Being overstaffed is a real kind of stress. It’s also the one I’d choose every single time, and here’s why.
Everybody in this industry talks about being understaffed. Tonight I want to talk about the other side of it. Being overstaffed, and honestly, being blissfully overstaffed.
Here’s one of the genuinely hard things about running a cleaning company: you’ve always got one foot on the accelerator for hiring and one foot on the brake for leads, or the other way around. It’s a constant back and forth. If you want to grow, you always need to be hiring. And if you’re always hiring, you always need to be bringing in new leads for the new people, which means always upping your marketing. And when I say upping your marketing, I don’t always mean spending more money. I mean finding new ways to get seen and gather leads, and there’s a ton of free marketing out there. That’s a whole other conversation for another night.
So you hear people constantly: “I’m so understaffed, I can’t find anyone to hire.” We’ve talked about that already. You dial it in, you figure out why you can’t hire, you fix your job ads, you fix your pay. But let’s say you fix all of it and you end up where I am right now: blissfully overstaffed.
Let me say it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I would rather be overstaffed than understaffed, every time. Here’s why.
What understaffed actually costs
When you’re understaffed and someone calls out tomorrow, you are completely rearranging the schedule. Canceling clients, shifting clients, moving people around, disrupting everyone’s day. And it’s brutal on your other technicians, because now they’re working late, staying past five, when one of our rules is that we respect their time and try hard not to make them work past five.
So when you’re short-staffed and someone calls out, everybody feels it. The office. The client. The other techs. The whole team. And that’s no fun. We lived in that for a long time.
We were having a really hard time landing quality candidates. And I got some beautiful advice from my bestie Nicole, as much as she bullies me and I hate to give her the credit, I’ll give it where it’s due, and from my dear friend Libby. Advice I didn’t really want to hear at the time, because I kept saying “I don’t need to do that, we can grow slow.”
Then May hit. We dropped from 19 cleaners down to 13. And not because anyone did anything wrong. One was moving. One had health issues and had to step away. All genuinely valid reasons, nobody got fired, people left for life. But suddenly we were understaffed, and May and early June were miserable.
I’m so thankful for how we schedule, because it’s built for exactly this. We keep certain clients on the calendar at a drastically reduced rate specifically because they’re flexible and know we might have last-minute changes. That’s what lets us protect our full-paying clients when things get tight. But it got so bad we were moving those flexible clients constantly. It got to a point where I had to call and say, “I am so sorry, I promise we won’t move you next time, we’ll find someone else to shift.” We did what we had to do to keep our solid schedule solid.
And then it flipped
Fast forward to now. In about a month and a half, we went from 13 technicians to 24, counting today’s numbers and someone starting next week. That’s a massive swing. And now we’re sitting in the land of being really overstaffed. It feels great.
Does it stress out Lexi, my salesperson? A hundred percent. And she’s handling it like an absolute champ. Every single day she’s filling the schedule for the next day. We’re doing it right at the last minute, but we’re getting our team filled. And if we can’t fill it with client work, we find something productive for them to do.
I would take that any day over being understaffed. Overstaffed stress is real, but understaffed stress makes way more people upset, your clients, your team, your office, all at once.
The part nobody warns you about
Here’s the honest tradeoff. All those new hires means we just went through a big round of training. They’re all doing great, or we wouldn’t have kept them on. But bringing on a lot of new people at once also brings a kind of chaos.
Because here’s the thing: even if a new hire has experience, every company does things differently. So we bring them on, we train them, and we make absolutely sure they’re up to our standard before we ever send them to your house. We want the same thing done in every single home, living up to the Peachy standard, every time.
Which puts us right back in training mode. And that’s exactly why I’ve been building the STEP method, so our technicians get trained the right way, every time: they’re shown, they’re told, they execute, and they prove themselves. So everybody gets the same thing.
Why on earth would I share all this?
Doesn’t this seem like the kind of thing I should keep to myself? Don’t I worry my competitors will know my business?
I don’t care. And here’s why: I don’t see you as a competitor. If you’re in my area and you clean houses, I love you, whether you believe it or not. And I don’t mean that in a “I’m better than you, so you’re no threat” way. I mean there is so much business out there. There is more than enough room for all of us. I want us all to win, and the way we all win is by coming together, sharing, talking, and lifting this industry up.
Because I love this industry. I can’t even fully explain it. Who loves scrubbing toilets? Some of us actually do. It’s hard work, but it’s deeply rewarding work, and I want the whole world to see it as a skilled trade.
But here’s the catch. For everyone to see cleaning as a skilled trade, the people doing it have to treat it like one. Train like it’s a skilled trade. Educate yourself like it’s a skilled trade. Don’t cut corners, like it’s a skilled trade. Sure, anyone can hire someone with a mop and a bucket off the street. But what happens to your valuables? Your quartz countertop, your travertine tile? Do you trust that person to be insured, to have their people background checked, to take care of your home? That’s the difference between a cleaner and a professional.
So to the “competitor” down the road from me: you’re not my competitor. I’m here to chat, to help, to share stories, to be a shoulder if you need one. And if you’re not in my area, I’m still here for all of that too. Let’s lift each other up. This industry is big enough for every one of us to thrive.
I’m not a threat, I promise. I’m approachable. And fair warning: if you spot me out somewhere, sitting by myself, I probably look grumpy. That’s just RBF. It’s not you, it’s my face, and I genuinely don’t know how to fix it. So come say hi anyway.