DNatureofDTrain's Forum

A cleaning business is about offering services of dusting, vacuuming and polishing among some to certain individuals who may not either have the time, patience or ability to do so.

A cleaning business is made up of two main markets which are residential and commercial. It’s a business which takes only a little start up capital and can be situated in your own home. The market is vast. A reason for this maybe due to the fact that a large segment of married households are both holding office jobs, thereby giving them less and less time to tend to the house. Averaging at least twelve hours a day each including travel leaves barely a few hours for the children when they get home and hardly enough time to do the household chores.

You would want to target a middle income family with these situations as your niche market. If your neighborhood comprises a lot of these households you may not need to travel far to land your contracts. Let’s take a look at each service in depth.

A residential cleaning business’ main offering is a maid service. It requires hardworking individuals who have to be thorough in their work. It also takes very little skill and know how so it should be quite easy to find a good working staff. Other aspects you will want your staff to have is that they should not be clumsy, so as to have their head in their work and be relied upon not to steal the things while they are servicing somebody’s house. If they can go on without much or little supervision, this will allow you to be able to schedule several clients at the same time, thereby increasing your output.

Commercial cleaning services are usually janitorial services, which is quite similar to maid services but tackles a much greater scope and variety of work. Your clientele for this may be restaurants, banks, hotels, offices, shopping malls, bowling alleys, theaters and other public centers.

So the first thing you should do is plan out your business. You will need to create a policy on how you will run your operations. You should device a rate system for the different tasks which you offer, assigning particular rates of labor to specific jobs. A suggestion is that you present a basic package consisting of typical tasks to be done in a general household. This may include dusting, vacuuming and polishing of floors and usual pieces of furniture, you can package the most common rooms, perhaps a couple of bedrooms with bathrooms, the family room and kitchen. For an additional room like a music room or a den, you can line that up in your task list as an add–on at a specific rate, maybe based on a per square foot area. You can also charge for removal of stains from the sofa and deodorizing areas inhabited by household pets. You must list this down on a job order form so that you and your client may tally you’re your job completion. They can check everything down on your checklist. This serves as your contract between you and your customer.

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