Cleaning Services Houston: Why You Should View It as an Investment

Posted by readysetm on May 24th, 2016

Have you said to yourself, “I wish I had more time” in the past week, month, year? I bet you might have. Admitting you need more time to get things done in the day is by no means an indication that you manage your “time” or better yet your activities poorly. I think sometimes while we admit to ourselves that we do in fact wish there was more time we often do not express it externally. So we decided that it was time to hire cleaning services in Houston. Read on to learn more about our interesting journey. We wanted our time back, we wanted to quell the digital noise, we had decided to fight for some of the more important things [to us] in life.

What Do We All Spend Our Time On

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics here is how we spend our time in America:

• 8.9 Hours Working (37% of your day)
• 7.7 Hours Sleeping (32.1% of your day)
• 2.5 Hours Leisure & Sports (10.42% of your day)
• 1.6 Other (6.66% of your day)
• 1.2 Caring for Others (5% of your day)
• 1.0 Eating & Drinking (4.16% of your day)
• 1.0 Household Activities (4.16% of your day)
• Here is a link to the statistics if you wish to check it out [http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/]

So there is a lot you can draw from these statistics. Now the data does include folks 15 years or older and all 7 days of the week (keep this in mind for later). A quick inference from the data is that we spend the least amount of time on the activities that can indeed enrich our lives. Its looks like we work a lot, sleep too little and don’t invest enough time in personal wellness. Then let’s not forget the average commute in the US is around 45mins per person daily. So what would you do with an extra hour or two you can gain back each day from hiring a house cleaning services? Or hiring a lawn mowing service? Do you have a few pounds you want to take off? Do you feel like you are neglecting your family, do you want to cook more, sleep more, walk you dog more and be more effective at work?

Go ahead and make that list of what you would do if you had more time. Really, jot down a couple of extra things you would do. Now you also have to consider the compounded time. If you have house cleaning service that saves you an anywhere from 2 to 3 hours per week or as the data suggest perhaps 5 hours per week that’s 260 hours per year, 10.83 days per year or 6.5 waking weeks per year. If you have kids, you are married, both parents working it can be an enormous investment. We tend to look at the price versus the cost of many things as humans. So let’s chat a little about this.

Price Versus Cost: Hiring Cleaning Services

First, let me say I am on the side of you get what you pay for when it comes to purchasing house cleaning for your home or really anything. But more on that later. Now price is the face value of a product or service. We tend to think in terms of expensive or affordable and much more if you talk to economics professors & marketing experts. But simply put many of us are price conscious at least at the early stages of buying [let’s face it, it is an important factor]. Let’s take bicycles for instance. You can go to your local {insert a mega, a super big super store here] and pick up a mountain bike for less than a 0 bucks. Now if you plan to actually mountain bike you pay a cost. Once you get on the trail chances are you may very well damage the bike and or causing injury to you or others because while the price was good that bike was likely not designed for actual mountain biking. It has cheap production run parts and likely has a cheap welding point and locks. Guess what…I learned this first hand. So I paid the price for well, paying a low price. This cost me more money and more time and some bruised elbows and knees.

Today I focus on cost and I am far more of an investor consumer than ever before. Once I fell on my face, broke my bicycle frame I went out and just purchased the mountain bike I knew I should have in the first place. It was 5 dollars and has been a timeless warrior for over five years now. So let’s say we look at the data and clearly I am of the opinion that we are not sleeping enough. What is the cost of not sleeping enough? You are irritable, you don’t get enough restorative sleep, you are maybe less effective at work [taking longer to do things] and maybe even performing well at your work. What’s the cost here? Let’s really think about it. Chronic sleep deprivation will make you irritable to be around, you’ll be tired and so you may eat poorly to get false energy gaining weight. Maybe you miss a promotion, big gig or that raise because you performed poorly at work.

Have you ever spent half your Saturday or Sunday cleaning your house? We did many times instead of taking the time to better ourselves by investing that time to our families, health or wellness. What about investing in your professional development? Today the workforce is more demanding of folks having multiple skills particularly in technology than ever before. If you cannot keep up with industry advancements than what is the cost of this? Will your company keep you around? Will hire someone else to replace you? Most people want to get better at what they do and many struggle to make the time to do so. Taking a coding course, meeting with your accountant, spending time with your loved ones all have a cost. So there is a negative cost and a positive cost component to every activity we do. More simply put, focus on the benefits of the activities you invest your time in. What does cleaning a toilet bowl in your house output as opposed to reading a self-development article in the same time?

We Were So Frustrated That We Launched Ready SET Maids - a Houston Maid and House Cleaning Service

Here is what happened. I had spent my 20’s dominating the corporate ladder in the retail sector. I was overseeing millions and millions of dollars by my mid 20’s and operating hundreds of millions by the time I was 31. The perks that came with these accomplishments were expense accounts, company cars, company cell phone, laptops, gadgets, paid “vacations” six figures a year plus a hearty bonus. I was the “boss” - I mean I really had it good by many measures. So remember price and cost right? Well, we had very little free time, our health was being to suffer, our family we rarely saw. We worked most national holiday/s eve and really found it just hard to live a little.  To accomplish what I accomplished in the time I did it in required essentially my soul. I would start working from 5/6am to almost midnight consistently.

I traveled 80 to 90% of the time. Meeting after meeting, conference call after conference call, email, after email after email. For many this would have a mind numbing but let’s be clear I didn’t hate what I was doing there was just a greater passion that had been building for a long time. You see me and my teams often were the top performers consistently and I can attribute running and operating those companies as if they were all my own company – I was always an entrepreneur at heart and in action, however, it wouldn’t come in the form we expected.

So while my fiancé and I got busier and busier we knew we needed to hire cleaning services to help manage our time. We had decided that aside from general cleaning we would no longer waste time cleaning or mowing or even shopping for groceries every time ourselves. Now we began to look for different cleaning services Houston had to offer. Right away I was irritated. Here is what we discovered:

• House cleaning websites were amuck. Not user friendly - wasting my time
• Had to “Request a quote” and wait for price – wasting my time
• Many wanted to do an “in home estimate/walk thru – wasting my time
• House Cleaning Agreements
• No Standard or Straight Forward Pricing – Our neighbor had our identical house in terms of square feet and rooms. We were estimated more for weekly services. Once I told them this they adjusted the price:} good for us but bad brand management for them.

Then in comes mayhem. We hired a national franchise maid service company and paid a higher price with the plan of a lower cost so that we could minimize our time allocation and invest it otherwise. The “initial cleaning” was pretty good and by the 4 visit we had issues that we had called or emailed to address [taking more time]. I mean big issues like the team not showing up and no one calling or email us to them not vacuuming or cleaning the ceiling fans per our customized house cleaning schedule. So we went thru the same painful process of hiring 2 more cleaning services [one an independent] and those were disasters as well. So it really cost a lot to time and distraction from our work and life and created additional stress of an already high stress society so we began to consider that there may be a real need here.

We found it was not easy to actually book and hire a maid service or manage the process more efficiently. The consistency was also a concern as some cleanings were good and some were bad. It was like ordering a burger from your favorite restaurant and sometimes it was made correctly and sometimes you even got a chicken sandwich instead. So we began to research everything and knew there were likeminded people who wanted the same things we wanted. So we started readysetmaids.com. We wanted it to be really easy to get your price and book your service

House Cleaning Houston: Getting What You Pay For

Being an investor minded consumer means I will pay a higher price for a better cost. Meaning I don’t have to replace what I purchased or repair it constantly costing more money and time. Remember our war is to take control back of our time and improve our overall wellness of living. When it comes to house cleaning you can get one-time offers as low as per hour or less, to weekly and bi-weekly services ranging from form an independent to 0 to 0 from established companies. Here’s why it’s better to pay a higher price for a lower cost overtime:

1. Do You Really Want to Clean? – Let’s Think about this. There are folks that enjoy cleaning but many do not. Professional cleaners clean all day. The scrub floors, toilets, bathtubs, kitchens. They vacuum, make beds and dust alllll day long. They deal with our mess our, little pickiness/quirks plus its hard physical work. Its likely when you purchase higher cost house cleaning services that your maids are better compensated [if the company is doing the right thing]. This will reduce turnover [which is huge in the industry] and improve the consistency of your cleanings.

2. What About Independent Cleaners? Ok, so like any company there are really great independent cleaners and some very suspect cleaners. We tried an independent when we were hiring our own house cleaning in Houston but quickly experienced the independent angsts. There is not a company to back you up, independents typically have trouble consistently showing up and the number one for us was and is security. With a company that has a good reputation, you can double check to see it their people are bonded, insured and background checked. Then there is the concern of damaged property from an independent. Typically, you up a creek if you independent breaks your stuff.

3. The Quality of Work – Our overall analysis found that there is indeed a higher and more consistent quality of work from a higher priced service. In fact, the whole front to end member experience is better. While it didn’t work out with the first high priced service we hired they were still better than the lower priced services. A quality Houston maid service or house cleaning service anywhere for that matter is far more about just how you clean your home. It involves communication, operations, the brand personality and how you feel when you think about your house cleaning service. All of this cost capital and execution to deliver consistent quality experiences for their members and very few do it well.

4. Rushed Timing = Poor Cleanings – I believe and our own in-house data supports as well as many in the industry agree, that rushed cleanings are attributed to inconsistent or poor levels of house cleanings. This happens because a company or independents are trying to get your business and will undercut prices [so the margins are bad forcing them to stuff their teams scheduled jobs for the day and then they only give the team a limited amount of time in each home – often less than it would take to service your house]. Hey, I like a deal as well, so you accept and then you replace them and do it all over again. Again costing you time, money and irritation.

5. Be Realistic – If you have a large house it will be higher priced. It takes longer to clean your home. Even a “basic” cleaning. If you plan to add more items outside of the scope of work that the company delivers or start to customize the plan to pay more or move to an hourly rate. Most companies that offer a comprehensive house cleaning checklist will hit just about anything you need. If you opt in for green cleaning or eco cleaning expect an upcharge as well. The product costs more to purchase.

6. Refer Your Circle – at Ready SET Maids we have a great referral program that makes it easy for our members to send their own unique referral code to their circle of influence. You get certainly get a discount often on your next service or you get a reward like points to redeem at any time. So you can save and save a lot if you consistently refer. Let me give you an example. We have two members who refer on average 2 new members every quarter. They get each time and their friend gets off their first service. The two members last year saved over 0 each [one saved nearly 0]. We also have a “super” member who received more than 50% of their services for free last year due to their referrals.

When you consider what you could be doing to reallocate your time to more important life enrichment activities you can begin to see how cleaning services have a significant impact on your life but other “lifestyle services” as well. The trick is to understand what you want, what your goals are and align your actions with those goals. You CAN make more money, you CAN grow your career, you CAN have more time for family. It just takes a little bit of planning, focus and having a perspective of guarding your time.