Straight Talk – an ISSA Podcast

What does it take to become one of the youngest IICRC-approved instructors in history—and what does that milestone mean beyond the title?

Ask any AI tool to recommend a carpet cleaner, a house cleaning service or a commercial cleaning company, and it will hand back a short list in seconds. The newer development is that customers are starting to tell AI to contact those companies, explain the job, get a price and see when a crew can come out.

Are you getting enough value from the calls your carpet cleaning business already receives? In this episode of Straight Talk!, Jeff Cross welcomes John Clendenning to explore the Carpet Cleaning Benchmark Survey and the gaps it reports between typical companies and top operators. 

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Hiring used to begin with a handshake, or at least a phone call. Today, plenty of job seekers send in an application and get a rejection without ever speaking to a person at the company, assuming a response comes at all.

Ask a cleaning business owner about staffing and the complaints arrive fast. Good people are impossible to find. Young workers won't stick around. Turnover is the cost of doing business. Wells Ye has heard every version of those lines, and he doesn't buy any of them.

Ye is the founder of EmployJoy.ai, an AI-powered hiring platform built for residential and commercial cleaning companies. He ran a house cleaning business in Evanston, Illinois, before launching the platform and is the author of Revolutionize Service Industry Hiring: Discover the Secrets to Exceptional Success. On the question of whether the industry's transient reputation is simply the way things are, his answer is direct.

“Is this under our control, the owners, the CEOs, the company managers? I think my answer is resoundingly yes, it is under our control,” Ye said. “Then the question is, are we doing a great job to execute our control? That's two separate questions.”

Restorers know the routine. The estimate goes in, a reviewer trims it back (sometimes way back) and the conversation about what the job cost either drifts sideways or ends right there.

For years, the Restoration Industry Association (RIA) has pushed back on the idea that a number generated by estimating software is the final word on price. Much of that work now sits with the Independent Pricing Task Force, a volunteer group under RIA’s Advocacy and Government Affairs (AGA) Committee. 

A new CEO gets the title on day one. Earning the trust of the people doing the work takes longer, and Craig Honig went looking for it on foot.

Every career has a beginning—the first opportunity, someone who offers encouragement or an experience that reveals what’s possible. As emerging leaders find their footing, those early moments can help shape the contribution they make.

A great interview doesn’t always produce a great hire. A sales candidate can bring energy, confidence and an impressive track record, yet still struggle to land the cleaning contracts a company needs.

For building service contractors (BSCs), finding the right salesperson starts with understanding customers and how they buy. Jeff Carmon, manager of member services for Elite BSC, has spent years helping contractors build business development processes that hold up over the long haul. His view on sales hiring is direct: Define the job before going out to find someone to fill it.

Most people get through college without thinking twice about the cleaning industry. Austen O’Reilly was one of them.

“I didn’t even know that this world existed,” O’Reilly said. “I mean, there are school janitors. That’s what I would have thought of. But beyond that, I had no idea what any of this was.”