How Home Clean Heroes Is Using Data To Move the Needle

Home Clean Heroes, the Virginia Beach-based home cleaning franchise, has cutting-edge tech keeping its franchise owners so on task that they’re beating corporate expectations in almost every single instance. With a business model built on understanding and effectively utilizing data, the brand has found the ticket to setting itself apart from the competition,

The company’s secret sauce comes from parent company Buzz Franchise Brands. Christian Pillat, owner of Home Clean Heroes of North Atlanta, is a bit of a tech expert himself, and he says he immediately recognized the brand is data-savvy. Smart data collection and reporting isn’t just nice to have — it’s an essential part of how a business transforms itself over time, something that’s essential in franchising.

"In my other life (my non-franchisee life), I'm the CEO of a tech company that helps franchises & auto dealers leverage data to make smarter decisions. When I met Kevin Wilson, the CEO of Buzz Franchise Brands, at a conference, I was immediately drawn to his data-driven nature. I knew that in purchasing Home Clean Heroes, Kevin and the Buzz leadership team would be able to coach our management team using data-driven insights,” said Pillat.

Data driven strategy

“Simply put, Buzz helps you manage the business by surfacing the KPIs that matter through business intelligence software. The software allows owners to grade themselves vs the system and enables local owners to operate more intelligently. Most franchise brands we looked at don't have a good system or process for sharing intelligence, and it is something that every franchise system should have.

When franchisees share the same goals and metrics across the system, you create a really powerful brand.

So far, the strategy has worked like gangbusters. In Q1 of 2021, the brand saw a 40% increase year over year in sales. Data, when understood and effectively utilized, can help a business identify opportunities to boost sales, reduce expenses and market more effectively. When that data is captured, it gives franchisors and their franchisees a substantial competitive edge.

“We use Tableau, a powerful data visualization tool, to show our franchisees reports of their performance on key metrics,” said Wilson. “Some people like bar graphs, some people like line graphs. We can show different, customized dashboards and data sets over the AWS web server that show our franchisees at a glance where they are and what they need. It could be cost per lead, average sale, average travel time or average time cleaning — it all goes into the dashboard. If an area shows green, it’s good. Yellow needs work, and red is bad.”

But data visualization isn’t just about making a pretty dashboard and then telling franchisees what they already know. It’s about isolating the variables holding a business back and drilling down into them to figure out how to evolve.

“At any point, a franchisee can call us and say: ‘For whatever reason, I'm not getting my average cost per clean low enough. Why is that?’” said Wilson. “And we can zero in on that. Maybe it’s lower because on homes that are over 3,000 square feet, you’re underpricing them and they’re taking longer. It’s dragging average revenue per clean down and increasing your costs. With the dashboards, we can find that very quickly. The whole goal is to drive increased profitability to their business.”

Proven business model

Wilson can stand behind these numbers as well. Rather than guesses and estimates at some other franchises, Wilson’s brands have corporate-managed territories that field test the business model and data strategy.

“Before we start franchising a brand, we have been running a territory or territories for two years,” he said. “We know what’s possible, and we drill down. That becomes the starting point. But when we get franchisees in, we find the company stores almost never do as well as franchise territories. If we see them improving upon metrics we created, they become the standards by which we judge franchisees.”

And that’s exactly what Home Clean Heroes offers with its data strategy. A proven, demonstrable system for managing and troubleshooting a business. The result is successful franchisees far outperforming even the corporate locations, and tons of happy franchisees like Pillat.

“This is the world-class business intelligence our franchisees deserve, and we couldn’t be happier to use it to drive the business forward by keeping a laser focus on the drivers of franchisee profitability,” Joe Delatte, the brand’s president said.

With a business model built on KPIs, the brand sets its franchisees up for success from the very beginning.