NW Maids is a maid and cleaning company based in Seattle, WA with over 600 5-star customer reviews and a dedication to the highest standards.

We spoke with founder Ilya Ornatov about how NW Maids uses Process Street daily to drive success rate, boost lifetime customer value (LCV), and reduce employee errors.

The NW Maids story

It was in 2014 that Ilya set sights on the cleaning business and quit his job as a VP of Sales to focus on making the NW Maids vision a reality.

Business is currently booming, with 10 teams operating across the city of Seattle.

As the company has grown, they’ve managed to overcome various obstacles in their mission to simplify the home cleaning experience.

Let’s look at some of the insights they’ve gained, and problems they’ve solved with Process Street.

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On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter was obliterated 57km above the surface of Mars.

What caused such a catastrophic event? Badly implemented processes.

“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes, to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”
—Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science

Despite all of NASA’s precautions, preparatory research and technical developments, the deviation from standard procedure for making sure their units were consistently imperial or metric was what resulted in the disastrous calculation error responsible for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in turn huge amounts of time, money, and material resources.

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Have you ever wished you could get some of those pesky work tasks done more easily while on the move, or out-and-about? Those routine tasks and emails that take so much time out of your day, that you would give an arm and a leg to be able to automate?

Or, picture this: you easily send a quick follow-up email, record meeting notes in real time, create new projects, send surveys, schedule meetings, and much more by simply talking to Siri.

You can do all of this and more with Shortcuts for iOS 12 in combination with Siri and Process Street, using the power of Zapier integrations.

Shortcuts, formerly known as Workflow, puts Siri in the control seat of your business workflows, with more power and usefulness than ever before. Using custom phrases recorded and added to Siri’s library of voice gestures, you can trigger a series of actions across multiple apps.

There are two ways to use Shortcuts. The best option is the Shortcuts app itself, which is where you can create your own workflows from scratch. The app also comes with a gallery of suggested shortcuts curated by Apple. Separate from this, Siri will recommend shortcuts based on your daily iPhone activity. You can see these in Settings under Siri & Search.

Here’s a quick list of all of the ideas I’ll be covering in this post, before we dive in:

• 1. Dictate meeting notes straight to your CRM
• 2. Send an electronic contract when timing is crucial
• 3. Master your calendar in an instant
• 4. Kickstart your client onboarding process
• 5. Get paid faster by sending your invoices ASAP
• 6. Assign your team members on the go
• 7. Grab and archive snapshots of your working screen-space during a technical audit
• 8. Jump straight back into your drafts, anywhere, any time
• 9. Dictate an email to your assistant
• 10. Manage your tasks with a dynamic to-do list

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Have you considered that your marketing process could be broken?

Marketing is the engine of growth driving your business, and making sure this engine is well-oiled and optimized for maximum efficiency goes without saying.

Your marketing plan must be well-organized, robustly structured, and efficient. For this to be true, you need to begin with the process behind the vision and make sure that is working at 110%.

In the absence of a tried and tested process that is fine-tuned to the needs and goals of a particular company, the untamed beast of marketing will waste time, money, and resources, and will fail to deliver any meaningful return.

Why is it, then, that so many businesses leave the marketing process as an afterthought?

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A support rep’s life becomes much easier when their help desk seamlessly fits into their workflow. Tools are simple to use. Tasks get accomplished faster. A personalized help desk lets your rep do things their way, so they can solve human problems instead of figuring out software.

The more you customize your help desk, the more useful it is to your team. While all help desks have customization options, not all help desks can be personalized to the same extent.

To spare you the trouble of perusing lengthy FAQs and comparing free trials, we took a deep dive into the features of four popular software— Freshdesk, Help Scout, Zendesk, and Groove—to decide the best help desk of them all. Here’s what we found.

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Running a business is hard.

The below movies are great for a break and can help you remember why you got into business in the first place.

This post was brought to you by Process Street, proces management software for teams. Check out the process manifesto.

Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

“I believe in total immersion, if you want to be rich, you have to program your mind to be rich. You have to unlearn all the thoughts that were making you poor and replace them with new thoughts – rich thoughts.”

Wolf of Wall Street is a must-see for individuals who are partaking in new ventures, small-to-medium-sized businesses or even large corporations. The film is based on the true story of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort; a stockbroker who eventually runs a firm that engages in securities fraud and corruption on Wall Street in the 1990s. While Mr. Belfort was taken for fraud and corruption, the story is fantastic: a man who starts out as the lowest on the totem pole rises up and soon makes close to $1 million dollars USD per week. Needless to say, Wolf of Wall Street is packed with motivational pieces and a quick lesson on the do’s and don’ts in business.

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Earlier this year we compared planner sisters Trello and Asana. But if you’re the owner of an Office 365 subscription, Microsoft has rolled out its own project management tool with kanban cards into your account for free.

It’s called Microsoft Planner and claims to “take the chaos out of teamwork.” Let’s see.

Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school email, and go to the app launcher by clicking on the Rubik’s cube menu in the top left corner. There you’ll see this friendly Planner logo:

Here’s our take on Microsoft Planner, including some tips and tricks for becoming a super user, and our take on how it differs from the other tools out there:

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Click here to get the interactive checklist

Warren Buffet is known as a god among investors and entrepreneurs. He is currently the 3rd richest person in the world and the Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company that owns hundreds of brands including GEICO, Dairy Queen, Heinz and has major investments in American Express, Coca-Cola, and IBM.

Warren Buffet is known for making stellar investment decisions. Putting his money on business fundamentals and long-term success rather than worrying about new fads and market movements.

So, what is the secret to Warren Buffet’s success?

In Robert Hagstrom’s book The Warren Buffett Way, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York, 1994 he reveals a checklist that Warren Buffet uses when making investment decisions.

Obviously, this is a high-level check before due diligence but it’s the first step Warren Buffet takes when making an investment decision. Read it, use it.

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This article is a guest post from Dillon Forrest, a front end developer, startup guy and content creator. Follow him on Twitter for more posts.

If you’ve ever wondered how to attract and retain engineering talent, this post is for you.

Engineers are notoriously difficult to find, screen and onboard. Every candidate who receives your job offer has likely received several others too. And once they do accept, it’s only a matter of time before another company tries to poach them.

It’s time to ask yourself if your developers are really happy, or are your company’s development processes driving them away?

Let’s take a deep dive into the world of Daria the Developer, discussing five common workflow problems, and giving you tips on how to manage developers.

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Process Street started in an unexpected place: the beaches of Thailand.

I was 24, had just quit my 6-figure sales job, and was ready to leave the rat race and travel the world.

Just months before taking off, I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek and discovered dropshipping — moving a product directly between a manufacturer and customers without keeping it in your own storage. It wouldn’t require making or storing any product, it wouldn’t require a giant team or a huge investment, and best of all, it wouldn’t require an office.

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