How to Get Cleaning Contracts With Schools Without Past Experience
Are you looking to get more cleaning contracts? Well, schools can be a great industry to get into, and it's an industry that needs daily cleaning services. Plus, the buildings are larger, which means nice sales increases for your cleaning business. In this post, you'll learn how to get cleaning contracts with schools without past experience.
Perform background checks and improve security
When working in schools, safety is a top priority. Since children are involved, security and the background of your employees can be a deciding factor of whether or not a school will hire your cleaning company.
Make sure that you perform thorough background checks on your employees and avoid hiring those who have any criminal background that would raise red flags. Most people don't want people in their businesses with criminal backgrounds, and people certainly don't want criminals hanging around their children.
It may cost a bit more on the front end before you hire employees to perform these background checks, but it can pay you better returns down the line when you can secure better contracts with schools.
Reduce employee turnover
Another factor that is similar to this background check policy is to reduce employee turnover within your company. In order to get contracts with schools, you are going to need to show consistency within your staff.
This is another kind of security issue for them because when they see new staff members cleaning their school from week to week it is a red flag. The lower your turnover rate is, the more trustworthy your company appears.
Plus, when your turnover rate is low, that usually means your staff is better trained and able to clean the school more effectively and efficiently. This also allows you to keep your costs lower, which can save your clients money. To get cleaning contracts with schools they are going to look for consistency in the quality of the job, and a lower turnover rate can help with this.
Get customer reviews and video testimonials
Another great method to improve your chances of landing a contract with schools is to increase the social proof on your website. This means getting as many positive reviews and testimonials from your customers as possible.
When dealing with schools they need to know you have high standards and are a trustworthy business. Posting content on your site talking about this yourself only goes so far.
However, when it is your past and existing customers talking about the quality of your services it goes a long way. Setting up a review management system can help you get more positive reviews for your cleaning business.
Even if the reviews aren't from schools, it can help you to get cleaning contracts with schools as future clients.
Focus on cleaning for health
Obviously cleaning for the sake of cleaning is important for schools, but cleaning for health is an even bigger priority. Sick kids often still go to school and germs can be everywhere.
Especially in light of recent pandemic issues sweeping the world, cleaning for health is more important than ever. Getting cleaning contracts with schools can hinge on your ability to clean for health in order to keep their students and staff safe.
Outline your cleaning for health in schools process on your website so potential clients can see all that goes into your cleaning methods. You might also consider creating a services page related to cleaning for health.
For example, if you are providing a sanitizing, disinfecting, or infection control services, make a specific page for that under your services. If it isn't clear to your website visitors that you prioritize cleaning for health, it can be harder to get cleaning contracts with schools.
You should also list out any specialized equipment you use or certifications and training you have as a company. Doing this will help you build more credibility for your company, which can lead to more clients. Click here to find more resources for cleaning schools for health.
Optimize your cleaning proposal
Optimizing your cleaning proposal is another foundation you need in place to secure contracts with schools. Part of optimizing your proposal is to fully breakdown the scope of work.
Your scope of work should include things like disinfecting touchpoints and emphasize cleaning for health. Since K-12 school contracts are also often government contracts you need to make sure everything is professionally done and accurate.
Another thing to keep in mind is that typically when you are presenting your proposal for schools it may need to be presented to a board of directors. This means that you should create an individual proposal for each board member to review.
Get the necessary cleaning equipment for cleaning schools efficiently
When it comes to cleaning schools there are some unique cleaning situations you may find yourself in that require specialized equipment to maximize your efficiency. Scrubbing floors, for example, could require additional equipment.
Schools will typically have long hallways that will require a large amount of scrubbing. If you try and tackle this kind of job without proper equipment it could take forever to clean.
Check out this post to learn more about commercial floor care machines.
Another hot spot you'll need to clean often is the restrooms of schools. Some schools could house thousands of students and there may only be a handful of restrooms on campus. Restrooms can be a hot spot for bacteria and messes, so having the right cleaning equipment for restrooms is also essential.
Start small and with private or charter schools
One benefit of working in commercial cleaning compared to residential cleaning is that you have the ability to get large clients. This is also true with getting cleaning contracts with schools, but you need to start small if you hope to eventually land bigger accounts.
In many industries that you are looking to expand into you need to prove yourself first. You likely won't get a large school account if you've never worked any jobs in the education sector. The same is true for other industries like medical facilities. Here you would start with small dental and medical offices and then move up to large, multi-story medical facilities and then hospitals.
In the school setting, you could start with small private or charter schools. Once you have a few of these smaller accounts under your belt you can begin to try and compete with larger school accounts.
Start with subcontracting
Another option to get your foot in the door with contracting with schools is to start off by subcontracting.
Some schools will have an in-house cleaning staff, while others will subcontract out part of their cleaning services, such as floor care. If you can start with a small subcontracting job in a school and prove your skills, you may be able to expand into bigger jobs. And you may eventually be able to convert the entire school cleaning services to being outsourced, rather than in-house.
Once you have this initial work of subcontracting in your experience, you can then start to build on it to get other school contracts. Some of the schools that are subcontracting to you may also simply let you take on more of their facilities when you do a good job subcontracting for them.
Plus, as you do a quality job in these schools as a subcontractor you can ask for reviews and testimonials that you can add to your website. This will add further credibility to your business in the school niche.
Network in your community
Networking in your community is another great way to get contracts with schools for your cleaning business. As we talked about above, you likely are going to need to present your proposal to a board of directors for the school.
Typically, people on the board of directors of businesses and schools are active in the community as well. Many are likely to participate in organizations like the Chamber of Commerce.
Becoming a member of an organization like this can help you to spread the word that you are doing business in the local area. Some of the people at these networking events may also know people who might be on the board of schools or that are a discussion maker for getting cleaning contracts with schools.
The key to these kinds of networking groups is that you need to be active in them. Simply joining them and only showing up once is not enough to start getting quality leads.
Also, don't expect to start pitching your business on day one either. You need to work on developing relationships and work on promoting your cleaning business naturally.
Ask for referrals
If you are doing business in other industries you can also ask your existing customers for referrals. You might consider incentivizing your customers to give you referrals as well.
For example, you could offer an additional service for free that you normally charge for, such as carpet cleaning or window cleaning. Depending on the size of the account, you may even offer a free month of cleaning if the new client referred more than pays for it.
The beauty of referrals is that there is already a built-in trust with these new leads. Their contacts wouldn't be referring you if you didn't do a quality job, so a referral lead can be much easier to do business with.
Using referrals as a tool to get cleaning contracts with schools, can be a great way to expand beyond your current network.
Create an industry page
Now we will be moving on to more digital marketing related strategies to get cleaning contracts with schools. The first strategy that you should do is to create an industry page for schools.
This can help you drive targeted traffic to your cleaning business website and help you get schools as cleaning clients. When people come to your website they are immediately looking to see if you can help them.
If you don't have services or industries listed that they represent, they might question whether you even serve their industry. Also, if you don't have an industry page related to their niche, they likely will think you aren't an expert in that space.
Schools don't want to hire a company that looks like they don't have any experience cleaning schools. As you can see with the photo below, this is a snapshot of what a school industry page would look like.
You can also optimize for SEO on this page related to schools. As you'll see below, the URL has school cleaning in it, and keywords related to school cleaning are also on the page. When you optimize your website for keywords like this, schools can find your site organically. If your company is the first to show up on Google, you can generate a lot of high-quality leads from schools.
Create blog posts related to school cleaning challenges
Similar to creating industry pages, blog posts related to school cleaning can also help you get cleaning contracts with schools. Creating blog posts is important because it can attract new clients and position your company as an authority in the space.
Certainly, people are going to be searching for keywords related to school cleaning, but they also search for things related to problems with school cleaning. Your industry pages can attract people searching for things like "school cleaning near me," but a blog post could attract people searching for things like, "The best way to polish floors in a school."
Blog posts give you more flexibility to target related terms that someone needing their school cleaned might be searching for. Plus, you can send this content out to your email list, and it can help convert people on the fence.
Each blog post related to school cleaning that you post can help more and more people come to your website organically. Click here to learn how to write engaging blog posts for your cleaning business.
Create case studies of current cleaning contracts with schools
Case studies are another great way to get cleaning contracts with schools. This step won't be an option to get new clients until you've started working with some smaller school clients.
However, once you have some basic experience working with schools you can use those client's stories to help convert new school clients.
Case studies can be on how your cleaning company reduced the number of kids getting sick and missing school due to your cleaning for health programs.
The framework of a case study is to have your client share the story of the problems they were experiencing before they hired you. Then they say why they hired you and the benefits they saw compared to other companies. Finally, you list the new improved situation they are in now and how their original problems are now solved.
When you create a case study framework like this, you'll find that new potential clients can relate to your existing client's case study. When people relate to others and the problems you solved, they are much more likely to hire you.
Run paid advertising to get cleaning contracts with schools
If you have the extra money in your budget to start scaling your cleaning business running paid advertising can be another way to get cleaning contracts with schools. The organic marketing strategies we listed above can bring in targeted organic traffic that can help you get leads from schools, but these strategies take time.
Certainly, running paid advertising takes time as well, but it can help you to start getting targeted traffic to your industry page for schools. For example, if you run Google ads, you could target a keyword like "school cleaning" and then send traffic to your industry page for schools.
Then make sure that the page also has an option where people can opt-in as a lead for more information about school cleaning. If you run Facebook ads you could follow the same process, and then start to build a custom audience of people who visited that school industry page.
From there you could remarket to these visitors and build a lookalike audience from those page visitors. This could improve your ad targeting, lower your ad spend, and help to increase conversions.
Conclusion
Overall, you don't need specific experience with cleaning schools in order to start getting cleaning contracts with schools. There are several marketing strategies and networking opportunities you can use to break into the school cleaning market.
Start small with subcontracting or private and charter schools to get some basic experience cleaning schools. Then once you have a few small cleaning jobs with schools under your belt, you can use that experience to acquire even bigger school cleaning jobs.
Also, make sure you set up a content marketing system focused on an industry page for schools, blog content, and even a lead magnet specific to school cleaning. Doing this content marketing strategy can help you to attract new leads for school cleaning.
Finally, once you have these systems in place that are getting schools as cleaning clients, you can scale up your business faster with paid advertising!
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