Making money in the cleaning business is rather straight-forward. You market yourself, get hired, you clean and finally invoice the customer.
That’s the recipe for creating a cash generating business. But if you want to make BIG MONEY, you need to step up your game to get more out of each account.
Now keep in mind, before you go on to bigger and better things, you need to get your business running nice and smooth. Work out any hiccups you may have first. Once you do that you need to start thinking about how to increase revenue. The first place to look is your existing customer base.
Offer a “Spring Cleaning”
The fact is your current customers already trust you. So if they already trust you to do one thing (clean) why not start adding in different services. This does not need to be complicated at first. You could market a “Spring Cleaning” where you dig in and do a heavy-duty cleaning for an extra fee.
A percentage of your accounts will be open to this. Maybe just 10% to 15% will say yes. But if you do get to a “yes”, that can earn you several hundred bucks per shot (even more at times). Maybe you get 2 to 3 accounts this year and make an extra $200 to $600 total this year.
That may not seem like a lot, but odds are they will hire you again next year. Add in the fact that you may get another 2 to 3 accounts next year on top of what you already have. Now you are up to 4 to 6 accounts and earn $600 to $1,200 extra per year.
Do the math for another few years and before you know it you could be making a ton of money each year just in Spring Cleanings. If you plan on being in this business for a while, the money can be substantial. But the earlier you start marketing this service, the more you’ll earn over time.
Though not the norm by any means, but I had one account (it was a large one) where we did a Spring Cleaning each year to the tune of roughly $1,200 a pop. You may or may not get that lucky, but the bottom line is you can make some decent money by selling the idea of a Spring Cleaning to your accounts.
Sell your accounts basic supplies
I’ve talked about this option before as well because it’s an easy money-maker. A percentage of your account base will purchase the basics from you. Items like C-fold towels, toilet paper (regular and jumbo junior), paper towels and trash liners. They need these supplies. You are already there regularly cleaning. They TRUST YOU. It’s a PERFECT MATCH. It’s WIN-WIN!
The way I looked at this is simple. I would go and check on my accounts, and while I was there I would see what they needed and order the items once I got home. Then when I came back again to check (next week) I would deliver them the supplies I ordered. I made money in the process and it was like i was getting paid to check my accounts in a sense.
On other accounts I had my staff just deliver the supplies themselves. It just depended on the situation. Where there is a will, there is a way. In the case of my staff delivering supplies, many times what I earned off selling the supplies paid for my employee’s salary for that visit (with money left over).
For instance this one account I had needed one person five days per week. I paid him roughly $30.00 per night to clean. On the Wednesday he delivered supplies (that was the day we made deliveries on that account) he would drop off a bunch of c-fold and trash liners (among other items). I made about $60.00 profit off the supplies on average. That equaled 2 nights salary for him!
So the bottom line is you have plenty of opportunities to increase your income. You just need to execute a plan to make it happen. The added bonus to all this is that the more you do for the customer, the more your customers DEPEND ON YOU. And that my fiend is what you want.
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Robin says
Thanks for the cleaning tips
Regards
Rb
Tom Watson says
Happy to help!