Wondering how to grow your cleaning company into a sustainable, profitable business? Start with professional janitorial software. Here’s why.
In thinking about how to grow your cleaning company, there are multiple directions you could go. Run specials to draw in more customers, place ads in your local magazines and papers, make cold calls, or take out a loan so you can buy a television ad during the Super Bowl. Okay, maybe don’t do that last one.
Whether you want to bring in a few more customers, expand to a larger geographic area, move from residential cleaning to commercial cleaning, or triple your business this year, the keys to sustainable growth are a good plan and good organization. And the key to good organization is professional janitorial software.
Keep track of inventory, work orders, and more with Janitorial Manager. Learn more today with a discovery call!
Find out how to grow your cleaning company with professional janitorial software as your secret ingredient
First, let’s look at some different approaches to how to grow your cleaning company. Most people immediately consider bringing on new customers as the first step in growth. Indeed, it’s always nice when new customers sign a contract with your commercial cleaning company. But there are other ways to grow your business.
Customer retention is vital for any business. If you have a revolving door or a one-in-one-out situation, you’re acquiring new customers, but you aren’t growing. However, if you have a good base of customers, you have a good foundation on which to grow.
You can also grow by expanding your services. This may attract new customers, and you might find your current customers are interested in adding services.
Think holistically about how to grow your cleaning company in the best way possible. You want your current roster of clients to stick with you and potentially add services, and you want to attract new customers.
Here’s where janitorial software can help. While you might have a good guess as to how many new clients you contract with or what your retention rates are like, with professional janitorial software, you can run reports and see exactly what’s happening. With this information, you can make informed data-driven decisions about where to focus your energies.
Do you have a good retention rate and new customers onboarding regularly? Fantastic! It might be time to look at additional certifications for your team.
Do your customers stick with you, but you have trouble adding to your roster? Your marketing or bidding could probably use some work. Again, janitorial software can help you here, too. You can make faster, more accurate bids with tools like built-in bidding calculators.
Are you losing customers as fast as you can bring new ones in? This sounds like your marketing and bidding are in good shape, but you might need to explore things like quality checks and inspections, employee training, or customer service. Again, janitorial software can help with all of these, from tracking employee schedules and performance to better communication with your customers and team.
What about the money?
We can’t talk about how to grow your cleaning company without talking about budget. Specific situations vary, but there are a few things that almost all businesses have to pay attention to when it comes to expenses.
Inventory and payroll hours can be two huge factors impacting your profit and loss statements. While some costs are relatively stable, such as your office lease or insurance, payroll and inventory can vary wildly. At the same time, you can’t grow your business if you can’t project your revenue with some degree of certainty.
The solution? You guessed it: janitorial software. Let’s start by looking at how to grow your cleaning business through payroll accuracy. Software solutions like Janitorial Manager offer time tracking through geo-fencing and facial recognition. This eliminates issues like employees clocking in for each other and ensures that you have the right number of people on site for any job.
Additionally, with workloading and task lists, you can feel confident that you aren’t overscheduling and wasting money on additional staff that could be working at another site.
And inventory? Quite frankly, any time you run out of supplies, you spend extra money on rush shipping or sending employees out to buy supplies, usually at a markup. Janitorial software can help you manage your inventory, so you can track usage. This offers several benefits.
The obvious benefit here is that you know when you need to order, so you aren’t stuck scrambling at the last minute trying to track down what you need. There’s another benefit, though. You know, based on normal usage and the specific facility, how much of your cleaning products your team should use and how much is currently on hand. If you find they are running through too much, you know you need to step in and do some on-site training.
There’s more than one way to grow your cleaning business. It’s just a matter of finding the right path.
If you’re ready to bring your cleaning organization to the next level, schedule a call with Janitorial Manager to see how our software can make your janitorial operation more successful!