Be a Pirate, Not a Pioneer

I attended my first ever commercial cleaning conference last month in Washington DC. The event was called Cleaning & Cocktails Live, the Interactive Playbook Edition. It was hosted by Michael Brown of Swept Technologies "I Wish You Would Have Told Me" and Ricky Regalado of Route/Rozalado Services "You Still Need the Grit and Blue-Collar". I was the event MC. That was such a cool experience. Big shout out to Michael and Ricky for believing in me, bringing in someone that's never been to a commercial cleaning conference, never MC'd a commercial cleaning conference, to BE the voice of the conference on their most important day. That was a great honor and I am grateful to both Michael & Ricky. I felt really good about it. I had a lot of fun. And I met a lot of great people. I will say this, I was definitely nervous in the beginning. But I noticed that I got more comfortable over time. Now get to put MC of a conference on my resume.

I met a lot of great people at this event. One of my new friends is Brian Comiskey from Legacy Cleaning servicing the Twin Cities of Minnesota. As Brian and I talked, he was sharing a takeaway from the night before that we both heard from Terrell Weg of MSNW. Terrell said. "You don't have to create everything on your own. Just learn to be a great copier. Copy. Copy. Copy." Brian and I agreed this was excellent advice. Why would we reinvent the wheel? It's working pretty good, right? And then Brian dropped this one liner. "Ken, we need to be a pirate, not a pioneer." I said. "Uh, Brian, can you say that again?" He kind of chuckled. "Yeah, sure. You have to be a pirate, not a pioneer." Then Brian explained his mindset even further. "Ken, we need to do what Terrell said and copy, copy, copy. We need to be the best cleaning pirates out there. Show up at someone else's cleaning company (with our Jolly Roger and cannonball and blast the front doors in)!" Brian didn't say that last part. He did say this. "And be a pirate and steal from others. That's what we need to do more of, we need to stop trying to pioneer or recreate everything."

I loved this mindset. It took me back to my days in Amway, when we learned that the most successful companies copied a proven business model. It's called duplication. It's what franchises use. Find a proven model and duplicate it. This is exactly what Terrell and Brian are talking about. No one is saying not to pioneer. We are entrepreneurs. It's in our blood. We would be wise to take the proven stuff and then pioneer from there.


Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website