Free Web Sites      Free Email      Free e-Business

Free Checking

Free
Bill Paying

Free
Wire
Transfers

HOW TO START YOUR OWN HOUSE AND APARTMENT CLEANING SERVICE

As more and more women seek jobs outside the home to supplement the family income, the opportunity arises for you to set up a lucrative business that can help both the working mother and you. House and apartment cleaning services are gaining in popularity. These are service businesses for which the demand is growing. Cleaning services used to serve only the affluent--homes of the wealthy people where women didn't want to be bothered with the drudgery of household cleaning, and had the money to pay someone to do it for them. But times have changed, and today the market includes many middle income families in every residential area across the entire country. This is a business that has grown fast, and has great wealth building potential.

A cleaning service is generally associated with women. However, men are finding that they can organize, start, and operate very profitable home and apartment cleaning businesses just as well as women. It+s an ideal business for any truly ambitious person who wants a business of his or her own, especially for those who must begin with limited funds. Actually, you can start this business right in your own neighborhood, using your own equipment, and begin to make a profit from the first day.

Many enterprising homemakers are already doing this kind of work on a small scale as an extra income producing endeavor. There's a growing need for this service. Organizing your efforts into a business producing $50,000 to $100,000 a year is quite possible, and you can get started for $100 or so. By using your profits, you can expand and increase your business, ultimately hiring additional employees or even creating a new franchise operation.

Absolutely no experience is required to begin a home cleaning service. Everyone knows how to dust the furniture, vacuum carpets, make the beds, clean up the kitchen, and carry out the trash. But you must ask yourself if making a house clean and bright is important and uplifting work. If you look on it as degrading or as drudgery, don't involve yourself in this business. Putting things in top shape should be a satisfying task for you. You need to have an instinct for details. And adding those nice little touches that the average client would never think will make a bigger impact than simply leaving a clean and tidy home for them to come home to in the evening.

Starting from scratch, you+ll need a telephone with an answering machine and an appointment book. You+ll also need an advertising flyer, such as the one illustrated below. It would be best to develop the flyer on a personal computer and have it printed on a laser printer. However, if you have strong artistic ability or are good at calligraphy, you can draw it out by hand. Either way, it's going to be your first advertising endeavor, and will be used to bring in that first customer for you.

If you're doing the layout on a computer, you+ll probably have access to a variety of type styles and a collection of clipart for computer users. All you'll need to do is chose a font (typeface) that is the right size, type in your text, add a picture or two, and you're ready to print out the finished product. Working by hand may take a little longer, but the original artwork can be used by your local printshop to produce a final flyer of the same quality as any computer and laser printer. It would be a good idea to visit your stationery store to pick up a pad of "fade out" graph paper, a couple of sets of transfer (ruboff) letters, a glue stick, and a clipart book.

Take your art materials home and clear off your kitchen table. Take a sheet of graph paper and temporarily tape the corners down on the table. With a pencil and a ruler, mark a rectangle five inches wide by six inches deep along the lines of the graph paper. This will be the overall size of your flyer when it's finished. Look for a clipart piece depicting a harried housewife engrossed with cleaning tools or a picture of a beautiful home exterior. Cut this piece out, and with your glue stick paste it in the upper lefthand corner of your rectangle.

Next, take your transfer letters and make the headline: "HOME AND APARTMENT CLEANING." Then, type out the body of the message on ordinary white typing paper, or write it out by hand in an easytoread calligraphic style. Be sure to use a relatively new ribbon if typing the message out, preferably a black carbon ribbon, and use upper case letters. Cut this strip out, and paste it onto the graph paper, centered just below your headline. Use some transfer letters that are about twice as large as your typewriter type, and paste up the action part of your message: "For details, call Sue: 1234567." Cut out a couple of border flourishes from your clipart book, paste them under your action line, and you're ready to take it to the printer.

In essence, you have a professional advertising "billboard." You can check around in your area, especially with the advertising classes at your local colleges, but generally they'll do no better than you can do on your own, using the instructions we've just given you, and they'll charge you $50 to $100.

Once you have this advertising flyer completed, take it to a nearby quick print shop and have about 200 copies printed. You should be able to get two copies on a standard 8" x 11" sheet, and running 100 copies on a high speed copier should cost under $10. For just a few cents more, have the printer cut them in half with his machine cutter, making you 200 copies of the advertising flyer. Take these flyers along with a box of thumbtacks, and put them up on all the free bulletin boards you can find in grocery stores, laundromats, beauty salons, office building lounges, cafeterias, post offices, and wherever else such announcements are allowed.

When a prospective customer calls, have your appointment book and a pencil handy. Be friendly and enthusiastic. Explain what you do--everything from changing the beds to vacuuming, dusting, polishing the furniture, cleaning the bathroom, to washing the dishes and the laundry. Or, everything except the dishes and the laundry--whatever you have decided on as your policy. When they ask how much you charge, simply tell them ten to twenty dollars an hour, but for a firm cost quote you'll need to see the home and make a detailed estimate for them. Then, without much of a pause, ask if 4:30 this afternoon would be convenient for them, or if 5:30 or later would be better. You must pointedly ask if you can come to make your cost proposal at a certain time, or the decision may be put off and you may end up without a sale.

As soon as you have an agreement on the time to make your cost proposal and have marked it in your appointment book, ask for the client's name, address, and telephone number. Jot this information down on a 3" x 5" card, along with the date and the notation, Prospective Customer. File this card in a permanent card file. Save these cards, because there are literally hundreds of ways to turn this prospect file into real cash once you+ve accumulated a sizeable number of names, addresses, and phone numbers.

When you go to see your prospect in person, always be on time. A couple of minutes early won't hurt you, but a few minutes late will definitely be detrimental to your closing the sale. Always be well groomed, and dress as a successful business owner. Be confident and sure of yourself. Be knowledgeable about what you can do, as well as understanding of the prospect's needs and wants. Do not smoke, even if invited by the prospect, and never accept a drink--even coffee--until after you have a signed contract in your briefcase. Once you've made the sale, the best thing is to shake hands with your new customer, thank him, and leave. A little small talk after the sale is appropriate, but becoming too friendly is not. You create an impression, and preserve it, by maintaining a businesslike relationship.

When you go to make your cost estimate, take along a ruled tablet such as those used by elementary school students, carbon paper, a calculator, and your appointment book. Some people find it easier to work with a clipboard and ordinary blank paper with carbon. Later on, you may want to have general checklists printed up for each room in the house, with blank lines or space for special instructions. Whatever you use, it's important to appear methodical, thorough, and professional while leading the prospect through the specifics of what he or she wants you to take care.

"Now, you want the carpet vacuumed and all the furniture dusted, and those two end tables, the coffee table, and the piano polished as well, I assume?"

Simply identify the specific room at the top of the sheet of paper, then lead your prospect through the cleaning steps of each room, covering everything in it. Your implications of putting everything in "ready for company" shape will cause the customer to forget about the cost and hire you to do a complete job. Always have carbon paper under each piece of paper you're writing on, and always look around each room one more time before leaving it. Then ask the prospect if he or she can think of any special instructions to note for that room.

Finally, when you've gone through each room in the house with the prospect, come back to the kitchen and sit down at the table. Take out your calculator and add up the time you estimate each job in each room will take to complete. Total the time for each room. Be liberal, thinking that if you can do the carpet job in fifteen minutes, it will usually take the ordinary person thirty minutes. Convert the total minutes for each room into hours and tenths of hours per room. Add the totals for each room to arrive at your total hours to clean the entire house.

Talk with your customer briefly, wondering how she can ever find the time to get everything done at home, especially when holding down a fulltime job. A little bit of small talk, a quick mental evaluation of the customer's ability to pay, plus your knowledge that you can get everything done in four hours (instead of the six it would take most people) and you summarize by saying:

"Well, Mrs. Johnson, you've certainly got enough routine cleaning work to keep you busy all day every day of the week! I don't know how you do it, but anyway, we can take this whole problem off your shoulders, save you time, and actually give you time to relax. We'll do it on a regular basis, every other week for $90 per month, or one single time for $55."

"I can well imagine how tired you are when you get home from work. If you're at all like me, there are times when, faced with all this housework, you want to run away someplace and hide. Now, we'll take care of everything for you--keep the house spic and span, ready for company, and allow you to forget about housecleaning chores--and for a lot less than it's costing you now in time, work, and worry. And we guarantee that our work will more than satisfy you. So, would you like to try our cleaning service one time for $55 or do you want to save $10 a call and let us take over all these chores for you on a regular basis?"

Here you begin finding a place in your appointment book, and tell her, "Actually, I have an opening at 8:30 on Tuesday morning. We could come in every other Tuesday at 8:30, clean the whole house and have it done before you get home from work."

The customer agrees that 8:30 on Tuesdays will be fine. Then let her know that you prefer to be payed at the end of each cleaning session, or on a regular monthly basis. Point out to her that by engaging you on a monthly basis, she picks up a free house cleaning every three months. This gives you a steady income, and allows the customer to feel as though she is getting a bargain in return.

Now that you have your first customer, you want to fill in every day of the week, each week of every month with regular jobs. Once you have one week of each month filled with regular jobs, it will be time for you to expand. Expansion means growth, involving people working for you, more jobs to sell, and greater profits. Don't let it frighten you, for you have gained experience by starting gradually. After all--your aim in starting a business of your own was to make money, wasn't it? And expanding means more helpers so you don't have to work yourself to death!

You can permanently operate this business quite successfully from the comfort of your home if you so choose. All you'll ever need is a telephone, a desk, and a file cabinet. As soon as you possibly can, recruit and hire other people to do the work for you. The first people you hire should be those to handle the cleaning work. The best plan is to hire people to work in teams of two or three--two for jobs not including dishwashing and laundry--three for those that do. You can start these people at an hourly rate several dollars above the minimum wage. This will insure that you get a high quality employee, yet still make a substantial profit from each job. Train the team to complete every job assignment in two hours or less (four total working hours).

Each team should have an appointed team leader responsible for the quality and overall completeness of each job assigned to that team. The team might operate in the following manner: one person cleans the bathroom, makes the beds, and carries out the laundry, while the other person dusts and polishes the furniture, and does the vacuuming. On jobs where you do the laundry and the dishes, the third person can pick up the laundry and get it started, and then do the dishes and clean the kitchen. By following a set pattern, your work will be more efficient and the complete job will take a lot less time. However, it is important that each person you hire understand that the success of the business depends on the "crew" doing as many complete jobs as they can handle each day--not on how much they get paid per hour working for you.

Your team leaders will check with you each afternoon for the next day's work assignments, and gather the team together--complete with cleaning equipment and material--on the next day. Your team leader should be supplied with a stack of "handout" advertising flyers to pass around the neighborhood or within the apartment building before leaving each job site. Also, provide team members with a good supply of business cards in order to advertise your services to others with whom they come in contact. The only other form of advertising you should buy is a display ad in the yellow pages of your telephone directory.

Probably the biggest timewaster in this business will be the travel from job to job. For this reason, it's important to spread advertising circulars to the neighboring homes when you're doing a job, or to the apartments on the same floor when you're in an apartment building. As the organizer and person assigning teams to jobs, it will behoove you to locate, line up, and assign jobs as close together as possible. Keep up your efforts to cut the time it takes for your crews to travel from one job to the next. Work at lining up jobs all in one block or in one apartment building.

Your equipment needs will be minimal: several types of cleaning solutions for different surfaces, cleaning and polishing rags, mops, a couple of plastic buckets, and furniture polishes. Many people will have the necessary cleaning materials already in their homes, including vacuum cleaner, soaps, and cleansers. However, it wouldn't hurt to have these item available just in case you get a job in a home or an apartment without these tools. As your business grows, you'll be able to purchase all your needs at larger discounts, increasing your profits as you decrease your costs.

One of the most important aspects of this business is asking your customers to refer other prospects to you. This will happen, of course, as a result of your giving fast, dependable service. You might even set up a promotional notice on the back of your business card (to be left as each job is completed) offering five dollars off their next cleaning bill when they refer you to a new prospect.

Copyright 1991 by Premier Publishers, Inc, USA. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the express prior and written permission of the publisher.

Win Trips and Stuff              Free Stuff

Click here for hundreds of Free catalogs Free catalogs

Free Download PaintShop Pro Shareware