Number 1 Advice You Need To Be Successful In Your Cleaning Business

Introduction

How do you decide which advice to take and which to ignore when it comes to cleaning business? Can you separate the myths and exaggerations from the truths? How do you even know if the information is true, especially when it comes from someone lacking credentials?

There are several online articles that show how to start or grow a cleaning business. Some say that once you start a cleaning business, it’s all about the cleaning. However, the truth is that you should manage your employees, customers, and finances for your company to be successful.

If you want to make it in this industry, you need to know how to do more than just clean. You need to be able to manage and lead a team of cleaners. And let me tell you: managing people isn’t easy! It can be one of the most challenging aspects of any business, regardless of industry.

You want people to trust you to their home or business and allow you inside their property while they’re away. That is why the number one piece of advice you need to consider is to perform background checks on potential hires.

This is a must-have when it comes to liability. Many cleaning service business owners may have the urge to skip background checks and criminal record screening due to the extra expenditure, but this step is crucial in order to protect yourself, your business and your current and future clients!

In this article, we will walk you through the importance of background checks to the cleaning service industry to ensure the safety of your business, your workplace, and especially, the welfare of your clients.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Importance of Running Background Checks for Cleaning Business Services   

Verifies Identity 

One of the most important things you can do and need to do is perform a background check. This will help to verify the identity of your potential workers. A background check is something that can protect you from people who are pretending to be someone they’re not. The last thing you need is to hire a dishonest person.

Even though you may think this isn’t necessary, I would urge you to do a background check on your employees. While you might know who they are, that doesn’t mean that they are who they say they are. You need to make sure that their information is valid and that it matches with their story. If you run into a discrepancy, then you should hold off hiring the applicant for the meantime.

Gives Peace of Mind 

It takes a lot of effort, trust, and work before you can convince someone to let you walk into their office or home unsupervised. Clients hire cleaning services because they don’t have the time, skill or desire to do it themselves. They expect their home or office to be professionally cleaned by a trustworthy company.

As a business owner, you should consider that there are important belongings, confidential documents, and personal stuff clients leave in their offices and homes since those are their own safe spaces. Having said that, hiring trustworthy cleaners should be your highest priority.

With identify theft and fraud crimes on the rise in recent years, you need to do background checks to help protect your business. Make sure that you don’t skip this crucial step to protect yourself and your clients from unnecessary risks.

By doing so, you can have peace of mind that the you can trust the people you hire with the belongings of clients.

Protects Assets 

This goes beyond the obvious. Many employees have robbed their hiring cleaning companies. Sometimes, they’ve stolen from their own employers, and sometimes they’ve stolen from clients’ homes. They do take just cash or jewelry; items like laptops, tablets, smartphones, and even cell phone chargers have been stolen as well.

Employee theft can happen in many ways:

• Employees stealing company cars
• Employees stealing from client’s own homes when they’re at work or at work when they’re at home

If your employees are going in and out of people’s homes each day without you being there, then you need to take extra precautions so this doesn’t happen to you too!

As part of your employee screening process, it’s important to find out if the prospective employees have any past criminal activity. These checks are not only good for determining whether someone is qualified for a position, but also for helping you ensure that you protect your assets and business, and not to experience the regret of hiring the wrong individual.

Provides Safety 

As an employer, the law requires that you do everything in your power to provide a safe work environment for all of your team members. Failure to do so could result in serious consequences, including legal action and financial penalties.

To ensure that your business meets criteria, there are certain things you should know:

• Employers need to ensure that there are no health or safety risks at work.
• The employer has a duty of care toward their employees.
• You must provide a safe workplace for your staff.

Performing a background check on your staff can help you determine which employee is best suited for the job. This way, you won’t make any mistakes when it comes to putting certain people on specific jobs.

One example would be, if someone has had any workplace accidents in the past (or other issues), this information will also be available and may help inform your decision-making process when deciding which employees should be assigned certain tasks.

Prevents Lawsuits 

Lawsuits against employers for “negligent hiring” are on the rise. An employer can be held liable for negligent hiring when the employer hires an employee who harms or injures a co-worker, client, or another individual.

If you fail to conduct or even ignore a background check on an employee with a criminal history, you can face charges of negligence if they commit theft, sexual abuse, or any other type of harmful behavior.

Hire employees only after you have conducted a thorough background check.

Types of Background Screening Tools You Can Use 

• Comprehensive Background Checks – get all the available details on a person so you can make informed decisions.

• Criminal Records Search – this type of search typically returns information about the court and jurisdiction where charged. When available, criminal records can include the charge, offense, disposition type, sentence, probation, and conviction.

• Arrest Warrant Search – it will help you find out if someone has an open arrest order or previous warrants.

• Watch List and Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) Search – the USA Patriot Act requires all US businesses to be OFAC Compliant. This includes checking OFAC and SDN lists as well as FBI terrorists and Interpol for countries, individuals, and groups known to be terrorists and narcotics traffickers.

• Drivers License Search – more often than not, cleaners will drive to the client’s office or home by themselves using a company car or truck with loads of heavy cleaning equipment. This search will verify the accuracy of personal information submitted by the cleaner to your business upon application.

Conclusion   

Being in the cleaning industry is not easy. It requires a lot of patience, humility, and honesty to stay even afloat and gain success. There will be times where you will run into clients who are difficult to please, especially when you don’t meet their expectations.

As a business owner, even if customers are difficult, YOU must remain consistent, fair, and trustworthy in your dealings with them no matter what type of job they hire your company for. This means being accountable for any issues that arise during work performed by your employees (and yourself!) on behalf of customers.

This is why it’s so important to have a strict policy to always run a background check or criminal record check on all new prospective employees before they are hired. It’s important to make sure that you are doing everything possible to protect your clients and staff from potential harm.

You might not realize the importance of background checks until you’ve run one. Background checks are the only way to get complete, accurate information about an employee’s history, and they only take a few moments of your time to complete.

You need to rely on your employees and trust them with sensitive client information. This step isn’t something that can be compromised—it’s a must-have when it comes down to safeguarding client property and protecting your reputation as an honest company.

If you need a 3rd-party service provider who can do all the types of searches mentioned above, you can turn to Searchbug to handle the background checks for you and your cleaning business. Let us take your worry away by providing verified, updated, and accurate information about your potential hires!