We recently connected with Poiette Noel and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Poiette thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?
When it comes to scaling your business, you not only have to have a set plan/strategy in place, but you also need to practice discipline and consistency. I learned early on that you cannot scale your business by trying to do everything yourself and being inconsistent. You have to not only learn how to delegate, but you also have to learn to trust others with completing some of the work required for your business to grow. Building your own business from the ground up creates a certain emotional attachment to the business that can sometimes make it difficult to trust others. You also may want to ensure the staff you hire do things the way you would. The reality is that that mindset is not only unrealistic but having staff who may do things different than you is actually healthy and can encourage growth in your business. I knew to scale my business, I was going to need to hire additional staff to not only perform the work to take on additional customers but most importantly, I would need an assistant. Having a full-time job, I knew it would be pretty much impossible to manage the day-to-day operations of a cleaning business. I started my business answering the phones 8 hours a day, managing schedules, handling customer complaints, doing all the marketing, and performing some of the cleanings myself. My staff consisted of only 3 cleaners, and I had a very basic website with minimal paid marketing. I knew that to make more money, I had to invest more money. Having a full-time job allowed me to ramp up my marketing funnels by pouring more money into them. I promoted my business frequently on almost every platform and built relationships with realtors and renovation companies for referrals. I created a customer experience that would encourage our customers to not only sign up for recurring services but most importantly, to refer us to their family and friends. Customer loyalty is a major piece of scaling your business so creating good experiences are just as important your marketing. As I started to gain more customers, I started to gain more complaints. Handling customer complaints can truly wear a business owner out. I knew this was a task I was going to have to delegate soon to avoid burnout. The staff I currently had were also sometimes unreliable, inconsistent, and were the cause of a lot of complaints. I decided that hiring could not be a one-time thing, but rather, I was going to adopt an open hiring process where I would be hiring on a rolling basis. So every Friday, I would conduct interviews between 2-4pm for several months. This was to ensure I always had potential candidates ready to work. Just a few months after our 1st year in business, I determined I was able to afford a virtual assistant. Creating an effective team to delegate is a major part of scaling your business. In order to spend more time on my business, I needed someone to handle the day to day operations, manage scheduling and coordinating with both cleaners and customers, and most importantly customer complaint resolution. To hire a virtual assistant, I had to fine tune all my processes, switch to a better booking tool that automated a lot of the work, and I had to develop SOPs to use to train. Once I hired a virtual assistant, I was able to not only hire more teams, but more teams meant I could take on more customers. Our assistant also was able to do 1 very important task: follow up with clients to build that relationship of trust and care. This is something I knew I could not do on my own and would have to hire a team to handle. Once I had my virtual assistant trained and dependable cleaners, I adopted a major shift in my mindset when it came to running my business. I had to trust that my staff was fully capable of doing the work and that even if things weren’t perfect all the time, it was still better than me doing everything. Lastly, as the business continued to grow, I eventually was able to afford SEO – Search Engine Optimization. Hiring an SEO team was not only about creating a more organic footprint for my business to grow online, it was also about website maintenance and updating, and essentially optimizing my site for an easy user experience and bringing more customers to my site. This would eventually lead me to being able to reduce my marketing expenses and paid lead funnels. Now 2.5 years in, I am on my way to hiring another virtual assistant to focus solely on sales and new customer acquisition. We are also hiring additional cleaners to take on additional work. I’ve set aggressive financial goals and have major plans for transitioning our company structure. I know that all of this is feasible with continued discipline and focus, learning from our mistakes and continuous improvement. There’s so much more we have to look forward to and I am definitely enjoying watching this company continue to grow as a 5 star minority woman and locally owned cleaning service.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I am originally from NY and relocated to the DC area in 2009 for work. I am a project manager by day and serial entrepreneur by night. I got into my industry by participating in a service-based businesses cohort that taught me how to set up my cleaning company from scratch. No More Dust Maid Services offers residential and commercial cleaning services to customers in the Washington DC and Baltimore metro areas. The main service we provide for our customers are not only cleaning services, but we give customers time back in their busy schedules to have to worry about one less task. I believe what sets us apart from others is the relationships we build and maintain with our clients. We create a customer experience that’s reliable and trustworthy and puts the customer first. Our work is guaranteed so no matter what the situation, we will not be satisfied unless our customers are completely happy. We are most proud of our rapid growth within the last 2.5 years and the path that lies ahead of us. The main things I want others to know about us is that we care about our clients as if they are family. We take pride in our work and enjoy creating a healthy and clean atmosphere for your home.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
I am pretty well versed in social media and spent a lot of time learning about social media marketing. To build our audience on social media, I spent a lot of time following other cleaning business, realtors, local small businesses, and our current customers. I ran small ads to bring more brand awareness to our page. In addition to that, I try to post content 3-5 times a week to constantly keep my brand in front of our followers face so that when they log in, it’s us again! I also spend a lot of time creating content that shows our work – customers know exactly what they’re getting and can see exactly what we do. With these tactics, we continue to get more and more followers every week. My advice I would give to those just starting is to be consistent. Post consistently, engage consistently, and create consistently.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
A lesson I had to unlearn was that every cleaning was going to be perfect. That’s not realistic. Humans aren’t perfect and there are going to be times we simply cannot meet a customer’s expectations. I used to beat myself up really bad when customers had a not-so-great experience, or we had a really difficult customer that wore us out. I had to teach myself that this is perfectly normal and part of running a business. The key is in how you handle each problematic situation. I now focus on not taking anything personal, providing the best resolution for our customers, and moving on. We try to focus on providing resolutions with the client’s best interest in mind and implementing those resolutions immediately.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nmdmaidservices.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/nmdmaidservices
- Facebook: facebook.com/nomoredustmaidservices
- Twitter: twitter.com/nomoredustmaid1
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8T_4R-g2K_P5exPECVSVzQ
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/no-more-dust-maid-services-washington
Image Credits
Omar McKenzie & No More Dust Maid Services