How to Start a Cleaning Business: Marketing to Your Top Prospects

When many entrepreneurs are setting out to discover how to start a cleaning business, they think of marketing as a tool exclusively for new leads and prospects. While marketing to new prospects is essential for both new and established cleaning companies, the rate of success when marketing to new prospects can be much lower than most of us would like to see, often in the low single digit percentages. In this How to Start a Cleaning Business article, we’re going to take a look at how to effectively market to your number one prospects: past clients.

If you’re just starting out with your cleaning services and discovering the fundamentals of how to start a cleaning business, the truth is that you aren’t going to have any past clients to effectively solicit. However, over time it is absolutely critical that you maintain contact with any past leads or cancelled clients. If you’ve been running your cleaning service for some time, these are strategies which you can implement right away.

Why are past leads and clients so important?

One of the fundamental lessons which we try to reiterate over and over here when discussing starting a cleaning business is the continual evaluation and analysis of marketing campaign success rates. With a direct to consumer campaign to new prospects, even in a highly targeted geographic market, you advertising pieces are likely to close new customers at 1% or less. For every 1,000 pieces you distribute, if you close new clients at 0.5%, you’re looking at 5 new customers. Let’s face it, not every household is going to hire a cleaning service and some may actively use other providers.

However, as you look over your list of past clients, they all have one thing in common: they hired your company. This means that there is, or was at one time, a 100% chance that they will use a cleaning service and chose you. When you compare that rate of success to 0.5%, you begin to see the value of continually marketing to past clients. I have seen success rates of up to 25% on marketing campaigns delivered to cancelled customers. This means that to get the same 5 clients as described in the scenario above, you only need to send out 20 marketing pieces. Not bad, is it?

How should you begin marketing to past customers?

If you’ve read any of the prior How to Start a Cleaning Business marketing articles, you’ll have noticed that we always advocate selling on price and including an immediate call to action. If you’re planning to market to your past clients, you already know the square footage of their home or office as well as the price which they accepted for past work. By utilizing this information in a direct mail piece tailored specifically to that past client, you can create a call to action based on the benefits of your service and why their lives would be made easier by hiring you back. Secondly, create an offer that enhances the call to action and creates an incentive to leave any potential existing service to come back to your company. These can be deep discounts for the first few services or perhaps complimentary add-ons for which you normally up charge.

Keep the frequency of contact up as well!

Don’t think of this as a one time marketing effort. You need to constantly be making contact with your past clients. For a fraction of the cost of a campaign to new prospects, you can deliver multiple impressions to any old leads or cancelled customers. Do it often and consistently throughout the course of the year.

Stay tuned to How to Start a Cleaning Business for more strategies for successfully marketing and managing your home or office cleaning service!

How to Start a Cleaning Business: Keeping an Eye on Your Finances

One of the most critical factors in learning how to start a cleaning business is understanding the need to properly track your financial progress from day one. Far too many entrepreneurs start out understanding many of the operational requirements of how to start a cleaning business, but overlook a lot of the “desk duties”. Deciding to set up a proper accounting and financial tracking system from day one is incredibly important to determining your business progress.

Don’t feel that this needs to be a daunting task. When we start to discuss accounting and bookkeeping, many entrepreneurs start to break out in a nervous sweat. This doesn’t need to be complicated. What’s important is being able to look at your business as an entity that generates income for you. After all, that’s the real reason for being in business, isn’t it?

There are many inexpensive software packages on the market that you can select from when choosing how to start a cleaning business. While many business owners still use paper ledgers or simple spreadsheets, there are desktop and online applications that you can choose that are configured out of the box for small business owners. While it may take you the better part of a day to configure your software choice and get used to the options, functions, and reports, it will pay large dividends in the long run.

One of the best options for new business owners learning how to start a cleaning business is QuickBooks. You can select from a desktop or a web-based version. The desktop version requires a one-time purchase while the online version requires a monthly fee. The online version is available from $12.95 per month and allows you to access it from anywhere you have internet access. The desktop version currently runs around $180.00 for the basic version and will need to be installed on your desktop or laptop computer.

After choosing your software of choice, you’ll spend some time learning its functionality. Over the next few months, we’re planning to put together a training course specifically for setting up QuickBooks for a cleaning business. When that’s available, we’ll post it on the site, however, in the meantime you can use most of the functionality of QuickBooks right out of the box.

While you’ll primarily be using your software for day to day tasks such as booking your deposits and entering and paying bills, the real power of setting up an accounting program when deciding how to start a cleaning business it the ability to see your business as a financial entity. You’ll want to spend some time each week and once a month looking at your profitability reports, referred to as a profit and loss statement in QuickBooks. This will allow you to take a real time look at money in and money out and adjust your business practices accordingly. Are you spending too much on gas? Are cleaning supplies eating into your profit margins? These reports indicate where changes should be made and in the long run, how to put more money in your pocket.

Again, while it will take some time to initially configure your accounting software of choice, don’t underestimate this critical step in learning how to start a cleaning business.

If you’re interested in QuickBooks, here’s a great video walk through to help you decide which version is best for you:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8bctY50fCI

It’s Always Cheaper to Keep Customers Than to Get New Customers

Alright, so this How to Start a Cleaning Business article may seem either completely evident or so elementary that you might not even choose to read it. But trust me, once you hit the ground running and start picking up new clients, you’re going to quickly lose sight of this idea. Whether you’re looking for advice on starting a cleaning business or any other type of service industry startup, I cannot stress this enough: it’s always going to be cheaper to keep your customers happy than to go get new ones.

The fact of the matter is you’re not going to make every client happy 100% of the time. Each and every customer has varying expectations and your job is to create a level of service that satisfies 95% of them. You are always going to have some degree of customer churn in your business even if you’re doing well and it’s relatively minimal. The problem is that for many office or home cleaning business owners, once the new business starts rolling in, we consider the customers that we’re losing expendable since we’re replacing them.

However, the cost of acquiring a new customer is high. When learning how to start a cleaning business, you always need to be mindful of your per customer acquisition cost which is the cost of your marketing campaign divided by the number of clients successfully sold from that campaign. Easy enough, right? If you spend $1,000.00 on a marketing campaign and you get five new clients, your acquisition cost for each of those clients is $200.00, meaning you need to do $200.00 worth of revenue for that customer (minus your direct costs for the service) before you begin to make a profit. As you can see, the cost of bringing in each and every new customer is not only high, but it defers your profit margins while you make up that expense.

For this reason, you can probably now see that when we teach you how to start a cleaning business, we would like you to start thinking along the lines of what you can do to keep a customer from leaving you, even if it costs money to do so. That’s a much more profitable strategy most of the time. And there are a few ways to go about focusing on customer retention that are a lot cheaper than $200.00.

Essentially, your primary goal should be to simply listen to your clients. Although there are many management and customer service ideologies that propose that you use complicated surveys or metrics to gauge you customer satisfaction, you know what? You can also just listen to your customers to keep a pulse on your business day in and day out. Change what they’re unhappy with within reason. Say thank you. Leave them a gift. Ask them about their family. Develop a relationship. Make it impossible for them to leave you or at least make the option of cancelling your service more difficult than not cancelling it. Think outside the box. How would you like to be treated as a customer?

It’s not difficult. Just make people happy and they’ll stay with you for a long time. I’ve seen it in action. In a future post here at the How to Start a Cleaning Business blog, we’ll explore some detailed retention tactics for your office or home cleaning business which you can put into place.

How to Start a Cleaning Business: Ensuring That Your Home Cleaning Business Gets Paid…NOW!

One of the fundamental mistakes that I see entrepreneurs make when learning how to start a cleaning business is confusing accounts receivable with making money. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate one point very clearly: you haven’t made any money from your office or home cleaning business until cash is in your bank account. In this discussion on how to start a cleaning business, we’ll look at ways to translate your hard work into cash as quickly as possible.

As you’ve heard it said many times, cash is king. This is especially crucial for an upstart office or home cleaning business. In the infancy stages, a startup needs cash for many critical operating requirements. These cash demands also increase rapidly as the business begins to grow. Whereas you needed $1,000.00 to meet an expense such as payroll the prior week, this week you’ve acquired several new accounts and your payroll is now $1,500.00. While your profit margins will cover the increase in the short-term (yes, at the expense of the owner’s paycheck in the early days), the cash from prior work now becomes essential in funding payroll.

The fledgling commercial or home cleaning business will, with proper planning, build up a cash buffer over time to cover increases in month-to-month operating expenses. However, initially cash will be scarce and to avoid the need to loan the operation your personal savings, collecting on accounts receivable as quickly as possible is necessary.

When deciding how to start a cleaning business and creating your company policies, you’ll need to determine precisely how you’re going to accept payment and what your terms will be to convert your accounts receivable into money on your bank account. Far too many new office or home cleaning business owners leave this as an afterthought. Below are some suggestions for getting paid as quickly as possible that I have utilized successfully.

How to Start a Cleaning Business Payment Method #1: Automated Credit Card Billing

Let’s face it, in this day and age, most of us pay for the majority of our day-to-day expenses with plastic. Asking your customers to do the same is not only completely acceptable, but often requested or expected. Look at it this way: when you go to a restaurant and have a meal, you don’t ask the server to send a bill to your house after you’re finished eating, do you? No, as soon as the meal is over, you pull out your credit card and pay the bill. This is a great way of running your office or home cleaning business as well. You can require that your new customers provide you with a credit card account to which you will bill each cleaning as it is rendered. This involves some trust, the need for a very secure method for credit card storage, and also a small amount of lost business. In my experience, approximately 2% of prospects will say “no” to your company if you refuse to do the work without a credit card on file. However, consider a conservative rate of bad debt (non-payment) of 5 to 10% and you’ll quickly see that this is an acceptable rate of refusal. That 5 or 10% of bad debt will hurt you more in the future than losing a few prospects along the way.

There are several methods by which you can execute this strategy and we’ll cover this topic in more detail in a future article, however, you can very easily sign up for a merchant account with your bank or financial institution and they will typically provide you with a secure online interface in which you can store and process credit card payments. It’s simple. You sign the customer up, store their payment information during signup, and after each service is rendered, you bill their card for the amount of their service. As soon as the work is done, the money is in your bank account. Admittedly, this will be a more difficult sell for a commercial office cleaning business, so an alternative method is suggested.

How to Start a Cleaning Business Payment Method #2: Payment by Check on Site

If you’re just learning how to start a cleaning business, you may believe that commercial clients will be the best paying, and they often are, I can tell you from experience that you’re at least as likely to experience non-payment from a commercial client as a residential customer. One in five businesses fail and this includes your commercial or office cleaning business clients as well. While your commercial clients may not be as willing or able to provide you with a credit card to keep on file, many will. However, for those that do not, I suggest that you request (and include in your contract with the client if appropriate), that your client pay you by check while you are at the site. If you’re working with an extremely large or decentralized company, they may not have the power to make this happen as they commonly need to send a purchase order to a corporate accounts payable department for payment. In this case, you need to decide if the value of the job is worth the wait as many times large corporations will not send your payment for 30, 45, or sometimes even 60 days.

There are many ways for your office or home cleaning business to collect on accounts receivable, however, I strongly suggest that you lay out whatever method you select in writing in your company’s terms of service. Just keep in mind when deciding how to start a cleaning business that cash is king!

How to Start a Cleaning Business: Routing Efficiently for Your Office or Home Cleaning Business

Starting a small home or office cleaning business is not a walk in the park, and more often than not business owners or entrepreneurs tend to jump at offers for any customer that comes along, without carefully considering all the specifications related to how to start a cleaning business. They do this in a bid to win over the customer by being agreeable, and this practice in itself is very unrewarding and outright wrong. As I always advocate, when deciding how to start a cleaning business for yourself,  you should develop a system. Create a standard system for pricing and more importantly: routing, where you draw up a routing schedule by grouping areas together.

A good routing and scheduling system is one of the most important parts of running a successful home or office cleaning business and understanding how set  up such a system will help you go a long way. Let’s take a look at 2 strategies that will help you effectively set it up.

How to Start a Cleaning Business — Efficiency Strategy 1:  Customer Density

Avoid downtime as much as possible by creating a marketing strategy that allows you to focus on a closely knitted area.  By marketing to a micro-targeted geographical area over a long period, you build up customer density in that location.  This allows you to reduce downtime via travel in between jobs.

For example, if your business hours are from nine to five, this means that you have eight hours in which to complete the day’s work. I know you know this, but let’s do some more math with those eight hours. If you have to complete jobs that are far apart, and the first house is, for instance, 35 minutes from the office you are supposed to clean next, and the second job is a 25 minute drive from the next job…this means that between the first three jobs you have lost almost one hour in travel time. That leaves you with seven hours to work. Add a couple more jobs in there, and you’ve lost another hour. But if, on the other hand, you have good customer density in the area and the jobs are only about five to seven minutes apart, that will cut your downtime by well over 70%.

How to Start a Cleaning Business – Efficiency Strategy 2:  Geographical Day Scheduling

This is quite difficult in the beginning, but as you will see, if you keep strictly to your schedule, profits will rise dramatically. There will be a lot of clients asking you to make exceptions just for them and you need to, as a matter of principle, turn down their requests. But you might want to tell them it’s a matter of policy. Make sure that all jobs within a particular geographical location are taken care of on the same day. To effectively schedule your work, you’ll first need to get a map or your target area. Then try to divide it up into five  parts if you work only weekdays, or seven parts if you work weekends as well.  Be sure to keep the number of properties in each group as even as possible.

Technology had made things like scheduling a non-issue since scheduling can be performed using computer software. I will discuss how this works in a subsequent article. Just bear in mind the importance of these two strategies and how understanding and implementing them will improve your time efficiency and increase your profits when learning how to start a cleaning business.

How to Start a Cleaning Business: Should You Advertise Price?

Strictly speaking, when deciding how to start a cleaning business, the predominant thought in the mind of every business owner, especially in the service industry, is the estimated value of every individual job. When starting up a cleaning service for homes or offices a lot of people tend to favor this line of thinking. They are always afraid that if the estimate comes in too low, they will lose profit; and if it comes in too high, they’ll lose a customer or contract bid. Yet such dilemmas can be prevented if you follow a few simple guidelines.

Some companies offer what they like to call “free estimates” to potential clients. Not long ago, that used to work. But we’re now in an age where decisions are made in the blink of an eye and people don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to be convinced. Search engines and the internet in general have changed the way business propositions are made and, more often than not, they affect a customer’s buying decisions. Looking through the list of cleaning companies that pop up, the customer can easily and quickly choose what companies they want, especially when a full quotation including price is offered at first glance.

You would be surprised to know that when it comes to the home cleaning business or office janitorial industry, whether  your quotation is near or far from the “right price”is not what determines whether you make the sale or not. Sometimes just giving an on the spot price quotation puts you ahead of the other companies that still advertise, estimate and then haggle with the customer. Some small business owners will argue that advertising a price leaves you open to being outbid by competitors and not getting the job; but more times than not, the opposite is true.

The days of “Hi John. We will come by your place at such and such time to look it over, and then give you a quotation” are long gone. Customers no longer have an interest or the patience for such time wasting strategies. Quote your prices for every variation upfront and watch how well it will work for you.

Let’s take a look at a few methods that will set you on your way to starting a small cleaning business that advertises price, and saves you valuable time that otherwise would be lost making individual estimates.

To start with, going by the law of average would work on your behalf if, instead of spending endless hours to give estimates of every home or office, you advertise your prices upfront. Yes, you will find as you work that you will have underestimated a few jobs; but all the other jobs on which you have an overestimate will help even out your revenue. To utilize the power of volume selling in a race to make maximum profit, you will need to streamline a lot of business processes, and eliminate the process of estimation altogether.

Technological advancements have made it a whole lot easier for small cleaning business companies to specify their prices. You just need to find out square footage, and then you can easily quote a price based on the size of the premises or offices that need cleaning and not based on the fact that it is sparsely or densely furnished, or whether the furniture will be easy to move around. The most important thing to take note of when considering the amount of time that it will take to finish a job is the size of that residence or office. There is a well of information that can help you with this and it comes absolutely free. I will discuss the process we named “armchair estimating” in details in a subsequent article. Armchair estimation can be done at anytime and in any location, for that matter.

Be upfront with your prices and at the end of the day this practice should bring you more jobs. Save yourself from many hours doing individual estimations; put your time to better use…bringing in higher revenues.  Stay tuned to the How to Start a Cleaning Business blog for more!

How to Start a Cleaning Business – Five Steps to Owning Your Market

When it comes to learning how to start a cleaning business or any other small service industry business for that matter, just the knowledge of how to get the job done will not set you apart. Most cleaning business owners actually posses the technical know-how and, in some cases, a wealth of invaluable experience in actual home or office cleaning when it comes to knowing how to start a cleaning business.

Then marketing comes along and the problems begin: how do we get those clients and keep them coming back? As in most cases, people start adopting any and every marketing approach, such as sending out advertisements and price quotations to everybody and anybody, some of whom they should never have bothered with in the first place. This frantic bid to get the business up and running can be very energy sapping if approached incorrectly.

I will do my best to break it down for you and show you in a few short steps how to set up a winning marketing strategy. I would like to introduce a five step model to ruling your market. I would like to implore you, however, to do your best to not get obsessed with details—just understand the main ideas we will discuss. As with all principles, try your best to understand how they blend together, and then you will be best prepared to succeed at creating that unstoppable marketing plan.

Step 1 — Understand your clients

A clear understanding of who your target customers are is the first step towards creating that winning marketing plan. What is their income level? Are they professionals? What media appeals to them? Get an understanding of what they spend their hard earned money on and why. Find out how you can convince them they need your services and why your business comes at the right price.

Step 2 — Select a  Targeted Market

Just knowing who your clients  are is not enough. The next step has to be knowing where they live, or to put it better: where the majority of your prospective clients are located. It will help you focus your efforts and resources when marketing. Keep in mind that you will also need to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. Zoning or grouping target areas will make such evaluations easier.

Step 3 –  Saturate the Market Cost Effectively

Find a cheap advertising or marketing alternative that works and stick with it. A lot of offers will come your way, and representatives of advertising companies will visit you over and over trying to sell you different advertising solutions. Don’t get carried away and start trying anything and everything. Select the marketing method where it will be easy to evaluate your results during or after the campaign. This way, you’ll have an idea of where your strategy is working and where it is not. Don’t just put up an ad in the yellow pages and hope that people will find it. Rather, put your business constantly in front of your prospective client’s eyes. Keep it as frequent as your budget allows in order to make your company the first that comes to their mind if they ever need a cleaning service.

Step 4 – Consistency is key

Keep your advertising constant. It often takes more than one look at an advertisement, or hearing it just once, to convince prospective clients your service will help them achieve a better quality of life. There are a couple of other reasons why you should stick with that one effective marketing strategy, and use it frequently: people’s circumstances change. Throughout our lifetimes, we all experience constant change. That’s when suddenly that service we thought we would never need becomes a necessity. This happens for a lot of reasons, for example: people redecorate their apartments or offices and all of a sudden they need the specialized service that your company offers. When changes like this occur, they obviously will turn to companies who advertise during that period.

Step 5 — Focus on the winners

Remember: when starting a new business, you cannot be chasing after lost causes. Focus your resources on areas that are bringing the much needed business. Don’t keep advertising in areas that have brought you just one odd client in 6 months. Instead, focus more on areas where the majority of your clients are massed. Don’t spend your time chasing after feathers in the wind. Obviously profit is the aim of business–so cater to the areas that bring in the most revenues. I state the obvious because I, myself, know all too well how easy it is to get caught up in one campaign, or one method. But even though you’ve invested time and money, and your own personal self, into trying a particular strategy or market, sometimes you need to just let it go if it’s not where the majority of your clients are. So heed this friendly reminder: focus on the winners.

A good understanding of these rules will help you focus your energy and finances wisely , irrespective of your location or target clientele. And the most wisely prepared are the most likely to succeed.  Stay tuned to the How to Start a Cleaning Business blog for more winning strategies!

How to Start a Cleaning Business – Doing One Thing Really Well and Learning to Say “No”

A lot of cleaning companies are founded by very intelligent people who know so very much about the operational side of the business of how to start a cleaning business. But like any other kind of investment, it is always best that you understand every facet of this business and take the time to do a survey and proper research when learning how to start a cleaning business.

There are many tools to help develop a cleaning business: sales plans, identifying target markets, defining strategies, providing scripts and outlines for appointments and services to be rendered. Yet often times, there still seems to be challenges and issues that we don’t anticipate. Here are a few important, yet often neglected, points to consider:

1. One of the most important lessons that you need to learn when discovering how to start a cleaning business is to determine precisely what type of market you plan to serve.

Decide who is most likely to use and benefit from your cleaning services. Determine whether you are you trying to appeal to businesses or individuals. Write a detailed description of your ideal client, including their spending habit, their yearly income, and where they live. The more detail you can describe, the easier it will be for you to identify your target customers.

2. Identify your niche in your local cleaning industry. Research your competitors and compare their business to your cleaning business. Think about how they market their cleaning business and what you have to offer that is different.

3. Promote, promote, promote. Place coupons for your business in public places that your target audience may visit such as libraries, restaurants and coffee shops. Carry business cards with you—not so you can spam all your friends and everyone you meet, but so you have your contact information handy if anyone asks. Your line of work will naturally come up in conversations, so why not look professional when someone is interested in your service?

4. Write down all your marketing ideas to help your marketing plan. Such a list will actually be a long one, but all you have to do is prioritize and remember this is all about efficiency and, subsequently, profits. Then create a schedule of when you want to use your different marketing techniques and a budget of how much your marketing efforts will cost you.

5. You may need to turn away potential customers. If you decide to supply your services to a large number of people, you’ll find that your company will start taking short cuts, and will consequently make the quality of your service suffer. Your customers will not remain satisfied if you are not operating with the highest quality of service.

Many new cleaning business owners are initially shocked by this. They wonder if it is possible to say ‘’no’’ and turn down work, especially during the very early stages of your business’ infancy. But by doing so, you will be rewarded with much higher profits margins in the long run when you set your standards . Be the best operation in town, and your reputation will help you achieve continued success.  Stay tuned to the How to Start a Cleaning Business blog for more recipes for success for your home cleaning business!

How to Start a Cleaning Business – Why Your Business Plan Is a Waste of Time

You will not find a more strongly emphasized tip for how to start a cleaning business, whether you look in all the available articles on the internet and magazines, or talk to professionals who share their wisdom with you, than this: write a business plan before venturing into business. This advice has been given to all, no matter whether you’re just learning how to start a cleaning business, or any other small scale home business for that matter.

But here is an alternative golden piece of advice, which I give based on all my years of experience working with service-based business startups: “you really do not need a business plan.” Of course a plan of some sorts is needed, such as figuring out what it is exactly you want to be involved in, how you plan to go about getting and keeping your customers,  forming your marketing strategy, and taking time to determine what your rates will be, and things like that.

But writing a traditional business plan is incredibly time consuming and saps your strength and energy. Yes often, it is distracting and not worth the time in the long. Yet, surprisingly, the traditional business plan is still being advocated by a lot of people.

Writing a business plan in a case where you will need to apply to commercial lending companies for loans that run into hundreds of thousands of dollars would obviously be appropriate. But writing a business plan for a small business that doesn’t needs a line of credit will do you no good. I have been on both sides of the aisle and I understand how tempted you might be right now to write that business plan. I would advise, however, that instead of spending those valuable weeks before startup, try putting together an executive summary and business description. And then spend time you might waste writing a business plan on actually developing strategies that will bring positive results, and lead you to success in your intended business.

Without a doubt, a clear picture of what direction you want your business to go is very important. So spend those precious hours strategically, and think up effective processes that will set your business apart.

Keep following the How to Start a Cleaning Business blog, and we will bring you the best and most valuable information that you’ll need to help you successfully start that cleaning business you’ve always wanted.

How to Start a Cleaning Business – The Critical Importance of Systems

Have you ever looked closely inside a service business startup when you’re researching how to start a cleaning business? If so, you’ve probably seen the same scenario, no matter what the business is: the owner is often stressed and in a panic. Why? Because they’re busy trying to single-handedly perform the duties of several employees all by themselves: accountant, secretary, service laborer, marketing consultant, customer service representative, and possibly human resources manager–if they can afford to hire help.

Yet if a business startup has the proper systems in place when they first start their business, then that business will have the tools needed to run much more smoothly, with less stress, and with greater financial success. To that end, one of our main themes at the How to Start a Cleaning Business Blog is the importance of putting these systems in place when you first start a business…and this blog will show you exactly how to do that.

The Importance of Implementing Your Systems From the Start

Putting the proper systems in place in a company’s infancy is key to laying the proper foundation upon which your business will build itself. Every aspect of the business needs to be systemized so that you’re customers will learn early on that they can count on you to offer a consistent, quality product at a reasonable price. This ensures the development of repeat customers, which will be your mainstay—the bread and butter of your business. Systemizing your business also helps you steadily grow your business without pulling your hair out.

And who doesn’t want to increase their business profits…with the least stress possible?

It can be done! You just need to work smarter, instead of harder, by applying these simple, yet crucial, systems.

The three most vital areas that need to be systemized:

Develop a Marketing Strategy

Even though marketing is crucial to any business, many cleaning business entrepreneurs neglect this strategy because they are not familiar with terminology or the processes that are involved. They know it’s an important strategy to employ, but they just don’t know where to begin, or how to get a good grasp of the concepts.

But it doesn’t need to be that complicated. And you don’t need to throw tons of money at advertising and marketing. In fact, before you spend even one dollar, you need to understand your market and your demographic. What are you selling, and who are you selling it to? Being equipped with such knowledge and having a focused system that allows you to evaluate your efforts will help ensure that your first marketing dollar will not be wasted.

Even if your first marketing effort does not bring you new customers, it still will not be a wasted investment because the system you’ve developed will allow you to effectively evaluate each marketing effort you make. You’re never going to get it right each and every time you employ a marketing strategy.  But using a measurable marketing strategy will allow you to evaluate your efforts so you can adjust and improve your strategy, until you learn what marketing methods produce the best results. After the initial learning curve, every marketing dollar has the potential to reap profits if you start with the proper marketing evaluation strategy.

Create an Operational Checklist

Here’s an all-too-common horror story that you do not want to find yourself in: you start your cleaning business with two fantastic employees.  Everything runs smoothly as you start cleaning properties for your new clients. But then one day your child’s school calls: your child is sick and you need to pick him or her up. You are confident your two trusty employees can finish the last three houses of the day without you.

But that evening the phone starts ringing.  They completely forgot the kitchen counters at the Jones  house.  They missed the master bathroom at the Smith residence.  Not only do  you have the horrible task of apologizing to your clients, and going back to literally “clean up the mess” tomorrow, but you also may have lost a repeat customer or two. Such a mishap could have easily been prevented with an operational checklist, and it is an absolutely critical system in the cleaning industry.

An operational checklist has two distinct benefits: it allows your employees to know exactly what’s expected of them, even when the supervisor isn’t looking; and it helps ensure consistent quality of service delivered to your customer. Just think: when you go to McDonald’s and order your favorite items, you know what your going to get. It tastes and looks about the same every time you go there to eat. That’s because the employees are not just guessing what toppings to put on the hamburger, nor are they guessing how long to cook your fries. They deliver the same product each and every time because their employer has supplied the employees with an operational checklist.  And you must do that as well in order to manage your employees (or to help maintain consistency in your own processes, if you work alone), as well to meet your customer’s expectations.

Employ a Communications Strategy

Trying to balance operations and coordinate communications with prospective customers and existing clients each and every day is driving far too many cleaning business owners close to the edge of insanity.  But in the year 2010, there is no excuse for this. With website “contact us” links, email, and web-based phone systems being so easy to set up these days, there is no need for you to take each and every customer question, quote request, and follow up call while in the field.  Putting a communications strategy in place will ensure that your customers and prospects know that communicating with you is easy, that they have a variety of methods to reach you, and that you will respond to them promptly. Plus, it helps you to coordinate your activities so that your time is utilized to maximum efficiency.

Here, at the How to Start a Cleaning Business Blog, we’re confident that taking the time to think through these strategies and systems, before you begin operating your business, will save you much time and frustration, and will help increase your profits in the long run. We’ve seen these simple principles in action and, time and time again, they’ve proven to be incredibly effective.  Stay tuned to the How to Start a Cleaning Business blog for more!