Bridget will
explain how to make-money starting your own
profitable Home, Office or Apartment Cleaning Service
As our lives get busier and busier, our life in the
new millennium will be eased up by an abundance of services
that we can hire to take care of some mundane things
in our lives - like house cleaning.
House and apartment cleaning services are gaining in
popularity. These are business services that are growing
in demand as a result of more and more women seeking
jobs outside the home. Their need to supplement the
family income creates the opportunity for you to set
up a lucrative business.
Ten years ago, businesses of this kind were serving
only the affluent - homes of the wealthy people where
women didn’t want to be bothered with the drudgery
of house hold cleaning, and had the money to pay someone
to do it for them. But times have changed, and today
the market includes many middle income families in every
residential area across the entire country. The potential
market among apartment dwellers is great also. All in
all this is a business that has grown fast, and has
as much real wealth building potential as any we can
think of.
This is a cleaning service generally associated with
women; however, men are finding that they can organize,
start, and operate very profitable home and apartment
cleaning businesses just as well as women. It’s
an ideal business for any truly ambitious person wanting
a business of his or her own, especially for those who
must begin with limited funds. Actually, you can start
this business right in your own neighborhood, using
your own equipment, and begin making a profit from the
first day.
Many enterprising homemakers are already doing this
kind of work on a small scale as an extra income producing
endeavor. There’s a growing need for this service.
Organizing your efforts into a business producing $50,000
to $100,000 a year is quite possible, and you can get
started for $100 or so, always using your profits to
expand and in crease your business.
Absolutely no experience is required. Everyone knows
how to dust the furniture, vacuum carpets, make the
beds and carry out the trash. But you must ask yourself
if making a house clean and bright is important and
uplifting work. If you look on it as degrading or as
drudgery, don’t involve yourself in this business.
Starting from scratch, you’ll need a cell phone,
appointment book and you'll also need an advertising
flyer. Click-here for
sample of advertising flyer.
HOME OR APARTMENT
CLEANING
Type this notice out on your computer; it’s going
to be your first advertising campaign which will bring
in that first customer to get your business started.
It would be a good idea to visit your stationery store
to pick up a pad of “fade out’ graph paper,
a couple of sets of transfer (rub-on) letters, a glue
stick, and if they have one, a Clip Art book.
Take these materials home and clear off your kitchen
table. Take a sheet of graph paper, and temporarily
tape the corners down on the table. Then take a pencil
and a ruler, and mark a rectangle 5-inches wide by 6-inches
long along the lines of the graph paper. This will be
the overall size of your flyer when its finished.
Look for a Clip Art piece depicting a harried housewife
engrossed with either cleaning tools or in the act of
running a vacuum cleaner, or some other household chore.
Cut this piece out, and with your glue stick paste it
in the upper left-hand corner of your rectangle. Then
take your transfer letters and make the headline: HOME
OR CLEANING. Next, type out the body of the message
on ordinary white typing paper. Be sure to use a relatively
new ribbon, preferably a black carbon ribbon, and upper
case letters. Cut this strip out, and paste it onto
the graph paper, centered just below your headline.
Then use some transfer letters that are about twice
as large as your typewriter type, and paste up the action
part of your message:
For details, call Bridget: 555-555-5555. Cut out a
couple of border flourishes from your Clip Art book,
paste them under your action line, and you’re
ready to take it to the printer.
In essence, you have a professional advertising “billboard.”
You can check around in your area, especially with the
advertising classes at your local colleges, but generally
they’ll do no better than you can do on your own,
using the instructions we’ve just given you, and
they’ll charge you $50 to $100.
Once you have this advertising flyer completed, take
it to a nearby quick print shop and have about 200 copies
printed. You should be able to get two copies on a standard
8 1/2 x 11 sheet, and running 100 sheets of paper through
the press is going to cost well under $10. For just
a few cents more, have the printer cut them in half
with his machine cutter, so you will have 200 copies
of the advertising flyer.
Now take these flyers, along with a box of thumbtacks,
and put them up on all the free bulletin boards you
can find - grocery stores, laundromats, beauty salons,
office building lounges, cafeterias, post offices, and
wherever else such announcements are allowed.
When a prospective customer calls, have your appointment
book and a pencil handy. Be friendly and enthusiastic.
Explain what you do - everything from changing the beds
to vacuuming, dusting and polishing the furniture and
cleaning the bathroom to the dishes and the laundry.
Or, everything except the dishes and the laundry - whatever
you have decided on as your policy. When they ask how
much you charge, simply tell them six to ten dollars
an hour, but for a firm cost quote, you’ll need
to see the home and make a detailed estimate for them.
Then without much of a pause, ask if 4:30 this afternoon
would be convenient for them, or if 5:30 would be better.
You must pointedly ask if you can come to make your
cost proposal at a certain time, or the decision may
be put off, and you may come up with a “no sale.”
Just as soon as you have an agreement on the time to
make you cost proposal and marked it in your appointment
book, ask for name, address and telephone number.
Jot this information down on a 3x5 card, along with
the date and the notation: Prospective Customer. Then
you file this card in a permanent card file. Save these
cards, because there are literally hundreds of ways
to turn this prospect file into real cash, once you’ve
accumulated a sizeable number of names, addresses and
phone numbers.
When you go to see your prospect in person, always
be on time. A couple of minutes early won’t hurt
you, but a few minutes late will definitely be detrimental
to your closing the sale. Always be well groomed. Dress
as a successful business owner. Be confident and sure
of yourself; be knowledgeable about what you can do
as well as understanding of the prospect’s needs
and wants. Do not smoke, even if invited by the prospect,
and never accept a drink - even coffee - until after
you have a signed contract in your briefcase.
Actually, once you’ve made the sale, the best
thing is to shake hands with your new customer, thank
him, and leave. A little small talk after the sale is
appropriate, but becoming too friendly is not. You create
an impression, and preserve it, by maintaining a business-like
relationship.
When you go to make your cost estimate, take along
a ruled tablet such as those used by elementary school
students, carbon paper, a calculator and your appointment
book. Some people find it easier to work with a clipboard
and ordinary blank paper with carbon. Later on, you
may want to have general checklists printed up for each
room in the house, with blank lines or space for special
instructions.
Whatever you use, it’s important to appear methodical,
thorough and professional, while leading the prospect
through the specifics he or she wants you to take care
of: “Now, you want the carpet vacuumed and all
the furniture dusted and those two end tables, the coffee
table and the piano polished as well, I assume?”
Simply identify the specific room at the top of the
sheet of paper, then lead your prospect through the
cleaning steps of each room, covering everything in
it. Your implications of puffing everything in “ready
for company” shape will cause the customer to
forget about the cost, and hire you to do a complete
job. Always have a carbon paper under each piece of
paper you’re writing on, and always look around
each room one more time before leaving it; then ask
the prospect if he or she can think of any special instructions
you should note for that room.
Finally, when you’ve gone through each room in
the house with the prospect, come back to the kitchen
and sit down at the table. Take out your calculator
and add up the time you estimate each job in each room
will take to complete. Total the time for each room.
Be liberal, thinking that if you can do the carpet
job in 15 minutes, it will usually take the ordinary
person 30 minutes. Convert the total minutes for each
room into hours and tenths of hours per room. Add the
totals for each room to arrive at your total hours to
clean the entire house,
Talk with your customer briefly, wondering how she
can ever find the time to get everything done at home,
especially when holding down a full-time job. A little
bit of small talk, a quick mental evaluation of the
customer’s ability to pay, plus your knowledge
that you can get everything done in four hours, instead
of the six hours it would take most people, and you
summarize by saying:
“Well, Mrs. Smith, you’ve certainly got
enough routine cleaning work to keep you busy all day
every day of the week! I certainly don’t know
how you do it, but any way, we’ll take this whole
problem off your shoulders, save you time, and actually
give you time to relax. We can do it on a regular basis,
every other week for $120 per month, or the one single
time for $75.
“I can well imagine how tired you are when you
get home from work. If you’re at all like me there
are times when, faced with all this housework, you want
to run away someplace and hide. Now, we’ll take
care of everything for you - keep the house spic and
span, ready for company, allow you to forget about housecleaning
chores, and for a lot less than it’s costing you
now in time, work, and worry. And we guarantee that
our work will more than satisfy you. So, would you like
to try our cleaning service one time for $75 or do you
want to save $15 a call and let us take over all these
chores for you on a regular basis?”
- Here you begin finding a place in your appointment
book, and tell her: “Actually, I have an opening
at 9:00 on Friday morning. We could come in every
other Friday at 9:00, clean the whole house and have
it done before you get home from work.”
- The customer agrees that 9:00 on Fridays will be
fine. Then you ask her if she prefers to be billed
with the completion of each house cleaning session
or on a regular monthly basis. Point out to her that
by engaging you on a monthly basis, she picks up a
free house cleaning every three months.
- Now that you have your first customer, you want
to fill in every day of the week, each week of every
month with regular jobs. Once you have one week of
each month filled with regular jobs, it will be time
for you to expand.
Expansion means growth, involving people working for
you, more jobs to sell, and greater profits. Don’t
let it frighten you, for you have gained experience
by starting gradually. After all - your aim in starting
a business of your own was to make money, wasn’t
it? And expanding means more helpers so you don’t
have to work your self to death!
You can operate this business quite successfully from
the comfort of your home, permanently, if you choose
to. All you’ll ever need is a cell phone, a desk,
and a file cabinet.
So, just as soon as you possibly can, recruit and hire
other people to do the work for you. The first people
you hire should be people to handle the cleaning work.
The best plan is to hire people to work in teams of
two or three - two for jobs not including dishwashing
and laundry - three for those that do.
You can start these people at minimum wage or a bit
above, and train them to complete every job assignment
in two hours or less. Just as soon as you’ve hired
and trained a couple of people as a cleaning team, you
should outfit them in a kind of uniform with your company
name on the back of their blouses or shirts. A good
idea also would be to have magnetic signs made for your
company and services. Place these signs on the sides
of the cars your people use for transportation to each
job, and later on, the sides of your company van or
pick-up trucks.
Each team should have an appointed team leader responsible
for the quality and over all completeness of each job
assigned to that team. The team might operate thus:
One person cleans the bathroom, makes the beds, and
carries out the laundry, while the other person dusts
and polishes the furniture and does the vacuuming. On
jobs where you do the laundry and the dishes, the third
person can pick up the laundry and get that started,
and then do the dishes and clean the kitchen. By operating
in this manner, your work will be more efficient and
the complete job will take a lot less time. However,
it is important that each person you hire understand
that the success of the business depends on the ‘crew”
doing as many complete jobs as they can handle each
day - not on how much they get paid per hour working
for you. Your team leaders will check with you each
afternoon for the next day’s work assignments
and gather the team together, complete with cleaning
equipment and material, on the next day. Your team leader
should be supplied with a stack of “hand-out”
advertising flyers to pass around the neighborhood or
within the apartment building before leaving each job
site. A good supply of business cards wouldn’t
be a bad idea for them either, in order to advertise
your services to others they come in contact with. The
only other form of advertising you should go with would
be a display ad in the yellow pages of your telephone
directory.
Design on paper a system of clean-up operation that
can generally be applied to any situation, then drill
your teams on speeding up their activities to make the
system work even better, Just as firemen practice and
practice, you should drill your people as a team in
their cleaning activities.
Probably the biggest time-waster in this business will
be in the travel from job to job. For this reason, it’s
important to spread advertising circulars to the neighboring
homes when you’re doing a job, or to the apartments
on the same floor when you’re in an apartment
building. As the organizer, and person assigning teams
to jobs, it will behoove you to locate, line up, and
assign jobs as close together as possible, Keep up efforts
to cut the time it takes for your crews to travel from
one job to the next. Work at lining up jobs all in one
block, or in one apartment building.
Your equipment needs will really be minimal: Cleaning
and polishing rags, mops, a couple of plastic buckets,
and furniture polishes. Most people will have the necessary
cleaning materials, including vacuum cleaner, soaps
and cleansers. But it wouldn’t hurt to have these
items available just in case you get a job in a home
or an apartment without these tools. As your business
grows, you’ll be able to purchase all your needs
at huge discounts, and these are the sources of supply
to cultivate as you grow.
One of the most important aspects of this business
is asking for, and allowing your customers to refer
other prospects to you. All of this happens, of course,
as a result of your giving fast, dependable service.
You might even setup a promotional notice on the back
of your business card (to be left as each job is completed)
offering five dollars off their next cleaning bill when
they refer you to a new prospect.
This is definitely a high profit business, requiring
only an investment of time and organization on your
part to get started. With a low investment, little or
no over head requirement, and no experience needed,
this is an ideal business opportunity with a growth
curve that accelerates at an unprecedented rate. Think
about it. If it appeals to you, set up your own plan
of operations and go for it! The profit potential for
an owner of this type of small-business is outstanding!
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