A maid service is a great homebased business that you can run by yourself or with employees. As your business grows, you may choose to rent a small office with some storage space, but many successful operators never need to take that step.
Today's typical maid service has several cleaners on staff, and the owner participates minimally in the cleaning duties, if at all. Owners generally take care of scheduling, handling customer relations issues, ordering supplies, answering the telephone, payroll, and billing, while the maids to the actual cleaning. Certainly, there are also owners who also clean, but as your business grows, you'll find your time is better spent on running the business.
The primary benefit a residential cleaning service provides is timesavings. What would take some customers a whole day, or even an entire weekend, can be handled by a maid or team of maids in just a few hours.
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One of the primary reasons behind the tremendous growth in the residential cleaning industry is that more women have joined the work force over the last 40 years. In families where both the husband and wife work, neither spouse wants to spend their limited leisure time on housework, which makes them great candidates for a maid service. Families with both spouses working and whose incomes are $50,000 and up are strong candidates for a maid service.
Of course, two-income families are not your only prospective customers. You'll also work for affluent families in which the wives are not employed but prefer to spend their time doing things other than housecleaning, as well as singles who don't have the time or inclination to do their own cleaning and senior citizens who no longer have the physical wherewithal to clean their homes.
Janitorial Service
While maid services typically only clean residences, janitorial services clean businesses--offices, hospitals, restaurants and schools, to name a few. And what a janitorial service lacks in glamour it makes up for in potential profits.
While it typically takes more than a maid service, the start-up costs for a janitorial business are still relatively low. It's possible to get started working from a homebased office with just a vehicle and a minimal amount of equipment.
But while maid services are pretty much "normal business hours" operations, janitorial services are almost the opposite. You will find some customers who want you to clean during the day, but most will prefer that you don't start until their staff has finished their work and gone home.
With few exceptions, janitorial jobs are going to be substantially larger than maid service jobs--even if you start with very small customers. "If you took someone who was used to cleaning homes and put them in a large office building, they would hesitate and think they couldn't do that huge space," says Michael R., who owns a janitorial service in Salt Lake City. The key is to not be intimidated; just break the work down into tasks that can be done in a logical, reasonable order.
Though not all businesses will hire an outside janitorial service company, their facilities all need to be cleaned. Not only must they meet health code requirements, but they also want to make a favorable impression on their customers. Offices and office buildings are the primary customers of most janitorial services, but you can also do very well cleaning restaurants, schools (including colleges and universities), hospitals, medical offices, museums, retail stores, warehouses and manufacturing facilities.
Carpet and Upholstery Cleaning Service
Most carpet cleaning services start as homebased businesses. As you grow, you may choose to move into a commercial location, but many highly profitable carpet cleaners never move out of their homes.
Every homeowner and business owner with installed carpeting and/or upholstered furniture is a prospective customer. Targeting a residential market will mean less in the way of startup costs and equipment, since businesses typically require more than just having their carpets cleaned (you'll need more equipment to service them). However, because of the wide range of commercial businesses that use carpet and upholstery cleaning services, this is a very lucrative market that's well worth pursuing. Commercial operations that use carpet and upholstery cleaners include apartment buildings and condos, offices, schools, banks, restaurants, hotels, churches, bowling alleys, transportation terminals and more.
Most carpet cleaning services do more than just clean carpets. They also might offer: Upholstery cleaning, wall cleaning, drapery cleaning, application of a fabric protector on carpet and upholstery, flame-retardant treatment for drapes and upholstery, spot and stain removal from upholstery, smoke damage cleanup and fire restoration, water damage restoration, ceiling cleaning, carpet dyeing, carpet restoration, or odor control.
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