These are gaining in popularity. These are business services that are growing in demand as a result of more and more women seeking jobs outside the home. Their need to supplement the family income creates the opportunity for him to set up a lucrative business.
With the changing of times the market includes many middle-income families in every residential area across the entire country. The potential market among apartment dwellers is great also. All in all this is a business that has grown fast & has as much real wealth building potential as any we can think of.
This is a cleaning service generally associated with women; however, men are finding that they can organize, start & operate very profitable home & apartment cleaning businesses just as well as women. It's an ideal business for any truly ambitious person wanting a business of his or her own, especially for those who must begin with limited funds. Actually, they can start this business right in their own neighborhood, using their own equipment & begin making a profit from the first day.
Many enterprising homemakers are already doing this kind of work on a small scale as an extra income-producing endeavor. There's a growing need for this service.
No experience is required in this business. Everyone knows how to dust the furniture, vacuum the carpets, make the beds & carry out the trash. If making a house clean & bright is important & uplifting work. If they look on it as degrading or as drudgery don't involve them in this business.
Starting from scratch, they'll need a telephone & an appointment book. They also need an advertising flyer, such as the following:
Home Or Apartment Cleaning
From a stationary store to pick up a pad of "fade out" graph paper, a couple of sets of transfers (rub-on) letters, a glue stick & if they have one, a Klip Art book.
Take these materials home & clear off the kitchen table. Take a sheet of graph paper & temporarily tape the corners down on the table. Then take a pencil & a ruler & mark a rectangle five inches wide & six inches long along the lines of the graph paper. This will be the overall size of the flyer when it's finished. For a Klip Art piece depicting a hurried housewife engrosses with either cleaning tools or in the act of running the vacuum cleaner, or some other household chore. Cut this piece out & with their glue stick paste it in the upper left corner of their rectangle. Then take their transfer letters & make the headline: Home Or Apartment Cleaning. Next, type out the body of the message on ordinary white typing paper. Be sure to use a relatively new ribbon, preferably a black carbon ribbon & upper case letters. Cut this strip out & paste it on the graph paper, centered just below the headline. Then use some transfer letters that are about twice as large as their typewriter type & paste up the action part of the message. Cut out a couple of border flourishes from their Klip Art book, paste then under their action line & they are ready to take it to the printer.
Once they have this advertising flyer completed, take it to a nearby quick print shop & have about 200 copies printed. They should be able to get two copies on a standard 81/2x11 sheet & running 100 sheets of paper through the press is going to good cost.
Just as soon as you have an agreement on the time to make your cost proposal & marked it in their appointment book, ask for name, address, telephone number.
Jot this information down on a 3x5 card, along with the date & the notation: Prospective Customer. Then they file this card in a permanent card file. Save these cards, because there are literally hundreds of ways to turn this prospect file into real cash, once they've accumulated a sizeable number of names, addresses & phone numbers.
Dress as a successful business owner. Be confident & sure of them; be knowledgeable about the understanding of the prospect's needs & wants. Do not smoke, even if invited by the prospect & never accept a drink--even coffee--until after they have signed contract in their briefcase.
Actually, once they've made the sale, the best thing is to shake hands with their new customer, thank him & leave. A little small talk after the sale is appropriate, but becoming friendly is not. They create an impression & preserve it, by maintaining a business-like relationship.*
When they go to make their cost estimate, take along a ruled tablet such as those used by elementary school students, carbon paper, a calculator & their appointment book. Some people find it easier to work with a clipboard & ordinary blank paper with carbon. Later on, he may want to have general checklists printed up for each room in the house, with blank lines & spaces for special instructions.
It's important to appear methodical, thorough & professional, while leading the prospect through the specifics he or she wants them to take care. Simply identify the specific room at the top of the sheet of paper, the lead their prospect through the cleaning steps of each room, covering everything in it. They implications of putting everything in "ready for company" shape will cause the customer to forget about the cost & hire them to do a complete job. Always have a carbon under each piece of paper they're writing on & always look around each room one more time before leaving it; then ask the prospect if he or she can think of any special instructions they should note for that room.
Finally, when they've gone through each room in the house with the prospect, come back to the kitchen & sit down at the table. Take out the calculator & add up the time they estimate each job in each room will take to complete. Total the time for each room. Convert the total minutes for each room into hours & tenths of a hours per room. Add the totals for each room to arrive at their total hours to clean the entire house.
A little bit of small talk, a quick mental evaluation of the customer's ability to pay, plus their knowledge that they can get everything done in four hours, instead of six it would take most people. Here they begin finding a place in their appointment book.
Now that they have their first customer, they want to fill every day of the week, each week of every month with regular jobs. Once they have one week of each month filled with regular jobs, it will be time for them to expand.
Expansion means growth, involving people working for them, more jobs to sell & greater profits. Don't let it frighten them, for they have gained experience by starting gradually. Their aim is starting a business of their own was to make money. And expanding means more helpers so they don't have to work themselves.
They can operate this business quite successfully from the comfort of their home, permanently, if they choose to. All they'll need is a telephone, a desk & a file cabinet.
They possibly can, recruit & hire other people to do the work for them. The first people they hire should be people to handle the cleaning work. The best plan is to hire people to work in teams of two or three--two for jobs not including dishwashing & laundry--three for those that do.
They can start these people at minimum wage or a bit above & train them to complete every job assignment in two hours or less. Just as soon as they've hired & trained a couple of people as a cleaning team, They should outfit them in a kind of uniform with their company name on the back of their blouses or shirts. A good idea also would be to have magnetic signs made for their company & services. People use for transportation to each job & later on, the sides of their company van or pick-up trucks.
Each team should have an appointed leader responsible for the quality & overall completeness of each job assigned to that team. The team might operate thus; one person cleans the bathroom, makes beds & carries out the laundry, while the other person dusts & polishes the furniture & does the vacuuming. On jobs where they do the laundry and the dishes, the third person can pick up the laundry and get that started, and then do the dishes & clean the kitchen. By operating in this manner their work will be more efficient & the complete job will take a lot less time. Their team leaders will check with them each afternoon for the next day's work assignments & gather the team together, complete with cleaning supplies & material, on the next day. Their team leader should be supplied with a stack of "hand-out" advertising flyers to pass around the neighborhood or within the apartment building before leaving each job site. A good supply of business cards wouldn't be a bad idea for them either, in order to advertise their services to others they come in contact with. The only other form of advertising they should go with would be a display ad in the yellow pages of their telephone directory.
Design on paper a system of clean-up operation that they can generally be applied to any situation & then drill their teams on speeding up their activities to make the system work even better. Just as fireman practice & practice, they should drill their people as a team in their cleaning activities.
Probably the biggest time-waster in this business will be in travel from job to job. For this reason, it's important to spread advertising circulars to the neighboring homes when they're doing a job, or to the apartments on the same floor when they're in an apartment building.
Their equipment needs will be minimal: Cleaning & polishing rags, mops, a couple of plastic buckets & furniture polishes. Most people will have the necessary cleaning materials, including vacuum cleaner, soaps & cleaners. But it wouldn't hurt to have these items available just in case they get a job in a home or an apartment without these tools. As their business grows, they'll be able to purchase all their needs at huge discounts & these are the sources of supply to cultivate as they grow.
This is definitely a high profit business, requiring only an investment of time & organization on their part to get started. With a low investment, little or no overhead requirement & no experience needed, this is an ideal business opportunity with a grown curve that accelerates at an unprecedented rate.
