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Three Tips for How To Start a Small House Cleaning Business

Type the words “house cleaning [your city here]” into Google and you’re liable to bring up a map covered in dots representing other businesses in your area.For someone about to start a cleaning business, that’s a scary picture. Seems every person in your area with a knack for keeping a place clean has decided to take their show on the road. But have no fear – when we dug deeper into the question of what makes a successful Maid Service business, we found ways in which you can find yourself business cleaning before the other maid does. We scrutinized advertisements, client comments, and various niches that maid services have taken to get cleaning contracts, and have come up with three tips that can help you get started.1. Choose a strategy for marketing and get your name out there.Sounds obvious, we know, but there are ways that work and ways that don’t. What we advocate for the beginning house cleaner is a direct marketing tactic that takes little money but a significant amount of time. Cleaning flyers. Advertise your house cleaning business to homes and apartments near where you live in the form of a carefully made piece of paper you drop on doorsteps. Entering business for yourself requires the same time commitment you’d give to a normal employer. In the beginning, spend several full days each week devoted solely to spreading the word. The flyer should really emphasize who you are (see tip number two), what you are best at, and the fact that you’re local and independent. Target a market, and tailor the advertisement to get clean up work from a specific group of people. Think creatively, here. If you’re living in a progressive part of the country, perhaps you’ll want to advertise that you are more truly “green” than the other cleaning businesses because you can walk to the worksite. If you’re in an economically depressed neighborhood in the suburbs, drop flyers by real estate agencies offering foreclosure cleanup. Taking time to set up a cleaning business marketing strategy that targets the people in your area is an excellent way to start your new business. As you expand, you’ll want to create an internet advertisement. This involves far more competition than very local door-to-door flyering, but has benefits. It is critical that you take time to make your Craigslist ad look better than that of the competition. It is an enormous boost to get registered on Yelp and to get your customers to provide feedback there. A side note: study all the feedback other maids are receiving. There’s a lot to learn by doing this about what does and doesn’t work.2. Put a face on your operation.Out of all the most highly rated cleaning businesses we found on the internet, at least one third had a business name that included the first name of the person doing the cleaning. What this shows us is that the small house cleaning business thrives on personality. If you can’t deal with obnoxious dogs, screaming children, or troublesome clients while wearing a smile and jovial attitude, you’ll miss out on word-of-mouth contracts and repeat customers. As you expand your cleaning business, these gigs will be your bread and butter. Your cleaning flyers must have your picture on them. It doesn’t have to be a shot of you cleaning. Everyone’s seen a hundred pictures like that. Let the picture be of your trustworthy face. In order to set up regular work with a client, they’ll have to love you as a person, not just the work you do. Apply the tenants of good customer service you learn in any service industry to the small cleaning business industry.3. Niche Cleaning Businesses Thrive on Promotions.There’s an advantage to starting a specific type of cleaning service, whether it’s foreclosure cleanup, business cleaning, a restaurant cleaning business, or a window cleaning service – you’re enabled an opportunity to offer promotions that aren’t economical or wise from the perspective of someone running a simple home cleaning business. In the case of a niche cleaning business, you know what you’re getting yourself into, what equipment you need, and how long it takes you to perform specific cleaning tasks regular to that niche. For instance, the window cleaner knows what window cleaning equipment will work for nearly all types of window and how long it takes them to clean a window of a certain size. As a result, bidding a sight-unseen contract becomes easier and the opportunity for strategic discounting emerges. Offer a free skylight cleaning for businesses that need you to do more than a certain amount of work, for example, or offer to clean the windows of a pet shop (in case you’re running an aquarium maintenance business) if they hire you less than two weeks from the time you advertise. Strategic promotions get interested customers to make a decision. A small deal that is easy for you to do and sounds big can push them into going with you as opposed to a different service. Keep your offers up-to-date, fresh, and seasonal.It might be impossible to succeed in starting a cleaning business if you don’t really love what you’re doing. You’ve got to be a joy to be around when you’re in someone’s home. If you market carefully and effectively, keeping in mind the entire time that the next step is the garnering of good feedback and references, you’ll be well on your way to starting a small house cleaning business that is a success.