The Rise of the Convenience Factor and How It Can be a Parent Bosses’ Best Friend

As a time-poor Parent Boss, doesn’t the thought of having dinner taken care of, your house already clean, and your laundry done sound amazing!

Imagine the pressure of “going home to start my other job” being SO much less!

• Instead of rushing home via the supermarket like a crazy person, because you “forgot to get something out for dinner”, you can come home and get dinner on the table in 15 minutes, because it’s waiting in the fridge.
• Your kids aren’t at you to wash their school uniforms as they don’t have a clean one for tomorrow. The laundry has been picked up and dropped off, taking care of that.
• You don’t cringe when you get in your shower, and you see soap scum everywhere because you haven’t had time to clean the house, as it’s already clean. You can actually see through the shower screen!

The rise of the service industry has been immense, and with Covid playing into the need to isolate and get deliveries, it’s grown even more.

An Australian Franchisee called Jim’s Group is a classic example of this. One man started as a lawn mowing business in 1982 in Melbourne, and has grown today to offer 54 different services with 3800 franchisees, all because people no longer want to do every household chore themselves.

And for time-poor Parent Bosses, you can jump all over this convenience factor to make life less rushed and less stressed.

Here are the most common services that many people have already or are open to using:

• Lawn mowing and garden care
• Food delivery – think Uber, Menu log, Door Dash
• Grocery delivery – Coles & Woolworths here in Australia
• House cleaning

We are currently using these services:

• Lawn care – every two weeks
• House cleaning – every two weeks & changes our bedding
• Grocery delivery – weekly with Woolies
• Meal delivery – weekly with Youfoodz & a catering company doing home meals.
• Vitamin delivery – monthly
• Pet Food delivery – monthly

The fantastic thing is over time, you can move more and more items off your plate and onto another’s.

We had a cleaner before that just cleaned the house every two weeks. We have a new cleaner, and he will be stripping all the old linen off our beds and remaking them for us as well! Amazing! I always hated making our kid’s beds, as they all have bunks, and now I don’t have to! Happy dance over here, and thank you, Stu!

At the moment, we will be washing the linen at home, so we have two sets for every bed. One he remakes with, one we wash. We set a budget for household help, as, of course, it costs money to get this help. We then set income goals in our business, as we have more time to focus on growing it, and as we get to another $ threshold goal, we increase our services.

So next step, we will get a laundry service to come and pick up the bedding and towels and wash them for us. Then we won’t have bulky loads of laundry hanging around in the winter months.

Because that is the thing – it either takes your time to do everything yourself, or you have to pay someone to do it, and like most households out there, we have bills, just the same as everyone else. We will increase our services as we go, and you can too.

Here are some other services that have started because of this rise in the convenience factor:

• “I can’t think of what to have for dinner” – Hello Fresh/Dinnerly/Every Plate/Marley Spoon are a few Australian dinner service companies that take care of that for you.
• “I need some help with handyman things around the house, as I don’t have time” – Hire a Hubby/Airtasker are two companies that will take care of that for you.
• “I constantly feel like all I do is laundry!” – Jim’s Laundry Services/The laundry lady (Geelong area) will happily take that off your hands.
• “I can’t take time off work to take the dog to the vet/get the car serviced/get the dog washed” – ALL these services come to your home or workplace now.
• “We’re out of alcohol, and I can’t pick more up, as I’ve been drinking!” – Uber/Dan Murphy’s/most pizza stores will bring alcohol to you. (Very important for a Parent Boss to know, in our opinion! J )

You name it; it can almost certainly be delivered or done by someone else now.

The only limiting factors are $, your location (if you aren’t in a larger town or city, you might not be able to access all these services) and your mind frick and comfort levels about having someone do these things for you. I’m cool with someone washing our sheets and towels, but not our underwear, for example!

What do you want someone to take care of for you?

What do you no longer wish to go out to get instead of having it delivered to you?

Some may say this is being lazy. YOU may say that this is being lazy.

In our opinion, killing ourselves by trying to run a business and be a full-time parent/housekeeper is not the best use of our time, and it is not the example we want to set for our kids on how to blend work and life.

And with the rise of the convenience factor and all the companies out there now that are busy offering other people these services, people everywhere agree.

Get some time, sanity and space back, Parent Bosses, and jump on board!