In our highly competitive industry, building service contractors are looking for new strategies that insulate their current client base but allow for significant growth. As you continue to identify new ways to bid on commercial cleaning jobs, one growth strategy is to expand and diversify your client portfolios.

This is not an original concept or a silver bullet, but if you create a clear and obtainable diversification strategy, you can substantially impact your growth goals. Although this may sound easy, it is a challenge. You need to consider your operational and sales readiness for expansion, as well as evaluate key geographic or vertical market options best fit for your contract cleaning organization.

"Diversifying the types of clients served is crucial for an organization to enhance growth,” Dave Domlija, chief revenue officer at Harvard Maintenance, Inc., says. “By expanding beyond a single vertical or client type, your company can tap into new and diverse revenue streams, reducing dependence on any one vertical. Serving a variety of clients, such as commercial offices, healthcare facilities, educational institutions and industrial facilities, provides stability and fosters innovation. This approach not only mitigates risks associated with market fluctuations but also builds a robust client portfolio, positioning the organization for long-term success and sustainable growth."

Building Your Diversification Strategy

Expanding your client portfolio is a complex process, requiring thorough research and planning. Here are some key topics to consider as you create a diversification growth strategy:

1. Vertical Market Readiness: Go-To-Market Strategy
   1. Customer Profile: Identify customers specific to vertical market, i.e., public/private, market trends, minimum square footage, identifying decision maker(s).
   2. Competitive Environment: Do you understand current players, and can you differentiate your services or approach in the market to gain share?
   3. Operational Readiness: Understand the services/statement of work (SOW) required for clients in this space. Can you service them? Do you have proper certifications/training? Establish competitive pricing for new SOWs.
   4. Sales Readiness: Create a playbook to train sales that includes a company footprint, customer profile, value proposition, talking points, target list, etc.
2. Geographic Expansion
   1. Self-perform or partner: Do you have the ability to execute? And how? What are the costs of expansion and scale needed for profitability?
   2. Sales resources required: Can you use current sales resources, or will you need to add support?
   3. Target list to gain a foothold: Create a target list based on your customer profile. Considering your hit rates, does the potential business opportunities provide adequate upside?

Integrating Sales and Operations

From the sales perspective, Steve Krines, senior vice president of field sales at Harvard Maintenance, Inc., has been working with his team to target new vertical markets. “As we move into new vertical markets, we need our sales team to understand that market,” he says. “What trends affect the market, pain points, decision-makers, influencers and goals? We strive to be the subject matter experts that can help the customer understand how Harvard can positively impact the health and safety of their stakeholders by choosing us as their janitorial partner.”

Operational readiness is key to any growth strategy, too. If you win new clients, you need to be able to perform. Steve Johnson, executive vice president of operations at Harvard Maintenance, Inc., aligns with sales to ensure his team can execute. His keys to success center on collaboration.

“Our operations team works closely with sales as we examine new markets. Many verticals require our cleaners to have special training and/or certifications,” he says. “In addition, we may need to create new services or align our services to meet specific customer requirements. It can be exciting but challenging for our teams as we get out of our comfort zone of servicing commercial buildings to other types of facilities.”

This is where designating team members as subject matter experts can be useful. It ensures full coverage of trends in each vertical market and promotes standardization of service delivery. “We want to make sure we can execute flawlessly and with consistency,” Johnson says.

Setting Everyone Up for Success

Your team plays a key role in expanding your customer base. They must be equipped with the knowledge and skills to deliver the same high-quality services to new clients. This may require providing education on new requirements and giving employees the tools and resources to meet these requirements.

Bottom line, maintaining the ability to grow your business consistently will require expansion into new geographic and/or vertical markets. Diversifying your client base will lower market risk and support growth goals over time.