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Starting out as a cleaning services company within the precincts of a large city such as London can be a wise investment. If you look at this city then there is a huge number of potential clients. There is a proliferation of offices of all sizes; shops from the small to the massive department stores; restaurants, pubs and clubs; schools, colleges, hospitals and nursing homes; in the outer parts there are probably industrial concerns from bakers to warehouses, food distribution centres to engineering works and immersed amongst them all are thousands upon thousands of private dwellings. Many of these will require the services of a cleaning company either for one off specialist cleans or daily office cleaning. The numbers of possible customers is incredible. It is not beyond belief that you too could have a slice of this cake?

Investigations into the level of competition there is within a City such as London is not too difficult. For example carrying out a search on one of the directories such as yell.com for cleaners in London gives over 600 unique companies for commercial cleaning and over 1000 operating in the domestic market. A quick look through Yellow pages shows that these numbers should be at least doubled to get the actual number. What these figures demonstrate is that London is awash with cleaners! On average their is a cleaning company of some description operating every 500 yards throughout the Greater London area. That is a high density of cleaning firms to compete with.

All these companies you have found are already quite well established and probably have a solid customer base, and a good marketing programme. More importantly they have a well worked pricing structure. So if you are going to break into this market how might you go about? Whatever you do it will be difficult initially. There may be an attraction to going down the route of specialising in one type of cleaning such as the deep cleaning of commercial kitchens and their extraction systems. On the surface this would seem to open up a potentially huge target audience. From schools to hospitals and restaurants to universities and then there are all the pubs and clubs which serve hot food. All of these will at some stage in the year require the services of such a company. Even in these specialist areas the competition is still remarkably high and to succeed the only real way of gaining customers is to seriously undercut them with your pricing structure.

We are experiencing very difficult economic times at the moment and all companies are looking to save money and get their cleaning cheaper. So even your competitors are probably readjusting their prices in order to survive and many are simply going out of business whose cost base is too high. This is your opportunity, your cost base will be relatively low so you should be able to undercut your rivals price wise. A cautionary word at this point however. It is all too easy to quote low and on paper seem to be still making a profit but when it comes to completing the work you only need to hit one small problem and your profits could evaporate and quickly become losses.

To pick an area of cleaning and become expert at it might seem like a sensible and durable business model to follow. In theory your reputation should grow and you will be in great demand. However in these tricky economic times your potential customers are also cutting back and delaying things such as their cleaning until it becomes absolutely essential. As a result your customer base is shrinking and quite a few specialist cleaning firms are going to the wall. Others in order to survive are diversifying their cleaning. Perhaps this is what you should be looking at also. Either pick up a number of specialisms or go the whole hog and be capable of carrying out any cleaning job.

Whatever area of cleaning you choose to go into your pricing is going to be the key to obtaining work. So what are your competitors up to in this area? Most will be like you and quoting sensible prices and whether you get the work or not depends upon many other factors including an element of being in the right place at the right time. However some cleaning companies use unethical means in order to secure contracts which should be avoided at all costs. Some will base their quotes for example on using 20 cleaners to perform the task and their quote will in theory show them to be quoting so low they make a loss. However when it comes to the clean they only put in 15 cleaners who will be expected to do the work of 20. Now the company is able to turn a profit on the clean. The second method is illegal and dangerous and that is to employ the illegal immigrants that flood into the cities. They are a cheap source of labour until you are caught.

Some companies will be able to undercut you by using quite legitimate means. What they can do is actually import legal labour and give them accommodation. This cost is then removed from their wages which means that they also can be on very low rates of pay as it is a method of avoiding paying the minimum wage and keep their costs down substantially For you to do this requires you to have substantial resources for the accommodation requirements and for these to be on low running costs for yourself. This is not something that is possible for most of us.

None the less despite all these disadvantages that a start up will face it is still possible to gain a foothold by doing something unique. This could be the way you approach customers, the way you find customers, the way you market yourself or the additional value you can provide the customers with. A novel approach used by some companies when starting out is to provide the customer with a free deep clean prior to the commencement of a daily clean. Others might be free carpet cleaning or a free week every 3 months of the contract. Whatever it is it has to be novel and be financially attractive to the customer.

Whatever your unique selling point may be once you have secured your contract the ongoing cleaning should be maintained at a high standard otherwise the client will very quickly look elsewhere. In these large cities they do not have to look very far either. – 35634

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