Howard Wagner, 63
Owner, The Maids of Barrington
Arlington Heights
www.maids.com
In the corporate world, Howard Wagner worked in manufacturing logistics. It was a statistical world.
He knew each machine’s rate of production and the quality of the products being manufactured. The information came to him in the form of reports, automatically measured, recorded and communicated.
Then Wagner went into business.
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He became a franchisee of The Maids (www.maids .com) about six years ago. Today, the business has 22 full-time employees, many of whom are on site, cleaning homes in the northwest suburbs.
To manage his business, Wagner had no choice but to rely on his employees’ word.
“We used to depend on the employees to tell us when they came and left [houses], and of course, that’s completely unreliable,” he said. “Now we’re dealing with reality, and that’s much better for business.”
Here’s how Wagner obtained his statistical reality:
Using GPS-equipped phones from Nextel (www.nextel.com) and a monitoring and reporting service from a company called Intergis (www.intergis.com) he has access to a virtual control room on his PC monitor telling him who’s where and how long they’ve been there.
Each team of four housecleaning employees carries a GPS-equipped phone, which is constantly recording the team’s location.
“The main thing I look for is the time that the team gets to a house and when it leaves,” Wagner said. “But it also maps how they got to a house, and I can tell if they’re taking the most direct way.”
If his maids took too long at a house, “Perhaps somebody needs to be better trained. The reverse is also true: if they’re spending too little time in a house, they’re probably cutting corners.”
How does the system know when the maids have entered a home?
“The system detects that the car has stopped,” said Wagner. “And as long as it’s in that location, within a 50- or 100-foot radius … we know they’re inside. As soon as the car’s moving, we know they’re on their way. It’s all automatic.”
The information comes to Wagner as a Web-based report.
“We see a map of where everybody is, but there’s also a list of cars and where each one is. So I can see that a car is on Route 12, heading north at 30 miles per hour. It also gives me an entire profile of the day.”
Every day, Wagner enters key data into an Excel spreadsheet, giving him accurate measures of business productivity, and, ultimately, success.
Total cost: a remarkably affordable several hundred dollars to configure the system and about $50 a month per phone.
“Before this, I was blind,” he said. “It used to be what people wrote on a piece of paper. Now it’s completely reliable and dead-on accurate.”
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