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Starting A Cleaning Business

Cleaning Business Working From Home

Cleaning does not sound much like a glamorous career (well, actually it isn't) but it has the advantage of being well paid and there is never any shortage of eager customers for a reliable cleaning service. Cleaning can be quite hard work so you need to be physically fit if you want to start your own cleaning business, even if you intend to employ staff, you will be the one who has to take over if they don't turn up for work.

If you are just starting out in business and have limited capital to invest, you will probably have no choice but to start small and build up the business by ploughing back most of your profits. If this is how you intend to start, employing staff will not be an option, it will be up to you to do all the dirty work yourself as well as marketing the business to new prospective clients.

Lack of capital need not prevent you starting a cleaning business. You can start up with just some basic cleaning materials and use of the family car. After testing the water, you can then consider taking out a business loan in order to expand.

The size of the business depends upon your ambition and capabilities. Some people are happy doing office cleaning for a few hours Monday to Friday evenings just to earn some extra money. Other people (who might have started out the same way), become ambitious and decide to work towards building up a company with office premises, a fleet of vehicles and numerous employees.

If you have capital available to invest in starting a cleaning business and can employ cleaners to work for you from the start, you will have more time to work on growing the business. You do, however, need to take into account the fact that it will be necessary for you to earmark time to supervise your staff to make sure their work remains at the standard you want to give your clients.

The first thing to decide is whether you want to offer a "maid" service doing domestic cleaning or whether you want to offer a commercial cleaning service where you would clean office premises, shops warehouses etc.

If you are cleaning people's houses, they will usually want the work done during the daytime. Most of your customers will be hiring a cleaner because they go out to work and don't have time to do all the household chores and have a life as well. You can appreciate the fact that these people wouldn't want you cleaning round them when they want to make the most of their time away from work. Commercial cleaning is always done when the premises are empty, so you would be working either during the evening or very early in the morning when the business is closed.

If you have young children and are the main or sole carer, you will need to make arrangements for child care while you are working during the school holiday breaks or outside school hours during term time. It would not be professional to take your children with you when you are working in other people's premises and your customers would not take kindly to such an arrangement. If you don't have obliging relatives willing to help you out, the cost of child care while you are working needs to be included in your budget figures.

One solution to the child-care problem is to team up with another parent in the same situation. If you set up the business as a partnership, you can take it in turns to look after the children when necessary while one of you does the cleaning work, and working in tandem during school hours. Another advantage of working with a partner is that you can arrange to cover for each other during vacations or times of illness etc. Second only in importance to a high standard of cleaning, is reliability. Your customers won't care if you have the flu and just want to stay in bed, their only concern is whether you let them down when they want their house or office premises cleaned.