A house cleaning business is one of the easiest businesses that you can start. You could start alone with a car and a few cleaning supplies or build a multi-million operation if you want to. You can operate from your home and work on a few houses per week or get an office space and hire hundreds of employees. The sky’s the limit with this model, and it’s a business you can start with only a few dollars.
You still should have a solid plan when you are starting out, and you must execute it properly if you want to be successful, however. Let’s look at some of the steps you’ll need to take to build a successful house cleaning business.
Choose the Right Business Structure and Start Looking at Insurance
The first thing you have to do is choose the right structure for your business. You could start as a sole proprietorship, but we would suggest you go with an LLC or even incorporate your business if you have the intention of going big. LLCs are usually the best option for those who are just starting out as they will allow you to be protected from direct lawsuits up to a certain level. Your personal assets will be separated from your business, but you could still find yourself liable depending on the nature of an incident. This is why you will need to also start looking for maid and house cleaning insurance. If you want to know what that includes and how much you can roughly expect to pay for it, you can find out more here. Insurance will be essential if you want to be covered in case you or one of your employees breaks something or injures someone. Insurance will cover your equipment, vehicles, and workers’ compensation as well.
Look at the Market
You also have to look at the market and see if house cleaning is even a viable business model for your area. If you live in a small mid to low-income town and there are tons of other house cleaning services there, you might want to look at another business or review your service offering. You might have a better chance working with factories and other businesses, or by selling another service like window cleaning, for instance.
If you feel like there’s space for another service where you are, look at what other house cleaning teams are doing and use that to craft your service offering. It would even be a good idea to hire them to clean your house once to see how they operate. Make sure that you hire the top-rated teams too so you can see how the best conduct business.
Work on Branding
Branding is extremely important for cleaning services. Branding is what will allow you to spread awareness about your service without having to constantly pump money into advertising. You could start with anonymous vehicles and no uniforms but spending a few hundred dollars on branded vehicles and spiffy uniforms will allow people to reach you and make your team more recognizable.
Once you have everything in place, you can start looking for clients and get a few contracts. Make sure to treat your first clients like gold and always try to find ways to improve your service.
