contractor success By: Michael Dambrosio T There is an old axiom that business and family should stay separate; however, there are many family-owned and operated clean-ing companies that achieve great success that they wouldn’t have otherwise found without maintaining closeness to kinfolk. Without familial ties, our company would have never survived the first year of business. Our family pulled together during tough economic times and achieved success by stepping up and making sacrifices that most employees never would have done. There are positives and negatives per-taining to working with your family. We argue more than a typical chief exec-utive officer (CEO) and chief operating offi-cer (COO) because we are brothers. But, when we work together, we can accomplish anything. We encourage one another to do better. We sit down at the dinner table and dis-cuss the day-to-day operations. We bring work home and, rather than seeing it as a task, we see it as an oppor-tunity to do better work, make more money and make our family proud. It is also great competition. Competition Breeds Confidence My brother and I compete constantly to see who can bring in the most business, who can save the most money or who can eat the most meatballs — and it’s all in good fun. My brother and I are complete opposites: One of us handles the operations — the actual cleaning — while the other handles business — the sales and marketing. He has no idea how to clean and I have no idea how to run a business. We also have completely different ways of thinking when it comes to making big deci-sions about the company. I think the glass is half empty; he thinks it’s half full. My brother is the visionary: He sees where we need to go and what we need to do in order to grow. I’m the conservative: I double check his plans and look for mistakes. He comes up with the crazy ideas, I come up with the ways they could fail, a proverbial punch or two gets thrown and then we come up with one solid plan that we never could have come up with alone. Many people think that, because they can do one or the other, they can successfully run a cleaning company. But, they quickly find out that successfully running a cleaning business is harder then they think. When you have your own business and you do everything yourself, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work. Focusing on your specialties ensures that you are benefiting the company to the best of your ability. You are no longer taking the chances you first took when you opened the company because you already know how hard it can be going down that road. So, sometimes you need that push, and who better to push you than your own family? That much needed push helps you realize that you haven’t reached your full potential, and neither has the company. It is inspiration backed with trust, love and family. Family Beyond Definition Our company works together — like a family. And, it is not just the family members who benefit from this; every employee of our business it treated like family, even if legally they are not. Our company uses only green-certified products, microfiber cloths and high-efficien-cy particulate air (HEPA) filtered vacuums. 40 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • April 2012 Image courtesy of ProTeam Inc. Why, contrary to widespread belief, doing business with family can be beneficial. Family Affair A
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