Choosing the menu of services your house cleaning business will offer will determine who your competitors are, what costs you will be handling, and how attractive your company will be to other clients. For example, you know that you will leave out carpet cleaning, which is a more specialized service which expands your competitors to carpet cleaning businesses as well as general home cleaners. Think through the following areas when choosing your services.
•The Market s Needs Look at the specific needs of the customers in your target market based on the location, climate, demographics and types of homes in the area. If the area is prone to flooding, then cleaning services for flood damaged basements may be the best choice. If the community has an elevated number of families, services associated with cleaning up after children may be needed. If the town experiences a lot of turnover of homeowners or renters, deep cleaning services preparing for sales or new tenants may be in high demand.
•The Advertisement Selling to businesses presents marketing challenges very different from selling to consumers. Mass advertising techniques won t work as well, as businesses engage in more focused searches for vendors when needs arise. When crafting an online campaign using either search engine optimization or pay per click advertising, choose keywords which residential cleaning services are not competing for as well. By always including words like office , store , commercial , janitor , and janitorial , you will avoid paying for clicks by those who are looking for home cleaning or maid services. Your competitors are still likely using the yellow pages and you should at least purchase a basic listing. The point is to be associated with the top competition each time businesses open up their phone directory to look for cleaners.
•The Cost of Services Some services will be more costly to offer based on the skills needed, if you have to hire or train more qualified workers, the time involved, or special equipment required. If your strategy is to provide general cleaning services to as many customers as possible, you may forgo specialty services like smoke and fire damage, post construction cleaning, or organization services. However, if you focus on special services that competitors don t do or aren t skilled at, you may be able to build additional revenue streams in those areas.
•The Expected As you survey the competition, note if there are certain services they all provide. If they are listed everywhere, these may be necessary for you to offer to be able to compete successfully, even if they are less profitable services. In those cases you just have to bite the bullet and seek to make up for this with higher profit offerings you can up sell customers to.
In opening a cleaning business, you have to take into consideration a lot of things especially the management and the market value of your services. It is imperative to attract more clients because your services are of quality services and affordable, but at the same time, does not compromise your costs in terms of providing your cleaning services.