If you are a contractor that does restaurant hood cleaning, (sometimes referred to as kitchen exhaust hood cleaning), or just pressure washing commercially, you have come to the right place. Here at Hood Cleaning Helper, my goal is to equip other professionals with the right tools to help them achieve success. We make a living in an industry that looks upon us as the bottom of the barrel and I plan on changing that, one contractor at a time.
Hood cleaning prices are all over the board across the country and this isn’t good for the customers we serve, nor our company’s long term success. While bidding on contracts, a restaurant owner may have one price as low as $70 then another in the thousands. How can two different companies be so far from each other on price when they are suppose to be doing the same scope of work? The truth is, it usually comes down to what is actually being cleaned. Company A may only clean the hood and Company B is cleaning the entire kitchen exhaust system from hood to fan.
Over the years of restaurant hood cleaning, I have seen very good work and I have seen work that made me embarrassed to call myself a hood cleaner. Sometimes bad hood cleanings happen because the contractor wasn’t properly trained or didn’t have the proper tools to clean the kitchen exhaust system from top to bottom to bare metal as suggested by the NFPA #96. Sometimes, they are just lazy. I can’t help with the former, but I intend to help those of you who are looking for help because you want to do the job correctly.
I plan on passing down the years of personal experience, learned knowledge, specialty tools, business forms and many other things that will build up this industry and help those of you who are in the restaurant hood cleaning business to stay.
Be sure to leave your name an email address in the box to the right, to stay up to date on the latest information in our industry.
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
Unless you want to get into a bidding war with fools, quality and service must be the thangs that you focus on with your business.
But what is quality?
Imagine with me that your wife tells you that she is in need of a new pair of shoes (What’s new, right?). Being the awesome husband you are, you immediately hop on the internet and start researching the best pair of heels known to mankind. You really want to outdo yourself and get her the best that money can buy.
You find a local store that carries these heels and off you go. After spending a weeks worth of income you head back to the house to surprise your wife. She is going to be so excited. These heels are made from imported dolphin lips and lined with kangaroo hair. Her feet will feel like they are walking on clouds 3 inches above the ground.
These shoes will make her legs resemble those of movie stars. Her friends will be so jealous. These heels are of the highest quality, how could anybody not love them?
You are probably asking yourself where I’m going with this, isn’t is suppose to be a hood cleaning site? Just stick with me for a second.
So now you have the shoes all wrapped up and you hand them to your wife. She opens them.
Her face goes from a huge smile to one of confusion. What? She’s not happy with them?
“These are nice, but they’re not what I wanted”, she says.
“But they are the finest quality in the world”, you scream. “How could they not be what you want?”
“I wanted running shoes”.
Doh!!!
Quality Isn't What You Think It Is
So how does this relate to cleaning kitchen exhaust hoods?
I’ll tell ya. You can talk all day until you’re blue in the face to a potential customer about the benefits of foaming technology and the super duper scrapers that you use and it can mean absolutely nothing to them.
Bare nekked metal should always be the standard, but sometimes other things hold higher value than how every spec of grease has been removed from a corner of a duct that took you 3 hours to accomplish.
Quality is giving the person exactly what they want/need.
To some owners, the time factor is what they are looking for. They may be paying an employee to stay behind while you clean and couldn’t care less about how wonderful you downstreamed their system, they want to get that employee off the clock as soon as possible, period.
Sometimes it’s how you leave the kitchen when you are done is what quality is to them. You can clean the exhaust system good enough to shave your face from, but their kitchen is a mess when they arrive in the morning so to them you do a poor quality service.
See what I’m saying?
Find out what your customers want/desire then give them that. You will be seen as a high quality cleaner. That doesn’t mean to hurry up and leave the duct looking like it hasn’t been touched. If you are bidding a customer that doesn’t care if you touched the fan or not as long as you are in and out of there within an hour, then find another customer.
Target your marketing better. Advertise what YOU offer as a company and find the accounts that want what you offer.
Here is another article on how to do that: Marketing Your Hood Cleaning Business
Your Turn:
Have you ever disappointed a customer because your idea of quality and theirs were two different things? Tell your stories below.
I just received a HUGE booklet in the mail of the motion that Flying J filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In a way, I’m glad I lost them about a year ago; they owed me no money. This booklet has to be at least 100 pages of vendors they owed money. It’s crazy.
It brings up an interesting point that we face as commercial service providers. I’ve always enjoyed the personal relationships that mom and pops offer and never really focused on chain accounts and big corporate accounts. Dealing with small businesses has it’s own set of headaches, but at least if one of them files for bankruptcy or goes under, you don’t lose your business too.
What is a good percentage of corporate vs. mom&pop accounts to have when running a hood cleaning or pressure washing business? I’ve always heard that no more than 30% of your business should come from any one source.
Lesson learned from this:
Get rid of debt, before it gets rid of you! Flying J made gajillions of dollars, yet debt ate them alive unto the point they have now filed for bankruptcy. So, when you are thinking about that new fancy pressure washer or that new handy dandy trailer, make sure you have the cash to pay for it.
As salesmen we often hear “no” when trying to pitch our services. If you would like to learn a way to turn those no’s into gold, you will appreciate this technique.
When I first started my hood cleaning business I did nothing but cold calling (or knocking on doors) to get new business. This approach can be quite effective, but you have to have a fairly thick skin and you must improve your closing skills constantly. Through the learning experience of hearing no about 7 out of 10 times, I learned a valuable method of improving that number to about 7 out of 10 to say yes!
Everytime I would go into a restaurant to inspect their kitchen exhaust system I would look at the sticker on the hood to see when it was cleaned last. WRITE THAT DOWN!
If there was no sticker then make sure you ask the owner/manager when it was cleaned last and how often their frequency is. Even if they say no to your bid, you have the most valuable information you need to make the sale, eventually.
Tom Hopkins calls this the “itch cycle”.
If you sold a product, it would be like finding out when that product is due to break down, then hitting the customer right before that happens so when it does happen, you are who they will come to. For instance: say your customer is driving a Chevy, you know that within a couple months they are going to be looking at getting rid of that thing, haha, just kidding, but you get my point.
It’s actually easier for us, because the sticker tells you when they are due to be cleaned again.
So what do we do with this information? What we do is start a tickler file with all the “no’s” information especially the frequency and when it’s due again. In 3 months you will send out a postcard saying something like “You’re due for a hood cleaning, we would love to come inspect your current company’s work to be sure that your restaurant is getting the best value for it’s dollar”.
It does two things for you: one, it shows the future customer that you are on top of things (maybe even more than their current company) and you care about their kitchen exhaust system.
Two, it keeps you in front of your customer so when that hack company doesn’t show for their cleaning on time, your customer will know exactly who to call!
Now, everytime you hear a no, don’t be discouraged, just put them in your tickler file and say to yourself, I’ll see you in a couple months.
Be sure to sign up for the update list. The Hood Wrapping video part 2 is coming VERY soon! It will include some cool tricks that I have never seen or heard anybody talk about before. You don’t want to miss it.
Hey guys, I shot this quick video for some of you who may not be providing grease containment on the roofs of your customers. It’s a simple installation and easy to maintain. A little extra money in your pocket and your customers will love you for taking care of their roofs for them.
