Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we're talking with Troy Royster, who owns a commercial maintenance cleaning company based in New York.
They work in several States around New York, they've been in business for a long, long time, and Troy is an entrepreneur who's a student of the game! He has a long pedigree of taking action on all kinds of marketing ideas to build his business, and because of that, he's built something amazing. Now he has so much potential and so much opportunity that we had a great conversation about how to deploy these capacities, including this idea that when you can serve a lot of different people in a lot of different areas, one of the greatest things we can do is deploy our ability to select a single target market.
That's going to be the big lesson in this episode.
A lot of the time people set up their business so they can be selected by a wide variety of people. One of the things we have to understand when we're going out to develop our Before Unit, is that we are doing the selecting!
You get to select who would be the ideal client.
If you want to grow your business. If you've got the capacity to take on new people, rather than just open yourself up and take on whoever comes, we've got the opportunity to select who that person is.
When you really understand that, it makes sense to think about who would be the largest check, who would be the most delightful, who would be the most convenient, who would be a lifetime client.
We had a great conversation exploring those options and really narrowing it down to who would be best to approach first.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 213
Dean: Troy.
Troy: Dean, how you doing?
Dean: I am good. Did you hear that? This is being recorded by the organizer.
Troy: Wow. I didn't hear that, but I'm glad -
Dean: That sounds serious. That's right. Well, I'm excited to finally get to talk to you. It seems like we've talked on the less doing thing a while ago.
Troy: Yes we did. I've been following your work for a while. I caught onto you through strategics. I think you were coming in on Thursdays and I was coming in on Fridays.
Dean: Oh I see, okay.
Troy: - we've never really spoke in person.
Dean: Right. We just passed. I got you.
Troy: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: Good. Well, I can't wait. I've got the new reMarkable 2 tablet here, for taking a minute to hatch an evil schemes and we got the whole hour. It's all us.
Troy: Okay. So that's good.
Dean: Tell me what the whole story here and then we can jump off from there.
Troy: We are a cleaning company - is one - throughout a bunch of days, and I've been at it now for about 30 years. So I know all about your ideal customer and all that great stuff. I've been through all of that. I've been through a bunch of training. I've been through a lot of courses and strategic coach and the Ritz Carlton and a bunch of others. The E-Myth Academy and-
Dean: Wow, so you're a veteran of all of this. That's good.
Troy: I've been through it all. I think there's one more... Verne Harnish, I've been through his -
Dean: Yeah, it's good.
Troy: ... Program. Yeah. So I know what to do and I know what I'm trying to accomplish, there's just something wrong. So the reason I say that is, we don't get as many opportunities as I think we should be. Meaning we're on Google, we're on all these platforms, we have vendors that handle cold calling, they do the some email marketing. We're spending a bunch of cash on all of that, and I'm on the Who Not How platform, so I got all these people to be the who's but the how is not happening. So, - the next opportunity.
Dean: It sounds like you're in a situation that is ideal, actually. You see it like it's something that there's a problem, but you are in a position where you are ultimately what I call scale ready. That you've got all of the pieces in place that if you only had the opportunities, like you're saying, if you only had the people to go, you're equipped to grow, you're equipped to take them on. And that's a better problem to be in than not being equipped for that, just having the dream for it. So all that work that you've put in to lay that foundation, you've got everything ready to go. Your during unit ready is what I say to people. If we could just open the flood gates for you, that'd be a great thing or give you some predictability on that.
So that's a, you're ready now. What's missing from all of it is a before unit. Have you've heard me talking about this idea of the three units of your business, the before unit, the during unit and the afternoon unit?
Troy: Oh yeah.
Dean: Okay. So what's missing, you need the rocket fuel for it is a predictable way to get in front of the people who can fuel the growth for you. And there's two components to that. Are you a franchise or are you a licenser? What are you?
Troy: No. It's all a privately held corporation.
Dean: Okay, perfect. And so when you're talking now about the... What you need is not more... You're not selling franchises or territories or operators. If we could just wave a magic wand and get? What is it that you would order up? If we could say, just send me this?
Troy: If the before unit was able to say, we need this, we need more people reaching out to us, or I don't care who contacts who, but we need more people that are requesting a quote for services.
Dean: Okay. More people requesting a quote for services. Now, what I'm going to walk you through here is, let's get super specific with that. When we look at it, when you look at all of the capabilities that you have and all your best clients and stuff, if we could send anybody over, what do you want to do? What would be the best clients that you could have?
Troy: The best clients that we currently have, and that I would want more of would be people that are the owners of multi tenant buildings. That would be one. And then another would be some type of educational building. We do a lot of schools, but the schools are not like schools from the city, they're schools that are, their charter schools and their schools for children with some type of a learning challenge. Those types of schools. Because the cities are not involved, so they're not looking for-
Dean: Independent schools, private schools, right?
Troy: Yes. Another one I guess, would be any type of business where they are looking to create an environment for their employees that is a pristine, clean and countable. And also the type of companies that have people coming in to visit. A lot of companies that have people that fly in from all over the planet, what you can't today, but when we get on track here, they'll be able to have their customers come in to their places and they want their places to look the best that they possibly can. Whereas if you owned a garage that repaired cars, you really -
Dean: Yeah, -.
Troy: Right. So multi tenant. So, I guess, any type of private company that most of them, the place is kind of newer, it's not too old, so they want to keep it new. So we look for the new construction target. And we just serve a multitude... So the corporate headquarters is also a big client. So, they may have a global company, but the headquarters is here and we serve as the headquarters. And again, you have the chairman and all the, as they say, the big wigs there, so they expect their place to look a certain way to uphold the corporate standard. So those are the -
Dean: This is all good. Yep. Those are good. And now, what is it about what you do that's different than what maintenance two does?
Troy: I'd just say right off the top, over the years, I've talked to a lot of clients and we asked the people, you've chosen us. As you say, they raised their hand. We responded, they've chosen us to be the provider. And I go in and I say, "Well, why did you choose us? You talk to 10 companies and why us?" We're big on communication, so we're not going to promise you something and it's not completed, or did you complete it and you're not going to... You may be in Florida and your company is here, but we need to make sure you know what's going on at all times.
And, Dean, I'll tell you through the years, just talking to people, a lot of cleaning companies that do services for companies, they don't respond, they don't get back to the customer quickly. It's almost as if the customer is doing them a favor because they hired you. So where we focus on, we know you have a lot of choices and I'm glad you chose you, so we're going to keep our end of the bargain and we communicate heavily, and we always keep you clued in to what's going on. And that may be something that is not like, we clean better or we do this or that, but a lot of companies don't do that.
So that's one I know. The other is we have a lot of long tenured employees. We have some people here that have been here for 25 years. And in the cleaning business, I know there's a lot of turnover and we kind of frown on turnover. There's a long process to get hired. It takes about two months. And if you get through all that process, chances are you want to stick around and learn, why is it so hard to get into this company? What's so special here? The way we treat the employees and the way we treat the people, I think is also an asset. A lot of other companies don't do that. They just view as low wage employees and you're here to take out the garbage and if you can't do it my way, there's the door. We don't treat people that way.
Those are the top two. Because, if you treat your people correctly and you really cherish the people that you have as an asset, that spills over to how they treat your customers.
Dean: How would somebody looking at, without knowing that about you, that's an internal thing that you do. Let's say that somebody is laying out here their options of Maintenance One, maintenance two, maintenance three. What's the, on the wrapper, the thing that differentiates Maintenance One from maintenance two and maintenance three? How do you articulate that in an outward facing way?
Troy: You're talking about that you haven't spoken to as yet, and you just viewing us on the web, or...?
Dean: Wherever. Like, what does somebody know about Maintenance One? Are you the low price leader? Are you the best quality, are you the luxury brand, are you the fastest, are you the cleanest? What's the thing that is different about -
Troy: So Dean, I could tell you, over the last five years, I've been turning this boat around to becoming the luxury brand of clean. So that's it. We do things that I know a lot of companies don't. And again, you can't really spell all that out, just if a person's just shopping. But, I think one of the keys is to let people get the understanding there that we're not going to be the cheapest one. And I'm sorry if you have to look for the lowest price, chances are, we're not going to be the lowest price-
Dean: And it's okay. I think that there's something about, and the way you said that was kind of indicative of the way that a lot of people feel about their pricing or the way their service kind of thing is that, the first thing is to apologize for being non apologetic kind of thing. You're kind of like, listen, if you're looking for the price, that's not us kind of thing. It's a defensive stance as opposed to owning it and embracing it and being... There's something about being... If you can demonstrate what do you get for this extra. Is there something that you do go above and beyond? You look at the quality is very different than some people do appreciate that.
Even you look at hotels, you go to a Four Seasons hotel or a Ritz Carlton hotel, you mentioned you did a training there, they're not apologetic about it at all. They're not like, hey, if you're looking for just an affordable bed, that's not us kind of thing. You're not even talking about that. It's just, if you're looking for the best hotel to stay in this city, you know that it's going to be a four seasons. That's what that stands for kind of thing.
And you take it all the way down to consumer things like you'd look at... I was talking a lot about Stella Artois, the beer, and how as a premium beer, they embrace that position. And they have billboards that have the beer Stella Artois and it says, "reassuringly expensive." And I think there's something interesting about those words that you could embrace that attitude of, your pricing is reassuringly expensive because you know that we're not cutting the corners that other people do. It costs more to do this. What are the things that you would get as a result of paying more than what normal people charge? Because you're doing things presumably, hopefully that other cleaners that are just trying to cut corners to get the price down low.
Troy: To get the price down. So for one thing, if the job takes 10 hours of labor, and we tell you it's going to take 10 hours of labor to get it the way you want it, - to what your standards are, that's okay. But then when it comes around to doing the job, we're not going to have one person show up for two hours and - for 10. I know that on out there. I've seen it. I've heard of it. And, we get called in because customers get tired of paying for shortcuts. So now I will tell you, we have GPS trackers that go on people's i-phones. So when a customer calls up and they... We've had people call and say, I only saw one cleaner, they were here for an hour. I checked the cameras, what happened?
The person may have not recalled that they had a holiday party, the place was closed, they only use the cafeteria and so we only had to really clean the cafeteria that day. So by having trackers, by having logs and - to prove what we've accomplished, and we take pictures and we have pictures that get texted to the client. We tell them what's happening and we backed that up with proof so there's no issue there. But, again, a lot of companies would just say, okay, run in and get the garbage for two days a week. On Thursday, let's clean the place up really, really good. And then Friday, just check the trash again and get out of there. They're paying us for 10 hours. We really only want to spend three hours because we need the other seven hours just to the profit.
That'll work for a while. That works for a short while, but I'm the kind of person that I looked at the whole viewpoint of, let's keep this customer for 25 years. When we get to that 25 years, let's keep them for another 25 years. I know we'll have to make changes because time goes on and procedure, the equipment, training changes. So at that point, we'll make it an upgrade on everything.
don't want to get rich on Dena's Jackson's buildings in three weeks. I want Dean until the buildings are no longer there. That's hard to do, but that's why we come in every day and keep trying.
Dean: Let's talk about some of the different types of buildings that you mentioned here. We talked about the multi-tenant buildings. Because each of these, part of this, what I look at now is profit activator one is select a single target market. And the distinction that I have to make for people is that it's not about... This is how people start thinking about their before you is, they're used to, well, these are all the different people we can help, and they want to cast a wide net so that they can be selected by more people. But what I'm talking about is we're doing proactively the selecting. We're selecting, these are the people that we want to get to.
So, if we'd look at these owners of multi-tenant buildings let's just isolate like that's the only thing that we're focused on for a few minutes here. So these multi-family buildings where are they, and tell me about them. What would be the ideal ones if we're looking to create the ideal scenario here?
Troy: So the multi-tenant buildings with a lot of companies in them are usually, we'll start with Manhattan. I mean, it's crowded with that, but we'll back up smaller. We'll go to the White Plains area in New York, we'll go to Stanford, we'll go to New Haven, we'll go to Hartford. Those have a lot. And then, if you go out into the suburbs of these areas, they built a lot of corporate parts. So the corporate parts may have 10 or 20 writing one park, one address.
Dean: That would be ideal. Do you have any situations where you have multiple buildings in one park?
Troy: Yes, I do.
Dean: Okay. Are there some efficiencies in that for you or some-
Troy: Yes, it makes it easier. So your crews go out there and they stay in one location for the whole the night, and it's easier to manage because you're leaders don't have to drive all over the whole state. It's-
Dean: Right, exactly. So let's narrow. If we can pick one, where are you located, actually?
Troy: New Haven. -
Dean: Let's start right there. Let's start in Connecticut then, and just kind of focus on that because each of these is a different target audience. But let's say just in new Haven, describe one of the ultimate building for you.
Troy: I'm going to switch over to Stanford, just because we have an office in Stanford also, and Sanford has a lot more places. So Stanford, down south Stanford has, I don't know, Dean let's just call it 100 multi-tenant, large buildings that are way over a hundred thousand in size. Probably 10 to 20 floors a piece.
Dean: Okay, perfect.
Troy: And they also have quite a few corporate parks. Corporate parks usually do not have the tall towers, but the buildings are still way over a hundred thousand, but they're much wider and maybe only six floors or three floors, but they're much wider and it's a far kind of a setting. So you know where they are, and I know that's who we want to target.
Dean: Perfect. Now, who would be the decision maker on something like that?
Troy: So here's where it gets tricky. Some buildings are ran by a private person. Some are run by a corporation. Some are run by a management company. So our contact person changes. It could be the owner of the building. It could be the facilities manager. And in some cases, the building owner does not want to get involved in the cleaning, so they tell the tenant, okay, you rent at 48,000 square feet of space here, but the cleaning is on you. So now that person that rented the office may give it to an admin, a manager, an HR person, and they may tap that person, "Go and hire a cleaning service." So in some -, it's the companies that rent the space that has to.
Dean: I was going to say, if you'd look at in a multi tenant building that has a 10 story thing that let's say has eight tenants in it, perhaps in a big thing like that, different one per floor kind of thing, when you're talking about the contract, are you talking about the building and the common areas and that each of the individual tenants would have their own maintenance, their own cleaning, or, is that-
Troy: Yeah. Sometimes it-
Dean: ... Difficult that it's included?
Troy: ... Work out that way, so the owner is responsible for the common areas, the rest rooms and all that great stuff. And then tenants are responsible for their own cleaning. And usually, it's the corporate parks where they're much wider buildings. Sometime one corporation will take the whole building and then the owner will say, "Look, you took the whole building. The cleaning is on you." And in some cases, the building may be split up into three suites. So when a person takes a suite and maybe the suite is a one third of the building, they'll tell the person, "This is a large place. I don't get involved in the cleaning. You have to contract your own cleaning." But when you have a taller plate, like 20 floors, usually it's one service. But in our case, we have quite a few companies that, the building gave us this cleaning crew, we don't like this cleaning crew. They're not very good. We come in maybe three times weekly and clean behind them. And that sounds crazy.
But again, some companies have a standard on how they want their place to look. And if the cleaning comes with the building and it's not up to par, they call us in and say, okay, we need you to clean up behind the cleaning crews. And it sounds crazy, but people do pay us to do that.
Dean: Do you prefer having the building and all the common areas or the individual tenants? What's your ideal?
Troy: I would tell you on a profit margin factor, I think it's more profitable if you contract each tenant separately.
Dean: Yes.
Troy: If you do the whole building, it may be one larger paycheck, but the building owner needs to keep his expenses at a certain margin and you can't go in and charge that person for... If you had 10 customers and you charge each of them, that's one thing. But if you grouped them all into one and said, okay, we're going to give you guys a break. We're going to do all 10 of you for one paycheck. It's usually a little bit less than it would be.
But to be truthful, I enjoy the two different ways, because each way has its own challenges.
Dean: It seems like one challenge is identifying who you're talking to. That's one of the big challenges of B2B stuff like that is knowing who the person is, so they're semi visible prospects I'd say. You can see the building, but it would take a little research, I guess you could find out who manages the -. And so, part of it then is once you get the 100 of these, for instance, you find these 100 or your dream 100 buildings kind of thing, do you then have an idea of what would be the areas of discontent that somebody might have that would trigger a replacement?
Troy: Yes. So when you brought up the dream 100, again, I went through the Chad Holmes program. And, we came up with that and we did make our dream 100 targets and we did the calling and did the homework, who's in charge of this location. We went through all that. And I think the materials that we sent out at that time did concentrate on what are the challenges or the dos for that type of customer. And we would repeatedly send that out to those people. And Dean, I could tell you, it's a longer process, but some of the customers that we've had for over 20 years, we got through that process.
Dean: And that's what I'm saying is that, you're not in a impulsive business, that's just the truth. The benefit and the problem with it is that something has to happen to really unseat an incumbent because it's not high stakes. I say that not that, not mission critical high stakes, that there're businesses, especially in situations, if they're at all affected by COVID or effected by whatever's going on in the economy now. If there are other priorities like that, the fact the bathroom in accounting wasn't to the right standards, or they keep forgetting to change whatever needs to be done in the break room or whatever, all of those things, they miggle, and they're a problem, but they're not going to jump to the top of somebody's to do list to sound the emergency to, "We need to get our cleaning company out of there immediately."
Unless there's an acute onset reason why they get rid of them, if they're fast or something happens that they immediately need to replace somebody or they fire their company. It just feels like you get this idea of the good news is once you're the incumbent, as long as you're doing the conscientious things like what you're talking about, you're in this for the long run. It would be very difficult to unseat you. Do you have a lot of attrition? I bet you don't I mean, it sounds like.
Troy: If that does happen so Dean, there's two kind of caution areas with that. When you first start out, if you don't get everything corrective and running smoothly within a few days, because people do know there's going to be challenges with the keys or the code or they forgot to tell us the door and the back corner does not close properly, you have to slam it. There's always the tweaks that go on within one to three days. If you don't hurry up and get all those tweaks kind of ironed out, by week three they're probably going to tell you what, this isn't working, we're going to call one of the other three people who we call.
So then the other challenge is, if you had a customer for 20, 30 years, 10 years, it's easy to become complacent and say, -
Dean: Yes, I get it.
Troy: ... They would never get rid of us because they love us. So they might love you and you may be cozy with all the people at the location, and they love the cleaners, everybody knows everybody by I know your dog and your kids and everybody, and everybody's happy, but you still have to deliver on the task that you're getting paid to do. You can't start not showing up or skipping on the hours. You can't start that because you've been here for 10 or 20 years. You have to work even harder to keep the job at 20 years than you may have in two years.
Dean: Yes, I get it. Tell me about the services that you do. So you do all the janitorial kind of services. But what else? I'm just wondering about the Maintenance One. Do you fix things, do you do sort of other mechanical maintenance or -?
Troy: We don't really get into the mechanicals of... We kind of do everything that is surrounded with keeping the place ready for people and clean. And so if there's anything to report, we report it quickly. And if you tell us, well, if you just turn this to the right or whatever, it's going to stop the problem until we can get a person out there, we'll handle stuff like that. Or changing of valves, or rolling up the carpets. We try to help out as much as we can and go beyond just cleaning. If you call us and ask us, "I got a person coming over, I'm two hours away, can you have one of the cleaners stop by and let the person in with his key?" Sure. No big deal. We do the carpet cleaning, the window cleaning, the floor waxing, the polishing, the janitorial, the day porter, all that kind of activity.
Dean: Are you doing anything now with more the sanitizing? Is that anything that you've changed the protocols now or added to the services to -
Troy: Yes. All the web pages have been changed over for COVID. We had to go get more Clorox equipment for COVID. And now we have people calling us that aren't our customers that may have a cleaning crew, or they may not have a crew, but they have cases or they're trying to stop cases and they need us to come and spray. There's cases where we spray every day, we spray twice per week, we spray once per week and we're driving and having crews go all the way into Manhattan. We do that.
And again, to go back on price, you told me that we need to be more don't apologize on price. I understand that. I don't really know how to do that and savvy with the wording, but in terms of COVID, we see a lot of people that's out there really getting over and gouging customers on price and people will tell us, well, why are you so cheap? It's not that we're so cheap. We're not trying to be cheap, but we're trying to cover the cost of the chemical, cover the cost of the person's spraying and be helpful to the communities that we're part of and not try to make a quick profit on COVID. I think that's horrible, but people do that.
So, we may be more expensive in cleaning, but when it comes to rolling up your sleeves and helping out, I don't want to be the person that's trying to make a killing. So it's kind of a two edge approach.
Dean: I get it. And so, what I was saying about my intention with the pricing thing is to be overt about where the extra comes from and what the actual benefits are. It's pretty clear to see when you go to a Four Seasons that it's a different environment than when you go into a Holiday Inn. You're getting a better bed, you're getting better linens, you're getting quieter, you're getting a beautiful design. It's all everything about it, and, you're getting the service. You see all of that and people are willing to pay for that. And that's all part of it. Not everybody is though, and that's okay too, because you just look at it and see, you've got to have your intention and your standards for you're looking for a particular client that you're going to stick with for 25 years like you said. That's the thing.
That's why selecting those companies, selecting the right things is going to make a difference. And so you look at it, especially now, when... What are you finding with just the offices in general now when you're going to people? Are most people or they skeleton crews in the offices? What's your observation of it now?
Troy: It depends on who their customers are. I can tell you that our factories did not stop the whole time because they supply the goods that need to keep the country running. Our factories, they open, our doctors offices and pediatrics, all that kind of, those people stayed open. Everything else trying to close down and then - to reopen, you have some people that are still scared to come in and that's okay. But a lot of companies did a half open. So half of their employees come in and we have to do the COVID cleaning every day and keep those people healthy as possible.
We've had schools that had opened and they did their protocols to keep COVID low. And we go in and do our cleaning. Plus we do the COVID cleaning daily with the Clorox products. There are places that have reopened and they're full speed ahead and we just give them the protection that we can. Again, we can do what we can in the office, but when you go home, you have to continue your personal protection. We can't follow you home and keep -
Dean: No, exactly, you got it.
Troy: So we just do what we can at your work place. And I believe this is going to continue at least probably one more year of the COVID type cleaning. And even if everybody gets the shot, I know that COVID is still going to be present and people are still going to be wary of, we no longer can just take out the garbage. We now have to understand all of these surfaces need to be cleaned daily just for that one more pushing of a protection.
Dean: Yes. Got it.
Troy: - or not. Because you know everybody's not going to take the shot.
Dean: Yes. I got it. What you didn't mention when we were talking about the ideal place was factories. Is that a good client for you or are offices -
Troy: Yeah. It's good because, it could be a global company. We have quite a few that have, they're really, really, really large, and maybe two of their plants are here. So we do their locations here. And in that case, somebody that's in charge of the cleaning at that building reached out and told us, "The crew that we have is not really cutting it. We've had them for about eight years and it's just getting worse and worse and worse" And then once you get into that one factory, they'll tell you, "Hey, we have a plant 10 miles up the road. Give this person a call and tell them I told you to call them." And that's how you get - to - location.
Dean: It feels like... When you said that immediately, I kind of perked up on it because a factory feels like they've got a facilities manager who's on site, who's responsible for making those decisions. The thing that I was concerned about with the multi-tenant buildings is just like you were saying, some of them are owned by private equity firms who they're not involved in maintenance of it and they outsource to a property manager who they're the second away from it. They're not invested in it as much as the key decision maker.
And so, I'm always looking for how can we find the person who's going to make the decision? I think that might be something that might be worth exploring, this idea of these... And it may be true with the headquarters and it could be office or factory that it's the headquarters rather than the multi-tenant one feels like they would be a more visible prospect for you. Does that make sense? Because I'm trying to think here... I'm trying to identify who is our audience that we're going to try and compel now in profit activator two.
Troy: Okay.
Dean: Is there such a thing as facilities manager or operations, or who would be the person in one of these headquarters or factories kind of put?
Troy: I can tell you Dean, a factory it usually would be the facilities manager, or maybe it could even be a person in HR or a person in the office part of the building that's just in charge of it. I'm thinking of one. The person that we talk to is in accounting, and I know about three others, the person that we talk to is some part of -, but also have been tasked with running the plant and contacting all of the outside vendors. So you're right when you say that. And even with some corporate headquarters, they still have that person because it is a large place and somebody has to be in charge of the snow, the cleaning, the grass, and all of the stuff that that goes on.
Dean: Yes. And I think that's the thing. You don't do the grass and the snow and the exterior stuff-
Troy: No. Cleaning is hard enough.
Dean: You just do the interior cleaning of that. Okay.
Troy: Yes.
Dean: How much is one of these clients worth to you? If you take a good size headquarters or a factory?
Troy: A good size headquarters is probably worth about 20,000 per month.
Dean: Okay.
Troy: And a good sized factory is worth let's say, I'm thinking of some here. I would say about 10 per month.
Dean: Because they got less offices and stuff.
Troy: Right.
Dean: It's really good when you think about the value of these. It's really a worthwhile thing to figure out, but what I was looking at is what could we do if we find a hundred of these? I want to hear your experience by the way, with the chip program. Because, that model of selecting your target audience and getting down to that granular level, kind of the two scopes that I go to are either a hundred like that or a thousand, if we're going to go by direct mail. But I look at both in a way. If you were to look at the next 10 years and we were to take just Connecticut for instance, and say, how many headquarters or factories that are owner occupied standalone buildings would there be? What's the largest a building that you have right now? What's the largest headquarters.
Troy: The largest headquarters is actually two buildings across the street from each other. So I would say it's about 370,000 square feet in total.
Dean: And is that an outlier in your portfolio or do you have other buildings that [crosstalk 00:55:25]?
Troy: We have quite a few that are in the 160 to almost 200 range.
Dean: Okay. So when you look at the things, if you were to take them, part of this whole process is identifying who they are. Because, that's where it is. Those are the ones. If we take a 100 of them and that's manageable if you're going to jumpstart something is, your 100 of them. And, we can use some inevitability kind of thinking. I always like to say, if we were to find a 1,000 facilities managers who have buildings like that in your market area, there's a lot of payoff, excuse me, on that, that if we're in front of those people every month for a two year period kind of thing, looking at that as a hundred weeks of branding in front of them, branding meeting. I've come up with a great definition of branding as an accurate. And what we're trying to establish is a brand B-R-A-N-D, a buying reflect affecting now decisions.
And that's ultimately the mechanical outcome that you're looking for if you have established a brand. That there's no need... You can do this on a micro level. Most people, when they think about brands, they think about Coca-Cola and Budweiser, whatever they're global big brands that everybody knows you're top of mind among everybody. But, the benefit of that is the buying reflex that comes with it. So if somebody goes into a restaurant at lunchtime and they say, what would you like to drink? The buying reflex in that now decision moment is on the coke. And they've established that buying reflex in billions of people just like Budweiser has done it with beer.
But, I imagine that in new Haven, Connecticut, there's a microbrewery that makes a New Haven pale ale or something that is-
Troy: Yes, there is.
Dean: ... Local only to there. And if you go into a restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut, and somebody says, "Would you like a beer?" They'll say, "I'll have a New Haven pale ale." They've established that buying reflex in the minds of a much smaller group of people but they've done it in a more passionate way.
So, what I'm saying is that, it's not about getting Maintenance One known to every-
Troy: Around the world.
Dean: It's about getting maintenance One to be a buying reflex in the mind of the 100 people who are the key decision makers on your ideal next facilities. And so that's why I was a big of the dream 100 idea because it fits that way. That it gets right down-
Troy: It's a long process though, Dean. It's long-
Dean: I understand.
Troy: ... But I don't care about it takes a long time. Like you said, if you were going to pour in the cash for two or three years, the pay off is okay. I kind of lost track with the Chad Holmes program because he would have you call the person, send the package, call the person, call the person. You and I both understand that in today, 2020, it's almost '21, people don't want phone calls and people don't take calls-
Dean: No, I get it. So that's why I say about what I liked about the idea, the sentiment of picking those 100, but I like to do direct mail. I like to do more things where we're trying to target to them. My approach on everything is that my phone only accepts incoming calls. That's the way I approach everything. I'm not making an outbound call to anybody for anything.
Troy: Okay. I got you Dean. Okay.
Dean: And so that's why I want to get them, compel them to raise their hand. If I know who they are. If I can narrow down that Wendell Johnson is the facilities manager for 32 Galaxy where is a big headquarters for the Acme Cracker company. That's a real person. That's who's the person I need to establish this buying reflex. And so I know that just like you said, something is going to happen with the incumbent. It's not on the top of anybody's to do list, to switch their maintenance company, unless it is on the top of their to do list.
Troy: But usually it's some type of trigger that causes that.
Dean: But sometime over the next two years, something's going to happen. And if you're-
Troy: Oh yeah.
Dean: And that's what I'm talking about is that if you were to look at that and we spend $50 over the next two years on that one person, establishing, first of all, that they know who you are, and then that you're there when something that's going to happen happens, and we need to be able to draw attention to those things. I would start looking at what are the things that are going to trigger them that could be a problem that you could be the solution for. And you start to get inside the mind of you start parading the negatives, the things that could be going wrong for them. And talking about all the differentiation stuff.
Troy: So I'm thinking that continuing to talk about how we are... So people would tell me, and people have told me, if you want to be like Walmart and just be cheap and have thousands of customers or millions of customers, or do you want to be a little more expensive and have a high of the top 20 clients and just have a bunch of top 20, that's great. But people would tell me, you're going to price your company out of the competition. Why would a company want to pay 150 a day when they can pay 100 a day and still get the garbage out? They don't need the crews to be dressed in the right clothing, the right attire, their crews are trained, your trucks are -, everybody's courteous they don't need all that. They just want the garbage out. What's your answer to that?
Dean: I think that's because they don't know, and you kind of have to agree with whatever their perception is, their reality. Unless you educate them otherwise, why is it important that all of the people wear fly uniforms? Why is that matter? How is that the advantage? Is it? I don't know. And you're again, trying to convince people who don't see it that way. When you're going to be the higher price thing, you're not going to... The Four Seasons isn't trying to convince Holiday Inn people that they should come up to, that it'd be better for them at Four Seasons. They're just being the Four Seasons and they're demonstrating that because they start out with all the great things. They start out with the best locations in the city. Where you want to be, they've got the iconic buildings that look great. Their whole pride of all of that is there.
But, just people take pride in the cleaning, in the fact that their maintenance team is wearing matching uniforms?
Troy: I don't know.
Dean: That's what I'm saying is does that make the person get the garbage out better, or get the carpets cleaner. It's a lot of it that that is what you have to be able to identify and articulate the advantages of these things where the extra money's going.
Troy: Okay. So you have to do this just by people viewing the website. Because again-
Dean: No, You can bring out things that... I mean, ultimately, if you can create something that you show there's a difference that happens. If you can talk about the return on clean, if you can show and tie that the sanitation and stuff that you do, even in non COVID times can reduce sickness downtime, lost employee time, that's a difference. If people aren't getting the flu or sick or colds, even right now COVID is overwhelmingly is the important thing. But in two years, the flu is not going away, cold's not going away. All of that kind of stuff is still there and it's still a significant impact on productivity.
If the flu goes through the office, you're going to have people out, you're losing people on downtime. And so, if you're saying that this extra care to do thoroughly do the sanitizing makes a difference, makes a measurable difference, that could be a great thing.
Troy: I believe also the hard evidence of, we've completed this task, you're ready to go is people don't want to have to be accountable and prove what they've completed, because it's easy to just slide through and just tell people, Oh we did that hallway on Tuesday. But today is Saturday and you're inquiring about that hallway, but there's no way to prove that we did it on Tuesday. But if on Tuesday night we think you proved that it's done and it's completed, that's part of, okay, this extra cash has gone into... They're really bringing up -
Dean: So there's an interesting thing that now each week, each month, imagine that as an article on a postcard that shows those things that are drawing to attention where the other companies are slipping. You show a picture of something down the hallway that's clearly muddy or dirty or whatever it is, and them saying, "We did the hallways on Tuesday night." And then show how your 360 accountability system shows that what they say is done, is done. Proof. So now you're saying that that's a differentiator. But that may be one and this is where it gets into now, the inside the mind of the person, what are the triggers that you could point to? That's one of the things. You just said that. So now you build an article around that, communication around that. That you're saying that these are all the reasons that somebody might switch people, all these tolerations that might be causing a problem for people.
Troy: So Dean, I know our time is almost up here and we-
Dean: Say it isn't so. How could it be? Oh my goodness.
Troy: I didn't bring up and I don't know how your view of it is, how I can tie this in to those 100, but we have podcast. The Podcast is all about service and quality standing on service. So we stand on our 30 years of going through challenges of having problems, because we're all people. We're not perfect. I'm never going to tell a person there that you won't ever have an issue. I've stayed at some big hotels and they're very great and there's been an issue, but I can tell you when there was an issue, not only did they resolve it very quickly, but going back to that place in the past 10 years, that same issue has never occurred again.
S, how would you tie in the podcast to... We've talked to a lot of people we talked to Ari, we've talked to Joe Weldon about how you can use speaking with your service. We've had a lot of people on that. They own retail across the country and we talk about quality, we talk about service and we bring in our own people and we talk about it again and again, and again and again. So how would you use that as a tool, just talking to these 100 and just reinforcing your standards?
Dean: I think it might be a situation where, if you think about the CEOs of those companies or whoever that, podcasts is a great way to feature companies that you would love to work with. It's almost unrelated, is that the podcast is about this master topic. And you're bringing in the CEOs as to get their perspective on things, how they do it. In a company that does voluntourism, travel things for corporate responsibility type things. And he was in New Zealand and I suggested doing a podcast about corporate responsibility and highlighting the leaders of the companies that are leading the way on those things. So he's highlighting them, but he's also getting to know them now. He's doing this role outside of, or as a kind of, not directly related to their voluntourism arranging program, but as someone who's created this media for corporate responsibility.
So when you think about what you're doing is you're taking these things, the qualities or the things that you stand for, and you're bringing in CEOs or bringing in founders or leaders who demonstrate those things to get their perspective, that's a valuable thing.
Troy: Okay. So it's not too much when I'm contacting them one time to tell them tune in to the podcast?
Dean: All of it. I would think you did a flagship vehicle of a monthly postcard, an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper that looks like a full page, like article type of thing on the front. And that on the address side, you've got an opportunity to do just that, tune in to our podcast or, put your offers right up on there so that whenever people have a need, they can call you. You're right in front of them.
Troy: Okay. Right. And I think the podcast will just strengthen our view on quality and why we're not cheap. But again, your approach to you can't just tell people we're not cheap and we're not going to be the cheapest options. You kind of don't do that when you go buy a Rolls Royce. You understand it's not cheap just because - the people-
Dean: No, you're the best. You focus on being the best. That's what it is.
Troy: Okay.
Dean: Very cool. Well, I enjoyed talking with you. I mean, I think you got a great-
Troy: I'm going to do all the tips and the tools and strategies and I'll let you know what's happening. I'm positive we will cross paths again.
Dean: I love it. That's great. This was one of the things, I think it would be... I do my breakthrough blueprint events where we do deeper dives in this. This conversation that we had, this would be like a two day conversation like that. So I'll reach out to you when I've got the ones coming up for the new year, but I think you'd get a lot out of that.
Troy: Oh yeah. I'd be happy to join, because I love to learn, so yeah.
Dean: Awesome. Okay. Well I've really enjoyed it. This was great. Yu have a great -
Troy: I did.
Dean: You have a great day safe holidays and we'll-
Troy: You too.
Dean: ... Connect in the new year.
Troy: Okay. All right, Dean.
Dean: Thanks.
Troy: Bye.
Dean: Bye.
Troy: Bye.
Dean: So there we have it. Another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation and go deeper in how the 8 Profit Activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now, you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com, and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book. And you can listen to the back episodes of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes.
Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the 8 Profit Activators are part of the breakthrough DNA process. You can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the 8 Profit Activators at breakthroughdna.com. And, that's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about breakthrough DNA, as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there.
So, that's it for this week. Have a great week and we'll be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.