subject: Planning Your House Cleaning Financial Targets [print this page] You need to have a detailed financial business plan to take your house cleaning business to the next level.
You'll need to write a business plan if you want to secure some funding from a bank or some other financial institution. However, here we'll discuss planning your financial targets.
1) Plan backwards. So for example, if you want to turn over 50K in your first year, you'll have to plan backwards of how much you need to turnover each month.
2) How to achieve this. You now have a monthly turnover figure in mind, so how are you going to achieve this? How many new customers do you need to recruit each month? Are you getting many cancellations? If so, why? How can you cut back on cancellations and gain more new happy paying customers?
3) The service. Are your cleaners doing their upmost professional job? Are you recruiting new customers through word-of-mouth because your service is so good? If not, why not?
4) Evaluating. After the first 4-6 months you need to sit down and re-evaluate your financial targets. Are you on target? Are you making the necessary monthly turnover to reach your 50K goal? If not, why not? What is working and what is not working?
Don't forget that you will have quiet periods such as January/February and summer holidays. Try and find innovative ways to get new custom during these times.
Keep a close eye on your competitors and try to stay one step ahead of them at all times. You can do this by keeping an eye on their ads (e.g. Yellow Pages), keep an eye on their website and their flyers.
It is a case of constant monitoring, evaluating, assessing and taking action.
If you keep at this and keep monitoring and tightening your service to a top-notch level, then you'll find it a lot easier to get new custom simply by free word or mouth advertising.
