The vast majority of Contract Cleaning Companies are small ‘one-man band’ outfits that provide basic cleaning to a limited number of clients within a relatively restricted area. This is fine unless you want to make real money and continue growing and expanding. If you restrict yourself to a small locality and operate alone then you have a limited number of potential customers. If you want to be out the front of the competition and challenging the big players in the cleaning business then you must be prepared to widen your horizons.

Much of your competition will be these small cleaning companies who because they have limited overheads will be able to undercut you. However by careful marketing you can put yourself ahead of these and get yourself recognised before them. How to market yourself successfully has been covered in previous articles. Having beaten off the competition by your carefully planned marketing strategy you will still restrict your growth potential if you do not widen your area of coverage.

A planned well managed expansion is difficult to achieve within the cleaning business. Once you start to advertise your services outside of your immediate area you have no idea what the response will be and the golden rule is to never turn down work because that potential customer will never ever return to you if you do turn them away. Consequently you must accept most of the work that comes in and worry about how you might manage it once you have got it.

In the initial period of expansion out of your area there will obviously be a great deal of travelling and extra work and you will imagine that there are just not enough hours in the day to cope with all the work you have taken on. If you are determined to achieve then you will and once you have a few contracts established in another locality you can always employ others to look after them. It is only that initial hurdle that you must overcome. Having done it in one or two places you can then continue to expand as far as your vision will take you. This is the one big problem with franchising because as a franchisee you cannot expand outside of your designated area so you will always be restricted. Think big, act big and you will make big things happen. Think small, be restrictive and small things will happen and you will never escape from this ‘smallness’.

David Andrew Smith runs and operates a successful commercial cleaning services company that operates throughout the UK.

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