The Mag
Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast, President with Home Clean Heroes - Mr. Joe Delatte. Good afternoon, Sir.
Joe Delatte
Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.
The Mag
Well, Joe, before we get too far into things tell us about Home Clean Heroes, how are you serving folks?
Joe Delatte
We are a residential cleaning business, you would be familiar with the business model we are based in with buzz franchise brands in Virginia Beach, we currently would be considered an emerging brand, we've got our first franchisee up and running in Williamsburg and our local performance proving operation. Here in Virginia Beach where we serve two territories been operating since 2017. That with that operation, and the franchise’s first franchise opened in Williamsburg in November of 2019. Those guys are doing very well they're crushing it up there.
The Mag
And now what makes Home Clean Heroes different than some of the other home cleaning services are out there?
Joe Delatte
Well, a couple of things make what would be the primary things that make us different out to start with the brand. You know, the business is a proven business model. But it's kind of got the sea of sameness. As far as residential cleaning business with Home Clean Heroes, one of the things you'll find is that you won't find the word maid anywhere in our collateral in our brand, we take this road persona, really to heart and we really like to serve our customers and return in their free time so they can do what is most important to them the things are as a franchise, business that differentiates us really, number one would be our focus on customer acquisition and retention.
So, as a parent company Buzz franchise brands have a Shared Services Division pretty like, much like an in a house advertising agency that provides direct mail service and digital marketing service as well as website development for all of our franchisees that is all taken care of as part of your franchise operation and one of the things we know is that you know this business needs to scale quickly so marketing is very critical and we build that competency and we get the phone's ringing for our franchisees another critical part again as far as the franchise franchisee goes is our focus on employee recruitment and training it's very important in this business course to keep your employees the employee staff full so you can meet your capacity so we provide tools both for recruitment and onboarding and techniques for to retain those employees on board as well.
But then the other important thing with the employees is the training process so my background is I used to be a franchise owner myself I knew in that business in a home services business is really important to have a good thorough training program for your employees, so we built a seven-part online video training and certification program that every one of our employees goes through for their franchise owners. So, the franchisee knows then that the employees trained thoroughly and exactly, in the same way, each time so they don't have to come off their duties to train an employee each time. And then the other thing that is really a hallmark of our business is the focus on business success.
For our franchisees, we spent a lot of time one on one coaching and nurturing. We've we have worked with this model to really you know, drive them to maximum efficiencies. So, we can coach our franchisees to achieve the same kind of success. We work with them on budget planning, we work with them on day-to-day reporting the business analytics is a critical part of what we provide to employees or to the franchisees on a daily weekly, monthly basis. That they know exactly how their business is tracking. And we can work with them then to help dial in their efficiencies, the routing that important components of their business. So, we know that that we keep them on track and get them to profitability as quickly as we can.
The Mag
Now the person who is a good candidate as a franchisee, are they somebody who this is their first swing at franchising? Or is this somebody who has maybe an existing franchisee? And this is a complimentary kind of element to a portfolio?
Joe Delatte
Yeah, good question. It easily could be either one. The important thing as far as a franchisee is that they are motivated to scale quickly. And really, I think one of the most important components is that they're passionate about customers, the customer experience is not a complicated business. There are some complexities to the efficiencies in the routings, but we provide the technology and the tools to do that. So, a first-time entrepreneur, a first-time business owner, could easily be an ideal candidate. They can, you know, as long as they're focused on the fact that they want to be a business builder, this, this isn't that you're not going to start a home clean heroes’ franchise to be the maid in the home cleaning, you're going to be building a business, you'll be managing your team hiring, training, working with your customers. So, you people person is a good franchisee. But again, that passionate about customer service and customer experience is really important too, because at the end of the day, what you're doing is making people happy, right? You have to really appreciate the value that brings both to your customers and to your business.
The Mag
Now, when you're working in the Home Services, how do you help the franchisee kind of maintain the relationship with the customer when it's one of their people that are going to actually be the boots on the ground in the home of your customer?
Joe Delatte
Well, one of the critical components of our process is every relationship starts with an in-home estimate or focuses on recurring customers, this business model is a recurring revenue business model. So, we want to start that relationship off on a very good strong note for a couple of reasons. One, we want to get to know the homeowner we want to get we want them to get to know the owner or the office manager, the person that they're going to be having a relationship with from the office side. So, the office manager or owner will visit the home, meet the customer but also spend a lot of time walking through the home, evaluating it from a couple of different perspectives, how long is it gonna take to clean this home? You know, what, what's, what's my cost going to be in terms of employee costs, labor costs and clean? But to what are the critical needs that the customer has? We call them hot buttons. What are the hot buttons that this customer, you know, either has not been pleased with from a cleaning service before or is just something that you know, they're very passionate about within their home, we want to make sure we get every ceiling fan dusted every time we are careful around, you know, the priceless antiques or whatever it may be? So those are all recorded in our field management software system.
And this is really the tool that provides, you know, sort of the conduit that answers your question. The technology system that we use to schedule route bills, manage each account is a tracking system for this relationship. So, every time a cleaning team goes into that customer's home, they know what those hot buttons are, they know what the conversation was with the client with the customer, they won. And they know what they need to do in order to keep that customer happy each time we service their home, then there's another piece to this system that's really unique.
And it's a three-way texting portal. So, what happens is, we will send a text to every customer before we certainly know on the day of service, and actually, a couple of days before if it's a Monday, it'll come out on a Friday and then again on a Sunday, hey, we're going to show up at the house. The customer responds to that text, that text thread actually becomes part of their account. So, the conversation, right? The text thread goes both to the cleaner and to the office manager as well as the customer. So, it's a three-way conversation. So that relationship actually is an ongoing conversation, not just the one time that the cleaner can refer to each time and that's how you know this, this thread and this relationship just continues to grow and evolve with that ongoing conversation, the cleaners, the cleaning specialists, we like to call them grime fighters can refer back to that thread, they can see what the history is of the conversation, make sure that we're dealing with the same, you know, problems or hotspots or you know, or service components each time they go in the house. So, it's a really unique way to serve and stay in touch with customers.
The Mag
Now, but again, the relationship can easily manifest itself for the person that's doing the cleaning is the one that is spending the most time with the customer. And the franchisee if they don't have some sort of a way to check-in or to, you know, stay in contact in a meaningful manner, then you're relying on that person that's in the house as the one if they screw up or if something happens as humans have something happened, that they that, you know, the franchisee takes the hit, you know, because of the lost account. So how do you kind of create these kinds of moments, or at least opportunities for the franchisee to, to stay plugged in in a way that isn't, you know, kind of
Joe Delatte
A couple of different ways. One, one way that we provide from the franchise or side from the corporate side is a relationship with a third party. It's really an online Relationship Manager as well as a customer satisfaction survey component. So, after every first clean, that customer will get an email survey from us asking us how we did. And it's a net promoter score system. So, they're ranking one through 10, how their service was 10 being the best. So that’s the beginning of tracking of their customer satisfaction through this survey system. In addition, as part of our process, the office manager owner or owner is going to telephones going to call back into that customer and follow up on that service as well. So that's the initial service, every quarter, another one of this customer satisfaction, email surveys are going to go out to each recurring customer so that, again, from it served from the actual franchisee it's a corporate relationship, but it's coming from the local franchise.
So, the franchisee is seeing these surveys, they're going over them with their cleaning team. Again, it's kind of that closing the loop of here's what the customer is saying back to me to the cleaning team. So, we know we're dealing with you know, any problem areas or they're getting, you know, the right kind of acknowledgment for a job well done as well. And then, as far as the franchisee’s processes, well, there's a quarterly phone call that goes back into every customer as well. So that, you know, we've got that ongoing touch and conversation because you're right, it's a critical part of this business model, you've got to give the customer the conduit back to the owner, the office manager, so you know what their perception of the services. If not, you can just be humming along thinking everything's okay.
But the customers don't like to complain, if they don't have, you know, a way to provide feedback, they'll just, you know, something's not going right, it'll just kind of manifest itself into over the course of time, a bad impression of the company. And before you know it, that customer just disappeared. So, we take these special steps to make sure that that that communication stays open, and the customer feels like they can get back to us with any kind of feedback, we want it we need it
The Mag
right and this is something that differentiates you from other franchises that are in this space as well as kind of the mom and pop just the person that's an individual that's out there doing this. You're proactively looking for interaction as opposed to most people who try to avoid any interaction because they might get bad news so you're trying to kind of nip things in the bad rather than letting them fester.
Joe Delatte
Exactly we don't we don't want those Festering Wounds we want to know exactly what's going on with our cleaning team so that they can get better if that's what's needed to be done.
The Mag
Now you mentioned that part of being a good franchisee is someone who is kind of this Empire Builder that wants to grow something that doesn't just want a job. How do you kind of go about identifying that person? Are there clues? Are there breadcrumbs that these people leave that that you can kind of identify them and make them aware of this opportunity?
Joe Delatte
Well, if you know we look for somebody who's passionate about the business who really, you can tell they're an entrepreneur, they want to belong to the process of building a brand building a business. You know, there's, there's a service component to it as well. There's a difference between somebody who just expects to show up to work but and someone who knows that this is going to belong to me. This is going to be something that I'm going to drive whether they intend to be the hands-on office manager or an owner who is building franchises and hiring that person to make those decisions they know how to make those decisions and manage those kinds of people for a frontline people person. People manager is an important skill too because you manage a different kind of person that you may if you're coming out of a white-collar. I know a corporate America job and now you're you've got a team of frontline people that you're managing. There's a different way to relate to him and we've got the experience to help you know franchisees learn that it's you know, it's a learnable understandable process so it's something that most people who have a bit of business savvy and the ability to relate to people can do to help with that as well.
The Mag
So now are there parts of the country you're aiming to set you mentioned you know where you're at in kind of what Virginia Beach is that are you looking to kind of create some clusters around that are you going on the east coast where are you looking to expand to
Joe Delatte
we really that's one of the beauties about home clean heroes would be called an emerging brand because we're fairly new in the space but the business model is proven and more importantly, buzz franchise brands have experienced in launching over 100 you know, hundreds of franchise operations through our current branches and we used to be the owner of Mosquito Joe as well so the original owners in the studio so our team has launched a lot of franchises, we really have a footprint that's nationwide, we have the ability and we built this company to scale quickly. So, we have the resources to operate in any state. As far as you know, the kind of markets that are the best for a residential cleaning service, they're, they're the ones with larger populations. So, the metros in basically any geographic area of the country work. The beauty of this business model is its year-round recurring revenue, for the most part, your employees are working in the home so it's pretty weatherproof or weather resistant. So, in just about any larger market, we got the potential to plant a flag at any point in time.
The Mag
Now for you What's the most rewarding part about kind of growing a margin franchise like this?
Joe Delatte
The most important thing the most rewarding thing is seeing people succeed so being you know the entity that helps somebody realize their dreams build wealth for their family build a brand within their community that becomes known that provides financial security and a future for them and their family that's easily the most rewarding I'm a builder I like to build things when I own my own home services franchise that was my goal, that's what made me happy was seeing the operation grossing become known within the community, you know, and the just the brand awareness and recognition. So, I really enjoy, and my team really enjoys seeing our franchisees reach that and achieve that market
The Mag
And then what attracted you to Buzz?
Joe Delatte
Well, a lot of things the success of the company but you know, I can tell you the model here with Buzz franchise brands with all of our brands and Home Clean Heroes, in particular, is one of nurturing and coaching the franchisee. I was offered the opportunity to build this on a national scale, the senior leadership team and the development team bus franchise brands what they did with mosquito Joe was the model for what we've built with home clean heroes, but for a franchisee, as I was when I was a franchisee, I needed the coaching and the connection with the business model both for helping me to train my employees and to know when the right times were to make the right moves within the business. So, we've got that culture of establishing that franchise business coach that's the title. It's the person that we have in place. Every 20 franchisees has a franchise business coach that they work with directly and we work with them on it on a daily basis to make sure their business continues to grow and evolve properly.
The Mag
Now you mentioned that as a franchisee in a market. The brand or the franchisor handles a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the launch and kind of the attraction of a business, is that launch forever? Or is this something that is for a period of time and then at some point, it becomes the responsibility of the franchisee to take over that element of, you know, maintaining and growing the business?
Joe Delatte
Yeah to two different pieces of it, I guess the launch and the whole entire ramp-up piece of it, heavy operation component to that, right. So, our franchise business coaches work day to day from the day you sign your franchise agreement through a 63-item checklist that starts with, you know, items like your business license, your location, if you're going to be located in a commercial location, you're every particular bit of your business, your LLC, or a corporate entity, whatever it might be. So, everything's in a checklist ready to go turnkey. So, we've got everything set up to start you up, including dropping an entire startup kit of equipment materials that will outfit your first two vehicles and teams on your doorstep. 30 days before you open your boom, you're ready to go. So that's all packaged, processed, ready to go.
As far as the marketing pieces of it, that is ongoing. And you know, the big components from the corporate end are very comprehensive, targeted direct mail program that all of our franchisees participate in, they'll drop direct mail to their targeted households in their franchise territory, three to five times a year based on the strategy and the budget, digital advertising component. So, it's display, search, marketing, and SEO, Search Engine Optimization that are executed by our shared services team. Here at Buzz franchise brand. The website is set up ready to go day one, SEO is already in place and functioning, the search campaigns are in place ready to go. So, you're found when somebody searches for you know, a home cleaning company, whatever it is that may be searching for. And that is mapped out and planned on an annual basis executed on a daily basis for the entirety of your franchise agreement.
The Mag
And how many kinds of customers can a franchisee handle?
Joe Delatte
Yeah, it's easy to scale. So, it's just a matter of how big the franchisee wants to get, you know, within a territory, a target a good target would be 300 to 350 recurring customers over you know, on an ongoing basis 300 to 350 customers, we operate in territories with 35 to 45,000. Targeted households. Those are zip codes sore, or zip code defined. So, within each individual territory, 35 to 45,000 customers. So, if you've got 350 recurring customers, you've got a 1% market share. And that can build you up to a million-dollar business.
The Mag
Wow. So that is very enticing for a lot of people. So, I guess the sky's the limit for you guys.
Joe Delatte
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to scale as you grow you add two employees in a vehicle each vehicle got two employees in it. background checked, insured, uniformed, professionally trained ready to go and as your business grows, you get to the point where that route that team is full, reaching, reaching their milestones, add another team add another couple vacuum cleaners and the equipment and off they go. So yeah, does it scale quickly and easily.
The Mag
And it sounds like you're handling most of the things that would be a hurdle or a hassle for most of the, you know, the operators.
Joe Delatte
Yeah, that's our goal is to make the entire, you know, especially startup experience. turnkey. So, it's a great opportunity. You know, and I'll mention one other thing too, where they said we're fairly early in, in the process of launching franchises, well down the road of being built and scaled and ready to go. But there is a special program in place as far as franchise fee discounts for what we call our first five franchisees. So, in our inaugural league we call them our franchisees, there's a $20,000 discount on the franchise fee. So that's something that definitely if you're in this interested in this space, this kind of business model, I would encourage people to at least talk to us about
The Mag
Good stuff. And if somebody wanted to have a more substantive conversation, what's the best way to get a hold of you?
Joe Delatte
An easy thing to do, I mean, there's an email address. It's an easy one to remember leads@ homecleanheroes.com. That'd be one way you can also go to our website homecleenheroesfranchise.com. As you pull that up, you'll see a request franchise info form right on the homepage. Fill that out. It will go directly to our franchise Development Director, and you'll get a call.
The Mag
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