“No clean is perfect” is what I often tell our cleaners during our Wednesday morning meetings. Now that we’ve done thousands of Airbnb turnovers, I’m even more convinced this is true.
No clean is perfect and that’s fine with me. But knowing this is true and doing nothing about it is a problem. Just because no clean is perfect doesn’t give us the permission to throw our hands up in the air and do nothing about it. There is something we can (and should do) if you want to dominate your market for Airbnb cleaning.
Quality Control Checks
QCs have won (and retained) us more clients than probably anything else we do. When I first started our Airbnb cleaning company, this was our big pitch. I’d say
“You’ll never have to worry about the quality of the clean. After each clean, we send in a second person to check over everything.”
That simple promise and delivery on that promise has won us countless accounts. If the host is local, they are going to QC your clean anyway (trust me). But if you tell them that you hire someone specifically for QC, the host sees that as a huge timesaver for them.
Cleaning companies that QC their own work, provide a valuable service beyond regular cleaning.
Pitfalls
It is not enough to tell your cleaners to do a walkthrough after each clean or even require photos. We do all of that and still “no clean is perfect.” If you truly want to grow your business beyond the 5-10 Airbnbs you currently clean, you have to implement a quality control system.
This allows you to win more clients, hire more cleaners, and build a reputation in your town.
The simplest approach
The easiest way to implement this is to simply pay your cleaners an additional fee (say $10-$15) for them to stop by another property after their clean for 20-30 minutes and do a QC. They shouldn’t know who did the clean and the cleaner shouldn’t know who is QCing them. This is very important. Each QC should be double blind to avoid any politics or finger pointing.
Provide your QC inspector with a checklist (happy to send you mine - just respond to this email) and let them know that if it takes more than 30 minutes to correct any and all errors made by the cleaner, they should let you know. In this case, the cleaner should get called back to correct the mistakes.
How often should you QC?
In my opinion, you should QC every clean done by a new cleaner until you trust them. Once you trust this cleaner, you should still QC about 50% of the jobs they do. No one gets a free pass. I would be lying if I said we QC 100% of the jobs. Our goal is to QC “the majority” of our cleans. This means we are QCing just over 50%.
Our hosts know this and they have come to trust us here.
Pro tip: don’t do the QCs yourself. You, as the business owner, are most valuable at your desk. Have enough faith and confidence in your cleaners that you can ask them to do the QCs. Doing this will require consistent feedback from you to both cleaners and QC inspectors but this is the only way to grow. If you’re always in the field cleaning or inspecting, who is selling? Exactly.
P.S. - have you downloaded our 5-Star Framework? This is the 60-point checklist that as given us +2,000 5-star cleans. You can download it here.
Until next time!
Logan
