Business View Magazine - October 2018

262 263 MAIDPRO ics that I thought were important to having a balanced life, I tripped across housecleaning.” “I was having a party, and wanted my apartment cleaned,” he continues. “So, I hired someone to clean it. They didn’t do a very good job. I had a cat, at the time; they locked my cat in the bathroom, so I came home to a mess- ier apartment, in some degree, than I had when I left. That sort of triggered me to say, ‘Hey, maybe I can do this a little bit better than the type of ser- vice that I got.’” Kushinsky began adding up the benefits of starting a housecleaning business. “I didn’t want a lot of inven- tory,” he explains. “I’d worked in the food business, so I didn’t want perish- ables. I didn’t want to have a business that cost a lot of money for building out a facility. It was great that it had recurring revenue. People paid at the time of service, so there wasn’t a lot of receivables. It was a service business, so if there wasn’t business in a partic- ular week, you didn’t have to support a staff. Another thing that I liked about it was that it wasn’t that ‘sexy’ of a business. The last thing I wanted was a business that everybody else wanted to be in, with tons of competitors.” Kushinsky eventually determined that house cleaning checked a lot of his boxes: it suited his lifestyle, it was affordable, and he thought he could do it well. “So I jumped into it,” he exclaims. “I thought that it might be a good business to start and maybe I’ll sell it in a few years, when I figure out what I really want to do. Of course, that never happened.” No, that never happened. In fact, the busi- ness took off. After several years, Kushinsky and company began interacting with other house cleaning operators. “We’d go to these cleaning conventions and I started speak- ing with people from a number of cleaning franchisors and franchisees, sharing ideas about software, and marketing, and web- sites,” he recalls. “And I came to find out that we had better software, marketing, and systems. So, I thought, ‘might as well start franchising.’ And today, we have one compa- ny-owned location and we have about 250 franchise locations and we’re in 39 states and Canada.” Kushinsky talks about some of the char- acteristics which, he believes, give MaidPro a competitive edge: “We don’t lock in a methodology of doing business, and pro- mote so highly, that we can’t move off the mark. Some of our competitors, for example, will require four people to clean a home and all their systems are built around that methodology.We allow our franchisees a lot of flexibility to be entrepreneurial.We don’t lock them into one way or method.We