Amaculate Housekeeping

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Every so often I get an email message with questions about starting up a cleaning business or how to bid for cleaning jobs. I finally got smart and decided to publish a couple of my responses. This advice does not address every issue but I do consider it fairly well thought out and hope it does you some good! Dear Sir, My wife and I have operated our business for about 25 years. 95% of the receipts come from residential cleaning - we leave the outside windows and carpet shampooing to others. The balance of our income is derived from mostly light commercial cleaning. We clean some offices and have cleaned larger businesses like auto dealerships, community centers, restaurants, etc.. Here are the important questions to ask yourself: a) How hard do I want to work? By 'hard' I mean how much stress do I want to take on and how much demanding physical labor do I want to perform. Just dealing with certain customers can be stressful enough every once in a while, hiring employees and dealing with them brings disappointments and stressful situations every so often as well. The larger you get - more employees and more customers - means you have more stress in your life but the reward of a larger income helps reduce the stress in other areas of life. The physical labor part is a serious consideration. Certain tasks are very demanding and sometimes dangerous. Stripping and rewaxing floors - unless you have invested in some 'high end' stripping and waxing machinery - is very hard work. Cleaning ceiling and walls throughout a house is very tiring. We have found that if you want your business to generate an income you can easily live with, which means enough income to pay the bills and have some to spend on things like vacations and retirement savings, will mean you will have to hire employees. They do most of the work in the field and you answer the phones, think up and implement ways to do more business and deal with the paperwork. b) How much money do I want to invest? Starting and equipping a residential housecleaning business is not very expensive in comparison to the start up costs of most businesses. We require our employees to have their own vacuum cleaners and reimburse them for the purchase of cleaning supplies. We don't have an inventory to deal with. We are very careful about the commercial jobs we take as we do not want to invest in the equipment necessary to compete on a full-time basis in the janitorial side of the business. We have done the stripping and waxing jobs and the carpet shampooing jobs (rented the equipment) but would prefer to stay away from them and leave them to specialists who have invested big bucks into equipment which reduces the amount of effort and time involved and which does a very good job. If you want to compete in the janitorial part of the market you will need to invest in some fairly expensive equipment (floor buffer(s), commercial vacuum(s) and more), learn about the proper handling of certain hazardous chemicals and be ready to put up with cleaning companies organized on a national basis with fancy, well maintained, newer equipment who pay their employees very little and are VERY price competitive.

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