The Most Dangerous Customer in Your Cleaning Business
What You’ll Learn
- Calculate each customer’s percent of monthly income
- Track that percent every month
- Market each month to get more clients
Short Summary
One customer can be too big for a cleaning company. Big jobs can lift revenue each month. One customer may bring in a large share of the money. If that customer leaves after a management change, cash can drop fast. A common warning level is 25% to 30% of the month’s total income. Find the share for every customer each month from total income. Watch the share as sales go up or down. Keep selling each month to add more clients and push the big share toward 15% or 10%.
Frequently Asked Questions
What percent is too high for one customer?
Around 25% to 30% is a warning sign. One loss can cut cash fast.
Why can a very large customer be risky?
A new manager can switch vendors fast. The company can lose a big chunk of income.
How often should the share be checked?
Check the share each month. The numbers change as new clients start.
Should the company do different work for the biggest customer?
Not always. The key is tracking the share and adding more clients.
What is a safer target share for one customer?
A lower share is safer. Many companies aim for 15% or 10%.
Transcript
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Hi there. Welcome back. Dan again from CleanGuru.
So, who is the most dangerous customer in your cleaning business? Or who are the most dangerous customers in your cleaning business? Is it the ones that are really difficult? They’re a real pain. Is it the ones that you’re not making much money on? That can be a problem.
But sometimes the most dangerous customer in your cleaning business might be the one that is so big, makes up so much of your monthly revenue, that if they were to roll over—if they were to have a change in management or ownership—and drop you, it would really be hard on your cleaning company budgets and your plans, and day-to-day operations and management. The hit that would come would be very difficult.
So what do we define that as? Is that they’re too big. We want big customers and taking care of them, making big dollar amounts per month. This is great. We can really grow our company.
Well, how about 25 to 30%? If you have one customer that makes up more than 25 or 30%, that’s somebody you want to take care of, but the point would be to identify that you have them.
So, the first thing is figure out what percentage each customer makes up of your total monthly income. But then the thing is this: it’s not that we’re going to do anything necessarily different for that customer. It’s that if that’s happening, we need to get more customers. We need to be actively working on a regular basis, every month, on trying to get more clients, so the percent of what they represent is less.
We get that down to 15%, 10%. We diversify our client base. We sleep a lot better at night knowing that if the big elephant—even though we like the elephant—were to roll over, it wouldn’t ruin or really hurt our cleaning business in terms of how we run things.
So, something to think about. Keep an eye on what percentage each customer makes up of your total. Till next time, remember, you can do this. You really can.
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