Another blog about things you do when you're moving house (sorry, they'll keep coming, I'm sure, it's big in my life)
One of the first things Alison wanted to do when we moved into the new house was get the oven cleaned.
One of the things we don't want to do is buy a new oven, not because we won't have a new oven, but because we don't quite know what we're going to do with this place and how we might chop it around, so it seems ridiculous just to buy a new oven for a short period of time when we might be changing things altogether, but similarly, the oven was minging. We didn't want to really use somebody else's minging oven, so it needed to be cleaned.
Luckily, we used to have a minging oven in our old house which we made minging ourselves and only when we realised it was minging did Alison decided to call out the oven cleaning guy and so out he came with his son in tow because he's showing his son how the business runs so that his son can take over the business.
The oven-cleaning guy has a van with all his stuff and turns up at your house with a smile on his face. He tells you how much it's going to cost before he does it, and then he turns up with his son, and they are absolutely 100% fantastically neat and tidy.
One of them takes all the trays out the van, puts them in a bath with (f*ck knows what in it) and cleans them until they are spotless and pristine, while the other one cleans the inside of the oven (again with I don't know what) but turns it out to be absolutely spectacularly clean, literally like it's brand new.
The other problem with the oven, though, is that the door didn't shut, so I asked him about that, and he said, "Yeah, it'll be the hinge. Do you want me to try and find you another one?", I said "yes please", and he did, and he came back about 4 days later, changed the hinge in the oven, and it was perfect.
The 2nd time they came was the 2nd time I'd met them in a few days, and so then I entered into a conversation with them about what they were doing in the Easter holidays and talking to his son about how he supports Chelsea and why and what was going on in football and what he was hoping for and expected, and they looked after my dogs and were nice to them, and then I paid for the stuff that they'd done with a tap on his phone.
They were winding down on Thursday, they said, because we were getting ready for having a really nice bank holiday weekend, 4 days off before going back to work on Tuesday and didn't want to have to work too hard on Thursday.
They were happy and contented, having fun working together.
He said business was great; he was busy, it was all word-of-mouth recommendation, and he built it up over the years.
As they left and drove away, I thought, 'How many other people would like a job like that?' How many other people would be able to see all the things that I just listed that built it into the job like that, the system they have, the clarity, the honesty and pricing, the ease of paying, the ability to word of mouth refer? It's a metaphor for any other business that you want to be successful, isn't it?
Blog Post Number - 4145
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