JANI-KING Franchise Complaints: Add your own – or defend the company – below.
(UnhappyFranchisee.Com) Entrepreneur magazine lavishes high praise on the Jani-King franchise opportunity via its 2010 franchise rankings. Entrepreneur ranked the 10,000+ unit Jani-King #8 overall in the 2010 Franchise 500, the #2 low-cost franchise, the #1 home-based franchise and #7 in the “America’s Best Global Franchise” category.
In a time when many individuals are struggling to make ends meet, the Jani-King franchise opportunity – with its low start-up cost and guaranteed cleaning contracts – seems especially enticing. But do a bit of digging and you’ll find some troubling – and remarkably consistent – complaints from Jani-King franchise owners.
Lawsuits allege a cleaning-contract shell game.
In an August, 2009 Franchise Times article on lawsuits leveled against commercial cleaning franchise companies, Julie Bennett writes:
…the lawsuits, filed recently in Massachusetts against all three companies and in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and California against Jani-King, contend that the cleaning companies misrepresent their offerings, because they do not have sufficient customers to guarantee each franchisee the amount of monthly cleaning business they purchase. Instead, the lawsuits allege, they breach their contracts by underbidding the amount of time and staffing required for each job, refusing to allow franchisees to inspect cleaning jobs or bid sheets before accepting or rejecting a job, offering geographically inconvenient jobs and unjustly taking jobs from one franchisee to re-sell them to others.
Consumer complaint sites are abundant with specific complaints about the Jani-King franchise, the franchisor and the regional master franchisees who recruit unit-level owners.
On the Complaints Board, 2009-08-22 letshelp wrote
franchise is a scam
I purchased a Jani-King Commercial Cleaning Franchise after reading they were a great franchise opportunity in several franchise magazines. During my initial meeting with the regional director I expressed concern over the 40% they take off the top of what clients are billed. He told me not to worry as they take all their fees into consideration when giving a cleaning quote to a client.
When they started offerring me contracts I would do the math and tell them there was very little profit in some contracts and absolutely none in others. I was told this was a low profit margin industry and I had to learn to work some “break even” contracts for I would get additional business from those same clients ( floor waxing ).
I accepted some of these contracts since they are only required to offer you the amount of cleaning business you purchased (with the franchise cost ). If you don’t accept the accounts they are not required to offer you anymore.
Once I started working accounts, the operations director would go by the account every month to evaluate the franchisee’s performance. He would always find something negative to write about to justify taking the account away from the franchisee and reselling it to a new franchisee. So the franchisee ends up losing the original franchise fee and whatever fee he paid for the accounts he was working at hardly no profit.
I later learned this type of scam preys on people who have never been in business for themselves – so trust the Franchisor. If anyone is looking into purchasing this type of franchise, do yourself a favor and run a Google or Yahoo search on Jani-King. They have had numerous lawsuits and government complaints. I lost all my savings, but hopefully others can learn from my mistake.
85 days ago, Rickety Rabbit responded:
Almost the same thing happend to me in Boston. I bought a Jani King franchise in 2006. I paid $15, 000 for $4000 per month in business. Minus the 22% Jani- King takes off the top. With what is left I pay for labor, chemicals, and equipment.
Jani King has it so they do not have to provide you with the $4000 per month in business, they only need OFFER it to you. If you refuse it, that’s it. They don’t owe it to you any longer. You had your chance. But here is what they do. They underbid the account by hundreds of dollars. They make false promises to the business owner, and do not tell the franchise owner about it. When the business owner cancels because the promises are not met, the franchise owner is left to make a decision. Take care of the promises never mentioned to you ( such as delivering the newspaper ever morning, or a free strip and wax every month) both are actual cases, and both would have put me in the negative for profit.
So I was forced to give it up. No fault of mine. Also the account is not supposed to cancel before one year. If they do Jani King promises to file suit with a killer legal team. Which they must have because they are still in business. However they only use it to defend itself from angry franchise owners.
They purposely offer you accounts that are way underbid, or too far away. When you deny them, they no longer owe you the account. If I could do it all over again I would invest in real estate on Venus before having to deal with this again.
One last thing. I placed over 40 calls per month to the district manager for four months straight. Not one call answered not one call returned. I had to buy an existing franchise that was already working with history in order to pay the bills while waiting for my $4000 in business. Now I am about to lose those accounts to under bidders. Can you believe that? In this economy there are those worse then Jani King that UNDERBID them. Sorry. Very sorry.
ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH THE JANI-KING FRANCHISE? WHAT DO YOU THINK? SHARE A COMMENT BELOW.
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The truth about Jani-King, Jan-Pro, etc...
To be honest they all virtually run the same. Going with one over the other is just a matter of how much more fees you will pay because of their "name brand recognition". The reality is this. They will take almost all of your profits every month (20% of the contract you will be servicing or higher ) and leave you with pennies at the end of the month. Not only that, but they make you purchase a franchise. They actually make you pay thousands of dollars for training & "guaranteed contracts", the more you pay the more business they will provide (allegedly).
They should be paying you to take on these awful accounts they give you!!! Mostly, they prey upon poor families looking to own a piece of the American Dream and trick you into believing it is a good investment. People invest their entire savings into this dream (more often nightmares). But, the only way these franchises can be profitable is if you have slave labor (you will be the slave in most cases). Working 5-7 days (mostly graveyard shifts) a week, with no vacation. Sound like fun? Not to mention what the work actually requires you to do. It is extremly hard, smelly, grotesque work. Not for the wimps that for sure.
Here are some facts:
1) Regardless of the lies you will be told, they are struggling to get new accounts to give new franchise owners. You will be told stupid taglines like "the dirt doesn't stop at the door, businesses need to be cleaned". Although it is true that businesses need to be cleaned, but unfortunately there are more cleaning companies and franchise owners then businesses that need cleaning.
Most of the profits that you would like to make are taken away from you in order for them to get the contract in the first place. The margins are so thin that you will be working for minimum wage just to stay "profitable". They don't stop taking in peoples money to buy more franchises just because they don't have business to give them. The reality is that you will most certainly get an old account that is being transferred from another franchise owner. These accounts more often than not have business owners that are ready to terminate the agreement due to poor service, complaints, irrational business owners that are impossible to please. They are so fed up that it is impossible to save the account. They are simply waiting for the contract to expire in most cases (although you will be told if you work hard, you can save the account, which can happen but is not the norm). A lot of time they come from other franchise owners that turn in the accounts because they are unprofitable. Reminds me of a pyramid scheme to be honest.
2) They purposefully offer you accounts that you will not be able to service because it is too far away (by offering you an account which you don't except regardless of your reason, it meets their contractual agreement to offer you an account within their set time frame, once they have offered you an account, they are no longer obligated to get you more business within any set period of time. Meaning they still owe you more accounts, but there is no time frame in which they have to get you the business once they have offered you enough contracts to cover the amount you purchased (if you are promised $3k a month and are offered a $1500 which you can't service for what ever reason, now they only have to get you $1500 within the time frame that was promised. So if you accept another account they offer for $1500, they now have as much time as they like/need to get you the remaining $1500 they still owe you. Which you may never see!
So knowing this, they will purposefully offer you accounts hundreds of miles away that they know you will decline just to fulfill their "end of the bargain". Doesn't sound like too good of bargain for the franchise owner though. Not only that, they will offer the same account to as many franchise owners as possible before it finally gets assigned after they receive as many no's as possible. You will be lied to and told that this doesn't happen. This is a fact though, it happens every day.
3) Labor Costs account for 50-70% of the accounts that you will be servicing. Equipment rental/payments account for roughly another 15%. If you have any financing when you purchase your business that will account for another 10-15%. You will always have 20-22% of your contract value going to the company every month (for example, Jani-King is 22%) You will most likely have to pay off your equipment/supplies that you recently purchased that will account for pretty much the rest of the contract leaving you with nothing. It will take you about 20 hours a week (4 hours a day, 5 days a week) to service every $1000 in contracts that they offer you. Meaning that 1 person can do a maximum of $4000 a month. This is assuming you can work a 16 hr grave yard shift everyday. Which usually isn't possible since most businesses are usually open 7am-5pm. They want to show up to a clean facility and don't want cleaning people there during normal business hours. Which means you normally have from about 6pm - 6 am to clean (only 12 hours).
There are some exceptions (restaurants, bars, etc..), but this is generally speaking... So the reality is you can probably service about $3k by yourself, then you will need to hire people to help you (costs go up tremendously at this point). You need to buy more equipment, more expenses, more management... Thinner margins. At the end of the day, you will probably see about 10-15% profits if you are an excellent franchise owner. That means if you want to make about $4k a month, you need to be billing about $30k a month. You will need multiple crews with lots of equipment and supplies for each crew. Not to mention, what are they going to be driving? Who pays for fuel, insurance, etc.?
4) New large accounts will not go to a new franchise owner. They do not want to take a chance on losing new accounts, so they will assign them to existing franchise owner with a good work history (or the one that greases the wheel the best). So if you fork out the money to buy a franchise that guarantees you over ten thousands dollars in monthly contracts you will most likely have a bunch of small accounts. They will offer you accounts all over "your territory".
Imagine starting a new crew just to service $1000 a month! Or a $500 contract for that matter! In fact, they will give themselves over a year to fulfill their contractual agreement to get you that business. They can offer you contracts that only bill $195 a month. Imagine the logistics in trying to manage 20 of those! They say this will never happen and most the time it wont, but it could. In fact, they might just keep offering you small accounts because they know you will decline them. They will add up and eventually their "contractual agreement" will be fulfilled.
5) The Director of Franchise Sales job is to make this investment sound as great as apple pie. If you work hard you can succeed like all these other franchise owners (most franchise owners are not happy nor have they succeeded. Although there are some!). They will show you Entrepenuer magazine or what ever their highest ranking is and say "look here, see we ranked #7 out of all franchises to own"... We are the best low investment franchise, these people think we are so great.. Blablabla.
They will tell you that you will be offered new accounts that are close to your home. "We always try to find the nearest franchise owner to the business. If they don't want it, we offer it to the next closest, etc... Now technically we can offer you business anywhere in our territory." They most likley fail to mention that some territories are hundreds of miles from one end to the other, covering multiple counties (It's in their FDD so that's how they get around it) . If you take traffic into account, you could be several hours from your home. Refer back to my point #2. They do this on purpose because they are lacking new accounts!
You will be told that there is plenty of business and you can always bring in new accounts or you can buy more contracts if you want to expand your business (which of course you will be paying 22% to the corporation every month, regardless of if you bring in the business or if they provide you the accounts).
6) You must purchase and operate under an LLC or Corporation. Sounds great right? Well, this is just one more expense. You will pay about $800 a year on top of the money it takes to file the paperwork with your state. Figure another $500. You will have to file separate business taxes which is also an additional expense every year if you use a CPA.
The bottom line is that they feed on people coming in with the dream of being business owners. They make it sound great because you can invest as little as $3000 and own your own business (not true by the way). You have to buy equipment, start an LLC, etc... What eventually happens is that people will be offered small accounts. They will start to service them and be offered more accounts (most of which are impossible for them to service since they are so far away).
So here they are sitting on a $1000 a month contract that they service every month. Almost $700 a month of which is being taken to pay your fees to the corporation leaving you with about $300 a month. It cost you more in fuel to get to most of the business than you make in cleaning them!
You will continue to ask for more accounts which they will never give to you (unless you are very lucky, it does happen from time to time). You will be told to go out and get your own accounts if you are sick of waiting. "We already offered you this account and you turned it down. We met our contractual agreement. Go get your own business!!!" So you continue struggling to service the small account you are given, most of the time working for less than minimum wage in hopes that one day you will get the additional business that you were promised. Eventually, you tire of waiting for the account and turn in the account you were servicing. Which then gets transfered on to the new sucker and the viscous cycle continues.
The fact is, the people that are making money in this business are the ones that take 22% of your blood and sweat every month. They sit in their mansions, yachts and fly around on their Gulfstreams laughing at all the money they are rolling in, as people pour everything they own into this industry to try and put food on their tables. It's really sad if you think about it.
If you still want to invest in this industry knowing the facts, I wish you the best of luck. Not too many people have what it takes to make it. It can be done, but you will need a lot of luck on your side. When all else fails, you may need to bribe someone to get you the extra business you need! :)
I am a commercial cleaning company owner and have sat here for 2 hours reading this whole blog. I want to thank whoever is responsible for this consistent truth into the evil business practices of Janiking, Jani Pro and Coverall but especially JANI KING. I myself and my employees run a small commercial cleaning company that is honest in service and fair in price. I know what it is like to bid on an account or fight to keep my account against JANI KING or what I like to call them JANI- SHIT ! I plan on using the information I have found in informing current customers and future customers to the horror that comes from choosing companies like JANI - Shit or COVERALL.
Cheers to the truth and the illumination of the evil practices of these companies that prey on honest working people so they can afford there Lamborghini's.
I owned and operated a very successful Jani-King franchise for 12 years. I bought an existing, smaller franchise and built it up to a very large one with the help of Jani-King's sales office and also from learning to bid my own accounts and actually doing some of the work myself. This is not an easy business or a get rich quick scheme, but it is also not all bad. Sorry to hear about some of the problems some of you have had. Some just seem to need a kick in the pants to get off your butt and run your business and others are down right ridiculous! I have never had some of the problems listed on this site in my 12 years of being a Jani-King franchise owner. I relocated to another state, sold my existing franchise to a friend who still runs it, (successfully, I might add) and tried my hand at operating a cleaning business on my own. What I found is that without the backing of a large corporation, it's a whole lot harder to land the nice, big accounts. I've had my own business for 6 years now and believe me, the "mom and pop" businesses and accounts cannot compete with the one's I've had through Jani-King. After all has been said and done, I'm considering buying another franchise with Jani-king and getting back into the business with them. There is definitely money to be made, but it does take time and work! So for anyone having any questions about a Jani-King franchise, I would be glad to help you if I can.....
jani king your company are scam you should have in trial
Molly Wotring continues to repost the same thing in diffrent blogs/ Jani King should be listed as a criminal enterprise that's my opinion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Before you speak out of school Mrs. Worting i to was a franchise owner.
Hey John,
Not sure what blogs you're speaking of when you say I re-posted the same things on different blogs as this was the first time I posted anywhere! As to your other comment about speaking out of school?, not sure what that was supposed to mean but we all have different opinions and I just happened to have had a good experience with Jani-King and was simply stating the facts of my franchise to show others that it is very possible! Sorry you had such a bad experience!
Well, I cannot speak about the experience of owning a Jani-King franchise as I am not a franchisee, however I can give you insight on the experience of the quality of service they provide. One word: HORRENDOUS!
The hotel I work for has recently come under new managment, within a month or so of their new quasi-tyrannical reign, they fired all of the original housekeeping staff here at my hotel and replaced them with a contract with this joke-of-a-company: Jani-King. Needless to say, the old housekeepers were primarily Latin American and actually did their job. We never had any complaints regarding the quality of housekeeping they provided us with.
Now, post-JaniKing contract, we get complaints back and forth. The quality of the staff they bring in is horrendous. First, they dress like a bunch of thugs and are covered in tattoos, and lack any sense of work-ethic. They are more suited to standing in line to be checked into the nearest penitentiary than they are to actually have employment.
Jani-King obviously cares about the quality of service it provides as much as it does the benefits that it gives its unfortunate franchisees....
Class action lawsuits is now going to happen in Australia as well.
I can and will tell a story about them so shocking you will find it hard to believe.
But since J-K here is being looked at by a few government dept for sham contracts not a lot has changed as of yet and we are still to go to court and I don't want to give it all away yet.
When I as a franchisee could not afford to pay legal wages to my employees I urged them to go to the ombudsmans office or Fair Work Australia. The Ombudsman took the view that Jani king was responsible and not me since I did not negotiate the contracts, needless to say J-K was forced to pay but I was still never compensated by J-K as they were hell bent on putting me out of business. Now i'm hell bent on getting even by telling the truth every where I go.
Ben Stoltz is the owner of Jani-King australasia and he is about to find out what it's like when you pick on the wrong guy. Corporate bullying seems to be their way but i'm not scared. so come on.
Come and sit down face to face with me in court and I'll tear you to shreds legally unlike the the way you tore me to shreds when you stole my family home and everything that meant security for my wife and 5 children you made yourself an enemy that will never rest.
I've spent three years getting to a position where I can strike back. If there are more aussies out there reading this and have been burnt by this company contact me on [redacted] or the Fair Work Australia as well as the ACCC so that you to can be part of this class action too.
A place called "Former jani king franchisees" have been set up on facebook get behind it where ever you are and welcome jani king to social networking.
My name is Roger Bush FZEE1016 and i'm not scared because i'm telling the truth and I can prove it.
There's no reason to invest thousands of $$$$$ in a franchise and if you do what you must realize is that your taking a chance, just because you invest money in someones else's business doesn't mean by any stretched sense of the imagination that it will pay off, if you take a chance and that's what your doing is taking a chance, it's your fault, you can do all the hard work yourself and start your own cleaning business, that's right start your own! Work hard, sell hard, go out there and get your own accounts and stop counting on someone else to get them for you, when you get your own accounts it's a great feeling of accomplishment, as long as the cleaning is detailed, custom designed to fit the customers needs, the pay off could be awesome! Work hard, sell hard!
Hi everyone, I am a former franchisee with Jani-King, actually I agree with all of the complaints. Without going into to much details I lost all of my accounts within the first year with my investment. I can see that I am not the only one. Actually I went back to visit the customer after the fact and I asked them for my own personal knowledge and growth why did they cancel the account? They told me they did not cancel the account, that the Jani-King rep told them I had moved out-of state. I really enjoyed the commcerial cleaning business and in the end it was taken away from me.
So if anyone is looking for a white hat in a room full of dark hats then I can make a suggesstion. I purchased a franchise last year from i-Clean. They are a new commercial cleaning company franchise in the USA i-Clean America and i-Clean Canada and have been in operating in Canada since 1999. I can tell you that they are nothing like any other cleaning franchise, they supply you with accounts that are profitable and fair plus they cannot remove you from an account without providing you written proof from the client.