Profiting From A House Cleaning Business
By: Toni Chainbridge
You will be surprised to learn how easy it is to make money from your very own house cleaning business. Not sure where to start? Let me show you how to set up and profit from a home-based house cleaning business.
House cleaning is in huge demand today. It is forecast for this trend to continue over the foreseeable future. Have you noticed that people tend to be more in a hurry and are much busier these days? This means that people are willing to pay service providers to help them with mundane and everyday chores - such as house cleaners.
You have to decide if you want some of this action now - while the demand is huge and still growing. Starting your own house cleaning business has never been at a better time than today.
Below are the main points you need to know to start-up as an Independent Cleaner.
Choosing a Name For Your Business:
For advertising purposes you really should give your cleaning service a name. It could just be your own name, i.e. 'Joan Walter's House Cleaning' or you could give it a more generic name i.e. 'Your Sparkly House'. Well, you get the idea anyway!
An identify for your business is very important and a good name helps provide this. Just because you want to work on your own as an independent cleaner doesn't mean that you should not take your business serious, because you should.
Identifying Your Customers and Territory:
You need to know who your customers are going to be and where they live. You might not have your own transport, so this will have to be taken into consideration. If you have a car then you will be able to travel further a field and be able to do more cleans per day.
Finding customers who live near you should be a priority if you don't have your own transport. If this is the case, then you need to find out if these people have surplus money to pay for a cleaning service?
So basically you need to know who can afford to pay for a cleaner. You also need to know if there are enough of these premium customers within a certain proximity of each other? Ideally you would want as many customers as close to each other as possible. This way you can do more cleans per day and not lose too much time travelling from one customer to another.
Set-Up Expenses:
Being a sole-trader within your own small business will require very little overheads and start-up costs. For example, most independent cleaners will usually use the clients' cleaning equipment and products. So in effect, you should not really need to buy any at all. For this reason, this is how you can make a great profit from the beginning!
The following are what you will probably have to spend some money on:
o An apron and tabard
o Marketing and advertising
o Money spent on travel
Setting The Price:
Setting a price structure is your next step. My advice would be to call your competitors, found in your Yellow Pages. Pretend you are an enquirer and ask what they charge.
You can then set your hourly rate in proportion with your competitors. Whether you choose to undercut them, charge the same, or set your prices slightly higher is totally up to you.
Getting the Word Out:
You need to let everyone who you want to target know about you. The most beneficial and cost-effective way is to make or have printed, small flyers. Get these put through your target customers' letterboxes by the hundreds.
Simply type up your flyer in a word processing document, or get somebody to do this for you. Try and put at least two flyers on one page. Take these your local library or wherever has a photocopier. Get them copied as many times as you can afford.
Post hundreds of flyers out through prospective mailboxes. This will keep you fit and really doesn't take that long. A surprise telephone message might be waiting for you when you get back home!
In addition to flyers, depending on your budget, advertise your cleaning service in the Yellow Pages. If you cannot afford this from the onset, once you start making some money you can then think about placing an advert then.
Expanding:
Seriously think about hiring cleaners when your diary gets too full. You can start to make double, triple, then quadruple the money. It's worth thinking about for the future.
Put an ad in your local newspaper advertising for a cleaner. Once you have chosen a satisfactory candidate take him/her with you on your cleaning rounds for him/her to get used to your cleaning methods and techniques.
Once you are happy and confident that he/she can go and clean on their own, you can then either have some free time to yourself or double your customer base.
Once you are totally confident with managing cleaning staff there is no reason why you can't hire more cleaners.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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