Transcription of Joe Walsh for the show Cleaner Homes & Beds for All #290
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Joe Walsh: I am a systems nerd. I love making systems, so that’s something else I love to do. If you put me in a situation I’m going to look for the system that I can make, I can create out of that. So that really came naturally to me, my desire to do that. It’s not to say that it’s been easy, but my desire to be able to set it up so that people would have a consistent experience from customer to customer to customer is something that I get really excited about doing. I can really keep going on that stuff.
Allie Smith: I was very fortunate early in my career to have the experience of exchanging my labor and work directly for only housing and food. That was in another country, and what I learned through that experience was what that reward felt like to get, to have my personal motivations be so aligned with the motivations of an organization, that all I really needed in return was basic living security.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio ShowNumber 290, Cleaner Homes and Beds For All, airing for the first time on Sunday April 9, 2017. Is it possible to take a good thing and make it even better? Today we speak with three entrepreneurs who are taking a unique approach to helping people have happier homes. Joe Walsh is the founder and CEO of Green Clean Maine, an innovative environmentally friendly home cleaning company. Amy and Allie Smith offer an earn-a-bed program through their non-profit, Healthy Homeworks. We think you’ll enjoy the show. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: Today it is my pleasure to speak with Joe Walsh who is the founder and CEO of Green Clean Maine, an environmentally-friendly home cleaning company serving greater Portland since 2007. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Joe Walsh: Thanks for having me Lisa.
Lisa Belisle: I really like many things about your company. Not the least of which is that you’ve been thinking about healthier homes and non-toxic products for longer than many people have been.
Joe Walsh: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: 10 years now.
Joe Walsh: Yeah, we’re going to be celebrating our tenth anniversary in October, but the start of the idea of the business was just over 10 years ago. We’re in March now, end of March already, so it was just over 10 years ago that the idea first started germinating in there.
Lisa Belisle: Appropriate for a green clean idea.
Joe Walsh: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Things growing in the right way. Tell me a little bit about your background. What was it about your growing up life in Rhode Island that caused you to think, “Uh, I think I’d like to go to Maine and open a green cleaning company?”
Joe Walsh: I think it’s one of those stories that I sort of ended up with starting a cleaning company; I didn’t move to Maine with that intention. Back in Rhode Island I had gotten interested in environmental issues through the road of sustainable development. I was involved down there in a community group that had gotten together to try and block or significantly change this suburban sprawl development that was going to be massive and would have completely change the character of my home town. I come from a very rural farming-type place in Rhode Island, a real small town.
This development that was going to go in would have brought a whole mess of suburban sprawl to the town that was totally out of character with the rolling hills and the stone walls and just totally out of place there. The more I learned about it the more I realized how environmentally irresponsible it was to build that way and I became really interested in sustainable land use and sustainable land use development, and really interested in places that had managed to remain walkable, places that weren’t auto-centered. I had lived in Ireland for about 18 months after I graduated college, and living in a city there that’s much like Portland actually, Galway Island, on the west coast.
They’re very similar, Portland and Galway, in that they’re both very walkable. They have vibrant food scenes and vibrant music scenes and vibrant art scenes. Just a really cool energetic small city. That is part of what drew me to Portland, but it was also this kind of idea, this interest in environmental sustainability. I was looking for a way to get involved in a business that would be making money but also benefiting the environment at the same time. I saw an opportunity in Portland that was a three or four-month contract job, it was a summer gig. It was selling advertising for a startup publication called the Sunrise Guide. You may know it now, it looks like….
Lisa Belisle: We’ve had Heather on the show before.
Joe Walsh: Good, that’s great. Yeah, Heather and I are good friends. I ended up coming here to help Heather get the Sunrise Guide started and sell advertising. What I found when I was working and meeting all these great small business owners was a super supportive small business community in the Portland area. Everybody’s helping each other out and supporting each other. I found it really inspiring, and I think that I fell in love with Portland.
I think it was falling in love with Portland and also being exposed to all of these sustainable businesses by selling advertising for the Sunrise Guide that really pushed me to want to go into business for myself because I’d been thinking about it for a while. But the question was, how do I figure out how to make a profitable business and benefit the environment at the same time? We had a really tough time finding home cleaning companies to advertise in our guide because they all said they were too busy.
All the green cleaning companies were too busy, so the light bulb went off and I said, “I like to clean and there might be an opportunity there.” I started researching business plans and how that sort of things worked. It was a good fit for me because my father is a residential construction contractor, so I’d be used to being in people’s homes and providing service in people’s home. I was comfortable with that atmosphere, and the idea made sense to me. That’s how I got into it.
Lisa Belisle: What was your original educational background? What did you think you were going to be doing when you were in college?
Joe Walsh: Boy, that’s a great question. First I majored in communication studies because I thought I was going to be on the TV, or on the radio. That was my thing, I wanted to be somehow involved with communication, broadcast communication. I didn’t know if it meant I was actually going to be on the air or if I was going to be in the production studio or whatever, but I was fascinated with television and radio. But that was when I was 18 and things changed pretty quickly when I got into college. I stuck with the communication studies and actually got a bachelor’s degree in it, but my interest started to lean more towards leadership studies and organizational communication, more the organizational and business kind of application of communication. I have a academic minor in leadership studies, too. That was always interesting to me.
Lisa Belisle: You also were part of the … You’re a 2016 graduate of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development’s Top Gun program and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program at Babson college. You’ve continued this interest in business and leadership in a more, I guess, academic way, and practical.
Joe Walsh: Yeah. I like to think of Green Clean Maine as my MBA program, because I thought of going back to school to get some more formal training in business, but it didn’t seem to make sense because by the time I got Green Clean Maine to a point where it was self-sustaining, which was probably year seven or eight, I realized that I’ve really learned a lot and I can really focus my training and my education on more practical seminar type programs that are going to expand my mind really is what I need to do.
That’s how I’ve continued my education. Top Gun was great for that because it exposed me to people and concepts and ideas that I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to, and also helping me to think bigger. I think when you start out… I started the business, I was scrubbing toilets and on my hands and knees scrubbing floors and doing everything from cleaning the showers to doing all the business planning and accounting and all that.
I think when you start from there it can sometimes be difficult to take things to the next level. You have to start to think bigger and think of yourself, I’ve had to learn to think of myself as the owner of a company, not a guy who cleans or even a guy who manages a couple of people. That’s what those programs have really helped me with, is the bigger picture stuff.
Lisa Belisle: Having some experience with men in my life, there’s not necessarily… it doesn’t necessarily follow that you would like to clean. I’m not saying… I know, I said this in such an awkward way. Maybe just not the men that I know love cleaning as much.
Joe Walsh: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: But you said you like to clean.
Joe Walsh: I do. I do. You wouldn’t known it by say looking at my college dorm room, because I don’t think that for me it was always something I actively paid attention to, but when I was a teenager I would spend weekends detailing my car. When I used to work in my dad’s construction business I would take time to clean out the work vans and get everything neat and organized. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing. I always found cleaning to be very cathartic. It really makes you feel good when everything’s clean and neat and organized. It also helps I think clear the mind, too.
There’s actually research that support this. Of course, since I’ve been doing this for so long now I hear a lot about cleaning and there’s a lot of research that actually supports the idea that for some people, actually, mental health therapists will actually tell people to clean as part of their therapy. There is definitely something to that. Yeah, I just enjoy it. I really get satisfaction out of seeing something start out looking one way and then you spend time with it and you can take a step back and look at your work, and there’s a lot of satisfaction with that, seeing everything just so and everything really shining at its best. In a way it’s like a passion for restoring things, I want things to look and feel the best they possibly can. I think that’s probably where that comes from, but I do like it.
Lisa Belisle: I need to back up and say that was a fairly egregious statement on my part. Just because you are male doesn’t mean that you don’t like to clean, but actually I do know men that like to clean. I need to apologize to any man who’s listening because that was a ridiculous thing to say. I’m glad that you like to clean, personally I like to clean too. There is something that is very… I don’t know, something about folding laundry, for example.
Joe Walsh: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You pull it out, you put something dirty in and by the time it comes out of the dryer it’s clean. You fold it up and then you get to use it again. There’s something very, I don’t know, satisfying about that.
Joe Walsh: It’s very satisfying, yeah. Yeah, I don’t blame you for saying that you don’t know a lot of men who want to clean, because I think it’s true, I don’t think it’s a sexist statement. I don’t know a lot of men who want to clean, and I’m in the business. This is a business that’s definitely, the doers, the people who actually do the work, it’s definitely dominated by women. I do have a couple of men who work for me, but it’s mostly women who work for me, who have the interest in doing the kind of work.
Lisa Belisle: We were referred, and when I say we I mean my household, and I should be clear actually, the man in my life, he actually keeps things nice and neat. He may not love to clean, but he likes things to be tidy and he likes things to be neat. He will clean. We were referred to your business through a designer, a friend of ours, Brent Johnson.
Joe Walsh: I love Brent. Big fan of his work.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, he’s great.
Joe Walsh: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Actually, I think we waited about a year, because we had people who were working with us already, and they were good, before we finally got in touch with your business. It was truly amazing, to be able to… I think I saw the car that was a Green Clean Maine car, this is a tribute to your, I guess, communications skills that you have these cars out there. I made the phone call, I immediately talked to somebody. I immediately got a quote based on the information that I was giving. It was impressive from the very beginning that we were talking to a person, we didn’t have to wait and you had a system in place. There was already a system for just knowing how much it was going to cost.
Joe Walsh: Yeah. First of all thank you for sharing that. I’m super glad to hear that you had such a great experience. That’s exactly the kind of experience I want people to have. I’m really glad to hear that. I am a systems nerd. I love making systems, so that’s something else I love to do. If you put me in a situation I’m going to look for the system that I can make, I can create out of that. So that really came naturally to me, my desire to do that.
It’s not to say that it’s been easy, but my desire to be able to set it up so that people would have a consistent experience from customer to customer to customer is something that I get really excited about doing. I can really keep going on that stuff. I’m glad to hear you had that experience from the beginning. I knew, I set out knowing, that I wanted to build a professional organization. I wanted to make it bigger than just me and a couple of other people cleaning houses.
I all along was looking for ways to systematize things, but I didn’t want it to feel like a big corporation or didn’t want it to feel like a franchise or anything, because it’s not. We have that independent spirit and have been built from the ground up. I also wanted the people who worked in my company to feel like they can be themselves and really relate to people and get to know people. That’s really important to me, but at the same time there’s got to be solid systems behind that to back it up. I’m glad to hear that you had that experience.
Lisa Belisle: It was great because it was also very clear immediately, “This is going to cost this much money, and this is when we will show up, and this is what’s going to happen next.” That makes a big difference because I’ve been fortunate to have people who have helped clean my house for a long time because as a person who works outside the home, married to another person who works outside the home with children, that was something that we chose to prioritize for a long time. I have a lot of experience with people who are willing to help out with that, and it’s varied. Sometimes we have had people who are really good and they communicated really well, and sometimes we would go weeks without people showing up. We always pre-cleaned and then we would pre-clean and we’d wait and there wouldn’t be anybody showing up.
Joe Walsh: Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Admission, we actually still use your company. We went through the process and what was also great was that your company comes in and does a mandatory thorough… I don’t remember what it’s called.
Joe Walsh: Initial deep cleaning service, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Initial deep cleaning service. It’s like, you want to get people on track and they’re going to start with the grittiest, grimiest, get everything all done so that when the cleaning continues you’re going back and it’s more routine.
Joe Walsh: Yeah, it’s also because I want to be able to guarantee our work, so I am not going to feel like I can guarantee that your house is going to stay looking spick and span if we don’t have the chance to hit the reset button first. I feel like once we’ve put our hands on every surface in your home we’re now responsible for the cleaning because we’ve had the opportunity to get everything to a baseline. Now I can tell you as a customer, I 100% guarantee that we’re going to keep this place spick and span for you and you’re going to love it. That’s why we have to do the deep cleaning first or we just can’t guarantee anything. We have to get into every nook and cranny.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, and it was great because we ended up… because the quote was over the phone, people came into our house and they said, “Well, you know, your tub’s a little bigger than we expected, it’s going to take us a little longer, so is it okay if we go ahead?” We were aware at every step, there weren’t any surprises, “This is how much it’s going to be. This is what you should…” And they were very thorough, they were there for hours doing this, it’s not like we have a huge house, but they were there for a really long time.
Joe Walsh: Even the size of the house doesn’t necessarily dictate how long it would take and neither does…. If it takes a really long time it doesn’t mean, “Oh, your house was super dirty,” or anything, but it’s got to do with how many rooms you have and how much stuff you have and the way the rooms are laid out. There’s a lot that goes into why it would take longer than other things, but yeah we really try and communicate with people along the way.
I believe that if you create good reliable systems that work people will thrive within those systems. I don’t think that if you create really good systems it means that every movement is scripted and people seem stiff and impersonal. I think it’s quite the opposite. I think if you have a really, really solid system in place that your employees know work, that the system works, then they can feel free to act within that system and be themselves and make sure that they focus on the client rather than focus on, “How are we going to get this work done?” Sounds like it worked in your case.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah.
Joe Walsh: I’m glad to hear that.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it definitely did. Every week, because we’d have our house cleaned every two weeks, and I’m telling you I have literally, because I have three children and I’ve been a doctor for 20 years and I’m very fortunate that I’ve had this sort of help, I have so much experience that it’s very rare that we had had people before that would come in, clean the house and then leave us a nice note and say, “Have a good day.”
Joe Walsh: The notes, the notes.
Lisa Belisle: It’s really great. After enough notes we actually did go on Yelp and leave a positive review, which was something that was asked.
Joe Walsh: That’s great.
Lisa Belisle: You guys follow up via email. I think one of the reasons I like this so much is that I’m also a systems nerd. I feel like there are things that you can put in place, they shouldn’t be…. It’s a nice structure to work within, so you’re not wasting time. If you put something good in place from the beginning, then you don’t have to waste time messing around doing the same thing over and over again in an inefficient way.
Joe Walsh: Yeah, I like to set it and forget it. Nothing in business is truly set it and forget it, you’re constantly revisiting and revising. That’s something I’ve learned along the way. I think when I first started out I thought, “I’m going to build these systems and then I’ll be able to walk away and everything will just be hunky dory.” It doesn’t really work that way, you always have to revisit and revise and check and test, “Is this working? What do we need to change?” But I completely agree with you, you setup that system and then you don’t have to waste mental energy thinking about how to reinvent the wheel every time you have to go this thing, whatever it is that you have to do.
Lisa Belisle: You started out yourself somewhat smallish, but I’ve now seen your cars in lots of places. I know you have different teams all over the place. What is your reach?
Joe Walsh: We serve currently Saco to Freeport and west to Windham. We’re talking about expanding that a little bit farther out. I’ve got just shy of 30 people cleaning. Every day there’s going to be somewhere between 22 and 27 people out cleaning homes and small offices for Green Clean Maine. I’ve got 14 vehicles out on the road I believe, those are the little white cars you see with the logo all around the Portland area. Yeah, that’s our reach now. I can see us getting out to Sebago Lake to the west, that’s a little bit farther than we go now but I can see us getting out there soon. I can see us getting as far south as Kennebunk or Wells, because we’re getting more and more demand from that area, people really wanting us to come down there. I think we’re getting ready to make that leap.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I think it took us a little while to get on the schedule. Clearly you’re very popular. It seems like whatever it is that you’re doing must appeal to people.
Joe Walsh: Yeah, for us the toughest thing, and I think you’ll hear this from a lot of business owners, is finding good people to do the work. We also have a training process that is rigorous so it takes a while for us to ramp up for staffing to add capacity. Our basic training is three weeks of direct supervised training. We have new people come in and work with a team leader and train hands-on. It’s all supervised and there’s a lot of follow up and a lot of supervision and checking of work, and things like that. Then, after the initial three weeks, there’s another two months of, you’re done with basic training but you’re still being supervised and things. It takes a while for us to really get someone to the point where we know that they’re able to do what we need them to do. That’s sometimes why the wait when people call. You might have to wait a couple of weeks before we can get you on the schedule because it’s a capacity thing for us.
Lisa Belisle: How has it been for you to retain, hire and retain, people who want to do this work and want to do it well?
Joe Walsh: That’s a great question. I think we… I know that we do a good job at this as compared to other people in our industry but it’s still a very high turnover industry. Our average length of employment for people once they get past training is two years. If you take everyone who’s working for me right now, I have some people who have been with me for almost six years, I have some people who have been with me for just a few months. If you average it all out it’s two years. Which in this business is good, that’s a really healthy number, but it’s still a high turnover industry, but each year that number gets higher.
Our goal is to make that average more like four years, that’s where we really want to be. We’re working on that. We are finding success because and finding good people for a few reasons. One is, you can actually make pretty good money working for us as a housekeeper. You’re going to make better money by the end of your first year than you would working in most of the hotels in the area for example, if you’re looking at housekeeping work. We also provide so much training that we find our employees really appreciate the structure and the training. The training program is very structured, again you were talking about systems, we really work hard to make sure everybody gets the same information and that people learn as they go.
We have some great trainers who really can adapt to people’s different learning styles. We get a lot of feedback that our employees appreciate that. We attract people because we’re not corporate, because we’re a smaller company and we have a little bit of a personality I think. We’re really engaged in the local business community in the greater Portland area. We retain people because they can quickly move up in the company, which is not like a lot of entry level jobs. Working for us you start $11 an hour and a lot of entry level jobs like that, you might start at 11 and in 18 months you might be making 11.25, but for us in 18 months you’re probably making $14 or $15 an hour and you probably have a company car. For someone who’s 25, 26, 30 years old to be making $15 an hour plus and have a company car and have paid vacation, these things, it’s a good job. That’s how we end up able to keep people.
Lisa Belisle: Have you been able to make your goal of having a sustainable business model?
Joe Walsh: Yeah. The business in a lot of ways runs itself. It’s what allows me to do things like be interviewed for a podcast on a radio show. It does but one of my big goals for the business is to be one of the few cleaning businesses in the country, the few residential cleaning businesses in the country, I should be specific about that, that offer health insurance. Right now we’re not big enough to be able to really support that financially, but it is a major goal of mine.
In my mind our next big milestone is to be able to offer full scale health benefits for our employees. We used to for a short period of time, there was really generous subsidies for small businesses to offer health coverage and those went away when the Affordable Care Act came into place, but that’s fine because my employees get really good coverage under the Affordable Care Act. They’re able to get the health coverage that they need from some way shape or form with the ACA, but given the current political climate, who knows what’s going to happen with the ACA.
I want my company to be able to provide health benefits if they lose their ACA coverage because quite a few of my employees depend on the subsidies from the ACA to get insurance for themselves and their families. If they lose that I want to be able to swoop in and do it. My goal is that next year, by next year or the year after, we’re able to offer health insurance. That to me is when I’ll feel like, “Okay, now we’re really a sustainable long term business that will be able to keep going for decades,” once I feel like we’ve reached that mass where we can actually do that. That’s to me the last big milestone for us.
Lisa Belisle: I have no doubt that you will be able to reach that goal. You seem like you’ve accomplished really great things in the last 10 years and I hope that your team continues to do a great job on my house. I have no doubt that they will there either because they really, I guess, call out team Ashley, that’s the people I’ve been working with.
Joe Walsh: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that.
Lisa Belisle: They’ve done a really nice job. I’ve been speaking with Joe Walsh who is the founder and CEO of Green Clean Maine, an environmentally-friendly home cleaning company serving great Portland since 2007. I’ll also say you guys have a fun Instagram feed, so thank you for that too.
Joe Walsh: Yeah, check us out @GreenCleanMaine. I have to make a plug for that, we have such a talented photographer we’re working with on that. She’s also a client of ours. We’ve been so lucky to be able to have her help us out, so definitely check it out.
Lisa Belisle: Thanks Joe.
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