5 Ways to Increase Cleaning Business Revenue

When you went into the commercial cleaning business, it wasn’t with the goal of making less money than you were previously making. The whole point of owning a business is to be profitable! So, as you’re striving to grow the success of your janitorial company, you’ll want to take advantage of all the ways you can increase cleaning business revenue. Here are a few of those methods:

Spending Less is Not Always Best

CoreSolution’s Barney Lawn, summed up the difference between price and cost best when he said,

Just because a product is less expensive than its competitors’, doesn’t mean you (or your business) save money in the long run. Sometimes, perhaps most times, you end up spending more in part because of time and efficiency lost to a mediocre product…Essentially, the price is the sticker price of what you’re buying. The cost is what you stand to lose in time, efficiency, problem-solving, etc. if you don’t consider your return-on-investment.

For example, you may think the purchase of lower-priced (and lower-quality) trash bags may cost less at first. But when your cleaners are having to double bag each trash can to carry the garbage to the dumpster every day, you’ll actually end up with faster use and increased waste in the long run. Granted, you don’t want to be wasteful with the funds you do have. However, you also don’t want to be so cheap that you end up spending more money fixing issues that could’ve been avoided by investing a little more on the front end.

Sometimes Less is More

While you don’t want to find yourself wasting money in your attempt to spend less on supplies (like those poor-quality trash bags), you may find that reducing your cost by buying fewer cleaning products can help you save money! Big picture, the cost of cleaning products and materials typically account for just 5-10% of your overall budget. So, purchasing fewer, but higher quality or even green, cleaning supplies that may be slightly more expensive pricewise, can often reduce your costs by lessening the amount of labor time required to do the job. Labor is your biggest budget-suck. So, when you can save time, you’re automatically saving more on your bottom line and working to increase cleaning business revenue.

Training Reigns Supreme

Providing adequate training is one of the most effective ways that you can save money. But again, it’s long-run results versus short-range savings. By spending a little more time ensuring that your cleaning team knows how (and in what quantities) to use the equipment and cleaning supplies, you can help eliminate waste, errors, time spent, and customer dissatisfaction of work poorly performed. As Richard Turner pointed out:

Adequate training is essential to ensure that all of your staff, no matter how long they have been employed by your organization, have the knowledge to properly identify the correct product for use on a given surface. They need to have an understanding of why the product cleans, how the product can be applied, how the surface itself can be affected, and the quality standards that should be achieved.

Always remember that training is not a one-and-done effort. Rather, it should be an ongoing process that incorporates the effective utilization of inspection reports, one-on-one reviews, and cross-training opportunities. That’s the way to effectively increase cleaning business revenue long-term, maintain employee loyalty, and keep customers happy.

Keep Your Current Clients Content

In his book, Making Cents of A Dirty Business, Troy Hopkins reiterates the importance of implementing a customer retention program:

I have said it before, and I will say it again: once you turn around your customer retention issue, you will have a lot more extra money to keep your employees motivated, plus some left over to improve your bottom line. To keep clients, you must meet or exceed the level of service you promised them. To maintain that level of quality, it is crucial that you routinely verify the results of your cleaners’ efforts. Using an inspection tool will facilitate regular quality audits for all your clients.

Use the Right Tools

It’s not only the inspection tools that will make a difference in your ability to increase cleaning business revenue. Rather, it’s having an overall strategy for managing your business effectively, onboarding new customers strategically, coordinating schedules accurately, and juggling all the plates of your company with a watchful eye on real-time dashboard reporting. It’s unreasonable to imagine that you can do all of this without a little help from automated processes via software designed specifically for the commercial cleaning industry. Partnering with a company like Janitorial Manager allows you to utilize a Cloud-based cleaning business management system that supports virtually every moving part and piece you deal with to help you increase cleaning business revenue. To learn more about the Janitorial Manager commercial cleaning software that can help, schedule a FREE one-on-one LIVE demo today!