Carpet Cleaning Business Start Up Guide

Posted on November 16, 2011 by admin

Why the carpet cleaning business?

Congratulations on finding the carpet cleaning industry and taking the initiative to discover what it really takes to start a successful carpet cleaning business.  Owning and operating a profitable carpet cleaning business is an incredible opportunity if you know what to do and “do it right”.

My objective is to provide information that can help you learn about how to start a carpet cleaning business and achieving the kind of success and lifestyle from your carpet cleaning business you can truly be proud of.  It’s about building the kind of carpet cleaning business that can definitely set you apart from your competition and set you free financially.  It’s about how you can build a truly successful carpet cleaning business in your market.

start a carpet cleaning businessDo You Want To Be A Carpet Cleaner or OWN A Carpet Cleaning Business?
You probably didn’t wake up one morning thinking… “Wow… wouldn’t it be great to start a carpet cleaning business and clean carpets for a living?”  But on the other hand, the idea of owning and operating  a highly respectable local business that you could start with a minimal investment, had very little overhead, was simple to market, could generate immediate profits and could be leveraged into a substantial enterprise, is worth some serious consideration.  Well, that’s exactly what a properly structured carpet cleaning business is all about!

What A Carpet Cleaning Business Offers…
I can’t think of another business that offers the low cost of entry, the freedom, the personal satisfaction and yes, the financial potential that owning and operating a professional carpet cleaning business can bring.

As I’m sure you realize — as it is with just about any real business — there are a lot of tricky little details you need to know to start a carpet cleaning business quickly, efficiently and economically.

For example, to operate a successful carpet cleaning business…

  • You need to know how to do wow a customer with your carpet cleaning
  • You need to know exactly exactly what equipment you’ll need to acquire for your carpet cleaning business and exactly how to properly use and maintain it
  • You need to know what cleaning products, accessories and supplies you need and the best way to use them
  • You need to know how to set your pricing, manage your appointments and maximize your profits
  • you need to know the best and most economical methods to market your carpet cleaning business, how to get the phone to ring, what promotional materials you’ll need and how to use them to consistently generate new carpet cleaning business
  • You need to know how to implement a customer service program that maximizes customer retention and generates new referrals

There is just no substitute for specific, hands-on, from down in the trenches information when starting a carpet cleaning business.  Learn more…

But How Much Money Can You Make Owning and Operating A Carpet Cleaning Business?
This has to be the best kept secret in home-business opportunities.  Most people have no clue how much money a carpet cleaning business can generate.  In this economy, finding a job that pays $100 (or more) per hour would be extremely difficult if not impossible for most people to land.   Earning that kind of money and more for every hour you work is easily attainable in the carpet cleaning business.

Carpet Cleaning Business Profits
To demonstrate, let’s break down a typical carpet cleaning job – and I’ll be conservative here.

First, a very good carpet cleaning business strategy is to target higher income home owners. Why? They have their carpets cleaned regularly, they have more discretionary income, they have more carpet to clean, they take a lot of pride in their homes (inside and out), and always want their carpets to look their best.

However, for this example we’ll look at an average 2,000 square foot 3 bedroom home. By the way, it’s true that we’re seeing more hardwood and tile floors – especially in newer homes, but a 2,000 square foot home could still easily have 800 or more square feet of carpeting. (Three bedrooms, living room and hallway). Most professional carpet cleaners would charge .35 cents a square foot for cleaning, and 15 cents a square foot to apply carpet protector (like scotch guard). So the total cost per square foot for carpet cleaning and applying carpet protector would be 50¢  a square foot. Many professional carpet cleaners charge more.

So 800 square feet X .50¢ = $400.00 in total revenue.

It should take between 1 ½ to 2 hours to complete this job. The cost of material would be about 3¢ a square foot or $24.00 total.

So your profit would be $376 for about 2 hours of actual work or $188 per hour. Even if it took  3 hours you would still have generated a gross profit of $125 per hour.

Now to calculate how much can be made for the day, week, month or year, simply multiply the number of jobs per day (2 or 3 are easy to do) times your average profit per job.  In the example above, 2 jobs would generate a daily gross profit of $772.  (This is gross profit because we haven’t taken into consideration other costs, such as fuel, insurance, depreciation, etc. – however, these costs are minimal.)

Carrying these calculations forward (2 jobs per day averaging $376 gross profit per job) would mean that your carpet cleaning business would generate $3,760 in a 5 day week and $188,000 in a 50 week year.  But what if you could handle 3 or even 4 jobs per day, and what if you operated your carpet cleaning business with multiple vehicles and crews?  It’s easy to see the profit potential.   Get out a pad and calculator and do a few simple calculations.  You’ll be amazed at what the numbers will reveal to you.

Most residential jobs only requires one technician, but working as a two person team can make each job easier, quicker and  more profitable.  Why?  One technician working alone can do 2 or 3 average jobs per day (like the average job in the example above) – or 3 to 4 smaller jobs. But a two person team can easily do 3 to 4 average and larger jobs.

So what’s the real key to building a successful carpet cleaning business?

Although a necessary ingredient, it is certainly not just the technical aspects of knowing how to properly clean carpets! The ability to clean carpets — or at least good enough to “wow” a client — is definitely important. But impressive carpet cleaning skills alone will not guarantee a successful carpet cleaning business nor will that skill alone allow you to make a good living at it. Only good technical skills combined with good business skills and sound marketing strateies will lead to long term, sustainable success.

Marketing Your Carpet Cleaning Business
Everything you do in your carpet cleaning business ties to your marketing plan. Marketing your carpet cleaning business is all about how to find people interested in doing business with you, converting them into paying customers, and keeping them coming back over and over while referring all their friends, coworkers, neighbors and family to your carpet cleaning business. Marketing your carpet cleaning business is really not difficult to do.  It can actually be very inexpensive and you can even have fun doing it.

The good news is that you can build a very successful carpet cleaning business with absolutely no advertising. Forget the yellow pages, newpaper ads, Val Pack coupons, print ads, etc.  They just are no longer necessary. Keep the money yourself instead – you’ll be glad you did!

A Carpet Cleaning Business Website

What you will definitely need for your carpet cleaning business is a great website that is properly optimized to rank at the top of Google Places.  In today’s business world, your website is the face of your business.  The first impression matters and you can make the right one with the right website.  In addition, you’ll need professional quality marketing materials including business cards, door hangers and brochures that naturally lead customers to your website.  For examples, take a look at these…

Managing and Growing Your Carpet Cleaning Business

You’ll also need to implement some important “administrative” skills.   Acquiring  customers won’t do you much good in the long term if you don’t follow up and stay in touch in an efficient and profitable manner.  The key here is implementing sound business and customer service systems.

Building a highly successful and sustainable carpet cleaning business requires three distinct skill sets — technical skills, marketing skills, and administrative skills. Furthermore, those three skill sets should fit into a business model and structure that supports your lifestyle. The reason a lot of business courses, including entire college programs, fall short is because they do not teach a complete system for building a business.  Having some technical knowledge and knowing a few marketing “tricks” alone will never create a solid foundation for building a long-term sustainable business.

Learning a bunch of useless “MBA” type-of-stuff really doesn’t help much either in the real world of get-your-lifestyle-right business. It might only slow you down. You need to ditch the theory and implement tried and proven business systems.

How to Develop Unique Positioning and A Distinct Advantage In Your Carpet Cleaning Business

In a  national survey quizzing consumers about their most bothering issues when it comes to carpet cleaning, the overwhelming #1 complaint was that the carpets were left too wet and took way too long to dry. The #2 complaint was that stains came back after the carpet had finally dried.

So here’s an idea for you… Wouldn’t it make since to be the one carpet cleaning business in your area that offered a carpet cleaning system that addressed these issues?  Here’s exactly how that can be done.

Over 90% of your competition will be utilizing traditional steam cleaning (or hot water extraction).  You’ve seen them with the big van out front with hoses running across the yard and into the house. Steam Cleaning (actually it’s really not steam – it’s just hot water) is a 40 year-old process that can leave the carpets wet for many hours (or even days) when not done properly.

It is an old system that relies on high water pressure, detergent and hot water to clean (which can force water and dirt down into the pad and even the subfloor). The water and soap is then vacummed out of the carpet (only 60-60% actually comes out), but because the pad and subfloors are so wet, it takes a long time for the carpet to become totally dry. This can cause wicking issues (stains coming back through evaporation), mildew and mold problems and quick re-soiling – not to mention a total inconvenience for the customer.

The equipment used for wet carpet cleaning  is costly, heavy, noisy, high maintenance, large, complicated to use, and susceptible to costly freezing damage in the winter months. The fuel to power the equipment is also expensive and hot water cleaners have to find a a place to legally dump the dirty recovered water (which also adds cost and time).

The carpet cleaning industry has come a long way in 40 years. With modern low moisture carpet cleaning systems, carpets can be totally dry in 30 minutes or less; stains will not come back, and carpets will repel dirt after cleaning, keeping them clean much longer. The equipment is far less expensive, light weight, quiet, maintenance free, easy to use, easy to transport, easy to store, and there are no freezing issues. There is no fuel to purchase for the equipment (you use the customer’s electricity), and there is no chemical laced water to dump back into your city’s water supply.

With a dry (or low moisture) carpet cleaning system, you can advertise “Professional Dry Carpet Cleaning” or “Quick Dry Chemical-Free Carpet Cleaning” utilizing eco-friendly green cleaning agents (chemical and residue  free). Implementing this methodology in your carpet cleaning business can give you a distinct advantage over 90% or more of the competition in your area.  Think about it.  If you had just had your carpets cleaned would you prefer to be left with wet, gushy, icky carpet or totally dry, clean, soft and fresh carpet?

A Carpet Cleaning Business is Recession Proof
If there is a recession-proof business, the carpet cleaning business is it. The reason is  virtually every home has carpet that needs to be cleaned at least once a year and there are tens of millions of people every year that buy new carpet for their homes.  When new homes are being built, there’s even more carpet to clean.   When the economy is weak, many people opt to get their old carpets professionally cleaned instead of investing in new carpet.  Those that do buy new carpet, will still need to have it professionally cleaned within a year.  Either way, there’s always a growing demand for a quality carpet cleaning business.

Should You Consider A Franchise For Your Carpet Cleaning Business?
Unless you want to deal with numerous restrictions, limitations, initial fees, royalty payments and  inflated overhead imposed by a franchise system, going the franchise route is probably not a good idea.

Am I saying franchising is bad?  No not at all.  If you can obtain a franchise for a Chick-fil-et or MacDonald’s, or a concept with a real brand power,  franchising can be an incredible (although expensive) opportunity.  But for a carpet cleaning business, it just isn’t necessary.  You can easily obtain your equipment, cleaning products, supplies and even marketing assistance from a quality supplier.

Here are a list of reasons for starting a carpet cleaning business that might make the carpet cleaning business the perfect opportunity for you:

    • The Carpet cleaning business represents a huge and continually growing market
    • You  can become your own boss in this business
    • You can control your own schedule
    • You can grow your Carpet Cleaning Business at your pace
    • Your Carpet Cleaning Business will generate immediate and daily cash flow – with no receivables
    • A Carpet Cleaning Business is a service that virtually every homeowner, property manager, realtor and business owner has a continuing need for
    • A Carpet Cleaning Business has a very low start-up cost and overhead
    • No Inventory (except for a few supplies) is necessary for a Carpet Cleaning Business
    • A Carpet Cleaning Business is simple, easy to start and home-based
    • You can easily build a high repeat customer base
    • A carpet cleaning business can be very profitable – right from the beginning
    • financial control is in your own hands
    • no employees are necessary (unless you choose)
    • no storefront or lease overhead is required
    • Unless you choose, you’ll never work holidays in your carpet cleaning business
    • You can take weekends off – only work weekends if you choose to
    • The carpet cleaning business is recession resistant
    • There is unlimited growth potential in most markets for a well run carpet cleaning business

A Carpet Cleaning Business is one of the most lucrative businesses to get into – regardless of the economy. It is an easy business to start, run, and maintain. It is recognized as one of the top ten businesses to start according to business professionals and entrepreneurial books and magazines, PowerHomeBiz.com, and other business research companies. It is also a business that can be operated part time while you keep your current job and transition to full time when you’re ready.

A Carpet Cleaning Business has one of the highest rates of return on investment of any business. The cost of cleaning supplies are typically less than 5% of the job, which means that you can expect to generate a 95% (or higher) gross profit margin.

With the new low moisture cleaning systems and residue-free-eco-friendly cleaners, a carpet cleaning business is now relatively inexpensive to launch. You no longer have to buy big vans and install expensive truck-mount cleaning machinery. The new high efficiency carpet cleaning machines can now be transported in a Minivan, SUV, or even a car.

Hopefully this information has given you a glimpse into what it takes to start a profitable carpet cleaning business.   Of course there’s much more you’ll want to know before you actually start your business.  To help you, I have reviewed every carpet cleaning business startup package, ebook and franchise I could find. If you’ve done the same, you’ve probably discovered there’s a lot of hype and misinformation out there that’s promoted by individuals that have never been in the carpet cleaning business or have even cleaned a carpet.  My best advise is to be super careful who you listen to.

For more information on how to start a carpet cleaning business check out the STRONG Dry Carpet System.  I highly recommend their services and encourage you to take a look at their programs and speak directly to their principals if you’re serious about starting a carpet cleaning business.