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Ideas Made to Matter

New case study examines good jobs and growth at Managed by Q

Zach Church

Jun 15, 2016

A new case study from MIT Sloan examines growth strategies for Managed by Q , an on-demand office cleaning and management company where pay above industry standard is a core part of the business model.

Founded in 2014, Managed by Q provides office cleaning, maintenance, and supply services. Headquartered in New York City, Q also operates in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Unlike other on-demand companies like Uber or food delivery service DoorDash, Managed by Q hires employees instead of relying on contractors. Those working 30 hours or more a week receive free health insurance, workers compensation, paid vacation time, and a 401(k).

As of summer 2015, cleaners were starting at $12.50 an hour, with a 25 cent raise every six months. Even without benefits, that put income well above the janitorial industry’s average annual wage of $15,000.

The approach has made Managed by Q stand out in the on-demand industry, where classifying workers as contractors—freeing companies from the need to provide benefits and a minimum wage—is the norm.

Managed by Q’s commitment to workers and operational excellence highlights several elements of “ The Good Jobs Strategy ,” a book by MIT Sloan Adjunct Associate Professor Zeynep Ton. In the book, Ton argues that when a company deploys its workforce in smart ways, its workers can be a driver of profit rather than a driver of cost. Costco, grocery chains Trader Joe’s and Mercadona, and convenience store chain QuikTrip are all detailed as examples.

“The original thesis is, if our people are so amazing and our technology is so amazing, eventually office managers will turn to us for everything,” Managed by Q co-founder and CEO Dan Teran says in the introduction to the case study. “So we’ll effectively aggregate the demand for all of the goods, services, and technology that’s required to run the office. And that’s the bet we’re making.”

The case study, which is available free online , was written by Ton and Cate Reavis, MIT Sloan’s associate director of curriculum development. It examines Managed by Q’s position in July 2015 and offers three paths to growth: acquire more customers and offer more services in the four current markets; expand into new markets; or build its technology platform to offer more services, including some by approved vendors such as information technology firms.

On May 9, Teran visited Ton’s class at MIT Sloan to discuss the case study. Teran told students that Managed by Q was pursuing each of the options, while paying attention to strengthening its technology platform.

Managed by Q has raised more than $40 million in funding, including a $25 million series B round earlier this year. In the class, students said taking on funding may force Managed by Q to make decisions that compromise its commitment to good jobs in exchange for faster growth and greater returns.

“It is true … there are some investors that are too short-term focused, but there are also other investors that are thinking more long term,” Teran said. “But the only way you can satisfy those investors is with operational excellence.”

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The Work Issue

Managed by Q’s ‘Good Jobs’ Gamble

Forgoing the gig-economy model, a start-up bets on a strategy that puts cleaning-service workers on a professional path.

Guillermo Garcia, a cleaning operations mentor at Managed by Q. He previously worked as a juice-bar barista. Credit... Joaquin Trujillo for The New York Times

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By Adam Davidson

• Feb. 25, 2016

‘B aumol’s cost disease’’ is a phenomenon that economists sometimes cite when they want to underscore the unequal effects of technological change. William Baumol, the New York University economist for whom the concept is named, uses a classical string quartet as his paradigmatic example. As he points out, no matter how fast our computers become or how many people worldwide plug into broadband-Internet access, it will still take roughly 30 minutes for four human beings to play Mozart’s String Quartet No. 14. If your business is playing string quartets for live audiences, there’s a fundamental limit to how much more productive, in raw economic terms, your work can become.

Or — to take an example in which many more livelihoods are at stake — consider office cleaning. In the future, there might be new solvents, new cleaners, better scheduling software. But at the end of the day (usually literally), someone will still have to run a vacuum over a rug, run a rag over a table, empty smaller trash cans into bigger ones. Because of this, it’s almost simple logic that the only ways for an office-cleaning company to make more money will always stay the same: charge clients more or pay workers less. In a big city, filled with competitive office-cleaning companies and a seemingly endless supply of desperate workers, this means that office cleaners as a rule will never make much more than the minimum wage.

Which is why, just over a year ago, Guillermo Garcia was perplexed by a job opening he heard about. He had been unemployed for six months — unable to find even minimum-wage work — when his counselor at Madison Strategies Group, a job-training-and-placement firm for low-income people in New York City, told him about the office-cleaning jobs that a brand-new company had listed. The company was called Managed by Q, and it was paying $12.50 an hour, or more than 40 percent above the city’s minimum wage. Even more unbelievable, the job offered full health care benefits and a 401(k) plan.

Garcia, 24, was born in a small, poor village in central Mexico. His parents brought him to New York City when he was 9. None of them have legal documentation. His father works at a carwash, his mother cleans houses. They don’t make much. Guillermo finished high school in 2010 — something his parents never did — but graduated into an economy that had a brutally low income ceiling for an undocumented worker like him, even one who grew up in the United States. (Because of a 2012 executive action by President Obama, Garcia is permitted to work legally and is protected from deportation.) The New York State Department of Labor recently released a report about salaries in New York City, and it makes for grim reading. Entry-level salaries for the kinds of jobs that someone like Garcia might apply for — retail clerk, food preparer, restaurant server, janitor, unskilled construction worker — are stuck right at or barely above the minimum wage , which is now $18,700 a year.

A few weeks after hearing about the improbable job at Managed by Q, Garcia had it. And today, just over a year later, Garcia’s pay is up to $14.50 an hour, and a remarkable $21.75 when he works overtime, which he does as often as he can. His supervisor is talking to him about a promotion that would come with a higher salary. There are even rumors of stock options. His life has been transformed, almost as if he won the lottery.

The chief executive of Managed by Q, Dan Teran, wants to be clear: His company is not a charity. Its plan is to become enormous and highly profitable. A little more than two years old, the company now cleans more than 2.1 million square feet of office space in New York City. (The fanciest two tiers of buildings, referred to as ‘‘trophy’’ and Class A in corporate-real-estate speak, typically hire their own in-house cleaning services, but Managed by Q currently cleans more than 1 percent of the rest, the so-called Class B and Class C offices.) In addition to cleaning, the company offers a whole suite of other services to its clients — maintenance, I.T. support, security, supplies and others. It has expanded its operations to San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles, with the eventual goal of conquering every major city in the United States and, eventually, the world.

The company pays its staff, like Garcia, considerably more than prevailing market rates not solely because its founders want to be kind to them, but because Teran sees it as crucial to his business model. Teran believes that most American businesses, and especially fast-growing start-ups like Uber, have mistaken short-term gains for long-term value, undercutting the share of revenue that flows to workers in a way that will perversely hurt their bottom line. He believes, even more radically, that decades of rising inequality and stagnant wages in America are not an inevitable byproduct of capitalism; instead, they come from a simple misunderstanding about how best to deploy workers and recognize the value they bring to a company. The future of jobs in the United States would be very different if Teran’s ideas catch on. But first, of course, he has to prove that they actually work.

T he concept behind Managed by Q came when Teran and Saman Rahmanian, friends who met through New York’s tech scene, realized that the various start-ups they had worked for always experienced the same weird problem. The office itself — the physical place in which the start-up worked — could never adapt as quickly as the company needed it to. Why was it such a pain to set up a new work space, or move a wall, or order new desk chairs, or bring in an exterminator? They imagined the dream office manager as something like the character Q in James Bond films, a quiet genius who understands technology and creates the tools that help Bond do his work. Thus the name: Managed by Q.

The business would first present itself to new clients as a cleaning company. That’s because potential customers already know what a cleaning company is, and they’re often looking for a new and better one. But once the clients were sold on the high quality of the cleaning service, they would come to realize that Q (as employees call it) could do so much more. Every new client was given a wall-mounted iPad with an intuitive app. Someone could request through the iPad, say, more paper towels or an exterminator or furniture assembly or a wall’s being put up or taken down. Q would take care of all the details, quietly and quickly.

At first, Teran was worried that his new idea would force him to make a horrible choice. He wanted to create a company that could pay a solid living wage to its workers and offer them good benefits. But he couldn’t figure out how to make the numbers add up. After seeking advice from anyone he could find, he found himself talking to Dervala Hanley, who was then the vice president for global strategy at Starbucks. She told him that the answers to all of his questions were in a book: ‘‘The Good Jobs Strategy,’’ by Zeynep Ton, a professor of operations management at M.I.T. The book offers a careful study of a handful of large companies that have been able to pay their workers well above prevailing wages while also keeping overall costs down and earning a healthy profit. Typically, companies see workers entirely as a cost, something that reduces profit; as a result, many try to minimize the number of workers and the amount they are paid. But as Ton points out, when a company deploys its workers in smart ways, those workers can become a source of profit instead of just a cost. Q is a perfect example: Teran doesn’t see his cleaners as simply cleaners. Instead, they are the essential link between Q and its clients.

Teran told me that the best way to see this was by looking at a spreadsheet he had asked his chief financial officer to create. It was a simplified version of Q’s own profit-and-loss statement alongside that of a fictitious competitor, based on standard industry data. The spreadsheet assumes that Q and its competitor, Non-Q, each begin with 100 clients, meaning 100 offices to clean every day. Non-Q pays $9 an hour for its ­workers; by hiring them as independent contractors rather than as salaried employees, Non-Q is also able to avoid paying Social Security taxes, overtime and other costs. Q, by contrast, pays $12.50 an hour plus benefits and Social Security taxes. This means that Non-Q realizes a total profit, per office, of $9,660, while Q makes a profit of only $7,980. It seems, at first blush, that Q has a terrible business model. The more customers it has, the further Q will fall behind the competition.

But over time, the picture changes. The cleaning industry is famous for steep turnover in employees and customers; as with many commoditized, low-cost businesses, the end of every contract is an opportunity to see if someone else can do the job more cheaply. Industrywide, roughly half of a cleaning company’s customers will choose a different firm every year, and it frequently costs about $1,750 in marketing and sales to acquire a new customer. Also, roughly half of a cleaning company’s employees will leave in any given year, and it costs around $150 in advertising and human resources to refill each slot. Teran believes that by paying workers more — and training them to stay in close contact with customers to make sure they are satisfied — he can drastically reduce both turnover numbers.

Nancy Gonzalez, cleaning operations supervisor. Previous job: Bakery co-owner.

Luis Rondon, handyman. Previous job: Building porter.

Jessica Ranko, cleaning operations supervisor. Previous job: Head housekeeper at Ooba Fresh.

Anthony Knox, cleaning operations supervisor. Previous job: Back-to-work counselor.

Allan Erickson, cleaning operations mentor. Previous job: Carpel Cleaning Corporation.

Tiquanna Lane, cleaning operations mentor. Previous job: Senior group leader for an after-school program.

Percy Forrest, cleaning operations associate. Previous job: Temporary work at the New York State Department of Health.

Erick Lopez, handyman. Previous job: Electrical junior mechanic.

So far, it has worked: Only around 10 percent of clients leave each year, and only 5 percent of employees leave. This means Non-Q has to pay a lot of money every year just to keep the same number of customers and employees. Q can funnel that spending into expansion, acquiring more clients. Teran points out that on the spreadsheet, Non-Q does better in its first year of operation: It makes a net profit of $871,000, compared with Q’s $709,450. It is only after a few years that the advantage of Q adds up. By the fifth year of operation, Q is bringing in 62 percent more profit than Non-Q.

The real secret to Q’s business, though, comes with the other services that it offers and facilitates through its app — maintenance, I.T. support, security and so on, some of which enjoy a significantly higher profit margin than its cleaning services do. With these allied services, Q functions as a matchmaker between its clients and a marketplace of service providers, working with a few carefully screened firms and connecting its clients with them quickly; Q then receives a percentage of their fee. Already, 30 percent of the company’s revenue comes from services other than cleaning.

The whole model works only if the clients trust Q. And the main contact with Q is that cleaner, or operator, who goes to the office every day. One reason Q pays its cleaners so much is that they effectively become a sales rep, smuggled every day inside the office of the customer. The better the cleaner is — the better trained and motivated and paid — the more effective a representative she can be, and the more money she can generate.

F or this reason, a main challenge — and one that will increase as the company grows — is selecting employees. Teran has invested heavily in data technology that allows the company to study the correlation between specific operators and clients and assess what sorts of relationships work best. Teran and his team learned that traditional markers of success — education, experience in the industry, recommendations from employers — were not tightly correlated with success at Q. Instead, Teran said, the two crucial personal characteristics are optimism and empathy.

When I asked what he meant, Teran suggested I spend a shift with Nancy Gonzalez, one of the most successful workers at Q. She is now a supervisor, which means she visits several different offices each night to check on the operators and offer help. She also works with the administrative staff, matching operators to clients. For example, one of her accounts is quite meticulous, she said, so she always makes sure the operator assigned to it is quiet and diligent; another account, by contrast, prefers a more engaging operator with a bigger personality.

Teran remembers when Gonzalez came in to interview; he was still able to meet all new recruits at the time. He gathered a group of recruits in a circle and asked them to describe a deeply negative experience. Gonzalez talked about facing the collapse of the bakery that she and her boyfriend owned in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The goal was to see what kinds of words she used to describe the fallout of the negative experience — to see if she was able to think positively even when recalling the most painful time in her life. Gonzalez’s answer scored quite highly for optimism.

After that, she was invited to a group exercise to explore her ability to work well with others. Several potential employees were asked to describe embarrassing incidents from their past. As Teran explained, the real goal of the exercise was to see how others behave when a person is presenting themselves in a vulnerable way. Gonzalez consistently showed enormous empathy, leaning forward, nodding along, unconsciously saying quiet, encouraging words. So she got the job, despite that fact that she had no ­cleaning experience, other than cleaning up her bakery and a home with seven kids.

Her first assignment, when she joined in September 2014, was at the offices of a growing health-and-wellness company. The firm had a regular cleaning company that did a thorough job each night and used Q only for supplemental tidying during the day. Teran says the revenue from the firm was around $400 a month. The Q app allows customers to rate an operator’s performance on any given day and, right away, Gonzalez was receiving the highest grades every day — five stars, five stars, five stars. The client would put notes in the review about how Gonzalez was a joy to be around, how she repeatedly went beyond the call of duty. Twice, she spent her cleaning shift filling in for a sick receptionist. Soon, the client replaced its nighttime firm with Q. Then it asked Q to clean its other offices, as well as provide other services, like maintenance and supply management. Today, the client pays around $7,000 a month to Q over all. So, in this one case, Gonzalez was central to bringing in an additional $79,200 in revenue per year.

W hy don’t more chief executives see the math the way Teran does? In large part because all the short-term incentives of corporate America point them in the opposite direction. Suppose that in 10 years, Teran’s ambitions are realized and Q is a multibillion-dollar company with a million employees worldwide. By then, Teran might no longer be C.E.O., and the company would be overseen by a board selected by its top investors. Just imagine the pressures on that chief executive. If the company cut worker pay by $1 a week, the firm would instantly realize a profit of $52 million a year. Then imagine that the company cut wages by $1 an hour. That would mean additional profit of $2.1 billion. Maybe the chief executive would realize that cutting pay would inspire many to quit. But he could cut the working time in each office by, say, 10 percent, allowing Q to lay off — or not hire — 100,000 workers worldwide.

This is how lousy jobs and stagnant wages arrive. Each company makes a series of relatively small decisions, based on what competitors are doing and what customers and investors are demanding. Soon, a new, lower norm is established, and the pressures are on everybody else to follow. In standard economic models, it’s simply assumed: Wages fall to the point where supply meets demand. This is why Teran plans that by the time Q is publicly traded — if it ever is — he will have so fully built out the model that even the most hardheaded successor will continue to implement it. And it’s why he is also working hard to persuade other chief executives to take his ideas seriously.

This month, I sat in on a phone call Teran had with Colin Barceloux, the chief executive of ConvoyNow, a service that sends I.T. workers to private homes to fix computer emergencies. Barceloux had assumed that he would use the Uber model, allowing independent I.T. professionals to receive a message any time somebody wanted help. Barceloux explained to Teran that his company is so new that he has no idea how much demand there will be in any given city at any given time, so he can’t hire people and pay them a fixed wage.

But Teran countered that Barceloux was thinking about the issue in the wrong way. If his customers had a different I.T. person each time they used the app, and the providers didn’t end up giving the same level of service, the customers would fall away. To follow the Q strategy, Teran acknowledged, Barceloux might need to rethink his business: Focus on fewer cities, or even start with just one, and build up the model locally. Perhaps there were other related services that ConvoyNow could provide, to take advantage of its trained workers.

I followed up with Barceloux a few weeks later. He was still convinced by Teran’s argument, and he hoped to shift his business to a model closer to Q’s, in which the people serving customers are employees, not independent contractors. But he wouldn’t be able to offer those employees full-time work, or maybe even predictable schedules. As he pointed out, the peculiarities of the cleaning business — that it’s a service that clients contract for every day, on a regular basis — are crucial to why Managed by Q can offer truly good jobs. Will the strategy really work for other industries, including his own? Barceloux was not entirely sure, but he planned to spend this year trying to figure out if it can.

An article on Page 40 this weekend about a start-up, Managed by Q, that tries to put cleaning-service workers on a professional path refers incompletely to the legal status of Guillermo Garcia, one of its employees. While he and his parents do not have formal legal status in the United States, he is permitted to work legally and is protected from deportation because of executive action taken by President Obama in 2012.

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MIT Sloan—Managed by Q

A strategy case study.

Managed by Q—acquired by WeWork 2019, sold to Eden beginning [2020] this year (raises some eyebrows, but I wasn’t surprised)!

Managed by Q = excellent venture/founders, WeWork = not so much!

https://www.slideshare.net/secret/IoJBLKGbtdnnD5

Presentation notes:

RBV slide 1:

Community culture: Q’s office space had a lounge f…

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• Material Detail: Managed by Q Case Study

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Managed by Q Case Study

In July 2015, Managed by Q co-founder and CEO Dan Teran was trying to decide how best to grow the 15-month old on-demand office cleaning and maintenance company. As Teran saw it, Q, which differentiated itself from the competition by leveraging people and technology, could grow by acquiring customers in its existing markets of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; expanding into new markets; or, diversifying the range of services it offered in...

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Full Description

In July 2015, Managed by Q co-founder and CEO Dan Teran was trying to decide how best to grow the 15-month old on-demand office cleaning and maintenance company. As Teran saw it, Q, which differentiated itself from the competition by leveraging people and technology, could grow by acquiring customers in its existing markets of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; expanding into new markets; or, diversifying the range of services it offered in the office management space. No matter which path Q chose, Teran was committed to protecting the company’s unique business model and culture.

Leaerning objective:

To demonstrate how a start-up can disrupt an established industry known for mediocre service and bad jobs with a good jobs strategy—a human-centered operations strategy that combines investment in frontline employees with carefully made operational choices and strong commitment to values; provide an opportunity to discuss growth in the context of a young business that has a human-centered operations strategy; and, highlight the importance of aligning investors and their expectations with a business that has a human-centered operations strategy.

A watermarked copy of the case can be viewed here. If you are an instructor you can complete the form to obtain an educator's copy. Note: You can obtain multiple educator copies with one form.

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Managed by Q

“The people that we have found through Underdog.io—they just come across as smart, good people at their core.”

Tyler Smith, Talent Lead

About Managed by Q

Managed by Q, a tech-driven office management company with a double-bottom line, has teamed up with Underdog.io as it expands its services and staff across multiple U.S. cities. We spoke with Tyler Smith, Q’s Talent Lead, about his startup’s approach to hiring and Q’s collaboration with Underdog.io. The people, price, and process of Underdog.io’s talent platform have made it a valuable resource to Q as it seeks to both upend the office cleaning space and challenge the gig economy.

The Hiring Challenge

A service-driven company, Managed by Q views talent as fundamental to its competitive advantage—whether in the office or in the field. “Compared to the tech giants we’re definitely small,” Smith said. “Every hire we make is pretty darn impactful--not just on their team, but [their impact] can be felt across the organization.”

Q looks for a range of characteristics and skills in candidates. At the heart of the company’s secret sauce is its “Q Code,” a list of 10 statements that define the company’s culture and that are employed in the hiring process. Smith shared that his team looks for those who support other teammates, and are humble, smart, driven and kind.

For technical candidates, Smith emphasized flexibility. “We have people who've joined the company with no experience with our stack but are smart, driven engineers—they came in and picked it up.” The company is open to hiring less experienced engineers if they are truly passionate about Q.

Partnership and Impact

For Q, the candidate pool, cost, and control over the process that Underdog.io’s platform offer make it a strong match.

Smith shared his appreciation for Underdog.io’s tailored, curated candidate group relative to the high volume of job seekers on other platforms. He appreciates that all of the candidates he has hired via Underdog.io have been a fit for Q’s dual mission and innovative culture. “The people that we have found [through Underdog.io]--they just come across as smart, good people at their core,” he said. “That’s what I look for and we've been able to find that.”

He also explained how he viewed Underdog.io’s pricing and process structure as a cost-efficient fit for the company’s recruiting practices, providing both freedom and flexibility. “Other [services] want to manage the communication process so they can receive their fee,” he said. “But, I would much rather see a name and have the ability to reach out to them on my own terms, than being forced through a manufactured funnel.” Smith values the sense of ownership over candidate relationships that Underdog.io’s platform fosters—including the ability to send emails directly from his own inbox.

Underdog.io’s flexibility aligns with Q’s recruitment approach, balancing short and long-term needs. “Day-to-day, we’re trying to fill current open jobs—it’s a large enough effort, it doesn't always give enough time to build a long-term pipeline, so we’ve been looking for ways to build pipeline,” he said, acknowledging that he appreciates the ability to contact Underdog.io candidates beyond their featured window. “It’s not just a one-shot, one-week wonder,” he said.

As for which kinds of organizations he would recommend partnering with Underdog.io, Smith believes that a range of companies would benefit from using the platform. “I think that for organizations that have limitations on their recruiting budget, the platform is very helpful—also for smaller organizations doing their first hiring,” he said. “[Underdog.io has] done a lot of hard work in getting candidates looking for work there and ready to review.”