Top to Bottom, Drag and Drop Spring Cleaning

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]”Top to Bottom Drag and Drop Spring Cleaning” is a way to upsell your cleaning business during the slow times. 

The drag and drop, clean my space, junkyard run with donations, junk metal, and a trash load will pay your bills. 

We Ask a House Cleaner how to build my cleaning business? And Angela Brown, The House Cleaning Guru says “Drag and Drop.” It’s like speed cleaning for deep cleaning and involves the removal of junk, waste, clutter, and debris. You remove odds and ends from your client’s attic, crawl space and under the house with a rental van and a team.

Today’s sponsors are HouseCleaning360.com (a hub connecting house cleaners with homeowners.) And Savvy Cleaner Training for house cleaners. 

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Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer.

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Question: How Do I Upsell Spring Cleaning?

I got a call the other day from a guy who wants to know how to upsell a spring cleaning. He’s had people ask about it but wants to know; “What does a spring cleaning involve and how does it work?” 

Spring cleaning is like a deep clean but there are garden varieties of the same upsell. Here’s one that’s worked for us for years. 

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Answer: Top to Bottom, Drag, and Drop Spring Cleaning

Top-to-bottom, drag-and-drop. Ooh, that sounds nasty. But what we’re talking about is attic cleaning or cleaning underneath your house. This is also known as spring cleaning. And we’re talking about the slowest months of your business.

What is Top-to-Bottom Drag-and-Drop Service?

Top to Bottom Drag and Drop, Taking Down Ornaments on Christmas TreeMy company offers top-to-bottom, drag-and-drop service every year between January and February. The reason being is this. Those are the slowest months in the house cleaning business. People just come off the holidays and they’re tight on money, and they’ve had lots of family in to visit. And they still have to put away the Christmas trees. They got to put away all the Christmas gifts.

Customers know they’re going to do some spring house cleaning. They know they got some new gifts for Christmas and there’s no room for them. They know it’s time to go through their bedroom and coat closets. 

“Let’s just put a hold on the house cleaner for a couple months while we sot all this stuff out.” 

Customers Cancel When They Need You the Most

Satisfaction Guarantee, Cash in Wallet.35-minAnd so, people cancel their regular house cleaning which gives you vacancies in your schedule. But if house cleaning is your main income you need jobs so that you can pay your bills.

Starting back in September and October, we sell this top-to-bottom, drag-and-drop service. Here’s how it works. It’s really just a spring cleaning but it covers the attic.  The attic is nice and cool in Jan and Feb whereas the rest of the year the attic is 150 degrees. 

Attic cleaning is an upsell. You can also help with the attic cleaning and put holiday decorations away. Or you can just sell the drag and drop service. 

Customers Get in a Cleaning Groove

Top to Bottom Drag and Drop, Crawl SpaceOnce you flip that cleaning switch and customers start going through stuff, upsells are easy. It’s an easy to add the crawl space, closets, toy boxes and garage into your cleaning package.

During the summer months when families are outside, they’ll wish they had more room in their crawl space to store stuff. Wheelbarrows, yard equipment, ladders, bicycles and sports equipment. 

Now is a good time to unload all the stuff they are not using now. 

Depending on what geographic part of the country you live in, you may have to wait until the snow melts to do these tasks.

The Crawl Space Has 30 Years’ worth of Junk

Top to Bottom Drag and Drop, Rusty BikeThere are people who have bicycles underneath their house from when their kids were 10. Their kids are now grown adults and they have kids of their own. And the parents saved these bikes to one day give to their grandkids. Okay, the bikes are old and rusty now. They’re not ever going to be used again. Let’s get rid of that stuff and take it to the junkyard or the Goodwill or whatever. Let’s get rid of that stuff.

Rent a Van – Include the Price in the Job

So, what we do is we build into the price of our service a rental van. And you can rent a rental van in the United States from Spring Cleaning Drop and Drag VanU-Haul for about $20 a day. It’s a great big extended van, and you can fit lots of stuff in there.

Now you’ll need to go on the internet and you’ll need to do some research and find out where the nearest dump yard or junkyard is to where you work.

For me, it’s about five miles away, and so I know in the back of my head that there’s a U-Haul place right next door. I can go down there and I can pick up the van which is $20 a day, and then I got to pay for gas and I got to pay for mileage.

Paint a picture the Customer Can Visualize

Top to Bottom Drag and Drop, Team in UniformsI’m going to show up with a crew of three people. We’re going to show up with a van. All your stuff needs to be pulled out of your attic and pulled out from underneath your house. You need to have big stacks of stuff in your yard. We’re going to take a load of metal, then we’re going to take a load of trash, and then we’re going to take a load of donations.

So, if you can separate all that stuff for us, then we will take three trips. We’ve got three people. Two to help you while one person takes the load of stuff. We’re going to make three trips from your house and fill up this van with all these different three piles.

Get the Customers Involved in the Drag and Drop

Top-to-bottom Drag-and-DropIf the customers need us, we can get more involved at an extra charge. We can build in extra time where we will go up inside their attic and we will help them sort stuff, and we will help them pull stuff down. A lot of times we’ll pass that off to a professional organizer who will come in first and help with all those emotional attachment items.

But once the customer’s ready to get rid of all that stuff, we are the manpower. And we are going to come in and we’re going to scoop all that stuff up and we’re going to take it to either the junkyard which you usually have to pay a fee for. I know that in the area I live in, it’s $7.50 to drop off a load of trash or junk.

Recycle the Metal and Tin in Your Drag and Drop

Top to Bottom Drag and Drop, Metal PartsSo, if there’s a recycling place, which there is a recycling place near me, I can take all of the metal and all of the tin, and things like the old bicycles or old garden tools that are made of metal, I can take those to the metal recycling plant and they will weigh the metal and then they will cut me a check for the leftover metal.

When we do a drag and drop spring cleaning We keep that extra money from the metal turn in. Because the customer’s just getting rid of it. They’re not turning it in for a fee. If they want to turn it in for a fee, they can rent their own van, and they can take it in and turn it in and get their own metal fee. But we do that, our company keeps it, and the customers don’t know about it. We don’t tell them about it. We don’t make a big deal about it. No one ever asks. No one cares.

The Trash Load Will Usually Be the Biggest in the Drag and Drop

Professional Organizers, Trash BagOkay, so anyway, then there’s the trash load. The trash load is going to have recyclables and it’s going to be trash. It’s going to be things like old broken swimming pools that are those above-ground pools that toddlers use, and then I don’t know why, but the parents will save those and put those underneath their house for storage. But they’re broken, they’ve been chewed apart by wild rodents. There are things that have collapsed on top of them and have smashed them. It’s just junk.

Okay, so anyway it is an opportune time for you and your business to pick up extra work that you normally would not have, or turn one-offs into repeat customers. The customer is not going to clean all this clutter unless they are moving and they are forced to for some reason.

But if they are moving or they want extra space, this gives you a chance to come in and upsell.

Top to Bottom, Drag and Drop Spring Cleaning

Unreliable Employees, Attic With Accordian Among Other Old ItemsThe top-to-bottom, the top is the attic, the bottom is underneath the house, drag-and-drop service is we’re going to drag it off your property and we’re going to drop it off at the junkyard or the donation center.

This is an incentive also for them to go through their closets and to pull stuff out of their house. And people get really motivated to clean when they are paying three people and a van, to come cart all their stuff away.

We found over the years that as we set up these drag and drops we get there and the family hiring us has folks over from the church, relatives, and friends also there to help them get their money’s worth.

Friends with No Attachment to the Stuff Are Great Help

Moving Truck with family helping Savvy CleanerThere are people that are just going through the house going, “Do you want this? Do you want that?” And they’re just carting stuff away. Hey, we’ll take it all. It will fit in our van. So, we cart it all up, we put it in the van, and off we go. We keep these sessions max four hours. The reason we do, we don’t want to wear out the homeowner and we don’t want to wear the team. It’s usually done on a Saturday when it is a weekend project, and all these other places like the junkyard and the landfill and all these places are open, and they are accommodating to people like us that are bringing in loads of junk.

Drag and Drop Spring Cleanings Are Awesome Weekend Projects

All right, so top-to-bottom, drag-and-drop service. It’s an excellent way to expand your business and to fill in the gaps between those slow months of the year. So, until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.

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About the Show

Learn how the show came to be, interesting facts about the show host, and other frequently asked questions about the show.

Resources For This Episode

Minimalism: The Practical Minimalist Strategies to Simplify Your Home and Life – http://amzn.to/2G2CCfO

Easy Minimalist Living: 30 Days to Declutter, Simplify and Organize Your Home Without Driving Everyone Crazy – http://amzn.to/2FpFFgY

The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life – http://amzn.to/2Fr8Joj

Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding: Why You Save and How You Can Stop – http://amzn.to/2Fqb57d

The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter – http://amzn.to/2tunBke

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