Recently we decided to focus only on one city and the home cleaning industry. We no longer aim to grow in Texas and New York, and we no longer offer office cleanings and post-construction cleanings. From now we are only focusing on providing home cleaning services in the Chicago area.
The only exception is if someone gives us a call to book a cleaning with King of Maids from those areas or seeks those services or to provide enough work for the current Providers that we have in those cities. Mainly we are keeping these openings for previous and current clients as well as doing a bit of Yelp advertisement to make sure our current Providers have work. We also have a somewhat established reputation in those areas, and sometimes we get some calls. Without pushing, it isn't much since competition is WAY ahead of us these days, but it brings a bit of revenue, so we decided to keep them open in those cases.
Why did we make this move?
1) After running some numbers, there's tons of room to grow in Chicago. As we stand today, we are still understaffed and pass up tons of jobs we can't handle every day. It makes more sense to keep investing in our best location with room to at least double revenue than spreading the budget across multiple cities. It costs much more to acquire a customer because our reputation is behind our competitors.
2) Running Chicago is much easier for us at this stage and much more profitable. I'm not focused on King of Maids and haven't been for long. I currently take a $0 salary from BookingKoala and am not planning on it for a while. My main focus is to grow BookingKoala into a billion-dollar company, and I don't want to take the money if I don't need it and it can be spent in better ways to help further grow the company. With that being said, King of Maids provides for our living, and it's much easier to handle one city with an excellent reputation versus focusing on multiple locations that are behind its competitors. With such locations, you need to put in the work and budget required to beat the competitors and take the market share.
3) I'm eventually going to be selling King of Maids to someone who will continue to provide fantastic service to our customers so that I can work on BookingKoala only. When? I'm not yet sure, but I know that day will come. Until then, our focus is to continue to grow in the city of Chicago, where we can double with less effort just by finding more great quality providers who are willing to take on the extra workload that we pass up daily—then increasing the marketing budget when we are all caught up. Until then, I will also continue to use King of Maids to make BookingKoala better for everyone. Since I can still see problems in the industry firsthand, it helps us build out features based on what I can observe. It also helps me put out content for those looking to grow their businesses in the same or similar industries.
Are you interested in becoming the new owner?
Once it is time to let go of a business I've been in for ten years now, I will let our BookingKoala users know. It's been a business I started at the age of 19 and changed my life more than I could've ever imagined. I want to pass this business to a BookingKoala member for a very fair and discounted price when we are ready to sell. When we sell it, I will require the user to continue using BookingKoala and form a strong relationship with me. I want to find an owner who will be hungry to grow the business while they share their problems with me, so we have access to someone who experiences industry-leading difficulties daily. This will help us continue building out BookingKoala to be the best platform in our industry.
If you're interested in acquiring King of Maids one day, you can follow me on Twitter. I'll make an announcement there when the day comes. It won't be soon, but it will eventually come.
If I never owned BookingKoala, would I make this move?
I added this paragraph because I figured some people might think that smaller is better after posting this blog post. I wanted to clarify the confusion. Smaller is sometimes better, and you can make more money going smaller and narrowing down on your niche, especially when starting. However, if I never owned BookingKoala, we wouldn't have made this move. Since I'd have a lot of time, I'd be focusing on building out those cities and growing the brand nationwide. So if you're hungry for growth and have the time to focus on your business, go big.