Title: From Startup to Success With a 40-Year-Old Sweeping Company
It’s quite a stretch from being a wholesale mortgage broker in Nevada to running a sweeping contracting business in Oregon, but that’s how Eddie Hamilton got his start in the industry.
Soon after having surgery for skin cancer he got a call asking him to come to Oregon to ‘package up’ a business so it could be sold. Knowing nothing about sweeping – but figuring that business was business – Hamilton saw the opportunity as something he could do and a way to get out of the mortgage business. Two years later, Hamilton decided to buy the company he’d made a success.
In today’s economy, the central constant is change. Reports from across the country confirm that bidding has become more challenging, with general declines taking place in both average price per sweep and service level per customer.
Many contractors are responding by expanding their service areas and/or scope of work. At the same time, they are finding themselves competing with more other contractors than ever before, as well as with other types of service companies.
Sweeping contractors and municipalities need to realize that many younger workers frequent the Internet. Advertising for employees online offers a number of benefits in addition to lower costs.
Almost every small business owner has to wear many hats: leader, accountant, admin, and caffeine fetcher. Whether you are doing it yourself or learning more to make better decisions with your agency, here are some strategies to help.
In the three-hour seminar, each of the approximately 50 seminar participants had an opportunity to split out and contribute to three different topic areas. Each of the topic areas was facilitated by the owner of a substantial-sized sweeping company.
Title: Specialists in Providing the Best Sweeping in a Rainbow of Colors
by Ranger Kidwell-Ross
Although Tim Skinner has operated his sweeping company for over two decades, his first ride in the sweeper occurred almost twenty years previously. After dropping out of college and spending time at home, his stepmother gave him three choices: go back to school, get a job or join the Army during the Vietnam conflict.
One night he filled out an employment application with a company that swept the Chicago expressways. Half an hour later he had been hired as a labor and found himself bouncing down the Dan Ryan Expressway riding shotgun in an Elgin Pelican.
How often do you miss the opportunity to ask for a referral? Do you have a specific strategy and action plan to manage your referral process? Are you leveraging the support of your unpaid sales force – your clients who already know, like, trust and respect you?
Building lists of subscribers, prospects, and customers is one of the most important activities your business can undertake. Once built, permission-based email lists can create sales for your company for years to come.
Title: DC-Area’s Quiet Sweep, Ltd. Also Handles Many Other Event(ualities)
Eight years ago, Steve Dekelbaum had a good handle on the course that his future business life would take. He’d gotten his pastry chef certificate in 2004 and was utilizing it in the family business. At the same time, he managed the shopping center where their business was located. However, that’s when fate stepped in.
Our feature article on the company discusses how, in the seven years since Dekelbaum and his wife purchased the company, Quiet Sweep has grown from three beat-up sweepers and five accounts to a 21-sweeper, 200 properties cleaned per night operation. And, they’ve added a host of other services on the way to becoming a force for event cleanup in their Washington, DC, area.
Title:Clients Call on – and Count on – Professional Cleaning Co., Inc. for Whatever Services They Need
As a college student, Jim Weinberg spent a couple of summers working at the Arlington Park Racetrack for the housekeeping contractor who took care of cleaning at the track. As fortune would have it, just at the time Weinberg finished college in 1984 the contractor was expanding his business and needed an operations manager.
Armed with a newly minted college degree, Weinberg suddenly had a new management job to go with it.
