Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Donny Minchillo Jr. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Donny, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?
My wife and I started our first business – a small eCommerce web development agency – just her and I built a remote team over the course of the last 6 years. Given the digital nature of that business – an all-remote team made sense and worked well, well before the pandemic and the world starting to experiment with remote work.
Fast forward to July 2019 and us acquiring what is now our primary business focus: Joy of Cleaning Florida, we didn’t realize how valuable that experience would be in a completely different industry. We we bought Joy of Cleaning we started with just myself running operations and with one cleaner we hired. Since then we have grown the company to a team of cleaning technicians currently 11 strong, and an admin staff of 5.
Obviously in this business, as far as the cleaning work, it requires a team on the ground and in person. In growing that pillar of our team, I’ve learned so much – I started out thinking I needed people with cleaning experience, asking very bland and straight to the point interview questions and basically hiring anyone who showed up to the interviews on time…we had the work and needed the people! I found people through Facebook groups and referrals mostly at first. In the beginning, we didn’t have any formal training process – we essentially sent new people to shadow existing team members. I would say for the first year, we struggled quite a bit with hiring people who were not cut out for the job, turnover, and customer feedback that required rethinking over and over again who we hired and how.
This is really where the admin team side of the story, and our experience hiring people remotely comes into the picture. If I had taken on the overhead cost of office space, equipment, utilities, etc, and had to find people locally to work full time in the “office” – there’s no way our company would have grown to the point it has in just over 3 years. Our experience hiring remotely, utilizing technology, and tapping into the global economy has made a huge difference in the growth and success of the company at such a young age, We were able to recruit highly qualified talent – from customer service and sales to marketing, design and social media utilizing digital avenues including social media influencers and gig-economy marketplaces like UpWork to hire our admin staff.
Being able to have a talented behind-the-scenes team, then enabled us to really change the game when it came to hiring our cleaning team on the ground. Once we had a solid admin team in place we were able to focus efforts in areas like developing the branding for the company and getting clear on our mission (and how to tell that story), branching out into partnerships with other local businesses, developing charity partnerships, building a social media presence and following, developing a formal hiring and training process, diving into better recruitment tools like Indeed for example, and the list goes on…. These are all pieces to the puzzle that help with recruitment and have enabled us to get to a point where we are attracting talent that is a much better fit for our company in so many ways, some of which include values and being mission-driven, work ethic and positive attitude, growth-focused individuals who can see the impact of their work and are interested in growing with us, etc.
Having the admin staff in place to help develop the business in so many ways that have helped with recruitment has also allowed me as the business owner to start to focus on bigger-picture tasks and activities to continue driving the business forward in the direction of our collective goals as a team. For example, I’ve been able to invest in (and take the time to participate in) high-level business coaching, which allows me not only to grow and develop as a leader but also implement tactical solutions that I learn along the way, For example – I’ve learned I don’t need people with tons of previous experience cleaning, and that what I’m really screening for during the interview process are personality traits that fit our company’s vision and brand and the chemistry of our existing team. With processes in place for training – we can now teach anyone to clean using our method, what can’t be taught is who someone is as a person.
Hiring and building this team has been without a doubt the most challenging part of growing our business and I would say also the most important element. It’s been a major learning curve through which we’ve improved so much in such a short amount of time, and yet I know we’ll still continuously learn and evolve as we go.
I can’t say that I’d necessarily do anything differently because what I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is that you really can only know what you know, until you learn something else. Learning and growing through mistakes and challenges is just a part of the process. Sure I’d love to have known what I know now when I started, but I didn’t and we can’t change the past. As human beings we can only learn and move forward.
Donny, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
When my wife and I moved to St. Petersburg in 2018, we hired a couple to clean our home. They were wonderful and really made a difference in our daily lives in the sense that they really took cleaning our house off of our very full plates as something we had to think about getting done. They provided a level of service neither of us has experienced in-home services before and we were not only impressed but truly appreciative.
They came to us in early 2019 saying that they were moving out of state, but were going to be working to find some other cleaners in the area to cover their clients’ homes. Being an entrepreneur to the core, I’m always on the lookout for potential opportunities so I began asking them some questions about their client roster and their plans. I saw there was clearly demand, and also through my own personal experience definitely saw the value in the service.
My wife and I made them an offer to purchase their book of business and by July 2019 we were the proud new owners of Joy of Cleaning – a cleaning company with no brand, no processes or systems in place, 1 cleaner, and 27 recurring customers.
Today we are one of the top-rated cleaning companies in the Tampa Bay area with 150+ 5-star Google Reviews; bringing our customers the JOY of a clean home. We service 160+ recurring clients on a monthly basis as well as many one-time clients through our deep cleaning and move-in/move-out services. Our 11 cleaning technicians and 5 all-star office staff assist in a convenient, high-quality service and experience for our customers from end-to-end; all the way from requesting a quote and receiving it online within 2 hours, to seamless, automatic payment processing – and of course a cleaning service that TRULY takes cleaning off of our customers’ to-do list. We’re an extension of your home team.
We take a great deal of pride in being part of the fabric of Tampa Bay’s (and more specifically St. Petersburg’s) bustling small business community – we are always looking for opportunities to partner with local initiatives and provide cleaning services as prizes for local charity events, raffles, etc. We’re also a proud service provider through the non-profit ‘Cleaning for a Reason’ and provide free home cleanings to patients undergoing treatment for cancer in the Tampa Bay area. We’ve enjoyed creating our own programs as well like ‘Joy it Forward’ (details can be found on our website), and our Joy Squad program partnering with other local businesses – because supporting local is not only a C-to-B effort, but we believe there’s a responsibility at the B-to-B level.
Can you talk to us about your experience with buying businesses?
I’ve already mentioned my company Joy of Cleaning and this was an acquisition for my wife and I. Our biggest learning in the process was that at the small business level what we really acquired was a book of business (a roster of clients), not necessarily a full-fledged business. Our due diligence was mainly focused on the clients they had, how much revenue they generated etc. What we learned after buying these clients was in order to turn this into a business with growth potential, we needed to start from the ground level turning it from a pencil and paper, owner-operated business to a BRAND with replicable pricing structures, systems, policies, hiring practices, a mission and the list goes on and on.
What attracted us to buying the business was actually a recent conference we had attended to learn about investment strategies, and one of the sessions was focused on the opportunity that exists amongst existing businesses whose owners are done for a myriad of reasons and looking for an exit strategy. So when our cleaners we had hired to clean our home (who we adored and whose service was incredible) told us they were moving out of state and would no longer be able to clean for us, and with the session fresh in my mind, it prompted me to start asking questions about their business and what their plan was. Turns out they didn’t have much of a plan and they were essentially just going to let go of all the3 clients they had spent a couple of years acquiring and building relationships with. The idea to ask about making them an offer to buy their business excited me – this was exactly the type of opportunity the speaker had been educating us on to look out for.
Because this was a very small ‘business’ at the time, the process was nothing like business acquisitions you read about in business journals. It was really a series of meetings, looking at their books and numbers, enlisting the guidance of a few mentors and business colleagues, using a template to put together a pretty simple contract, and agreeing to a purchase price as well as a process for them introducing and handing off their clients to us. Certainly, this approach was not without risk, but again at the small scale and this being the first endeavor of its kind we ever took on, we just dove in and did what felt right at the time. Now 3 years later, we still service some of the original clients we acquired, have turned Joy of Cleaning into a recognized local company with a brand of its own, and have grown the company by more than 400%. It definitely has been an instance of risk returning reward for us.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
Aside from referrals which in my opinion will never be matched, particularly in the home service industry – our very best strategy for client acquisition has been creating an ambassador program and partnering with local social media influencers and micro-influencers. We developed an entire program to identify influencers with followings we believe cross over with our target demographics, created a basic program structure and outline – we clean their homes for free in exchange for them authentically posting about their experiences with Joy of Cleaning and that has continued to be our greatest method of lead generation. We live in an era of influence and consumers look to these figures both on a national/international level as well as locally and close to home for ideas that suit their lifestyle.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://joyofcleaningfl.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joy_of_cleaning/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoyofCleaningFlorida/
- Other: https://keepsaintpetersburglocal.org/members/joy-of-cleaning