Create Your Own Part Time Job Starting a Professional Cleaning Service

One of the steadiest service businesses going is also one of the most invisible. If you work in an office or store you're probably used to coming in every morning and seeing clean carpets, empty ashtrays and freshly mopped woodwork. In fact, most stores and offices would be pretty dreary places to work if you didn't see them spar­kling clean every day.

Starting your own professional cleaning service is easier than start­ing many other kinds of businesses precisely because it is invisible. That is, the business is performed at night. While you are in the process of putting your cleaning service together you can maintain your day job until your income from the cleaning business is big enough to support you by itself.

The equipment you need to start this business is minimal: a good vacuum cleaner, mops, brooms, cleaning cloths, sponges, buckets and a few different types of detergents and grease-cutting fluids. If this list sounds familiar, it should. These are the same cleaning tools found in almost every household, and there's no reason you can't use what you already probably own - at least for starters.

There are several ways to acquire customers: a free local classified ad on GladList.com, a listing in the Yellow Pages (under "Janitor Ser­vice" and/or "House Cleaning"), printed circulars. But the most effective way to get customers is through personal solicitation. Al­ways remember that you are offering a service, and that means servicing your clients as well as their places of business.

Start by calling people you know who either work at or own their own retail store, suite of offices, or restaurant; even call affluent homeowners. Make appointments to see these people late in the day or even during your lunch hour. And when you do get to see them, come prepared to discuss price specifically. Since this kind of business requires an investment of time more than anything else, it can be very tricky to price properly.

There's only one good way to find out how long it takes to clean an office thoroughly. Do it yourself. You might try working nights for a while for another cleaning service, as an employee. Or just tune yourself carefully while cleaning one or more rooms in your own house or apartment. You pricing will be based on the hourly pay rate to a small crew of workers you will hire (or yourself if you participate in the actual cleaning) plus your cost for cleaning ma­terials and depreciation on your cleaning tools, and your profit. For example, if you figure it will take one person two and a half hours to clean a suite of eight offices, your costs will be: $20.00 for employee's salary (at $8.00 per hour), $6.00 for supplies and $4 for "overhead" (advertising bookkeeping, etc.). That comes to $30.00. For twenty working days a month your costs amount to $600. You charge your customer between $1000 and $1200 and your net profit runs between $400 and $600.

When soliciting customers, your objective is to sign them up to a six-month or year contract, payable monthly. You might offer a one-month trial, with an option to extend, to give customers a reasonably risk-free way to try your service.

One of the attractive features about starting this kind of business is that the work is done at night. You could do the whole thing your­self, without any employees, during the trial period, and still keep your day job. When you are ready to hire people you have a rich source of employees in college students who want part-time work after classes, as well as men and women who want to supplement their incomes but can only work at night.

As you can see from our example of costs, with contracts for ten or twelve offices, stores or restaurants, you can easily net more than $4000 a month. The growth potential for this business is ob­vious. The points to remember are to use good personal selling techniques and to carefully price each job before committing your­self to a months-long contract. As your business grows you'll be in a position to bid on major cleaning contracts for large companies, each one alone being worth thousands in profit.