and running a professional and effective website.
Cleaning Website Templates removes the technical barriers for home service business owners, allowing them to focus on service delivery and growth.
The included SEO optimization ensures the website is easily discoverable, paving the way for higher traffic and increased client acquisition. This initiative provides a valuable tool for cleaning business owners and contributes to raising the industry standard for online marketing.
Marcus and I have been working closely to create a pre-built website template specifically designed for cleaning businesses. This template includes SEO optimization, a seamless design, and easy customization options. It incorporates years of our combined experience in SEO, marketing, and operations to provide a robust digital platform that can help other cleaning businesses kickstart their online presence quickly and effectively.
6. Lexi’s Tech Stack
Choosing the right tools for your business operations can significantly improve efficiency and scalability.
Lexi’s use of Jobber for Victoria Home Pros and Booking Koala for Pure Cleaning Victoria illustrates the importance of selecting specialized tools that meet the specific needs of different service areas.
Jobber is my go-to for the exterior maintenance business. It's worked perfectly. It has the capability to manage and organize all of my contractors, all of the invoicing, all of the scheduling, and its interface. Its UX is really nice. For residential cleaning, I use Booking Koala because it's more affordable and suits my needs better.
7. Common Mistakes to Avoid
Due diligence in hiring and financial management can't be stressed enough. As Lexi points out, trusting the wrong people and neglecting financial best practices can harm your business. Ensuring you vet employees thoroughly is crucial, as poor hiring decisions can disrupt operations and damage client relationships.
Proper financial management is equally vital. Lexi emphasizes the importance of financial housekeeping, stating that neglecting it can lead to significant issues. She advises setting up a reliable bookkeeping system from the start and prioritizing financial health.
A big mistake that I made that other peole can avoid is trusting the wrong people out of convenience… That has bitten us in the butt several times. So, trusting the wrong people and trying to offload things onto your plate without doing your due diligence to really vet them properly… Another big one is financial housekeeping.
8. What’s next for Lexi
Continual growth and adaptation to market trends are vital to sustaining a competitive edge. Lexi will continue to focus on scaling her businesses and exploring online platforms for further growth, showcasing a strategic approach to staying ahead in the home services industry.
Definitely going to continue to scale both of them. I'm working really closely with Marcus to build the backend systems for a lot of these. And we're sort of navigating into more of an online full package space for the cleaning niche specifically."
Wow! You made it to the end; thanks for sticking with us.
The full interview with Andy is available on YouTube below, Spotify here, and Apple Podcasts here.