Have you thought about starting your own cleaning business? It’s not as difficult as you think.
The biggest problem that you are going to come up against is not the competition – it’s deciding what market you are going to target. You have a good choice.
You can go into the domestic cleaning market, carpet cleaning, window cleaning, commercial cleaning, car cleaning, pressure washing etc. It’s your decision.
Once you have chosen your target market you need to check out the competition. This is easy. Grab a yellow pages directory and take a note of the display ads – not the small classifieds. There’s a very good reason for this but it will take to long to explain in this post.
Next do a local Google search for your target market and check out their web sites. Are they professional? – are they running a newsletter? do they have a separate fax number? Pay close attention to their trading names too as that is a dead giveaway.
As you can see checking out your competition is a big subject – especially for those of you who are just starting out and it’s something I’m going to cover in another article. That’s just the beginning of course.
You need to know your competition if you want to beat them – especially if you’re thinking of starting your own cleaning business in a competitive niche such as office or house cleaning.
Once you’ve decided which niche suits you – and that’s very important by the way, (I’ll cover that another time) you need to break that niche down. We’ll come to that in a moment.
The thing to remember is that a lot of these small cleaning businesses are being run individually. The owner is time starved and wrapped up in the “job”. Consequently they do not pay enough attention to the marketing side and have got themselves into the classic “working in the business” syndrome.
You don’t want to make the same mistake because it’s easily done. You only have to look at the number of web sites that aren’t taking full advantage of ecommerce. It’s mind boggling to think that the majority of your competitors rely on occasional fliers and a yellow pages advert to generate business.
That leaves the field wide open for you doesn’t it? Providing of course you’ve chosen the right cleaning niche and know what you’re doing …
Now I’ve already covered two methods of researching your competition – The yellow pages and an online search. The trouble is it will only give you an idea of how many competitors are out there and the quality of their advertising. And that’s not really enough is it?
What you need to do is look for a niche within the sector that you’ve chosen and dominate it. Don’t worry about the size of the niche because opportunities will always present themselves. I guarantee it.
Let’s take commercial cleaning as an example. I’ve just Googled “commercial cleaning services” and it returned 17,200,000 results. That’s what you call a huge market. Don’t you think you could find a tiny niche inside there?
Let’s get really basic. Start a window cleaning service – I can think of three ways straight away – you can go after the residential market, go for commercial, or subcontracting. That’s three. What about going one step further and concentrating just on interiors or exteriors.
Interior glass is another one but I’ll save that little gem for another time. What about specializing in the construction industry? That’s where I made my money …
Cleaning is a big industry. There are a lot of people doing it and reason is simple. There’s money in it – if you know where to look. It doesn’t have to stop at the obvious either – think facilities management contracting – plenty of money in that niche. What about civil aviation and heavy engineering? Rail and truck. And of course the clean and hire business.
The most important thing you need to do right now is look for a niche before starting your own cleaning business and decide how you’re going to make money from it and not in it!
In my next article on how to start a cleaning business I will cover some of the more unusual niches that you might not have come across.
One last thing. Whatever you do don’t get sucked in by the old chestnuts. You know the ones – “start an office cleaning” business, a “domestic cleaning” service, a “carpet” cleaning round etc. You’ll end up working long hours and getting stuck in the business “job”. Let me show you a better way.
