There is much to share here from my personal experience.
1. you will treated as a second class citizen at Cintas: None of the other divisions care about deep clean. You do not have anywhere near the amount of administrative support as the other divisions. your compensation is way lower than the other divisions. you are expected to track all of your own paperwork and billing (no other roll has to do that) and if you can't provide 100% documentation you do not receive your comission
Unrealistic sales goals and implementation: they will try to tell you that an average deal sells for 5k... more like 1-2k. you are expected to hit sales goals that reflect the average job being 5k. Heres the kicker though, even if you sell all the necessary business, for you to get paid it has to be installed. This means you have to fit all those jobs on the schedule for that month. you also have to share the schedule/resources with another rep as well as the market managers "recurring business" It is also important to know that the market manager has full say of what goes on the schedule and when.
Overworked/non existent technicians: Our branch had technicians quit left and right. if the techs can't work, they expect you to go out on the job and help to get the job done (unpaid). if the jobs don't install, you don't get paid and its still reflected in your goals.
Used as a stepping stone for people wanting in upper management: This division is used by the ambitious in order to get to the next levels of management. several people have had to be the head of that division in order to get to the next level of management and are now in upper management. They will squeeze you dry, and leave promises of being able to get you to a different division with no follow up action. I had a manager trying to tell me i needed to go on 25 new appointments a week, which is completely unrealistic. When i asked him if he truly thought this was realistic, he told me that I just wasn't working hard enough, even though this boss never had to sell this product in this division.
Complete unawareness of the product and sales process from other divisions management: my favorite was when they said that "FS and Uniform are a harder sale than deep clean is", which is unbelievably false. Seeing as how Cintas is one of the few companies who can consistently fill orders of supplies without hiccups, the majority of people use them simply off this fact. With deep clean, you have local competitors everywhere who are willing to do it for 1/3 of the price without a major difference in end result (most of the time), you are automatically disqualified from many large job bids due to Cintas' "non union" status, and frankly even if you did win a big contract the resources deep clean has would in no way be able consistently meet the terms of the contract.
If your operations team is unable to complete the jobs management will still put you on a plan: If the schedule is full or you don't have the technicians to complete jobs, the management will still put you on a performance plan.
ask these questions while in an interview (but if you do they will probably cut you, Cintas doesn't really like "Free thinkers")
1. what happened to the last rep here? what about the one before that? the one before that?
2. what would you say the retention rate for the division as a whole has been?
3. Can you direct me to some people who used to work in this division so I can ask further questions regarding their experience? (if they're still employees the may not tell you the truth directly, but their body language will say it all)
4. what has the staffing been like for this position on the ops side? Is there enough people employed for this division to run sufficiently?
