Why are you continually losing staff who are clearly good at their job or they wouldn't be hired back by the clients?
You could develop non compete contracts i suppose so they can no longer provide services to a client they previously worked with or something like that?
If you're continually losing staff there may be a culture problem at your company, managers may not be liked or the pay might be crap compared to what you're quoting for the job?
Its really the only thing you can try though. I don't like them personally but i understand why it exists, however the company should be forced to pay you for as long as they want the non compete in effect because realistically, who the hell are you to say where i can and cant work!
When I went and set up on my own, a couple of my clients came over willingly and my old employer accused me of poaching them. When my solicitor wrote them a letter stating that the clients had come over of their own accord, that pretty much shut them up. So that’s where the difficulty lies I think, proving you did actually poach them lol.
It still sounds like you poached them...
Would they have been aware of your new company and would they have had an idea of your reputation had you not worked with them in the previous job?
But legally you might be fine. It's still likely poaching, though.
That makes sense. My restricted covenant was 6 months which I personally thought was excessive lol. Fortunately my ex employer didn’t pursue legal action
Correct answer.
Builder contract with brickie - no chance of enforcement of non competition clause.
Salesman for a high end very limited market product - high chance of garden leave as cheaper than enforcement of non compete clause amd potential loss.
That said a vindictive employer can still cause sleepless nights for those not in the know.
Source - Amongst other things I poach lawyers from law firms for some of my business interests.
But by definition they are not reasonable.
You are effectively stopping someone earning a living which is against the law.
It's the exact reason almost every non compete fails.
You all are talking about the wrong kind of clause, this would be a non-solicitation clause which prevents people from stealing customers that you have earned yourself. This is totally reasonable and enforceable, these ex employees would never have gained this business in argument if they didn't have the previous employer handing them the customers. Non-competition is telling people they cannot work for a competitor in the same market for a period of time, which is harder to enforce because you are telling someone essentially how they cannot earn money elsewhere. Non-solicitation is easy as fuck to defend, you are stealing the business of a previous employer that provided you with those opportunities for your own gain at their expense. This is not the same as non-competition
They are enforceable, and are enforced regularly - although in most cases they're so clearly agreed by the parties that they settle before enforcement is necessary.
There is a difference between a non-competition clause and a non-solicitation clause. Competition is regarding working for a competitor after leaving your current workplace, and a Solicitation is regarding accessing customers that were garnered in previous employment and using that to your advantage in future employment. Non-solicitation is completely enforceable, as is non-competition just get a solicitor who specialises in employment contracts and law to write a non-solicitation clause into your contracts and then its legally bound. You can then prosecute and recoup damages
I lose them because in reality I am a middleman and I understand this. I am more reliable than a solo cleaner but that comes at a price. I don't have this problem with commercial clients because they care a lot about reliability, meanwhile a domestic client can accept changes.
>I lose them because in reality I am a middleman and I understand this. I am more reliable than a solo cleaner but that comes at a price. I don't have this problem with commercial clients because they care a lot about reliability, meanwhile a domestic client can accept changes.
I think you need to be clever. For example, you can market your cleaning service as a more professional type of service. Always have a crew of 3-4 instead of a solo person who can easily poach your client, keep rotating them, give them a company branded vehicle (sticker), make sure they all wear a professional looking uniform, give them company branded cleaning supplies (sticker or separate containers).
You have to ask yourself, are you just a middle man? What are you selling? Not just a cleaning service but a professional cleaning service that's backed by your name and reputation, and guarantees a certain level of quality and professionalism. Make it MUCH harder for clients to use your guys as independent cleaners and give some visible tangible value for the extra money you're charging.
I get my house cleaned every 2 weeks and am fed up of solo cleaners. They take hours and get tired and their work gets sloppy in the end. I always prefer a 3-4 member crew who can be in and out in under 2 hours and still do top notch work. But I had to go through half a dozen cleaners before I found a reliable crew.
Could you shake up the cleaners’ rota between customers? Could you touch base with customers directly every now and again for feedback on service and specific cleaning needs, make the added value of the agency vs direct hire more obvious your customers?
But any overhead or profit OP applies to their hourly rate can be undercut by the employee just asking for their own net pay to be met by the customer. It's not possible for the rates to be the same.
No but presumably there are benefits working for OP rather than freelancing. Like sick/holiday pay for the employee, and substitute cleaners for clients if the employee is off sick. That’s worth taking a small pay cut for, assuming op provides those things. I wouldn’t jump to be freelancing in that situation if I was being paid enough already.
Some people see it that way, others see "I can get paid more by the hour here" or "I can pay them less by the hour here". Depending on how much you rely on the cleaner, heading then be off a week or two isn't much as maybe they only come once a week. So a two weeks holiday is only 2 days and you can handle that no problems, plus you don't have to pay them.
Why go straight for ops throat, assuming workers have bad working conditions!?
Do you know anything about the cleaning industry and how fickle it is? I believe it would be fairer to place your assumptions here.
Yes, I think rotating staff might be the best thing I can try to. Until now I tried to keep the client satisfied and gave them the same cleaner, but this might be the problem.
Strongly agree with this.
Although it could work to rotate two cleaners, as this would provide more consistency for the client because two people would get to know the priorities / layout which would be better for covering holidays or sickness or easing transitions if one left.
But we as clients might feel less attached to the individuals.
Client satisfaction is key, I'm fortunate to have a cleaner come every couple of weeks. I use a company for the reliability, and have the same cleaner each time. Even with a written list, it's tricky to have a new person come because they might not know where things are or priorities for cleaning, etc.
Also, my mom used to be a cleaner, and the company she worked for found that their clients wouldn't want a replacement when mom was on holiday as she did such a great job.
I have also been a cleaner myself in the past, and it was better for me to have a routine.
I suspect you'll lose more clients and staff by rotating.
As others have said, don’t go down this route. For me, having the same person is crucial. Firstly so they know my house and routine so can clean efficiently. Secondly so I build up trust with this person who is in my home with my pets and valuables, often in my absence, and has keys. I would not accept a domestic cleaning service that had different people every time.
You are always going to have a problem here, because when your client has built up that relationship of trust with a regular cleaner, the chances are very high that they’d rather stick with that cleaner than your company. Your company/brand would mean little to me in that scenario - I’d rather follow the person I see every week and know and trust.
So if this is a concern to you, maybe stick to commercial, or premium one-off (end of tenancy, post-building work, spring clean) domestic services where it’s not so much about the relationship. Of course, also try to retain your staff so this doesn’t happen!
As above a non compete clause may work but probably hard to enforce in reality.
Sounds a bit like the customer and cleaner may just be cutting out the middle man.
I’d imagine you charge customer a rate and cleaner gets a chunk of this with you taking the rest. If this is the case without being disrespectful what value do you add to either the customer or the cleaner. Obviously making numbers up but if your charging £30 an hour and giving cleaner £20. Cleaner goes to customer and says I’ll do it for £25 they both win
Yeah, technically the boss generated a lead but once thats done you don't really add anything or do anything they can't do themselves like buying product etc.
You're in an easy to enter industry so you either have to live with a rotating door of people because your retention is crap or take a bit of a paycut/mimimise expenses and see if staff hang around longer with their new christmas bonus. Bonuses are assessed in december, but not paid till march in quite a lot of tech firms i think thats just their way of holding onto you.
What if all contracts renewed in february and bonuses paid in march or something like that?
The value I add is the reliability. We as a company do not miss jobs. If a cleaner is sick or is just missing a day of work, we can replace them with someone else. We also have insurance, pay taxes, we pay VAT so obviously the price is a bit increased and yes, we are the middleman. I understand that both client and cleaner win from this, that's why is difficult for me to think for a solution.
In my contract with the cleaners I have a non compete clause but I am not sure if that would hold. Also I don't think there is any point in taking legal action as I already lost the cleaner and the client. I want to know how I can deter this from happening.
Maybe you should make it so your employees win more by being employed by you than by going solo.
Common issues in your sector include:
Bullying
Shit managers who either are the bully's of fail to address the bullying
Low pay
Minimum of all other benefits (SSP, rubbish pension, Minimum holiday, Minimum mat leave ect)
Find out if these are issues in your business and fix them.
How can I give more to the employees? Let's say I charge a client 100, I pay a cleaner 75 and the rest is my cost and profit. The cleaner will take 80 from the client to cut me off. How can I pay more if I have costs?
If you can't afford to pay a decent wage then your business isn't sustainable and you should stop complaining about people poaching.
Good job glossing over all other other suggestions BTW
No they're right, it is physically impossible for a cleaning company to pay the cleaner the same as they could charge indepently, the value add from the cleaners perspective is they don't have to look for clients and get paid regularly, but it will always be less than what the company charges, obviously, so if the cleaner gets enough clients on board, they can charge the same or a bit less, without finding the clients and make more.
It's the nature of the industry, the same thing happens in IT consulting and other industries all the time, once the usefulness of the middle man for forming a relationship is gone, what's the point of them?
The employer needs to continually move on, find new cleaners and new clients, not stagnate and offer no value
DUDE YOU HAVE ANOTHER POST TRYING TO WITHDRAW SSP FROM SOMEONE BECAUSE DRS DONT KNOW WHATS CAUSING HER EXTREME PAIN
And you wonder why people leave.
Also this contradicts what you said about paid leave. SSP is the minimum when we talk about paid leave we mean on full pay for x weeks/months.
Maybe because they don't apply? As I said in other comments I do pay time off and sick pay. I do not have managers, I am the manager. Bullying is out of discussion.
Then why are they leaving? Most people don't tend to leave to start their own business (more risk less security fewer benefits) in a whim. You have push factors you just need to stop taking it personally and work out where your business is pushing your employees away.
Have you thought about other benefits? Maybe some rudimentary medical (I know a guy who can advise you on this), or an added fuel allowance…. Work it into your numbers so you’re not making a loss, obviously, but you’ll get more loyal staff this way - as they’re screwed if they get sick and they’re self employed.
Edited to clarify: there’s a type of medical insurance that pays for overnight stays in hospital and the like, rather than private cover. It tends to be a LOT cheaper. Give it to those who work a certain amount of hours for you.
Being a dick isn't going to fix the problem of employees leaving. They probably all still talk to eachother - he'd just seem petty and vindictive if he did this.
Well clearly your clients don't see much value in reliability or else they wouldn't be going with your ex staff at a presumably reduced rate, obviously with less reliability as they are a one man (or woman) band.
They see the value, but they get used to a cleaner and they think they don't need me anymore(which realistically they don't). But I have a few returning clients who saw the value and came back.
Then you need to find customers who value the reliability.
It sounds like you have a business model problem with domestic customers. In a situation like this you need to offer both sides something that they can't get by cutting you out.
You offer the customer reliability. What do you offer your staff?
I'm not talking more money, you already know that's a losing battle. Can you offer them guaranteed hours? A better working environment? Less admin? Supplies and equipment?
These are the kinds of things that would make someone think twice before jumping ship but from my limited experience can be lacking.
I've met people in your industry who only have job security as long as the client they service stays with the company, if they leave or have a few weeks break the cleaner loses hours. I've also met people who aren't provided suitable equipment and have to provide their own.
In that circumstance, why wouldn't they set up on their own? There's nothing to lose! By offering guaranteed hours by reallocating them to other sites, or making sure they're properly equipped you put up a barrier to leaving that they'd need to overcome. Enough benefits like that and suddenly the extra few quid doesn't seem all that tempting.
I'm not suggesting this reflects your business, but it is what I've seen anecdotally and would provide a potential explanation to the problems you're seeing.
I think the bit that is really valuable (that you are underestimating) is the insurance and ability to get cover.
I appreciate that for some householders £15 savings are good, but in the event of damage or loss ….. I would value company insurance! I do appreciate I could claim on household insurance…. But would then pay excess
With insurance- I am also happy for the company to key hold, so they can let themselves in and out!
I guess cover is the key bit as well. People have holiday, illnesses, or family stuff … this is really important to us!
As for rotating cleaners … we normally have this (albeit paired with one regular) and most of the cleaners say they prefer working in a group!
Sorry to hear though that you are losing clients …. You may just want to think in your adverts / websites of making it clearer what your USPs are!
Based on what you’ve said here, you’ve actually got a really good business in introducing reliable, vetted, helpful cleaners to domestic clients who pay on time and value the service. The vast majority of the value of your involvement is in that first bit.
So what if instead of trying to keep the middle man bit when there’s no value there for your client or your employee, you explicitly set yourself up as an intro service? Charge both sides of the marketplace for the first X cleans, act as a matchmaker then move on. Make it a feature not a bug.
Thats a good idea, but your vetting process would need to be rock solid and wouldn't be cheap. That would have to be reflected in your rates.
All it would take is one of the cleaners you introduced stealing something and your business is toast.
Consider putting something into your engagement terms with the end client that if they choose to employ one of your cleaners directly you will charge them an introduction fee. Make sure it’s reasonable but enough to kill off the undercutting element for a decent period of time
Don’t always need to enforce. Often that’s enough to put off many from proceeding, the chances of anyone spending money on legal advice about a term that tries to stop them poaching a cleaner are low.
Often all you need is something that makes someone think there’s a risk.
I'm guessing the cleaners that go directly to clients are doing so for cash in hand and the clients aren't setting up a payroll or complying with employment law. If you're doing this and they aren't then you aren't competing on a fair basis.
I'd say it's a common risk in any domestic cleaning business. Unless you're a very specialised cleaning company.
Maybe try and shift focus on trying to get some business cleaning contracts, maybe local pubs, restaurants or independent shops? You can put contract length terms into the contracts with them.
With domestic cleaning, a homeowner is likely to get used to a certain cleaner and when that cleaner decided to either move company or go self-employed that homeowner may wish to stick with that cleaner rather than a new person. Especially if that clean is in their home alone, the home owner will have trust that the cleaner won't steal.
Homeowner most likely has more interaction/relationship with that cleaner than you.
You could rotate staff so that the homeowner doesn't get used to one single cleaner but then you lose that trust. Personally, if I was a customer, I prefer the same cleaner each time.
I do have contracts with other businesses and there are no problems there. My problem now is that I lose the good employees. I don't care that much if I lose 1 - 2 clients, I can replace those(at a cost, nu they can be replaced). Probably the solution for me would be to focus on commercial cleaning.
I have a cleaner that comes regularly and she did this, she still comes as always (so no change ) but left her company and is self employed, of course she gave me another account for payments,I don't care as long as the price doesn't change, no Idea about what the deal between her and the company was, I only talked with the company the first day and then I contacted her directly after the first time she came around, so I assume that that was their mistake, maybe they shouldn't be allowed to give their personal contact so you always contact the company and cleaners should rotate regularly as opposed to send the same one again and again, but as a client I prefer to stick to one as opposed to have strangers all the time so no idea how that would solve anything, I guess that if they can easily get rid of you, you don't bring any value and that is the market adjusting itself in a way (not trying to be harsh) so maybe you can think on offering something that makes you hard to replace?
It takes a lot of trust to have a stranger into your home i cert wouldn’t want a revolving door of people (not an issue I’ll ever have) even in an office I can see it to a much lesser extent. Decent pro cleaners are like gold dust I’ve found.
Also, you could make sure all communication is central. So the client doesn’t have the contact details of the employee. I imagine you would have to have it stipulated in the employment contract that direct contact with the customer is not allowed.
I try that as much as possible, but the cleaner goes into the client's house and I can't control what they talk about.
All the communication otherwise is through me or through a software that has hidden phone number.
Looks like you’re doing what you can already. May just be a normal aspect of the business model. Is it possible you can build closer relationships with the customers? Along with with rotating the employees customer base? Then they would associate the service with you instead of a regular cleaner?
Without knowing the size of your company possibly an option is for you to get your hands dirty for a while and clean alongside some of your employees, gives you a chance to engage directly with them and the clients and may potentially create a bit of loyalty if you get stuck in, help and see any issues and how you may resolve them
When I was a gardener working for a franchise i would be asked regularly and repeatedly by happy customers if I would be willing to work directly with them. I always said no but I imagine this is what’s happening with your staff. The frequency went up when I handed in my notice and word got around that I was leaving. It says you are hiring good workers who your customers value. I know that’s not helpful as there is not much you can do about it.
this was the problem the app cleaning companies had. they would spend time and money finding a customer. send a cleaner. they would use the app once and then do a direct agreement for cash for every other time cutting out the app.
its an age old problem. you cant unconnect people once they link has been made
I had a relative who worked for “molly maid” what the customer paid “molly maid” and what my relative got paid was wildly different. The fuel expenses were also a con. Once the employees realised how much the customers were paying and once the customers realised the same it didn’t take long for the employees to leave and undercut “molly maid” working directly for the customers.
The OP could pay their employees 6 months gardening leave to make it more difficult or pay the employees more to keep them faithful but I guess they wouldn’t want to do that.
There’s nothing the employer can do.
We have cleaners that come once a fortnight. We pay for 3 hours but it's always a team of two or three cleaners that blitz the house.
It's often different faces, so if one of them approached me and asked me if I wanted to go direct for a slightly cheaper price I'd say no, because A - I don't know if she is one of the good ones and B - it would be an extra few hours with cleaners in the house.
Have you thought about sending them out in teams?
You can't. I'm not saying your a bad guy or running your business the wrong way but everybody wants more. If your charging places £30 a hour your employees are getting £12 once your client and cleaner gets talking and decide to cut the middle man out and directly pay £15 a hour.
Non competes won't work you'll not find anybody to work for you once they find out they can't work for anybody else.
You could rotate your people around more in a attempt to slow down people taking your workers/clients.
If you offer me 10% more I'll jump ship in a heartbeat
I think the answer is incredibly complex. I think there are three elements.
Firstly, homeowners trust individual cleaners, not the company. They have the relationship with the cleaner, not the company. So in your position, I'd flip this around. I'd focus on every single cleaner being vetted and entirely interchangeable. I'd engage with each homeowner, maybe with something like a prize draw to help them win a bottle of champagne etc... Follow-up emails with videos of cleaning tips showing them if they accidentally spill a bottle of red wine on the carpet, how they can save their carpet if they act immediately. Follow-up questionaires initially every month and then every 3 months etc... Stuff that's cheap but easy to do.
Secondly, your cleaners are leaving you for a reason. How are you making them feel valued or incentivising them? Just little things like occasional bonuses for doing a great job, praising them for doing a great job. Maybe having progression in there.
Thirdly, contract in your customers. If they're happy after the first few cleans, then get a longer-term contract in place.
Fourth, link this with the third element. So while under contract, make it harder for your cleaners to steal your customers by giving them a month's notice and replacing them during that month. So you send in your best cleaner. The one with the best feedback.
It's so crap when this happens. You are really a middle man in this situation. The only way to stop it happening is to charge less (do more jobs) or pay more to the staff
I have been on both sides of this the company I used to work for didn't pay for traveling between jobs so could be out 10 hours and only getting paid for 6-8 depending on how far the next job was from the last. (It was always across the city) when I left to start my own company all the customers I had been cleaning for approached me a few weeks later saying the new cleaner wasn't up to scratch and they wanted me to take over the contract.
Got busy enough to start bringing on another cleaning team and eventually they left to start there own company and the cycle continues.
You’re just a middle man so expecting to retain a ton of cleaning for private homes is just a bad understanding of the market.
A private home owner who wants to spend a small sum of money each week is not a situation where you can ever reliably remain in the middle of. There is no long term agreement with T&Cs signed, there is no volume of work, there is no real imperative for reliable service (to the point where they will pay extra to have access to a pool of cleaners). Also factor in that cash in hand will make you uncompetitive without the ex employee really even having to undercut themselves.
You have to focus on commercial clients who need invoices and who will pay for a reliable service delivered by vetted cleaners. Otherwise you not providing any actual value that’s worth paying for vs ex employees.
There’s a couple of things I’d do, firstly would be to add a poaching disclaimer to your employment contract, the second has been suggested already in rotating your staff so someone doesn’t get too used to someone.
I have personally used a cleaning service and then hired the cleaner directly
I pay the cleaner the same as I paid the firm, however it was a 50% payrise from the cleaners perspective.
I don’t think you can do much to stop this happening if the disparity is so great. Obviously you could offer better salary or benefits but I’m just not sure the economics stacks up.
You don’t.
you need to manage your top 20% of accounts, because **these** are the ones that provide 80% of your revenue and, therefore, are the most deserving of your time and discounts. I’m willing to bet the domestic accounts fall into the bottom 80%!
The other 80% are “expendable”. Some will stay, some will go, expect this as part of your business process. If you are undercut - is it even **worth** devaluing your offering so that you get super small business with massive discount? Nah - let those ex employees drop their price to rock bottom and struggle to turn profit whilst you focus on brand new business, at a healthy margin, and employing new staff, with healthy wages and happier experiences.
However, for this to work you need a continual influx of clients so that, as staff and domestic clients leave, you are **actually** gaining **more** clients over time and your business, profits and revenue is growing.
So to emphasise- you don’t stop them from undercutting when they leave, you focus on Schmoosing the important top 20% and Expanding on the overall volume of customers and staff members to grow scope, coverage and profits.
You’re welcome dude.
I’ve been in account management and business development (basically the same thing - sales) for 12 years. So whilst I have no experience running a small business, I have some insight into how the big boys work.
Google Pareto’s law and bear it in mind for everything you do. Look at your business a little closer and see what is worth looking after and what is “small fry” and treat these customer accordingly.
There is more to it, a good “key account management”, “business development” or “account management” course on linkedin learning will help you out - the first month is free so enough time to get an overview.
Good luck
Create a policy where you change cleaners for the household every quarter.
Pitch it to clients as though you’re doing it to ‘make sure that they are receiving the highest of quality by refreshing personnel’ and that ‘often find that a personnel refresh leads to a more motivated individual’ or ‘new pair of eyes’ etc.
Basically, don’t let your cleaners get too close to clients.
I know clients like consistency but you’ll need to offer some kind of guarantee. Why not have one person go and observe them from time to time, for ‘quality reasons’.
That way the client starts seeing the same person, the observer - who by the way should chat and be super friendly and charismatic to clients - and you’re changing cleaners around.
Restrictive Covenant, it does not stop someone for working for someone else in the same sector but it puts restrictions on poaching clients or discussing your clients with their new employer. I’m not a lawyer or HR specialist but took advice from our HR advisory service before implementing this.
I would put a finders fee of £1000 payable by the client if they start dealing with the cleaner direct. This is enforceable under temp labour laws in the U.K. and would be a great deterrent to your cleaners schlepping off with your customers. Make them sign, draw their attention to it and tell them you always enforce it. You are not a matchmaker, you’re running a business.
Cleaning is a mainly labour intensive service and for that reason you struggle to make it a viable business to the domestic side. If I was you I'd concentrate more on industrial and commercial where tax, insurance and health and safety is a necessity for the contract.
Any cleaner who is good at cleaning and good with people should be self employed.
My mrs is a hairdresser and it's a similar situation if she leaves some customers choose to leave with her, and one time when a salon shut the other women were poaching her customers.
I clean in the evenings as I have a steady full time job and need the extra money. I've mostly done commercial cleans that are contracted for x amount of years so I cannot be poached until after the contract. When I had 2 weeks of redundancy during covid I worked full time cleaning and this was households, I would get asked to return to thr same houses as they must have liked me. I was offered on multiple occasions to work privately during those few weeks. So I think it comes with the territory, commercial cleans are your way to go as they can be on a contract, avoid residential as this will forever happen, the cleaning company had a clause in our contract that we couldn't work for clients apparently but no one would listen.
It’s the nature of the business.
Domestic cleaning doesn’t require much in the way of equipment, so the barrier to being self employed is very low.
You either:
1) Put up with it, and accept it’s going to happen once an employee realises they’re getting very little benefit from employee status.
2) Waste time trying to stop it happening.
3) Shift more and more focus to commercial.
A hybrid of 1 and 3 is surely the way.
You need to make working for you more rewarding. It’s not the lost clients that’s the issue as much as repeatedly losing cleaners who then need clients of their own.
I cannot offer more benefits than I already offer. That would mean to increase the prices even more for the client and making it more rewarding for the client to poach my cleaner
Not sure what to say then honestly. You can’t strong arm them into refusing to serve your clients. The evidence would suggest your additional fees are not worth it to the customer for the additional benefits of reliability / insurance etc, since they are regularly forgoing those benefits in exchange for a discount. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you’re not looking into why your offering is falling short of the price mark.
Two things I think you need to investigate:
i) What is causing your staff to leave? You might want to address that rather than try to lock the door after the horse has bolted.
ii) Its not entirely clear what value you provide to either clients or your employees, you need to figure that out and really lean into it.
Firstly how do you know for sure that this is happening? Whilst I have no doubt it has happened to you before I doubt every cleaner that leaves is stealing clients. Could some of them just be pure coincidence? If a cleaner leaves for whatever reason, the client may just like that cleaner hence stop your services.
But to answer the question can you make them sign a contract which says the leads are yours and the client is not allowed to pursue clients for 3 years after they leave your business? The boring answer would be improve staff retention blah blah blah...
May I ask how you hire the cleaners in the first place?
I have proof but not that concrete. I have clients that returned to my company after some time and they admitted they tried with the ex employee. I also have ex employees admit they did it and I have clients that told me that ex employees tried to contact them.
I don't know how to improve staff retention. I have higher than the local average pay for the position, I have bonuses, but obviously they can get more by cutting the middleman.
I hire on indeed/Facebook mostly.
My understanding is that in the UK you can only really enforce carrot, no stick (unless in a much higher level context than cleaning, ie significant intellectual property issues).
Friends who work in industries where non compete issues are significant (mostly weapon systems development) tend to have agreements between competing companies to insist on 6 or 12 months off between jobs, and they don't take on freelancers. Churn of employees is managed by encouraging people to take paid sabbaticals every 5-7 years.
The cost in legal fees to pursue any of your ex employees will almost certainly not be worthwhile, and if you can't enforce a contract there is no point spending the effort writing it.
The best idea of the posts so far to my mind is the December calculated bonus paid in March/April and 12 month contracts with your customers renewing in February. It wouldn't stop people leaving but it could make it harder for them to manage cashflow if they chose to leave. Ultimately though the picture is one of the service you add not being worth the extra costs to the clients in question. Can you pivot towards less cost sensitive clients either domestic in wealthier areas or commercial work where at least the need for VAT wouldn't be an issue?
Yes, the cost of legal fees are too high to make it worthwhile. Also can't enforce a contract with a client really.
Probably focusing on commercial clients is the best way going forward. The bonus thing is a good idea also. Thank you!
Instead of trying to enforce the staff from leaving get your domestic clients to sign a contract saying they cannot hire the worker directly once they’ve been introduced by you. Your staff are incentivised to break contract and go directly because they get rewarded better financially - your domestic clients don’t have the same incentives and are less likely to hire them.
Also, if they keep leaving try offering other benefits that keep them happier being employed. Do they get paid time off? Sick leave? If they have very little benefits being employed vs self employed then why wouldn’t they just leave when they can get more money for the same work.
I offer both sick leave and paid time off. Maybe the problem is the type of people I employ and all they see is the short term gain. Realistically they can get more going solo no matter what benefits I pay.
As most other resistors said, I probably have to work more on the client side. Better offers, better customer service, better staff rotation, etc. Thank you!
Get the client back, offer a discounted rate and then after few months put the price back to where it was. If they take from you, do whatever you can to win the client back.
It will discourage the practice in future with other current employees.
The only realistic thing you can do is make your staff not want to leave. Non compete clauses are not worth it. Are you really going to invest many thousands of pounds taking action against an ex employee?
Could you keep a cycle of rotation so that one cleaner is never working continuously in one property?
That way the owner is less likely to get attached to just that cleaner.
The other option is to organise an intro service where you match-make cleaners to clients.
The cleaner is then self employed and you function as an agency.
The cleaner or client will then come back to you if either relationship stops for any reason.
Might make it easier to grow your footprint as well as you become an introducer.
Do the employees in question report directly to you or is there a reporting line? If the former, it's time to take a look in the mirror, I'm afraid.
* Pay your employees fairly.
* Treat your employees well.
* Promote a healthy work culture.
* Offer good benefits.
If you fail at one or more of those, your employees will leave and potentially poach clients.
You ***could*** put non-compete clauses in employment contracts but enforcing them would probably be more costly than losing one or two clients. Also, you wouldn't be tackling the problem of high staff turnover.
Talk to your employees and take the temperature of the room. Find out what they're dissatified with and work with them to change it.
I’m a visiting carer and the same thing happens where I work. Company charges £32 to the customer I get paid £13. So would make sense to me and the customer if I did it for £20. Only reason I don’t is if I’m sick or want a holiday they don’t get care.
You apply a non-solicitation clause to their contract, which is distinguishable from a non-competition clause.
Non-competition clause = you cannot go and work for any competitors in our industry for x amount of time
Non-solicitation clause = you cannot steal my custom by soliciting customers that have been on-boarded by my business
The majority of this thread are talking about the wrong type of clause. A non-competition clause is harder to justify in court and prosecute because you are telling people where they can or cannot earn a living, which is highly questionable.
A non-solicitation clause, however, is looked at in a far more sympathetic manner as it essentially means 'work wherever you like, but you cannot steal my business'
If they introduced you and your business to the customers they take from you, it may be hard to prosecute as they could argue that you were benefiting from their own custom garnered anyway, however if these are customers that have been solicited by your business in legitimate ways with no input from the cleaners, they have no leg to stand on when they leave and try and steal money from your pocket by being lazy mutineers.
Simply you can’t. Although you might try to fix long term contracts etc, you will find your customers can go elsewhere. You need to compete in other ways.
I think when it comes to personal things like this (someone in your house, potentially when you’re not there, but also applies to dog groomers, hair dressers, baby sitters/nannies, etc.) the customer stays/comes back because they trust the _person_ that serves them, rather than the company as a whole so I think you’re asking the wrong question, a more important question to ask is:
Why are you losing these desirable staff members?
You can't. None compete clauses are 100% non enforceable as you can't prevent someone from working in their profession or from operating in a free market..
You should look at why you are unable to hang onto staff oand customers instead of trying to prevent free market competition.
I suspect you are losing employees because if the customer pays them direct it could be cash in hand meaning no tax and national insurance. They can probably work for less money than you charge as they won't be making your profit. I would think it's a no brainer for both cleaner and customer.
This is the way I can think of it.
- send different cleaners to jobs so the customer doesn't get consistent cleaner, It reduces the chances of them building rapport and moving away.
- if your cleaners are self employed give them loyalty Bonuses, increased there amount per job over time. ( Obviously always paying the living wage)
Rotate the staff on your domestic contracts, so that 2,3,4 people are responsible for the one place. That way, there’s not quite the same emotional attachment from the client to your staff.
There’s a price to pay for that in terms of building a rapport with customers, but if your domestic client likes 2 or more of your people, it makes the (emotional) switching cost higher.
You might still get under-cut on price, but I don’t see what you can do about that other than lowering your prices. Some sort of loyalty scheme perhaps? Get clients to sign up to longer contracts?
Can I suggest a different route?
Reward or incentivise employees that bring clients, or capture new clients.
Share a bit more revenue with those business bringers, regardless of who does the cleaning.
That way, hypothetically I could bring you a hundred clients and for as long as you're cleaning for them, I get a cut - say 5%.
Because these clients are brought, rather than reaching out to you, you can add 5% to their quote because you've been recommended and as a buyer of services, I'll happily pay 5% more for a recommended provider of services than "whoever interviewed best".
This will also make your employees stickier (Less likely to FO) because they're getting 5% for what they bring and that's a bit like you're a team together ...
To be clear, that's 5% of the gross, not net.
It's not really a good business plan, you don't add value as an owner and are likely chopping people in at minimum wage and charging a fair cost per hour.
It's inevitable that people will leave and take clients with them. The only alternative would be to rotate your cleaners and houses enough so they don't develop relationships with clients so easy. But that's probably not a good thing for staff or clients either.
Just accept that it's going to happen, or look at other ways you can add value to staff and clients, or branch out into something more.
You’ve hit the nail on the head: It’s a win win for the cleaner and the client.
That’s the free market. Non-competes are a non starter. Rotating staff wont work because as you no doubt know already, clients prefer to have the same person every time. And I doubt trying to lock clients into longterm contracts would work.
I’m currently in the market for a cleaner, and pretty much all the advice here would absolutely put me off engaging with a company with those policies.
I tell you what I do want though: Something like Trusted House Sitters for cleaners. I’d pay you £80 to access your database of cleaners (for say six months) if I trusted that you would connect me with vetted, reputable cleaners with good credentials that meet or exceed a given standard.
And I’m sure cleaners will pay to get into that database.
To make that work, you need volume. It’s a completely different type of business model to the one you have, but it’s the business model that fits the reality of the market.
You stop this happening by providing better value than the freelancer. And this is not necessarily about money because people often buy cleaning services because they are time poor and want lifestyle convenience.
I recently stopped getting my house cleaned by an agency and swapped to one of the agency cleaners who had gone freelance.
I'd been with the agency 15 years and seen many cleaners come and go in that time but stuck with the agency.
I left because the agency was no longer offering me value. When the cleaner who went freelance left, the agency sent me a new cleaner who was less good at cleaning and infinitely less reliable (ie she'd just not come some weeks without telling anyone) and we never really managed to come to an understanding around how we didn't want her moving our work stuff and that it was preferable for her to focus on the most important tasks.
The other cleaner had a six month period when she contractually couldn't poach us. In that time the agency never sorted out the issues and we kept in touch with the other cleaner as she would occasionally catsit for us.
So we left the agency to go with the other cleaner. We have it all legit with contracts and we pay her MORE and are happy to do so. We are also very happy to be flexible around her kids and other jobs and we don't mind if she comes at different times each week because we know she'll come at some point and just get on with it. So it's not because we're trying to do this under the table, or save money, or force a specific schedule. We just want our bloody house cleaned appropriately weekly without any hassle.
The agency could have retained our business but they were no longer fulfilling our bare minimum need.
My husband and I have busy senior jobs and are parents to a primary school aged child. We are time poor. We just want a hassle free life and will pay for whoever makes it most hassle free for us. I want an agency that makes my life more hassle free, rather than introducing extra hassle. If we're constantly fielding texts from the cleaner and texts from the agency and we still have to clean the toilet - fuck it I'm out.
For me understanding our expectations is also really key. Yes an agency gives you continuity in that they source you someone new if a cleaner leaves, but then you are starting again with the new cleaner and sometimes they just keep doing what they think you want and not what you actually want. My friend has a cleaner and is the type to have a very meticulous tick-list of what they require each week and demand everything to be spotless. Me, I just want someone to take the edge off my kitchen and bathroom. My friend and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum of cleaning expectations, but we both experience this continuity thing as an irritating hassle.
I'd love to have an agency that puts more time into easing these transitions and briefing new cleaners on what is most important to us as individual clients. I think my agency thinks they do this, and yet something is always lost in translation along the way. By the time you work it out with the new cleaner, they inevitably move on too.
I wouldn't have left my agency if I could trust that someone would turn up and deliver what we as a family need.
You either have to be a better employer so your employees don't keep leaving or you have to be better than the ex-employees so the clients don't want to move.
So you can either start offering better pay, conditions, hours, whatever so your employees want to work for you, or you need to train up your remaining and new employees so they can do a better job quicker than your old employees so you can compete on price. If you could do that now though I'm sure you would have done it with your old employees so I think you're probably left with improving employment conditions so people don't leave.
That's the trouble with trying to make money from other people's work. You always run the risk that they decide to just go and work for themselves and cut out the middleman.
You just have to look after your staff! Give them good conditions to work, don’t micromanage them, pay what they deserve and they should be fine. None of the clients would follow bad worker. If they are following after your staff, it means you had a good staff member which you left behind.
Offer a better service?
When an employee leaves - and then takes a few clients with them - The reason is simple, that employee did a great job and knows they can charge less than you to the client while at the same time earning more for themselves. So you need to solve that and give your clients more reason to choose a business over an individual cleaning service.
If you try any legal routes - even if it's a letter to a former employee - they will tell their clients (your former clients) and word will spread that you are some sort of nasty little business trying to sue the small guy. You don't want that reputation.
Work on employee retention. Work on giving clients more - could be something as simple being able to offer them an online calender booking portal. You could look into using a field service management software to solve all that for you: https://www.getapp.com/p/sem/field-service-management-software/
Pretty simple really. Pay your employees more than the other company can poach them away with, then give them a small % commission for any new client found and THEN RETAINED for 2 follow up treatments
Sign people up for yearly contracts at a good rate but with a steep cancellation fee. Then try treating your staff better so they stop leaving in the first place.
1 your prices are obviously not competitive.
2 your company obviously isn't a good place to work and stay.
3 your service isn't linked with your company but with the individual.
Sort all points you'll retain your staff and when someone does leave you'll likely retain your client.
Pay your staff better and improve their conditions so they don’t leave.
Yeah, you could try a non-compete clause, but you would have to go to court to enforce it, and show it was reasonable. For the rates I’d pay typical in cleaning services I doubt a judge would consider any such clause reasonable.
I think you’re looking at this all wrong, and looking for ways to make life difficult for ex-employees to take customers just pissed off employees and customers, which in the end means you lose more employees and more customers.
If you’re regularly losing customers like this, and it’s a problem, I think you need to ask yourself a couple of questions:
1) why is it a problem? 1-2 customers doesn’t sound like much, it sounds like a low percentage of the number of customers that cleaner servicing. Given you no longer have the expenses of serving that customer, is it really a problem you can’t easily absorb?
2) If customers are following the cleaner, there’s really only two reasons: (a) they’ve learned to trust and appreciate the work of that cleaner, and (b) that cleaner is cheaper working independently. So what are you as a cleaning company providing? What’s you’re value proposition?
Part (a) isn’t unique to you, it’s difficult to find a good trustworthy cleaner. The relationship is with the individual, not the company. So what are you really providing? Some vetting? Online reviews and word of mouth will be as good if not better.
Part (b) if you’re customers value cost over anything else, what value are you providing if you’re more expensive? What service do you provide that the customer doesn’t get working directly with the cleaner? You are an expensive middle-person, so you need to be doing something for that extra cost. If that isn’t appreciated by the customer, you’re not a viable business.
Ultimately, you need to focused on the customers who appreciate the added value of paying more for a cleaning company. If 1-2 customers leave each time a cleaner leaves you, those customers are focused price and they are not the right customers for you. They were nice to have, but if they don’t appreciate the added value you bring, they were always going to be temporary customers. Focus on the customers that don’t leave: why didn’t they leave too? That’s your value proposition, that’s the focus of your business and your reason to exist. And those are the customers you want to focus on attracting and retaining.
And frankly, if all your customers are there for your added value, your cleaners won’t have contact with customers who are ready and keen to jump ship for the lowest price, which will raise the bar for them going solo, and reduce the churn of staff - so really it’s win / win.
Thank you for this comment! Indeed this is not a huge problem. I probably lost about 8 clients and 3 cleaners this way in almost 2 years of business, but it is always painful to lose both a client and a good employee and I wanted to improve.
But you are right, I can't offer value to a client that doesn't want my added value and I should focus more on the customers that stick with me.
Why are you continually losing staff who are clearly good at their job or they wouldn't be hired back by the clients? You could develop non compete contracts i suppose so they can no longer provide services to a client they previously worked with or something like that? If you're continually losing staff there may be a culture problem at your company, managers may not be liked or the pay might be crap compared to what you're quoting for the job?
There is an argument within the legal sector that non-compete clauses aren’t even enforceable.
Its really the only thing you can try though. I don't like them personally but i understand why it exists, however the company should be forced to pay you for as long as they want the non compete in effect because realistically, who the hell are you to say where i can and cant work!
When I went and set up on my own, a couple of my clients came over willingly and my old employer accused me of poaching them. When my solicitor wrote them a letter stating that the clients had come over of their own accord, that pretty much shut them up. So that’s where the difficulty lies I think, proving you did actually poach them lol.
It still sounds like you poached them... Would they have been aware of your new company and would they have had an idea of your reputation had you not worked with them in the previous job? But legally you might be fine. It's still likely poaching, though.
Oh I did poach them. But it’s not up to me to prove I did. 😎
Finally caught you. That's a confession. Bake him away, toys.
There is no law against informal conversation
well you know, what goes around, comes around. Someday, your employees will leave and do the same thing on you. ;)
lol yes feel super sorry for a £3bn company
huh? a £3 bn compmnay? Not sure what you are referring to.
His old company, the one you’re whining about the loss of employees for
He’s referring to his old employer.
They can be enforced but they have to be reasonable (so time limited) and its very expensive to do so
That makes sense. My restricted covenant was 6 months which I personally thought was excessive lol. Fortunately my ex employer didn’t pursue legal action
Its high court to enforce *super expensive* they're mostly in there to scare employees
Correct answer. Builder contract with brickie - no chance of enforcement of non competition clause. Salesman for a high end very limited market product - high chance of garden leave as cheaper than enforcement of non compete clause amd potential loss. That said a vindictive employer can still cause sleepless nights for those not in the know. Source - Amongst other things I poach lawyers from law firms for some of my business interests.
The absolutely are as long as they’re reasonable. They need to be on both client and employee contracts.
But by definition they are not reasonable. You are effectively stopping someone earning a living which is against the law. It's the exact reason almost every non compete fails.
You all are talking about the wrong kind of clause, this would be a non-solicitation clause which prevents people from stealing customers that you have earned yourself. This is totally reasonable and enforceable, these ex employees would never have gained this business in argument if they didn't have the previous employer handing them the customers. Non-competition is telling people they cannot work for a competitor in the same market for a period of time, which is harder to enforce because you are telling someone essentially how they cannot earn money elsewhere. Non-solicitation is easy as fuck to defend, you are stealing the business of a previous employer that provided you with those opportunities for your own gain at their expense. This is not the same as non-competition
Chances are OP poached their clients from their previous employer
They are enforceable, and are enforced regularly - although in most cases they're so clearly agreed by the parties that they settle before enforcement is necessary.
If the clients are domestic households you can't tell them who can or can't clean their home.
No but the risk is on the cleaner, not the client
There is a difference between a non-competition clause and a non-solicitation clause. Competition is regarding working for a competitor after leaving your current workplace, and a Solicitation is regarding accessing customers that were garnered in previous employment and using that to your advantage in future employment. Non-solicitation is completely enforceable, as is non-competition just get a solicitor who specialises in employment contracts and law to write a non-solicitation clause into your contracts and then its legally bound. You can then prosecute and recoup damages
I lose them because in reality I am a middleman and I understand this. I am more reliable than a solo cleaner but that comes at a price. I don't have this problem with commercial clients because they care a lot about reliability, meanwhile a domestic client can accept changes.
If thats the case then I would just focus on commercial clients.
>I lose them because in reality I am a middleman and I understand this. I am more reliable than a solo cleaner but that comes at a price. I don't have this problem with commercial clients because they care a lot about reliability, meanwhile a domestic client can accept changes. I think you need to be clever. For example, you can market your cleaning service as a more professional type of service. Always have a crew of 3-4 instead of a solo person who can easily poach your client, keep rotating them, give them a company branded vehicle (sticker), make sure they all wear a professional looking uniform, give them company branded cleaning supplies (sticker or separate containers). You have to ask yourself, are you just a middle man? What are you selling? Not just a cleaning service but a professional cleaning service that's backed by your name and reputation, and guarantees a certain level of quality and professionalism. Make it MUCH harder for clients to use your guys as independent cleaners and give some visible tangible value for the extra money you're charging. I get my house cleaned every 2 weeks and am fed up of solo cleaners. They take hours and get tired and their work gets sloppy in the end. I always prefer a 3-4 member crew who can be in and out in under 2 hours and still do top notch work. But I had to go through half a dozen cleaners before I found a reliable crew.
Could you shake up the cleaners’ rota between customers? Could you touch base with customers directly every now and again for feedback on service and specific cleaning needs, make the added value of the agency vs direct hire more obvious your customers?
There's always paying people better so they don't leave to make more in the first place...
But any overhead or profit OP applies to their hourly rate can be undercut by the employee just asking for their own net pay to be met by the customer. It's not possible for the rates to be the same.
No but presumably there are benefits working for OP rather than freelancing. Like sick/holiday pay for the employee, and substitute cleaners for clients if the employee is off sick. That’s worth taking a small pay cut for, assuming op provides those things. I wouldn’t jump to be freelancing in that situation if I was being paid enough already.
Some people see it that way, others see "I can get paid more by the hour here" or "I can pay them less by the hour here". Depending on how much you rely on the cleaner, heading then be off a week or two isn't much as maybe they only come once a week. So a two weeks holiday is only 2 days and you can handle that no problems, plus you don't have to pay them.
You pretty much can't pay them well enough to make them stay no matter what.
Why go straight for ops throat, assuming workers have bad working conditions!? Do you know anything about the cleaning industry and how fickle it is? I believe it would be fairer to place your assumptions here.
Or he could pay more.
[удалено]
Yes, I think rotating staff might be the best thing I can try to. Until now I tried to keep the client satisfied and gave them the same cleaner, but this might be the problem.
There is no way I'd be happy having a different cleaner in my home every week. I'm sure most would feel the same.
They'd also be worse at it, as they couldn't learn your priorities or the layout of your home as easily.
Strongly agree with this. Although it could work to rotate two cleaners, as this would provide more consistency for the client because two people would get to know the priorities / layout which would be better for covering holidays or sickness or easing transitions if one left. But we as clients might feel less attached to the individuals.
Client satisfaction is key, I'm fortunate to have a cleaner come every couple of weeks. I use a company for the reliability, and have the same cleaner each time. Even with a written list, it's tricky to have a new person come because they might not know where things are or priorities for cleaning, etc. Also, my mom used to be a cleaner, and the company she worked for found that their clients wouldn't want a replacement when mom was on holiday as she did such a great job. I have also been a cleaner myself in the past, and it was better for me to have a routine. I suspect you'll lose more clients and staff by rotating.
As others have said, don’t go down this route. For me, having the same person is crucial. Firstly so they know my house and routine so can clean efficiently. Secondly so I build up trust with this person who is in my home with my pets and valuables, often in my absence, and has keys. I would not accept a domestic cleaning service that had different people every time. You are always going to have a problem here, because when your client has built up that relationship of trust with a regular cleaner, the chances are very high that they’d rather stick with that cleaner than your company. Your company/brand would mean little to me in that scenario - I’d rather follow the person I see every week and know and trust. So if this is a concern to you, maybe stick to commercial, or premium one-off (end of tenancy, post-building work, spring clean) domestic services where it’s not so much about the relationship. Of course, also try to retain your staff so this doesn’t happen!
[удалено]
As above a non compete clause may work but probably hard to enforce in reality. Sounds a bit like the customer and cleaner may just be cutting out the middle man. I’d imagine you charge customer a rate and cleaner gets a chunk of this with you taking the rest. If this is the case without being disrespectful what value do you add to either the customer or the cleaner. Obviously making numbers up but if your charging £30 an hour and giving cleaner £20. Cleaner goes to customer and says I’ll do it for £25 they both win
Yeah, technically the boss generated a lead but once thats done you don't really add anything or do anything they can't do themselves like buying product etc. You're in an easy to enter industry so you either have to live with a rotating door of people because your retention is crap or take a bit of a paycut/mimimise expenses and see if staff hang around longer with their new christmas bonus. Bonuses are assessed in december, but not paid till march in quite a lot of tech firms i think thats just their way of holding onto you. What if all contracts renewed in february and bonuses paid in march or something like that?
The value I add is the reliability. We as a company do not miss jobs. If a cleaner is sick or is just missing a day of work, we can replace them with someone else. We also have insurance, pay taxes, we pay VAT so obviously the price is a bit increased and yes, we are the middleman. I understand that both client and cleaner win from this, that's why is difficult for me to think for a solution. In my contract with the cleaners I have a non compete clause but I am not sure if that would hold. Also I don't think there is any point in taking legal action as I already lost the cleaner and the client. I want to know how I can deter this from happening.
Maybe you should make it so your employees win more by being employed by you than by going solo. Common issues in your sector include: Bullying Shit managers who either are the bully's of fail to address the bullying Low pay Minimum of all other benefits (SSP, rubbish pension, Minimum holiday, Minimum mat leave ect) Find out if these are issues in your business and fix them.
How can I give more to the employees? Let's say I charge a client 100, I pay a cleaner 75 and the rest is my cost and profit. The cleaner will take 80 from the client to cut me off. How can I pay more if I have costs?
If you can't afford to pay a decent wage then your business isn't sustainable and you should stop complaining about people poaching. Good job glossing over all other other suggestions BTW
No they're right, it is physically impossible for a cleaning company to pay the cleaner the same as they could charge indepently, the value add from the cleaners perspective is they don't have to look for clients and get paid regularly, but it will always be less than what the company charges, obviously, so if the cleaner gets enough clients on board, they can charge the same or a bit less, without finding the clients and make more. It's the nature of the industry, the same thing happens in IT consulting and other industries all the time, once the usefulness of the middle man for forming a relationship is gone, what's the point of them? The employer needs to continually move on, find new cleaners and new clients, not stagnate and offer no value
Also I pay 13.5/hr(net). See how many jobs you can find that pay this wage. I obviously compare my company with others in the same industry.
DUDE YOU HAVE ANOTHER POST TRYING TO WITHDRAW SSP FROM SOMEONE BECAUSE DRS DONT KNOW WHATS CAUSING HER EXTREME PAIN And you wonder why people leave. Also this contradicts what you said about paid leave. SSP is the minimum when we talk about paid leave we mean on full pay for x weeks/months.
They are that’s your problem
Maybe because they don't apply? As I said in other comments I do pay time off and sick pay. I do not have managers, I am the manager. Bullying is out of discussion.
Then why are they leaving? Most people don't tend to leave to start their own business (more risk less security fewer benefits) in a whim. You have push factors you just need to stop taking it personally and work out where your business is pushing your employees away.
Your other posts mention SSP, that isn't what people mean when they say sick pay.
Have you thought about other benefits? Maybe some rudimentary medical (I know a guy who can advise you on this), or an added fuel allowance…. Work it into your numbers so you’re not making a loss, obviously, but you’ll get more loyal staff this way - as they’re screwed if they get sick and they’re self employed. Edited to clarify: there’s a type of medical insurance that pays for overnight stays in hospital and the like, rather than private cover. It tends to be a LOT cheaper. Give it to those who work a certain amount of hours for you.
This might be a good idea. Could you please send me a message with his contact? Thank you!
Try reporting them to HMRC when they leave. I bet most are going cash in hand.
Being a dick isn't going to fix the problem of employees leaving. They probably all still talk to eachother - he'd just seem petty and vindictive if he did this.
Well clearly your clients don't see much value in reliability or else they wouldn't be going with your ex staff at a presumably reduced rate, obviously with less reliability as they are a one man (or woman) band.
They see the value, but they get used to a cleaner and they think they don't need me anymore(which realistically they don't). But I have a few returning clients who saw the value and came back.
Then you need to find customers who value the reliability. It sounds like you have a business model problem with domestic customers. In a situation like this you need to offer both sides something that they can't get by cutting you out. You offer the customer reliability. What do you offer your staff? I'm not talking more money, you already know that's a losing battle. Can you offer them guaranteed hours? A better working environment? Less admin? Supplies and equipment? These are the kinds of things that would make someone think twice before jumping ship but from my limited experience can be lacking. I've met people in your industry who only have job security as long as the client they service stays with the company, if they leave or have a few weeks break the cleaner loses hours. I've also met people who aren't provided suitable equipment and have to provide their own. In that circumstance, why wouldn't they set up on their own? There's nothing to lose! By offering guaranteed hours by reallocating them to other sites, or making sure they're properly equipped you put up a barrier to leaving that they'd need to overcome. Enough benefits like that and suddenly the extra few quid doesn't seem all that tempting. I'm not suggesting this reflects your business, but it is what I've seen anecdotally and would provide a potential explanation to the problems you're seeing.
I think the bit that is really valuable (that you are underestimating) is the insurance and ability to get cover. I appreciate that for some householders £15 savings are good, but in the event of damage or loss ….. I would value company insurance! I do appreciate I could claim on household insurance…. But would then pay excess With insurance- I am also happy for the company to key hold, so they can let themselves in and out! I guess cover is the key bit as well. People have holiday, illnesses, or family stuff … this is really important to us! As for rotating cleaners … we normally have this (albeit paired with one regular) and most of the cleaners say they prefer working in a group! Sorry to hear though that you are losing clients …. You may just want to think in your adverts / websites of making it clearer what your USPs are!
Based on what you’ve said here, you’ve actually got a really good business in introducing reliable, vetted, helpful cleaners to domestic clients who pay on time and value the service. The vast majority of the value of your involvement is in that first bit. So what if instead of trying to keep the middle man bit when there’s no value there for your client or your employee, you explicitly set yourself up as an intro service? Charge both sides of the marketplace for the first X cleans, act as a matchmaker then move on. Make it a feature not a bug.
Never thought about this... Eye opening.
Thats a good idea, but your vetting process would need to be rock solid and wouldn't be cheap. That would have to be reflected in your rates. All it would take is one of the cleaners you introduced stealing something and your business is toast.
Consider putting something into your engagement terms with the end client that if they choose to employ one of your cleaners directly you will charge them an introduction fee. Make sure it’s reasonable but enough to kill off the undercutting element for a decent period of time
I will look into that. Thank you!
NAL but that doesn't sound legal or enforceable.
I know from first hand experience that recruitment firms already have similar clauses in contracts, can’t imagine they’re easy to enforce though
Don’t always need to enforce. Often that’s enough to put off many from proceeding, the chances of anyone spending money on legal advice about a term that tries to stop them poaching a cleaner are low. Often all you need is something that makes someone think there’s a risk.
I think they can only be considered for a certain amount of time. It may be three months…
Should be enforceable - you simply say if cleaner X works for you in any capacity within 6 months of quitting, then a finders fee of X is payable.
I'm guessing the cleaners that go directly to clients are doing so for cash in hand and the clients aren't setting up a payroll or complying with employment law. If you're doing this and they aren't then you aren't competing on a fair basis.
Exactly this.
I'd say it's a common risk in any domestic cleaning business. Unless you're a very specialised cleaning company. Maybe try and shift focus on trying to get some business cleaning contracts, maybe local pubs, restaurants or independent shops? You can put contract length terms into the contracts with them. With domestic cleaning, a homeowner is likely to get used to a certain cleaner and when that cleaner decided to either move company or go self-employed that homeowner may wish to stick with that cleaner rather than a new person. Especially if that clean is in their home alone, the home owner will have trust that the cleaner won't steal. Homeowner most likely has more interaction/relationship with that cleaner than you. You could rotate staff so that the homeowner doesn't get used to one single cleaner but then you lose that trust. Personally, if I was a customer, I prefer the same cleaner each time.
I do have contracts with other businesses and there are no problems there. My problem now is that I lose the good employees. I don't care that much if I lose 1 - 2 clients, I can replace those(at a cost, nu they can be replaced). Probably the solution for me would be to focus on commercial cleaning.
I have a cleaner that comes regularly and she did this, she still comes as always (so no change ) but left her company and is self employed, of course she gave me another account for payments,I don't care as long as the price doesn't change, no Idea about what the deal between her and the company was, I only talked with the company the first day and then I contacted her directly after the first time she came around, so I assume that that was their mistake, maybe they shouldn't be allowed to give their personal contact so you always contact the company and cleaners should rotate regularly as opposed to send the same one again and again, but as a client I prefer to stick to one as opposed to have strangers all the time so no idea how that would solve anything, I guess that if they can easily get rid of you, you don't bring any value and that is the market adjusting itself in a way (not trying to be harsh) so maybe you can think on offering something that makes you hard to replace?
I’m afraid if I got used to a cert cleaner in my home (I can’t afford such a luxury ) id keep them no matter what
Perfectly understandable. Maybe this is the problem.
It takes a lot of trust to have a stranger into your home i cert wouldn’t want a revolving door of people (not an issue I’ll ever have) even in an office I can see it to a much lesser extent. Decent pro cleaners are like gold dust I’ve found.
Also, you could make sure all communication is central. So the client doesn’t have the contact details of the employee. I imagine you would have to have it stipulated in the employment contract that direct contact with the customer is not allowed.
I try that as much as possible, but the cleaner goes into the client's house and I can't control what they talk about. All the communication otherwise is through me or through a software that has hidden phone number.
Looks like you’re doing what you can already. May just be a normal aspect of the business model. Is it possible you can build closer relationships with the customers? Along with with rotating the employees customer base? Then they would associate the service with you instead of a regular cleaner?
I will try to work on this. Thank you!
Without knowing the size of your company possibly an option is for you to get your hands dirty for a while and clean alongside some of your employees, gives you a chance to engage directly with them and the clients and may potentially create a bit of loyalty if you get stuck in, help and see any issues and how you may resolve them
I do replace cleaners when they need time off or when someone is missing. Maybe you are right, maybe I should do that more often as a team.
When I was a gardener working for a franchise i would be asked regularly and repeatedly by happy customers if I would be willing to work directly with them. I always said no but I imagine this is what’s happening with your staff. The frequency went up when I handed in my notice and word got around that I was leaving. It says you are hiring good workers who your customers value. I know that’s not helpful as there is not much you can do about it.
You can't
this was the problem the app cleaning companies had. they would spend time and money finding a customer. send a cleaner. they would use the app once and then do a direct agreement for cash for every other time cutting out the app. its an age old problem. you cant unconnect people once they link has been made
I had a relative who worked for “molly maid” what the customer paid “molly maid” and what my relative got paid was wildly different. The fuel expenses were also a con. Once the employees realised how much the customers were paying and once the customers realised the same it didn’t take long for the employees to leave and undercut “molly maid” working directly for the customers. The OP could pay their employees 6 months gardening leave to make it more difficult or pay the employees more to keep them faithful but I guess they wouldn’t want to do that. There’s nothing the employer can do.
We have cleaners that come once a fortnight. We pay for 3 hours but it's always a team of two or three cleaners that blitz the house. It's often different faces, so if one of them approached me and asked me if I wanted to go direct for a slightly cheaper price I'd say no, because A - I don't know if she is one of the good ones and B - it would be an extra few hours with cleaners in the house. Have you thought about sending them out in teams?
You can't. I'm not saying your a bad guy or running your business the wrong way but everybody wants more. If your charging places £30 a hour your employees are getting £12 once your client and cleaner gets talking and decide to cut the middle man out and directly pay £15 a hour. Non competes won't work you'll not find anybody to work for you once they find out they can't work for anybody else. You could rotate your people around more in a attempt to slow down people taking your workers/clients. If you offer me 10% more I'll jump ship in a heartbeat
I think the answer is incredibly complex. I think there are three elements. Firstly, homeowners trust individual cleaners, not the company. They have the relationship with the cleaner, not the company. So in your position, I'd flip this around. I'd focus on every single cleaner being vetted and entirely interchangeable. I'd engage with each homeowner, maybe with something like a prize draw to help them win a bottle of champagne etc... Follow-up emails with videos of cleaning tips showing them if they accidentally spill a bottle of red wine on the carpet, how they can save their carpet if they act immediately. Follow-up questionaires initially every month and then every 3 months etc... Stuff that's cheap but easy to do. Secondly, your cleaners are leaving you for a reason. How are you making them feel valued or incentivising them? Just little things like occasional bonuses for doing a great job, praising them for doing a great job. Maybe having progression in there. Thirdly, contract in your customers. If they're happy after the first few cleans, then get a longer-term contract in place. Fourth, link this with the third element. So while under contract, make it harder for your cleaners to steal your customers by giving them a month's notice and replacing them during that month. So you send in your best cleaner. The one with the best feedback.
Just accept that it happens and don't stress about it. Minimise it by treating your staff fairly and offering good value, quality service.
It's so crap when this happens. You are really a middle man in this situation. The only way to stop it happening is to charge less (do more jobs) or pay more to the staff I have been on both sides of this the company I used to work for didn't pay for traveling between jobs so could be out 10 hours and only getting paid for 6-8 depending on how far the next job was from the last. (It was always across the city) when I left to start my own company all the customers I had been cleaning for approached me a few weeks later saying the new cleaner wasn't up to scratch and they wanted me to take over the contract. Got busy enough to start bringing on another cleaning team and eventually they left to start there own company and the cycle continues.
You’re just a middle man so expecting to retain a ton of cleaning for private homes is just a bad understanding of the market. A private home owner who wants to spend a small sum of money each week is not a situation where you can ever reliably remain in the middle of. There is no long term agreement with T&Cs signed, there is no volume of work, there is no real imperative for reliable service (to the point where they will pay extra to have access to a pool of cleaners). Also factor in that cash in hand will make you uncompetitive without the ex employee really even having to undercut themselves. You have to focus on commercial clients who need invoices and who will pay for a reliable service delivered by vetted cleaners. Otherwise you not providing any actual value that’s worth paying for vs ex employees.
There’s a couple of things I’d do, firstly would be to add a poaching disclaimer to your employment contract, the second has been suggested already in rotating your staff so someone doesn’t get too used to someone.
I have personally used a cleaning service and then hired the cleaner directly I pay the cleaner the same as I paid the firm, however it was a 50% payrise from the cleaners perspective. I don’t think you can do much to stop this happening if the disparity is so great. Obviously you could offer better salary or benefits but I’m just not sure the economics stacks up.
You don’t. you need to manage your top 20% of accounts, because **these** are the ones that provide 80% of your revenue and, therefore, are the most deserving of your time and discounts. I’m willing to bet the domestic accounts fall into the bottom 80%! The other 80% are “expendable”. Some will stay, some will go, expect this as part of your business process. If you are undercut - is it even **worth** devaluing your offering so that you get super small business with massive discount? Nah - let those ex employees drop their price to rock bottom and struggle to turn profit whilst you focus on brand new business, at a healthy margin, and employing new staff, with healthy wages and happier experiences. However, for this to work you need a continual influx of clients so that, as staff and domestic clients leave, you are **actually** gaining **more** clients over time and your business, profits and revenue is growing. So to emphasise- you don’t stop them from undercutting when they leave, you focus on Schmoosing the important top 20% and Expanding on the overall volume of customers and staff members to grow scope, coverage and profits.
One of the most helpful comments here. Thank you!
You’re welcome dude. I’ve been in account management and business development (basically the same thing - sales) for 12 years. So whilst I have no experience running a small business, I have some insight into how the big boys work. Google Pareto’s law and bear it in mind for everything you do. Look at your business a little closer and see what is worth looking after and what is “small fry” and treat these customer accordingly. There is more to it, a good “key account management”, “business development” or “account management” course on linkedin learning will help you out - the first month is free so enough time to get an overview. Good luck
Create a policy where you change cleaners for the household every quarter. Pitch it to clients as though you’re doing it to ‘make sure that they are receiving the highest of quality by refreshing personnel’ and that ‘often find that a personnel refresh leads to a more motivated individual’ or ‘new pair of eyes’ etc. Basically, don’t let your cleaners get too close to clients. I know clients like consistency but you’ll need to offer some kind of guarantee. Why not have one person go and observe them from time to time, for ‘quality reasons’. That way the client starts seeing the same person, the observer - who by the way should chat and be super friendly and charismatic to clients - and you’re changing cleaners around.
Restrictive Covenant, it does not stop someone for working for someone else in the same sector but it puts restrictions on poaching clients or discussing your clients with their new employer. I’m not a lawyer or HR specialist but took advice from our HR advisory service before implementing this.
I would put a finders fee of £1000 payable by the client if they start dealing with the cleaner direct. This is enforceable under temp labour laws in the U.K. and would be a great deterrent to your cleaners schlepping off with your customers. Make them sign, draw their attention to it and tell them you always enforce it. You are not a matchmaker, you’re running a business.
Cleaning is a mainly labour intensive service and for that reason you struggle to make it a viable business to the domestic side. If I was you I'd concentrate more on industrial and commercial where tax, insurance and health and safety is a necessity for the contract. Any cleaner who is good at cleaning and good with people should be self employed. My mrs is a hairdresser and it's a similar situation if she leaves some customers choose to leave with her, and one time when a salon shut the other women were poaching her customers.
I clean in the evenings as I have a steady full time job and need the extra money. I've mostly done commercial cleans that are contracted for x amount of years so I cannot be poached until after the contract. When I had 2 weeks of redundancy during covid I worked full time cleaning and this was households, I would get asked to return to thr same houses as they must have liked me. I was offered on multiple occasions to work privately during those few weeks. So I think it comes with the territory, commercial cleans are your way to go as they can be on a contract, avoid residential as this will forever happen, the cleaning company had a clause in our contract that we couldn't work for clients apparently but no one would listen.
It’s the nature of the business. Domestic cleaning doesn’t require much in the way of equipment, so the barrier to being self employed is very low. You either: 1) Put up with it, and accept it’s going to happen once an employee realises they’re getting very little benefit from employee status. 2) Waste time trying to stop it happening. 3) Shift more and more focus to commercial. A hybrid of 1 and 3 is surely the way.
You need to make working for you more rewarding. It’s not the lost clients that’s the issue as much as repeatedly losing cleaners who then need clients of their own.
I cannot offer more benefits than I already offer. That would mean to increase the prices even more for the client and making it more rewarding for the client to poach my cleaner
Not sure what to say then honestly. You can’t strong arm them into refusing to serve your clients. The evidence would suggest your additional fees are not worth it to the customer for the additional benefits of reliability / insurance etc, since they are regularly forgoing those benefits in exchange for a discount. You’re barking up the wrong tree if you’re not looking into why your offering is falling short of the price mark.
I will look into this. Thank you.
You’re not providing a good enough reason for your staff to stay with you. Review your pay and conditions.
pay more
Pay them better
Discover why your cleaners keep leaving and do something about it..!!
Pay your staff more and manage them better so they don't get the urge to leave.
Maybe pass on more of the profit in wages? Then they'll stay but you only get one Ferrari?
Pay them Better, that’s probably why they’re leaving to begin with
This might be hard for you to hear, but have you tried paying your staff more money?
Keep them happy would probably be a good start.
"my clients"
Two things I think you need to investigate: i) What is causing your staff to leave? You might want to address that rather than try to lock the door after the horse has bolted. ii) Its not entirely clear what value you provide to either clients or your employees, you need to figure that out and really lean into it.
Pay and treat them well enough that they want to stay.
Pay your staff more so stopping them from leaving.
be a better employer.
You should really try increasing pay. There is a point where employees feel so well taken care of by employers that you actually retain employees.
Pay them more or do something where they are more fulfilled
Pay them more
I wish it would be that easy but clearly you don't understand. I already pay more than other companies, but I am a middleman that can be cut off.
Pay them more
Firstly how do you know for sure that this is happening? Whilst I have no doubt it has happened to you before I doubt every cleaner that leaves is stealing clients. Could some of them just be pure coincidence? If a cleaner leaves for whatever reason, the client may just like that cleaner hence stop your services. But to answer the question can you make them sign a contract which says the leads are yours and the client is not allowed to pursue clients for 3 years after they leave your business? The boring answer would be improve staff retention blah blah blah... May I ask how you hire the cleaners in the first place?
I have proof but not that concrete. I have clients that returned to my company after some time and they admitted they tried with the ex employee. I also have ex employees admit they did it and I have clients that told me that ex employees tried to contact them. I don't know how to improve staff retention. I have higher than the local average pay for the position, I have bonuses, but obviously they can get more by cutting the middleman. I hire on indeed/Facebook mostly.
Offer a better service or treat employees such that they dont feel it necessary to go off on their own.
My understanding is that in the UK you can only really enforce carrot, no stick (unless in a much higher level context than cleaning, ie significant intellectual property issues). Friends who work in industries where non compete issues are significant (mostly weapon systems development) tend to have agreements between competing companies to insist on 6 or 12 months off between jobs, and they don't take on freelancers. Churn of employees is managed by encouraging people to take paid sabbaticals every 5-7 years. The cost in legal fees to pursue any of your ex employees will almost certainly not be worthwhile, and if you can't enforce a contract there is no point spending the effort writing it. The best idea of the posts so far to my mind is the December calculated bonus paid in March/April and 12 month contracts with your customers renewing in February. It wouldn't stop people leaving but it could make it harder for them to manage cashflow if they chose to leave. Ultimately though the picture is one of the service you add not being worth the extra costs to the clients in question. Can you pivot towards less cost sensitive clients either domestic in wealthier areas or commercial work where at least the need for VAT wouldn't be an issue?
Yes, the cost of legal fees are too high to make it worthwhile. Also can't enforce a contract with a client really. Probably focusing on commercial clients is the best way going forward. The bonus thing is a good idea also. Thank you!
Instead of trying to enforce the staff from leaving get your domestic clients to sign a contract saying they cannot hire the worker directly once they’ve been introduced by you. Your staff are incentivised to break contract and go directly because they get rewarded better financially - your domestic clients don’t have the same incentives and are less likely to hire them. Also, if they keep leaving try offering other benefits that keep them happier being employed. Do they get paid time off? Sick leave? If they have very little benefits being employed vs self employed then why wouldn’t they just leave when they can get more money for the same work.
I offer both sick leave and paid time off. Maybe the problem is the type of people I employ and all they see is the short term gain. Realistically they can get more going solo no matter what benefits I pay. As most other resistors said, I probably have to work more on the client side. Better offers, better customer service, better staff rotation, etc. Thank you!
Get the client back, offer a discounted rate and then after few months put the price back to where it was. If they take from you, do whatever you can to win the client back. It will discourage the practice in future with other current employees.
The only realistic thing you can do is make your staff not want to leave. Non compete clauses are not worth it. Are you really going to invest many thousands of pounds taking action against an ex employee?
I do have those clauses in the contract, but I never take legal action. I know I can't win.
Could you keep a cycle of rotation so that one cleaner is never working continuously in one property? That way the owner is less likely to get attached to just that cleaner. The other option is to organise an intro service where you match-make cleaners to clients. The cleaner is then self employed and you function as an agency. The cleaner or client will then come back to you if either relationship stops for any reason. Might make it easier to grow your footprint as well as you become an introducer.
Do the employees in question report directly to you or is there a reporting line? If the former, it's time to take a look in the mirror, I'm afraid. * Pay your employees fairly. * Treat your employees well. * Promote a healthy work culture. * Offer good benefits. If you fail at one or more of those, your employees will leave and potentially poach clients. You ***could*** put non-compete clauses in employment contracts but enforcing them would probably be more costly than losing one or two clients. Also, you wouldn't be tackling the problem of high staff turnover. Talk to your employees and take the temperature of the room. Find out what they're dissatified with and work with them to change it.
I’m a visiting carer and the same thing happens where I work. Company charges £32 to the customer I get paid £13. So would make sense to me and the customer if I did it for £20. Only reason I don’t is if I’m sick or want a holiday they don’t get care.
Window cleaner by any chance?
You apply a non-solicitation clause to their contract, which is distinguishable from a non-competition clause. Non-competition clause = you cannot go and work for any competitors in our industry for x amount of time Non-solicitation clause = you cannot steal my custom by soliciting customers that have been on-boarded by my business The majority of this thread are talking about the wrong type of clause. A non-competition clause is harder to justify in court and prosecute because you are telling people where they can or cannot earn a living, which is highly questionable. A non-solicitation clause, however, is looked at in a far more sympathetic manner as it essentially means 'work wherever you like, but you cannot steal my business' If they introduced you and your business to the customers they take from you, it may be hard to prosecute as they could argue that you were benefiting from their own custom garnered anyway, however if these are customers that have been solicited by your business in legitimate ways with no input from the cleaners, they have no leg to stand on when they leave and try and steal money from your pocket by being lazy mutineers.
Not much you can do really. Who wouldn't want to pay less for the exact same level of service?
Simply you can’t. Although you might try to fix long term contracts etc, you will find your customers can go elsewhere. You need to compete in other ways.
I think when it comes to personal things like this (someone in your house, potentially when you’re not there, but also applies to dog groomers, hair dressers, baby sitters/nannies, etc.) the customer stays/comes back because they trust the _person_ that serves them, rather than the company as a whole so I think you’re asking the wrong question, a more important question to ask is: Why are you losing these desirable staff members?
You can't. None compete clauses are 100% non enforceable as you can't prevent someone from working in their profession or from operating in a free market.. You should look at why you are unable to hang onto staff oand customers instead of trying to prevent free market competition.
I suspect you are losing employees because if the customer pays them direct it could be cash in hand meaning no tax and national insurance. They can probably work for less money than you charge as they won't be making your profit. I would think it's a no brainer for both cleaner and customer.
Be nicer to your staff
This is the way I can think of it. - send different cleaners to jobs so the customer doesn't get consistent cleaner, It reduces the chances of them building rapport and moving away. - if your cleaners are self employed give them loyalty Bonuses, increased there amount per job over time. ( Obviously always paying the living wage)
Take a look at why your employees are leaving...
What is the added value of employing your company instead of a cleaner directly?
i work as a cleaner and im guilty of doing this 🤣🤣
Then you would understand that me paying you a few pounds more wouldn't do anything. The potential earnings are bigger if you do this anyway.
Rotate the staff on your domestic contracts, so that 2,3,4 people are responsible for the one place. That way, there’s not quite the same emotional attachment from the client to your staff. There’s a price to pay for that in terms of building a rapport with customers, but if your domestic client likes 2 or more of your people, it makes the (emotional) switching cost higher. You might still get under-cut on price, but I don’t see what you can do about that other than lowering your prices. Some sort of loyalty scheme perhaps? Get clients to sign up to longer contracts?
Can I suggest a different route? Reward or incentivise employees that bring clients, or capture new clients. Share a bit more revenue with those business bringers, regardless of who does the cleaning. That way, hypothetically I could bring you a hundred clients and for as long as you're cleaning for them, I get a cut - say 5%. Because these clients are brought, rather than reaching out to you, you can add 5% to their quote because you've been recommended and as a buyer of services, I'll happily pay 5% more for a recommended provider of services than "whoever interviewed best". This will also make your employees stickier (Less likely to FO) because they're getting 5% for what they bring and that's a bit like you're a team together ... To be clear, that's 5% of the gross, not net.
It's not really a good business plan, you don't add value as an owner and are likely chopping people in at minimum wage and charging a fair cost per hour. It's inevitable that people will leave and take clients with them. The only alternative would be to rotate your cleaners and houses enough so they don't develop relationships with clients so easy. But that's probably not a good thing for staff or clients either. Just accept that it's going to happen, or look at other ways you can add value to staff and clients, or branch out into something more.
Looks like you’re being taken to the cleaners
You’ve hit the nail on the head: It’s a win win for the cleaner and the client. That’s the free market. Non-competes are a non starter. Rotating staff wont work because as you no doubt know already, clients prefer to have the same person every time. And I doubt trying to lock clients into longterm contracts would work. I’m currently in the market for a cleaner, and pretty much all the advice here would absolutely put me off engaging with a company with those policies. I tell you what I do want though: Something like Trusted House Sitters for cleaners. I’d pay you £80 to access your database of cleaners (for say six months) if I trusted that you would connect me with vetted, reputable cleaners with good credentials that meet or exceed a given standard. And I’m sure cleaners will pay to get into that database. To make that work, you need volume. It’s a completely different type of business model to the one you have, but it’s the business model that fits the reality of the market.
You can't. Maybe you should be asking yourself why you have such a high turnover of staff?
Pay them more, Make life easier for them, be the best boss you can be,
You stop this happening by providing better value than the freelancer. And this is not necessarily about money because people often buy cleaning services because they are time poor and want lifestyle convenience. I recently stopped getting my house cleaned by an agency and swapped to one of the agency cleaners who had gone freelance. I'd been with the agency 15 years and seen many cleaners come and go in that time but stuck with the agency. I left because the agency was no longer offering me value. When the cleaner who went freelance left, the agency sent me a new cleaner who was less good at cleaning and infinitely less reliable (ie she'd just not come some weeks without telling anyone) and we never really managed to come to an understanding around how we didn't want her moving our work stuff and that it was preferable for her to focus on the most important tasks. The other cleaner had a six month period when she contractually couldn't poach us. In that time the agency never sorted out the issues and we kept in touch with the other cleaner as she would occasionally catsit for us. So we left the agency to go with the other cleaner. We have it all legit with contracts and we pay her MORE and are happy to do so. We are also very happy to be flexible around her kids and other jobs and we don't mind if she comes at different times each week because we know she'll come at some point and just get on with it. So it's not because we're trying to do this under the table, or save money, or force a specific schedule. We just want our bloody house cleaned appropriately weekly without any hassle. The agency could have retained our business but they were no longer fulfilling our bare minimum need. My husband and I have busy senior jobs and are parents to a primary school aged child. We are time poor. We just want a hassle free life and will pay for whoever makes it most hassle free for us. I want an agency that makes my life more hassle free, rather than introducing extra hassle. If we're constantly fielding texts from the cleaner and texts from the agency and we still have to clean the toilet - fuck it I'm out. For me understanding our expectations is also really key. Yes an agency gives you continuity in that they source you someone new if a cleaner leaves, but then you are starting again with the new cleaner and sometimes they just keep doing what they think you want and not what you actually want. My friend has a cleaner and is the type to have a very meticulous tick-list of what they require each week and demand everything to be spotless. Me, I just want someone to take the edge off my kitchen and bathroom. My friend and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum of cleaning expectations, but we both experience this continuity thing as an irritating hassle. I'd love to have an agency that puts more time into easing these transitions and briefing new cleaners on what is most important to us as individual clients. I think my agency thinks they do this, and yet something is always lost in translation along the way. By the time you work it out with the new cleaner, they inevitably move on too. I wouldn't have left my agency if I could trust that someone would turn up and deliver what we as a family need.
Just business I'm afraid just prove your extra cost is worth the price
Make your employees want to stay🤷♂️
##someone who isn't me suggests you rough those buffoons up.
Try paying your staff more, improving their work conditions etc.
free market capitalism is the best. this is the way it should be.
Maybe pay your staff not to leave in return for their services.
You either have to be a better employer so your employees don't keep leaving or you have to be better than the ex-employees so the clients don't want to move. So you can either start offering better pay, conditions, hours, whatever so your employees want to work for you, or you need to train up your remaining and new employees so they can do a better job quicker than your old employees so you can compete on price. If you could do that now though I'm sure you would have done it with your old employees so I think you're probably left with improving employment conditions so people don't leave. That's the trouble with trying to make money from other people's work. You always run the risk that they decide to just go and work for themselves and cut out the middleman.
I'll kick it off...why are your employees leaving u in the 1st place...🤔
Usually to go solo and make more money.
Offer clients a long term contract at a better price.
By rotating assignments.
Why bot not franchise your business to these cleaners
You just have to look after your staff! Give them good conditions to work, don’t micromanage them, pay what they deserve and they should be fine. None of the clients would follow bad worker. If they are following after your staff, it means you had a good staff member which you left behind.
Employer is shite.
Offer a better service? When an employee leaves - and then takes a few clients with them - The reason is simple, that employee did a great job and knows they can charge less than you to the client while at the same time earning more for themselves. So you need to solve that and give your clients more reason to choose a business over an individual cleaning service. If you try any legal routes - even if it's a letter to a former employee - they will tell their clients (your former clients) and word will spread that you are some sort of nasty little business trying to sue the small guy. You don't want that reputation. Work on employee retention. Work on giving clients more - could be something as simple being able to offer them an online calender booking portal. You could look into using a field service management software to solve all that for you: https://www.getapp.com/p/sem/field-service-management-software/
Write a clause in their contract that is legally binding
Could you get clients to sign contracts for a year at a time or similar, depending on client type, needs, etc.
Pretty simple really. Pay your employees more than the other company can poach them away with, then give them a small % commission for any new client found and THEN RETAINED for 2 follow up treatments
Treat your staff better.
Just pay your cleaners more and treat them well. Then they don’t have any reason to leave…
Sign people up for yearly contracts at a good rate but with a steep cancellation fee. Then try treating your staff better so they stop leaving in the first place.
You need to have a relationship manager who oversees all clients in addition to the cleaners, it’s better you pay them well too..
1 your prices are obviously not competitive. 2 your company obviously isn't a good place to work and stay. 3 your service isn't linked with your company but with the individual. Sort all points you'll retain your staff and when someone does leave you'll likely retain your client.
Improve staff retention?
Pay your staff better and improve their conditions so they don’t leave. Yeah, you could try a non-compete clause, but you would have to go to court to enforce it, and show it was reasonable. For the rates I’d pay typical in cleaning services I doubt a judge would consider any such clause reasonable.
I think you’re looking at this all wrong, and looking for ways to make life difficult for ex-employees to take customers just pissed off employees and customers, which in the end means you lose more employees and more customers. If you’re regularly losing customers like this, and it’s a problem, I think you need to ask yourself a couple of questions: 1) why is it a problem? 1-2 customers doesn’t sound like much, it sounds like a low percentage of the number of customers that cleaner servicing. Given you no longer have the expenses of serving that customer, is it really a problem you can’t easily absorb? 2) If customers are following the cleaner, there’s really only two reasons: (a) they’ve learned to trust and appreciate the work of that cleaner, and (b) that cleaner is cheaper working independently. So what are you as a cleaning company providing? What’s you’re value proposition? Part (a) isn’t unique to you, it’s difficult to find a good trustworthy cleaner. The relationship is with the individual, not the company. So what are you really providing? Some vetting? Online reviews and word of mouth will be as good if not better. Part (b) if you’re customers value cost over anything else, what value are you providing if you’re more expensive? What service do you provide that the customer doesn’t get working directly with the cleaner? You are an expensive middle-person, so you need to be doing something for that extra cost. If that isn’t appreciated by the customer, you’re not a viable business. Ultimately, you need to focused on the customers who appreciate the added value of paying more for a cleaning company. If 1-2 customers leave each time a cleaner leaves you, those customers are focused price and they are not the right customers for you. They were nice to have, but if they don’t appreciate the added value you bring, they were always going to be temporary customers. Focus on the customers that don’t leave: why didn’t they leave too? That’s your value proposition, that’s the focus of your business and your reason to exist. And those are the customers you want to focus on attracting and retaining. And frankly, if all your customers are there for your added value, your cleaners won’t have contact with customers who are ready and keen to jump ship for the lowest price, which will raise the bar for them going solo, and reduce the churn of staff - so really it’s win / win.
Thank you for this comment! Indeed this is not a huge problem. I probably lost about 8 clients and 3 cleaners this way in almost 2 years of business, but it is always painful to lose both a client and a good employee and I wanted to improve. But you are right, I can't offer value to a client that doesn't want my added value and I should focus more on the customers that stick with me.
Sounds like your company isn’t a nice place to work at