Our Mission
“Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress;
Working hard for something we love is called passion.”
― Simon Sinek
COVID 19 has challenged me in a way that I have never been challenged before.
In March, we lost 60% of our revenue overnight and we had to start making tough decisions. Not just how to continue to provide meaningful work to our staff while protecting our clients. But also, as a company,
who did we want to become?
As entrepreneurs, we start off with these assumptions about American business. The things that every consultant has ever told me. You must expand. To expand, you have to appeal to everyone and don’t make waves. 80% is an acceptable success rate if you want to get big: that’s why large corporations have complaint departments, after all. Reduce costs and maximize profits, even if it hurts people. Fight for the largest market share. Compete, compete, compete.
And if we built our business on these principals, no one would fault us for it—it’s just business, right?
Early on as we had been expanding aggressively, we kept being asked to compromise our morals along the way. “If you paid your staff less, you could compete on price.” “A 1% margin of error is too low, if you want to expand. It’s okay to make mistakes a lot of the time, just have someone to field the complaints.” “Why spend so much time and money fighting for your people? You should be fighting for market share.”
We were fighting to be the biggest, but we kept struggling with the hard truth that if you wanted to be the biggest you had to give up being the best.
I’ve been studying Simon Sinek and Seth Godin recently. Godin introduced me to the remarkable, counter-intuitive idea that instead of conquering the largest market share, you should look for the smallest viable segment. It raised a question: could we find customers that believed what we believed, treated people like we treated people, and dreamed of the same kind, compassionate world that we dreamed of?
So we started rocking the boat. We went public with our goal of getting all of our employees to a living wage or above by 2022. We went public with out goal not to lay anyone off during the pandemic, and I actually eliminated my own salary to ensure the safety and stability of my staff. We actively pursued candidates who were being mistreated at other jobs due to their sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status and made ourselves a sanctuary for them. We allowed our staff to attend Black Lives Matter rallies during work hours and in uniform. We upped our use of personal protective equipment and disposable supplies to protect our customers, without raising their rates. We told ourselves, and our staff, and our community that our mission is
“to prove that you don’t have to be an evil corporation to be a successful company.”
And for the first time in the history of the company, I have gone a full calendar month without getting push-back on price. People will say, “that’s outside of our budget, but I understand what you’re doing and why it costs what it does.” For the first time in the history of our company, a client told me “we chose your company because of your ethics.”
And we’ve come back like a hurricane. In April, we lost over half our customers. In July, we almost doubled our sales compared to last year. And it goes to prove that doing the right thing really does pay off.
And here we are, in the middle of the apocalypse, with hope. For our business, for our community, and for our future.
Amber Starling, Author
Founder and President of
Good Witch Cleaning Services, LLC
IICRC Journeyman Textile Cleaner