The Dirt Squad
Location: Wilmington
Thedirtsquad.com

The Dirt Squad is a full-spectrum residential and commercial service company. We offer janitorial services for homes and offices, as well as window cleaning, pressure washing, gutter cleaning, snow and landscaping services. We are also partners with Cleaning for a Reason, a nonprofit, where we provide free cleaning services to women who are currently undergoing cancer treatments.

What have been the biggest factors that contributed to your company’s growth over the past three years? We have worked extremely hard and reached out through networking events, community involvement and coaching our employees to become sales people.

Looking back, what’s the biggest mistake you made and what would you do differently if you could? Not utilizing the proper technology earlier enough. As we grew, we bought out a few competitors around the area. Learning more about how other companies did things enlightened us and we found CRM (client relationship management) software, and advertising automation really helped! By investing more into these efficiencies, we’ve been able to cut administrative costs and raise wages and salaries for our folks to stay ahead of our competition.

What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned over the past three years? Don’t ever compete on price. If you’ve got a great product (or service), compete with yourself to improve or find a way to do it better — offer more, but don’t take less.