I decided to try and spend the day with the family but as always, business continues. I had a meeting with the new employees who are amazing and had a day at the park with my family. Did a little business planning and I feel like it was an overall successful day.
So the new employees called something like 120 companies yesterday and ended up calling 180 today. These numbers are great! We got another 5-6 companies that are interested in signing up and these two girls are putting all of us founders to shame. I love it. They are working and modifying their script trying to find the way to get past the gatekeeper than answers the phone. I think today was a great day for them due to their own success. They got the mental reward for their hard work and can see they are more than capable of doing the job. We are still trying to figure out the bonus structure but they will have a bonus structure for getting providers to sign up.
So, my wife and I had a good talk about the business planning. I wish my other partners were here but they are on a much needed vacation. According to the numbers, we have about 20-25 days left of calling providers here in the DFW area before we have to figure out what is next. The big decision is stay in DFW and add more services (house cleaning, pest control, handyman, etc) or move to the next city, which is Houston. We decided both. We will move onto Houston with the two employees we already have and hire a third to start up the “secondary” services we want to offer. We mapped out the future a bit and for see about 10 employees calling full time. We want to grow by 8 cities a month in 9 months from now but I know I don’t to overhire then need to fire later on. I’m a bit of a sucker when it comes to employees.
So now we have a bit of a plan, I plan on putting together more of a calendar. We need to define what will be in the secondary services and tertiary services. I’m thinking the secondary services will include: handyman, home cleaning, lawn care, pest control, pool care and appliance repair. The third tranche will include tree trimming, bee keeper, garage door, locksmith, fence repair, lawn sprinkler and then maybe add the auto service. Auto services may be 4th. With a more solid plan ahead and some better numbers we can plan on, we can try to forecast out a bit. Time to plot it out on a calendar.
Oh, we are probably going to need another employee. I think we are going to need an onboarding team. Someone to harass the people who want to join into actually registering and filling out their profile and adding availability. This is something I have been lacking on and honestly don’t have a great system setup to track and monitor. I think we can automate some of this with time but for the time being, we just need to manually log into all of the provider accounts and see what is missing and watch their availability. FML… we need another employee.
