31. How Your Cleaning Business Should Partner with Security Companies
Zero Cost Marketing
One under utilised channel for winning more cleaning contracts is with partnerships.
Through collaboration, businesses can offer services that complement each others and gain access to potential clients at zero cost.
My cleaning business partnered with businesses including removal companies for move out cleans and property maintenance companies for post-construction cleans.
The most lucrative partnerships were with security companies.
Agenda
Why security companies
Approaching security companies
Solving a problem
Why security companies?
After starting successful partnerships for move-out and post-construction cleans, I wanted to find similar partnerships for office cleaning.
I researched the facilities management industry and quickly realised that security and cleaning were the low hanging fruit.
In general, they occur at the same time (after office hours) and have at least a day 5 schedule (Monday to Friday).
To get a better understanding of the security industry, I contacted 200 security companies in and around London and they highlighted three common problems:
Manned guarding is a commodity service
Lack of margin
Competition from facilities manager
Because of these challenges, some security companies were offering either additional soft services (cleaning, waste management) or diverse mix of security related technology products.
Offering soft services improved sales, increase margins per client and improve retention rates.
This presented an opportunity.
Solving a problem
Feedback from the security companies I spoke with highlighted:
The number of tenders requiring cleaning and security to be provided by the same service provider was becoming a standard requirement for public and private sector contracts
39% already offered cleaning as a complimentary service
49% were interested in offering cleaning as a complimentary service by partnering with or sub-contracting to a cleaning business
Of the security companies that were offering cleaning, 48% were partnering or sub-contracting to a cleaning business, while the remaining 52% employed in-house cleaners.
These findings lead me to creating a partnership program for security companies that allowed them offer a dual service package alongside their manned guarding service.
The pitch was simple.
There are significant costs, in terms of time and money, in setting out an in-house cleaning division. Our partnership program:
Adds top line revenue at zero cost;
Increases revenue + margin per client; and
Boost client retention rates.
Massive upside for security companies with very little work.
Massive upside for my cleaning business because we were an easy sell into existing relationships.
Zero Cost Marketing.
Approaching security companies
Once I completed the research and identified the value proposition, I had a ready made list of security companies to sell to.
The 49% who were interested became my Dream 100 list.
I also built additional lists of security companies to contact.
I wrote a research report that I used as part of an email campaign outlining our partner program.
I had meetings with at least 25 security companies in the first 12 months of the campaign.
The outcome?
We signed up 3 partners and grossed around £100K revenue.
That’s the power of partnerships.
Content to check out
In this week’s episode of The Growth Lab podcast, I have a chat with James Fitzpatrick about building how to build an award winning cleaning business. Listen here.
Prefer watching over listening? Check out The Growth Lab podcast on YouTube.
Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
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