Leo Plaza: After almost 50,000 hours of cleaning in different offices and over 200 offices, we just have all this data and I just love sharing that when we used to work with say a lawyer or an accountant, we had to like sort of like dress up as like we are not authentic and we had to be at their professional level. Whereas with E commerce we were ourselves. So we fell in love with working with E commerce. Pretty much the energy is like there, people are engaged, you know, it's like they're inspired. And one inspired employee is worth like two or three.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Cart to Australia's leading E commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers adding to cartoon.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart.
Nathan Bush: My name is Nathan Bush, host of
Nathan Bush: Add to Cart and director at E
Nathan Bush: commerce talent agency E Suite. It's another first for Add to Cart. Today we are interviewing a cleaner. That's right, a cleaner. But this is no ordinary cleaner. He is a cleaner to the E commerce stars and it's making big impacts to the culture of these high performing teams. Leo Plaza is the co founder and the director of EasyClean, a cleaning company that specializes in looking after e commerce spaces and their unique needs. Leo's clients are brands such as lskd High, Smile and Princess Polly, some of the best in the e commerce game. In this chat today, Leo reveals how to get cleaning right from a business point of view. He also talks about how he uses E commerce technology to to improve the way that EasyClean maintains their high standards and how he has a passion for reinventing the workplace of the future. Think the Gen Z happy place.
Nathan Bush: I didn't think we'd be saying that in this work from home world.
Nathan Bush: Now if you're struggling to maintain your space or you just wanna review your cleaning processes, Leo has a really special
Nathan Bush: deal today as well.
Nathan Bush: He's offering a free cleaning audit for
Nathan Bush: all Add to Cart listeners.
Nathan Bush: So stick around until the end to
Nathan Bush: hear how to take full advantage of that.
Nathan Bush: So let's get clean. Thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Paclio. Here's our conversation with Leo Plaza, co founder and director of EasyClean.
Nathan Bush: Leo, welcome to Add to Cart.
Leo Plaza: Hello, how are you going?
Nathan Bush: Good, good.
Nathan Bush: Now this is a bit of a
Nathan Bush: left field turn for most of our guests on Add to Cart. Leo can you tell our audience what you do.
Leo Plaza: Right? So we are a commercial cleaning company, quite different, but we specialize in servicing E commerce. Right. That's probably what you're wondering, like, why is this guy doing here? Like, am I selling?
Nathan Bush: I just had a cleaner on a decline.
Leo Plaza: Exactly. Why am I selling mops or vacuums online? No, no, no, I'm not doing any of that. I'm just actually very involved in the e commerce community.
Nathan Bush: So you got your niching in cleaning e commerce offices and warehouses.
Leo Plaza: That's right. So I'll tell you how it happened, actually. So back in 2020, before the pandemic, right, we were doing offices, traditional offices. That was basically our market offices. Then we started to get emails going, hey, I don't need you to clean anymore because, like, you know, we shut down, everyone's going home, we don't know what to do. We got email after email after email saying, hey, you know, I have to clean. So I was like, I rang Emilio, my business partner, and I said, like, what are we gonna do? We just out of business or what? Like, so I remember one Sunday, came down to the office and I called him and I said, what are we going to do? Are we going to clean? We're going to have to clean buses. Like that's the only thing that's still running or hospitals or whatever was essential at the time, right? So we were freaking out, like, literally was like a pretty terrible day. But then we noticed that like some other of our clients were actually asking for more cleaning and we were like, oh, what's going on here? One of them is Princess Polly, actually. They called up and said, hey, I need you to come and like send someone like full time almost. And we were like, holy, holy crap. Right, so what's going on? So we basically saw that like the traditional offices went to zero and then e commerces were booming, which is something that we all know that thanks to Covid, online retail was gone.
Nathan Bush: And was it the growth in E commerce as well as the new standards, including due to the pandemic?
Leo Plaza: It was a bit of both, yes. So definitely people were knowing what to do with how to clean and disinfect and be able to keep running. Right. So I all of a sudden became an expert in like, you know, how to. I was on the phone to Queensland Health a lot myself and I was just calling them, how do I do this, how do I do that, what do I do? But also, yeah, they were just going massive, right? So they were like having to expand, get another warehouse, increase the amount of time that the workers, so they were doing split shifts and, and it was crazy. So yeah, demand blew up and actually this is the biggest thing actually we enjoy working with them like mine, they talk our language. When we used to work with say a lawyer or an accountant, we had to like sort of like dress up as like we are not authentic and we had to be at their professional level. Whereas with E Commerce we were ourselves. So we fell in love with working with E commerce pretty much. And that's how yeah, this relationship and our passion for E commerce began. But going back to your question quickly. So just to be clear, like it's an E commerce as a whole, which is, you know, it's massive. There's a whole universe. Right. So and within that there's the online retailers and then there's the information and technology offices that service basically they're like service providers for the E commerce. So we service both. So it's a whole thing. So it's a big market for us, not just the retailers.
Nathan Bush: Okay. And you mentioned Princess Polly. I know you and the team are based on the Gold Coast. What other E commerce retail providers do you work with?
Leo Plaza: So High Smile, they're really sick story there as well because we actually saw them when they were back in Mermaid beach, you know, like tiny. And then they went on to this one of the most amazing offices in the Gold Coast. High Smile, Princess Polly, lskd, Amex stores, Movidas and a few others. The list goes on. But it's just like. And honestly, if I was to say how did we capture them? Some of the top brands in the Gold coast is purely by just sharing values and being like minded. So there was a collection.
Nathan Bush: You got the who's who of retail on the Gold coast there.
Leo Plaza: Yes, I know. So it's really cool. Seriously. And later on in the podcast, we'll probably talk about something that it's going to born out of this, which is really sick. I'm really looking forward to.
Nathan Bush: So let's talk cleaning. Hey, let's talk cleaning. So from an E commerce perspective, I'm assuming that we've got offices and warehouses as the main kind of environments. Can you talk us through what's so special about those environments and what you need to do differently from a clean cleaning perspective to look after them?
Leo Plaza: Definitely. So a few factors. Right. And from if I can go back to my experience, a lot of people think cleaning is the same no matter what you do, whether if it's a restaurant, a hotel or a room. My background in hotels I was, I'll go through that very quickly. So my first job ever in Australia was like a cleaner, right. In a hotel. And then I saw like how it was very specific to that type of size and I learned that like, hey, actually you clean this this way and you clean that that way, right. And after like three years, I actually ended up running that hotel myself. And the biggest thing for us was cleaning like that was in a hotel. I can tell you from my experience, it's like cleaning is the biggest challenge in operations wise. Right. And cleaning is also. I don't know if you can, you can probably tell me otherwise, but cleaning itself is probably the biggest source of complaints in a commercial space worldwide. If you can tell me like, hey, no, there's more complaints due to these other factors. But if you look at as a global space like cleaning itself, cleanliness, it's probably one of the biggest source of complaints in the world, right. So with that background, we looked at the E Commerce space and how the setup is so unique, right. So we call it a warehouse. So we patented, I think it's in the process of. We try to patent this word warehouse ware. Office. Yes. So what is a warehouse? Right. It's a combination of what traditionally E commerce is when they get to a certain stage, they run from. So which is an office, a warehouse, most likely a showroom, gym and so on. So they have this very unique setup. Now going back to your question, like why is it so specific or whatnot? Well, each section needs to be approached in a different way with a different checklist, with a different schedule, with different tools. No one's doing that. No one in the world is a specialist in cleaning that type of facility. So we're the only ones. And there's a lot that goes into it. They're very unique, right? From things like just think of the amount of stock they have, right. So there's a lot of risk in there. So that's why we clean in the mornings, right? So there's someone there. So we don't have a huge liability. There is also for occupational health and safety, like we cannot have someone there cleaning at night by themselves. So there's a lot of things like, you know, I could mention 100 things on how they're unique.
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Nathan Bush: can you give us a couple of examples that are on the checklist for your E commerce warehouses and offices that you might not find in your say your lawyers buildings.
Leo Plaza: Yeah, definitely. So like when you do for example the cleaning of the warehouse and how you do it, you don't have that warehouse and the fact that they sometimes attach to each other. So what gets cleaned first, what makes sense to clean after, how do we actually stop for example as well the in the warehouse is quite sometimes like in an industrial space. Right. So it's quite. There's a lot of dust and whatnot. So there's a way that we actually stop all that dust and debris going into the office. Right. So again you don't have that in a traditional office. Look, it's fast paced. Toilets get absolutely destroyed because the amount of people running up and down in a warehouse, right. And there's sometimes one toilet, right. So they get absolutely destroyed. So you need to increase the frequency in that you clean the toilets. Also a lot of these traditional offices working from a building, they have a body corporate that looks after the facilities, the common spaces, there's none of that in the E commerce space. Again once they get to a certain level and they have their own facilities. So yeah, we got to look after them. Like we need to help them with like toilet consumables like dispensers and window cleaning because they just don't have a facilities manager. Right. So we become like almost like the facilities manager. It's quite very different. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And you mentioned before around how you need your team in early in the morning for warehouses. Can you talk us through what a typical schedule, a cleaning schedule would look like throughout the week for an E commerce business? Especially for those who are like starting to think about oh have I got my schedule right, have I got enough cleaning? Not enough cleaning, what do I do daily, what do I do weekly?
Leo Plaza: Yeah, exactly. So we have very specific checklists for that and what it allows us to do is we break it down into areas. Right. So for example Some of the sites like Macro Mic, so that's another one that we have in the Gold coast and they have a gym and they have a showroom, they have like an office and all that. Right. So what it allows us to do is you break it down. You end up almost going every day. Right. And allows you to clean the toilets every day because that's like a big thing that you cannot have toilets done just once a week with the amount of people and traffic and the pace is fast paced. So that's something that's quite unique and it allows us to. If you break it down by areas, we can go in the morning from 6 or 5 to about 9 or 10 when people start to work. So you don't disturb them. Right. You're not in their faces. But if you break it down each day, again it allows us to get the toilets which is the main thing people find disgusting if they're not looked after. That's a good way to run your schedules for E Commerce and look when you're small because I know we both thinking right now the stages that an E commerce usually starts from home and then goes this small facility with a shed or warehouse somewhere else. And then eventually the ultimate goal or dream for them is to have a one site with everything. And so the cleaning requirements, what I see a lot that happens is they take the same cleaner that was doing their home to then do like the biggest warehouse.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Leo Plaza: And that is a big mistake that we see because it just does not work. I mean you have a cleaner that can yes, certainly do your house and it's fine, maybe this small facility and office. But then you're asking this one person, that's when you need to get a company because that's a big thing that you can learn from. This is like you get to a certain level, you need to engage a company. It's going to cost more but they know what they're doing. Right. And then you're not going to have an issue where like oh, they didn't show up this week because it's just one person running the show with a bucket and a mop. Which worked fine for your house, but no longer for. So you need to identify at what point this just one person you should not run based on that. So you can actually then rely on a company that they do all the scheduling and making sure that someone's going to show up. Yeah, so that's a big one.
Nathan Bush: And when you're walking into a new business for the first time, potentially in a new business Perspective, what are the signs that you see that you go, this has not been looked after. Right. From a cleaning perspective, what are the dirty secrets?
Leo Plaza: Yes, this is what's interesting, right? So I'm myself super passionate and, like evolved and I research every day. I think I read this more than anyone, to be honest, about workplace culture and how generation said is coming into the workplace. And, you know, by the end of next year, it's going to be the biggest basically player. So you can tell that a company's culture. At this point, we've cleaned almost 50,000 hours. 50,000 hours and worked with over 200 offices. So with all that experience, I can walk into a place like a business office and I can tell the sort of culture they have based on how they run and keep their office. The toilets, the kitchen. The kitchen is a big one. Their workstations, like, are they messy? Do they not care? I can tell the level of care through just by looking at it. A new place. So that's a big one. And I think it's like. And we look for those who care because otherwise, if by default they don't care, like, how fun is it going to be to work with them? Right? So I think I find that super interesting, actually.
Nathan Bush: That's really interesting, the link between culture and cleanliness. And I love what you're saying there because I'm just casting my mind back to some of the offices I've been to now and I'm like, yeah, that kind of. That does make sense. You put the pieces together. When you are presenting or talking to businesses for the first time, do you talk on a purely transactional level, like, we'll come in and clean and we'll do it this day, this day, this day, and it'll cost this much. Or do you dive deeper into that employee engagement side as well?
Leo Plaza: Yeah, a hundred percent. Because to tell you the truth, one of the few companies that actually pays all entitlements to the cleaners. So my cost to clean is between 45 and $48 an hour. Cost to clean, right. That's what a lot of other cleaning companies quote. So how can I compete? Right? So I truly go, I need to make sure I'm going to the companies that actually value. And again, it all comes down to the culture and what they value. Because if they value the people and the workplace environment, they are willing to pay the actual. What it costs, right? So we see a lot of people that. I get a bunch of quotes and if they don't, yeah, it all ties back down to that culture aspect and why we choose these amazing brands not just because they're cool but because we know that it's sustainable to do business with them. Right. To give an example, like yeah, these guys understand like, hey, and they value a place that's clean looked after. It's all about like looking after their staff and their employees and just making them feel like important and empowered and like that. Yeah, they looked after. So it's. Yeah, there's definitely a big link between the two. Yeah. You know.
Nathan Bush: Have you had feedback from some of the business leaders that you're working with around the impact that it's had on their team?
Leo Plaza: We see it through things. Interesting. Right. We have a survey system that we came out of like as an accident. Right. So it basically is. This is how it works. So we put it in a specific location in the toilet, sometimes in the kitchens as well. Specifically designed for when you go to do number two in the toilets. Right. I know that it's like a bit of an awkward topic but when you go to the number two, sit down with your phone, right, and you have your phone here. Everyone does that, right. Whether if you want to admit it or not. So then we have a QR code right there placing a location that you can only see it if you actually do it. Number two. So what we started to see is feedback. Initially we started to get captured feedback on cleaning. Is it clean? Is it not? But we started to see a whole bunch of other things in there. Right. Hey, the kitchen is this, right? Oh, I don't like this. The toilets are dirty. Like oh, the lights. And then we start to get all this additional feedback and guess what, this is a link. Those like minded and good culture companies, they were actually engaging in giving us feedback. Those that didn't care did not give us feedback. Right. So we could start to see like employee engagement through that.
Nathan Bush: You know what you should call that survey what's giving you the shits?
Leo Plaza: Hey, that's a good one actually. What's giving you the shits? Yeah, because that's actually. I'll keep that in mind because that's actually when you had a stupid idea. But yeah, we want to actually implement. It's funny because we're actually talking to an investor and he was interested in possibly taking this Australia wide because it's such a great idea to empower. And let me actually go back to what's going on with the generation set and, and the up and coming workforce in this such a relevant topic right now, which is work for talent. Now we have this new term, silent, quiet, quitting. And basically, you know, a shortage of labor and all that. And so what is key that I wish to actually pass on this message from all my research. And by the way, I speak to on a daily basis, I speak to all sorts of people about this topic. Not so much cleaning. I actually talk to them about, like, workplace of the future. What's the workplace of the future? I used to have a podcast myself, actually, just purely around the workplace of the future. And so there's two key components to that. And I think it's like, you know, as generation set comes on, on board, there's two big things that you need to actually address and have right, Is first, you need to make them feel comfortable and welcome back to their authentic self, right? Not just like, hey, yeah, you're welcome, but like, hey, we behave like this and you're not allowed to behave that way. No, your authentic self, like, as an individual is welcome here. So that's what I can name some companies that are really good at that, like lskd, amongst others. But lskd does it really well. Second, the second thing you need to get right is you need to engage them, right? Uninspire them. Because uninspired employee is useless, right? It's like if you have one engaged uninspired employee, it's worth two or three employees that are uninspired and unengaged. And you cannot afford to do that in this market. In this job labor market, you cannot afford to do that.
Nathan Bush: You speak in my language.
Leo Plaza: Exactly. I think everyone's going to relate to this and then we'll go back to cleaning. But I just can't help it to
Nathan Bush: talk about, like, what this is good. This is good.
Leo Plaza: After almost 50,000 hours of cleaning in different offices and over 200 offices, we just have all this data and I just love sharing that. But going back to that second point is how do you engage employees and how do you measure that? Right? There's many ways you can. I've done research and yeah, there's like 20 points on how to. And it's like all these surveys and it's like that's outdated. How do you measure engagement is the following way is you open up decision making to your employees. You need to empower them, right? And how do you empower them? Through micro decisions. They need to take decisions on what we do as a business. What, what happens to the office and all of these things. You can start to. Basically, you need to open up and democratize decision making in your organization. That's so key. And then, for example, if you are allowing for 30 decisions, micro decisions to your staff a month, 30, so one per day sort of thing, then you can see who's taking part in the decision making and who's not. Because we know that those engaged employees are going to take part in decision making.
Nathan Bush: What kind of decisions are we talking about there?
Leo Plaza: Honestly, like, for example, I'm not talking like high, high level of investors and like that, but we just want to open up like anything that needs to happen operationally wise, particularly about your facilities, the workplace. I'm talking about more specifically in the workplace. For example, if you refit in the office, you're doing, for example, what happens to the supplies that you get, right? The suppliers, the stationary, like the consumables, like cleaning, maintenance, the looks of the building, what happens, what activities take place, bonuses, recognition, that sort of things, like everything that impacts your employee experience. I can tie it to basically workplace experience. See, workplace experience is like in a business, that's the foundation to your culture. Culture is not like shopping them, hey, here's our values and here's what you do here. And this is our mission. Read it now. It's actually each touch point, so you need to start thinking, okay? And when you actually do that exercise, you realize that you can take, get your employees to take part in so many micro decisions and that empowers them and that actually basically engages them. And then you can measure engagement. But so that's one thing, that amazing thing that by accident happened with this QR code that I was going back to cleaning, right? So we start to see all this feedback and how amazing is for us to then be able to share that feedback onto the sites, you know, the managers, which by the way, another key thing with generation set is they struggle is so key, actually. They struggle with a difficult conversation, right? They're the type of people like I used to hide behind. I shouldn't say hi, but they're just born with ease. That's the method of communication. So they much rather tell you on a text message, hey, I'm quitting, I'm not coming back, than like having, hey, Nathan, you know what I want to talk to you about? I'm not feeling best in this workplace environment. Do you think they're going to really say that? No, they're just going to not show up, send you a text message and go on.
Nathan Bush: And I think the other side of that too, Leo, is that often in organizations, especially as they get larger, you have a head of operations or a head of facilities. Making decisions on everything that directly impacts employees experience from what tea bags are stocked to what's the parking situation. But for a lot of times it's just a tick box activity. But employees actually care what tea bags are there. Like so allowing your employees to have that decision when it's really not a big decision either way, but it can make those, those 1 percenters a hundred percent.
Leo Plaza: Like I can if you want. That is huge. Coffee. Like believe it or not, like I mean 80% of people like probably drink coffee in the office. The quality of that coffee is like I know some offices actually with like sick coffee machines and like you can tell people are like so happy. Like I said, it's all those micro little things like each touch point from the moment parking is a huge one. You're right. But going back to this survey, which again is something amazing, it's like a breakthrough for us to be honest. And you'll see it in a couple of years going big because going back to that difficult conversation that generation set has with their managers, particularly if they're from a different generation, they're going to struggle to talk, right? So by having this like open forum or like this survey in there, it's a way for them to communicate and be anonymously. It's anonymously, right? So they can actually send things that they are going to feel more comfortable in sharing, right. And this is valuable feedback for us to pass on to the managers. And these are the way that we actually outsource these. I guess more like talking about like what we offer as a service provider is we are able to guarantee 80% it could be more, but I just want to take my ass here. But 80% of reduction in complaints to facility related issues because people are not going to the office manager. Because the office manager is always like, oh my God, there's so many things like so many emails. And so they're already overwhelmed. So people are not going to them, they're going to the QR code, which we call it the wps. And so all the complaints are going straight to our cleaner, right? And what's happened as well, which is really cool. Traditionally when you tell the office manager, hey, the kitchen's a mess, right? The office manager is like, I got 100 things in my head by the time I remember or go and send an email, could be a couple days. By the time that email gets to the right person in the cleaning company and gets passed on to the area supervisor, passed on to the cleaner, two weeks. That's traditionally the average two weeks of our response time. So through the QR code. Four hours.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's brilliant.
Leo Plaza: Go straight to the cleaner.
Nathan Bush: And who are you mainly speaking to in businesses? I'm assuming that it usually starts with operations or officer admin or whatever. Do you end up working closely with HR teams as well?
Leo Plaza: Oh, yeah. People and culture. When you say me like I'm actually in sales and marketing, right. Emilia is more in operations. I'm all over people and culture. People like that role, hr. I actually have a thing, I don't know if a little bit of a thing about calling it hr. I don't know why. I just don't think.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I don't like the word hr. It just came to mind.
Leo Plaza: Human resources, that's your business, right? It's not like another resource. It's not like a supply chain. No, that's your business. And those successful businesses that we looked at, lskv, Heisman, that's what they understood, that they need to sell the right thing, which is the mission to the right people, the employees. And the business takes care of itself. So that's who I mainly talk to. And yeah, so that's the main point of call.
Nathan Bush: And in terms of the offices that you're working in at the moment, I'm assuming that you've got a really good sense of the buzz and the atmosphere. Like you talked about the culture. And I'm assuming, though, there's still some businesses that you walk into and you go, this feels a bit dead, bit lifeless, especially with COVID because we're talking to a lot of businesses at the moment. Some are flexible, some still want all their people in the office and can't understand why people don't want to come in every day. What are the big differences that you notice between workplaces that are pumping post Covid, where people choose to come in and work, versus those that kind of telling people they've got to come in and work.
Leo Plaza: That's a topic for a whole episode in itself, but I'll try and give you my take. And by the way, this QR code, just to move on to the next topic and why it's related to E commerce, it was inspired, right? I got inspired by the E commerce, the techie, like, you know, that forward thinking, right. And when I was at the Retail Fest and I met you, I think that was the first time I met you actually. You know, all that surrounding myself with like the forward thinking, the future, that's what like inspires to do. The QR code. Now, going back to your point on like, yeah, what about all those businesses that are lagging and that are still trying to hire through Seek? You know, like it's funny because like the ads on Seek, they have no pictures, no nothing. It's just like expecting them to apply and it's like what is in it for me, right? What's interesting is like people think, oh, but that's just generation set. But no, like that actually awakening of like life meaning it's actually translating onto, it's got flowing up to generations. So it's actually your 60, 70% of your employment market, your jobs market that is impacted by this shift in mindset. And so when talking about like the workplace is dead or the workplace is amazing and they have no issues because that's the one thing I'm going to tell you. These companies that I'm talking about so greatly, they have no issues in recruitment. They have a whole line of people coming to work, want to work with them. Meanwhile, I know I could name a few, I'm not going to say the names, but they're just not able to hire stuff. No one wants to work there. Like they just don't want to work there. Like they don't care if it's like X amount of money. They rather do find some other job online and work from home. You should go and see on Facebook if there's ever like a job opening that you can work from home and boom, 100 comments engaged. And people just want to do that now.
Nathan Bush: Oh, we deal with it every day at E Suite and we've seen 100% that the conversations with job seekers has shifted significantly from the first question being what's the salary? To when do I have to be in the office and what's the flexibility? Like that is the number one consideration now and the number one hurdle. If you can't get over that hurdle with the team that you're trying to bring on board, you won't even get to the salary or the skills conversation.
Leo Plaza: It is. And so that's where like look, my take on this is like in a way, working from home or the office, what's better? That's not how you should be really looking at it. It's like you comparing a bicycle and a car. Each one is good for something, right? So working from home allows for flexibility and basically for someone to hyper focus. But actually spending too much time just working from home is not healthy. Right. It's not mentally healthy and that. So I'm not going to tell you what I think should be the case, but it actually ties into the company's mission and vision and the values. That's what's going to determine what's best for your organization. If it's working from home, a situation where they can mostly work from home or mostly have to come to the office, that's going to depend again, on the company's mission and vision. So it's going to be different for every organization.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. There's no special formula to say the ideal is three days at home, two in the office.
Leo Plaza: I see a lot like, oh, what's the best formula? Like, what, four or one or three or two or two and two. It's like, you know, I was having
Nathan Bush: this conversation with some business leaders last week over lunch, and there are more traditional business leaders, if I want to put it nicely. And they were great. Like, really successful businesses, but really struggling with office environments because they've invested so much. But they've basically got tumbleweeds going through their office at the moment and saying that, you know, their team just won't come back to the office. And they saw it as, my team's just too comfortable and probably, you know, taking the easy option. And we spent the conversation, I was saying, actually they're not. They've just realized that there's different modes of productivity and they are looking for the most productive way of working for you, but also their families, their lives, and everything else they've got into it. So if it's at home, yes, some days might be at home, they'll be more productive, like you were saying in those activities. But some days, actually it makes sense to be in the office. If you can make the office productive, make sure that the Internet is on. Make sure that if you're forcing, if we're all coming to the office, make sure we're all in the office together, that there's not a smattering of some people at home. And we spend our days still on zoom, talking to the people that are at home when we could be in the office together. It's productivity.
Leo Plaza: I think this is what needs to happen if you are a business struggling to hire people. And if that's the hot topic, you know, what offer them, say, you know, yeah, if you want to work five days from home, do it. Get over that, like, initial idea of, like, what perceived value right now, employees looking for jobs that have that perceived value, oh, if they can let me work from home, I'll work for that company. Let them do it now. Your job is to, after they've been hired, inspire them to come to your office. You know, that's what you need to do is I get over that initial. Because yes, everyone's like, it's like a train. It's like, it's a hot thing right now. It's like, you know, like Tesla. So everyone wants a Tesla. Everyone wants to work from home. Right. So let them, let them work from home. Then your job is to inspire them to come to the office, to do what the office is best at, which is to bring that community and to embody that mission that a company has and for them to leave that mission and then go or whatever and then apply and help you with that mission. So if you're not able to inspire them to come to the office, to be part of the community, then you need to relook at your leadership team. And so it needs to change. So then what you need to do is hire a people and culture person that's under 25 years old, needs to be a girl.
Nathan Bush: Why go.
Leo Plaza: They also understand like people way better. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it actually, but yeah, under 25 they're going to be from the generation said they're going to speak the language. Right. And if I don't want to generalize. Right. But in particular this is a thing that I learned recently. But under 25 girl, they're going to transform your culture like this.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Leo Plaza: So yeah, it's hard to have someone in the leadership team like in charge of culture when they from a different generation. It's not like that they don't understand it, it's just like completely. It's like they're going to be completely like a bit different and it's going to be a lot harder for them to relearn what this new up and coming generation is all about. So we see this and I'm telling you the reason why I said that is because we see that this a lot like. And they have the best cultures.
Nathan Bush: Now they may do 1000 burpees before breakfast and bench press pallet racks for
Nathan Bush: fun, but when it came to Black Friday, lskd needed some spotting.
Nathan Bush: Introducing the well built Shopify Plus. Look out.
Nathan Bush: LSKD replatformed onto Shopify Plus. Between the 2019 and 2020 Black Friday sales period, in order to keep up with the huge growth in automated processes
Nathan Bush: that were running through the business.
Nathan Bush: And the results were a PB in Black Friday 2020, LSKD handled 50,000 orders. That's a 1100% increase from the year prior, even serving 19,000 shoppers at the same time.
Nathan Bush: Talk about some serious gains.
Nathan Bush: To read more of lskd's story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com plus you can also hear the full LSKD store.
Nathan Bush: It's incredible, incredible growth story. Back on episode 76. Leo, you mentioned before how passionate you were around predicting workplaces of the future and designing workplaces of the future. If I had retailers listening to this today going, look, in the next 12 months, we're going to have to build our new office and warehouse. What are say the top three things that you think they should be considering in designing that workplace?
Leo Plaza: Again, ties back to their mission. So what they want to do is really look at the mission vision and what embody that, give that a physical shape that's basically, again, it's not like, well, there's no one solution. It depends on your mission. So you can see High Smile. I think one of the things we were going to talk about is some of the coolest offices.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, let's get into them. What are the coolest offices and how do they tie back to their mission?
Leo Plaza: Yeah, so you go to High Smile and you leave their mission when you walk in. Right.
Nathan Bush: How so?
Leo Plaza: It's so sick. Yeah, it's like a really cool office. Like, you know, like you walk in and then you see like basically some of a museum of the products and very. It's designed specifically for them, you know, so it's again, it's like embodying their mission. Another really cool one is lskd. I think they have like a sick. And again, it's, you know, the upstairs is just like a gym, like for them to actually leave that mission of like, you know, like the. I'm wearing actually like one of the tracksuits.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah.
Leo Plaza: Chase the vibe, change the vibe. And we actually wanting to get all of our uniform done by then, but
Nathan Bush: you guys, you'll be the cleaners with like the coolest uniform and the widest teeth.
Leo Plaza: Actually, we are working on that as well.
Nathan Bush: But let's say the lskd example because
Nathan Bush: we had Jason on back almost 18 months ago now and they're in the process of building that brand new, amazing space and he was super pumped for the gym there and it's brilliant to be able to see it come to life now. You see it all over their socials. It's obviously a place for their team, but it also embodies the brand and is somewhere where they can film a whole lot of stuff and get their community involved. They've created a shop out the front their first retail store. And I know so much thought and money went into creating that space. What's the feeling you get when you walk into that lskd space?
Leo Plaza: The energy is like there. People are engaged. You know, it's like they're inspired. And that's like one inspired employee is worth like two or three. It is a question in a lot of people's minds, like, is it really worth investing many millions in like a facility? And I'm going to say again, goes back to what your ultimate 10 year vision is. LSKD is a perfect example of they had to have something like that. Maybe for other businesses it's not as relevant. And so going back to cleaning and how, because how do I tie this into my business and the offering that we have for businesses, it's like by understanding this. Well, we then have basically and we have an app, an application on our cleaner's phone. By the way, I could talk on like how our cleaners, in two years they're going to look like half robot and half cleaners, right. Literally they're going to be like, they're going to look so sick because we only have like the latest tools, like the latest vacuum cleaners, mops, they're completely different and like very futuristic. Why is. Because I saves a lot of time. Right.
Nathan Bush: I saw your rant today on, on LinkedIn around people who still use corded vacuum cleaners.
Leo Plaza: Yeah. See, here's what happens, right? So when you pay traditional commercial cleaners that do all sorts, restaurants and houses and offices and they don't really like specializing to an area, you know, what ends up happening is you're paying them and half the money is actually going to just them doing unproductive stuff. Right. When you have someone that's specialized, has the right tools for your facility and the latest tools and all that, well, they're gonna, that money is actually going to clean because there's a lot of automation behind what they do. Again, going back to the right tools, I'm quite passionate with that and with the e commerce and also talking about the traditional offices. We understand this fluctuation in working from home, working from the office. Our app lets us adjust that on a monthly basis on the occupancy and we can adjust it. And in fact, every three months we conduct a revision of your cleaning requirements that doesn't exist in traditional cleaning companies because they don't apply technology the way we do. And again, it's inspired by like some of the companies that we work with. And yeah, I think it's really cool. And oh, going back to your point, I wanted to make sure I address this like with the investment in your facilities, right. It's a big concern, it's a lot of money, right. But what we are seeing now is we through this survey again is going to allow us to give you ROI on your investment, right? So because if your workplace promoter score is sitting at say 10, right. And then you throw all this money on like to redo the kitchen and buy this new amazing coffee machine and like maybe you repainted the interior. So we are going to see and we want to measure that your WPS, it's like an NPS, right, goes from 10, is it going to go to 20 or 30? And so there's a way for have a bit of peace of mind that at least you have a baseline and then you're going to be able to see the return investment because it is, I know it's a lot of money, right, to consider, hey, should I just get them to all work from home or should I just spend how many millions in getting a facility? So it is definitely relevant.
Nathan Bush: Leo, it's been so good to hear your take on cleaning and I hope everyone can see now why I was so excited to have you on. Because it is so much more than cleaning cleaning. It's about the future of how we work and how we keep our team engaged, which is right up my alley. It gets me really excited. So thank you for sharing that. You've mentioned a whole bunch of ideas here that you want to move forward with with Easy Clean to continue to differentiate you from the pack. What's next on your radar? What are you really focusing on?
Leo Plaza: So we're going to keep going at our mission, which is to help mission driven companies achieve their goals through their facilities. Because that's where the workplace experience is a way to inspire employees. And so we're going to keep going at this mission and that's why these other ideas, but they're all born from this, our mission, right? And one of the things I'm going to tell you what's next is so sick because so we're putting together an event called Surf Work. Right. We are bringing this is going to be in January 2023, but we already started to put together the event. So we're going to bring the coolest companies or coolest brands and best brands in the Gold coast. We're going to bring them to the beach on a surfing sort of slash coaching and yeah tournament. So and tickets are flying already like so we already have like a few that have signed up. The idea behind this is basically to again, work at getting together with some of the leading companies and develop the workplace of the future. Right? To really understand what people want. I'll give you an example of how this started, right? So I was at High Smile and I was talking to them and they said, oh, will it be cool to connect with the guys at lskd because they really do some cool stuff with the workplace. And I was like, hang on. Okay. So I wanted to do this surfing event because I love surfing. And then the idea of connecting the top, the leaders in workplace culture, the leaders in workplace culture together. So that's next and it's truly going to be about just working together as a community with this top, you know, like this, some of the best brands on the Gold coast and just design and develop the workplace of the future. So that's what's next for us. Not to mention the WPS AT survey system, which is. I think it's really cool.
Nathan Bush: I was wondering how you were going to integrate surfing into your offering eventually.
Leo Plaza: Sorry. Yeah, yeah, surfing. Look, I think it's the Gold coast, right? So we are here because of the lifestyle. So that's the ultimate, like getting inside the ocean. There's no more lifestyle than that. So. And I want to be able to put more people to share that. Sometimes you forget, like, there's a beautiful ocean right there. You know, it's like just get amongst it. I think that's enough. That's got, that's keep me, keeping me a lot, giving me a lot in my plate.
Nathan Bush: So that's plenty. So, Leo, if we've had retailers listening to this and go, I want to reach out whether it's to look at how easy clean might help them in their offices on the Gold coast or just pick your brain on other things about employee experience. What's the best way to get in touch?
Leo Plaza: So LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn and my email is Leo L E o P for PETA@easycleangoldcoach.com but look, what we are offering right now is like as well, even if you're like a small online retailer that maybe we are not able to help you because it's too small or whatever, but we are offering like a free audit. So there's five things that we look at with this audit. So we'll come and tell you, hey, look, I will give you a checklist. You'll be surprised with how many places don't have a checklist. And the Power of a good and effective checklist that's used that can transform how your resource on cleaning can leverage so much more. So we are offering that for free and it includes things like we measure your indoor air quality. We can give you basically a full audit on helping you manage your own cleaners.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. What's the best way for them to get that?
Leo Plaza: Yeah, so reach out to me on email or LinkedIn and yeah, we can go from there because honestly, I love talking and helping businesses just grow and that's the biggest thing, what we've seen. It's just so cool.
Nathan Bush: So good. Leo, it has been brilliant chatting to you. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you've shared today. I love the link between cleanliness and employee engagement. You've nailed it perfectly. Thank you very much.
Leo Plaza: Let's have a chat. Yes. All right. Thank you.
Nathan Bush: I remember first meeting Leo at Global Retail on the Gold coast and my
Nathan Bush: first thought was, what's a cleaning company
Nathan Bush: doing at an E commerce conference? But it didn't take long chatting to Leo to see the link between a workplace being clean and the formation of a great culture. And I think you got that today. I hope you got that today. Here are the top three lessons that I took out of that show.
Nathan Bush: Chat with Leo.
Nathan Bush: Number one, what gets checklist gets done. It sounds simple, but breaking it down and creating specific checklists for your cleaning needs or any other part of your business is a game changer. Work out what's important to your team about their physical environment and make sure you action and review these regularly. Simple as that. Number two, foster the feedback loop. If staff feel their voices are valued and they can make a difference, they will care more and be more productive. In turn, they'll share more feedback and you can make more improvements. It's win, win and feel free to
Nathan Bush: steal the what's giving you the shit survey. It's free.
Nathan Bush: Honestly, take it. And number three, when worlds collide, Leo was inspired by the e commerce industry to use tech innovations to improve the way that he cleans. Not a natural fit, but that's where he took his inspiration from. And it's a great example of looking to other industries for inspiration rather than just chasing others who are at the top of yours. So as e commerce professionals have a think, are there other industries that inspire you? How can you use other advancements in other industries to make your e commerce business better and leapfrog your competition? Not just copy them. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the people best e commerce talent
Nathan Bush: with the fastest growing brands in Australia.
Nathan Bush: Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free e Commerce Salary Guide and sign up to our weekly e Commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to cart.
