Do you need a business plan for house cleaning? Some call it a game plan or setting goals. Angela Brown says yes you need a business plan.
Professional house cleaning is hard work and if you are the cleaning business owner you don’t want to work for nothing.
You’ve got to have a plan of action driven by visualization and business direction.
Listen: Do You Need a Business Plan for House Cleaning?
Watch: Do You Need a Business Plan for House Cleaning?
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.
Do You Need a Business Plan for House Cleaning?
Do you need a business plan for house cleaning? That is a great question if you run a small business, and we’re going to talk about that today. Many house cleaners wonder about this, including one who wrote in with this question.
“I’ve recently decided that I need to start my own business, and I’ve settled in on the residential house cleaning services. For someone starting out, is it necessary to put a business plan together? Particularly for residential home services?
I need to know whether I should spend any energy trying to get this done or whether I should disregard it.“
Yes, you need a business plan. Do you need one right away? The answer is no. You can actually start your journey into house cleaning without having a business plan. But, the sooner you have a business plan, the quicker you’re going to be able to get on track.
Use a Business Plan to Discover Where You are Now
Now a business plan is not so much for the future of your company. It does include the future, but the first part of the business plan is to discover where you are right now. Because how are we going to get there if we don’t know where we are?
So, having a business plan helps you walk through a whole bunch of different avenues. Like how much money do I pay on a regular basis for all the different things like my rent or all the different cleaning supplies that I’m going to use?
Am I doing any advertising and marketing? Do I have a website? Do I have internet access? There are lots of expenses that we have in our day to day lives.
You Need a Business Plan to Find Out Your Costs
And so, when you discover what those costs are, you can help determine how many jobs you need to have on the other end. Because if you don’t know how much money you’re actually spending every month, how do you know how much money you have to have in order to pay the bills?
So the business plan helps you get from here to there. It’s like having a roadmap because you don’t jump in your car and start driving nowhere, right? There’s got to be a destination in mind. So that is the business plan.
Find Your Goals in Your Business Plan
What are the goals of your business? And then on days when you get up in the morning, and you’re having a bad day, and you’re like, “Why am I doing this?” You have a plan. And so you say, “Well, let’s follow the plan.”
It’s like if you’re on a road trip and you’re going all the way across America, yeah, I can hop in my car and I can drive up to the interstate. I can hop on the interstate and start driving. But unless I know where I am right now and I know where I’m going, I will never know how many miles it is between.
I’ll never know how many times I have to stop for gas. Do I have enough money on me that I can pay for the entire trip from here to there, right? Or do I have to put it on credit cards? Do I have to get out a loan?
You Need a Business Plan to Avoid Surprises
There are different things in your business journey that unless you know what those variables are, they’re going to surprise you. And we don’t want any surprises in business. We don’t want any huge emergencies.
So if you have a business plan that takes you from here to there, you can start factoring in all the other things along the way.
If it’s a road trip, for example, you will determine where along the way you’re going to stop for food. How many hours between point A and point B? Will there be a hotel stay night somewhere along the journey and in what towns? That way it gives you a goal to look towards. You have a goal and that way you’re headed towards the goal.
You Can’t Go Randomly Through Business
It’s the same in business. You don’t randomly go through business and hope to be successful. Especially when your business starts growing.
Then you have to start figuring out things like, how am I going to pay for an employee? How much cleaning supplies do I need for an employee? Is the employee going to ride with me or are they going to drive a car of their own, or are we going to buy a company car?
There are a whole bunch of other variables that have to be factored in that are not determined until you have the business plan in place.
Use SCORE to Help Make a Business Plan
If you’ve never done a business plan and you need help, in America, there is a free program called SCORE. It is a free program by the U.S. government. It’s by the Small Business Administration, and there are mentors.
And the mentors have been business owners or they are currently business owners. And they volunteer some of their time as a way to give back to the community, and they help you create a business plan. They get all your goals together and get on track.
It’s like free guidance, right? It’s awesome and they have all these things that are available to you as a small business owner.
Business is Tough
Now business is tough. The house cleaning business is super hard. You have a lot of other variables, like difficult customers, clients that cancel on you, all those things.
Those would be the hiccups along the way that if you know that they’re coming. You can prepare and brace your business for them. This way you don’t lose a whole bunch of money due to a whole bunch of cancellations. You don’t have a waiting list, and you don’t have all those other things in place that are going to keep you through those times.
A Business Plan Will Help You Avoid Slow Periods
So, a business plan will help you figure out when you need to start upselling for the fall, for example. This way you don’t have a slow fall, and you can survive when customers decide, “I’ll skip my cleaner for a few months.” That’s not cool for the house cleaner.
You still have bills to pay and so you want to stack all your upsells in those early parts of the year or the last parts of the year.
Months like October, November, when it’s a little bit slow before the big holiday push.
So, you want to stack certain times of the year with your upsells so that you have continual money coming in. You sell those in other parts of the year when money is not tight.
Business Plans Keep You Focused
So, a business plan will help you be laser-focused so that you can keep your business running when other things are not on the front of your mind. So do you need a business plan? Absolutely.
And the sooner you have one, the quicker you’re going to be able to get on track with your business. Do you need it today, if today’s the first day of your business? No, not so much. You need to get your business up and running, but as you get it up and running, jump on that bandwagon of making sure you have a business plan.
Make sure you have financial goals in place, and that you know where you’re headed so that you will recognize those landmarks as you approach them. And that way there are no surprises and your business just keeps right ongoing.
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