Case Studies

Commercial Janitorial Cleaning Service Company

Situation:

• Privately held commercial janitorial cleaning service company.
• No sales tracking or methodology capabilities to objectively assess sales performance.
• Management strategy – consider increasing business volume by utilizing lost leader pricing, lacked a working business model.
• Management strategy – to outsource sales and marketing function to effectively increase revenue and generate additional profits.
  

Before:

• Company focused on three revenue streams: commercial, school districts, and retail/flooring.
• No pre-qualification of opportunities. Quoted on all business calls.
• No designated sales and marketing function. Utilized "word of mouth" referrals.
• Relied on president completely for all strategy and leadership ability.
• Poorly utilized its internal resources which caused overall inconsistent results and follow through.
  

How Square One helped:

• Engaged the clients CPA firm to assist in gathering certain job cost information. Led to change in revenue mix.
• Created a contact management database to track leads, customer and decision making information, quality issues, and quotes.
• Became their sales and marketing resource. Put together a process for qualifying sales to focus on the more profitable work. Sales increased year over year.
• Provided sales materials to prospective customers in the form of direct mail campaigns, general information, and website.
• Implemented a due diligence review of initiatives before moving forward on business strategy.
• Financial metrics improved (Liquidity, Activity, and Efficient Ratios).
• Company significantly increased its income from operations for the years 2000 thru 2004.
• See Appendix for detail metrics.

After:

• The revenue mix was significantly changed from focusing away from retail/flooring to school districts and commercial/industrial. This increased gross margins.
• A pre-qualification process is in place to ensure that the most profitable work is being attained.
• Square One continues to be on retainer for sales and marketing resources.
• Metrics are in place to provide a scorecard going forward for the business. The metrics consist of labor hours per job, marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue dollars, gross profit per full time employee, lead generation tracking success, revenue mix.
• Company has successfully placed a "footprint" in the school district market as the "go to" cleaning service provider.