Are you a fly-by-night cleaning company? This means you are living with friends or relatives, or moving around and haven’t settled down yet.. You’re here today and gone tomorrow.
No worries, you can still be wildly successful with a simple formula that you can leverage if you are a good honest person with a few business skills and a pinch of savvy.
Listen: Fly By Night Cleaning Company
Watch: Fly By Night Cleaning Company
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. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
How Does a Fly By Night Cleaning Company Build Customer Loyalty?
How does a fly by night cleaning company build long-term customer loyalty? Now there is a caller that called into the show and she asked this question.
“Hi, Angela. My name is Shannaba. I really love your show, and I love the fact that you are so simple. Okay, so with that being said, my husband and I, we stay in an RV trailer and we’re always, with his job construction, we’re always on the move here and there.
And right now, where we’re staying, I just started a cleaning service, and I was wondering, how do I attract, how do I gain the trust so that they don’t think that I’m going to rip them off? Thank you so much.”
Our Society is a Transient Society
All right. Hey, I’m super excited that you have gotten into the house cleaning business. Welcome. I’m really excited for you. And one of the worries that you have about building long-term customer loyalty with a transient lifestyle is nothing to worry about. And the reality is our society is a transient society. We come and go; we move around at all times.
And when you are in the cleaning business, your clients, for the most part, don’t know where you live, and they don’t know how long you’ve lived there. So, they don’t know if you’ve lived there for three hours, or if you’ve lived there for three months, or three years.
They don’t know, and it’s not important that they know. What’s important is that they know, like, and trust you to come into the privacy of their home, and to clean their home, and leave it a cleaner place.
Have a Series of Things That You Offer
And so, what is it about the ads that would stop you? And you have to stop and work through this in your head and say, okay, I need to have a series of things that I offer so that I’m not just winging it, and I’m not just making it up as I go.
Do you have any testimonials? And if you don’t, you want to start to collect them. Because you can have a website, and the website has your address on it, or it can have the city that you serve.
So, if you live in Charlotte, North Carolina, it can say, Charlotte, North Carolina. You might even include the zip code, 28105, or 28103, or whatever the zip code is that your service.
Most People Want to Know You Serve in Their Area
What happens then is the person that looks at your website from the flyer that you left will see that and say, “Oh, they’re in my area.” That’s all they want to know is do you serve the area that they live in.
Because if you’re in Tucson, Arizona, and they live in Charlotte, North Carolina, your website is not current and they’re going to not call you because they think that you’re clear across the country, right? So, you can establish credibility by having a current website as a current area in which you live. All right?
Create Testimonials for Your Website
On that website, you want to create testimonials. So, every time you clean a house, you want to ask for a testimonial, and I do mean every time. I would have a QR code on your worksheet. At the bottom of the worksheet, have them scan that QR code and leave you a rating and review.
Now here’s the cool thing about ratings and reviews. We don’t know where they came from. And so, while you may have just come from Tucson, Arizona, the rating and review from Tucson doesn’t say, “I live in the Meadowbrook neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina.”
It doesn’t say that. Most of the ratings and reviews just say, “Oh, so-and-so came to my house and they did a great job. I’m super happy with the service.” So, you can collect ratings and reviews for years and have those up on your website, and nobody knows in what neighborhood they came from, right? So that’s a way to build trust.
Build Credibility and Trust With Your Skills
Another thing is the skills that you have. When you show up and you’re able to do a walkthrough and you know what you’re talking about, and how long it takes you to do a job, and you know how to price your services. What happens is that builds confidence in the customer. And so instead of you winging it and you’re not sure, and this is a new neighborhood, and all these unknowns, a house is a house, is a house.
We know that it has certain things. It’s going to have a kitchen. It’s going to have bathrooms. It’s going to have bedrooms. There’s probably a living room. There may be a den. There may be a bonus room. There are certain things that are standard in all homes.
They may have stairways and entryways in a mudroom, a front and a back door, and a hallway or something like that, right? Homes are pretty similar in what they offer. And if it’s a condo, the whole complex of condos will be very similar in nature.
Being Confident in Yourself Builds Long Term Loyalty
So, when you walk in, you start getting more confident in your bidding abilities and you start getting accurate with the prices that you quote. That, that is what builds long-term loyalty. Because then when you go to a new neighborhood and you’re not like, “Oh no, I’m starting all over again.”
You walk in and you’re, “Oh, I have totally been here before. I know the routine.” And you walk in, yes, it’s a new home, but that is no different from a new home in a neighborhood you just came from. It’s just a new home. It’s just a home you’ve never cleaned before. Right? It doesn’t matter where it is.
So, my suggestion to you to build your business would be to get a great, great flyer. And I have a great flyer you can download a hundred percent for free. I will leave links in the show notes. Download the flyer, and you can adjust it to whatever you want. This is a multi-flyer, and this is perfect for your situation because it offers a multiplicity of different tasks that you offer. So maybe you only do maintenance cleaning, or maybe you do deep cleaning. But on this flyer, it has special projects.
Fly By Night Cleaners Aren’t Regular Cleaners
And so, there are people that have a regular house cleaner, but the regular house cleaner doesn’t do special projects. So, you might come in and say, “Hey, I’m passing through town, or I’m just moved to town, or I have a business in town,” or whatever the phraseology is that you use, “I work by referral only, and I have a special ability to clean the insides of all of your appliances.”
That might be the inside of your oven, and your stove, and your dishwasher, and your garbage disposal, and your toaster oven, and all these things. And so, people are like, “Oh, well my regular house cleaner doesn’t do that. Why don’t you come over and just do that special project?”
Now you have an inside into their house. Once you get inside their house, you can say, “By the way, I have a cleaning service. I know you have a cleaning service already; would you like me to give you a quote for the whole house, make sure that the pricing is on target with what you’re paying?” And they might go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a price quote and let me know.” Right?
Keep Your Current Clients On Your Website
So now you have an in, they know, like, and trust you already because they’ve had you already to their house. When you get a customer testimonial from them, that goes up on your website. So, wherever you go, the goal is you just want to keep your website current with the current area that you serve.
And you will pick up business really quickly in a new area, once there’s somebody in the area that knows, likes, and trusts you and says that you did a fantastic job, they often tell their neighbors and their friends.
People Will Find Out About You If You’re Good
Because there’s this thing in the cleaning industry where if you have a housekeeper and they’re not very thorough, all the neighbors know about that too. There, “Ewww, I don’t want that cleaner.“
And then when there’s a good cleaner that comes to town, they pick up the phone and they call their five or six friends and go, “Oh my goodness, I just got a great cleaner. Pick her up really quick. I know that she has a quasi-empty schedule right now, it’s going to fill up fast.”
And they’ll book your schedule for you. But you have to be good at what you do, and you have to have the confidence in knowing that you are just picking up on a new house.
You are the Traction in Your Business
So, don’t think of it as how am I going to build this business? And then we’re going to move again in a couple of months, and I’ll never really get traction in my business. It’s traction in you. It’s what you do. And then you just get in the habit over, and over, and over of every house you go clean.
You leave flyers at the houses on both sides of that house, and the two houses across the street. And so, every single house you clean, you do that. And then you start picking up neighbors, because guess what? The people that live on both sides, they saw your car out front all day. Oh, they got your flyer, they’re going to call the neighbor and say, “Hey, how did he or she do?”
And so now you have an in. They saw you outside. They saw how you got out of your car. They saw how you were dressed. They saw how you carried your cleaning supplies. They know about how long you stayed at the house. There are clues that will then generate really quickly into referrals, and it will boom and explode your business. And then if your business up and leaves and you have to be a fly by night company, you just go start over again in the next area. You got this.
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