Can you make money doing a partial cleaning? Or should you stick to complete jobs? Does your company have a “no job too small” policy? And, do you need one?
Partial cleaning can be an audition for the bigger job which includes recurring cleaning service, upsells and special packages. Your cleaning client may be testing your skills and giving your company a test drive.
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Watch: Should You Offer a Partial 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.
Should You Offer a Partial Cleaning Package?
Should you offer a partial cleaning package or do you have to clean the whole entire house every time you go if the customer only wants a partial cleaning?
There are several house cleaners that want to know if a customer only wants a partial clean, should I go over and do the job, and is it going to be worth my money? Well, the answer is if you charge enough money to make it worth your time, the answer is yes.
How to Charge for Little Jobs
So have a minimum. And when the customer calls and says, “Can you just clean my toilet?” You have to charge something that’s worth you getting in your car and going over there just to clean the toilet and not the whole house. So the answer is yes because it can be an audition for a future job.
If the customer likes you and they like the way that you are dressed and they like the way that you brought in your supplies, they like the professionalism, they like your response time, they like how courteous you were, they like the fact that you catered to their needs.
Maybe they would like to have you as a regular ongoing customer. So yes, it is a great chance to audition for the job.
All right, the next thing is what if the customer loves cleaning their own house but there are a couple of things in their house they don’t love to clean?
Some Customers Only Want You to Clean Floors
They might hire you just to clean the floors. We’ve had several customers that have hired us only to clean their floors. They do not like sweeping and mopping hardwood floors. Truth is, my company doesn’t like it either but we do it because that’s what we do.
It’s part of our job. And we have several customers, we only clean their floors. We have other customers who want us to clean the whole house and they want to clean their floors. So there are partial cleanings that you can still make a lot of money off of and have regular, recurring customers for partial cleanings.
So it is a business model. Now, we learned this from plumbers. And at Savvy Cleaner, which is my company, we say, “No job is too small.” Now, you have to price it so that it’s worth your time getting in your car and going over there.
This is What We Learned From Plumbers
But we learned this from plumbers. Let’s say Mrs. Wexler had a toilet that didn’t flush, so she calls a plumber and the plumber said, “Well now, Mrs. Wexler, is it just that it’s not flushing, or it’s not flushing well, or you have to hold the handle down extra-long?”
He’s trying to figure out what exactly he needs to bring with him in order to make the job right. She says, “I don’t know. I just know when I flush it, the water doesn’t go down all the way, and then it has a really long time and I have to flush it three or four times and I have to jimmy the handle. Just come fix it.” He says, “Well, I have a minimum for coming and it’s going to be $140.” She says, “I don’t care what it costs. Come on over.”
So he goes over to the house. He takes off the lid of the toilet tank, and inside the toilet is what is called a toilet fill valve. There’s one in the back of every toilet. When the water fills up, it pushes the little lever up, and then it makes the toilet full so that it flushes properly. By adjusting this little knob right here, it adjusts the toilet valve that goes up and down. So he goes in and he does some tests.
Did He Rip Her Off for the Work?
He adjusts the knob on the toilet fill valve. He adjusts the water level, and now her toilet flushes. So he doesn’t charge her any extra parts because if he had to replace this part, it costs about $12 to replace. So it’s not an inexpensive part even at that. But he didn’t have to replace it. All he had to do is turn the knob and adjust the water level. The toilet is fixed.
She writes him a check and she’s so happy that her toilet is fixed. Now, did he rip her off? No, he didn’t. That’s his business. He has children to put food on the table for. It’s his way to pay his own bills. He has a minimum.
He guessed on the phone what he might need and he brought a couple of things with him. He did bring a toilet valve. He brought the little flapper that goes up and down, and he also brought a toilet handle, which is the replacement handle in case the handle itself was broken.
He Made it Worth His Time to Do the Work
He didn’t know what the different pieces of the toilet were that were going to need to be adjusted, but he knew that he knew the skill, he knew how to fix the problem, and he made it worth his time to go over there and fix her toilet.
When he left, she was so happy her toilet flushed and he was so happy because he got a $140 just making the adjustment. It’s his skill, it’s his information, it’s the way he was able to do it. It only took a couple of minutes to fix the toilet but it gave her the results she was looking for.
So would you go over and say, “Well, because I’m not going to replace the whole toilet, I’m not going well.” No, you wouldn’t do that.
Customers Have Very Specific Needs
You’d try to figure out what the customer needs. Can I service this customer in a way that helps them, and can I also stay in business? And so by answering all of those questions, it was a win-win-win-win for everybody. Everybody in this story won. Now, back to the house cleaning.
There are customers that have very specific needs, and it might be as they get older they’re not able to climb inside the bathtub, for example, and clean out their bathtubs. They can clean the whole rest of the house.
They can sweep and mop the floor, they just can’t bend over very well. And so what you might do is put together a package that, “Hey, we do close to the floor items. We clean out bathtubs and baseboards.”
Put Together Packages Based on the Customer
And you put together a package of services that is conducive to that type of customer, and that might be a regular package that you offer, and you might have a service fee for that package and it might include two bathtubs or three bathtubs, and it might include the area behind the toilet because the people who can’t bend over to get in the tub are also the people that can’t bend over to clean behind and around the toilet.
So there are different packages that you can offer that are very partial cleanings. And it’s not a whole house, it’s not a whole price. It’s a reduced price for a reduced package.
There are Different Ways to Offer Partial Cleanings
But there are different ways that you can offer partial cleanings and still service the customers that you live around.
And then the cool thing is, if they love your service and they love how you act and how you treat them, they might recommend you to full paying customers.
So my suggestion is, yes, offer partial packages for house cleaning because it could lead to a bunch of other things and it could put food on the table during short times, small times, cancellations, whatever, and it could fill in the gaps to keep your business flowing smoothly.
Resources
How to Start Your Own House Cleaning Company – https://amzn.to/3c2imeJ
How to Start a Cleaning Business – https://amzn.to/2MUXY6Y
Start Your Own Window Cleaning Business – https://amzn.to/30hrbfs
Your House Cleaning Business, A Blueprint For Success – https://amzn.to/2O7WcQe
How to Start, Run and Grow a Successful Residential & Commercial Cleaning Busines – https://amzn.to/3ecoK5K
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