How to Pick a Target Market for Your Commercial Cleaning Business

No. The key is steady repeat work that keeps staff longer.

It helps fill the schedule with repeat hours. It also helps keep staff from bouncing around.

A common limit is about a 45-minute drive. This keeps hiring and site checks easier.

Often, yes. Bigger offices are more likely to need cleaning several nights each week.

Hours change often. That can lead to staff leaving and slower growth.

Well, hi there. Welcome back. Dan here from CleanGuru.

Today I wanted to talk about a question we get at the office a lot: What kind of buildings should I clean? What kind of cleaning should I offer? What should be the target market for my janitorial service?

There are lots of ways you can go with this, but it’s certainly worth thinking about. Take an afternoon to talk about it and think about it, because you’re going to be working on it a long time—probably years—building this. So upfront thinking about this will probably pay off.

I remember my business partner Tony and I thought about this, and I’ll share with you the two or three things we thought about that may help you when you’re trying to decide what kind of buildings and what kind of cleaning to offer.

The most important thing we thought was, let’s make it something that we can build on, that we can grow. To do that, it would also need to be stable. It couldn’t constantly be falling apart, as far as the employees leaving, or we would never be able to be scalable. They call it being scalable, and we thought that was important.

So we thought, what would be the best kind of cleaning? For us, we felt that office cleaning in the evening made sense because there were a lot of places that needed to have their offices cleaned, and there were a lot of people that we could hire and train. We thought we could create good jobs in the evening, part-time, that would be stable because folks may want to have their full-time job, and then they wanted to add a part-time job at night.

So we tried to do that, and we tried to make it maybe three hours of cleaning a night. We tried to customize the jobs so that people would want to stay, so we didn’t have too bad of turnover.

Now, in over 20 years running a commercial cleaning company, we had problems at times. We did. But in general, that target market helped us.

For example, if we needed six hours of cleaning because it was a big building, we’d hire two people working three hours a night. Why? Because a lot of our folks had day jobs, and they didn’t want to work too much at night—just a little bit. A little bit turned out to be about three hours: 5:30 to 8:30, 6:00 to 9:00, 6:30 to 9:30, something like that. So we tried to create these really good jobs that they’d like to keep.

Now, we also thought, well, how many days a week would they like to clean? Probably at least maybe three days a week. So we tried to target going after at least three-days-a-week accounts. You’re going to get a lot. There are places that only need one day a week. There are places that need two days a week. And you certainly can cobble together a schedule that makes up three days. You can, and we did. But in general, we said, “Let’s try to go after accounts that need at least three to five days a week.”

What does that mean? It meant we had to go after larger accounts—higher employee count, bigger buildings. It was more important to them that they wanted to be clean every day, or at least three days a week. So that’s what we did.

And then we thought to ourselves, what about how far away? In a world where people are doing mass telemarketing, or just picking up subcontracted work anywhere, or just doing cold email like crazy—a lot of which we think is crazy—we really believe in a different philosophy: really targeting who you want to go after, and really going after them by physically stopping in to meet them, some direct-response mail to them, but really this connection.

We tried to go after places within about 45 minutes of our town because not only could we target those buildings, we could hire for those buildings. We could do supply runs, inspection checks, customer service calls. So a lot of things were better for the convenience of managing those accounts if we kept it within 45 miles.

So all of these pieces came together: office cleaning in the evening, part-time jobs, hopefully about three days a week, within 45 minutes. All of those things came together to make up the buildings we wanted to go after, the kinds of cleaning we wanted to offer, and our target market.

Now, yours may be different than that. Folks could go after apartment buildings, construction cleaning, tile maintenance. Some of these jobs are more difficult in some ways and need more training. The stripping and refinishing of tile floors is a skill that takes time and experience to learn to do well. And you pay more for that to your employees as they learn this. But then also, if you ever lose those folks, you’re right back to square one trying to find someone and hire them to get experience.

Plus, those jobs aren’t always Monday, Wednesday, Friday. They can be one-time projects. Not all the time, but sometimes they’re not as recurring. So there’s a lot of thinking that can go into it, but I hope that me sharing how we decided helps you.

Till next time, remember: you can do this. You really can.