If you are assessing about building a cleaning industry or buying an existing business, the number one tool every cleaning business must have is a customer database. Without a good quality customer database, you will have no Goodwill when you decided to sell or exit your business. It is that important that without it, you will lose over half of the value of your business when you go to trade your business.
Let me explain … why is customer database so important?
The function of the customer database is to inform the history and the story of your customers over a period of time. Many accountants will tell you that your customer database is your secretarial package like MYOB and QUICKEN. In fact, I will tell you now that if you only use these application you are gravely restricting the achievement of your business as accounting packages do not inform you the full history of the relationship between you and your customers.
The customer database is the most significant tool in your whole business. It contains every bit of information about your customers where as the accounting system only contains essential contact information and what they have purchased. The sort of information that you want to store in your customer database does vary depending on the type of business you actually have.
The sort of information I would generally expect in the customer database are things like, their contact information, goods they are interested in, information about what they are expecting from you, when you have contacted them and what they discussed, what advertising material you sent to them and whether they buy off that marketing stuff, what adverts brought them to you, what their standard dollar sale is, what their predicted long term value is, any special deals you have done with them and so much more.
What I suggest to every cleaning business owner is to strive and locate an industry specific client database. Pretty much every industry has its own customized system which focuses on the issues related to your business. If your industry does not have one, then it is really important that you invest the money into building one that address the issues of client management for your business.
Over the last few years my team and I have built a number of business specific database for industry like the car cleaning business, the sewing machine sales and repair industry, the carpet cleaning industry, the recruitment industry, the industrialized industry and so forth. In each and every case, their requirements for their customer management structure were very different.
In the case of the Sewing Machine industry, there value in their business was being able to track and manage the actual sewing machine not the customer. It was more significant for them to be able to know what repair work was done on the machine and how many diverse people had owned it. The real money in the sewing machine industry is in repairs and sales of their material etc.
Where as, in the carpet cleaning industry, the most significant element to track and manage in their industry is in fact the homes that they clean not the clientele. This was particularly significant when you are doing housing rental carpet cleaning. In this industry, renter’s can be a very misleading group of people; one of my customers had a situation arise where the occupant actually accused her carpet cleaning business of wrecking the carpet and streaking the carpet and not them.
Well because my consumer had track the past of the carpet in that home, they were able to show to the Real Estate agent, what stains were at first in the house from preceding work to what was in there now. In fact, since they photograph every home once they begin and when they end, they had a complete photo history of this home on file. They were able to show to the real estate agent the full account of work carried out and which stains were enduring and what were new and this meant the earlier renter had to foot the full bill for the damage they had completed not our client.
If my client had not invested in building this customized carpet cleaning customer database, then she could have been in a real bind. Further to this, when my client decided to sell her business, she got three times what others were getting for their carpet cleaning commerce, because of the value that was established in her customer database.
The corporation that bought her out was a National Carpet Cleaning Company and they wanted her business because of the customer history she had. This is a perfect example of how the Customer Database illustrated the true value of the Goodwill in her business to the prospective buyer. I should note, she now drives roughly in a white Mercedes because of the cash she earned from the sale of her business.
Customer databases do not need to be costly and they can be easily built in Microsoft Office applications like Microsoft Access. The reason many companies are using Microsoft Access is because of the ease of being able to build the systems and get people to help them. What a lot of companies do is to train one person in using Microsoft Access and then get them to construct the database as part of their job. Alternatively, there are lots of Microsoft Access Developers out in the market place and they are really cost effective to hire. Always though check with preceding clients to see what they thinking of their work and how first-class they really were.
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