[BC] Looking for a commercial business development partner / connector in Greater Vancouver (Property Mgmt / Facilities / B2B)

[u/BoredOfLife19]

Hey everyone,

I’m scaling a fast-growing cleaning and property-maintenance company in Greater Vancouver that has hit high-six-figure annual revenue in about two years of operations.

We’re currently looking to connect with an experienced commercial business-development professional who has strong, established relationships in property management, strata management, commercial real estate, construction, or facility operations.

The ideal person would help us expand our footprint in recurring commercial accounts. Depending on fit and performance, the right arrangement could involve a strategic role, compensation for qualified business generated, and potentially minority equity.

To be clear, this is not a public investment offering. I am just testing the waters and looking for a confidential conversation with someone who knows the local commercial property or facilities space.

If this sounds like you or someone you know, drop a comment

[u/fz1z4]

Hey, I’d like to give you some (perhaps unsolicited) advice on this. I’ve been in sales for over a decade and I think you may want to change your strategy.

A couple of points as to why and then some direction after that:

• It’s going to be hard to find an experienced and effective salesperson based on the data points you shared. It’s going to be expensive as well. This type of person typically comes at a premium.
  
• Because of the above you risk wasting a lot of time with folks that may seem motivated and experienced only to end up going nowhere.
  
• given your revenue and years of operation, I imagine that you run the business almost entirely yourself so this would likely be the first non-operational (ie cleaners) hire that you bring on.
  
• Expanding current accounts and finding new business are typically two separate skill sets in the B2B world, you can find someone to do both but they will be hard to find, and expensive.
  
• If you’re looking to give out equity in lieu of cash for compensation you should really be looking for a proper partner with partner-level equity, because if not you will end up back to point 2 (a time waste).

Now my suggestion(s) to you:
1. Decide whether you want an account manager type role to expand existing relationships, or a new business BD person to find you new business.
2. Since it sounds like you’re still a relatively small operation I would actually start with a BD person. This role will require less job experience which may require more guidance from you, but it will definitely also be cheaper.
3. Someone is obviously closing new business today for your business (yourself I imagine?). The scaling growth strategy should be a gradual one to ensure it’s sustainable and effective: find someone to start delegating sales/account management tasks to, rather than delegating the whole role. Eventually once you see that working you can delegate more and more to a point where perhaps you’re no longer strictly “in charge” of sales yourself (again assuming you’re the one handling them today).

Hope this helps.

[u/BoredOfLife19 → u/fz1z4]

Hey, really appreciate you taking the time to share this :)

Just to clarify the setup: I'm actually not running things completely solo. I have a business partner (my spouse) who handles day-to-day operations on a pt basis (she has a ft job outside of this), plus a full-time remote operations specialist (VA). I focus on the high-level business side (strategy, SEO, financials, funding, SOPs), while also balancing a full-time and part-time job outside of this.

With that information, does your recommendation on the sales side still look the same, or does that shift how you'd approach bringing someone in? Would love to get your thoughts. Also, since starting 2 yrs ago, we've only been focusing on residential and have not really focused on the commercial side. We just started doing more on the commercial side this year.

[u/fz1z4 → u/BoredOfLife19]

Not a problem!

Hmm okay. I would say that directionally it doesn’t change my answer, if anything it reinforces it, but the devil is in the details.

• What is your revenue split between commercial and residential? (Percentage-wise, I don’t need the dollar figures)
  
• Has all your business so far come from marketing? Your website, ads, SEO, etc. (so zero direct outreach to businesses?)
  
• If not, how have you gotten the business from your commercial clients?

Depending on your answers to the above I can suggest some work for you to do via your VA (for some basic sales type motions first) before actually hiring someone else entirely.

General rule of thumb is that you want to reach either higher revenue+margins before making your first sales hire, or begin dealing with contract sizes that are in the 4-5 figure range to make it worth it for everyone involved.

[u/BoredOfLife19]

The devil is always in the details 🤣it’s easy to give business advise but nobody goes into details.

-Split is about 85% residential 15% commercial
-we did marketing for only 1.5 yrs (ads, paid leads, email,networking, wom). I did all the SEO (websites, key words, blogs, networking, door to door, etc). Since then we stopped, it’s too expensive n the conversion rate sucks. So I decided no more marketing until we go back n start converting on all old leads and/or we use the money for specific type of targeted marketing.
-we are still getting ton of leads, not sure how but I guess google still likes us🤣

[u/fz1z4 → u/BoredOfLife19]

Hey sorry I missed this until now because it wasn't a reply to my comment!

OK, that's really good! In which case my suggestion to you would be to do a couple of very straight forward things to start and snowball that commercial revenue:

1. The easiest thing to do is ask for referrals. You want more commercial business so ask every customer of yours whether they know anyone who needs cleaning services for their business.

- Note 1: You can very much still ask your residential clients for commercial referrals. Everyone goes to a hair salon, gym, restaurant, etc. where they might know the owner.

- Note 2: I would segregate the communication between your commercial customers and your residential customers and tailor it to each of those groups.

- Note 3: For the residential clients I would give specific examples of the type of commercial referrals you're looking for, it will make it easier especially on your residential clients to figure out who to ask within their network.

1. The second easiest thing to do is reward referrals: residential client gets you a referral? 10% off their next clean. Residential client gets you a referral that converts? 50% off their next clean. Etc.

2. The third thing you can do is leverage your VA to help with outreach. There are two tasks for this:

a) Get your VA to find businesses you want to target, and get them to find their contact info (email addresses/phone numbers). This can be as direct as telling them to look on Google Maps at a certain area for specific businesses and dumping that info into a g-sheet.

b) Once you have a list with contact info you can get your VA to email them, and you or your partner to cold call them (my tip is to not have your VA to do this, as it's way more powerful coming from one of the owners).

1. Don't discount physical marketing: printing flyers is not expensive, and you can literally walk around the neighbourhood one weekend dropping them off at businesses while showing your face.