Bubble Chambers, what are they?

It was a fun time this past week as my family came to visit me at work.  I love those days.  Mostly because I feel there is more connection with why I’m gone most days.  If your kids and my kids are anything alike, they ask questions “why can’t you take me to this activity or that?” and My answer is sometimes “because I have to work”.  Not fun conversations for a dad.  So, when the opportunities exist to share my place of work with them, I feel it’s a stronger bond.

That’s cool and all, but what about bubble chambers?

Okay, okay. Let me share the importance of the situation even more.  The cleaning industry has a great advantage for the workers.  In that, every cleaner has the situation open to them to see another world.  Yes, the job can be monotonic.  The job also has the potential for growth into a huge number of industries. 

Have you ever heard of Sidney Weinberg; the man went from a Janitor’s assistant to a leader on Wall Street. How about Richard Montanez, went from moping floors to being a leader Frito-Lay and originator of Flaming Hot Cheetos (so yummy).  And how about Gail Evans, also went from cleaning buildings at Eastman Kodak to now a global chief information officer at Mercer (super large HR firm). There are just three, there are so many more. 

The point here is the cleaning industry touches every other industry and to limit the exposure of workers to what they bring to the table is limiting humanity.  Organizations and leaders need to take the opportunity to share what they are cleaning, why they are cleaning, and the effect they have on the host organization.  In doing so you could be feeding the imagination and drive of a cleaning industry person to want to try other adventures.  Because, and the big because, is that some cleaners are using the job as a steppingstone, and we need to honor that.  Encourage it rather.  Be the company that changes lives instead of just changing toilet paper.

Now for the bubble chambers and the visit, and how this prompted this post.

I currently work at Fermilab National Laboratory, I see our cleaner (Carmen) everyday around 9am.  She is polite and we try to converse in Spanish, hers native and mine horrible.  She cleans other buildings in the lab as well.  And here is the cool part, she and her coworkers can see all the stuff scientists are working on.  Imagine the questions she has.  Probably the same questions I had when I visited the Education Center in the lab with my family last week.  The fun comment from my son was “does this work with regular bubbles?”, you know the everyday bubbles kids play with.  I love their connections to their lives.

“does this work with regular bubbles?”

— Personal

In comes the coolest looking device I’ve seen.  So, cool I just want to mount it on my Harley.  It’s the bubble chamber, a device that was invented in 1952 by Donald Glaser.  In short, and I’m sure scientists will pile on the comments (that’s okay), it superheats liquids and changes its physical state, then they pass particles through the device and liquid and track the bubbles.  With this they can detect: the velocity a particle is going, the curvature to the momentum, and the charge of the particle. These devices have been vital to the discovery of the W & Z bosons, and now revitalized to be used in dark matter experiments. See below for a much larger bubble chamber.

Imagine walking by and dusting a device that has such a dramatic impact on science.  Imagine what that cleaner will see tomorrow. We could have the next noble prize winner right under our noses if we could just share with them the industry, they impact every day.

References

Elkins, K. (2018, March 27). How Richard Montanez says he went from the factory floor to an exec at PepsiCo. Retrieved from CNBC Make It: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/a-janitor-invented-flamin-hot-cheetos-and-became-a-pepsico-exec.html

Montag, A. (2017, September 21). How a janitor went from cleaning floors to the C-suite as a 6-figure tech exec. Retrieved from CNBC Make It: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/21/gail-evans-went-from-janitor-to-executive-at-microsoft-and-mercer.html

Tietz, T. (2016, September 21). Donald Glaser and the Bubble Chamber. Retrieved from SciHi Blog: http://scihi.org/donald-glaser/

Wyatt, C. (2019, October 19). From Janitor to CEO: The Ultimate Rags to Riches Story. Retrieved from Business Barrage: https://businessbarrage.com/2019/10/10/from-janitor-to-ceo-the-ultimate-rags-to-riches-story/

Save Money, Write Better for Your Business.

HandPrint Inc.

The cleaning industry…

is rife with change in the recent decade.  More eyes on our businesses means more scrutiny too.  But are we wasting money with our own words?  Are we leaving money on the table of our clients because we can’t explain our services at a top-notch level?  Are the proposals a cut and paste situation for each new deal, and is that causing problems and confusion with your staff’s delivery?  The change in our industry will require these 3 main focuses to establish clear communication and deliverables.

Before we get to the 3 focuses, I wanted to share a couple of interesting studies (Verbal Identity):

1.      The National Commission on Writing (surveyed 120 major American corporations) –

“Two-thirds of employees working in large companies write as part of their job. For service companies that goes up to 80%. Yet almost a third of the companies in the report said that 33% of their employees’ writing skills weren’t up to scratch.”

This is serious when discussing turnover, when a 3rd of your staff is not effective in writing the wrong messages could be sent out with the wrong meaning or intention.  This also affects the business continuity of leadership positions. Imagine if a second generation of leaders is coming up with the same 33% bad writing.  Now your business in heading in a downhill trajectory with communication.

2.      Within the same article another killer statistic took me by surprise –

“37% of people think that their company’s process for collecting and combining feedback works well.”

This one hurts the most!  To grow our company’s, we need to identify key performance indicators (KPI’s) to visualize beneficial and dangerous trends.  The cool thing is that there is a plethora of data available hidden in the processes used by each of us.

So, what are the 3 main focuses to establish clear communication and deliverables?

1.      Are your manuals readable to the average employee?  If not, start there.  For example,

“General Electric rewrote one of their software manuals. As a result, calls and letters to their customer care team dropped by 125 calls a month. This translated to a saving of $375,000 per year for every single customer.”

This is real savings, but what about the cleaning industry?  The same applies to us, from what to do for HR calls and how to clean the floors for beginners.  If the writing is not clear the message will be lost. 

Suggestion:

looking at two items first: language barriers, and focus group work.  Both inclusions can, however long it takes, will win over every employee in the long run.

2.      Next, focus on the proposals.  I’ve been a fan of the cut & paste method of proposals for ever.  I mean it saves time, right?  I sure do, but if the proposal is filled with fluff, then you risk looking like all the other contractors promising the same thing.  Which puts you in a commodity market based on price.  That is not the space to be in.  If you say something in the proposal, be ready to back it up.  Plus, and here is a warning, if you have an item in there that you forgot to take out the client might be expecting it.  That could cost you.

Suggestion:

here is to have a couple of versions of proposals ready for different industries and have a one-sheet on top for you to see the deliverables in that contract (which may need to resemble the clients Request For Proposal).  Just be sure to keep the Fluff on the peanut butter sandwich and not in the proposal.

3.      Finally, email is the choice mode of communication in this fast-paced world.  Face to face is always the best method of communication but email is the strongest current method of communication as the number of clients increases per manager.  The cleaning industry’s average clients per manager is tough to nail down as processes and procedures vary wildly company to company.  Back to the email concern, with emails being used primarily the two statistics from Oberlo are shocking –

“In 2022 alone,333.2 billion emails were expected to have been sent and received each day (Statista, 2021).”

AND

“Emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates (Yes Lifecycle Marketing, 2019).”

Suggestion:

take the time to run role play games with your managers about email use.  Share with them that each email is a possibility to gain trust, increase revenue, upsell, share experience, and more. Role play with written email curriculum to support our managers.

With these three tips to strengthen you cleaning company a content writer or ghost writer can help build these resources in a fraction of the time an employee can.  Saving time and money to increase your bottom line.

Bibliography

Mohsin, M. (n.d.). 10 Email Marketing Stats You Need To Know In 2023 . Retrieved from Oberlo: https://www.oberlo.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics#:~:text=81%25%20of%20small%20businesses%20rely,50%20percent%20higher%20open%20rates.

Verbal Identity. (n.d.). Hard proof that better writing makes a better business. Retrieved from Verbal Identity: https://www.verbalidentity.com/hard-proof-that-better-writing-makes-a-better-business/

Are you planted or buried?

What a great past couple of weeks.  The cleaning industry is always buzzing with movement and that’s what this post will dive into, the cleaning industry. A passion of mine.

A couple Mondays back it started with a simple message through LinkedIn (benefit of networking) and spawned into a communication between six companies. Starting with a conversation about selling an established company, 20 people roughly and around $20,000 in reoccurring monthly revenue. The company has a good client base and is in a turn-key position for anyone looking to buy a company.

Then the outward reach starts with people I know who are looking, and have a history of purchasing other companies or looking to expand.  All the conversations led to other longer conversations about business metrics, cleaning standards, employee turnover, and the overall health of the cleaning industry. Our talks led to hours of interesting perspectives on how to raise the quality of our industry.

Whether you are into high-margin one-time work or are into low margin reoccurring contract work, the job comes down to the Law of Diminishing Returns.  In short, this law states the idea where if the amount of time you spend (cost for materials, labor, etc.) and the amount you charge need to be as far apart as they can.  The closer you get to the same number the worse it becomes for your company. This needs to be understood.  As amount A (cost) gets closer to the price of the job might it is not a good fit.  Conversations about profit margins and price standards were discussed in all the meetings. 

I bring this up in the vein of understanding how one company can lowball a bid and get the awarded job but still maintain a profit.  There were two main types of funding models I heard about during this week: grouped job profits and individual job profits.  Grouped Profits is the flexible option, it allows for a job that is higher in profit margin to pay for the entrance fee to get another client that may lose money at first.  The Individual Job Profit model is stricter and only focuses on each job individually to make a certain profit. These two mindsets have flaws and advantages.

Grouped Profit model allows for the lowball bid to work as long as 3 conditions exist.

(1) you have a diversified portfolio to weather recessions,

(2) Balanced workloads of low margin high investment clients compared too high margin low investment clients,

(3) a plan to help frontline leaders understand that they will have a zero-profit client and those that have the opposite situation understand that they are contributing to a higher cause.

The problematic points of this are the high trust need amongst leaders and the high level of communication needed.  Also, standards will be tested to try to make the situation work long-term.

The Individual Job Profit model is simpler in concept.  You bid the job to make a profit, whether a predetermined set margin for every job or a planned profit margin by location and management investment. There are 4 criteria to push this model:

(1) You must understand the profit margin range for the locations, from rural to urban,

(2) a set program to allow the team to work at the desired margin,

(3)  an accounting system set up for individual account management,

(4) higher level of efficiency and spotting performance improvement areas.

There are a few drawbacks to this model also.  You need to understand you may not win every bid, especially if you are pricing the work to your higher standards.  This relates to the Law of Diminishing Returns.  What does the client want to what you want to deliver.  Be careful here.  This warning comes from experience.  If the client is a stickler to the Scope of Work (SOW) or the Request for Proposal (RFP) then price it to your standard, enforce your standard, and prepare to battle it out why you are more expensive.  If the client is more relational based, you have the same choice as the previous statement only you will need to defend against a personality.

At this stage of our conversations, it came down to which clients are which type? But before that you must ask yourself, will our company honor the SOW to the letter, or will you try to do as much as you can and rely on the relationship to cover the rest.  This is an important part to discuss over lunch or with your leadership team, and even your crew leaders too. Mostly the teams understand the game of doing a great job or a good enough job, but they might not understand the trade off in the profit margin.

At this stage I would like to interject an exercise from a great read, Imaginable by Jane McGonigal, “Take a Ten-Year Trip”, (excellent read, and really a playbook on how to see the future) is a game in which you imagine the future of you.  Where do you see the company in 10-years?  What are the details?  Within the book she outlines the steps needed to see where the future (potentially your company future) could be ten years from now. This is important as this will be the purest image of your company will be.  Purest intentions, purest values, purest self to portray to clients.  If you are stuck in a situation where your margins are shrinking, and you feel in a dark place remember this:

As the activist Christine Caine has written, “sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried when you’ve actually been planted” - Imaginable.

The caution then is your company supplying a commodity that is compared to other cleaning companies the same way.  An example of this is in the marketing brochures “we value are employees”, or “we have the best equipment”, or “we have the best client relations”.  These are common phrases of the most common cleaning companies.  Being a commodity is a fast way down the diminishing returns road.  Deciding where you want to be in the future, what values, and other desires to not be considered a commodity. Take a second and think about your company, your client interactions, your contract compliance, or your team’s product they are putting out. If this is not in line with your 10-year plan change course quickly and often until you get it the way you want.

The Balance Beam of Financial Conversations

Cool Moment to report.  I was on my way to my daughters’ gymnastics class, and she asked a deliberate question.  One she hadn’t asked before. One that threw me off my parenting game for a second.

A little pre-explanation needed here, my daughter is a little business mogul in the making and the below conversation just proves the point.  And to highlight the prep work explanation, she has me read my business books to her at night because the story books are too scary. She’s unique in this nature I think compared to other 7-year-old girls.

Yes, I might suffer from normalcy bias a little bit. Normalcy bias is a condition that hinders most of us in dealing with anything new.  We prefer normal over everything else.  The cool thing is that as David Swanson put it, “almost everything important that’s ever happened was unimaginable shortly before it happened.” What follows was something not normal on the way to gymnastics.

The interesting part was the question “Dad, why can’t we pay for the house later and do the fun stuff now.” And as I thought about it, that question was loaded with several lessons.  I had to ask her to explain her question in more detail.  You know, just to gain context on the depth of my answer.  If you are a parent, you understand.  They can ask a question and can only be mildly interested in the answer.  I think they call that the Shiny Object Syndrome.  Limited attention spans and all that.

Back to the question.  She explained that she had a question about house payments because she heard me talking about it a week ago.  So, we started down the road of discussing mortgages, banking, renting, credit scores, etc.  It turns out, she was mostly concerned with “why do we have to pay monthly?  Why can’t we pay at the end of the deal?”

That escalated to a discussion on trust.  This 15-minute drive to a gymnastics class was getting deep.  Annnnnnnd she was listening.  Conversations do not usually go this way.  I was excited for the chance.

And a little nervous.  I do not think there was a time I could remember asking my mother these questions.  I wish I had though, it would have maybe saved me some time figuring out all this financial stuff in my midlife.  You know that time in your life when you are checking the next box on your insurance forms.  Or when the doctors just flat out tell you to change your diet, instead of hinting at it.

That nervousness subsided as I shifted from trying to teach a lesson to just having a conversation with her about my journey with mortgages, credit, money, renting, and financial matters.  I wonder if that was really what she was after, a genuine conversation.  How often are we telling kids what they should be doing when they really didn’t ask for advice?  It was nice to have a wholly organic conversation with no real mission other than a morning talk while driving.

The benefit, as she had asked the first question on the topic, was me thinking that our times are special with our kids, they maybe are more open to discussing financial matters than we think, and I wish (I hope) this conversation highlighted that money and financial matters do not have to be complicated or scary.  In the current reality I see kids, and adults, not knowing where to go with questions and who to trust when they are in financial trouble.  As a parent I hope I can be there for my kids in that regard.

Enjoy your Sunday. HP

Trade Words Like Cash

Lets Get Learning!

With making money on the minds of most people, knowledge is our only path to a bountiful secure future.  The great thing is that we have so much information at our fingertips.

But how do we choose the right knowledge to use to your advantage?

Do you listen to the media? Do you listen to social media? Do you try YouTube? Do you park it at the library?  Attend school?  There is no right answer. The cool thing is that there is no wrong answer either. Knowledge is knowledge.  In our business we need to have a process for knowledge gathering and use. 

As this is a topic on knowledge and making money, I’d like to share a piece of knowledge that is setting some groundwork for me.  In their book, Virtual Selling, by Mike Schultz, Dave Shaby, and Andy Springer (https://bookshop.org/a/93509/9781734883909) , is a prime example of learning something new, but not just for the newness of knowledge but to learn the lingo and skills for a new opportunity.  Pulled from their book a common quote that all business professionals and entrepreneurs should consider when introducing new information.  After all repeat business is our best friend.

“Change is not necessary, but neither is survival.” W. Edwards Deming

So, there lies the turmoil of what is next, what to act on.  What to move us from survival to revival.  Do you feel you have enough knowledge to support the proposed financial growth hypothesis?  How do you build the sellers/buyers relationship and not look the part of the fool?  The list of factors is too great to list here.  From day one we trade our knowledge in our lingo, our tech talk, and our jargon.  In the negative egotistical sense, you can see this as a pissing match.  However, in a true knowledge quest you see this trading in shared visions of workplace pride.

When listening, each trade has its own set of jargon.  For example, below are three different examples of industry lingo.

Plumbing                        Physical Science           Business

snaking lines                 gun spark                        Return on Investment

rough ins                         bias flow turbine          run to fail

water hammer              Hobbit Hole Door         Bleeding Edge

ballcock                           McClure Box                   Blue Ocean

You get the picture.  Once the lingo of an industry is understood a whole new world is opened to you.  Which opens new possibilities too. What possibilities are thinking up right now for your business?   The authors of Virtual Selling also provide key lingo to start learning to set you on YOUR next adventure financial gain.

Virtual Selling Lingo:

Engagement threshold

Cost impact model

Armageddon pitchman

Saccharin-sweetness

Bialys (admittedly this one is a flatbread – but I had to look it up)

NOTE – this is only a small example from the book.

Once the lingo is brought into the field the authors start working through their method for success, the R.A.I.N Method, which is a foundation to shift from F2F (face to face) selling to a virtual selling environment with an included ROI model to see the impact of delivering exceptional success. 

BUT that’s not all!  There are more tools like the Buyer Change Blueprint, review of the impact model, and more!  There is even a Star Trek mention from the old episodes if you can catch it.  The point is change is hard, but it’s harder without a system and without a good vocabulary.   Check out the book.

HandPrint Content

A Mother’s Memory

Mother’s Day is just around the corner. 

How are you honoring the mother in your life?  One wine, one tumbler, and a little relaxing? I would like to take a second to honor mothers out there everywhere and including my mother. 

This message is one of the fondest memories of my mother, it’s the way she could make everything, and everyone feel comfortable.  She did this from inside her kitchen.  Many can relate I’m sure, and the one recipe she made that always won me over was her Monkey Bread. Sometimes I feel she did it just for me, but I’m biased. 

Later in life I realized how easy the recipe is and my wife makes it every so often for our family.  I know I mentioned the recipe being easy, and that is not to neglect the effort of the task.  I think she liked the recipe because she and I could spend the time talking.  As a parent now, those moments are precious. 

A little detour from the honoring, the recipe is easier than I ever really knew.  The exact quantities are not in my memories, but I’ll try:

Ingredients:

1 package of biscuits, the kind that explodes when you twist the tube.  That is the coolest part to do besides eating.

Some butter, brown sugar, and a little cinnamon. 

Directions:

Cut the biscuits int smaller pieces, small enough to eat with your fingers. Place those pieces into a bunt pan or a pan of your choice (now that I’m writing this, we have a skull cake pan which would be cool to use).  Oh, I think you need to spray the pan with butter or something.  Whie you are doing that you are combining the other ingredients in a sauce pan to get is mixed, dissolved, able to pour over the biscuit pieces.

Then bake it for some prescribed time at a good temperature.

Please do not judge me, I was remembering the part about eating it and talking with my mom.  The fabulous finger food desert has given me so many fond memories. I’m betting she was thinking that it was an easy desert for the effort expended compared to the ROI of the experience with her son.

Thank you to all parenting members out there.

New Secret Mentors

Right off the tail of reading Upstream, by Dan Heath, is the awesome book The Logic of Failure, by Dietrich Dorner.

Within the realm of facilities management, we all shoot for the glorified predicative maintenance program.  However, we usually reside in a reactive position.  It’s mentally draining. Unmotivating.  

How come we cannot seem to get past that stance?  I say “we” because I’ve worked for many organizations and have seen levels ranging from both extremes.  It’s brutal that the thinking is not the same in the industry.  This one-two combo of books is a great way to extract a solid plan for your facility, more important though is how to develop a plan to calculate success.

The Upstream notion is difficult for most as the current thought is - if it isn’t broken, why fix it.  This is common.  Dan mentions “Downstream work is easier to see”, so then the dilemma is, when we do not think about something consistently, we lose sight of it. Then a year passes, then two, unconsciously we slip into a run-to-fail scenario.  Imagine the emergency lighting in your facility.  Have you checked it lately?  Have you saved funds to replace any? Now if you are in a facility with one, that’s not much and can be accommodated well. The struggle for the organization is – what other things will be slipping into end-of-life? Now the next scale of organization may have a larger burden of expense.  And let’s not forget about the safety of your staff.

Upstreaming is the golden level of preventative maintenance.  But it is hard to pay a worker to fix things before they break. Right?  The balance comes from trying to find that line where you reduce the occurrence of repairs to zero and increase the value of the employee to contribute to the profit of the organization.  This is the crux. 

Now without spoiling the book for you there are a few barriers to becoming an Upstream hero – “problem blindness” or that’s just how it is mentality.  Refusing to see the problem in hopes that it will magically disappear. Not good. These authors showcased the dangers within ourselves to struggle with not being able to see the problem as a condition of the environment we are in.  Their suggestions/hypothesis was centered around the idea our inability, in general, to not be able to visualize the situation and the unintended consequences was at the heart of the trouble.  The mastery of these books is that they have shared many tools that can be used to map out a situation and test the hypothesis of the outcomes.

There were two major examples given in the books that were traced out in beautiful detail.  The Chicago Public School graduation rate and the Chernobyl incident. Tracking the change in situation and using the model they used the unintended consequences of not doing anything were clear.  The walk away from this was a siren call to perform after action reviews from any project. 

“ “If we act on the basis of a more or less randomly generated list of complaints, we necessarily remain captives of the present moment.””

— Dietrich Dorner

One major highlighted quote (Dorner) is “If we act on the basis of a more or less randomly generated list of complaints, we necessarily remain captives of the present moment.” – this encapsulates the concept of reactive maintenance.  To switch from this stance an investment of time, money, and/or material is needed.  There is no way around it. 

Heath and Dorner have now become secret mentors of mine.  Their direction within the books is not simple nor do they claim to give a simple answer. Predictive results require planning and reviewing.