Make money cleaning carpets

What do you charge? The response will determine your future. And were you to call twenty cleaners as a prospective customer to ask this question, the odds are each will quote a competitive price. A quick market analysis will reveal several startling facts in regard to carpet cleaning: The average customer is more concerned about price than anything else. Most professional cleaners will either sell price to get business or hold their charges down out of fear of losing it.

Cleaners come and go in and out of this profession like migrant fruit pickers. Most customers the vast majority have had more than one bad experience with a professional cleaner. When they were finished, I could hardly tell that my carpets had been cleaned.

I found rust spots and varnish stains under all the legs.

But the root of the problem runs deeper. Selling price to get business A while back, I received a call from a cleaner in North Carolina who told me he was quite successful.

To make more money, you must do more jobs. To get more jobs, they buy a bigger yellow page ad, mail more fliers and lower their prices. However, the greater their volume, the greater their business overhead: As a guy who does say However, because of the competitive price, you realize less money per job to pay all these bills.

Yes, this approach to business building works if your objective is to clean more carpet. The less you charge, the less time you can afford to spend at a given service location. But the more soiled the carpet, the more time required to restore it. And the less soil you remove for lack of time, the more displeased or unimpressed the customer will be and the more average you become as a professional.

The more average a cleaner is, the less reason a customer has to call back for future service.

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When a customer does call back, the low price, not quality, will be the reason. The most you can hope for in building a business on the basis of price is to develop a client base that will keep you very busy working very hard to earn very little. Net profit determines success For all the correlated associations in between, net profit is all that matters.

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Let me repeat the same question in a different way. During my first year in business, I was hit with this price question every time I picked up the phone, because I was yellow-page dependent the best source there is for price shoppers.

And early on, I discovered that to answer the question was to lose the job, because I refused to lower my charges. The customer thought I was just gathering information to assess a charge, but that was not the case. Rather, I was leading her away from her original question to another, which finally came in discerning the reason she had not called the cleaning firm she previously used.

Often, they had forgotten the details but not their negative reaction. Take note of two important points: Most cleaners don't stay in touch with their customers, so they're forgotten. My objective was to cause the customer to revisit her past negative experiences with other cleaning firms. And my purpose was to use this negative energy to develop the desire for something better.

In developing the desire for better, I also developed the willingness to pay more to get it "I don't want to go through that again. What you must understand is that the service charge determines how much time a cleaner can afford to spend in your home. However, the degree of carpet soiling will also determine how much time is required to restore your carpeting.

How much one is willing to pay for any given service will determined by the value placed on it.

Now it must suffice to simply say that it has two parts: The value derived in avoiding the negatives and that derived in acquiring the positives. Each customer has her own system of values, both positive and negative. If all you want is the job, then keep answering the price question with a low price.

Make Extra Money By Cleaning Houses

You must educate, educate, educate! Therefore, to make money in this business, you must sell it as a service. Dick Ragan owns Consumer-Oriented Publications. For information about cleaning-for-health materials and customer newsletters, call toll free at All Content Copyright National Trade Publications Inc.