I purposely re-released “Excellence Vs. Perfection” last week. Many solo cleaners struggle with perfectionism. They are under a belief that ‘good enough’ is when the perfectionist is finally happy… and they are never happy. Over-cleaning is problematic for multiple reasons. It costs the solo cleaner time and money because they are at each house or office a lot longer. It also dissolves trust with the customer because they don’t want you in their house for 6 hours!

Do you know what customers want? It’s pretty simple. They want their house or office cleaned well. They want to be happy when they come home or enter their office. They want to get the cleaning at a great value. This is where excellence comes in. The solo cleaner needs to shift their mindset to ‘good enough’ is when the customer is happy. Trust me. It takes a lot less to make the customer happy than a perfectionist solo cleaner.
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There is a balance. The solo cleaner does need to have a way to measure their quality and relate that measurement to customer happiness. In C3, that measurement is a quality score of 8.0 out of 10.0. Excellence is anything over an 8.0. Perfection is 10.0. If the cleaner doesn’t have this measurement system, they may not clean well enough and the customer is not happy. That is also problematic. There is a balance between Excellence and Perfection. 

I’m not a solo cleaner anymore. We have a team of 10 solo cleaners at C3. I am having a blast finding and training great people to clean at the company. I have a problem though. I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to following the rules. It’s in my personality type. Therefore, I struggle with employees failing a quality inspection or not following company protocols or not being responsive or a customer late on payment. It strikes my ‘that’s not fair’ gene.  My gut in each of these cases is to act and penalize the employee, acting swiftly to follow the protocol.

That approach does not work! My coach, Josh Melton, has taught me that we need to be relationship-first with team members and customers. He doesn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe the customer is having issues with the parent company or the computer system crashed and they can’t make payment yet. Maybe the team member is dealing with something in their health or family and they didn’t have the time to follow the protocol. Maybe they couldn’t concentrate on hitting the required quality level. There are all kinds of maybe’s. Josh taught me to be patient with people. Assume the best and give them a chance to explain themself before you execute a verdict!

Recently, I had an interesting scenario play out. I found a high-quality prospect in my hiring pipeline and offered her a job. Then I waited. She seemed to have a lot going on in her life and I wasn’t impressed with her responsiveness. I was patient like Josh taught me, prodding her along from step to step of the onboarding process. Here was the problem though. I needed to fill that position for the benefit of the company by a certain date. I also need to know that every C3 hire is responsive. This candidate was not checking the boxes.

Ultimately, I decided to be bold and direct. I was kind. “Responsiveness is vital to your success and our success at C3. You are not as responsive as other new team members we’ve had success with in the past. It doesn’t seem to us that you truly want this job.” She replied and confirmed my suspicion. Her life was too busy and this second job was a bit too ambitious. She thanked me for being honest and turned down the job. I was able to move on to the next candidate and fill the position in a more prudent manner.

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website