Episode 57: Are You Ready to Grow your Cleaning Business By Taking On Larger Accounts?
Most of us started in the commercial cleaning industry by cleaning small buildings under 5,000 sq ft. But as your business grows, it becomes more difficult to manage these small accounts and more desirable to get into larger buildings. In this video Jean offers her recommendations for moving up the ladder to larger buildings.
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Episode #57 - Video Transcription
When most of us started our commercial cleaning business we started by cleaning small offices, maybe 2000 - 5000 square feet in size. It's fairly easy to get into this size of building and they're fairly easy to clean. Most of these offices only need cleaning once or twice a week, taking a just couple hours to get the job done.
The good news is, this is a great way to get started in the business, plus this type of account can be highly profitable. Not to mention you don't have all your eggs in one basket so if you happen to lose an account it's not going to be devastating to your business. However as your business grows and you start hiring employees, you'll soon discover that managing all these little accounts becomes somewhat challenging for a number of reasons.
First, employees may have to travel from one building to the next, which costs you more in travel time compensation and possibly gas expense. Employees may have to transport equipment since some offices don't have a storage room, AND it may not make sense to store equipment for a once a week account. It also becomes more difficult to schedule employees to make sure all the accounts are cleaned at their scheduled time. And it becomes more difficult to follow up on employees and the accounts since they're scattered all around. And finally, it starts to feel as if that $250 a month account is just more trouble than it's worth considering the small amount of income it's generating for your business. Pretty soon you start to think about getting larger sized accounts that pay more. A nice 20,000 or 30,000 square foot office building that is cleaned 5 days a week is starting to sound really good. And you're right! By getting into larger sized buildings, you will quickly generate more income for your business (several thousand dollars a month versus a few hundred). Plus, you'll find they are actually much easier to manage. Your employee turnover will likely decrease because people like to report to one location for their shift rather than traveling from building to building. It's also much easier to supervise your employees if you have perhaps 4 or 5 employees working in one building. And there is more camaraderie between you and the team working in the building.
As you grow your business, you'll be able to hire a supervisor to help you manage these larger accounts, enabling you to continue growing the business. Your cash flow will improve and you'll be invited to submit more proposals on larger sized buildings, which will help your company to grow faster. And the best thing is that your personal income will increase along with the growth of your business! So as you can see, there are a lot of benefits to cleaning larger sized buildings. But my recommendation is to work your way up. Don't go from cleaning 5,000 square foot buildings to trying to get into a 100,000 square foot account. Look for 10 or 15,000 square foot buildings first. Once you've got a couple of those under your belt, start looking at 20 - 30,000 square foot buildings and so on. You'll have a much easier time managing your growth in this way, rather than biting off more than you can chew.
So, I'd like to ask YOU. Are you ready to grow your business by taking on larger accounts? Is the thought of taking on a large account scary to you or are you up for the challenge?
