Meet April Lane

 

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to April Lane. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

April, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.

I would have to say that generosity comes mostly from wishing another well — wishing that they feel they are well taken care of and supported by someone who sees them and who wants them to have a wonderful life.

The money I make as a business owner wouldn’t have been enough to keep me interested and involved for more than the first 15 years or so, and I’ve owned ALHC for longer than 30. What has kept my interest is the beautiful community of like-hearted people I’ve been able to cultivate and the supportive environment we’ve developed together.

I am a big believer in “Be the change that you want to see in the world”. And I believe that an employer has the responsibility of creating the best work-life experience that the business can afford while still being viable.

As a parent, we do our best to develop strengths and areas of excellence in our kids, and we provide the best life experiences that we can afford. And aren’t all employees just grown up kids? Why would this stop when they hit the workplace? What kind of world would we live in if this didn’t stop?

So developing strengths and areas of excellence that are critical to being an amazing housecleaner is our main focus at ALHC and we do this while providing the best work-life experience that we can think up and figure out how to afford. And because we specialize in hiring people with beautiful hearts who love to be in service to others, that desire to take great care of others is easily passed on to their clients as we clean and beautify their homes.

So when asked, “where does your generosity come from?” The only answer I can think of is from the well-wishing of others, but maybe it ties into a sense of purpose, too. Purpose meaning the idea that the expression of life that you wish surrounded you is backed up by your actions and what you create in your areas of influence. And, from the outside, I guess that looks a lot like generosity.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Willingness to fail and learn from my failures.
This may look like fearlessness or willingness to take risks from the outside, but I think it all boils down to a willingness to fail. Go into everything you do with the knowledge that failure is inevitable. You can’t know everything and even if you did, you’d make some very human errors all the same. Go ahead and get excited to fail. Rejoice in the failures of your employees, too, because we all learn the most important & most impactful things through failures.
Plus the old adage is true — without failures, there is no success.

Be idealistic, have a vision that is meaningful to you and know what your values and principles are so that you can hire people that want to create the same impact that you do.
Employees who enjoy what they’re doing, believe in the importance of what they do and why they do it, and who have the opportunity to interact with the owner, managers, and co-workers who also share their values and support who they are individually are happy long-term people who are worth every dime and every minute it took to find them and bring them along professionally.

Be direct, be blunt, and teach your people to be lovingly intolerant with themselves so that things are done well and efficiently. My company’s super-power beyond community building is training. We spend a month training very specific and very exact ways of doing every little thing. At the end of 30 days, our cleaners are as skilled as a 2nd or 3rd year cleaner. They’re not as fast yet, but they know exactly what to do and what not to do. A ton of job satisfaction comes from knowing that you are very, very good at what you do. My employees will tell you that they’ve never been through a training program as thorough as ours. One said that we put Boeing to shame… which is a little scary but good, I think. Rigorous training lets you as the employer see how your new employee handles things that are really hard, and gives an opportunity for their foibles to show themselves right from the get go, before you have too much invested in them. Plus once they’ve mastered something that they weren’t sure they’d ever get right, they proudly keep that mastery and build on it. I don’t throw it away.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

Well, as a business owner, especially if you’re in it for the long haul, your job is to hire yourself for everything you enjoy and that you are naturally really good at.
And, while you may have to do tasks that feel like pure torture whilst you figure out how to do it, what all is involved, what it looks like when it’s done right, booby traps to eliminate the potential for, etc., my advice is DO NOT take on these tasks one second longer than you have to. Doing so takes you away from the things that keep the wind in your sails. The tasks you hate or just aren’t good at simply are not for you. Someone else will naturally love that task, they’ll take to it very quickly, they’ll create better workflows for it, they’ll be better and faster at it than you will ever be, and they will find it all weirdly satisfying much to your dismay.
As an owner, it’s been my experience that you have to know how to do everything that makes your business function so that you know instinctively if something isn’t right and have some idea about how to get down to the bottom of it & solve the problem. If you let someone else invent it, you won’t go after problems straight away because you won’t even know where to start. Furthermore, if people know that you have no idea how to do their job there is a much greater invitation to cut corners, leave out things that are important, or to be dishonest/not forthcoming in some way.
I’ll also note, for the same reason you shouldn’t be doing anything that you hate doing or simply are not ever going to be good at, nor should anybody else who works for you.

We do a review with our entire management/office staff once a year where we have a large sheet of presentation paper for each main function such as:
Client Management, Sales & Invoicing
Employee Management, Hiring & On-boarding
Marketing Website Management
Bookkeeping & Budgeting
Supply Management and Purchasing

Each sheet has a list of tasks that fall under that category

We also have a large sheets, one each with the team members name on top and sections lined off with these indications:

I like it and I’m good at it
I like it and I’m not good at it yet
I don’t like it but I am good at it
I don’t like it and I am not good at it

Then we each have our own unique colored pad of sticky notes and the process starts off with us writing down each task, one categorized task sheet at a time and putting it where it belongs on our own preferences grid (remember, it’s one sheet per person)

Then after each person’s preference chart is full of all things from one sheet, we decide who is going to do each task as the main person and who is going to be their backup person in the case they’re sick or on vacation and type it into a spreadsheet for the coming year. If a task is something that everyone hates we either put it on rotation or assign it to a field staff person who doesn’t hate it.

This way my people can choose skills they’re interested in getting good at but are only stuck with them for a year if it turns out to not be their thing. And it effectually lets people know that we are a team and that this team supports everybody’s happiness and everybody’s growth. Nobody is stuck doing things that they hate indefinitely because it’s not healthy and is contrary to our company values.

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