Episode 493 – Commercial Cleaning vs Residential? Which is Better?
So you want to grow as fast as possible, but you don’t know which customers are the best for YOU and YOUR goals. There’s so much information out there about what the “best” is – commercial cleaning vs residential. You waste all of your time and abilities on the WRONG things and stay stuck. Today we’re going to explore how to know what is best for YOU!
False Belief: The quickest way to grow is to have as many TYPES customers as possible so I should do commercial AND residential.
The reality is that the quickest way to go broke is to dabble in something your competitors are EXPERTS in! For example, there’s tons of business coaches out there, but I specialize in specifically helping owners of cleaning companies. The people that do specialize in a certain niche, make it BRUTAL for you to compete with them.
False Belief: It doesn’t cost me anything to have other customers.
The truth of it is, ALL you have is your time! Successful people value that more than anything! Poor people think money is super valuable and their time is worthless. Wealthy people know that money will come and go but our time never comes back. So find a small group of people that you can be transformative for and serve deep, not wide. Another corollary for this is…
False Belief: Every customer that gives me more money than I spend on them is a “good” customer.
A “good” customer actually depends on more things than just how much money they make you. It depends on how much of your bandwidth they take, if they are seasonal, WHEN they pay, the RISK you take, and how they make you and your customers FEEL. All of this dictates your ability to grow and scale! For example, seasonal customers, in general, are not scalable. Also, as another example, think about how a bar client will make your employees FEEL. They will probably be cleaning late hours overnight, which in turn can make it harder on your employees, and therefore harder for you to keep employees.
False Belief: Whatever customers I have are my ideal customers.
The EASIER the customers are to get, almost always means they are the worst quality (move in/ move out, apartment turns/ construction clean up, etc). For the worst quality customers, it means they have a higher churn rate for their cleaners because once a cleaner starts their job, they realize how hard it is and give up the client.
It’s not much harder to attract the RIGHT customers, but it’s WAAAAYYYY MORE profitable! If you have a plan and system in place, it’s even easier!
False Belief: “Commercial” or “Residential” is a “Niche”.
“Commercial” and “Residential” are oceans with many niches within them! When we take “Commercial”, for example, say you decide your niche will be medical offices. Even that is not specific enough because there’s all types of medical offices such as pediatricians, dentists, minute clinics, etc. Even in that breakdown, there are high end quality offices and low end offices.
False Belief: My customers won’t care if I serve others.
Your customers are ALWAYS asking you AND YOUR COMPETITION, “is this right for me?” They may not even be aware of it consciously or tell you that they want a specialist but take this example: You’re the owner of a small private boutique gym looking for a new cleaner. Would you be more likely to call a place called “Steve’s Cleaning Company” of “Select Services Private Gym Cleaning”? You’re probably going to lean towards the specialist. Which leads us to another common misconception…
False Belief: I can be “the best” at a “broad niche”.
You can’t actually. It’s really hard to be the best in the world with a broad niche. Just like I mentioned earlier, there’s tons of business coaches out there for example. However, they have not taken the time to specialize in the cleaning industry and actually run a cleaning business to understand it. Same goes for specializing in your niche in cleaning! Specialize in something that you can really stand out form your competition in!
False Belief: I should pick “the best” niche: Commercial is better than residential or vice versa
The truth of the matter is…there’s no “best” niche. It’s really about YOUR goals and what fits YOU best. Therefore you should start with YOUR goals for your life and work backwards to the business you need, and use THAT to pick your niche. Think of things like: when do you want to work? This will put a limit to some degree on residential vs commercial since generally residential is done during the day and commercial at night.
Having the right niche will allow you to be the BEST in the world at serving a VERY specific group of people. This will serve you and your clients on another level, instead of you being average to bad at trying to help anyone with money!
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