Use this quick and easy pulse check to keep all of your employees on track toward your growth goals.
I have built my business around reoccurring customers; they are my bread and butter customers. For the ease of the math, assume your average bi-weekly (every other week) client is billed $100 a visit, they will spend $2,600 a year on for as long as you do business with them. 

That doesn’t mean I will turn away a one-time job if we can fit it on the schedule, but they are hard to predict and even a large one time clean is normally only $500. 

Because reoccurring customers are so important to me, I have created a simple point system to track my business. Basically a client is assigned a value for the number of times per month we clean them. Weekly clients are 4 points, bi-weekly are 2 points and monthly clients are 1 point. This lets us keep a running tally. If we gain a new client, we add the points. If we lose them, we subtract the points. I have a big board in my office that we reset every month that looks like this:

I have this on a huge white board so everyone can see it. We take it a step further and write wins in green and losses in red. This keeps everyone in my office aligned on what really matters to me, adding more on-going clients than we lose. They know when there is a lot of green on the board I am giving extra hours and hiring. They also know if the board has too much red on it, I will have to start cutting back on hours. 

In the example above we are PLUS 3 for the month. This means we have booked 3 more on-going appointments per month than we have lost. If we take the average cleaning charge of $100 from the example above, this means we have booked $300 a month in on-going revenue. That is $3,600 a year. I can tell all that in 30 seconds with no software or fancy reports. That is how I keep my finger on the pulse of my business.  

I like my system because it is a quick and easy to way to keep track of my business. 

Other variations on this system exist, though they are often more complex. Some business owners believe that some clients are worth more than others. In my system, however, a weekly client with a large home at $150 a visit is given the same point value as a weekly client with a small apartment $85 per visit. Why? Because over time it all averages out, and you can drive yourself crazy trying to track your business down to the dollar on the fly.

I think of it this way. This system is about making sure I have my finger on the pulse of my company. Just like there are fancier ways to measure health with extra equipment, there are much more detailed ways to keep track of your business. My accounting or my scheduling software will give me the actual revenue gained and lost each month when I run my Sales report at month end. But much like taking the pulse of a person, this method lets me quickly know if I have a problem or not without all the fuss, and it is easy for everyone to understand.

Derek Christian is the owner of My Maid Service with locations in Cincinnati, OH and Dallas, TX, as well as a business coach through Cleaning Business Builders and publisher of CleaningBusinessToday.com.  Derek is now an investor in several cleaning companies including My Maid Service Dayton and Real World Services Columbus.  Derek is also a consultant for industry leaders Blue Skies Services and Castle Keepers.