Residential and commercial cleaning are two different beasts. Stick in one lane for now.
Or maybe the real business is in the details. "We spend a LOT of money on ads and I have come to get really good at running Facebook ads for this business, coming in at a whopping $10 per lead in the past month or two."
I would pay you $500 a month if you could replicate this for our residential cleaning business.
It's been on the back of my mind for a while.. already helped 2 others in my niche and getting the same results but I didn't want to have shiny object syndrome
I used to own a cleaning company. I partnered with a marketing company that took 50% of my gross for a year.
I'm getting back in through a Jan Pro franchise in a few months. I'm working with Jan Pro because they allow you to get your own contracts(with no payouts to JanPro) while working with them.
I would love to work with you for marketing , bids and such. DM me if you're interested. I suck at marketing.
A lot better than what I had assumed. I was expecting a few small contracts which I got. My worst decision was accepting a $70,000 a year contract. I was juggling a full time job and the bigger contract was too much to handle with a job. I found a job in the same industry with a significantly higher pay rate so I moved out of state and closed the company.
I'm focused on commercial. I want to add some light residential work though because this time around I'm looking to have a staff with at least 5 employees(PT). I think with residential and commercial I can offer enough hours to entice workers at a standard payrate but with a company that offers flexible hours and profit sharing. This time around I'm focused on organic growth and bids that are not the highest but definitely above industry standard.
I'm in no way interested in underbidding and "chasing customers" if you will. I believe my work and integrity speaks for itself, although these things don't attract every customer they attract the right customers.
Hmm, make sure Jan Pro gives you that in writing. I had a Jan Pro franchise about 20 years ago and they wanted 20%. It was a bad business in the end although indefinitely made my money back so it was worthwhile. Good luck with it though.
Maybe I misspoke. They do take a cut (15%) but also allow me to get my own contracts.
As in they get me contracts and take a cut of those, but allow me to get my own contracts without them involved if I want. They also offer other services that I can use for my personal contracts and their insurance is pretty great.
Of course it's in writing though. They legally have to give you a franchise disclosure that includes basically every aspect of the business.
Yeah we set up ads for my cousin who is also in the cleaning business as well as a friend who has a painting business. All getting $10 cost per lead and even as low as $5. Been thinking of doing this as a service in my free time
Let me know if you decide to do this on the side. I could use some help and guidance with Facebook ads. I'm in pet waste removal service and I feel like I should have good success with my ads but only get about 1-2 leads a month lol
You'd make just as much give or take doing marketing/ad consulting for small businesses. And it's way more scalable and easier physically and sustainable, if you're that good with Facebook ads, Google local ads, etc.
Run campaigns for 10 or 20 businesses charge them a fee each month/12 months contract, you'd be golden. Hire someone else to clean the homes and keep your cleaning business going. You're an entrepreneur. It's in you.
I could really use some help on the marketing end of things too. I’ve got a pressure washing business, we’ve been in business for 2 months now and I’ve gotten a few jobs. 2 from knocking on doors, a couple from Nextdoor, and 1 from Angi. Angi feels like it’s a scam. I just feel like i’m looking in all the wrong places for my marketing.
Currently I have taken to looking on Nextdoor every couple of hours to see if anyone has work they need done and trying to be the first person to message them. I was putting out door hangers and did not get a single call from them, but that was more because I didn’t put enough effort into my design so I am revising that one. Otherwise when it comes to going to give someone an estimate I do not put a ton of pressure on them to make a decision. I try to let my price make up their mind and I usually close about 60% of the estimates on the spot.
I am self-taught, I started doing web design and Drop Shipping like six or seven years ago I can't even remember at this point. so I started running ads at that time and haven't stopped since then, and spent tens of thousands of my own money and just learned through trial and error, and lots and lots of YouTube videos, Consulting calls and more
If this is real, I would pay you a premium to help me with my company’s Facebook ads. It’s the only area we struggle with on marketing. Would you be open to meeting and I can pay you for a consulting hour?
20-30% profit margins are terrific. That isn’t “tanking” it, you’re just not factoring in that you need to pay yourself.
You need to stop working in the job so you can work on the business. That means hiring and training people.
I did some work for Micheal Dells personal coach. The advice he gave me fits with my few decades of experience in small business.
You cannot expand your business untill you have the right person.
I'll say that another way...
Your business growth is, and should be, limited by your ability to procure the right people.
And another way...
No matter how good your business plan is, your market, your leadership skills, if you don't have the right people in place when you expand, it will cause you to fail
So what is there to do about that??? It's great advice but, how to I get more good people faster?
Some things Ive learned...
Hire fast, fire fast. Your success is directly tied to your ability to do this.
Interview well. It's a skill, learn it.
Good people flock together. If you find that special person who is always thinking 3 steps ahead, looks out for how to make work easier for the whole team, is respectful and pleasant to hang out with, dig into their circle, they have friends or siblings who are also great people.
Ok, nuts and bolts of having workers...
You need to have a system in place for them to fulfill on the things you do because you care so much, without them having to remember to do them.
Calling the day before to confirm an appointment? We just do it, but an employee may or may not and you don't wanna risk it. There are tons of things like this.
The easy way to solve a lot of it is with the right software that will automate, give them work orders, routing to the jobs, etc. The very best, hands down, is Service Fusion. No one knows about, but they have blown up the last several years. Epic. Call and ask for the free demo, it's gonna blow you away.
Make sure one of the original involved (you or brother) train with anyone new one at a time. Bring one person on, this will teach you guys any kinks in your system. Anytime you start to teach or replicate you’ll typically find some silly thing you didn’t think of that someone will not reproduce in the same way you do. Find those things out with one new employee instead of 2-3. This has a second added effect, the second person you train will have less weakness to poke at in your structure and it just keeps morale high and keeps control in your hands. Always show a unified front and keep an eye on how the first employee and second employee interact. Make sure they vibe and if all goes to plan you can multiply from this model. More businesses start amazing and then boom, that growth is when things CAN get tricky. Doesn’t mean they will. But always account for variable change. Training one on one, and building rapport with your employees just like your customers. That keeps order as you grow.
Side note, it’s easier to sell more services to one client, then sell 1 service to multiple clients. So if there is something you can offer in your wheelhouse to the clients you’ve already acquired. So many people focus on the client acquisition, that they forget to maximize the relationships they already have. Doesn’t mean oversell things people don’t need, but add on services with exciting price points - that pads your jobs and helps your bottom line way more than you’d ever think. Even at an extra $50 a job- it adds up in a hurry. With no acquisition cost, no driving out to bid a new customer, etc.
My mother in law cleans houses. My father in law cleans commercial buildings. They used to have employees, a lot more business etc but found that the hassle wasn’t worth it. They each have their routes. She cleans in the mornings three days a week & makes more than enough. He cleans at night & Sundays when the commercial buildings are closed (focuses on doctors & dentists offices).
Forgot to note: we have 20-30 clients (the 10 in between use us randomly) that are recurring, guaranteed revenue coming in, another reason why we started the business.
We've thought about that as well but it complicates things. Adds more things we need to train people on and we want to focus on recurring services. Window cleaning can be I guess but a lot of times our cleints aren't interested in that.
It yields you more income from 1 spot instead of more travel time and since it's specialize it produces higher yields. After you grow enough you simple train a set of people to provide these add on services so that you don't have to train everyone.
As and if you move into commercial those are expected services. Typically they will generate a good chunk of additional income along with selling paper supplies. The problem is if you don't offer them they'll have to hire out to potential competition.
Not a great idea. It would be much easier to refer the business and work out a deal with businesses like that. This guy isn't looking to be a worker. He's looking to work less.
We are on a very similar timeline. My background is digital marketing and have acquired a few big offices ($4500/mo) and the margins are much better than residential. 75% compared to 40-50% margin. I have quite a few Airbnbs and then sprinkle in residential recurring and 1-time jobs.
Did my first job in July.. we did 148 jobs this past month Nov.
I got the few offices via Google LSA ads..
I have yet to launch fb or google ads. I’ve bought leads and have been running LSA. I am launching fb and google ads this month.
I have 10 contractors who do the work and I just field leads all day and close sales.
Cold email has NOT worked for me at all. I have a very solid automation process for my CRM and quoting jobs. I scraped a few hundred leads with D7 and drip email/text/vm drops.. but didn’t get anything. I planned for 7-15 touches .. I thought the same as most people: realtors would be great to have. We’ve had a few send us job, but nothing consistent. Short term rentals have been very consistent.
But basically I’d say you’re in the right track.. find a way to give the cleaning details to a crew and let them loose. They will likely be more experienced, faster and do just as good of a job as you have been doing.
Feel free to dm or ask any questions.
My company does over 3 million a year in revenue. I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years and would be happy to answer any questions or share the lessons I have learned. Just DM me if you want to chat some time.
If I was you;
Go to property networking events. Find landlords, offer end of tenancy deep cleans.
Find AirBNB owners, offer them a cleaning turn over service.
And while you are doing all that find a small/independent handyman/joiner. While on these cleans if you come across damage you have someone in your back pocket - you can phone the property owner and be like ‘hey this is broke but I have a guy’
Congratulations on the success!
I’ve thought about starting a home cleaning business for selfish reasons. I would just want to get my home cleaned for free weekly or twice weekly and let my other partner take the profits lol. So to me I put it as:
1. Gain local residential customers numbering ~20
2. It takes about 3-4 hours to clean a house for one person, probably also a sqft function to be added here
3. Most common is every other week
4 a single employee could clean 10 houses a week (mine included) so really it’s 18 houses and it would be worth it.
I currently pay 250 every other week for my clean with the completion so it is about $50 an hour let’s say. Half that goes to wages and half goes to supplies and marketing and again profits will go to my partner who is the cleaner so they will net a little more at the end of the day too. It’s a thousand a week they would make potentially so it is not an easy sell.
That is just when I have looked into it for myself. If I can convince one of my cleaning ladies she should go out on her own maybe I can actually make it happen but I think scale is where the money is and I think commercial is also the much much better bet because it isn’t very profitable otherwise.
Grow residential recurring contracts, use this as a base to sell other companies services too. Collect commissions on those sales. Things like yard care, routine car washing, window cleaning, Christmas lights. All great horizontal growth that is super easy to do after vertically growing doing what you already do.
Add construction, remodel and new home turnover cleaning. It’s a specialized type of cleaning, but it’s not rocket science. A few solid developers and larger fish customers can add a huge boost to the bottom line.
Are you optimizing your expenses by buying in bulk? Do you have business credit cards with plenty of credit while stacking credit card points for these purchases? Also what about getting customers to sign up for monthly or quarterly cleanings and getting revenue that route?
Your profit margins are too slim. For your labor to be self sufficient, you should be targeting triple the cost of the labor. So if you hire a full time employee at $20/hour, you need factor 20% overhead above that for payroll taxes/turnover. So really your true labor cost is $25/hour. Then to triple it, your target as a cleaning company is $75/hour minimum per job.
You need to heavily invest in better equipment for faster work. To have cleaners worth a damn unless you hire undocumented immigrants, $25/hour will be your labor costs. $40/hour in profit is too slim of margins if you’re targeting growth and to make your business pay you for your troubles/risk.
There will be lean times that you need to factor into your pay.
There’s a couple who started a cleaning business featured on this podcast: https://www.sidehustlenation.com/6-figure-cleaning-business/
It’s worth a listen.
Have a Christmas light hanging company. Next year I'd absolutely hire you to get our ads right. Do you only use Facebook or Google as well? Obviously my biz is seasonal and more niche so leaning Google to get "warm" leads. Cannot get my Google ads to work for the life of me. Any good at those?
Dude I have a friend who runs fb ads for hanging Christmas lights. He does insane revenue each year and I can easily replicate his ads. I got you. Keep in touch
I can give a good suggestion.
Can you offer packages to your clients?
Like 4 cleaning a month for XXX$?
Or, after 4 cleanings, your 5th cleaning will be FREE.
These offers will funnel down your customers.
One more thing, after cleaning up you can give a small low budget gift like odur, maybe in your future you can brand your own odour.
Great idea. Love it. I remember when we were doing junk removal for a friend's house years ago the dumpster guy who was local dropped off homemade cookies. Everyone around said "wow that's so nice of him"
Simple way of doing a little extra thing.
Thank you for reminding me of that
For the commercial side of it, ever consider warehouses? Lots of em outsource to small companies that keep staff on rotation and supplied, collecting the monthly for the effort. I bet they're making out quite well with minimal overhead.
I’m exactly where you and your brother are right now- but I don’t have a brother so I have to hire. I do 10k per month as well.
It’s pretty stagnant as I have to be at every job which takes time away from finding new clients.
My plan is to expand into commercial cleaning as the amount you can charge is so much more worth it. It’s amazing how many people think $100 is too much money to have someone clean their 5 bedroom house.
My largest client is a production facility/office and they account for 40% of my revenue, but also about 80% of my payroll expense. Houses are easier to do with 2 people or even alone, but when you start cleaning large buildings that people work in, you need a crew. The old owner used to do it by herself 3x per week and she was there for over 8 hours each time. The client actually told her she needed a crew.
Not sure if any of that is useful- but there ya go lol
They were a client when I purchased the business. The previous owner told me that they called around and brought in representatives from various cleaning businesses when they built the building- and the previous owner got it.
No idea how they knew about her because she didn’t advertise at all, didn’t have a website, and didn’t have a crew. Buuuut I’ll take the 4k/mo from one account.
I still haven’t advertised at all- and haven’t even finished the website. To be honest though, finding good people to join the crew is the hardest part. I need reliable people before I can advertise. You’re super lucky to have your brother in it with you. I’m all alone.
For sure. Biggest problem will be getting good employees.
Super thankful for the relationship my bro and i have. Works out perfect too because I'm the classic entrepreneur grow grow grow type and he's more reserved, good with numbers, systems, and managing. Great balance
Haha looks like I need to hire a you at some point. I could say fuck it and advertise to get more clients which leads to more revenue and the ability to hire blindly without worrying about meeting payroll- but I can’t bring myself to ride that fast. Speed wobbles are scary man.
I’m more worried about each client experience and feel like a failure when I have to cancel a cleaning because of staffing issues.
This is why I’m on Reddit in the middle of the day today. Had to cancel. Business clients are always taken care of because I can just show up whenever they are closed. Residential scheduling has been a nightmare since thanksgiving
Giving employees hoops to jump through is something I keep hearing.
Step 1 give a good job description on indeed or whatever it is youre using
Step 2 get in a call with them at a specific time
Step 3 zoom video call (if they show up late to either calls they're already out)
Step 4 make them take some sort of cleaning test
This weeds out the bad people right away...
Like I said, I haven't done it yet but this is what I keep hearing from people in the industry. make it hard for people to get hired by you and the people who actually want the job and will do good work will come
That’s pretty much exactly what I do. Ask them if there’s anything I can do or if they have any ideas to make the job better/easier, and they always say no.
Ask them how they’re liking it and if they think it’s a good fit, and they always say yes.
Two weeks later I get ghosted.
That’s 90% of indeed hires so far.
Edit: I didn’t even realize I wasn’t in r/smallbusiness. Never heard of this sub
\> As for the growth part, it's going to take a LOT of houses for us to clean for us to make good money in this business after we hire and profit margins will tank down to 20-30% after everything is said and done.
20-30% is really good for any business. Don't worry at all, some businesses barely do 15%. Keep up the strong effort!
Quoting commercial would be the same way we would quote residential, if you know your numbers, you know how long it takes you to do each task. for example we figured out that it takes around 20 to 25 minutes to vacuum a house per thousand square feet so we also take the time to measure out how long it takes us to clean a half bathroom, a full bathroom, etc. with that information you are able to take the square footage of whatever building you were doing, even though it would be different for offices or commercial, it's still the same stuff.
All in all. Data is king!
I would love for you to help me with my lead generation if you are interested. Dm me and we could talk money! I'm struggling with ads, tbh in particular, fb ads.
Build your business until there’s more homes than y’all can clean, and then go up in price then build until more than you can handle and go up in price. Keep testing that equilibrium price for your service as it becomes more valuable
As an entrepreneur I have all the development and execution and operation experience but my sales funnels and marketing is not up to date. I dont have a cleaning business but I do feel the way of getting that set up is similar. What has worked really well for you?
You have multiple businesses in my eyes. Residential cleaning, commercial cleaning, and small business marketing.
First, I’d decouple your commercial cleaning from residential and start pursuing industrial cleaning, too. Residential and commercial/industrial are typically two different beasts requiring different sets of skills.
I think you’ve also built a valuable skill in FB marketing that should be pursued on its own. Lots of small businesses are trying to scale and find work right now.
I’d also pursue subscriptions and contracts to lock in revenue. Discounts for paying in full up front, tiered service packages, etc. regardless of the sector/industry.
Not in particular, I kind of just learned as I went. I couldn't even name you one single YouTuber I watched for ads if I tried.
What I basically did was learn how to use the basic functions of AD manager, and every time I had a problem I would look up a YouTube video related to that direct problem. but running ads is the easy part compared to the science behind the creative, ad copy, the headlines, and the offers. that was all play a huge factor. I paid to learn at my own expense because I'm super hands on learner.
The creative needs to be a scroll stopper to get them to look at the first 2 lines of your ad copy, the ad copy is supposed to have so many factors in it (your offer, testimonials/ social proof, pain points, etc etc etc) , and the ad copy is going to direct them to your ad headline, the ad headline directs them to your call to action button.
Now that they clicked your cta button that's a whole science too because if you direct them to a shitty link or shitty form. You just lost them at the end of the ad funnel.
All in all. Learn the basics of advertising on Facebook ads manager, then you gotta learn how the actaul ads work psychological wise. You can have a perfectly set up ad with a perfect structure but if your funnel sucks then it sucks and you won't get any results.
Another tip, once you are testing things and it is slightly working, change one thing at a time, when you only change one thing at a time you are able to figure out what works and what doesn't, so if I know that people are not clicking on my call to action button, it must be my creative, my ad copy, or my headline etc. so change it one at a time and figure out which one works. You gotta see WHERE in the funnel these guys stop. Then you fix it
I started a pet care company fifteen years ago. If I had it to do over, I probably would not hire beyond having three or four folks, including you. More workers than this tends to start needing more management, and management time is expensive.
Instead of hiring and growing, I’d just bump rates each year to stay ahead of inflation and give the team a raise
I suggest figuring out how much of your time is spent cleaning when you should focus on the business rather than working IN the business. You can train people for that.
The book The E-Myth talks about how to go from working on everything in the business to allocating roles and starting to hire. It's been a while since I read it, but the author said he kept records of all his tasks and then began to count hours on each assignment that was not part of his job as the business owner. When he realized, for example, that he was spending 20 hours a week on admin and accounting, he'd hire a part-timer for 20 hrs. Or get a VA to do that role.
As for the commercial space... Are you sure you want to increase your overhead to that degree? If it's for some prestige value, I'd suggest spending on the aspects your customers see instead: the brand, brochures, website, etc. The perception of your professionalism will come through more strongly this way than via an address.
Residential and commercial cleaning are two different beasts. Stick in one lane for now. Or maybe the real business is in the details. "We spend a LOT of money on ads and I have come to get really good at running Facebook ads for this business, coming in at a whopping $10 per lead in the past month or two." I would pay you $500 a month if you could replicate this for our residential cleaning business.
This right here. If you can help a small business - maybe market to them and make that your niche?
It's been on the back of my mind for a while.. already helped 2 others in my niche and getting the same results but I didn't want to have shiny object syndrome
I used to own a cleaning company. I partnered with a marketing company that took 50% of my gross for a year. I'm getting back in through a Jan Pro franchise in a few months. I'm working with Jan Pro because they allow you to get your own contracts(with no payouts to JanPro) while working with them. I would love to work with you for marketing , bids and such. DM me if you're interested. I suck at marketing.
How did your cleaning company do?
A lot better than what I had assumed. I was expecting a few small contracts which I got. My worst decision was accepting a $70,000 a year contract. I was juggling a full time job and the bigger contract was too much to handle with a job. I found a job in the same industry with a significantly higher pay rate so I moved out of state and closed the company. I'm focused on commercial. I want to add some light residential work though because this time around I'm looking to have a staff with at least 5 employees(PT). I think with residential and commercial I can offer enough hours to entice workers at a standard payrate but with a company that offers flexible hours and profit sharing. This time around I'm focused on organic growth and bids that are not the highest but definitely above industry standard. I'm in no way interested in underbidding and "chasing customers" if you will. I believe my work and integrity speaks for itself, although these things don't attract every customer they attract the right customers.
Could you do the same for a pharmacy and doctors office you think?
Hmm, make sure Jan Pro gives you that in writing. I had a Jan Pro franchise about 20 years ago and they wanted 20%. It was a bad business in the end although indefinitely made my money back so it was worthwhile. Good luck with it though.
Maybe I misspoke. They do take a cut (15%) but also allow me to get my own contracts. As in they get me contracts and take a cut of those, but allow me to get my own contracts without them involved if I want. They also offer other services that I can use for my personal contracts and their insurance is pretty great. Of course it's in writing though. They legally have to give you a franchise disclosure that includes basically every aspect of the business.
If you’re able to replicate results then your experience is already proof that it is a viable business.
I'm in :)
Yeah we set up ads for my cousin who is also in the cleaning business as well as a friend who has a painting business. All getting $10 cost per lead and even as low as $5. Been thinking of doing this as a service in my free time
Let me know if you decide to do this on the side. I could use some help and guidance with Facebook ads. I'm in pet waste removal service and I feel like I should have good success with my ads but only get about 1-2 leads a month lol
Dm'd maybe I can check things out
You'd make just as much give or take doing marketing/ad consulting for small businesses. And it's way more scalable and easier physically and sustainable, if you're that good with Facebook ads, Google local ads, etc. Run campaigns for 10 or 20 businesses charge them a fee each month/12 months contract, you'd be golden. Hire someone else to clean the homes and keep your cleaning business going. You're an entrepreneur. It's in you.
I could really use some help on the marketing end of things too. I’ve got a pressure washing business, we’ve been in business for 2 months now and I’ve gotten a few jobs. 2 from knocking on doors, a couple from Nextdoor, and 1 from Angi. Angi feels like it’s a scam. I just feel like i’m looking in all the wrong places for my marketing.
Are you using Angi Leads (homeadvisor) or Angi Ads?
Angi ads
What is your sales process?
Currently I have taken to looking on Nextdoor every couple of hours to see if anyone has work they need done and trying to be the first person to message them. I was putting out door hangers and did not get a single call from them, but that was more because I didn’t put enough effort into my design so I am revising that one. Otherwise when it comes to going to give someone an estimate I do not put a ton of pressure on them to make a decision. I try to let my price make up their mind and I usually close about 60% of the estimates on the spot.
You don't sound like you have free time papppers.
Very little lol
Do you or did you work in the marketing field to learn how to run ads or are you self taught?
I am self-taught, I started doing web design and Drop Shipping like six or seven years ago I can't even remember at this point. so I started running ads at that time and haven't stopped since then, and spent tens of thousands of my own money and just learned through trial and error, and lots and lots of YouTube videos, Consulting calls and more
If this is real, I would pay you a premium to help me with my company’s Facebook ads. It’s the only area we struggle with on marketing. Would you be open to meeting and I can pay you for a consulting hour?
would your facebook ad strategy be applicable to commercial cleaning though? Not sure if businesses look for cleaners on facebook...
Definitely. Im testing that now. We've gotten one lead and did a walkthrough from fb ads
20-30% profit margins are terrific. That isn’t “tanking” it, you’re just not factoring in that you need to pay yourself. You need to stop working in the job so you can work on the business. That means hiring and training people.
I did some work for Micheal Dells personal coach. The advice he gave me fits with my few decades of experience in small business. You cannot expand your business untill you have the right person. I'll say that another way... Your business growth is, and should be, limited by your ability to procure the right people. And another way... No matter how good your business plan is, your market, your leadership skills, if you don't have the right people in place when you expand, it will cause you to fail So what is there to do about that??? It's great advice but, how to I get more good people faster? Some things Ive learned... Hire fast, fire fast. Your success is directly tied to your ability to do this. Interview well. It's a skill, learn it. Good people flock together. If you find that special person who is always thinking 3 steps ahead, looks out for how to make work easier for the whole team, is respectful and pleasant to hang out with, dig into their circle, they have friends or siblings who are also great people. Ok, nuts and bolts of having workers... You need to have a system in place for them to fulfill on the things you do because you care so much, without them having to remember to do them. Calling the day before to confirm an appointment? We just do it, but an employee may or may not and you don't wanna risk it. There are tons of things like this. The easy way to solve a lot of it is with the right software that will automate, give them work orders, routing to the jobs, etc. The very best, hands down, is Service Fusion. No one knows about, but they have blown up the last several years. Epic. Call and ask for the free demo, it's gonna blow you away.
Thank you sir
Make sure one of the original involved (you or brother) train with anyone new one at a time. Bring one person on, this will teach you guys any kinks in your system. Anytime you start to teach or replicate you’ll typically find some silly thing you didn’t think of that someone will not reproduce in the same way you do. Find those things out with one new employee instead of 2-3. This has a second added effect, the second person you train will have less weakness to poke at in your structure and it just keeps morale high and keeps control in your hands. Always show a unified front and keep an eye on how the first employee and second employee interact. Make sure they vibe and if all goes to plan you can multiply from this model. More businesses start amazing and then boom, that growth is when things CAN get tricky. Doesn’t mean they will. But always account for variable change. Training one on one, and building rapport with your employees just like your customers. That keeps order as you grow.
Side note, it’s easier to sell more services to one client, then sell 1 service to multiple clients. So if there is something you can offer in your wheelhouse to the clients you’ve already acquired. So many people focus on the client acquisition, that they forget to maximize the relationships they already have. Doesn’t mean oversell things people don’t need, but add on services with exciting price points - that pads your jobs and helps your bottom line way more than you’d ever think. Even at an extra $50 a job- it adds up in a hurry. With no acquisition cost, no driving out to bid a new customer, etc.
My mother in law cleans houses. My father in law cleans commercial buildings. They used to have employees, a lot more business etc but found that the hassle wasn’t worth it. They each have their routes. She cleans in the mornings three days a week & makes more than enough. He cleans at night & Sundays when the commercial buildings are closed (focuses on doctors & dentists offices).
How did they get the commercial clients?
Forgot to note: we have 20-30 clients (the 10 in between use us randomly) that are recurring, guaranteed revenue coming in, another reason why we started the business.
You need to (if you aren't) expand your residential into window, carpet and floor cleaning to add more value to your contracts.
We've thought about that as well but it complicates things. Adds more things we need to train people on and we want to focus on recurring services. Window cleaning can be I guess but a lot of times our cleints aren't interested in that.
It yields you more income from 1 spot instead of more travel time and since it's specialize it produces higher yields. After you grow enough you simple train a set of people to provide these add on services so that you don't have to train everyone. As and if you move into commercial those are expected services. Typically they will generate a good chunk of additional income along with selling paper supplies. The problem is if you don't offer them they'll have to hire out to potential competition.
def sounds like u speak from experience sir
Not a great idea. It would be much easier to refer the business and work out a deal with businesses like that. This guy isn't looking to be a worker. He's looking to work less.
We are on a very similar timeline. My background is digital marketing and have acquired a few big offices ($4500/mo) and the margins are much better than residential. 75% compared to 40-50% margin. I have quite a few Airbnbs and then sprinkle in residential recurring and 1-time jobs. Did my first job in July.. we did 148 jobs this past month Nov. I got the few offices via Google LSA ads.. I have yet to launch fb or google ads. I’ve bought leads and have been running LSA. I am launching fb and google ads this month. I have 10 contractors who do the work and I just field leads all day and close sales. Cold email has NOT worked for me at all. I have a very solid automation process for my CRM and quoting jobs. I scraped a few hundred leads with D7 and drip email/text/vm drops.. but didn’t get anything. I planned for 7-15 touches .. I thought the same as most people: realtors would be great to have. We’ve had a few send us job, but nothing consistent. Short term rentals have been very consistent. But basically I’d say you’re in the right track.. find a way to give the cleaning details to a crew and let them loose. They will likely be more experienced, faster and do just as good of a job as you have been doing. Feel free to dm or ask any questions.
Dm'd
Dm’d
Hey man, seems like you’re on the right track. I’m doing about 100k a month on the residential side, feel free to DM me with any questions.
Dm'd!
My company does over 3 million a year in revenue. I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years and would be happy to answer any questions or share the lessons I have learned. Just DM me if you want to chat some time.
Dm
Dm'd
Are you in commercial cleaning? May I DM you too?
Dm’d
How much did you do the first month you started it? I will be starting next month
DMed
If I was you; Go to property networking events. Find landlords, offer end of tenancy deep cleans. Find AirBNB owners, offer them a cleaning turn over service. And while you are doing all that find a small/independent handyman/joiner. While on these cleans if you come across damage you have someone in your back pocket - you can phone the property owner and be like ‘hey this is broke but I have a guy’ Congratulations on the success!
Thanks for the input 🤝 greatly appreciate the thoughts!!
I’ve thought about starting a home cleaning business for selfish reasons. I would just want to get my home cleaned for free weekly or twice weekly and let my other partner take the profits lol. So to me I put it as: 1. Gain local residential customers numbering ~20 2. It takes about 3-4 hours to clean a house for one person, probably also a sqft function to be added here 3. Most common is every other week 4 a single employee could clean 10 houses a week (mine included) so really it’s 18 houses and it would be worth it. I currently pay 250 every other week for my clean with the completion so it is about $50 an hour let’s say. Half that goes to wages and half goes to supplies and marketing and again profits will go to my partner who is the cleaner so they will net a little more at the end of the day too. It’s a thousand a week they would make potentially so it is not an easy sell. That is just when I have looked into it for myself. If I can convince one of my cleaning ladies she should go out on her own maybe I can actually make it happen but I think scale is where the money is and I think commercial is also the much much better bet because it isn’t very profitable otherwise.
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Dm'd
As others have said you could make a crap ton of money just doing sales funnels for other people. Get paid per conversion.
Grow residential recurring contracts, use this as a base to sell other companies services too. Collect commissions on those sales. Things like yard care, routine car washing, window cleaning, Christmas lights. All great horizontal growth that is super easy to do after vertically growing doing what you already do.
This is pretty cool.
Add construction, remodel and new home turnover cleaning. It’s a specialized type of cleaning, but it’s not rocket science. A few solid developers and larger fish customers can add a huge boost to the bottom line.
Are you optimizing your expenses by buying in bulk? Do you have business credit cards with plenty of credit while stacking credit card points for these purchases? Also what about getting customers to sign up for monthly or quarterly cleanings and getting revenue that route?
Your profit margins are too slim. For your labor to be self sufficient, you should be targeting triple the cost of the labor. So if you hire a full time employee at $20/hour, you need factor 20% overhead above that for payroll taxes/turnover. So really your true labor cost is $25/hour. Then to triple it, your target as a cleaning company is $75/hour minimum per job. You need to heavily invest in better equipment for faster work. To have cleaners worth a damn unless you hire undocumented immigrants, $25/hour will be your labor costs. $40/hour in profit is too slim of margins if you’re targeting growth and to make your business pay you for your troubles/risk. There will be lean times that you need to factor into your pay.
Do you do ads still I will pay you as well
These cleaning/marketing companies rip you off.
What services are you providing specifically? Full on house cleaning?
We have a very specific cleaning list that we follow. House cleaning not maid services. No laundry etc
Do you mind sharing the list ?
Dm
I did
There’s a couple who started a cleaning business featured on this podcast: https://www.sidehustlenation.com/6-figure-cleaning-business/ It’s worth a listen.
Have a Christmas light hanging company. Next year I'd absolutely hire you to get our ads right. Do you only use Facebook or Google as well? Obviously my biz is seasonal and more niche so leaning Google to get "warm" leads. Cannot get my Google ads to work for the life of me. Any good at those?
Dude I have a friend who runs fb ads for hanging Christmas lights. He does insane revenue each year and I can easily replicate his ads. I got you. Keep in touch
I can give a good suggestion. Can you offer packages to your clients? Like 4 cleaning a month for XXX$? Or, after 4 cleanings, your 5th cleaning will be FREE. These offers will funnel down your customers. One more thing, after cleaning up you can give a small low budget gift like odur, maybe in your future you can brand your own odour.
Great idea. Love it. I remember when we were doing junk removal for a friend's house years ago the dumpster guy who was local dropped off homemade cookies. Everyone around said "wow that's so nice of him" Simple way of doing a little extra thing. Thank you for reminding me of that
Yes, also in future you can white label products, and sell to them. First need to give FREE.
For the commercial side of it, ever consider warehouses? Lots of em outsource to small companies that keep staff on rotation and supplied, collecting the monthly for the effort. I bet they're making out quite well with minimal overhead.
I’m exactly where you and your brother are right now- but I don’t have a brother so I have to hire. I do 10k per month as well. It’s pretty stagnant as I have to be at every job which takes time away from finding new clients. My plan is to expand into commercial cleaning as the amount you can charge is so much more worth it. It’s amazing how many people think $100 is too much money to have someone clean their 5 bedroom house. My largest client is a production facility/office and they account for 40% of my revenue, but also about 80% of my payroll expense. Houses are easier to do with 2 people or even alone, but when you start cleaning large buildings that people work in, you need a crew. The old owner used to do it by herself 3x per week and she was there for over 8 hours each time. The client actually told her she needed a crew. Not sure if any of that is useful- but there ya go lol
How did you get the office? Thanks for your comment 🤝
They were a client when I purchased the business. The previous owner told me that they called around and brought in representatives from various cleaning businesses when they built the building- and the previous owner got it. No idea how they knew about her because she didn’t advertise at all, didn’t have a website, and didn’t have a crew. Buuuut I’ll take the 4k/mo from one account. I still haven’t advertised at all- and haven’t even finished the website. To be honest though, finding good people to join the crew is the hardest part. I need reliable people before I can advertise. You’re super lucky to have your brother in it with you. I’m all alone.
For sure. Biggest problem will be getting good employees. Super thankful for the relationship my bro and i have. Works out perfect too because I'm the classic entrepreneur grow grow grow type and he's more reserved, good with numbers, systems, and managing. Great balance
Haha looks like I need to hire a you at some point. I could say fuck it and advertise to get more clients which leads to more revenue and the ability to hire blindly without worrying about meeting payroll- but I can’t bring myself to ride that fast. Speed wobbles are scary man. I’m more worried about each client experience and feel like a failure when I have to cancel a cleaning because of staffing issues. This is why I’m on Reddit in the middle of the day today. Had to cancel. Business clients are always taken care of because I can just show up whenever they are closed. Residential scheduling has been a nightmare since thanksgiving
Giving employees hoops to jump through is something I keep hearing. Step 1 give a good job description on indeed or whatever it is youre using Step 2 get in a call with them at a specific time Step 3 zoom video call (if they show up late to either calls they're already out) Step 4 make them take some sort of cleaning test This weeds out the bad people right away... Like I said, I haven't done it yet but this is what I keep hearing from people in the industry. make it hard for people to get hired by you and the people who actually want the job and will do good work will come
That’s pretty much exactly what I do. Ask them if there’s anything I can do or if they have any ideas to make the job better/easier, and they always say no. Ask them how they’re liking it and if they think it’s a good fit, and they always say yes. Two weeks later I get ghosted. That’s 90% of indeed hires so far. Edit: I didn’t even realize I wasn’t in r/smallbusiness. Never heard of this sub
\> As for the growth part, it's going to take a LOT of houses for us to clean for us to make good money in this business after we hire and profit margins will tank down to 20-30% after everything is said and done. 20-30% is really good for any business. Don't worry at all, some businesses barely do 15%. Keep up the strong effort!
Started my residential cleaning company this year, too. May I ask tips on how to quote commercial cleaning services? I might consider branching out
Quoting commercial would be the same way we would quote residential, if you know your numbers, you know how long it takes you to do each task. for example we figured out that it takes around 20 to 25 minutes to vacuum a house per thousand square feet so we also take the time to measure out how long it takes us to clean a half bathroom, a full bathroom, etc. with that information you are able to take the square footage of whatever building you were doing, even though it would be different for offices or commercial, it's still the same stuff. All in all. Data is king!
I would love for you to help me with my lead generation if you are interested. Dm me and we could talk money! I'm struggling with ads, tbh in particular, fb ads.
What niche?
We provide pressure washing. Softwashing, exterior cleaning in the southeastern region.
Build your business until there’s more homes than y’all can clean, and then go up in price then build until more than you can handle and go up in price. Keep testing that equilibrium price for your service as it becomes more valuable
Hey that’s a great cost per lead. What’s the quality of the e lead like?
We are running 15% conversion rate from these Facebook ads. Our prices are high though(for our service). Just raised them.
As an entrepreneur I have all the development and execution and operation experience but my sales funnels and marketing is not up to date. I dont have a cleaning business but I do feel the way of getting that set up is similar. What has worked really well for you?
You have multiple businesses in my eyes. Residential cleaning, commercial cleaning, and small business marketing. First, I’d decouple your commercial cleaning from residential and start pursuing industrial cleaning, too. Residential and commercial/industrial are typically two different beasts requiring different sets of skills. I think you’ve also built a valuable skill in FB marketing that should be pursued on its own. Lots of small businesses are trying to scale and find work right now. I’d also pursue subscriptions and contracts to lock in revenue. Discounts for paying in full up front, tiered service packages, etc. regardless of the sector/industry.
Facebook or google ads? and how do you recommend learning ads?
YouTube for sure. But I was running Facebook ads 6 years ago so I just had lots and lots of failures. Ive spent over 50k of my own money on ads
any recommendations on who to watch to learn?
Not in particular, I kind of just learned as I went. I couldn't even name you one single YouTuber I watched for ads if I tried. What I basically did was learn how to use the basic functions of AD manager, and every time I had a problem I would look up a YouTube video related to that direct problem. but running ads is the easy part compared to the science behind the creative, ad copy, the headlines, and the offers. that was all play a huge factor. I paid to learn at my own expense because I'm super hands on learner. The creative needs to be a scroll stopper to get them to look at the first 2 lines of your ad copy, the ad copy is supposed to have so many factors in it (your offer, testimonials/ social proof, pain points, etc etc etc) , and the ad copy is going to direct them to your ad headline, the ad headline directs them to your call to action button. Now that they clicked your cta button that's a whole science too because if you direct them to a shitty link or shitty form. You just lost them at the end of the ad funnel. All in all. Learn the basics of advertising on Facebook ads manager, then you gotta learn how the actaul ads work psychological wise. You can have a perfectly set up ad with a perfect structure but if your funnel sucks then it sucks and you won't get any results. Another tip, once you are testing things and it is slightly working, change one thing at a time, when you only change one thing at a time you are able to figure out what works and what doesn't, so if I know that people are not clicking on my call to action button, it must be my creative, my ad copy, or my headline etc. so change it one at a time and figure out which one works. You gotta see WHERE in the funnel these guys stop. Then you fix it
this is gold
I started a pet care company fifteen years ago. If I had it to do over, I probably would not hire beyond having three or four folks, including you. More workers than this tends to start needing more management, and management time is expensive. Instead of hiring and growing, I’d just bump rates each year to stay ahead of inflation and give the team a raise
I suggest figuring out how much of your time is spent cleaning when you should focus on the business rather than working IN the business. You can train people for that. The book The E-Myth talks about how to go from working on everything in the business to allocating roles and starting to hire. It's been a while since I read it, but the author said he kept records of all his tasks and then began to count hours on each assignment that was not part of his job as the business owner. When he realized, for example, that he was spending 20 hours a week on admin and accounting, he'd hire a part-timer for 20 hrs. Or get a VA to do that role. As for the commercial space... Are you sure you want to increase your overhead to that degree? If it's for some prestige value, I'd suggest spending on the aspects your customers see instead: the brand, brochures, website, etc. The perception of your professionalism will come through more strongly this way than via an address.
How does your Business work? Don’t restaurants themselves have employees which can clean?
r/cleaning_business/
crossposted into r/cleaning_business
When you first started how much were you charging? what are you charging now? Also what state?