Carpet Cleaning Services, A Billion Dollar A Year Business!

This is why these services are earning so much, there are 2 major reasons why this industry is a billion dollar a year business. These 2 reasons can practically guarantee the success of any newcomer to this service business.

First, almost every home and office building built since 1960 has wall to wall carpeting in it. Thousands of yards of carpet are installed every year and almost every office has some type of carpeting installed in them.

Secondly, people want to take care of what they have. Especially when it comes to their expensive carpeting. Considering what a large investment, wall to wall carpeting is. People want to make it last as long as possible.

Many small offices and office buildings hire a private cleaning service to clean up the office and vacuum the carpet, but they also hire and pay for a carpet cleaning service company to clean their carpet at least once a year.

Restaurants are also considered a commercial cleaning job like an office, but restaurants generally have their carpet cleaned more often than offices do. Residential carpet cleaning consist of houses, apartments, condominiums and rental properties.

There is always a need for this service business to be done and it is growing all the time. You could operate your own carpet cleaning service business on a small scale for extra income or make a big business out of it and bring in at least $50,000 dollars a year or more. All that's really needed is a regular business license, some advertising flyers and the information contained in this guide.

You can get lots of residential carpet cleaning jobs from real estate property managers who manage rental properties because every time a tenant moves out, the carpet gets cleaned. Contact these property managers and offer your service to them. You only need one property manager to start using your service and you'll get a substantial amount of business from them.

Residential jobs will primarily come from the homeowners themselves. Homeowners typically vacuum their carpet on a regular basis but they usually pay to have it cleaned once or twice a year.

When first starting out in this business, you can concentrate your efforts on residential work or on commercial, both are demanding jobs. A lot of people try to save money by doing household chores themselves.

However, this has not kept carpet cleaning companies from doing a large amount of business every year. The people who do it themselves, that rent a carpet cleaning machine when they need it, are no reason to worry, as they will not have an affect on your success in this service business.

Getting it started is the hard part and will require a commitment on your part. You have to sell yourself and your service to potential customers. Soon you will be getting your carpet cleaning customers lined up every day and it will become easier for you. You'll have all the business you can handle if you stay with it and get through the start up stage.

It will be to your benefit to learn all that you can about promoting your carpet cleaning service or selling your service. The most common method of cleaning carpets is referred to as steam cleaning. It got that name from the steam that rises off of the carpet from the hot water being used. It's not actually being cleaned with steam.

It's cleaned by injecting hot water into the carpet and extracting it using a wand and suction power. There are truck mounted units that do this and portable units. All you really need to get started in this business is a good portable unit. Before you ever buy or rent and carpet cleaning equipment, you need customers.

Most people are just too busy or too lazy, to handle all of the chores that need done around their home. People also procrastinate and put off doing any chore that requires special equipment like cleaning the carpet.

You will find that most people will be very willing to pay you to bring in the equipment and do this work for them. The cleaning of the carpet is just something that needs to get done. It doesn't take any special skill or experience to operate a carpet cleaning machine.

Almost anyone can do it. It's a service business that you can start one day and have money coming in within a very short time. You can start this business in your own neighborhood, and begin making a profit almost immediately. You can get started in this business and earn $200 per day or more with no up front investment by renting the equipment needed, when you need it. One of the most important thing to remember about this business or any type of service business is to always persue your marketing efforts. All service businesses succeed, mainly due to the marketing efforts they put into promoting them. Your success in the carpet cleaning business will depend on the effort you put into it.

Your main customers are, any business, office, restaurant and home in your area with carpet on the floor. The work ahead of you is in reaching these prospects. Your objective is to convince them to hire you and your carpet cleaning service.

Then get them to set up a time for you to do the work. The least expensive method of reaching these people is by way of handouts or flyers delivered in person or by some teenagers and or college students, looking to make a little extra money.

These flyers are advertisements, that should be announcing a, Carpet Cleaning Special. Your flyer will be like having your own advertising billboard. You should be able to get 2 flyers off of one standard size sheet of paper.

Have a printer cut them in half for you with their paper cutter machine after running the copies for you. That way, if you have the printer run off 500 sheets and cut them in half, you will get 1000 flyers out of it.

Click Here For Your Carpet Cleaning Flyer

A big tip you should know about, to do a great job is to use some kind of carpet spot cleaner before you use the carpet cleaning machine. There are some excellent carpet spot cleaner products on the market today. They are either in the form of a liquid, foam or powder. One of them is called "Resolve", it is an excellent cleaning product!

Whatever spot cleaner you choose to use, it's a good idea to pour it into one of your own spray bottles to use in the customers home. Prices that are charged on commercial jobs such as offices and restaurants range anywhere from 12 cents to 24 cents a square foot. In this case you would simply measure the total amount of carpet and charge a price per square foot.

Anyway, back to your advertisement for residential work. Write out your own flyer on a blank sheet of paper and take it in to a printer to be typeset and have copies made. You may already know how to do this yourself on your own computer. If not, a local printer will help you with the design and layout of your flyer. You just have to tell them what you what it to say.

While your flyers are being prepared, you should be making plans to have them delivered. These flyers can be put out by anyone of the following:

do it yourself

with help from a friend or relative

college girls and boys

high school students

Whatever arrangements you make to distribute your flyers, be sure that you have someone available to answer your phone and set up appointments for you if you can. The next best thing would be for you to have an answering service or an answering machine and be sure to call people back, as soon as possible!

The special offer advertised on your flyer should only take you about one hour in the customers home. Depending on the travel distance between appointments, you can schedule one job to be done, every 90 minutes or less.

Regarding residential work, always try to line up several carpet cleaning jobs to be done on the same day, maybe even give an additional neibhorhood discount. This will become easier to do as your business gets off the ground.

Every time that you do a residential job, you should write down the customers name, address and phone number on an index card along with the date that you did the work and exactly what was done for how much money, etc. These people should then be called every 6 months about setting up their next carpet cleaning appointment.

Try to line up a few appointments for the same day or two consecutive days. Then get over to your local janitorial supply house. They are advertised in the yellow pages of your local phone book. Some of them have a much larger selection of products and services then others, so you may want to talk with them on the phone before driving all over town.

What you would be looking for from them is to rent a portable carpet cleaning machine. Many stores and some super markets will rent a portable type of carpet cleaner but you will find that the type of portable machine available from the janitorial supply business is much more powerful than the portable machines available elsewhere.

Some of the larger janitorial supply businesses will allow you to rent to own, or extend credit to you and let you make payments on a good portable carpet cleaning machine.

When you are just starting out, you can rent a machine for about $24 dollars for 24 hours. Make sure that you understand how to operate it from the business that is renting it to you. Load it up and go to your first appointment.

This method is profitable and it works. This is exactly how to get started with no money invested in purchasing equipment. Usually, a carpet cleaning service business takes you directly into the homes of your customers.

Therefore, beginning with you very first job, you should always present a professional image. A pullover shirt with a collar and your company name on it is a good way to do this. You could also buy yourself a uniform from most department stores.

Either way, if you are using a pullover shirt or a uniform, you should have your company name put on to them. How you dress and handle yourself in your customers homes has a direct influence on the success of your business and it can bring referrals your way.

Once you are providing the cleaning service to a particular office, you are there every week, you have an ongoing working relationship with the office manager and you have earned their trust. At this point, it is very easy to be the one who gets their next carpet cleaning job.

Just talk with the office manager and tell them that you now offer that service also and you would like to do it for them when they are ready to have it done, unless of course you would prefer that another company provides them with that service.

When you do hire someone to help you with the work, be sure to have that person dress accordingly and go out of your way to be polite and friendly to each and every customer.

Also, when you are in a customers home or office doing the job, Be sure to avoid getting involved in long, time consuming conversations. Just keep it business like and be polite. Concentrate on getting the work done so you can move on to your next job.

You should make it a point to always speak with the neighbors who are directly on each side of your customers home or office. As long as you are already doing work in the area, they might like to have you clean their carpet or their office for them too. Always leave a business card with everyone.

If you are in a customers home cleaning their living room carpet, the customer may ask you about the cost to do the other rooms in their home. Give them an estimate for example $19 dollars each for additional rooms or so much per square foot and do the work right then if possible, while you are already there.

A typical carpet cleaning job could end up involving more than just one room with an average bill to the customer of anywhere from $50 to $200 dollars. Your cost for materials on each job that you do will only cost you about 4 dollars each or less for the small amount of detergent you will be adding to the water.

Anyway, with just 4 appointments per day, five days a week, your income before expenses would fast be approaching $1000 dollars per week. It adds up fast! Many people who set up their own carpet cleaning service business bring in $50 thousand dollars or more their first year. You get out of it what you put into it.

Be creative and always put efforts into getting new customers. You have read about how to get started with practically no out of pocket investment, however, you should either purchase or lease your own carpet cleaning equipment as soon as you can.

Specifically, the service you would be providing, is referred to as

the deep down steam cleaning of carpeting in homes or offices.

Always try to use the best carpet cleaning machine that's available to you.

Eventually, you'll want to lease or buy your own equipment.

Your business will grow and prosper as a result of you always doing a good job. When you are in a customers home or office, it may take you a few minutes longer than you expected to do an extra good job. Especially when you are just starting out and learning to use and work with the equipment. Soon you will find that you are able to work very quickly, and still do a very good job.

Building a group of satisfied customers is the key to your becoming successful in this service business. Satisfied customers will call you back for more and they will help to spread the word about your service for you.

If you are careful about your work, the chances are, that you will never have any kind of accident in a customers home or office. Being able to advertise, All work fully insured will add a lot to your business image.

For example, on the subject of a so called home based business, as long as you don't put up a large sign on your front lawn that you are operating a service business from out of your home, you won't have any problem operating your business from your kitchen table or a spare room.

Also, sooner or later, you'll have to get yourself a business license. The sooner you do this, the better you'll feel about your business and the more confidence you'll have about what you're doing.

If you wanted to, you could have one business license and one company name that would include several different types of services all under one roof. If you decide to make a full time business out of carpet cleaning, then check on the cost of running a good ad in the yellow pages of your local telephone directory when you can afford to do so.

You'd be surprised at the number of calls you can get from these ads in response to your carpet cleaning service. However, just starting out, you should run a small ad in your local weekly paper. run a simular version of the advertising special that you advertise on your flyer.

Traditional radio or television advertising does not work that good for this kind of service when you compare the costs involved to the number of phone calls you get from it. I would recommend however, that you check into doing some cable T.V. spots. The cost to advertise on cable T.V. is very reasonable.

If you ever want your carpet cleaning service to grow real big, then as soon as you can, hire other people to do the work for you. The best way to do this is to hire people to work as a cleaning team of 1 or 2 people. Some good part time help is college girls and boys. Then your only job would be to get customers lined up, see that your employees are doing a good job and keep everything running smoothly.

Starting from scratch, this is a low cost and a low overhead type of business for anyone who wants to make it on their own. A carpet cleaning business of your own is one of the easiest service businesses to start and operate. It's a service business that can grow very fast and bring in the additional income for you.

Remember, that most every customer you work for will have you come back on some kind of regular basis. Even if it's only once a year. You would be building up a repeat customer base and it adds up fast! Understand, that marketing your service business is an on going continual process. It never ends.

You should put some effort into marketing your carpet cleaning service every week. Decide on your own plan of marketing and stick with it! The profit potential for this type of service is excellent!