(Image by gratuit at Free Images Live)
Every project or business teaches me something.
Remember the cleaning business whose owner wanted to exit and move on? That’s done now. We aren’t talking about a type of business that’s doing wizardry. You might expect that they’re all more or less doing the same things, but they aren’t. Not all domestic cleaning businesses do the same type of cleaning.
There are plenty of small domestic cleaning businesses. A person can start cleaning as a sole proprietor with very little investment. In fact, a friend in Tennessee did that when she went through a nasty divorce and found herself as a single mother living in her car with her daughter. She cleaned apartments after tenants moved out. By the time we met several years later, all that was far behind her and she was going full tilt in property management. But domestic cleaning was how she scrambled up from her lowest point.
The cleaning business here, where the owner was ready to exit, mostly cleans people’s homes in one town, plus the offices of a couple of small businesses.
Another operates in a scenic rural area. That business cleans holiday cottages.
Most of the small cleaning businesses I called in the search for a buyer are owned and operated by women. It’s one of the few industry sectors where that is the norm. All of these are domestic cleaning businesses, but they reflect different strategic choices and operate differently.
Even what seems to be a straightforward business can have more going on behind the scenes than we realize.
Cleaning Homes
The business with the departing owner does what most people think of when you mention domestic cleaning. Most of the customers want someone to come in and clean their homes on a regular schedule, typically weekly or every other week. A few customers take care of their own routine cleaning and only want help when it’s time to do a deep clean, such a monthly or every quarter year.
Of the three businesses I mentioned, this one has the steadiest revenue pattern. It’s also the most personal. Customers let the staff into their homes and allow extensive access to their private space, so customers develop a relationship with favorite members of staff and trust the business. Do good work at a reasonable price and customers tend to stay for years, having a cleaner in and paying on a regular schedule, like clockwork.
On occasions when a cleaner can’t make it on the normally scheduled day, customers are usually willing to either reschedule for a different day or accept a substitute cleaner among the staff. All the customers and cleaners are within a tight radius, so cleaners can cover for each other’s absences readily.
The downside? Even near the top of market pricing, it brings in the lowest hourly rate.
Rental Unit Turnaround
My friend who cleaned rental units between tenants had to win over the property managers who ran apartment complexes.
The window of time available to clean each unit was usually more flexible than for cleaning in people’s homes. It needed to be done after tenants moved out, after any repairs or maintenance were finished, and ideally before showings to prospective new tenants. That tended not to impose many urgent appointments.
In this type of business, cleaners don’t meet people who lived in or will move into the rental units. The relationship to develop and nurture is with property managers, and it’s about their property rental business. For my friend, starting to do this type of cleaning business allowed someone to notice her reliability and intelligence, and offer a transition into property management. Cleaning was a stepping stone.
Some businesses like this charge an hourly rate. Others charge a flat rate for each unit cleaned.
The downside? Rental units don’t come up for turnaround cleaning on a regular schedule. There’s a seasonal pattern. Tenants are most likely to move in the warm months of spring, summer and early autumn, so that’s when the cleaning business is hopping. There isn’t so much relocation activity in late autumn or in winter, so work and revenue drop off them.
Turnaround cleaning is also often a big chore. Tenants are focused on moving all their stuff out when they leave and may not have the time, energy and inclination to thoroughly clean behind themselves. Baked-on crud in the oven, dust bunnies, grout stains… everything like that has to be gone, shipshape, when the cleaner finishes. Think of it as every job being like spring cleaning.
Holiday Cottage Turnaround
This one charges the highest hourly rate. When someone’s rates are high, there’s a reason. Of the three cleaning businesses I’m discussing, this is the toughest to operate.
This type of cleaning business burgeoned alongside booking websites such as AirBnB or VRBO that let people rent their extra space. At first glance it seems like an easy way to make some money, and being able to charge substantially more than for cleaning homes is enticing. Look closer.
The company’s service territory is about 50 miles square. The holiday cottages it cleans are scattered across a sparsely populated scenic British rural area. A smaller territory wouldn’t encompass a large enough potential market of holiday cottages. Getting to a cottage to clean it can take as much as two hours of driving time each way.
The flow of work fluctuates. In high vacation season, there’s a lot to do. In late autumn or in winter, there aren’t so many vacationers so there isn’t so much turnaround cleaning of the cottages.
The business has no control over which cottages need to be cleaned on what schedule. That’s determined by the bookings received by clients. Cleaning has to be done whenever one guest leaves, before the next guest arrives.
Check-out time may be 10:00 or 11:00. Check-in time for the next guests may be 15:00 or 16:00. That may sound like plenty of time for cleaning, but what do people do when they are on vacation? They relax. They party. They don’t fret about how much of a mess they’re leaving.
If they trashed the place, there’s no latitude for taking longer than usual to finish. Instead, another cleaner has to be called in on an emergency basis to make sure the cleaning is finished on time… and remember, it may take a couple of hours for emergency help to get there.
Wrap-up
Scratch the surface of practically any type of business and you can find more happening than meets the casual eye. You can also find more strategic choices than you would have guessed. There’s always more to see when you take a closer look.