Five Sure-Fire Cleaning Company Killers

1. Not marketing

Sitting in front of a keyboard on the web all day long is not marketing, it is sitting. Subcontracting from other janitorial companies or buying accounts from franchise companies makes you a janitor not a cleaning company owner.

Marketing your services with no money is hard. Whoever said you could open and start a cleaning company with no money, any more than you can open a restaurant or a gas station with no money, lied to you. You can market your services with no money to a point, but getting rich is highly doubtful and you have to work ten times harder.


2. Calling employees subcontractors

If you tell them what to do, supervise them, provide them anything at all except a written contract and tell them the work they are doing is either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, they are employees that you are required to pay taxes on. If they do not have their own clients, tools, liability and Workman’s Compensation insurance that you maintain a current certificate on file at all times, you are a target for lawsuits and worse all taxing authorities.

If you manipulate your accounting and tax records, you can do jail time too.

3. Looking like a janitor

If your manner of dress (when not physically WORKING on a job site), printed material or online presence (cheesy websites or Facebook profile picture of you holding a can of beer with a baseball cap turned sideways), professional facility management people will not give you the keys to their buildings, period unless there is something wrong with THEM. This is a business; you are expected to look professional.

Bad graphics, pictures of any porcelain fixture found in a restroom, misspelled words or homemade cards or brochures are all a quick way to have professional purchasers of your services, laugh at you the moment you turn your back. You can try to sell your services until you keel over from starvation but if you look bad, you are toast.

4. Taking clients for granted

Every single other cleaning service owner is after your client and it does not matter how long you have been there or who you know there. People that sign janitorial contracts that loved you at one time, ALL die, retire, are transferred, are fired, or quit one day. On that day, there will be a new cleaning service with the keys to your building.

This is not now nor has it ever been a good absentee ownership business. When you are not supervising the cleaning, your clients are. As soon as they figure out that supervision is what they are paying for and are not getting, you are gone.

5. Failing to plan

Owning a janitorial service is not an alternative to unemployment benefits, something to do because you can’t hold a job and is a really bad idea if you read business opportunity magazines, who all lie about how easy the business is ( add in an increasing number of internet site owners promising easy money in the janitorial business). If one day you started on a whim and think you will become rich or even make a good living, the very moment you finish reading this sentence, turn off your computer and figure out something else to do.

If you don’t have some kind of a plan (and it can all fit on one page) of what you are going to clean, can identify who you will clean for, how much you are going to charge based on what people are currently paying and specifically where and most of HOW you will sell these services then please read the last two paragraphs again, turn off the computer and come up with another way to make a living.

Sometimes the truth is not pretty but there are folks that will tell you what you want to hear. So sorry, but I am not one of them.

Ed