Royce Ard joins Smart Business Moves to bring his perspective on automating cleaning companies from years of experience in various fields.
Royce gives his methods for automating, marketing, the hiring process, and more! We all come from different entrepreneurial perspectives and we are given a very helpful look into the point of view of an entrepreneur who has succeeded in the corporate environment as well as the cleaning industry. To watch this video, click the link below.
Episode Highlights
Who is Royce Ard?. Royce owns My Amazing Maid in Columbus, Georgia, with his wife Tamara. His background is in sales, marketing, and technology rather than cleaning. He spent 12 years at a cable TV company, rising to VP of sales and marketing. He said the company went through bankruptcy when he joined in 2000 and was sold about 12 years later for $1.5 billion. The transcript spells the company "Knowledgey," which is likely Knology, so please confirm. Royce and Tamara started a handyman business to serve families arriving through the BRAC base realignment and ran it for 11 years, reaching about $600,000 a year. They started the maid service later and sold the handyman business in 2017 to focus on recurring revenue. While they ran both, top-tier biweekly maid customers got one free hour of handyman service per quarter. Royce said that hour cost the company about $15 but was worth $85–$100 to the customer, which made customers stickier.
Running thin. Royce said he and Tamara grew the maid business to about $700,000 in revenue with no managers, no field service manager, and no customer service rep. That freed money to pay for a child's college. They now have a field service manager running day-to-day operations. They haven't been in the office since March 2020 and plan to sell their house, buy an RV, and run the business remotely for about a year.
Ideas that framed the conversation.
- Your entry point shapes your strengths. Royce said owners view the business through the lens they came in through, whether cleaning, operations, or technology. Liz said she'd never heard it put that way.
- A lost appointment is lost revenue. Royce said a missed job can't be made up the next day, so the schedule has to run efficiently.
- Technology is only a temporary advantage. Anyone can buy the same software, so Royce said businesses should compete on customer service or cleaning quality instead. He noted that cable-industry field service software cost about $1 million to develop, while comparable software now costs about $250 a month.
- Change your model, not the software. No software fits a business perfectly, so Royce advised adjusting the business model rather than building workarounds. If the software requires too big a change, it's probably the wrong software. Tom said, "Royce, I could hug you," and called it worth the price of admission.
- Eliminate reasons to call. Royce said he isn't against customer service people, only against customers having to call. Removing the need frees staff to spend real time on the calls that do come in.
Picking a lane. Liz asked how to reach owners who think "my business is different." Royce compared it to restaurants, where a six-table boutique and a 200-seat Disney World restaurant both work but are run very differently. He said you can't easily scale a custom business. Using retail as an example, he said the extremes work (Walmart at the low end and local boutiques at the high end), while the middle, like Sears and JCPenney, is "death." He said most cleaning companies should lean toward boutique, with less volume, more service, and higher prices. He described Mark Baker's model as Amazon-like, with high volume, thin margins on cleaning, and margin made on add-on services. He said Mark's business delivered beer to his office within two hours of ordering online.
Blue Ocean. Liz recommended Blue Ocean Strategy, using Cirque du Soleil's reinvention of the circus as an example. She said no one has yet found the "blue ocean" for the cleaning industry. Royce said he isn't the type to invent the big new idea but is good at taking an existing idea and improving it. That's why he studies other industries, like fast food's move to icon-based ordering and kiosks.
Customer service by text. About three years earlier, Royce heard a conference speaker say texting was bad for business. He disagreed, found business-class texting software, and moved all customer service to text. His company now gets only 12–14 phone calls a day, and almost all booking happens online. The transcript names the conference as "the rc show," possibly the ARCSI convention, so please confirm.
Pricing and booking. Royce prices by square footage, with good-better-best packages, and customers can get a price and book online without talking to anyone. His site is myamazingmaid.com, though the transcript writes it as "myamazingmade.com," so please confirm the spelling. He said customers needed some convincing when he dropped in-home estimates.
Reviews. Royce uses NiceJob to request Google reviews automatically. During COVID, he lost 40% of his business overnight. He reasoned that the 60% who stayed were his most loyal customers, so he sent them a text asking for reviews and received 41 Google reviews overnight.
Ticketing. All customer communication flows into one ticketing system, so customer service reps work from tasks pushed to their screens instead of hunting for them. Royce uses six or seven software tools that all generate tickets. For example, if a customer picks a package online but doesn't book, a ticket prompts a rep to call them. Liz noted that MaidCentral users like a similar ticket feature, which turns a "heavy thinking job" into a task-driven one.
Top three systems to automate. Liz asked for Royce's top three.
- Hiring. Royce runs ads on Indeed, Craigslist, or similar sites. The initial application has only two questions, asking why the applicant wants to work there and for a good phone number. Applicants then get an emailed link to his "job information center," and about 70% follow it. There, about 20 screening questions double as job education. For example, rather than asking whether someone can arrive at 8:30, it explains what happens at 8:30 and then asks. Applicants who are allergic to or afraid of dogs, for example, are screened out. Those who pass schedule their own phone interview through Calendly, and later their own in-person interview. Royce said self-scheduling sharply cuts no-shows because applicants can plan around childcare. Every applicant also lands in an automated spreadsheet that flags wrong answers, so when the company is desperate for staff it can still call borderline candidates.
- Training. Royce said he borrowed this idea from Mark Baker. New hires complete four to five hours of paid online training before day one, covering orientation, cleaning a bathroom, uniforms, non-slip shoes, safety, and COVID procedures. About 70–80% finish it. Hires then go straight into the field on day one, working in teams. Royce said far fewer people now quit in the first days than when he ran in-person classes, where half the class sometimes didn't return after lunch. He said labor law may not require paying for training that's transferable to other jobs, but that paying for it fits his values. That's Royce's reading of the law, not something verified.
- Data entry. Royce said no one should retype customer data. A customer's details from the online quote form flow through Zapier into his texting, marketing, field service, and customer service software. That keeps records consistent and error-free, and when a customer texts later, the system already knows who they are.
Royce's tool stack. The transcript garbles several of these names, so please confirm them before publishing.
- ResponsiBid for online quoting (written "responsibility")
- NiceJob for Google reviews
- Calendly for interview scheduling
- BambooHR for applicant tracking and onboarding
- Trainual for pre-employment training (written "train you" and "training training")
- Loom for training video hosting, after moving off YouTube
- Zapier to connect the tools
- Textline for texting, chosen because it connects to his customer care software. For most people, Royce recommended Heymarket.
What's next. Royce is turning his customer service rep training into a customer-care service he plans to offer to a limited number of other businesses.
Closing. Royce thanked Tom and Liz for running the show daily and said Liz's "Maid Whisperer" training videos were an affordable lifeline for training his staff during the worst of COVID. Tom noted that the episode drifted from automation but still covered how to combine affordable software tools so a business can run from an RV.
