There are generally two ways people start and operate a house cleaning business:

• They decide they want to work for themselves and choose to do so by cleaning houses to earn a living.
   

• The other way people approach the venture is as a real “business”.
  In the first instance, what these folks are doing is “buying a job.” And there’s nothing wrong with that provided this is the aim. But if the intent is to make a real business out of the venture and earn more than a modest living, it means a long and often painful endeavor. They spend all their time working IN the business – so much so that they have no time to work ON their business. I call this “backing INTO the business.”

The second approach is the one that will result in the most return on your time and investment. If you invest in a cleaning franchise, the new owner’s training consists primarily of the “business” end of the business; not the physical cleaning aspect. In fact, at least one of the major franchises requires the owner to hire and bring another person to the company’s training center to learn and eventually teach others the technical issues – the owner receives NO training during this period on the actual cleaning. Personally, I don’t condone this because what if that person quits? It’s a darn good idea for the owner to know enough to be able to train his or her workers to do the job.

Having said this, how do you approach your venture as a real business?
Determine what you want to get out of the business. Don’t ask yourself, “How much money do I want to make?” – ask yourself, “How much money am I willing to earn?”  I suggest you think about this last statement because there is a HUGE difference. And it’s important to be specific. It’s not enough to generalize, like, “I want to earn a lot of money.” If you want to earn $200,000 a year (or whatever your objective is), put this number in writing and stick it on the mirror in your bathroom at home so you’ll see it each and every morning. This will give you a specific target to shoot for and to plan around.

Once you’ve determined your specific objective, now you need to form a plan on what you will have to do to earn it. This, too, must be in writing and you need to spend a fair amount of time putting your business plan together. Some people think you only need a business plan if you intend to borrow money, but this is not at all true. This will serve as your guide to reaching your objective and force you to think through all the issues such as how much capital you’ll need, what your operating costs will be, how many people you’ll need to hire and manage to reach your goal, what kind of marketing activities you will engage in, and so forth. And you need to establish time frames during which specific goals will be achieved. There’s an old proverb that says, “Few people plan to fail; most people fail to plan.”

No business plan remains static. It needs to be constantly revisited and revised in accordance with your progress. If you find that some of your assumptions were wrong, change them. If your projected labor costs are out of line, analyze the reasons why. If your marketing isn’t working the way you had planned, determine what needs to occur to improve your results. If operating costs are higher than expected, find out if you had neglected to plan for certain expenses or whether your pricing structure is too low . . . and so on. If you don’t start out with a written business plan, you’re likely to find yourself making knee-jerk reactions in a blind frenzy.

Never stop learning. Knowledge is power. Get and review all the information you can relative to managing your business successfully. Learn from your best competitors; network with other owners in the business; make good use of your ARCSI Membership and participate in conference calls, seminars and conventions sponsored by ARCSI.

Decide how you want to position your company in your market. Do you want to be known as the cheapest cleaning service in town or the most reliable and professional one? If you want to be the latter, you can’t afford to be if you position yourself as the price leader. But if you don’t deliver more than just a clean home, you won’t be able to justify charging the same as those companies that do.