What comes first? Employees or Clients?

Ah, the age old debate: What came first? The chicken or the egg? Here's the solution...order both from Amazon and see which ones arrive first.

Well, you can't really do that with employees and clients. But what should come first? Without employees, you'll work yourself thin. Without clients, you won't have any money to pay your employees. 

I see so many in the cleaning space think they need employees first. I contend it's the wrong order of operations. 

On finding clients first:

• Unless you're a marketing and sales machine, you won't win any clients right after starting towards a goal or new business.
• Some of your commercial clients may have a 4-6 week buying cycle. For example, churches have monthly committee meetings to discuss a new vendor. Most of your competitors have a 30-day escape clause in their contract so at the earliest it'd be 4-5 weeks. 
• You don't want all of your prospects to sign your proposals. Why? It means you're undercharging. We purposely try to lose 80% of our bids due to price. So if we win 1 new client a month at our target goal, we're doing really well. 
• You never would want to be in a rush to win clients. You can make mistakes in your pricing and contracts, and it'll set you up for failure.
• You can build into the contract a delay before starting. If you win a new contract tomorrow, you don't have to start tomorrow. You can build it out for a month out. That gives you plenty of time to hire.
• If you do have challenges finding employees, then you create inaction in finding clients, and inaction leads to no income whatsoever.

On finding employees (second, not first):

• As of this blog post, we're heading into the holiday season. Work is slowing. And there's a surplus in labor. With a surplus, you can get away with a higher labor pool and lower wages. It's not like it was early in COVID when the government paid people to sit at home. Still applicable, check out "Hiring in the Age of COVID" podcast episode on Beyond the Mop podcast.
• If you have a well-tailored ad and you know what wages to pay (based on your competition's wage average), then you'll have a lead machine built of potential employees. I always say: hire before you need to hire. Have ads running even when you don't need employees. Store their info into a database and now you have job leads running into the hundreds of job applicants.
• If you're in a pinch, you can hire fast. I didn't really believe this at all, but we had a situation a couple of years ago. Remember the hasty withdraw from Afghanistan? Well, the State Department flew over Afghanis by the scores over to the US. They set up temporary housing facilities. We know this because we received a call to staff one with 40 cleaners working 24/7 to keep their facility clean. We received a call from a contractor who needed a cleaning crew to hire 40. I had less than 24 hours to do so. I picked up the phone and began networking. Within 12 hours we had 24 people ready complete with paperwork. We promised $25/hr before any overtime and they came from everywhere. People were calling their friends and those friends called friends. In the end we got outbid by a competitor who promised the 40 within a few hours. How they did that I don't know. But that exercise showed me it could be done.

In summary, it was so much easier to hire than it was to find a client. Conversely, it's a lot harder to find clients first. Last thing you'd want to do is to lose out on potential labor because you can't get a job lined up for them first.