Most people who start their own cleaning business primarily start small and then they later on expand when they have proven the potential of their business and have gained clients beyond their immediate families, neighbors and friends.

It takes time and a great deal of patience before you can actually see the growth of your cleaning business. If you are able to maintain regular clients, consider your self lucky. You have some amount to spare to further promote your services through promotions and advertising.

If you plan on expanding your cleaning business, you have to spend some time to think this decision through. A lot of professional house cleaners are struggling in their business. They wonder why they don’t get more of the jobs they bid on. They ask why people won’t pay their rate and instead want to negotiate the price down.

If you’re not presenting yourself as a professional cleaning business, your prospects assume you just need to make some extra money; you don’t have their respect and they think you’ll be happy to take whatever they offer to pay.

First impressions last and this probably holds especially true with your cleaning business. Therefore you have to see to it that the moment you answer your client’s call, you already know what to say and what to offer. Not only are they judging you before they hire you, but they judge you again when you arrive on the scheduled service date.

Document each of the services you will provide with your every client. Use the Service agreement form to define your terms of doing business. This form will serve you great deal of time in effort during your in-home or telephone bidding. You will discuss the content with your prospect and then have them sign it, not as a contract, but to provide both parties with an understanding of your terms and the service start date.

The Customer Checklist records all the cleaning services you can provide your clients with as well as an estimate on how much you will charge your clients for your cleaning services. This form alone can get you the job immediately or even later after your prospect has tried other services.

The Work Order is created from the important notes you recorded on the Service Agreement during the walk through or telephone interview. It specifies the client, the address and phone number, information pertaining to pets in the home, client specific requests and directives, including important notes you documented about the home.

The Service Checklist is used by you or your team on the scheduled service date. It is a reminder of the regular service tasks that are to be performed and is used to maintain quality. One of the biggest complaints from clients is that quality of service deteriorates over time. If you’re not using a Service Checklist, you’re not instilling trust in your clients, especially new clients. They will automatically check your work on every appointment to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

When you start to use business forms for your existing clients, they will probably ask you why the sudden change. This provides you with a chance to tell them that you’re expanding your business and would appreciate referrals. This leaves them impressed knowing that you are serious about running a professional business and will be more likely to make referrals.

See: How to start a house cleaning service

One thing to do if you have already started with your own cleaning service business is to have it advertised and publicized to your friends, neighbors, relatives, and everyone else who might be interested in the type of services you offer. Advertising and publicizing your business is one way of boosting your clientele and generating more revenue for you. There are different types of advertising you can consider. You can even do word of mouth advertising – where your clients would simply pass on good words about your businesses to their families and friends. Other than this, of course there is the infamous handling out of flyers or posting them on trees and the like – the customary way.

Giving your customers discounts is also one best way to promote your home cleaning service. When your customers are happy and satisfied with the discounts you provide them with, it is more likely for them to refer your services to their friends and relatives. Or better yet, give discounts on a referral basis. When your customers refer 10 of their friends to try out your home cleaning service, you can automatically give them a service absolutely free of charge. But before you get all too excited about it, you might want to consider doing comparative research with all the other home cleaning services near your area and compare their rates. Of course you wouldn’t want to be over charging them nor would you want to cut on your income.

Before going big but unarmed in the cleaning service industry, you might want to consider focusing only on your community or neighborhood first. You can simply pass around flyers or leave them on the cars of your neighbors that are parked all over the streets of your neighborhood or village. Don’t hand out flyers that look like scratch papers, please. See to it that even if your texts are in black and white, your paper and the layout is attractive. Don’t give people the reason to throw your flyers into the trash can.

See to it that you provide accurate information in the flyers that you will be sending out to your prospective clients. Check the information you provide several times before actually handing them out. See to it that you address, location, contact number and even the services that you offer and boast of are accurately noted in your flyers.

If you’re thinking of other ways on how you can hand out your flyers and brochures, you might want to consider distributing them in places where there’s a great deal of people traffic like schools, malls, groceries, churches etc. Of course you have to properly ask permission from the owners or the guards of these establishments to make sure that what you will be doing is allowed and legal.

If your flyers come in the form of stickers, don’t make the mistake of sticking them on walls and doors of households and establishments because this could be very irritating to your prospective customers. Not to mention, you might not be able to get them as your customers at that.

See: Home based cleaning service