61. Fast Growth vs Sticky Revenue
Which do you choose?
Fast growth and sticky revenue.
Essential elements for building a successful cleaning business.
In an ideal world, you’ll have access to a lot of clients guaranteed high volume recurring work.
Depending on the stage of your business, you have to choose between fast growth or sticky revenue.
Fast growth requires reactive cleans.
Sticky revenue requires planned cleans.
As you start your cleaning business, you want to grow and grow quickly.
Win more clients, faster and grow revenue.
Then you reach a tipping point.
You start diversifying into planned cleaning and play the long game.
In today’s email:
Reactive Cleaning
Planned Cleaning
👇🏾 Listen: Need some advice for growing your cleaning business?
THE BIG IDEA
Reactive Cleaning
Reactive cleaning includes tenancy cleans, deep cleans and specialist cleans.
Businesses that need planned cleans deal with reactive work - building contractors, property managers and crime scene investigators.
It’s the type of cleaning that happens after an event:
A tenant has moved out of a property;
A new build project has finished; or
An incident has happened involving hazardous fluids.
When I started my cleaning business, all my business development focused on reactive cleans - tenancy cleaning.
We targeted property managers and letting agents in North West London. We ended up working all over London and the Home Counties.
As a result, the business doubled in size year on year in the first 3 years.
Fast growth.
Reactive cleaning is easier to scale because demand is high.
Google LSA and paid ads can bring you floods of reactive cleans.
You can grow a great business on the back of reactive cleaning.
But it’s not sticky revenue.
You won’t find a 3 year contract for tenancy cleans.
Building and maintaining good relationships plays a central role in reactive cleaning.
You’re only as good as your last clean.
As a result, you have to deliver the best cleaning service every time.
Even then, there’s no guarantee of future work.
If you fuck up, clients go to the next cleaning vendor on their list to take your place.
If someone provides a better price or a more comprehensive service, they take your place.
Without strong client relationships, reactive cleans put a lot of pressure on your cleaning business.
But if you want to grow quickly, focus on reactive cleaning.
Planned Cleaning
Planned cleaning is all about recurring revenue aka cleaning contracts.
Most commercial premises need to be cleaned every day to provide the hygienic environment for workers.
Because of this requirement, cleaning is planned in advance.
Businesses sign up to 2 year/5 year or 10 year cleaning contracts. They know that as long as the business operates a commercial property, it needs to be cleaned.
Contracts provide sticky income. They provide security for your cleaning business.
However, planned cleans are not as easy to get as reactive cleans.
You can run paid ads and use LSA to generate leads for cleaning contracts. But it’s expensive and in my experience, the leads you get are not great.
Cleaning offices for 2 hours a week on a Friday night won’t move the needle.
You can find contracts worth 10 or 20 hours a week using cold outreach (email/phone/LinkedIn). There are lots of businesses with this requirement.
With the right approach, you might be able to win at least 5 or 10 or these a year.
Businesses with this sort of requirement might sign up to a 12 month or 2 year contract. But they’ll also be quick to change cleaning vendors when they’re not happy with a clean.
Businesses with 50+ hours of cleaning tend to be committed for the long term.
These contracts will have benchmarks and KPIs that you need to maintain over multiple years.
If you fuck up, you get the chance to make it right as long as you meet the minimum requirements.
Businesses don’t want the hassle of changing cleaning vendors unless they really have to or the contract is up for renewal.
These type of contracts are harder to come by. You need to hunt for them and practice patience.
You need to nurture contacts after first reaching out to them. It might be 18 months before you get the opportunity to bid or tender.
But it generates sticky revenue.
Cleaning contracts compound growth.
It will be slow to start and take while to reach the tipping point.
However, over the long term they provide the right foundations for you to build a successful cleaning business.
Content to check out
This week’s episode of The Growth Lab podcast provides 7 pieces of advice for growing a successful cleaning business. Listen here.
Prefer watching over listening? Check out The Growth Lab podcast on YouTube.
Need More Help?
Want to 3x revenue growth for your cleaning business in the next 12 months? Book a call.
Email me with the growth strategy for your cleaning business. The more details you provide, the more personal I can make my response.
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Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
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