College Student Runs Property Maintenance Startup [Interview]
How a high school student built his own macitence business, ran it, and continues to grow it as a college senior.
Hustle Gurus is a series of interviews, videos, and podcasts for day-in-the-life content of Chicago founders, business leaders, and startup entrepreneurs. In this interview Matt L.F Smith sat down to talk with Tom Iwema, founder of IKG Property Maintenance.
By the round of sophomore year of high school I decided to dabble into this and started painting on on the side. I would paint on weekends or whenever I didn’t have school. It started off as me painting on the side, getting a couple side gigs going.
From there people started asking me to mow their lawn, I thought “yeah I think I could do that I mean I’m not really that interested in it but I think I could do it.” Before you know it I started growing this from painting, to landscape, to property maintenance management. We branched into carpeting, drywall, I would hire plumbing companies to come in and subcontractors for me and I would actually start maintaining entire properties.
TOM: Hi, my name is Tome Iwema, founder and CEO of IKG Property Maintenance. We’re a combination of a full service painting, and then environmental contracting company. Also, your residential commercial and light industrial painting interior and exterior contractor, certified lead, mold, and asbestos abatement provider in all Chicago land area.
MATT: This talk is pretty unique. Most of the businesses I do interviews with have something to do with tech, but you’re running this traditional service business at a really young age. With so much tech innovation going on right now, what drew you to get IKG off the ground?
TOM: It’s funny you mention that. I’m not a traditional kind of tech company, many of which seem to be a lot of the focus these days. However, a ton of technology is integrated into my operations. For instance, we pull all our leads through our website, we buy the leads through third party online platforms. People will call, set up a free quote, I put them into our system, and then personally drive out to look at the quote. We use scheduling software where either myself or one of my subcontracting partners come and perform the task from there.
MATT: When a job comes in and someone says e.g “hey, can you to do this attic job?” are you on site personally most of the time? How do you communicate with your subcontractors?
TOM: Everything gets sent through electronically. When someone pays at the end of a job they’ll sign their payment info right there on a smart device. Essentially the business can run itself through my integration of technology.
MATT: What are some challenges that you’ve faced not just as a traditional business, but as a business in general? How have you coped with those difficulties?
TOM: Particularly for my business, penetrating the market is difficult. When it comes to facility maintenance and you Google something, there’s just gonna be hundreds, thousand of results. I mean, painters are pretty much dime-a-dozen. It’s all just being smart with your very tight budget. You need to know how to use the internet and have technology to work for you.
MATT: Your website mentions the IKG difference a lot, this idea of you guys having a specific quality that you come with. When you work on somebody’s property what do you do in order to consistently differentiate yourself?
TOM: The IKG difference is our emphasis on quality and superior standards. Any kind of contractor you know usually comes in, does the work, and gets out as fast as they can. With IKG, we want to build a relationship with our customers and perform tasks down to a tee, a checklist of “did we’d preform this?” For instance, we’ve worked with the brookfield zoo. We’re around animals and they’re very particular about their work and policies. We’re not here to make a quick buck, I mean, we want to make money, but we’re here to ultimately serve people and we want them to experience the difference of having a quality service. We actually want to exceed their expectations. You might contract us to paint a stairwell in your commercial facility but we want you to come in and be like “Wow! This is a lot more than what i expected.”
MATT: How did you develop the IKG difference? When you were at a very early stage and it felt harder to penetrate this super crowded market, what did you do to stand out?
TOM: I just did a lot of research and talked to people. I did a lot of customer interviews during a customer discovery phase. I needed to figure out what do people want?
MATT: How do you use social media to promote IKG and build a face of the brand?
TOM: I think it just comes down to understanding how, to use those platforms. For instance, i’m not the best at Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram myself. The best part about being a college senior is that… this Is what everyone around me is doing! I’ll reach out to them and have them help me build my brand on these platforms.vWhat college kid doesn’t want a little extra money and something they can use for their resume? I think it’s a win-win for everybody.
We’re always researching the top trends and new algorithm changes on these sites too. It help us pull in leads and of build that following.
MATT: What short or long term goals you have for IKG right now? How Do you see yourself getting there from where you’re at today?
TOM: Short term, it’s kind of just continuing to develop our processes that lead to job completion. We want to prefect the entire process. I’d like to get that done before the end of this summer 2018. The long term strategy is to keep building upon our existing customer-base, focusing on customer service innovation. That quality in the IKG difference, and building upon that to see the company grow.
MATT: Finally, because Hustle Gurus is all about connecting and adding value to other people’s work… if someone reading this wants to reach out, are you looking for any specific talent right now to grow the team? Where can they reach out?
TOM: For sure! I would love to hopefully hear from prospective people that are looking to get into more of a operations side. Hopefully once I graduate here in a couple months I’ll look into hiring for part-time, and eventually a full-time position, a position to help out with operations. Freelancers are always welcome, I definitely need more help with developing brand, social media content, and marketing.
You can reach out on our contact page, on our website IKG Maintenance
MATT: Thanks tom!
TOM: Yep!
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