How profitable are cleaning services?

You've got 3 big hurdles...

1 Have you had any experience generating leads and closing them?

2 Long gone are the days of a mop, bucket and cleaning fluids
to get the job done...do you know that?

3 Low skilled workers who take cleaning jobs
have real challenges keeping to commitments...
have you previously been in charge of them, recruited them and
fired them?

Is this the type of business, that will always have those problems,
what you want to deal with on a daily basis?

Take some serious thinking around it.

Best,
Ewen

If you Google it, you can find a guy in the States who
writes about how to make six figures a year cleaning
windows.

Thanks for the replies. The more I think about it the less appealing it seems. Perhaps this isn't as easy as I thought... I was just looking for a service that is easy to outsource so I can focus my efforts on making sales.

I've been cleaning for 14 years, so I have some perspective on this.

1. Finding cheap labor is the most difficult thing that you will encounter. There's a reason that cheap labor is cheap. Good luck finding cheap labor that shows up and does a good job.

2. Speaking of doing a good job, do you know what your customer's expectations will be? Do YOU know how to clean? How will you maintain any quality standards? If you don't, you will lose those jobs as quickly as you get them.

3. Do you know the accuracy of your figures? For instance, is 2 hours of office cleaning in your area really going to fetch 50/hour? I'm a member of some cleaning associations and from what I've seen, at least in the residential side of things, it can be difficult to get anywhere near that kind of money for cleaning. Maybe commercial is different, but do your due diligence to find out what kind of money is really available for that kind of work.

4. What services will you offer? Just basic office cleaning, or what if your corporate clients also need carpet cleaning, or floor stripping/waxing, or window cleaning, etc. Do you know how to price the various services, how to perform them, and what supplies/equipment you will need?

True, you don't need to know everything, but we always found office cleaning to be very cutthroat. Someone comes in and underbids you and boom, you're gone. It is very much a commodity because they often don't have much of a relationship with you. We much prefer residential cleaning, but that's just us, and my wife and I don't hire out either. We do it all ourselves and build relationships and enjoy what we do, which is difficult to do in a commercial setting. Then again, residential cleaning is much more varied and difficult, so there are always pros and cons to any such situation.

Best of luck with it, but you need to realize that there is far more involved than simply sitting back, generating leads, and finding people to fulfill them. Someone has to sell and be the point man for everything that goes on, someone has to do some quality checks particularly if you're hiring cheap labor, someone has to fill in when they don't show up, someone has to do the books and set the quality standards, etc. I know people that have successful cleaning businesses, but in my view most of them have just swapped out doing the cleaning for managing the employees that are usually a pain in the rear, and they don't seem to make a great deal of profit over if they had done the work themselves.

Check out this sub reddit where several guys started their own cleaning companies.

Entrepreneur Ride Along
DAY 26: From Zero to Website Launch-A recap of everything that got us here! : EntrepreneurRideAlong

Profitable???
Well my mates parents just sold their cleaning biz last year here in the UK and retired to Oz

Your biggest challenge is going to be finding great workers and keeping them. Make sure you check the references for everyone.

Cleaning business's is a great investment, but takes a lot of work just getting started.

I love the cleaning business.... Super easy to get started, low investment needed & some of your most effective advertising methods are practically FREE... Yes man power can be a little tricky, but you shouldn't take too long to find stable help !

I work with a steam cleaning company, and it is one of my favourite clients to work with, because it is so easy to generate leads and customers. And trust me, it's completely realistic to earn well into 6 figures profit with cleaning. But we'll get into that in a second.

However, as others have said, GOOD labour is one of the hardest things to find. One of the biggest limiting factors for my client is the fact that she offers a FANTASTIC service. So it's hard for her to find employees who will match that standard.

Anyway, looking at the maths, it's pretty SIMPLE (but necessarily not easy) to earn over 6 figures. You just need to tweak how you look at things. Now, you're gonna have a lot of jobs on your plate if you do build things to this level, so again, the labour is the issue.

The trick is REPEAT customers. But to have customers come back to YOU in such a competitive industry isn't so easy, especially when you're trying to do things on the cheap. But here's the maths.

Using your numbers, you said that 1x 2 hour job would be worth £58 profit.

How often are people likely to want that sort of cleaning? Every day? Every week? Every month?

Let's say just once every two weeks.

* This means that 1 client is worth 26 weeks times £58, which is £1,508 per year.
* If you're gaining 15 clients each month, let's say that only 6 of these clients choose to stay for a full year. This means that by the end of the year, you'll have 72 repeat clients, each worth around £1,500.
* That's £108,000 worth of business.

Now, since this is residual income, you're not gonna have the full £108,000 by the end of the first year. But you'll have about half of it.

On top of that... Look at all the stuff I haven't accounted for.

I've IGNORED 9 jobs each month.

I've UNDERESTIMATED how often people return - Only 1ce every 2 week. Image if that once once a week. Or multiple times each week?

I've assumed that only 6 out of 15 people will become repeat customers. What if that number could be 8 or 10?

The simple fact is: You could make over £100,000 profit, with just 6 new loyal customers each month.

But if you build a REAL business from the start, with a clear USP and niche, and you don't get into that mentality of:

"What's the cheapest way to X"...

Then your job will be much more fun, and much more rewarding.

But as you're in the UK, I'd love to have a chat about how you're looking to go about things, and maybe we could share some ideas.