Anita & Rajesh Rauli

Anita and Rajesh Rauli consider ‘good team-work’ to be an essential part of their success in life. This attitude starts with their marriage and carries through to their careers as owners of a steadily growing successful Jani-King franchise.

The Raulis have spent much of their 18-year marriage working together, initially running a small newsagent business. However, after a while they realised that their ambitions lay beyond a corner shop and Anita went off to learn new retail and management skills at Waitrose, with the idea that she would bring these back into a future business to be run by ‘Team Rauli’. Working as a supervisor, Anita soon had to manage up to 15 employees and she learned how to organise staff workloads and rotas as well as motivate people to work effectively.

Anita and Rajesh had been looking at franchise opportunities since the early 1990s. They were attracted to the franchise route of running a business by the value in having a proven business model with support at hand. They also understood that the strength of a franchise brand name could attract the kinds of clients that a one-man band never could. Eventually, the Raulis settled on Jani-King as it met all their requirements and they bought the Central and North London franchise in February 2004.

Allocating Responsibilities

A key success factor for working well as a team is knowing people’s skills and allocating responsibilities accordingly. The Raulis have this down to a fine art. “I deal with the financial side and the employees” explains Anita, “whereas Raj is best dealing with the operational side, organising the extra-work, chemicals and equipment. This plays to our strengths.” Anita goes on to say “Raj and I work well as a team. We know each other’s qualities and we both have the same passion and drive to succeed. We work to the same agenda. Marriage is team-work, that’s how we operate in the domestic sphere and work is no different!”

One of Anita’s core skills is management of people which she learned much about during her stint at Waitrose. However, now it’s different; she has to be her own HR Manager rather than relying on a corporate HQ. Anita feels her experience at Waitrose, supervising a small team, helped her make the transition to managing a much larger team of cleaners at Jani-King. “At Waitrose, I was used to supervising small teams and that was how it was for us in the early days with Jani-King. Because our franchise grew steadily, we were able to grow along with it. Now we have 110 part-time employees!”

The Broader Team

“Raj and I are very hands-on people” admits Anita. “That’s why we enjoyed going through the Jani-King “Clean to Learn” training programme – we could learn at the same time as growing our business. It’s so important to get to know how the business works first-hand and that means rolling your sleeves up!” Now Anita knows she is in an excellent position to pass on her knowledge and experience to her supervisors so they can, in turn, educate the cleaners they are responsible for.

The Raulis understand how important their cleaning staff are to their business. “If the cleaners get it wrong, it’s our clients, and therefore our business, that suffers” explains Raj. They operate a reward system for their cleaners to promote a high standard of work and loyalty towards their company and this is working well. “Because our cleaners are paid per clean rather than per hour, they are motivated to work rather than sit around and chat or have coffee,” continues Raj. “Because our cleaners are often unsupervised, they need to have this kind of motivation. This is all part of the Jani-King model.”

“We see our clients as part of the team, too,” Anita adds. Raj continues, “although I am probably more customer-orientated than Anita, clients are the one part of our business that we don’t divide up between us. Both Anita and I know all the clients and they know us, so we both understand the issues.”

The Jani-King “Family” – an Even Wider Team

Jani-King provides all its franchisees with good ongoing training and support, and “Team Rauli” is no exception. Anita and Raj get continuous feedback from the Head Office team, with regular KPI meetings every couple of months, which set the agenda for the targets each franchisee’s business needs to meet.

“If you are not meeting your targets, then Jani-King will work with you to meet them, giving you as much support as you need,” explains Anita. “After all, they want their franchisees to succeed!”

One of the benefits of being a Jani-King franchisee is that you have a ready-made network of other franchisees on hand to learn from. “We can always turn to them”, admits Raj. “We see them at meetings about every six months, but in between we’re on the phone to one or other of them at least once a week to ask advice or check out ideas. We call them “our family”!”

Success Now and in the Future

The successful Rauli husband and wife team have grown their Jani-King franchise to a £720,000 annualised turnover with 63 clients and 110 part-time employees in just over 3 years, and now have the £1million turnover target in their sights. “All you need is to have the work ethic and to implement the business model,” smiles Anita. “One of the attractions of Jani-King for us was their offer of “guaranteed turnover” and blue-chip clients.” Guaranteeing turnover means that franchisees know they will get a minimum level of income during the first 18 months when they are building their business, although the Raulis had exceeded this figure themselves after 14 months.

Anita and Raj now have an impressive client base with household names such as Odeon, River Island, Next and Spirit Group delivered via the Jani-King central sales force plus 3-4 other clients which they acquired themselves. “Once the clients trust us with the everyday cleaning work, we build on this to get additional work from them,” explains Anita. “This extra work is things like floors stripped and sealed or carpet and upholstery cleaning. That is where the real margin is created.”

Jani-King has met “Team Rauli’s” expectations, particularly in respect of turnover. Anita and Raj are not daunted by hard work necessary to succeed in any walk of business life. “As long as you implement the whole Jani-King system, hard work pays off,” confirms Anita. “And, compared to when we had the shop, we can now get holidays and take time out. As long as the whole structure is in place, you can have a really good lifestyle.”

As well as meeting the £1million turnover target, the Raulis success criteria include making their target profits and building a resaleable business. This way they will be able to realise their investment at some point in the future and are confident they are well on the way to achieving this, with their Central and North London franchise now extending to West London and even to Aylesbury!