PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Running a Porta Potty Business

Hiring Office Help for a Porta Potty Business, and What Each Role Does

In most young portable toilet companies, the office is the owner's phone and a kitchen table at night. The owner takes calls between stops, builds tomorrow's route after dinner, and does invoices on Sunday. That works for a while. Then the business grows to the point where the office work is costing more than it would to pay someone to do it.

Signs You Need Office Help

Good communication takes time, as covered in Customer Communication in a Porta Potty Business: Calls, Texts and Alerts. When nobody has that time, it shows up quickly.

The usual signs are easy to spot. Calls go to voicemail because the owner is pumping a unit. Website requests sit for a day before anyone answers. Invoices go out late, or in a pile at the end of the month. Routes for tomorrow get built at 9pm. The owner works every Sunday on paperwork. If two or three of these are true most weeks, the business needs office help.

Start Part-Time

Your first office hire does not have to be full-time. Many small companies start with someone for a few hours each morning, which is when most of the scheduling and calls happen. A spouse, a family member or a part-time hire from the community can cover the core work once the systems are in place. As the business grows, those hours grow.

Because PortaPottyBossPro is never billed per user, adding an office helper does not change your monthly bill.

The Three Office Jobs

In a larger company these are three people. In a small company, one person often wears all three hats. It still helps to think of them separately.

Dispatcher

The dispatcher decides what goes out and on which truck. A typical day:

• Check the Waiting List for weekly services, deliveries, extra pump-outs and pickups that are due or overdue
• Assign jobs to trucks and days on the Scheduled List dispatch board
• Use auto-routing, Closest First or Furthest First from the yard, and adjust route order
• Watch Start, Skip and Complete come in from the driver app, and crew GPS on the office map
• Reschedule skipped stops and fit in same-day calls

A good dispatcher knows the area, keeps calm when a truck breaks down, and does not let overdue pins sit.

Customer Service

The customer service role answers the phone and the texts. They take new requests, answer questions, handle site changes like moving units or adding a hand wash station, and update placement and access notes on the job so the tech sees them. They check Form Responses for new website requests and sign-ups, build estimates from the service list, and convert sign-ups into clients with one click. Two-way texting from the office keeps every conversation tied to the customer.

Billing

The billing role makes sure every job turns into money. They review invoices, check that extra rental days and extra pump-outs were billed, set contractors to monthly account billing where it makes sense, follow up on past-due accounts, and keep cards on file current. They also run the weekly reports, covered in The Reports to Watch Every Week in a Porta Potty Business.

Office User Roles

Not everyone in the office needs to see everything. PortaPottyBossPro has office user roles, so you can set what each person can see and do. A part-time helper who answers texts may not need access to billing settings. A billing person may not need to change routes. Set roles from the start. It is easier than taking access away later.

Write Down the Office Routine

The office needs procedures as much as the trucks do. A short daily list and a short weekly list, written down, mean that when the office person is sick, someone else can cover. They also mean the owner can step away without everything stopping. Keep the lists near the desk and update them when something changes.

What the Owner Keeps

Even with office help, the owner keeps a few things: pricing decisions, large accounts, hiring, and the weekly look at the numbers. The goal is not for the owner to know nothing about the office. It is for the owner to stop doing the office work at night.

Plan a hand-off period. For the first two weeks, sit with the new office person for an hour each morning while they build the day's routes and answer the first round of texts. Explain why you put a site on a certain truck, or why a contractor gets a call instead of a text. Most of what you know about customers is not written anywhere yet, and this is the time to get it into the client notes and tags where the next person can find it. After two weeks, step back to a short check-in at the end of the day.

For the office tools behind each of these roles, visit the Porta Potty Business Software page.