How Do You Start a Successful Commercial Cleaning Business?

As an entrepreneur, you realize that building a successful business from scratch is no a crazy. In fact, opening a cleaning business has high returns and a relatively low start-up cost. Especially in cities with a large population, a commercial cleaning business is in high demand. How do you start a successful commercial cleaning business?

7 Steps to a Commercial Cleaning Business Startup

There a many tips and tricks for starting a business. If you are keen on owning a commercial cleaning business, then register your business, finish with all the legal formalities, and follow these 7 steps: 

1. Set Goals for Your Business

Goal setting is a crucial aspect of any business. The process of setting goals and objectives is very simple, yet it is widely recognized as critical to good strategic management in any business or organization. Businesses must have clear targets.

Ask yourself these questions when setting business goals:

• What is the message that your business wants to communicate? Build a story around your business’s brand. 
• Do you want to only concentrate on commercial ventures, or do you also want to try your hand at home cleaning ventures? 
• What does your business offer that other commercial cleaning businesses don’t have? Do a lot of research and carefully construct your brand’s image.
  

2. Picking the Right Service Area

Your service area is your target market and it can be integral in playing a part in how successful your business might be. If you pick an area that’s too small, you might struggle to compete with an already existing business. On the other hand, if you pick an area that’s too big, you might be taking on more clients than you can handle. Instead, focus on being available to business neighborhoods where cleaning services are needed and are easy for workers to get to. 

3. Create a List of Potential Clients

When you’ve just started your business, you have to put in a lot of research about what sort of clients you want for your business. These are your target customers. Once you have a list of the clients you want to work with, call the companies, and see if they require your expertise as a commercial cleaning business. Other than digital marketing efforts you’re putting in, cold calling is an age-old effective way to get clients.

4. Invest in Cleaning Supplies

Now that you have set up your business, you will need to invest in cleaning supplies before taking up any jobs. So you will need to estimate startup costs.

Here are some tips to purchasing your cleaning supplies:

• When you start off, you will need to invest in basic cleaning supplies like vacuums, mops, brooms, dustpans, multipurpose cleaners, glass cleaners, sponges, cloths, buckets, protective gloves, and a mode of transport. 
• A commercial cleaning business might be a little more expensive because you’ll need to buy more cleaning supplies and spend on expensive cleaning items like an industrial floor buffer. 
• You’ll also need a monthly budget for these supplies as they will need to be replenished regularly. 
• You’ll also need a professional-looking uniform with your company’s name and logo for your employees. A professional appearance can go a long way in impressing your new customers.

5. Invest in Management Software

Other than cleaning supplies, you’ll also have to budget in buying a computer for your office and selecting the proper software applications to operate your new business.

You might want to invest in essential office software like:

• Payroll software – To keep track of the expenses at the end of every month.
• Marketing management tool – To understand how your digital marketing strategies are performing. 
• Cleaning business software – Cleaning business software will tremendously help you and your employees to track and maintain a cleaning business checklist. You can track cleaning schedules so that your employees don’t miss out on any important tasks when they are out on a cleaning job. This is a great way to create a foolproof plan that will help your employees remember all the tasks at hand and to impress your clients by doing a thorough job.
  

6. Start a Marketing Campaign

Marketing plays a very crucial role in bringing customers to the door, so consider allocating your marketing activities a good chunk of your budget. Whether you’re hiring someone in-house to help you with marketing or hiring a team, you should focus on creative ways to promote your brand identity for you small business.

Here is a marketing checklist of all the activities you should take care of when you start a cleaning business:

• Build an impressive marketing website. 
• Set up social media pages.
• Run paid ads on social media platforms and Google.
  

The right marketing strategy can help attract customers if they’re impressed by your website and social media pages. There are many ways for small businesses to use online marketing.

7. Launch Specials to Attract New Customers

There’s nothing like a good discount or offering something extra to attract new clients. A discount or a special offer might be all you need to get new clients to try your business out. You might think you’re making a loss by offering a discount on your services, but the long-term gains outweigh the slight loss — you’ll get many repeat clients who will provide you with a regular stream of income if you provide exceptional services to them. 

Steps to a Commercial Cleaning Business Startup

There are a few challenges to starting up your own commercial cleaning business including being financially prepared to start your own business. Yes, opening up your own commercial cleaning business might seem like a daunting task, but once you’ve followed these steps, you’ll have a smooth-running operation in no time! 

Author Bio: Akhil Rajan is a Customer Success Specialist at Zuper, an intelligent workforce management platform for service-oriented businesses. Working with customers on a daily basis, he has a deep understanding of their needs and pain points and so he is able to contribute to the marketing strategies for Zuper with the content he writes. He writes on topics like how to increase workforce utilization, how to reduce the service turnaround time and increase workforce efficiency, customer adoption, cost reduction strategies, etc – to name a few. He is often found buried in books or playing chess in his free time.