Today we’re talking with Douglas Schultz from the Buffalo, New York area!

Douglas was struggling with something a lot of us struggle with in Cleaning Nation… niche selection! Now, he had done 95% of the battle which is actually selecting a real niche to target. If you put a blindfold on and threw a dart at a board with a selection of niches to target, you’re already far ahead of someone that is trying to sell everything.

Keep that in mind!

In Douglas case, he had chosen restaurants as his preferred commercial cleaning client. Fortunately, restaurants can be very easy cleaning contracts to win since usually they’re pretty unhappy with their current cleaners. Unfortunately, they can be a huge hassle and Dougals chose a one-off cleaning service – their cooking hoods.

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We want to avoid doing ANYTHING that is one-off! You want to turn all of your clients into monthly recurring clients as quickly as possible. Now, his idea to target restaurants with this service isn’t entirely bad. He can use it as a marketing pitch to get his foot in the door to these restaurants since they legally need to have their cooking hoods cleaned twice a year to keep their insurance.

He can use this hood cleaning service as a way to break into cleaning routinely for restaurants. Restaurants are dirty, nasty places. In fact, most cleaning companies won’t even take on restaurants because of this and the weird hours the cleaners will have to work. Many restaurants stay open until midnight or even later, creating some wonky hours for you as the cleaner.

However, if you can get past restaurants trying to charge you cheap prices and can deal with the weird hours, restaurants can be incredibly lucrative. These businesses need cleaning seven days a week. That is a lot of recurring business. You will need to make sure you motivate your employees with these kind of jobs, because there WILL come a day where they will get sick cleaning out the nasty restaurants.

The best way I know to do this is by paying your employees a higher wage than you would for other jobs. Make sure to pass this extra wages you’re paying the employees into the actual fee you’re charging the restaurants.

Restaurants are incredibly difficult clients, but they can be incredibly lucrative since so few cleaning companies really know how to go about cleaning them.

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If you can become that “go-to person” in your area, you stand to make quite a lot of money from it.

One last thing on restaurants… it is just as hard to staff up and get going with one restaurant client as it is with twenty. Don’t stop at one. When you’ve scaled it up to twenty different restaurants you will be able to afford to hire someone to take care of the more annoying parts for you.

Keep that in mind. This niche becomes much easier from a business owner perspective at scale.

Alright, let’s jump into the Lightning Round!