Why write a business plan?  Your bank, and many customers, will ask for it.

The purpose of this article is more to help you think about developing a business plan through understanding what it entails generally – for detailed information on how to make a business plan for home cleaning services, start by reading this article, then pick up something more in-depth.

There are two good ways to gain in-depth knowledge of how to write a business plan. You could check out an idiot’s guide or similar publication from the library, or find a reputable online guide geared toward exactly what you’re doing. This kind of material will have details about each section I describe below, and should be kept pretty up-to-date. There probably isn’t any “idiot’s guide to writing a cleaning business plan”, but a generic guide to how to write a business plan will work. Check out a guide that was published within the last year. This will give the publisher the best opportunity to give you information about banks’ general lending policies, which change regularly.

Prioritize your time when you prepare a business plan. Don’t spend forever sweating about what are good cleaning business names and which ones sound corny. Spend more time thinking about your target market and sales strategy. Here’s a general outline of what you’ll need to eventually have in your hand when you walk in the bank.

The 13 elements of a complete home cleaner’s business plan:

Executive Summary – short couple of paragraphs that answer WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and WHY. Don’t fuss too much over including target market information unless it’s a really gimmicky kind of a thing, like a cleaning company for retired doctors.

Objectives – What do you plan to do. If you plan to clean houses, say it. Organize your objectives into concrete bullet-point items. It can be obvious, like, objective one, make a company, objective two, get clients, objective three, make the system sustainable and profitable.

Mission – Like the objective section, but different. Here you can sound a little passionate. Believe in yourself, but don’t deliver an over-the-top inspirational speech. Don’t worry about being a little redundant or obvious. Just don’t be long-winded. Explain your business acumen or professional philosophy.

Company Summary – Describe who will owns the business. Describe projected start-up costs in a table. Be very detailed in this table. Spend a lot of time trying to consider every variable. In the meeting with the banker, if they ask you “How much will you spend on computers?” you should be able to point to a table. If they ask you “What do you plan to spend the most on in the second month?” then you should point to the table’s second column, represents the second month, and point to an individual cell probably containing the word “advertising”.

Services – Explain who you’ll target as far as demographics, and what you mean when you say you’ll clean their houses. For example, “We will target upper-middle class families with two incomes, and we will offer to deep clean their bathrooms, kitchens, organize their garage, etc.” Mention any selling points you would to customers, like, “We’ll use only eco-friendly chemicals”.

Market analysis – Research and describe your findings. Who’s spending on house cleaning. Where do they live. How much do they pay for the service. Research different groups of potential buyers. Be methodical about how you research, and explain how you did the research in the research.

Advertising – Describe your advertising methods and how much they’re going to cost you. Say you’ll try several different methods of low-budget advertising before isolating the most successful method and spending more on that one. Be crafty with how you’ll spend – everything can be an experiment. When in business, record your advertising experiment findings as methodically as you can possibly imagine. How much did you spend on what, when, and how do you know whether or not that worked to get you customers.

Competition – Again, research and describe your findings. A thoughtful competition section is critical to a successful business plan. Who will you be competing with. Display the competition, including rates, location, and selling gimmicks in a table. When in doubt, use tables and charts.

Competitive Edge Summary – Based on the above two points, describe how you’ll still be able to get business, or how you’ll take business away from those competitors.

Sales Strategy – How will you turn phone calls into sales? How will you bid work? Why is your sales strategy an especially good one?

Sales Forecast – You should definitely use a table for this one. Months on the x axis and the y axis should have many different sections. Different rows for different client segment groups. Google “sales forecast in a business plan” and see if you can find pictures of tables people have come up with. This is a good way to learn.

Milestones – What are going to be important milestones for the evolution of your company? Try “establishment of base of operations”, “deployment of advertising campaigns”, “hiring of employee”, etc.

Management Summary – Especially if you plan to have employees, talk about you, as the owner, and your history as a co-worker or manager. Describe your work history in the cleaning industry, if you have it. Kind of a resume section.

Personnel Plan – If you’ll have them, how many employees will you have, when, how will you train them, what will you pay them, how will you ensure quality of their work. Think like a boss.

You’ll need to have well-reasoned number figures arranged in more tables when you’re writing a business plan. These will tell the potential financier what you expect to make, what you expect to lose, what you’ll need in order to break even, and more. Best to turn to your book, or look through another sample business plan. Don’t hesitate, it’s easier than it looks. It’s like filling in the blanks. Everyone should try to make a business plan someday, if only as a learning exercise.

It’s not the hardest thing in the world to spot what’s dirty and make it clean again. Sure, some people seem to be blind in that special way where it seems like there’s something wrong with their head that’s preventing them from noticing what’s obvious. Some stroke victims, when recovering from their experience, experience blindness to just a certain kind of thing, say, the banana in the refrigerator sitting clearly in front of their face when they’ve spent five minutes looking for it. Unfortunately, roommates, spouses, and children the world over seem to experience a psychological blindness not caused by a brain hemorrhage when it comes to finding and removing the dirty buildup from everyday human existence.

Lots of People can Clean a House

Whether you’re the rain man of cleaning apartments, or you simply are willing to take the time it takes to think logically about what gets dirty and where, you can probably handle cleaning someone’s home. In the small house cleaning business, the cream rises to the top in the things that are done without gloves on. To win the war and not just the battle, the maid service owner must do things right all throughout the process. In order to succeed at one particular cleaning job, taking two hours on one particular day, the cleaning business owner must do things right the day before, the hour before on the day of the job, and the day after the job has been completed. That’s three critical moments of success – not naturally separated like that, but for the purpose of this article we’ll cut them into three and talk about each one.

1. The day before the job – aka Getting the Work – aka Marketing

Know your market. Not just the upper middle class people who can afford to have someone stop by and clean their house once a week because they’re too busy to do it themselves. These are the most commonly thought of employers of maids, but they’re certainly not the only ones. Think also about people trying to get their deposit back from a rental property. Everybody needs to clean an apartment or house they’re vacating, and everyone wants their deposit back. If they’re busy and they procrastinated, paying a maid $100 dollars in order to get a $500 deposit back is an obviously sound investment. Market to a particular kind of customer.

 

2. On the job – aka Customer Service – aka The Front End

 

Bad manners, unfriendly demeanor, offendable – these are all common complaints about maids which can be found through a simple search on Yelp or Google Reviews. Believe it or not, the overall cleanliness of the house or apartment is much less commonly remarked upon in these feedback forums. That’s probably because most maids can clean well enough. The above and beyond – the reference-earning service happens through absolutely perfect customer service. Make sure you know what this means before you get into this business. It’s not easy for everyone, and it’s not always obvious. Take learning customer service seriously.

 

3. After the job – aka The Follow Up – aka The Brown Nose

 

Ok, ok, so brown nose has a negative connotation. Maybe it’s too strong. But maybe not. People love to be doted on. Especially when it comes to working with someone who entered their home. Say it to yourself, enter a home, until you realize the gravity of what those words mean. Starting a small home cleaning business is somewhat like starting a surgery practice – you’re entering the insides of peoples lives, where they have no privacy, and where you’re being trusted to do things right. It’s a big deal. So call the clients up afterward, ask them how they would rate the service, what you could do better, and so on. DON’T ask, “Will you recommend me to your friends?” because that sounds too selfish. Make the follow up call all about the customer and be ready to take a little criticism. You will learn what to do better, and increase customer satisfaction. It could lead to a call-back or word-of-mouth reference.

 

 

Starting your own business is an intimidating undertaking – particularly if you don’t have a whole lot of experience in the field you’re entering. Getting paid a high hourly working for yourself sounds like an excellent deal, but what does it really entail? How do you look and work like a real professional if you haven’t run a show yourself before? Some people might say that you can’t do it without knowing what you’re getting into beforehand, but we would disagree. Even someone who hasn’t cleaned houses professionally can start their own business – and they can start working in under 24 hours if they do it right. If you’re a savvy people-person and have a little business acumen flowing in your blood, you’re good to go. Here’s what you do.

Study: Learn the House Cleaning Business

Study the process and techniques involved in cleaning a house. Read every review and piece of feedback you can get your hands on online. Watch YouTube videos published by cleaning services that describe their process. There’s an order of events involved in cleaning a house that follows a very logical pattern. If you’re even considering starting a house cleaning business, you certainly know a thing or two about what makes a house dirty, and what makes it clean. Start by cleaning high and work your way down. Think like a clean-freak, not a bachelor. Reading through the online reviews of maid services on Yelp.com or google reviews is probably the best way to gain free, infinite insight into the world of cleaning houses. Customers will be very specific. They’ll say, for instance, “The maid forgot to clean the shower curtain”, and, by reading that, you’ll remember the shower curtain. They’ll say, “The maid worked too slowly, and reacted badly when I told him I needed to leave to go somewhere, and could we reschedule”, and you’ll have learned a little about how not to treat a customer on the job.

Tools: Probably Already Under Your Sink

Buy cleaning equipment. Most of the things you need will probably already be sitting under your kitchen sink. We won’t go into the list here, but our ebook contains a complete list of items that will come in handy – some of which are commonly overlooked. Try calling a maid service from another city and asking for a little advice. Maybe you’ll want to pay them to act as a consultant. Just be sure you’re not stuck having to leave the job to pick up something you forgot.

Marketing: Key to Starting a Small House Cleaning Business

Plan a marketing strategy and start it as soon as possible. Create fliers engineered to a certain kind of potential client in a certain area (read more about that here) – you do this by knowing your market. Then, create a spiffy craigslist ad and publish it. This will provide you very effective free marketing.

 

Lastly, in order to get your first “pilot” customer – the customer you work for in order to get a feel for the way the home cleaning business is, and whether or not you really want to get into it seriously – you’ll need to bid competitively. You might need to work for peanuts, or you might even need to take a loss. This field experience is important. It is a way to gain you positive references, word-of-mouth advertising, and, most importantly, it will improve your skills as a home cleaner.

 

Learn the details about how to start a small home cleaning business in under 24 hours by reading our free blog or buying our bestselling ebook.

So you clean houses. Is that all you have to say to a potential customer you run into on an elevator? Make sure it isn’t. Craft and practice a short story, called an “elevator pitch”, which is under a minute in length and which convinces the person hearing it that your cleaning service is the one they should choose. When someone asks “What do you do?”, you better be ready to hit them with all you’ve got. You don’t say, “I clean houses”. If you did, you’d fade into the dozens of other similar services and lost potential business.

Start By Doing This

Answer the following four questions, spending less than two sentences on each answer.

1. What service do you offer?
2. What are the problems that you solve?
3. What makes you different?
4. Why does anyone care?

Your answers, if you can manage to keep them to-the-point and brief, will form a condensed story – one that the listener will remember.

Here’s a possible pitch that could come from somebody beginning a house cleaning service. This pitch contains the answers to the four questions above.

One Possible Pitch

“I’m the founder of Organic Interior Detail, an earth-conscious maid service which deep cleans your home while being conscious of the life inside it. Other maid services ask you to prepare your home beforehand, to keep an eye on belongings to prevent theft, and that you stay at home for the duration of the cleaning. We don’t require preparation, and we’re completely bonded. You’ll love our cleaners, and you’ll have to same ones every time. We build real relationships with our customers. We use non-toxic chemicals, and dote on your plants, children, and pets. Our cleaners all come from backgrounds of horticulture and child care. This makes for a housekeeping service that performs upkeep on multiple levels – not just for your things, but for the living things inside the home.”

The first sentence needs to be a publishable headline under 25 words in length. The headline itself should leave no questions about what it is that you do. Most small business owners have trouble making product descriptions which are succinct, catchy, unique, and easy to remember. Read the first sentence of your pitch and make sure it’s headline worthy. If it’s hard for you to get into one sentence what it is you do, you’ve got some rethinking ahead of you.

Keeping it Short Pays Off

Ideally, the 60 seconds of attention you can expect from an average listener won’t be filled with just a pitch. If you can get it shorter, you can give them a moment to absorb on reflect on the information you’ve delivered. At that point, you should be ready to deliver an anecdote or illustrative example which adds color to your story by providing history. People love stories. Especially funny ones.

Grab their attention, and keep hold of it. Have tried and true means of doing this within the first 60 seconds of talking with someone, and that person will want to hear you tell them more.

When we googled, “house cleaning Portland”, this is the map that came up beside the search results.

Intimidating. Looks like just about every tidy person in Portland has already set up some kind of maid service business. Just under the surface of the grim picture google offers to the aspiring self-employed maid is a more complicated, but hopeful picture. We studied cleaning businesses advertisements, customer feedback, and home cleaning business models, and found a few things you should know about before you start a cleaning service. Here are three tips that will greatly help you set up a cleaning business that pays.

1. Make a marketing plan and stick to it.

There are a myriad of ways you could get your name out there, and all of them have competition. Short of writing your name in the sky with a hired airplane, there will always be the name of somebo
dy else’s house cleaning business beside yours. One solid tactic is direct marketing. Spend five bucks on fliers and a couple eight hour days dropping them at doorsteps near where you live. When you go into business for

yourself, treat every day like you were in a normal workplace. It takes major, disciplined time commitment to make it work, especially when it comes to marketing. Your flier should look good and must contain the human element (see the next section). The flier should mention that you’re a LOCAL cleaning business, and, depending on your neighborhood, it should have “printed on recycled paper” on the bottom or have a “support our troops” flag in one of the corners. Know who you’re trying to clean for, and target them. Cleaning flyers are perhaps the best way to get clean up work when you’re just beginning. This marketing method can be tailored to the aspiring maid who wants to get work doing business cleaning or foreclosure cleanup. All it takes is creative thinking and a willingness to experiment. When you make the shift to advertising your business on the internet, remember that you’re entering a much more competitive arena than the in door-to-door method. This can certainly help you get cleaning contracts, however, and becomes a necessity as your business grows. Our advice: take time to look better than the competition. Register on Yelp and similar sites, and ask your clients to give you feedback. As a matter of fact, take the time to read through all the feedback you can find on Yelp or Google Reviews before you start flyering. This will help you know what to avoid. Craigslist works if you play it right. Here are two Craigslist ads. Make yours look like the better one. It’s worth the time it takes.

 2. Sell yourself.

Among the top three highest ranked cleaning services in all the major cities we studied was at least one cleaning business that had someone’s name in the title. What this tells us is that the client really cares about who it is that’s doing the work. To succeed once you’re at the jobsite, you need to have an excellent personality. Be ready to smile through it all – whether it’s a yap dog, a toddler who insists on investigating the contents of your cleaning bucket, or an evil stepmother impersonator who follows your every step. Online feedback and solid references are what will make or break your residential house cleaning business. Before you even get to the jobsite, you’ll have to use this personality to get calls requesting work. Your flyer should contain your picture. It doesn’t have to be a picture of you cleaning. The picture should evoke trust in the person who sees it. Why not be humorous? Take a picture of yourself smiling, wearing rubber gloves, and photoshop it into an image of the dirtiest looking place you can find on the internet. Write a little bit about yourself into the flyer. House cleaning ads without the human element are doomed to the recycle bin.

3. Find a niche and make an offer.

If you’re interested in specializing, it’s critical that you make a concrete offer. If you want to start a window cleaning business, include an average price per square foot of window in the advertisement, and advertise a special discount if someone has more than x number of windows or if they call in the springtime. If you want to start an office cleaning service, try making an offer like, “bonus upholstery deep clean” for contracts from offices over x square feet or offices that contact you in the next two weeks. Offers and promotions get people “off the fence” and make them feel like they’re getting a really good deal, whether or not you’re taking less money than you want for the work you do.

Once you’re in the door, it’s time to really turn it on. Once you know how to get cleaning contracts, you’ll have to learn how to keep them. You’ll have to learn how to turn one happy customer into two new ones. We can’t overstress the value of carefully reading customer feedback on the internet. This will give you tons of training in what is and isn’t a good way to create a satisfied customer. Bottom line: you’ve got to love what you do, and show it.

Launch a Cleaning Business in 24 hours. Guaranteed. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything you need to start your cleaning business–instructions on how to clean ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, a complete list of supplies, accounting tips, a website, a flyer template, advice from real home cleaners–were all assembled in one place? Have a look at my 24 hour crash course on how to start a home cleaning business. 100s of successful home cleaners worldwide got their start with this very course!

Regards,

Robert Keppel
Creator
The Housekeeping Blueprint

Every small business owner understands the power of advertising, but not every small business owner understands how best to advertise. As a professional home cleaner, your expertise is in understanding how to safely and effectively clean a home, not on how to create and execute effective advertisements. But, just because advertising and marketing are not your primary areas of expertise, it is still important to understand what draws customers in or pushes them away –especially when it comes to your business website. Here are the 3 most common mistakes your business website may be making right now and how you (or your webmaster) can fix them.

1. Title doesn’t include the CITY you service and the SERVICE you offer.

The internet contains billions of websites and the first place your business is going to compete with them is in the pages of Google or other search engines. The headlines that appear in search engines are actually the title of your website. If your website title doesn’t give your potential customers what they need in the glance of an eye, they will never click your link, never visit your site and you’ll have no chance of ever making your pitch. The title of your site should always contain the city your company is located in, the words ‘Home Cleaning’ and your company name. This will ensure that your potential customers understand where, what and who you are, quickly and efficiently.

A perfect example of providing an accurate, informational title:

2. No photos of the owner and staff.

Customers are selective about the people they allow into their home. According to this study, subjects are twice as likely to trust someone who they can see in a photograph. Mini Maid of Louisiana does a great job of showcasing their staff on the front page

3. No coupons or specials.

Finally, when it comes to turning potential customers into paying customers, many small business websites fall short on providing an appropriate incentive for would-be-buyers. Many small businesses have sites that either offer no discounts or long term offers that never expire. People use the internet to quickly compare and contrast service providers. When a potential buyer has a choice between a business that offers a special and one that does not, they will more than likely choose the business with the discount. On the other hand, some businesses have offers that never end. These unlimited offers often come across as superficial and un-special. To effectively entice a potential customer, make sure you offer specials that have an ending date. You don’t even have to change these months. Examples might include:

• Fall Special: 15% off all initial home cleanings.
• Winter Special: Add ONE FREE ROOM to all cleanings FREE.
• Spring Special: Free refrigerator cleaning with all initial cleanings.
• Summer Special: 15% off all move-out cleanings.

Note this company’s approach to offering a special:
http://www.earthwisehousecleaning.com/Spring-Cleaning-Special.html

Take action: forward this page to your web designer.

Email photos of you and your staff. Have him/her change your title and add a special. It’s about 2 hours of work that could convert into $1000s of jobs in your future.

Launch a Cleaning Business in 24 hours. Guaranteed. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything you need to start your cleaning business–instructions on how to clean ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, a complete list of supplies, accounting tips, a website, a flyer template, advice from real home cleaners–were all assembled in one place? Have a look at my 24 hour crash course on how to start a home cleaning business. 100s of successful home cleaners worldwide got their start with this very course!