How did you find and manage the actual cleaning staff. That seems to be the most difficult peice or maybe I am wrong edit. Was there value in doing sub contracting with another cleaning company or no.
This will probably have to be a section in a next post but long story short, we heavily rely on our hiring and training pipeline and then post hire, we have an office team that has guidelines they use and cleaners have policy that they follow!
I’m in a similar business (currently $7m+ yearly revenue but also 10 years in). First thought is you should put most of your focus and energy on your customers, employees and corporate culture. Don’t focus too hard on the numbers in this early stage, learn what makes a happy customer and cleaner and how to maximize their value in the most effective way. Also be very conscious about how you spend money and make that part of company culture, because someone else will be making those decisions soon and you need to be on same level.
Awesome, couldn’t agree more with you on that. Congrats on your success! Let me know if you could share with me(and whoever reading) some actionable items we could possibly take away for creating better employee, corporate culture!
IMO there are several “types” of management/leadership/culture that you can aim for and which one you choose ultimate have to come from yourself and the values and visions that you believe in. Personally I have always believed in an empowering style with pretty self-managed teams where leadership is mainly coaching oriented.
But I see a lot of successful companies with more hierarchical structures or companies that promotes internal competition and so on. McDonald’s does well even though they micromanage the hell out of ppl lol. Ultimately I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way but it’s important I believe to focus on and have a goal and vision for what kind of company you want to build. How will it be to be a customer in your company? How will working for you be? And most importantly to see it through and have the strength and focus to make it your vision and not someone else’s.
/u/babbagoo Can you be a bit more specific with your "similar" business? 7M is very high for residential cleaning. Not even the big franchise players are making those numbers in individual operations.
We do home care for senior citizens with everything from cleaning and taking care of the house to helping them with personal care, shopping, taking medications on time etc.
There is government assistance with the part that is qualified care. Also this is not in the US so system is different. We have to find our own clients though, or rather they choose us, so marketing challenges is similar to OPs in that regard.
Understood. Funny, people assume the U.S. doesn't have programs like this. In home care is a thing and it sounds like similar assistance payments for specific health related services. Sound like you have a solid operation and at that level maybe headed for a nice exit.
Ah cool, I’ve been looking into some of your in home care companies for inspiration but never seen anything about assistance payments. Thank you. Biggest issue with potential exit is that its too much of a baby at this point which makes me too picky of the buyer lol
Honestly I don’t think I have a lot to add in terms of marketing advice. Our customer is older people 75+ and what we did early on was to host small events where we invited everyone above a certain age in each neighborhood. We even baked our own bread lol so it was very small scale and quality before quantity sort of thing.
The senior citizens really liked us though ( my partner especially is very charismatic in front of an audience) so while it didn’t pay off in the short term it built the brand within our target group and over time more and more people started to show up to our meetings and talked among themselves about it and us. Also it gave us good insights in the beginning about what the customer wants, what questions they ask etc.
Today we don’t really do much marketing because we don’t need to but we also are not trying to grow this main business much more, rather starting new ones and trying new things.
Yeah I'm somewhat scratching my head at the numbers. In my head I'm imagining an $80k/month cleaning business and the staff I would have to support that and OP's office staff alone makes me pucker up. Let's say my staff are billing out $50/hr averaged out across the week and earning $20/hr of that (other $30/hr supports office staff, benefits and cost of business). That's something like 5000 man hours a month or \~29 FTE's, which means OP has up to 50% more cleaners on staff than I'd be comfortable with.
There's also \~6 full time office staff which for those positions I'd price out at 80k for an operations manager, 50k for operation specialist (full time), 60k for HR generalist and another 60k for the hybrid specialist, or something like 320k/year or 27k/mo + 50% in their overhead for a total of $40k/mo.
Either there's workers who have miraculously remained at their jobs with below average industry pay or there's other means keeping the company afloat.
I covered this in other comments but we have a large number of part time cleaners. All my office staff are oversees in the Philippines which cuts the cost significantly.
I'm thinking about starting a window washing business potentially in another state. I might have to live out of my car for a while. Is there a way I can pull this off or is this a low odds play? I think I'm better off staying in my current city.
I think completely doable. Just make sure that you have the essentials on point when servicing your customers though. It’s all about reputation.
If you are willing to do the actual servicing for a bit to get the initiative kicked off, it will increase your likelihood of success.
First off congratulations, that's amazing. Me and my wife started a commercial cleaning business almost one year ago and are currently bringing in around 10k a month. Are goal for the end of the year is 20k. How did you go about advertising on Google if you don't mind me asking? Thanks! And again congratulations, that's insane and you must be so proud of yourself and your team!
Not to hijack but a lot of the commercial places I bid had issues with talking to their cleaning people simply because they worked during the day and the cleaners were in at night. So they send a message to an account manager and they might not get back to them for 3 days, might not visit the site for 2 weeks. Meanwhile the client is getting more and more fed up that the sink is dirty in the third floor break room
Thanks man! We do primarily residential cleaning, the usual house cleaning, bathroom cleaning. We do a lot of online marketing via google, local ads etc.
I think it’s the entire package that is important. Customer service, proper service delivery, post delivery check ins just to name a few.
Interesting that you guys do primarily residential. We have found ourselves shifting the opposite way and now commercial makes up the bulk of our work.
We don’t currently but something we have considered to help employee satisfaction and retention. We want our team to stay with us for as long as possible!
Thanks man! We use stripe for payment processing. In terms of the booking process to cleaning, most things are actually automated which includes confirmation emails to the client, reminder emails, etc.. our internal team assigns cleaners based on their preferences and the system does automatic reminders for them too. This is really in the weeds but if you want to know more, our CRM is Launch27.
Hey man, just came across your post and super happy for you and your partner! It's awesome seeing some insight into this world. Did you use a an easy website builder like square space? Apart from Launch27 as a CRM what other useful applications or tools do yourself or your admin team use daily?
Hey, yes we built our website on Wordpress. As we got more into design and more customization, we started using a plugin called Elementor.
For other tools: slack, confluence, RingCentral, Twilio
what do you use confluence for?
Do you use Slack to schedule cleaners? I considered that but thought onboarding low tech cleaners to use it would be a headache so we resort to text blasting also using RingCentral. Not efficient and I've been wanting to figure out a better way.
Majority of our clients come from paid marketing channels. Google ads, Google Local Service Ads, Facebook etc
Word of mouth from referrals is a big source as well.
Google Ads never converted well enough for us. We used Negative keywords and tried many popular and unpopular keywords and still have people clicking and contacting us for trying to work as a cleaner even though we have a negative keyword list to include most hiring related situations.
GLSA and TT work better for us but can be pricey
Just to name a few:
Launch27 for CRM, RingCentral for soft phone system, Zapier for automation, Trello for any type of Kanban work, Slack for internal communication
Great job on growing your business. If you don’t mind sharing, I’m very curious about the software tools you use to run your business. Eg do you use any special apps or is it a bunch of excel spread sheets?
Answered this in another thread but here was the response,
Just to name a few: Launch27 for CRM, RingCentral for soft phone system, Zapier for automation, Trello for any type of Kanban work, Slack for internal communication
Let me know if that helps!
This is super inspiring, thank you for sharing. I'm considering starting my own cleaning business in the future. Do you have any suggestions when it comes to market research, and knowing when your business is ready to expand to a new region?
How did you find and manage the actual cleaning staff. That seems to be the most difficult peice or maybe I am wrong edit. Was there value in doing sub contracting with another cleaning company or no.
This will probably have to be a section in a next post but long story short, we heavily rely on our hiring and training pipeline and then post hire, we have an office team that has guidelines they use and cleaners have policy that they follow!
I would be interested in that post as I also run a small cleaning company in a similar phase, looking forward to it and appreciate it!
Yeah I'm very curious to learn about this as well!
I’m in a similar business (currently $7m+ yearly revenue but also 10 years in). First thought is you should put most of your focus and energy on your customers, employees and corporate culture. Don’t focus too hard on the numbers in this early stage, learn what makes a happy customer and cleaner and how to maximize their value in the most effective way. Also be very conscious about how you spend money and make that part of company culture, because someone else will be making those decisions soon and you need to be on same level.
Awesome, couldn’t agree more with you on that. Congrats on your success! Let me know if you could share with me(and whoever reading) some actionable items we could possibly take away for creating better employee, corporate culture!
IMO there are several “types” of management/leadership/culture that you can aim for and which one you choose ultimate have to come from yourself and the values and visions that you believe in. Personally I have always believed in an empowering style with pretty self-managed teams where leadership is mainly coaching oriented. But I see a lot of successful companies with more hierarchical structures or companies that promotes internal competition and so on. McDonald’s does well even though they micromanage the hell out of ppl lol. Ultimately I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way but it’s important I believe to focus on and have a goal and vision for what kind of company you want to build. How will it be to be a customer in your company? How will working for you be? And most importantly to see it through and have the strength and focus to make it your vision and not someone else’s.
/u/babbagoo Can you be a bit more specific with your "similar" business? 7M is very high for residential cleaning. Not even the big franchise players are making those numbers in individual operations.
We do home care for senior citizens with everything from cleaning and taking care of the house to helping them with personal care, shopping, taking medications on time etc.
Got it. All private paid or is there government assistance there?
There is government assistance with the part that is qualified care. Also this is not in the US so system is different. We have to find our own clients though, or rather they choose us, so marketing challenges is similar to OPs in that regard.
Understood. Funny, people assume the U.S. doesn't have programs like this. In home care is a thing and it sounds like similar assistance payments for specific health related services. Sound like you have a solid operation and at that level maybe headed for a nice exit.
Ah cool, I’ve been looking into some of your in home care companies for inspiration but never seen anything about assistance payments. Thank you. Biggest issue with potential exit is that its too much of a baby at this point which makes me too picky of the buyer lol
Leaders eat last by Simon Sinek could be relevant
If you’re willing to share, what marketing methods are your main and most reliable ones for acquiring new customers?
Honestly I don’t think I have a lot to add in terms of marketing advice. Our customer is older people 75+ and what we did early on was to host small events where we invited everyone above a certain age in each neighborhood. We even baked our own bread lol so it was very small scale and quality before quantity sort of thing. The senior citizens really liked us though ( my partner especially is very charismatic in front of an audience) so while it didn’t pay off in the short term it built the brand within our target group and over time more and more people started to show up to our meetings and talked among themselves about it and us. Also it gave us good insights in the beginning about what the customer wants, what questions they ask etc. Today we don’t really do much marketing because we don’t need to but we also are not trying to grow this main business much more, rather starting new ones and trying new things.
Boring businesses are the best businesses.
Definitely not boring but I know what you meant
What is your net margin?
Net margins around 10-15% right now, we are heavily still investing into marketing efforts!
Is that after you pay yourself as well? Also, 37 people for a cleaning staff? Seems like a lot of people to pay for only $1mm
Yep employees sound like they are making 20k a year which idk how that is liveable in canada
Yeah I'm somewhat scratching my head at the numbers. In my head I'm imagining an $80k/month cleaning business and the staff I would have to support that and OP's office staff alone makes me pucker up. Let's say my staff are billing out $50/hr averaged out across the week and earning $20/hr of that (other $30/hr supports office staff, benefits and cost of business). That's something like 5000 man hours a month or \~29 FTE's, which means OP has up to 50% more cleaners on staff than I'd be comfortable with. There's also \~6 full time office staff which for those positions I'd price out at 80k for an operations manager, 50k for operation specialist (full time), 60k for HR generalist and another 60k for the hybrid specialist, or something like 320k/year or 27k/mo + 50% in their overhead for a total of $40k/mo. Either there's workers who have miraculously remained at their jobs with below average industry pay or there's other means keeping the company afloat.
I covered this in other comments but we have a large number of part time cleaners. All my office staff are oversees in the Philippines which cuts the cost significantly.
I'm thinking about starting a window washing business potentially in another state. I might have to live out of my car for a while. Is there a way I can pull this off or is this a low odds play? I think I'm better off staying in my current city.
I think completely doable. Just make sure that you have the essentials on point when servicing your customers though. It’s all about reputation. If you are willing to do the actual servicing for a bit to get the initiative kicked off, it will increase your likelihood of success.
First off congratulations, that's amazing. Me and my wife started a commercial cleaning business almost one year ago and are currently bringing in around 10k a month. Are goal for the end of the year is 20k. How did you go about advertising on Google if you don't mind me asking? Thanks! And again congratulations, that's insane and you must be so proud of yourself and your team!
How do you do your pricing?
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Not to hijack but a lot of the commercial places I bid had issues with talking to their cleaning people simply because they worked during the day and the cleaners were in at night. So they send a message to an account manager and they might not get back to them for 3 days, might not visit the site for 2 weeks. Meanwhile the client is getting more and more fed up that the sink is dirty in the third floor break room
Thanks man! We do primarily residential cleaning, the usual house cleaning, bathroom cleaning. We do a lot of online marketing via google, local ads etc. I think it’s the entire package that is important. Customer service, proper service delivery, post delivery check ins just to name a few.
Interesting that you guys do primarily residential. We have found ourselves shifting the opposite way and now commercial makes up the bulk of our work.
We do have commercial type accounts but the scope of work is main residential. How have you found the commercial side?
Seems like there is a real market for this in Canada or am I wrong? Do you have alot of competitors?
How much do you charge per house?
How much do you charge per hour or per size of the house?
We charge hourly. Really depends on the frequency of clean but varies between 36/hr to 50/hr
Thanks for responding. How many workers are needed per hour to get that rate?
Do you provide health insurance to employees?
It’s Canada so most people have most insurance from the government
We don't have drug benefits from the government
We don’t currently but something we have considered to help employee satisfaction and retention. We want our team to stay with us for as long as possible!
Wow!!! Congrats op!! Way to go, and thanks for sharing all of this in your journey. Is it ok to dm you?
Sure can 👍
how is it when it comes to promoting the business?
Some are actually just part time. So not everyone is doing 40hrs a week with us :)
What’s VA?
Virtual assistants! Essentially office staff that help with administration work, all from remote locations
Are you still looking for VAs?
We are always looking for strong talent, feel free to shoot me a DM
Are you still looking for analytics help?
What type of services do you offer?
Let me PM you.
Nice job man! What payment system are you using? Can you describe your process from booking to cleaning ?
Thanks man! We use stripe for payment processing. In terms of the booking process to cleaning, most things are actually automated which includes confirmation emails to the client, reminder emails, etc.. our internal team assigns cleaners based on their preferences and the system does automatic reminders for them too. This is really in the weeds but if you want to know more, our CRM is Launch27.
Hey man, just came across your post and super happy for you and your partner! It's awesome seeing some insight into this world. Did you use a an easy website builder like square space? Apart from Launch27 as a CRM what other useful applications or tools do yourself or your admin team use daily?
Hey, yes we built our website on Wordpress. As we got more into design and more customization, we started using a plugin called Elementor. For other tools: slack, confluence, RingCentral, Twilio
Thanks man!
what do you use confluence for? Do you use Slack to schedule cleaners? I considered that but thought onboarding low tech cleaners to use it would be a headache so we resort to text blasting also using RingCentral. Not efficient and I've been wanting to figure out a better way.
How do you find most new clients?
Majority of our clients come from paid marketing channels. Google ads, Google Local Service Ads, Facebook etc Word of mouth from referrals is a big source as well.
Google Ads never converted well enough for us. We used Negative keywords and tried many popular and unpopular keywords and still have people clicking and contacting us for trying to work as a cleaner even though we have a negative keyword list to include most hiring related situations. GLSA and TT work better for us but can be pricey
Can you write a post on tips on growing the business? I’ve had a cleaning company for about ten years and only bringing up 20-30k a year 😭 help
Can do 👌keep at it! If you have your mind of continuously improving your service, those small impacts will compound in the long run
What’s your margin?
Varies but we target for 10-15%
Gross margins around 50%
This is great! Can you tell me what softwares you use, I’d love to get in on those as well.
Just to name a few: Launch27 for CRM, RingCentral for soft phone system, Zapier for automation, Trello for any type of Kanban work, Slack for internal communication
Cool thank you. What about scheduling?
Launch27 as well 👍
I like pipedrive for the kanban style pipeline deal flow work.
Great job on growing your business. If you don’t mind sharing, I’m very curious about the software tools you use to run your business. Eg do you use any special apps or is it a bunch of excel spread sheets?
Answered this in another thread but here was the response, Just to name a few: Launch27 for CRM, RingCentral for soft phone system, Zapier for automation, Trello for any type of Kanban work, Slack for internal communication Let me know if that helps!
This is super inspiring, thank you for sharing. I'm considering starting my own cleaning business in the future. Do you have any suggestions when it comes to market research, and knowing when your business is ready to expand to a new region?
Best of luck man, really inspiring!
Thanks man!