When it comes to running a home service business, the best type of business can and should be run from your home office.
Office space can be prohibitively expensive, an unnecessary cost in this age of technology and ease of communication.
Delah Gomasi, owner of MaidForYou, a house cleaning agency based in Sydney, Australia, goes into extreme length in this article as to how he started his house cleaning agency and why office space was unnecessary for his venture. His company has completed over 30,000 cleans in Sydney metropole alone.
According to Gomasi, MaidForYou was started on a whim.
“We were looking for a business to start, that would have little to no overheads and a low risk.” Delah goes onto say, “The cleaning business is generally the most competitive, because of the cost to start this type of business, meaning we had to go into this venture with a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve in the hopes that we would be able to stand out from the thousands of competitors in the marketplace.”
MaidForYou is a two-sided marketplace which sees them connect professional cleaning businesses (usually husband-and-wife teams) with both business and general consumers.
Having a two-sided marketplace essentially means there is no need for any office space, considering there is no need to provide inventory, equipment, or vehicles.
Here are two recommendations given by MaidForYou’s owner on running your business from home.
Organisation Is Key:
To run a successful cleaning agency from home, organization must be a key focal point for the owner and any staff working.
Managing staff remotely comes with its own set of challenges; there are numerous things one can do to mitigate such challenges.
It’s best to have every single minute of your day mapped out in a project management application or an easy-to-access calendar.
Gomasi states, “We generally use Trello for all project management, that in collaboration with our booking and scheduling software Launch27. They enable us to have every facet of our business streamlined and organized. We are always ready to handle any problem or obstacle that comes our way.”
Having organization at the forefront of your operations means that emails are always answered, and most importantly, actioned on time. Cleaning jobs aren’t missed and customer complaints are responded to in a timely manner and given the attention they deserve.
An organization is a synonym of the concept of a ‘business’ for a reason. It is a key performance indicator of any business, that their operations be as organized as possible. This is even more true of a business that fully operates from the comfort of one’s home.
With organization comes standard operating procedures. Clear-cut standard operating procedures or SOPS are part and parcel of any successful business that is run from home.
Hiring freelancers is a growing trend for many home-based businesses. Having standard operating procedures in place means that the business is not reliant on the knowledge of any one freelancer and as such if a freelancer leaves, they can be fully replaced in no time.
Like organization, Delah asserts that technology must be at the forefront of any business that is run from home.
Technological Prowess:
Working from home without the use of technology are two mutually exclusive concepts.
There lies a deep symbiosis between the relationship of running a business from home and utilizing technology as a means of streamlining business activities.
According to Delah, “What separates us from our competitors that have an office is that we’re able to streamline all processes and strategy from one computer if necessary. Daily huddles with staff can be conducted simply via web conferencing, and we were utilizing Zoom as standard before it became the cult smash of organizations working from home today.”
He goes on to state, “Cleaning teams can be managed via iMessage or WhatsApp if necessary. We use a combination of Zapier (a business process automator) and Twilio (a text API) to coordinate all forms of communications with our teams.”
Technology enabled MaidForYou to be able to not only work from home but process payments, schedule cleaning services, gather reviews, handle customer service queries, invoicing and other miscellaneous tasks from a computer or mobile phone.
Delah says, “In my opinion, if your business can’t be ran from your smartphone, you don’t have a business, you have a job.”
Therefore, it’s seen as imperative that if a business is ran entirely from home, it should and must utilize the latest technology to be able to do so.
Working from home is the dream of any budding entrepreneur; it epitomizes the move away from corporate slavery and into the 4-hour working week.
Delah states that working from home has enabled him to be able to achieve a work-life balance that he had not been able to achieve in any other previous ventures.
“Now I’m able to go to the gym during the daytime, spend time with my kids at lunch and clock off whenever I feel it necessary. If I want to, I can take my children to the local park and be ready to handle any business queries that come through to my phone.”
The importance of utilizing organization and technological prowess is imperative when running a home-based business, and Delah has concluded that it is evident through the running of his home-based business that he is able to achieve a stress-free, satisfying lifestyle.
He finishes with this: “Running my business from home has been a God-Send for my lifestyle. I’m happier, I’m healthier, and so are my dependents.”
We’d probably have to ask them to find out if this is true.
