The Theatre of a Specialty Cleaning Company - Randall Linton | May 2007

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

How are your company’s front and back stages performing?

By Randall Linton is co-owner of Interior Care, one of CanadaÕs largest commercial specialty cleaning companies, and The Excelerator Mentoring Group, a company that helps service business owners reap optimum results from their efforts. He is also creator of Òthe Carpet Care Solution™,Ó a system for marketing and managing specialty cleaning services to corporate facilities.

He has an economics degree from York University. Randall lives with his wife and their three children in Toronto.

He can be reached at randall@ exceleratormentoring. com or visit www.excelerator mentoringgroup.com.

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RANDALL LINTON

E

very day, the curtain rises at your company.

You have likely never thought of your company as a theatrical production, complete with “front and back stage” activities.

Dan Sullivan, the founder of The Strategic Coach™ in Toronto, says that every company, regardless of industry or profession, has a “front stage” and “back stage.”

If you’ve ever been to a theatrical play, you will have experienced both front and back stage activities.

For example, the front stage is everything you see and experience when you go to the play.

The tickets you buy, the sights and sounds the moment you walk into the lobby, the ushers that take you to your seats, the program they hand to you as you walk in, and the play itself, are examples of the front stage experience.

The back stage processes support the front stage.

These are activities that you don’t often see, but should never be taken for granted, such as the writers and show director, set creators, stagehands, makeup people, costume designers, orchestra, sound and lighting crew, and so on.

Think for a moment about your own company.

Consider how your specialty cleaning business resembles a theatrical production with front and back stage activities.

The front stage The front stage consists of all the activities your company does to build the business and make an impression on your prospects and clients.

Everything they see is a front stage experience. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the following: (Continued on page 26)

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Don’t emphasize one more than the other A common mistake in business is when management puts more emphasis on one stage over the other.

One famous example took place a number of years ago when Coca-Cola decided to change its recipe (the back stage) to create “New Coke.”

It was a public relations disaster.

They created a sweeter form of the famous soft drink, which was meant to capture a younger generation of cola lovers who preferred Pepsi (remember the Pepsi-Coke taste tests?).

Millions of dollars were spent on the front stage in order to market and sell the new soft drink.

Coke never anticipated the reaction of their loyal consumers, including me, to this change in the soft drink.

Not long after introducing New Coke, the world’s largest soft drink bottler went back to its original recipe.

Indeed, a lot of damage was done to Coke’s front stage (company image) by messing with the back stage (the popular recipe).

Even in sports, we see examples of how changing one stage can seriously affect the other.

Take, for example, professional-team owners who attempt to buy league championships. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn’t.

The front stage looks awesome with talented big names in the lineup. But then the back stage doesn’t deliver for reasons such as bad management, poor coaching and training, or intangibles such as inflated egos and poor team chemistry.

— R.L.

The back stage

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• Your website • The person who answers the telephone in your office • Your salesperson/estimator • Your sales presentation • Your telemarketer • Your clean vehicles displaying your company’s name and telephone number • Your stationery, brochures, newsletters, marketing pieces and business cards • The confirmation call from the person in your office who schedules the work • Your inspection sheet that is left at your client’s office • Your invoice that is mailed to their office • The state of the carpet when they come in the morning after it is done • The appearance of your technicians (if the client is there when the job is done).

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The back stage consists of everything that is done behind the scenes that supports the front stage activities.

The following are examples of the carpet cleaning back stage: • Your technicians • Your subcontractors • Your office support staff, including your word processor, bookkeeper and scheduler • Those who supply your equipment, cleaning products and chemicals • Training programs • The graphic artist who designs your company’s stationery, brochures, website, etc.

• The company that does your printing.

Having a well-organized and effective back stage is vital to your organization’s

ability to deliver a unique experience to your clients.

Everything necessary to support the front stage experience belongs in the back stage.

You may think of others, but those items listed are the main components of the front and back stages of a specialty cleaning business.

Changing our front and back stages Over the years, we have experimented with changes to our company’s front stage and back stage processes.

For example, back in the mid-1990s, there was a real emphasis in the corporate market toward going “green.” The “environment” was in everyone’s vocabulary and we scrambled to make some adjustments to our back stage in order to meet this growing trend.

Once we had environmentally responsible products and processes in place, we then decided to make changes to our front stage to support our back stage activity.

New identification logos, marketing pieces and newsletters trumpeted our new direction and we were applauded for it.

Another example was a deliberate change we made to our back stage in the late 1980s that created a more confident and profitable front stage.

Our back stage consisted of hourly and commission technicians who only had short-term ambitions of cleaning carpet for a living.

Our back stage was a revolving door of technicians which created much stress for us.

We knew we had to do something so that our front stage (our sales team) would feel confident about selling our services.

To address this, we decided to sub-contract our services to Service Associates (see my article in CM/Cleanfax® magazine, August 2006).

We quickly discovered there were many advantages to hiring business people who owned and operated their own companies and invested in vehicles and equipment, bought their own supplies, and paid for (Concluded on page 28)

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their own training.

This is a significant advantage to us because we spend less time seeking and training technicians to do the work for us (back stage) and focus more time on our front stage, the marketing and selling of our services.

Testing your front and back stages

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We don’t assume that things are going smoothly in our front and back stages.

Every day when we unlock the door to our office it is “curtain time.” The long-running performance is, once again, about to begin.

How do we ensure our “theater” is running as it should? By sending out annual questionnaires to our clients, we can gauge

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how our team is performing.

We ask how the carpet looks when they arrive the day after our service call.

Another technique we use to check on our two stages is through phantom checks.

We ask a friend to have their home or office carpet cleaned on our dime.

Believe me, it’s an excellent investment.

We ask them to do a number of checks for us (on our service team), including: • Was their truck and equipment clean?

• Were they polite and courteous?

• Were they helpful?

• Did they do a thorough job?

• Was their uniform tidy?

• Were they well-groomed?

• If you were paying, would you have us back?

We also set-up phantom calls to our

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office and pretend to be a potential client.

We prepare questions and evaluate the responses of our staff.

Never, ever assume that everything is running smoothly in your company.

Don’t become complacent. Take nothing for granted. This is your livelihood and reputation. Test your front and back stages.

Now it’s your turn. Take a look at your company. Make a list of your front and back stage activities.

Do your front stage activities support your back stage activities, and vice versa?

What do you have to do to create a more supportive environment for your front and back stages? Is one holding the other back?

The best theater venues, stage props, advertising and music can’t support a poor script, or bad singing and acting. CM

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