27. Domestic Cleaning Business Owners: 3 Reasons Why You Should Move Into Commercial Cleaning
And a real example of someone who's done it.
I’m speaking with a lot of domestic cleaning business owners at the moment.
Some of them have been running their cleaning business for a while and want to make the move into commercial.
The main attraction?
Secure recurring revenue; and
Contract value.
The commercial cleaning market is HUGE, estimated to reach $468.2B in revenue by 2026.
That’s 10x the size of the domestic cleaning market ($40.38B by 2025).
If you’re thinking of diversifying into commercial, there’s a lot of opportunity out there.
The commercial cleaning market is lucrative.
There’s a high demand for commercial cleaning services and the start up costs are low. You need cleaning equipment, transport and supplies.
That’s the good news.
The not so good news is there’s a lot of competition with new businesses entering the market every year. In the US alone the number of commercial cleaning businesses grew by 5.7% between 2016 to 2021.
Similar to domestic, attracting and retaining staff is also a challenge. Staff turnover is expensive and time consuming.
However, switching from domestic to commercial cleaning does offer three big advantages:
Recurring revenue (the holy grail)
Commercial clients need cleaning on a regular basis. They also sign up to long-term contracts. This helps to build secure and predictable revenue every month.
There’s recurring revenue with domestic but clients can cancel on a weeks notice, which impacts churn rate.
Long term, bigger value contracts increase the lifetime value of your clients. Winning commercial contracts also helps to build your business into a valuable asset, which creates exit options.
Higher earning potential
Commercial clients have larger spaces that need daily cleaning (in most cases). They also pay more for cleaning than domestic customers.
Depending on the type of commercial cleaning, there’s also greater scope to charge a premium.
Office cleaning is a standard commercial service with lots of competition and low barriers to entry so the market dictates the price, say £25/$50 per hour.
Data Centre cleaning is very niche, requires specialist equipment, certification and processes. These barriers to entry create less competition and allows you to charge a premium price for a specialist service.
Opportunity for growth
Commercial cleaning businesses are more scaleable than domestic cleaning businesses.
The difference in market size gives you an insight into the opportunity for growth.
Domestic cleaning centres around one core service, cleaning homes. With commercial, there’s different sectors that you can move into to grow your business.
If you’re really bold, you can pivot into facilities management, where cleaning is one of a range of soft and hard services you provide to commercial clients.
This type of move is hard to execute in domestic cleaning. But not impossible.
If you run a domestic cleaning business, there’s nothing stopping you from diversifying into commercial. The opportunity is there and the rewards can be exceptional.
For inspiration, listen to this week’s episode of The Growth Lab podcast where Samantha explains how she pivoted her successful domestic cleaning business into an even more successful commercial cleaning business.
Content to check out
In this week’s episode of The Growth Lab podcast, I have a chat with Samantha Read about why she switched from domestic to commercial cleaning, and how she improves her cleaning business by 1% every day. Listen here.
Prefer watching over listening? Check out The Growth Lab podcast on YouTube.
Need More Help?
If you’re struggling to generate sales leads that grow your cleaning business, I offer help in 3 ways:
Email me with your current prospecting strategy. The more detailed you provide, the more personal I can make my response.
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Turn 100% cold prospects into 5-10 sales leads and booked appointments every month for your commercial cleaning business.
Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
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