When you’re dreaming of being a successful entrepreneur, over-complicating things comes naturally. For example, starting your own cleaning business sounds simple. However, the saturated niche forces many entrepreneurs to offer services they are not skilled for. Whether you want to offer specialist maid services or a commercial cleaning company, launching a successful cleaning business always starts with knowing how.
Always, Always Be Learning
Running a cleaning service is attractive to many because it appears to be a simple business. Considering the equipment and chemicals cleaning services have to use, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Furthermore, many cleaning services implement greener products and janitorial software into their business to help the environment and increase efficiency. Like any other industry, entrepreneurs in the cleaning services field need business and leadership skills. The subscribe to industry publications to stay on top of trends, attend conventions, and meet with suppliers. All entrepreneurs are on a continuous learning path to improve their business and remain competitive.
Clean With The Utmost Care
As the business owner, you need to ensure you and your staff are cleaning with care. Regardless of the job, you and your staff must remain professional at all time. Put yourself in the role of the client, and clean to reach your personal expectations. In this industry, repeat business and recommendations are the best way to grow.
Find Your Way Of Doing Things
No two businesses have exactly the same processes, systems, structures or approaches. This means you spend the time to work out your own methods for completing the job. Having systems in place will ensure the work is done consistently. Scheduling, incident reports, workplace injuries are just a few things you will have to consider. If it affects how your business operates, it needs a system.
Avoid Becoming Careless
Time management is an important element for a cleaning service business. The faster each job is completed, the more jobs you can schedule within the day. While the commodity of time is essential, it should never come as a sacrifice for quality, care or customer service. Rushing through a job will reduce the quality of your work, affect consistency, and negatively impact your reputation. Worst of all, rushing can lead to accidents, loss of time, cost of replacing equipment, and damaged customer relations. Make yourself more time-efficient by working carefully and making this a big part of your branding, training, and onboarding.
Value What You Do
One of the most common pitfalls in business is underselling yourself. The psychology behind this is understandable. You’re just starting out, so to get yourself a decent client base you undercut your competitors and offering your services for less money. Don’t do this because it will eventually set you up for failure. Instead of engaging a price-war, simply offer outstanding service. By doing this, you won’t have to make up for your loss of earnings by rushing. Not only that, but people put a lot of emphasis on value over cost. They would rather pay more for a better service than they would less for something worse.
Your Employees Are Everything
One of the most overlooked realities in the world of entrepreneurship is how important your employees are. If they are not successful then you won’t be successful either. After all, it’s the quality of their performance that determines whether your customers are satisfied. That’s why you need to focus on them and do all you can to take care of them and help them do their best. How you do that will depend on whether you hire the right people, training, and communication. Always treat them like you would want to be treated, and incentivize them by giving your top performers a good benefits package. You could even use subtle little perks like letting them use company equipment in their own homes as a way of keeping them happy.
Know What You’re Great At
It can be so tempting for a startup business to throw everything at the wall at then see what sticks. But don’t try and be all things to all people, not right away anyway. Instead, your best bet is to know which market you are set up to serve best and focus on doing the best job in that niche. It could be that you are amazing when it comes to servicing smaller office buildings, or you can offer tall-building window cleaning services or have everything you need to manage a hospital’s needs. Whatever it is, focus on that first, take control of this niche and then grow into other areas. We know this sounds like it’s limiting your audience and thus your chance to make money. However, being great at one thing is better than failing at everything. So, start small, excel, be consistent and then expand when you are ready.
Expand Your Knowledge
It can be way too easy to think of cleaning services as easy and simple. But being skilled with a mop, buffer, clothe, spray and hover is just part of the business. The other thing you need to be great at is computers. Sure, the cleaning industry isn’t what anyone would call “state-of-the-art” or “high-tech” but there is still a huge need for technology and for you to get to grips with it. Put it like this: you don’t have time to do estimates, billing, payroll, inventory control, taxes, rotor-management and other record-keeping by hand.
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