Need Help Marketing a Cleaning Business?
Mike sits down today with Josh Burstein of Sawgrass Cleaning Solutions based out of Florida (http://sawgrasscleaning.com) who needs help marketing a cleaning business. Josh wasn’t always a cleaning business owner. He started as an accountant for a firm in England.

Josh grew tired of the office environment and decided to start a cleaning business on the side. At first, he kept both jobs, but trying to juggle both was too much. Josh realized he would never grow his cleaning business the way he wanted while still working the accounting job, and finally decided to go full time with his cleaning business.

Josh shares, “Once I quit the accounting job, I had time to go to more networking events which is were I got most of my work, that would have never happened otherwise”

Currently Josh goes door to door dropping off flyers and business cards. Although he has had some success marketing a cleaning business like this it is time consuming and has a low success rate. Let’s discover some more effective ways of marketing a cleaning business.

What Are YOUR Customer’s Worth?
One of the great things about marketing a cleaning business is you can often get clients for little or no cost. The problem is that is not a scalable system. So many business owners aren’t willing to invest in their companies to attract clients. This is often because they do not calculate the lifetime value of a client.

If I offered to get you a client for $1,000 nearly every cleaning company owner would either decline or be very suspicious. Let’s make some assumptions and find out if that is a good deal…

If your average commercial client is $1,000/ mo and they stay 2 years, that is $24,000 in revenue. Assume your labor cost is half, that single customer is worth over $10,000 in gross profit to your business. Acquire just one of those customers a month, you would create over $100,000 in gross profit for your cleaning company every YEAR!

NOW would you pay $1,000 for that customer? How many of those customers would you take for $1,000? Cheap or free client attraction methods are good, but not a solid foundation to market a cleaning company.

Before moving on, remember you can spend more money to acquire a $5,000/ mo client than a $1,000/ mo client. If you are residential and your clients are only worth $200-$300/ mo, you will want to figure out how long they stay and how much profit they provide so you can figure out how much you can spend to marketing a cleaning business.

Ok, I’m Willing to Spend Money to Market My Cleaning Company… Now What???
As much as money helps, it is not the only answer- you still have to use that money to create a message that is compelling to your ideal cleaning company prospect. The biggest rookie mistake owners of cleaning companies make is to talk about things their customers are NOT interested in. Namely YOUR cleaning company.

BONUS LOVIN: Make Your Life EASY and Talk About Your Customer’s FAVORITE Subject…
You are 100% correct… their favorite subject is THEM! Ask your customers what they are passionate about. What their biggest frustrations are. WHY they do what they can do. Talk about that and ONLY THAT in your marketing!!

Candy, Creativity and Marketing a Cleaning Business…
Want a mindblowingly easy to market a cleaning business? Pick 25 ideal customers (ideally all in a small geographic area). Buy 25 candy dishes and a HUGE bag of candy. Don’t cheap out- get the good stuff! Take the candy dishes to your customers, fill them with candy and leave a stack of business cards next to them. Every week come back and fill the candy dish and leave more cards.

Don’t try to sell or talk about your company at all, just serve your customer. You will be shocked to find out how quickly people start getting to know and like you, asking for bids and referring you to every other company that comes in and takes some candy!

More Creative Marketing?
Have you ever heard “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”? Use that to your advantage when marketing your cleaning business. Get your message across in a creative way. Instead of hand delivering your message, send it by USPS Priority Mail. As of this writing it only costs $6.45 and it comes in a Priority Mail envelope (no extra charge).

marketing a cleaning business with priority mailHow many times have you received an envelope like this and NOT opened it? Me too! Your open rate with this type of mail will be near 100%! As long as you include a message and an offer/ call to action that is compelling to your prospect, your response rate will be through the roof.

Have fun with it. Tell them if they invite you to come bid and it isn’t the most creative bid they have ever received you will bake cookies for the whole office! Or donate $100 to their favorite charity. Or buy something from their kids the next 5 times they are selling something for school! The trick is to have fun and be creative!

Imagine if you sent 100 of these envelopes. It would cost around $700. Do you think you would get at least ONE customer? There is the $1,000 customer you asked for!

If this has your motor running and you want even MORE amazing ideas on marketing a cleaning company, check out this video or listen to this podcast.