Starting A Home Based House Cleaning Business

House cleaning is in big demand at the moment and it will continue to be in demand over the coming years. The reason being is that peoples' lifestyles have changed and more and more people are turning to house cleaning services to help free up some of their time.

Why not get in on the act now, take advantage of this demand, and start profiting from your own home-based house cleaning business

Below are the main points you need to know to start-up as an Independent Cleaner.

Choose a Business Name

For advertising purposes you really should give your cleaning service a name. It could just be your own name, i.e. 'Joan Walter's House Cleaning' or you could give it a more generic name i.e. 'Your Sparkly House'. Well, you get the idea anyway!

Having a business name forms an identity for your business. If you are serious about making a profit and an income from this, then you need to take your little business seriously and it all starts with a name.

Choose Your Territory & Customers

You need to know who your customers are going to be and where they live. You might not have your own transport, so this will have to be taken into consideration. If you have a car then you will be able to travel further a field and be able to do more cleans per day.

It would be sensible if you targetted people near where you live if you don't have your own transport. But you will also need to identify if the people in your area have the money to pay for a cleaner.

So it is important to find out which potential customers can afford to hire a cleaner. You also need to know if there are enough of these premium customers within a certain proximity of each other? Ideally you would want as many customers as close to each other as possible. This way you can do more cleans per day and not lose too much time traveling from one customer to another.

Set-Up Costs

As an Independent Cleaner, there is very little you need to buy when starting a home business. Most Independent Cleaners tend to use the cleaning products and equipment of their customers. So you won't need to buy any cleaning products. This is the main reason why you will make a healthy profit!

The following are what you will probably have to spend some money on:

o A tabard/apron
o Advertising
o Travelling costs

Pricing

You need to set yourself a price structure. The best way to do this is to ring around the local cleaners in your Yellow Pages and find out what they are charging. You can also get this information from your local job center.

You can then set your hourly rate in proportion with your competitors. Whether you choose to undercut them, charge the same, or set your prices slightly higher is totally up to you.

Advertising

If you don't carry out advertising activities, then know one will know about your cleaning service. The best and cheapest way to do this is to create small flyers and to put them directly into your potential customers' mailbox.

Simply type up your flyer in a word processing document, or get somebody to do this for you. Try and put at least two flyers on one page. Take these your local library or wherever has a photocopier. Get them copied as many times as you can afford.

Put your flyers out by the hundreds if you can. You will be surprised at how quickly this actually takes. You never know, you could have your first phone call as you approach your drive.

In addition to flyers, depending on your budget, advertise your cleaning service in the Yellow Pages. If you cannot afford this from the onset, once you start making some money you can then think about placing an advert then.

Expanding

Once you are well on your way of having a full, jam-packed diary you might want to think about expanding your cleaning business. By now you will be beaming with confidence of what you have accomplished all by yourself. So thinking about hiring a cleaner to help you expand should not be too daunting.

Put an ad in your local newspaper advertising for a cleaner. Once you have chosen a satisfactory candidate take him/her with you on your cleaning rounds for him/her to get used to your cleaning methods and techniques.

Once you are happy and confident that he/she can go and clean on their own, you can then either have some free time to yourself or double your customer base.

Once you are totally confident with managing cleaning staff there is no reason why you can't hire more cleaners.